Russia and the West: ten disputes and an inevitable escalation?

At the end of the Cold War one might have thought that the collapse of the communist bloc and the disintegration of the USSR, concomitant to the defeat in 1991 of Saddam Hussein to the then unanimous "international community", indeed heralded the coming of a "new world order" (George Bush Sr), the triumph of western values of democracy and the liberal economy (Fukuyama's end of History), and the unification of the European continent (Gorbachev's "common home"). The wars which went with the collapse of Yugoslavia rapidly brought us back to reality and to the "return of history" (Guillaume Parmentier).