[LINK] Kaletsky on an upcoming (?) Cold War

[rfmcdonald]

From Anatole Kaletsky's editorial in The Times, on what seems to be a breakdown in Western-Russian relations, "It’s the West that’s starting this new Cold War":

Casting Russia as the enemy suits everyone at this year’s summit. It distracts attention from President Bush’s contempt for Europeans on climate change and his geopolitical blunders. It helps Angela Merkel and Tony Blair to disguise the failure of their Atlanticist diplomacy while allowing Nicolas Sarkozy to sound tough, without being antiAmerican. It gives all the European leaders at the summit a chance to “show solidarity” with the EU’s newly admitted Eastern members without making any concessions on the discriminatory economic and labour policies that will keep these countries firmly in their place for decades ahead. And best of all, from every nation’s standpoint, the starring role of villain is one that President Putin himself craves.

Mr Putin faces a difficult transition from his present position as a wildly popular czarist-style absolute ruler to some kind of power behind the throne – a kingmaker or political puppeteer possibly modelled on Deng Xiaoping, of China, or Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, but with no real parallel in Russian history. In managing this unprecedented transition, nothing is more useful to Mr Putin than his image as the first national leader since Stalin who could stand up for Russia’s interests against an inherently hostile world. This is why all the EU’s complaints about neo-imperialist bullying of Poland and Estonia, all the lectures from President Bush about democracy and all the admonitions about human rights from Mrs Merkel are water off a duck’s back to President Putin.

[. . .]

While Westerners see Russian resentment about these territorial losses [of most of the western and southern tiers of the ex-USSR] as a throwback to 19th-century imperialist thinking, consider how the process might look when viewed from the Russian side. What Russians see is a powerful and wealthy empire expanding steadily on their Western border and swallowing all the intervening countries, first into the EU’s economic and political arrangements and then into the Nato military structure. Consider from the Russian standpoint the EU’s explicit vocation to keep growing until it embraces every European country with the sole exception of Russia itself, and the almost automatic Nato membership now granted to EU countries. Is it so very unreasonable to view this EU-Nato juggernaut as the world’s last remaining expansionist empire, or even the natural successor to previous German and French expansions that were considerably less benign?blockquote>

Thoughts, if any?