According to sources there is a lot of loose talk about a new "Cold War" a comparison of present-day tensions to the bitter ideological and military rivalry that existed between the Soviet Union and the West from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. Meanwhile the "Cold War," says Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at the CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, "was a competition resulting from a bipolar system, where two superpowers, both with economic and military advantages, were competing to shape international politics.
Sources reported that their Universalist ideologies made this competition inevitable, as did the distribution of power at the time. He added today's competition is not the result of a balance of power, or Universalist ideology per se, but "conscious decisions made by leaders, the strategies they pursued and a series of definable disagreements in international politics".
Further during the real Cold War there was an armed
peace in Europe, while the real battles were fought out across the globe from
Angola to Cuba and the Middle East. Today's battle lines are generally much
closer to Russia's own borders between Georgia and Ukraine and there is a very
different balance of forces between Russia and the West. Russia also has very
limited "soft power", lacking an attractive internationalist ideology
to "sell" around the world.
