Stephen Cohen has an article titled; The New Cold War . Cohen argues that the main threat to American security remains Russia and that the American policy approach to Russia since the Cold War is exacerbating that threat.

Cohen points to many statistics of a Russian state in decline since the 1980s. It is under-going depopulation, demodernization and is suffering wartime death and birth rates. Additionally there is little to no public support or confidence in the governmental institutions outside of Vladimir Putin.

Cohen sees Russia as forming a threat to the US through either Balkanisation as the political, economic and ethnic divisions result in further disintegration of what was once the Soviet Empire.

The other possibility he mentions is the increasingly autocratic government and oligarchic economy enabling virulent authoritarianism and nationalism. Regimes of this nature tend to spread disruption to their international neighbours.

Cohen identifies two policies toward a fragile Russia which Washington has undertaken;

one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently, professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a generous relationship of "strategic partnership and friendship."

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The real US policy has been very different - a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist Russia.

The latter policy is the encirclement of Russia with American bases in parts of the old Soviet states such as Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Cohen argues that this doctrine entails that Russia has no legitimate interests outside of its own sovereign territory. He also argues that America has interfered in Russian internal affairs as well, basically not treating it with the fearful respect that it did during the Cold War.

This has lead to a 'chill' in Russian-American relations;

The extraordinarily anti-Russian nature of these policies casts serious doubt on two American official and media axioms: that the recent "chill" in US-Russian relations has been caused by Putin's behaviour at home and abroad, and that the cold war ended fifteen years ago.

The first axiom is false, the second only half true: The cold war ended in Moscow, but not in Washington, as is clear from a brief look back.

Cohen links this behaviour to the triumphalism of the ending of the Cold War which was claimed as an American victory, rather than a Soviet-American mutual decision to end the conflict.

One was to treat post-Communist Russia as a defeated nation that was expected to replicate America's domestic practices and bow to its foreign policies.

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From that triumphalism grew the still-ongoing interventions in Moscow's internal affairs and the abiding notion that Russia has no autonomous rights at home or abroad.

Russia still has a veto on the United Nations, but neo-conservatism has done an end-run around multi-national institutions as the United States seeks to restate its right for national sovereignty and international hegemony.

In reality, Russia is being treated little differently to other nations under the neo-conservatist foreign policy doctrines coming from the White House.

Cohen's claim that this is not new to the Bush Administration is true, but the Clinton White House had similar views on US hegemony and the on-going reach of its military. In terms of rhetoric and behaviour surrounding that doctrine, Clinton was less abrasive internationally than Bush II has been.

The Cold War was an economic one that centred on social and economic organisation. The Soviet's did lose that competition. Liberal democracy and a market economy were better able to provide prosperity to its people.

Additionally those forms of organisation were better able to provide political stability to its institutions, effectively minimising the destructive effects of corruption and arbitrary government.

Communism, as practiced by the Soviets could not compete and collapsed under its own weight.

Autocracy and oligarchy are not much better than the prior Soviet political and economic organisation. The west is right to point this out to Russia. Even though the west is going through its own collapse into executive decree in the Washington and Westminster systems, there are enough checks and balances that executive decree is hitting barriers.

The spread and reach of American military has meant that any nation which is an American ally has an American base on its territory. Australia has two for instance.

It is only really Russia, China and Iran who do not now; and even they are surrounded by fixed bases and American blue-water projection from its carrier groups.

American policy has been destructive in the past, the action in Iraq has had a destabilising effect on the region, as well as oil markets. Russia again is no different in this respect. America plays power politics hard and spares the whip for no nation - not even a longtime lapdog ally like Australia.

This is effectively the world-order that Russia, like other nations, has to exist in.

So what should Russia's policy be?

Putin has been building new sympathetic states to the Kremlin between Russia and EU/NATO; such as Belarus and a failed attempt at the Ukraine.

This will fail, the best means to capture the world's attention is to build a thriving internal economy. Do that and every nation will want to be Russia's friend.

China has discovered that despite being a one-party state, the west wants a part of the new Chinese prosperity.

Russia has enough people that even if it maxes out in GDP per-capita, it will be one of the world's biggest economies. This, coupled with Russia's existing military power and entrenched status in multi-national institutions from its Soviet days, will ensure that America and other nations wont be able to push too hard against Russia.

Russia doesn't have to Americanize to achieve this; but it will have to adopt more liberal political and economic policies, and this is where Russia has failed.

