By Zach Battat, The Montreal Review, July 2026

Zach Battat is a Montreal-based historian and foreign policy analyst whose work focuses on international affairs, Cold War history, and the long roots of contemporary conflict. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies. His scholarship has appeared in The International History Review and other peer-reviewed journals, while his public-facing writing has been featured in The National Interest, Policy Options, La Presse, Le Devoir, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Made By History series. His upcoming academic book is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic.

More than a century ago, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and began reshaping the vast Russian Empire into a socialist state, Washington made a fateful decision. After a failed intervention on the side of the Whites during the Russian Civil War, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet government. During the ensuing years, successive American administrations treated the Soviet Union not as a difficult partner to be managed but as an illegitimate regime to be isolated through sanctions, diplomatic cold shoulders, and rhetorical hostility. Thus, what most commentators call a ‘New Cold War’ between the United States and Russia is, in fact, the third phase of a conflict that began in 1917 and has never truly ended.

If we take seriously what a ‘cold war’ actually is—namely, a protracted freeze in relations between two states characterized by deep mistrust, ideological antagonism, and periodic crises short of a full-scale war—then this American posture toward Soviet Russia already contained the seeds of what we now call the Cold War. The roots of today’s confrontation did not suddenly appear in 2014 or 2022 or even 1947; they reach back to 1917.

The canonical Western definition of the Cold War tends to fix it between 1947 and 1987, framed by the Truman Doctrine on one end and the Reagan–Gorbachev détente on the other. In that forty-year span we find the familiar features: proxy wars on several continents, arms races, nuclear brinkmanship, and the fear that a crisis in Berlin, Cuba, or the Middle East might end life on earth in a matter of hours. But if we strip away the mythology and return to basics, a cold war is simply a situation in which relations between two major powers are frozen by deep structural suspicion. It may lead to proxy wars, as it did between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this is not inevitable. The Sino–Soviet split in the 1960s produced a sharp chill in relations between Moscow and Beijing with border clashes, propaganda battles, and a total breakdown of trust yet without the global narrative we attach to the U.S.–Soviet rivalry.

In that sense, what we usually refer to as the Cold War between Washington and Moscow was really only the middle act of a much longer drama. The first act began in the wake of the Russian Revolution, as the American refusal to recognize the Soviet government solidified into a pattern of treatment that cast Moscow as permanent outsider. For roughly a decade and a half, the United States adopted a policy that combined moral disdain for Bolshevism with economic and diplomatic pressure. The new regime in Moscow might have called itself a great power, but Washington treated it as something closer to a pariah. The depth of this early mistrust was reinforced by the information environment that Americans inhabited after 1917. In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published a landmark study, ‘A Test of the News’,1 of the New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution, showing that the paper had repeatedly assured readers that the Bolshevik regime was collapsing and that the White armies were on the verge of victory, when in fact the opposite was true. Lippmann and Merz concluded that the Times had not simply reported events; it had stated what its editors hoped would happen. The effect was to entrench in the American imagination the idea of Soviet power as temporary and illegitimate, helping to solidify the early pattern of treating Moscow as outside the legitimate international order.

It was only in 1933 that this first cold war thawed. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a far more pragmatic and worldly strategist than many of his contemporaries, made the decision to formally recognize the Soviet Union. On November 16, he took the step that Woodrow Wilson and his successors had refused to take, hoping that Soviet–American relations would, as he put it, ‘forever remain normal and friendly’.2 The decision was not born of naïveté about Stalinism; Roosevelt understood perfectly well that he was dealing with a brutal dictatorship. But he was also realistic about geography and power. The Soviet Union could and should, he believed, be drawn, however slowly and imperfectly, into a cooperative framework with the Western democracies. In a 1928 article in Foreign Affairs, written well before his presidency, Roosevelt spelled out what he thought America’s approach to the world ought to be:

[America] can point the way once more to the reducing of armaments; can cooperate officially and whole-heartedly with every agency that studies and works to relieve the common ills of mankind; and can for all time renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention in the home affairs of [its] neighbors.3

Here was the embryo of what would later become his vision of a ‘Grand Alliance’: a permanent concert of powers—‘The Nations’ as he sometimes called them—which would include the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China as guarantors of world peace after the defeat of the Axis. Roosevelt’s strategy toward Stalin was not sentimental. Knowing the Soviet leader’s paranoia and the trauma his country had endured, Roosevelt believed that engagement, reassurance, and careful respect for Soviet security concerns were far more likely to produce stability than open confrontation.

