US-Russia talks in Geneva revive Cold War memories
Geneva, a neutral city that often hosted Cold War negotiations, receives top Russian and US officials to discuss missiles, nuclear weapons and spheres of influence at a time when a potential conflict may erupt.References abound in the Swiss capital to the struggles for influence between East and West in the 20th century, recalling the tense era between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the world seemed to face an unknown fate.
The two rival camps have begun to openly draw comparisons, even if observers note notable differences.
"What we are witnessing today is a kind of new version of the Cold War, an improved Cold War," Russian Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky said last month, blaming the United States for responsibility.
In Berlin, a city once divided by a wall that has become a symbol of the Cold War, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned Thursday that any Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Western countries fear could happen at any moment, would return the world to a period when "this was the case." The continent and this city are divided in half… and the specter of all-out war weighs on everyone.”
The similarities are stark.
First, the geographical split is identical, as Moscow corresponds to the countries of the West.
Militarily, too, there is once again the danger of a local conflict involving proxy forces turning into a broader and more direct confrontation between the great powers.
As at the height of the Cold War, the two powers mobilized allies and defended their spheres of influence in a traditional display of political realism.
And while the Americans suspect that the Russians want to use Belarus as a rear base for any possible attack on Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which the United States recently tried to aim at China, has rediscovered its reason for its existence since its founding in 1949, namely the defense of an unarmed Europe Soviet from a possible attack by Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, practices "Cold War-style brinkmanship, threats and intimidation with the aim of bolstering Putin's image as a strongman," Cornell University professor Sarah Krebs told AFP.
The venue for the talks is based on the phrases used and the issues raised for discussion, which are antiquated in the negotiations of the two sides regarding the deployment of missiles and soldiers at the gates of the anti-bloc.
The decline of the ideological component -
However, John Bolton, who served as National Security Adviser to former President Donald Trump, noted that the current direct confrontation lacks the ideological component of communism versus liberal democracy that "formed the framework of the Cold War."
"What we're seeing now is a kind of classic confrontation of nineteenth-century power politics, and I don't think it contains an ideology," he said.
"The immediate issue we face is not just about Ukraine, but Putin's attempt to either reassert Russian control over the former Soviet Union or, at the very least, to impose Russian hegemony over it," he added.
For Bolton, the current crisis is the end result of a long estrangement caused by the short-sightedness of Western leaders and intellectuals who in the 1990s silenced them in building a world without major conflict and did not realize that Moscow did not really accept the disintegration of its empire. This is what Putin referred to in 2005 as the "great catastrophe" of the last century.
"Putin is patient and quick to move," Bolton said, adding that the process "wasn't quite fast, but it was consistent", referring to Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008 and the 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula.