Are Russia and the West Facing a New Cold War?

news week: There’s an irony in the fact that when Belgium laid out the month’s “Programme of Work” at the U.N. Security Council, this last week was absent an agenda. Since Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the diplomatic community has been rather preoccupied. The United States and Western Europe have flailed about, ultimately unable to check Russia’s unabashed aggression. Defying a host of threats from the West, which now include military posturing in Poland, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have invaded a neighboring country with impunity.

President George W. Bush rightly reminded the world that “the cold war is over.” Today’s Russia is by no means the Soviet Union, and just as much, today’s West is not led by Ronald Reagan’s big-talking United States. Putin heads an energy-rich, autocratic country loaded with more than half a trillion dollars worth of foreign reserves (most of which are held in U.S. dollars), while the United States is faced with a worsening financial crisis and taxing military commitments overseas.

“On balance, Russia sees that they have more leverage economically over the West than the West has over Russia,” says Cliff Gaddy, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “Belatedly, this incident in Georgia is waking everybody up to a reality that’s already true.” That reality is that the West lacks the capacity to contain Russia in the way that it did for nearly two decades after the end of the cold war, and the invasion of Georgia signals a new era, one in which authoritarian regimes can brazenly buck the international system.

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