World War II seemed to vindicate that logic. The Soviet Union lost more soldiers than any other Allied power: over 27 million lives, perhaps more if we include those never properly accounted for. Without the Red Army’s brutal, grinding push across Eastern Europe, it is difficult to imagine Nazi Germany’s defeat. The wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow was never harmonious, but it was effective. For a brief moment, it appeared that shared sacrifice might provide a foundation for the cooperative postwar order that Roosevelt envisioned.

However, history turned in another direction. Roosevelt did not live to see the end of the war; he died in April 1945, just weeks before Germany’s final surrender. Roosevelt had insisted on his vice president, Henry Wallace, a progressive internationalist who favoured continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, as his running mate in 1940, but by 1944 conservative Democrats had replaced him with Harry Truman. This quiet political shift proved decisive: Roosevelt’s death handed the presidency to a leader far less committed to engagement with the Soviet Union, and the careful balance he had tried to maintain in dealing with Stalin was abruptly lost. Truman inherited the presidency without sharing Roosevelt’s instinctive preference for engagement over confrontation.

Before Truman met Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, he sought advice on how to handle the Soviet leader. He turned to two men with very different readings of Moscow: Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and W. Averell Harriman, the sitting ambassador. Davies, recalling a country that was crude, battered, and profoundly scarred by the war, urged Truman to handle Stalin with care, avoid unnecessary provocations, and recognize the depth of Soviet insecurity. If handled carefully, Davies believed, Stalin could be drawn into Roosevelt’s vision of ‘The Nations’, a Soviet Union integrated, however uneasily, into a cooperative postwar system. Harriman, by contrast, painted Stalin as irredeemably paranoid, blunt, and untrustworthy. According to his reading, the only sensible approach was to give nothing, concede nothing, and treat every Soviet move as an aggressive gambit to be countered. Truman, lacking Roosevelt’s intuition for great power politics and confronting an intimidating new strategic landscape, gravitated toward Harriman’s advice.

From that choice grew the second part of the American–Russian cold war. The line of continuity between Roosevelt’s cautious engagement and Truman’s more confrontational posture is often smoothed over in textbooks, but it had important implications. Instead of exploring whether a softer, more patient approach might have brought the Soviet Union into a more stable relationship with the West, Washington hardened its attitude. Within a few years, the rhetoric of partnership had been replaced by talk of containment, ‘iron curtains’, and an existential clash between ‘the free world’ and communism.

This second act, the Cold War proper, stretching from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, contained many chapters: the Berlin airlift, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, multiple rounds of arms control and arms races, the brutal suppression of uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the détente efforts of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and, finally, the remarkable, almost theatrical relationship between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. For all their ideological differences, Reagan and Gorbachev shared one crucial insight: the nuclear arms race had brought both countries to the edge of catastrophe. Their meetings in the mid-1980s, especially the 1986 Reykjavik summit where they briefly contemplated the elimination of their entire nuclear arsenals, were extraordinary. Domestic opposition in both countries forced them to pull back from that radical idea, but they did succeed in abolishing an entire class of nuclear weapons and generated a genuine sense, felt by millions, that the long freeze might finally be ending.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, many in Washington and Moscow proclaimed that the Cold War was over. Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, Stanislav Shushkevich, and several other leaders gathered in a hunting lodge in the Belovezh forest and signed the documents that became known as the Belovezha Accords, effectively terminating the Soviet state. The Russian Supreme Soviet then ratified the accords. Later, one of Yeltsin’s own advisers admitted that the process had been ‘neither legitimate nor democratic’.4 The decision was taken over the heads of a populace that, only nine months earlier, had expressed its wishes in a referendum. Gorbachev himself later complained that the men behind Belovezha ‘wanted to get rid of him’.5 Nationalist deputy Sergei Baburin recalled a communist colleague justifying the ratification by saying that by voting yes, ‘we will get rid of Gorbachev and then come together again’.6 Accordingly, many deputies voted less to break up the Union than to be rid of an increasingly discredited centre.

