The New Cold War by Edward Lucas
Newsnight 12 Feb 08, 01:34 PM Journalist Edward Lucas claims that
Russia has started a new Cold War - and the West is losing it
because it is unwilling to confront the new threat.

Extract from:

The New Cold War
How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
by Edward Lucas
Published by Bloomsbury at £18.99

Vladimir Putin wants to build up the Kremlin's influence not only on
the West, but also in the West. The growing business lobby tied to
Russia represents a powerful fifth column of a kind unseen during
the last Cold War. Once it was communist trade unions that
undermined the West at the Kremlin's behest. Now it is pro-Kremlin
bankers and politicians who betray their countries for thirty silver
roubles.

Russia is still too weak militarily and economically, and too
dependent on the outside world, to use brute force. Other tactics
are just as effective.

Chiefly, it can menace and subvert the weaker and smaller countries
in the ex-Soviet neighbourhood. For them, Russia is like an
aggressive man on crutches - no threat to the able-bodied, but still
a menacing bully for someone in a wheelchair.

It uses the Soviet Union's most powerful legacy, the monopoly hold
on gas and oil pipelines running from east to west, to blackmail and
bribe its former satellite countries. In response, the West not only
fails to support its allies, but is also succumbing to pressure
itself.

The old Cold War imposed a demanding regime of mental and moral
toughness on the countries of Western Europe: they knew that if they
did not hang together they would hang separately.

Now the Kremlin's central tactic, of `divide and rule', has an
almost free run. During the old Cold War, no NATO member would have
considered doing private deals with the Kremlin. In the New Cold
War, such deals are commonplace. Remembering the grim grey days of
the past is hard.

Memories of Russia now are shaped by the optimism that surrounded
the end of the Cold War, not the realism of the previous four
decades.

Those old reflexes would be useful now. The Soviet way of life was a
combination of economic backwardness, plus repression at home and
abroad.

'A dark shadow'

That was a hard sell. Now the Kremlin has stopped wasting time,
money and people in trying to make a flawed economic system work,
and in pursuing an unworkably utopian political idea. Instead it has
adopted the trappings of a Western system - laws, elections and
private property, to conceal a lawless, brutal and greedy reality.
That is not only a problem for Russians.

The ideological clash between Russia and the West has changed, but
not disappeared. Instead of an explicit argument between Marxist-
Leninists and the supporters of welfare capitalism, both sides seem
to endorse the same capitalist model.

The difference between Russian and Western models of capitalism can
be deceptive, for respect for the law is so central to the Western
approach to life that many of those who benefit from the security
and predictability that it brings hardly think about it. But the
ideological conflict of the New Cold War is between lawless Russian
nationalism and law-governed Western multilateralism.

In short: the West is losing the New Cold War, while having barely
noticed that it has started. Mr Putin and his Kremlin allies have
seized power in Russia, cast a dark shadow over the eastern half of
the continent, and established formidable bridgeheads in the main
Western countries. And the willingness to resist looks alarmingly
feeble.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2008/02/the_new_cold_war_by_edwa
rd_lucas.html