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The New Cold War by Edward Lucas

• Newsnight
• 12 Feb 08, 01:34 PM

Journalist Edward Lucas claims that Russia has started a new Cold War - and the West is losing it because it is unwilling to confront the new threat.

Edward Lucas speaks to Jeremy Paxman on 12 February.

Extract from:

The New Cold War
How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
by Edward Lucas
Published by Bloomsbury at 拢18.99

Vladimir Putin wants to build up the Kremlin鈥檚 influence not only on the West, but also in the West. The growing business lobby tied to Russia represents a powerful fifth column of a kind unseen during the last Cold War. Once it was communist trade unions that undermined the West at the Kremlin鈥檚 behest. Now it is pro-Kremlin bankers and politicians who betray their countries for thirty silver roubles.

Russia is still too weak militarily and economically, and too dependent on the outside world, to use brute force. Other tactics are just as effective.

Chiefly, it can menace and subvert the weaker and smaller countries in the ex-Soviet neighbourhood. For them, Russia is like an aggressive man on crutches - no threat to the able-bodied, but still a menacing bully for someone in a wheelchair.

It uses the Soviet Union鈥檚 most powerful legacy, the monopoly hold on gas and oil pipelines running from east to west, to blackmail and bribe its former satellite countries. In response, the West not only fails to support its allies, but is also succumbing to pressure itself.

The old Cold War imposed a demanding regime of mental and moral toughness on the countries of Western Europe: they knew that if they did not hang together they would hang separately.

Now the Kremlin鈥檚 central tactic, of 鈥榙ivide and rule鈥�, has an almost free run. During the old Cold War, no NATO member would have considered doing private deals with the Kremlin. In the New Cold War, such deals are commonplace. Remembering the grim grey days of the past is hard.

Memories of Russia now are shaped by the optimism that surrounded the end of the Cold War, not the realism of the previous four decades.

Those old reflexes would be useful now. The Soviet way of life was a combination of economic backwardness, plus repression at home and abroad.

'A dark shadow'

That was a hard sell. Now the Kremlin has stopped wasting time, money and people in trying to make a flawed economic system work, and in pursuing an unworkably utopian political idea. Instead it has adopted the trappings of a Western system - laws, elections and private property, to conceal a lawless, brutal and greedy reality. That is not only a problem for Russians.

The ideological clash between Russia and the West has changed, but not disappeared. Instead of an explicit argument between Marxist-Leninists and the supporters of welfare capitalism, both sides seem to endorse the same capitalist model.

The difference between Russian and Western models of capitalism can be deceptive, for respect for the law is so central to the Western approach to life that many of those who benefit from the security and predictability that it brings hardly think about it. But the ideological conflict of the New Cold War is between lawless Russian nationalism and law-governed Western multilateralism.

In short: the West is losing the New Cold War, while having barely noticed that it has started. Mr Putin and his Kremlin allies have seized power in Russia, cast a dark shadow over the eastern half of the continent, and established formidable bridgeheads in the main Western countries. And the willingness to resist looks alarmingly feeble.