Whatever its flaws and the brutality it bred, communism was a Big Idea, almost a religion, that for decades satisfied the minds of brilliant if misguided people and inspired hope of “salvation” to millions throughout the world. It is very unlikely that Mr. Putin will inspire ideals in anybody apart from the crowds cheering him in Moscow on Tuesday after his fiery speech lambasting the West — and perhaps some ethnic Russians in Crimea and elsewhere in Russia’s “near abroad.”

It is fanciful to imagine there will be leaders of peasants in South America, Asia and Africa fighting for a revolutionary creed preached from Moscow, as they did in the Cold War. “Workers of the World Unite ... for Gazprom Profits!” isn’t an appealing slogan.

For most of the Cold War, the threat to liberal democracy and freedom was not the Red Army or the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, but an ideology that for a long time seemed to offer an alternative to capitalism and to Western values. It was an illusion, but one many people in the West shared. There is no prospect today that the residents of European capitals will one morning wake up to find that commissars have nationalized the means of production.

If there is a threat, it is geographical, not ideological, and it is to a confined area on Russia’s periphery. Despite bloodcurdling talk from a few officials in Moscow and some armchair warriors on Fox News, there is no global military challenge, no clash of a cultural or economic kind. If anything, it’s the reverse. During much of the Cold War, there were few economic or business links between East and West. Now trade is interconnected as never before. Russia exports its gas in huge amounts — and its millionaires. On the day after Russia took effective control of Crimea, the Moscow stock exchange fell by nearly 10 percent, though it has since rallied. Throughout most of the Cold War, Moscow didn’t even have a stock exchange.

In one depressing way, though, the Cold War is echoing loud and clear. The rhetoric already sounds eerily familiar. The United States Secretary of State, John F. Kerry, says democracy would “never be stolen by bullets or invasion,” the kind of thing which his predecessors might have said in the 1960s and 1970s. A cautious Democratic president stands widely accused at home of being soft on dictators. Mr. Putin talks of rescuing Russians in Ukraine from a “neo-fascist coup” — an old script the major players must have dredged up from deep in their memories.