The referendum they overrode, organized by Gorbachev and often forgotten outside the former Soviet Union, had asked citizens whether they wanted to preserve a reformed union. Roughly 76 percent voted yes. In other words, three-quarters of Soviet citizens did not want the country to be broken apart. That vote is better read as evidence of a third position than as nostalgia for the status quo. Many citizens were critical of late Soviet bureaucracy and political repression, yet they were also wary of a market transition that threatened to dissolve social guarantees and transfer public wealth into private hands. They wanted reform without dispossession: political opening alongside a protected, mixed economy rather than either authoritarian continuity or shock-therapy rupture.

To outsiders, the Soviet Union was an ideological adversary or an abstract geopolitical entity. To the people who lived in it, it was their life. They were born there, went to school there, had their first romantic experiences there, built careers, formed families, and buried their parents there. A person cannot remove themselves from their diary any more than they can remove themselves from their own skin. It is not surprising, then, that decades later many Russians as well as Ukrainians, Belarusians, and citizens of Central Asia continue to feel a complicated nostalgia for certain aspects of the Soviet period. They remember not the queues and the shortages but the sense of certainty: guaranteed employment, subsidized prices for basic goods, free education and healthcare, the widespread use of Russian as a common language, and a social safety net that, however frayed by the 1980s, still existed.

Yeltsin’s abrupt decision to dissolve the Union, without preparation and against the clearly expressed will of the majority, shattered a highly integrated economy. Supply chains that had been woven together across fifteen republics were suddenly severed, resulting in a collapse in production, a plunge in living standards, mass poverty, and a surge in social pathologies, such as alcoholism, crime, and demographic decline. At the same time, a new class of oligarchs emerged, enriched by insider access to the privatization of state assets. Wealth that had formally belonged to ‘the people’ was claimed through presidential decrees, often without even a fig leaf of parliamentary participation. Russians memorably dubbed their new ‘democracy’ under Yeltsin a dermokratiya (дерьмократия), a ‘shitocracy’. This was not merely a domestic tragedy; it was an international turning point. In Washington, the collapse of the Soviet Union was read as proof that America had ‘won’ the Cold War. The old commitment to treat the Soviet Union as an equal, ritualized in arms control agreements and diplomatic summits, was replaced by the conviction that the United States was now the world’s sole superpower, licensed to reshape the international system as it saw fit.

This is where the third part of the American–Russian cold war begins. It did not start with Vladimir Putin, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, or the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Its origins lie in the 1990s, when the United States chose to treat post-Soviet Russia not as a potential partner in building a more stable order but as a defeated adversary that could safely be ignored, instructed, or pushed aside. To understand this third phase, it is important to recognize that post-Soviet Russia is not simply a continuation of the Soviet Union. Its political and economic system is no longer communist but a hybrid form of state capitalism with conservative social tendencies, shaped by the chaotic transition of the 1990s. Although many Western commentators have interpreted Moscow’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022 as evidence of an effort to rebuild the Soviet empire, Russian officials have repeatedly rejected that characterization. Putin himself has often invoked the well-known line that ‘anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyone who wants it restored has no brains’7 in order to signal that the Kremlin does not seek a wholesale restoration of Soviet borders. From Moscow’s perspective, the war in Ukraine emerged not from expansionist ideology but from a belief that Russia required a buffer against what it viewed as the steady advance of NATO toward its frontiers. Whether or not one accepts this rationale, the Russia of the twenty-first century operates within a very different institutional and geopolitical framework than its Soviet predecessor, while Washington’s strategic outlook has remained strikingly similar to its late Cold War mindset.