Cohen has a point that American policy toward Russia should be more aware that Russia could be at a tipping point internally where it adopts a path that can lead to greater international disruption.

But it is naive to think that American policy will change to allow a 'Russian exception'. Power politics is selfish and focused on internal advantage.

The only exception America will follow is American exceptionalism. It stands that other nations need to put themselves in a position of strength in this environment and the path Russia has taken under Putin does not achieve this.

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After World War II when the conflict between Stalin's ambitions and American wishes to hand Europe back over to the Europeans, the Americans found they had to face Stalin flatly. After confusion as to Stalin's behaviour Truman denied territorial concessions in Turkey and the Mediterranean. Additionally the US Sixth Fleet was stationed in the Mediterranean permanently and indefinitely.

Stalin did not conduct foreign policy through the European great power policies or Realpolitick; instead his policies were ideological and stemmed from a Marxist reading of capitalism being inherently at war with itself and unsustainable. Stalin believed democracies were the same and in short order America, Britain and France would all be at war with each again.

To explain all this George F. Kennan sent a 'long telegram' of 8,000 words from the embassy in Moscow to the US. Telegrams at the time were short as the technology was laborious and had bandwidth issues. Kennan's telegram broke with accepted conventions but ended up informing Truman's policy of containment and the Marshall Plan.

Gaddis writes:

Moscow's intransigence, Kennan insisted, resulted from nothing the West had done: instead it reflected the internal necessities of the Stalinist regime, and nothing the West could do within the foreseeable future would alter that fact.

Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because they provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand".

Kennan argued that long string of failures would be needed before Soviet leaders would see the fallacy of their internal governance, however, war would not be necessary. Kennan wrote that what was needed was a;

long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies.

Marshall was concerned that the breakdown of Western Europe after the ravages of war made it ripe for Marxist-Leninist doctrine. He asked Kennan for a quick and simple solution to this issue. The consequent policy was the reconstruction of Europe which became known as the Marshall Plan.

When Czechoslovakia threatened to transition to democratic capitalism Leonid Brezhnev implemented what came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine; the USSR could violate the sovereignty of any country in which an effort was being made to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism. Beware the morally unassailable courtesy of ideology when they have the resources of a nation-state behind them.

Democracy is morally superior to the authoritarianism inherent in communism, however, we saw similar morally unassailable and shallow claims to history from the Bush Administration and their policy to bring to democracy to the Middle East through the violation of a nation's sovereignty with the force of arms. It is little different to Brezhnev's doctrine.

After Czechoslovakia the Soviet Union expended much foreign policy to ensure that the doctrine would not become a dictum as it would require their intervention all through South America. In the same way the Bush Administration has backed off their claims which would logically require the invasion of Pakistan amongst others.

Moral claims to forms of political organisation as absolutes, such as the end of history, are dangerous. Humanity is a technological species and political organisation has followed our increasing capabilities of technological innovation from tyranny to democracy, and might makes right to republicanism (constitutional liberalism).

I have no doubt humanity will develop forms of technology and political organisation that will make democracy seem like a quaint historical form of illiberalism and tyranny.

The map of Europe at the end of WWI had never intended to be permanent, but the new Cold War between the Soviet Union and America (and by extension the democratic and capitalistic West) had led to the divisions in Europe and Asia being an established part of the geopolitical landscape.

Detente was a doctrine in the 1970s which accepted those divisions and map as permanent. This gave the Soviet government legitimacy, as well as the territory and political hold they had on Europe legitimacy as well. Detente was more important to the Soviets than it was America, however, from the US point of view it followed a doctrine of realpolitik.

John Lewis Gaddis points to several world leaders who were not prepared to deal in Dentente which entrenched the cold war conflict as the status quo; they were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev.

The main push against detente was Reagan's and could not have happened unless there was an increasing liberal and peaceful Soviet leader as there was in Mikhail Gorbachev. The irony of these two leaders and their militaristic nations is that they both believed in peace and that MAD [Mutually Assured Destruction] - a center piece of detente - was an out-dated and dangerous military policy. It was through this understanding that the liberalisation of the Soviet Union, and ultimately its collapse as a political, ideological, economic and 'historically infallible' entity occurred.

The leaders did not manage to do all this in isolation. The American population was constantly pressing for a more moral conduct of American foreign affairs which included the international establishment of human rights, the respect for democracy and free markets as well as a Wilsonian zero tolerance for authoritarian regimes.

