The New Cold War: Part One In the last few months, one newscast after another has attacked Russia and its steely president, Vladimir Putin. "This is the new Cold War," a man I know says. "it's just like old times." So let's look back for a moment at those old times. The first Cold War started in about 1947. It pitted the United States of America against the then-communist ruled Soviet Union. These two countries were then the most powerful nations in the world. They were allies in World war II that just ended in 1945. Helped by other countries like Great Britain, Canada, India and Australia, the U.S. of A. and the Soviet Union had defeated, in the world war just ended, Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan and fascist Italy. Yet soon afterwards, the U.S. and the Soviets were at loggerheads. "An Iron Curtain has fallen across Europe," said the former British and World War Two Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The Iron Curtain Churchill said lies "from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic." This communist-imposed Iron Curtain, Churchill claimed, must be rolled back. So the first Cold War began. The U.S. of A. led the western allies in this war. The U.S. president Harry Truman brought back the military draft for young men. The U.S. planted 750 military bases around the world. Now its army swelled again to 1.3 million soldiers. And for the next 44 years or so, wars erupted in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Nearly all these terrible conflicts involved U.S. troops or armies of America's allies fighting Soviet allies. Even when the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died in 1953, the Cold war just rolled on. Yet then in 1991 it was over. The Soviet Union splintered into 14 separate republics, the biggest of which was Russia. Right next door to Russia was the Ukraine which had Ukrainian-speaking people in its western regions & Russian-speakers in eastern parts. Then there were the six counties which had been Soviet allies and Soviet dominated since 1945. These six that included East Germany, Poland and Hungary were now supposedly free. Meanwhile American pundits and leaders celebrated. "We won the Cold War," they said over and over again. "Socialism and the Soviet Union are history." The Cold War is over, others proclaimed. But it wasn't. As said before, when the Cold War ended in 1991, Soviet troops marched out of East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. "Free, free at last," African American leader Martin Luther King Junior predicted for his people at the great civil rights march in Washington, D.C. in 1963. Citizens of the six formerly Soviet ruled countries may have felt the same in 1991. Yet soon most of these countries slid into the American or now-reunited German orbit. Hungary, Poland and a few others joined NATO or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Economic Union. Soon nuclear missiles, supplied by the U.S., popped up in many of these countries. All the missiles were aimed at Russia. This fact broke the promises that the U.S. government had made to Russia after 1991. In the republics that had once been part of the Soviet Union, America flexed its muscles here too. The small now-countries of Latvia and Georgia moved into the U.S. orbit. Soon fighting broke out in Georgia between Georgian and Russian troop. Many of the former republics became total U.S. allies. Yet the Ukraine did not. So after 1991, elections either put a Ukrainian speaking president in power or a Russian speaking president. The Ukrainian speakers looked to Europe and favoured bringing the Ukraine into the European union. The Russian speaking presidents wanted to form an alliance with Russia. Meanwhile the U.S. poured millions of dollars into the Ukraine through its National Endowment for Democracy, or the NED. "This allows us to do legally what the CIA did illegally," said U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in effect in 1986 when the U.S. government set up the NED. Funds from the NED helped form pro-European groups inside the Ukraine. Yer Russia in 2000 now had a tough new president in power, namely Vladimir Putin. And unlike his hapless predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Putin was tired of the U.S. planting missiles all around his country, and interfering in the Ukraine. This former KGB agent lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and wanted Russia to flex its military muscles too. He started to rebuild his country but along dictatorial lines. "Putin restored order inside Russia,' one Ukrainian told this author. "But not law and order." Soon the stage was set for a big power clash in the Ukraine. The new Cold war was about to begin. Yet not all the blame for this can be put on Russia's shoulders. By Dave Jaffe
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