The Clinton administration gave the Yeltsin government what amounted to a carte blanche to ‘reform’ Russia so long as those reforms aligned with the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy in Washington and the prescriptions of Western economists. The guiding assumption was that a rapid ‘transition’ to a free-market economy, shock therapy, would create democracy, prosperity, and stability. In practice, it destabilized a nuclear-armed state to an extent that, in retrospect, looks reckless.

Contrary to many Western narratives, Russians were not clamouring for unregulated capitalism. Both before and after the Bolshevik revolution, setting aside the extreme statist model of the Stalin era, Russia had generally operated with what its own economists and officials would recognize as a ‘mixed economy’: significant state involvement in strategic sectors combined with private enterprise. When reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of perestroika (перестройка), or ‘restructuring’, they were imagining something closer to European social democracy than American libertarianism: a system combining market mechanisms with strong social guarantees, regulated prices for essentials, and public ownership of core infrastructure. Russians often described this aspiration as sotsializm s chelovecheskim litsom (социализм с человеческим лицом), or ‘socialism with a human face’.

But the zealots who dominated American foreign policy and economic establishment in the 1990s had little interest in such nuances. They pushed Yeltsin to move as quickly as possible toward privatization, deregulation, and integration into Western financial structures. The result was not a healthy democracy but a fragile, corrupt system in which a small group of insiders seized wealth on a colossal scale while ordinary people saw their savings wiped out and their life expectancy fall.

Meanwhile, the broader strategic relationship between Washington and Moscow remained trapped in Cold War thinking. Officially, the Cold War was over, but the mentality in Washington and in many think tanks had changed very little. NATO, instead of redefining itself or fading into a different kind of security architecture, expanded steadily eastward, incorporating countries that had once been part of the Warsaw Pact and, later, part of the former Soviet Union itself. Each round of enlargement was justified as defensive, but from the Kremlin’s perspective, it eroded the buffer zone that had historically been seen as essential to Russian security.

Under George W. Bush, there was a brief moment of cooperation when, after the September 11 attacks, Russia supported the American campaign in Afghanistan. That moment soon gave way to familiar patterns. In 2002, the Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the bedrock of Moscow’s national security, and launched the invasion of Iraq a year later. In 2006, former Vice President Dick Cheney declared in Lithuania that Russia should no longer be considered ‘a strategic partner and trusted friend’.8 Moscow read these moves as signs that Washington no longer felt bound by great power understandings.

Barack Obama took office in 2009, promising a ‘reset’ with Russia. For a short period, there were indeed gestures in that direction: a new START treaty, some rhetorical softening, and a photo op featuring a symbolic red ‘reset’ button. Yet the underlying structures of distrust remained. NATO increased its rotational deployments, exercises, and infrastructure in Eastern Europe during the Obama years. The intervention in Libya in 2011, justified to Moscow as a limited humanitarian operation but quickly becoming a regime-change war, reinforced the belief that American assurances were not to be trusted. When protests in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 culminated in the ouster of President Yanukovych and Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Donbass, the Obama administration led the push for sanctions and for a firmer NATO posture on Russia’s borders. The ‘reset’ was dead, and the third act of the cold war moved into a more confrontational phase.

On top of this came the pattern of American unilateralism more generally: the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s without a UN mandate, the full-scale invasion of Iraq, and then Libya. To many in Moscow, the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine, though not American military operations, appeared as Western-backed efforts at regime change. Each episode may have had its own logic in Washington. Seen from Moscow, they were chapters in a single story—a story in which the ‘victorious’ West felt no obligation to honour earlier assurances or to treat Russia as an equal. This perception of betrayal was not merely a propaganda line; it was, and remains, held by much of the Russian elite, from liberal internationalists to hardliners. Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have repeatedly spoken of promises made and broken, particularly around NATO enlargement. Whether every recollection is precise is less important than the cumulative effect: a deep conviction that the United States, having declared itself the winner of the Cold War, is determined to keep Russia permanently constrained.