Those living in communist countries were also constantly pressing for change and effectively delegitimized the communist governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and eventually the Russian Republic itself. The two most visible incidents of this was Solidarity who sought to establish a labor union that was separate to the state, and the fall of the Berlin Wall when East German guards opened the gate between East and West on their own initiative.

When authoritarians are faced with the loss of legitimacy to rule they usually respond with violence. Deng in China put down the Tiannamen Square challenge with violence, in the same way that Brezhnev rolled the Soviet tanks into Prague earlier. The difference with Gorbachev the peacenik is that he did not. He was prepared to let personal happiness be found in self-organization and political expression despite his belief in socialism.

Gaddis points to the tanks not rolling into Poland when there were strikes and protests over the lack of food as the turning point to when the Soviet Union collapsed even though the fall of the Berlin Wall came as a complete surprise to governments around the world. It meant the abolition of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Instead the Soviets opened up the Polish economy to trade with the West in order to ensure there was sufficient food for the Poles.

Lenin-Marxist ideology claimed that communism was the end result of history; it was inevitable since capitalism could only end in war and poverty, consequently socialism, central planning and a ruling elite were inherently legitimate. Reagan challenged this through the 'evil empire' speech. It also sounded an end to detente. Gaddis writes:

The 'evil empire' speech completed a rhetorical offensive designed to expose what Reagan saw as the central error of detente: the idea that the Soviet Union had earned geopolitical, economic, and moral, legitimacy as an equal to the United States and the other western democracies in the post-World War II international system.

By this time communism had lost legitimacy in the Soviet Republics people were living double lives, and it was obvious that the Lenin-Marxist system of government, economy and organization was unable to provide prosperity or happiness. In comparison to the ability of capitalism and market economies to scale horizontally in complexity and wealth, the centrally planned economy was an inefficient beast steeped in stasis, corruption and failure.

Humanity is a moral species. It follows that the amoral nature of realpolitik will have trouble being explained or legitimized in a democracy which relies so heavily on popular support for political legitimacy. Foreign policy requires an element of morality for it to be complete. Reagan and Gorbachev's willingness to challenge the status quo, or detente, led to a geopolitically better world.

I was born in the early seventies so the Soviet Union as the empire of evil ready to nuke the civilized world into oblivion for political and economic ideological reasons never resonated with me. By the time I was a teenager and able to comprehend the complexity of politics the Soviet Union was another failed nation that couldn't feed its people.

My memory of the glory of the Soviet Union was food lines and people waiting days on end for toilet paper. My experience of food and other essentials in Australia during the seventies and eighties was abundance. Consequently the Soviet Union got lumped in my mind with other nations that couldn't feed their people like Kampuchea and Bi-Africa. For me it wasn't a state to be feared, if anything it was to be pitied.

Eventually the Berlin wall came down, but again, me not being a cold war warrior and Germany being a long way away from Australia it was all a pretty abstract concept and something that happened on the other side of the world.

Since my knowledge of Cold War and Soviet history is pretty poor I recently picked up Gregory Feifer's book on the Soviet - Afghanistan conflict. Gregory Feifer writes:

Most Americans view the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan as a naked act of aggression by a ruthless, totalitarian state. The reality was far more complex. For more than a year, Soviet leaders rejected pleas from the Afghan communist government to send troops to help put down rebellion by the rural population protesting the regime's merciless modernization program.

After Moscow did invade, it found itself locked in conflict - essentially a civil war - it could barely comprehend. While it cannot be said that Afghanistan triggered the Soviet collapse, it did project the image of a failing empire unable to deal with a handful of bedraggled partisans in a remote part of its southern frontier.

It certainly looks like the Afghan politicians used the Soviets to build their own legitimacy and make up for their own bad governance, especially their inability to resolve internal political conflicts without violence.

The modernization program killed numerous people in the rural areas, robbing Afghanistan of its tribal leadership and stability. Added to that the political violence as the different communist factions in Afghanistan fought with each other using Army and Air Force loyalists didn't make for much pleasant in Afghanistan.

The Soviets were concerned about American influence in Afghanistan after the Revolution in Iran which was anti-American. Previously to that Iran had been pro-American and the Soviets were concerned that America would start to seek influence in Afghanistan instead.

Additionally it seemed Brezhnev was sentimental for the ousted leader of Afghanistan and made an emotional decision to send in the Soviet troops on a large scale. Brezhnev was aging and the core group that made up the Soviet decision makers shielded him from bad news in Afghanistan which largely led to the conclusion that Soviet intervention was necessary.