The chilling fog of the new cold war

Like analogies which involve the Second World War, the ‘new cold war’ is not a phrase to use lightly.

Or maybe at all: Russia now is not seeking military domination of Europe. Russia is not a one-party state, not does it claim to be the embodiment of an ideological success story. The once-towering edifice of Marxist-Leninist ideology is as ruined as Social Credit or syndicalism. An exposition of "sovereign democracy" as the Kremlin now grandly calls its scheme of things, would barely fill a postcard, let alone a textbook.

To compare that to the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev may look not just insulting but absurd. The west’s differences with Russia seem like mere nuances compared to the gulf between the modern world and the suicide bomber.

But to argue that the old cold war is dead and gone is to miss the point. It is much harder to dismiss the argument that a new one is approaching - or maybe has already begun (just as in the mid-to-late 1940s, it takes a bit of time to sink in).

Point one: Russia is different. Whether you call it Gazpromistan or Kremlin inc, Russia is now an entity as unusual as the Communist party-state: an authoritarian bureaucratic-capitalist arrangement in which an elite largely drawn from the security services extracts enormous rents from raw materials, steals some and uses the rest to vie for power at home and abroad, using nationalist and sometimes xenophobic rhetoric to maintain its popularity with the population.

In short, it turns wealth into power, and then power back into wealth. At home - and abroad.

Point two: Russia is a threat. The Soviet cocktail of communism and imperialism was a hard sell. Especially towards the end, it meant poverty and dictatorship, plus foreign domination. Russia’s main weapons now are more subtle and potent: cheap gas and money for the right people. The orgy of greed and moral myopia in Moscow in the past 15 years shows that lawyers, accountants and bankers are willing to forget professional ethics for huge fees. So why should politicians and officialdom be any different?

To see the contrast, imagine that Helmut Schmidt, the German SPD chancellor until 1982, was not only great chums with Brezhnev, but that in his final months in office pushed through huge government loan guarantees for a project that would increase his country’s energy dependence on the Soviet Union - and then as soon as he was out of office, took a lucrative post running that same project. Oh, and the package included a Russian orphan to adopt.

Fanciful? That is just what Gerhard Schröder did with the planned Baltic gas pipeline. Even if it is never built or used, it shows that Russia can brazenly seduce a western politician and expect only a whimper of protest. The west looks ill prepared to counter this. There is still a huge dose of wishful thinking. Surely it is better to negotiate and compromise with Russia, than have a messy and costly confrontation?

Even now, money can’t buy everything. So there is always murder. A veteran Kremlin-watcher in Moscow wrote to your correspondent recently: "Anna Politkovskaya was killed to warn Russians against criticising the Kremlin, especially in western media. Alexander Litvinenko’s murder was to warn defectors. The only question now is who is next."

Surely the Kremlin is not that brazen or brutal? Perhaps. But few have won money in recent years underestimating the brazenness and brutality that lurk beneath those onion domes. We face a systematic conflict based on conflicting values and clashing geopolitics. Not a cold war, perhaps, but it’s getting chilly.

• The author is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Like analogies which involve the Second World War, the ‘new cold war’ is not a phrase to use lightly.