The conflict between Russia and the West that began this week is terrifying precisely because it does not resemble the Cold War. In fact, it is crucial to work through the distinctions between this evolving conflict and the Cold War in order to address the policy challenges coming to the United States and its allies. If we don’t, we could fail to understand the true dangers Russia currently poses to its neighbors, to the West and to the rest of the world.
These distinctions crystallize around four sets of ideas—the Iron Curtain, the competition of the nuclear era, the nature of diplomacy, and the rise of social media and cyber warfare. Careful consideration of these four issues describes the acutely uncertain terrain of European security and of U.S.-Russian relations in the winter of 2022.
Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was a defining feature of the Cold War. Established roughly in 1945, it divided Europe in two. Announced by Winston Churchill in 1946 speech, the Iron Curtain connoted a border that could not be crossed (or not easily crossed) as well as the line of contact between East and West in Europe, the Cold War’s archetypal dividing line. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1962, it acquired its final symbolic form in the mileslong concrete wall that cut through the city.
The Iron Curtain was tragic for Europe, an unnatural barrier in the region’s culture and politics. It was resented in East and West alike, but it also kept the peace (for the most part). It followed from agreements made in the wake of World War II in Yalta and Potsdam, through which the Soviet Union was granted its sphere of influence in Europe and the Western allies were granted theirs, despite their dislike for spheres of influence in theory. The Iron Curtain prevented the United States from intervening during the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It also kept the Soviets on their side of the division, although Moscow could never quite tolerate the awkward little island of West Berlin behind the bona fide Iron Curtain separating East from West Germany.
There will be no Iron Curtain in this conflict. Perhaps with an enormous display of force, followed by an occupation of western Ukraine, the Russian military can build an Iron Curtain around Belarus and Ukraine, but this is unlikely. The Russian occupation of Ukraine will have its limits and once the initial round of fighting stops it will be contested—most likely by an insurgency with no Cold War analogy. This insurgency will have a “coalition of the willing” behind it, an ad hoc group of Central and Eastern European nations who see Russian victory in Ukraine as an existential threat. Russia may in turn respond to this insurgency by threatening the territory of these countries, many of them NATO members. If so, nothing would be curtained off, or if there is a curtain it will be made of something much more flimsy: It will be a loose, long and unsteady line of contact stretching from Estonia to Bulgaria and Turkey. Rather than an Iron Curtain, there will be a vortex of instability, radiating tension into Europe and the Middle East.
Nuclear stalemate. Among the most memorable Cold War moments was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Despite some moments of panicked escalation, though, the Cold War was more typically characterized by the reluctance on both sides of the Iron Curtain to use nuclear weapons. The primary function of nuclear arsenals was to deter enemies, and that’s what they did. The Cold War also witnessed a great deal of successful arms control. Superpowers beholden to the idea of containment showed themselves to be good at containing nuclear war. The Cold War was cold for this very reason. The severity of its weapons imposed limits on strategy and on action.
President Putin does not speak in these terms. In an interview he gave shortly after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he claimed that he would have been willing to use nuclear weapons if the annexation had been challenged militarily. And after beginning a wide-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin made a not very veiled threat to any country that might consider aiding and abetting Kyiv. Running counter to Russia’s military objectives might result in punitive measures “never seen before in history.” Putin may be contemplating a new kind of war, in which conventional military action is conducted on the assumption that, if necessary, it will be backed up by a nuclear attack or by the threat of nuclear attack. This is a sharp departure from Cold War precedent.
Diplomacy and Détente. The Cold War was marked by stretches of real diplomatic engagement. Some of this was arms control. Some of it was, as with Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon, a function of good personal relations. Some of it was détente, a relaxation of tension, a suspension of hostilities. And some of it was real conflict resolution, especially the diplomacy Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan pioneered, which was so effective that it ended the Cold War.
In this new conflict, diplomacy will not disappear overnight. Deconfliction is more necessary than ever, and Russia will play a role with Iran, with North Korea and in the Middle East that Western diplomats will not have the luxury of ignoring. But diplomacy with Russia has made little headway in recent years, and Putin has gone out of his way to humiliate diplomats, many of whom voyaged to Moscow to be enlisted (unknowingly) in a game of deception. Their visits helped to convince many that negotiations were still on the table. It was all a ruse. Diplomacy requires some degree of trust, and Putin merely takes advantage of the trust he is given. Real diplomacy between Russia and the West will not return until Putin leaves the Kremlin.
Covert operations. The Cold War was the golden age of espionage and of “active measures”—sometimes called covert operations—with many examples of disinformation and manipulated public opinion. Spies went into and came out from the cold. But many of the political and informational borders were far less permeable during the Cold War than they are today.
Now surveillance and covert operations take place virtually, on social media or through cyberwarfare. Cyber has made espionage and active measures much cheaper and much more powerful. Russian election meddling in 2016 demonstrated how destabilizing even a cyber operation that did not attack critical infrastructure could be. In escalating tensions between Russia and the West, cyber weapons might well be turned on critical infrastructure. There are many theories about cyber war. There is only limited experience of it, and none of it is of Cold War pedigree.
The truth is that the current conflict between Russia and the West will be less stable than the Cold War was (in Europe) and in a sense more frightening. At the same time, by being different from the Cold War it may prove not as all-consuming. Today’s tensions with Russia are not as rooted in ideology. Putin’s Russia has more civil society than the Soviet Union ever did, and authoritarian governments exist within the NATO alliance. Putin does not have access to allies in the world’s communist parties as Stalin and Khrushchev did. Social media, which was overpraised in the 2000s for its contributions to democracy and international community, does contribute to democracy and international community. Nor is there an Iron Curtain to prevent it from doing so. And it is very possible that the hostilities Russia initiated this week will not lead to four decades of tension and will not amount to a long twilight struggle, as John F. Kennedy described the Cold War.
By invading Ukraine, Putin has thrown overboard the gifts of stalemate. He is rushing past the warning signs of overreach. He is piling up risks and costs of enormous size and scope. These may be the foundation of his eventual failure, following on the heels of early battlefield successes. Or they may be the foundation of his rapid failure, of having gone too far too fast and with too little respect for the excruciating limits that had once characterized the Cold War. The Cold War still contains lessons for us. One of them is to move slowly, to build internal resilience, and to have patience.