Mikhail Gorbachev warns that the world risks a reprise of the cold war between Russia and the west. The leader who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union is mistaken. The cold war was a global contest between two political and economic systems. For several decades, the world lived in the shadow of nuclear self-destruction. In 1989 communism lost. There is no going back.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia does not have an alternative ideology to sell. The Russian president’s authoritarian style has its admirers, not least among populist xenophobes in western Europe. But truth be told, there is not much of a market elsewhere in the world for Moscow’s economic and political model.
The Soviet Union was a superpower. Today’s Russia is a dangerous but declining regional power. Those two characteristics are connected. Mr Putin wants to grab territory and influence in the former Soviet space. He craves “respect”. But if the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine are a serious challenge to the global order, they fall some way short of an existential threat.