I am traveling to Moscow this weekend, at a time when Russian media are speculating about a World War III and U.S. media are debating whether we are embroiled in a new Cold War.
The crisis du jour is a likely U.S. missile strike on Syrian military sites to punish the Assad regime for another banned chemical weapons attack on civilians. Russian military personnel are present at key Syrian bases; Russia's chief of military staff, Valery Gerasimov, warned in March that if Russian personnel were endangered the Russians would shoot down U.S. missiles and attack their launch sites.
On Wednesday, President Trump, in his feckless way, taunted the Kremlin by tweeting: "Get Ready Russia because (the missiles) will be coming "nice, new and smart!" By week's end, however, officials on both sides (and Trump himself) were pulling back from their brinksmanship.
Yet, the Syria crisis � which could have exploded by the time my plane lands � will color a trip in which I will be looking at how the fraught U.S.-Russia relationship appears from the Russian side: at current views of Trump (in whom the Kremlin had invested big hopes); the impact of new U.S. economic sanctions targeting Putin cronies; the why and how of Russian cyber-trolling; and the latest Putinology by experts parsing the foreign aspirations of Tsar Vladimir.
To inject a bit of optimism into my visit, I also hope to talk with young Russians who still believe they can build a more democratic country from the ground up.
Before departure, I spoke with the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, whose new book, From Cold War to Hot Peace: The Inside Story of Russia and America, looks at the complexities of the current U.S.-Russian relationship.
McFaul told me he uses the phrase "hot peace" because he wants to echo certain dimensions of the Cold War that are back but to make clear that this is "not the old Cold War but rather a Cold War 2.0".
For starters, Russia does not have the heft of the old Soviet Union, with a current GDP roughly the size of Italy's and an economy that is stagnating, despite rich energy resources. Low oil prices and Putin's failure to modernize the economy are a further drawback.
Of course, Russia has a substantial nuclear arsenal, which it is modernizing. But, says McFaul, the danger is not the numbers of nukes per se, but the fraying rules of the nuclear game. While we are safer than in the Cuban Missile Crisis period, "we are not necessarily better off than during the late Cold War (in the 1980s), when there were rules of the game about how states interacted that made it safer."
Back then "things like annexation didn't happen." McFaul is referring to Moscow's annexation of a portion of neighboring Ukraine in 2014.
Moreover, when Washington and Moscow were engaged in arms control negotiations, "we slowed down and decreased the number of nuclear weapons." At present, says McFaul, "there is a new qualitative arms race on the offensive and defensive side" with no negotiations in sight. Both Putin and Trump are bragging about new nuclear capabilities.
Moreover, despite treaty limits on Russian conventional forces in Europe, "The Russian defense ministry has made faster, better weapons and have a formidable conventional force in the European theatre," which has been making its presence well known with massive military exercises on the borders of European states.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of Cold War 2.0 is the new Russian doctrine of hybrid warfare, as espoused by Gen. Gerasimov, that advocates "nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategical goals". Under that heading comes cyberwarfare, wider disinformations wars, and interference with Western political campaigns. And also an ideological struggle, about which McFaul says Americans are too unaware.
"We in the West are asleep to this dimension of hot peace," the former ambassador argues. "We say communism is dead and liberal democracy triumphed. But Putinism exists and has become an anchor for conservative authoritarians around the world who stand against the 'decadent, immoral, liberal West'."
This kind of "shirt-off, strongman, anti-liberal authoritarianism was initially aimed at Russians, but now Putin is exporting it, finding allies in Europe," funding and promoting far right parties from Hungary to France and elsewhere.
And, of course, as McFaul notes, the strongman ideology of Putinism has followers in the United States, including Trump's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. And, wittingly or unwittingly, Donald Trump.
It is these subliminal Trump-Putin linkages � whatever the realities of any formal collusion � that will make it so fascinating to travel to Moscow. Trump clearly still yearns to hold a summit with Putin, which he recently proposed. Last week, despite the chemical attack in Syria, he twitter-blamed "much of the bad blood with Russia" on the "Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation".
So long as Trump refuses to confront Putinism and the Gerasimov doctrine of hybrid war he will undercut any hope of a coherent U.S. pushback against cyberwar � or chemical attacks by the Russia-backed regime in Syria. This blinkered outlook, says McFaul, would also make any Putin-Trump summit extremely risky.
On the other hand, it will be fascinating to hear how Trumpism � and Putinism � appear to analysts and journalists in Moscow. I will let you know what I learn.
