The Russians feared, well, exactly what the US feared from the missiles in Cuba: That the US could now, and quite plausibly would, mount a first strike that could hit so quickly that there would be no chance for Russian retaliation, breaking mutually assured destruction. What is fairly rarely mentioned was that the United States had just set up nuclear missiles in Turkey at the time. Just for the record, the Cuban Missile Crisis was not a case of Russian overreach, and Khruschev's actions at the time were quite rational. “In a way, I think history is what drives him.” I think he resents a certain Western triumphalism,” Logevall says. “Putin feels great resentment about how the Cold War ended. The conflict in Ukraine seems sure to be at least a coda to the Cold War, if not a new beginning. And the interconnectedness of the global economy - where waves of corporations have severed ties with Russia - makes isolated coexistence harder to tolerate. China, which signed a pact with Russia shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, looms much larger. The world isn’t as bipolar as it was decades ago. Logevall, who co-authored the book “America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity,” doesn’t expect a Cold War rerun. America is back and it’s on a white horse saving a white country in the middle of Europe against the horrible Russian Bear.” “They got their enemy that has always been, always deserves to be and is always at the forefront of the American mind,” says Khrushcheva. "My country just killed itself," she says, and the U.S. Kennedy was president of the United States. “Putin is the global villain he deserves to be, and Russia is finished for decades to come,” says Khrushcheva, whose great-grandfather was premier of the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when John F. Now, she begins her classes by apologizing. To her, Putin’s invasion was devastating because it confirmed the worst about her native country. Nina Khrushcheva, a Moscow-born professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, maintains that the Cold War never really went away - that the West’s view of Russia remained stuck in the broad portrayals of villains Boris and Natasha in “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons. Gallup found that 88% of both Republicans and Democrats have an unfavorable view of Russia. elections, its annexation of Crimea and the nerve agent attack on Putin's leading opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who's currently imprisoned.Īnd while former president Donald Trump has maintained his esteem for Putin, anti-Russian opinion has uncommon bipartisan support. According to Gallup poll conducted in February, 85% of Americans viewed Russia unfavorably, easily the country’s worst rating in more than three decades - a slide accelerated by Russia's meddling in U.S. A Russian Foreign Ministry official, Alexander Darchiyev, according to an Interfax report, recently suggested that “perhaps it would be worth recalling the well-forgotten principle that worked during the Cold War - peaceful coexistence.”Įven before war began in Ukraine, Americans had a historically dim view of Russia. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said “the threat to global security now is more complex and probably higher” than during the Cold War, partly because there aren’t the same back channels of communication. The invasion of Ukraine is intended to deter Western influence and NATO infringement from Russia’s sphere of influence, and potentially to restore a Texas-sized part of the former Soviet Union.īarely two weeks in, the Cold War has often been invoked. A former KGB agent, he once called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. The Cold War is innately connected to the crisis in Ukraine partly because it so much informs Putin’s world view.
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