Russia Profile Weekly Experts Panel: Assessing the New Cold War

[dajoki]

June 8, 2007
Russia Profile Weekly Experts Panel: Assessing the New Cold War
Introduced by Vladimir Frolov
Russia Profile
http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=Experts'+Panel&articleid=a1181309043

It is now official. The growing Cold War style rhetoric between Russia and the West has finally acquired an ideological underpinning – it will be about U.S. new imperialism pushing back Russia’s new revisionism.

President Vladimir Putin said at a Kremlin news conference on May 31: "There is a clear desire by some international players to dictate their will to everyone without adhering to international law... This behavior is nothing different from diktat, nothing different from imperialism."

Putin also insisted that the United States is responsible for a "new round of the arms race" because of its planned missile defense system. In response, Russia recently successfully tested a new multiple warhead mobile ICBM designed to penetrate U.S. missile defenses. Putin commented: "Our partners are stuffing Eastern Europe with new weapons. What are we supposed to do? We cannot just sit by and watch all this."

The Bush administration wasted no time pushing back.

In Potsdam, Germany, on May 31, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded to Putin: "I find Russia's recent missile diplomacy difficult to understand, and we regret Russia's reluctance to accept the partnership in missile defense that we have offered.” She called bilateral relations a "mix of cooperation and competition, friendship and friction." She stressed that "we want a 21st-century partnership with Russia, but at times, Russia seems to think and act in the zero-sum terms of another era."

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What changes will this new rhetorical escalation bring to Russia’s relations with the West? Why does Putin seem to be looking to overplay the differences with the United States rather than downplaying them? Why is the Bush Administration seeking to push Russia back rather than engage it by showing a degree of understanding for its concerns with U.S. policies? Where will it all end?