In this context, sanctions appear less as an episodic instrument than as a standing feature of Washington’s Russia policy, with roots reaching back to 1917. Indeed, after new American sanctions were imposed in response to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Medvedev, then prime minister, remarked that Russia had been sanctioned for a hundred years in one form or another.9 Even Medvedev, often cast at the time as one of the system’s more pragmatic, West-facing figures, described relations as razrushennye (разрушенные), or ‘destroyed’.10

The climactic crisis of this third cold war act came, of course, in Ukraine. The seeds were planted long before 2014, but that year’s events, Kyiv’s Maidan Revolution, the flight of President Yanukovych, the Russian annexation of Crimea (or, as Russians refer to it, the reunification of Crimea), and the outbreak of war in Donbass accelerated the spiral. From Washington’s standpoint, Russia had violated international law and the sovereignty of a neighbouring state. From Moscow’s standpoint, the West had supported what it saw as a coup in Kyiv and had refused to acknowledge any Russian stake in the outcome. Even then, there remained a narrow diplomatic path. The Minsk Accords were intended to provide a framework for reintegrating Donbass into Ukraine with a special status and constitutional guarantees. Yet successive Ukrainian governments, encouraged by Western rhetoric and arms deliveries, did not implement the political provisions of Minsk, while Russia maintained its military and political backing for the separatists. Likewise, neither the United States nor the European Union exerted serious pressure on Kyiv to take the difficult steps necessary to make the accords work.

From 2007 onward, Russian officials repeatedly signalled that the prospect of Ukraine (and Georgia) joining NATO was a red line. These warnings were often dismissed in the United States, Canada, and the European Union as bluster or bargaining. Then came the 2008 war in Georgia, the Bucharest Summit’s reckless promise that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’, and years of mutual distrust. In late 2021, Putin’s government sent written proposals to the United States and NATO outlining what it claimed were its security concerns and desired guarantees. Whatever one thinks of the specifics, Washington responded by treating the proposals largely as unacceptable.

In February 2022, as Ukrainian forces increased their deployments to the eastern frontlines and President Volodymyr Zelensky began publicly musing about nuclear weapons and fast-track NATO membership, Putin made the decision to launch a full-scale invasion. If Putin pulled the trigger, it was the United States and its allies who had spent decades loading the gun.

This is not a defence of Russia’s actions. The invasion was a preventive war by choice not necessity. The threat to Russia’s existence, while emerging, was not imminent. Diplomacy, however strained and unlikely to succeed, had not been exhausted. War, once unleashed, proved predictably catastrophic—cities destroyed, half a million killed or maimed, millions displaced—and the risk of escalation to direct NATO–Russia confrontation or even nuclear use was far from negligible. Looking back, it is clear that Putin’s decision rested on a cascade of miscalculations. He overestimated the readiness and effectiveness of his own armed forces, underestimated Ukrainian resilience and nationalism, and, perhaps most dangerously, misjudged the willingness of the American foreign policy establishment to continue its Cold War-style confrontation at high cost and high risk. He was hardly alone in misreading the situation, but as the leader ordering the invasion, he bears ultimate responsibility for the choice.

Had the Istanbul peace talks in the spring of 2022 produced a settlement, those who argue that Putin’s gamble was strategically justified might have had a stronger case. But the war has dragged on. The drawn-out character of the conflict, its mounting death toll, and the cumulative devastation have made it increasingly difficult to portray the invasion as a rational act of statecraft, even from a narrowly Russian perspective. It is quite possible that, over time, Russia will secure enough territory or political leverage to claim some sort of victory, but whether those gains will be worth the economic, military, and human price is a different question entirely.

What is unmistakable, however, is that the war in Ukraine has not become part of a ‘New Cold War’ so much as deepened an old one. The structures of distrust, grievance, and mutual suspicion that have shaped American–Russian relations since 1917 have simply entered a new, more dangerous phase. The language of a ‘New Cold War’ suggests a break with the past, as if something fundamentally different began in 2014 or 2022. In reality, we are watching the third act of a drama whose first lines were spoken when the United States refused to recognize the Soviet state and whose central theme, the inability of Washington and Moscow to move beyond a zero-sum view of each other, has never been resolved.

