A Europe enriched in commerce with Russian oligarchs doesn't want confrontation. Why the Cold War isn't back

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private analysis that Vladimir Putin is living “in another world” struck a chord because Russia’s military incursion into Crimea does feel like a blast from the Cold War past of twilight struggle, eyeball-to-eyeball brinkmanship, clattering hotlines, U-2 spy planes and rolling Soviet tanks.

Long gone are the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s triumphant tours of New York and Washington — and gone, too, is George W. Bush’s confident peering into Putin’s “soul.” Judging by the cable news chatter, it’s back to the future of jangling discord and stalemated standoff, with few clear or easy options — and the mutually assured unthinkable one always looming in the background, as it has for 70 years.


But grim as the headlines from Ukraine are, the feeling in the capital is nothing like the cold fear that gripped Washington when children were taught to “duck and cover” and to know the locations of fallout shelters whose ominous black and yellow logos still dot some federal buildings around town. POLITICO’s White House reporters have not been given instructions to report to a top-secret site in case of attack, as NBC’s Sander Vanocur was at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

( POLITICO's full coverage of the crisis in Ukraine)

Putin’s bulging pectorals may be menacing, but his bluster can’t quite compare to the growl of the Soviet bear in the days when Nikita Khrushchev threatened to “bury” us, and KGB cloak-and-dagger work in Washington was all too real. Early 1960s thrillers like “Seven Days in May,” “Fail Safe” and “The Manchurian Candidate” were scary because they were plausible (if nightmare) scenarios — not the sexy, “Mad Men”-era nostalgia of FX’s popular television drama, “The Americans.”

But as President Barack Obama’s GOP critics lambaste him, as John McCain did for a “feckless foreign policy in which no one believes in American strength any more,” it’s worth remembering that some things haven’t changed since the bad old days. Because even at the height of the Cold War, the United States generally held back from direct confrontation with the Soviet Union in the face of its most provocative acts within its own sphere of influence — and no American president has ever had good options to the contrary.

When Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian rebellion in 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower was privately appalled and enraged. But, confronting global hotspots from Suez to Berlin to Southeast Asia, he confined himself in his State of the Union address two months later to saying only, “The recent events in Hungary demand that all free nations share to the extent of their capacity in the responsibility of granting asylum to victims of Communist persecution.”

( PHOTOS: Scenes from Ukraine)

When Soviet tanks smashed the Prague Spring of 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state Dean Rusk — enmeshed in the geopolitics of the Vietnam war — let it be known that American foreign policy should content itself only to “demonstrate informally and tactfully that the USA welcomes gladly the steps of Czechoslovakia towards normalization.”

When the Soviets engineered martial law in Poland in 1981, that master cold warrior, Ronald Reagan himself, did not “begin bombing in five minutes,” (as he once joked he might like to in a sound check for a radio address). Instead, he called “upon all free people to join in urging the government of Poland to reestablish conditions that will make constructive negotiations and compromise possible.”

Only in the Cuban missile crisis itself did Washington truly go head-to-head with Moscow, and even then John F. Kennedy ultimately defused the crisis by agreeing to withdraw outdated American missiles from Turkey — a move that would have been seen as so supine by the uber-hawks of the day that it was kept secret for years.

“There’s all this posturing, all this talk of flexing our muscles,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek. “But happily, when push comes to shove, we show ourselves to be more restrained and sensible. We don’t really have all that many options, short of getting into war with them, and that would be incredibly stupid.”

The White House hopes that a tightening noose of economic sanctions on Russia — and a lifeline of emergency aid to the beleaguered Ukrainian government — can break the stalemate. Already the Russian stock market and currency have tumbled. Administration officials believe that Putin’s move – in response to the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader – was fundamentally defensive, not offensive, and that the “clash of titans” trope in the American media is mostly hype.

In at least one important respect, this crisis is not like those of the past. A Western Europe enriched and entangled in commerce with Russian capitalist oligarchs is less interested in confrontation with Putin than an earlier generation of European leaders were with Communist chiefs like Khrushchev. And a Russia still discomfited by the 1990s inclusion by NATO of its former Eastern European satellites is more belligerent than the old Soviet Union was without a competing security alliance adjoining its very border.

In that regard, administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, expressed satisfaction at the European Union’s willingness to join in pressuring Putin, despite differences over timing and tactics.

Putin may or may not be delusional. Some clear-eyed critics — like former Defense Secretary and CIA chief Robert Gates — do not share Merkel’s view (expressed privately to Obama, according to The New York Times) that he is out of touch. Instead, they say, he knows exactly what he is doing: moving to reassert hegemony over a former Soviet republic. For better or worse, Putin’s rambling, disjointed defense of his actions summoned up nothing so much as the earliest American government analysis of the Soviets’ post-World War II motives and world view.

"At bottom of Kremlin’s view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” the American diplomat George Kennan wrote in his famous “Long Telegram” of 1946, the document that helped form the policy of containment.

“Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples,” Kennan wrote. “To this was added, as Russia came into contact with more economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area.” And, Kennan concluded, “They have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.”

At John Kennedy’s first face-to-face meeting with Khrushchev over Berlin — in Vienna, in 1961 — the American president complained that the Soviet leader had “savaged” him, and had treated him “like a little boy.” In Kennedy’s era, the ability to manage the confrontation with the Soviets was foreign policy Job No. 1 — as it was for every president in the 45 years after World War II. Obama and his most recent predecessors have been spared that singular burden, as they confronted the new threat of global terror and non-state bad actors more menacing than even a former KGB operative like Putin. Indeed, Obama famously confided to Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, in 2012 that his own re-election would give him “more flexibility” in dealing with Russia.

Even if Obama had some magic laser at his disposal to disperse Russian troops in Ukraine, he would still need Russia’s support — or at least its acquiescence — in Washington’s efforts to block Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and Syria’s brutal civil war.

The Cold War arguably began in Crimea — at the Yalta conference in 1945 when Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Soviet Union’s assertion of dominance in Eastern Europe. It may be only coincidence that cold war tensions have erupted in the same place 70 years later. But it’s poetic coincidence all the same, which helps explain why the notion of a new cold war has gotten traction in the media this week.