Robin Wright has covered the foreign policy beat for 4+ decades, most recently for The New Yorker. Today she takes up the question of whether the Cold War actually ended, back in 1992 when then-President George H. W. Bush announced its death.
Spoiler alert: she reaches no firm conclusion. It turns out whether it ended or not depends on whether one views the Cold War as a clash of ideologies, or as a clash of nations and empires.
If the Cold War was a fight to the death between Communism and Capitalism, between the dictatorship of the proletariat and freely elected representative governments operating in a multi-party environment, the answer is it is over, Communism lost.
If on the other hand the Cold War was a battle between the Russian empire, aka Soviet Union plus Warsaw Pact versus the West - the U.S. and its NATO allies - then no, it never ended. There was, to be sure, a pause, a lessening of hostilities, but no end.
Putin has described the fall of the Soviet Union as the "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." He intends to "put the band back together," to reassemble as much of the old Soviet sphere as he possibly can. He has had some success in Crimea, Georgia, and Belarus. Ukraine - a major prize - appears to be next on his agenda.