In Donald Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, there were brief, contradictory signals about a possible shift. On the one hand, Trump occasionally spoke in terms that sounded closer to Joseph Davies’s old advice, hinting at the possibility of better relations with Russia, questioning the wisdom of some interventions, and expressing scepticism about endless confrontation. On the other hand, his administration’s actual policies included new sanctions, arms sales to Ukraine, and a hard line on many issues, most notably its decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty. The broader American establishment, Congress, the intelligence agencies, and much of the media treated any talk of a détente as almost treasonous. A kind of ‘Russia frenzy’ took hold in sections of the Western political class, where every domestic controversy seemed to include a Russian angle.

The subsequent Biden administration, from 2021 to early 2025, reverted to a more traditional American posture: rhetorical commitment to democracy and alliances, support for NATO enlargement, culminating in the accession of Finland and Sweden, and a willingness to treat Russia primarily as a malign actor to be contained, sanctioned, and weakened. When the 2022 invasion confirmed every negative expectation about Moscow, it became even harder in Washington to argue for anything resembling Roosevelt’s old vision of a concert of powers.

In January 2025, Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term with rhetoric which, again, suggested some instinctive openness to reducing tensions with Moscow or at least to questioning the automatic logic of permanent confrontation. Yet he is hemmed in by the same structural forces that constrained his first term: a foreign policy establishment invested in the existing paradigm, a Congress suspicious of any overture to Russia, and allies wary of any unilateral American bargain. The tension between Trump’s occasional gestures toward Davies and the entrenched Harriman school in Washington has only grown more visible. The administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy makes this tension plain.11 It rails against ‘globalism’ and promises restraint, yet insists that U.S. economic and military pre-eminence must endure and treats the war in Ukraine as a problem to manage rather than a chance to rethink relations with Russia. The document does not end the long Cold War; it quietly updates it.

In late November 2025, Reuters published the text of a draft 28-point U.S.-backed peace framework for the Russia–Ukraine war, which it reported obtaining.12 It pairs a reaffirmation of Ukrainian sovereignty with a constitutional bar on NATO membership, constraints on Ukraine’s armed forces, phased sanctions relief for Russia, and an economic reintegration agenda including energy, critical minerals, and investment vehicles. It treats enforcement and incentives as the core mechanism of stability, with conditional guarantees and compensation doing the heavy lifting. Regardless of its feasibility or justice, the document reads less like an exit from the long cold war and more like its management by contract—a management which is now shaping the next phase of the war in Ukraine.

Now in its fifth year, the war in Ukraine has evolved into a grinding contest of attrition, with periods of escalation and stalemate, recent expanded strikes on Kyiv and Russian warnings of further attacks, diplomatic initiatives raised and abandoned, and a steady tightening of the sanctions and countersanctions that now shape the broader relationship. Inside Russia, too, the long war has narrowed Putin’s room for manoeuvre: high interest rates and the hidden conversion to a war economy have strained the civilian economy,13 and the scale of Russian casualties has become increasingly difficult to conceal.14 Yet public opinion appears to reflect the same constraint: many Russians favour ending the war, but far fewer support doing so if it requires returning the territories Russia already holds.15 This leaves the Kremlin facing pressure for an endgame, but not necessarily for territorial rollback or for a settlement that looks like defeat. That tension has given hardline voices within Russia’s strategic and foreign-policy establishment more room to sharpen a longstanding argument that Moscow should impose an outcome in Ukraine rather than wait for a negotiated settlement with Washington, a view reinforced by the war on Iran and by the belief that Tehran was left bargaining over sovereign choices under military and economic duress before receiving only a fragile interim understanding.16 Trust between Washington and Moscow is effectively non-existent. Arms control frameworks that once put guardrails on the rivalry have eroded or collapsed. The wider international system has grown more multipolar and more brittle, with other powers—China, India, and regional actors in the Middle East and the Global South—seeking to navigate between a sanctioned but assertive Russia and a self-confident but internally divided United States.

