Not Your Father's Cold War

From Jonah Goldberg, at the Los Angeles Times:

Will everyone please stop talking about a new Cold War?

However badly things work out between Russia and the United States and the West, a new Cold War isn't in the cards because Russia today isn't the Soviet Union. Sure, we are in a diplomatic and geostrategic conflict with Russia, which was the heart of the old Soviet Union. Also, Russia wants much of the real estate that belonged to the Soviet Union before it collapsed. And Vladimir Putin is a former KGB colonel who now waxes nostalgic for the good old days. That's about it.

That's hardly nothing, but the Cold War was far more than a conflict with Russia. Everyone should agree on that. Communism, anti-communism and anti-anti-communism divided Americans for decades, particularly among academic and media elites. Right and left may still argue over the merits of those divisions, but no informed person disputes that the topic of communism — the real version and the imagined ideal — incited riots of intellectual and political disagreement in the West for a half century.

Meanwhile, Putin's ideology holds little such allure to Americans or the populations of the European Union. With the exception of a few cranky apologists and flacks, it's hard to find anyone in the West openly defending Putin on the merits. And even those who come close are generally doing so in a backhanded way to criticize U.S. policies or the Obama administration. The dream of a "greater Russia" or a "Eurasian Union" simply does not put fire in the minds of men — non-Russian men, at least — the way the dream of global socialist revolution once did. And that's a good thing.

Cranky flacks? Like the "realist" apologists for Putin?

Heh.

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