WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The crisis in Crimea is a crime against humanity, but it’s also a crime against history. In their haste to explain these events, to score political points and perhaps even to shape our response, politicians and pundits have used spurious historical comparisons.

They say Vladimir Putin is like Hitler. They say Russia’s annexation of Crimea is the first shot in a new Cold War. They are wrong.

Instead of thinking about what the future might bring, the pundits and politicians are fighting the last war, and the war before that. This isn’t like the opening maneuvers of World War II, and it’s not like the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that prevailed for nearly 50 years.

Putin is certainly no Adolf Hitler; if anything, he’s more like Benito Mussolini, who also liked to invade small, defenseless nations.

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The heightened tensions between the West and Russia aren’t like the Cold War, which was an epic global battle between two roughly equal forces over which of two diametrically opposing ideologies would prevail.

In the current conflict, we have a weakened Russia that is no match politically, economically or militarily for the West. Instead of championing a worldwide Communist movement that promises to liberate billions of people from the shackles of capitalism, we have a Russia that stands mostly for Russian nationalism and imperialism. Who, besides Russians, can get behind that?

Russia may have a few allies in this world, but it has no followers.

That’s not to say that Russia isn’t dangerous. No one should underestimate the aggressive nature of a cornered bear, especially one armed with nuclear weapons. But Russia is cornered, and its ambitions have been scaled back from global domination to just being the toughest guy in the rundown backwater once known as the Soviet Union.

While Putin’s Russia is much weaker than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was, the West has gotten stronger. Capitalism and democracy have advanced steadily eastward toward the Russian heartland. The Baltic republics, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and several Balkan states have joined NATO. No one doubts that the United States would fight to protect its NATO allies, even the ones behind the former Iron Curtain.

In the 1970s, NATO and the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact had rough parity in conventional military power. But now, NATO spends 11 times more on its military than Russia does. Russia’s aging military is only a shadow of what the Soviet Union commanded during the Cold War.

Vladimir Putin, left, Benito Mussolini Getty Images

Putin may be an opportunistic thug, but he’s no Hitler, who had the most powerful military in the world to back up his aggression in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Putin is more like Mussolini. Hitler attacked all the great powers of his day: France, Britain, and Russia. He declared war on the United States.

And Mussolini? He attacked Albania, Libya and Ethiopia, just as Putin has attacked those major powers: Georgia, Chechnya and Crimea.

Mussolini strutted around like the heavyweight champion of the world, just like Putin. Putin is more likely to end up hanging from lamppost than down in a bunker chewing on cyanide.

The Ukraine crisis is real. It threatens the peace and stability of the region. It threatens the economy of Europe and Russia. But it is not a global conflict that will last two generations.

It’s not World War II or the Cold War. And all the nostalgia the pundits and politicians have for those days won’t make it so.

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