In this landscape, American leaders often describe the confrontation as a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Such language captures some of what is at stake, but it misses a deeper divide. The real fault line in the latest phase of this long cold war runs between a universalist project and various forms of non-universalism. On one side stand those who insist that a single set of political and economic norms can and should apply everywhere and that the United States and its allies remain the natural guardians of those norms. On the other stand states and movements that reject this universalizing claim, whether in the name of sovereignty, civilizational identity, religious tradition, or simple resentment of Western power.

Russia does not offer a coherent alternative model of world order, and neither do many of the governments that resist Western pressure. What they share is a refusal to accept that Washington’s preferences are identical to the interests of humanity as a whole. Russia’s own official rhetoric has increasingly framed this refusal in civilizational terms. Since 2022, and building on older debates, the language of Russia as a distinct civilization or ‘state-civilization’ has moved closer to the centre of official discourse, though in practice this civilization is imagined less as a culture above the state than as a multi-confessional, statist order protected and defined by the state itself.17 For them, the argument with the West is less about the details of parliamentary procedure and more about who has the authority to declare which rules are binding for everyone and which are open to negotiation. In practice, the current confrontation is not simply a contest between democrats and authoritarians. It is a struggle over whether any power can still claim to speak for a universal order and what follows if that claim is no longer widely believed.

Seen in that light, references to a ‘New Cold War’ between America and Russia obscure more than they reveal. What we are living through is not a fresh confrontation born of Putin’s personality or NATO’s latest moves. Rather, it is the third stage of a long-standing cold war that has repeatedly changed its surface form while preserving its core: a deep, reciprocal inability to imagine security with the other side rather than against it coupled with a recurring American temptation to confuse its own universalism with the interests of the world.

There have always been alternative voices. Roosevelt’s vision of a Grand Alliance, including the Soviet Union and China as co-guarantors of peace, was one. Davies’s recommendation to Truman to deal with Stalin carefully and without gratuitous provocation was another. Even in recent years, scattered figures in both countries have argued that the true threats to American and Russian security—international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics, and cyber vulnerabilities—are not problems that can be solved by treating one another as permanent enemies or by insisting that one side’s institutions are the universal template for all.

Yet the zealots of confrontation in Washington and their counterparts in Moscow have repeatedly prevailed. In the United States, ideological triumphalism combines with entrenched institutional interests to make questioning the logic of endless rivalry exceedingly difficult. The military-industrial complex, far from being a conspiracy theory, is a structural reality of American politics, reinforced rather than restrained by partisan polarization. The U.S. operation that captured Nicolás Maduro and removed him from power in early January 2026 serves as a reminder that the repertoire of intervention remains readily available, even in the Western Hemisphere.18 In Russia, a mixture of genuine security concerns, wounded pride, and regime self-preservation has reinforced a siege mentality that feeds on Western missteps. On both sides, universalist rhetoric is often used to justify policies that deepen, rather than reduce, insecurity.

What we are witnessing is not a ‘New Cold War’, but an old one still unfolding, now in its third phase and more than a century old. The urgent task is not to debate labels but to confront a deeper impasse: the United States’ reluctance to relinquish the claim that its own model represents the sole legitimate destination of history, and Russia’s continued tendency to ground its foreign policy in grievance rather than coexistence. Without some modest retreat from universalist ambition and some corresponding acceptance of pluralism, talk of ending the cold war will remain empty.

For the sake of their own citizens and the wider world, American leaders will eventually have to decide whether they wish to continue staging new variations of the same cold war drama or whether they are prepared to imagine something different. Roosevelt once believed that the United States could ‘renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention’ and ‘cooperate…to relieve the common ills of mankind’. That imagination has flickered at times, but it has never quite gone out. The tragedy of the last century is that whenever such voices have emerged, in the United States as in Russia, they have been marginalized by those who regard confrontation as a permanent necessity or, worse, a profitable habit. The danger today is that we now find ourselves closer to catastrophic miscalculation than at any time since the early 1980s war scares and, arguably, since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Rather than debating whether this ‘New Cold War’ is really new, it is time to ask what the old one can still teach, even if learning those lessons is harder in a world where the claim to speak for universal values is contested as never before.