At the Beijing Olympics, Russia, whose confident young athletes brought home more medals than any other country save China and the United States, certainly didn't look like a defeated country. Russia has recovered at last from her post-communist dog years of shame and depression. Under the skilled leadership of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev gifted politicians by any standards Russia is reasserting its natural role as a great world power.
Historians will see NATO's attempts after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 to extend its security mandate to cover the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states adjoining Russia as a great folly. With Soviet communism, Russia's abiding strategic imperative for a national security glacis of friendly and unthreatening neighbours on its western and southern borders should have been respected. Instead, under the mischievous influence of neo-conservatives in Washington over the past eight years, the Russian bear was recklessly baited and provoked.
US-led NATO gave diplomatic and material support to assertively anti-Russian post-communist government policies in the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine and Georgia. Russian diplomatic signals over several years that it could not accept such provocations in its near abroad, that it demanded friendly and mutually respectful relations with its near neighbours on the Finland model (and, be it noted, Finland is a fully sovereign European nation and EU member), were recklessly brushed aside.
Finally, now, Georgia: a bridge too far by a weak, irresponsibly advised, US prote{aac}ge{aac} government, producing national disaster. Abkhazians and South Ossetians, whose regions were included in the Georgian republic under the old Soviet internal boundaries but which were ethnically distinct communities, had good reason to fear Georgian nationalism after a brutal armed incursion into Abkhazia soon after Georgia voted for independence on the break-up of the Soviet Union. They have been de facto Russian protectorates ever since. Georgia's military attempt this month to occupy South Ossetia while the world's eyes were on the Olympic Games ended in humiliating failure. Now, the Russian Parliament, pointedly citing the Kosovo precedent, has formally recognised the two regions' right to independence.
In response, the US and the EU pronounced this decision internationally invalid, and NATO declared it would review its whole relationship with Russia. Poland finalised a long-debated deal to install a US anti-missile system on its Baltic coast, over Russia's vehement objections. Russian President Medvedev says defiantly that Russia needs nothing from NATO. US Vice-President Dick Cheney announces a demonstratively supportive visit to broken, humiliated Georgia. The British Foreign Minister, David Miliband, pays a similar visit to Ukraine. The East-West mood is worsening daily.
So is the Cold War coming back? Some in the US want it so. The US, by far the most highly militarised country in the world, needs a plausible new global enemy. Islamic fundamentalism is too diffuse and inchoate. China is too deeply enmeshed in the US economy as a major creditor and industrial supplier: too many vital interdependences are at stake to risk sabre-rattling. Self-sufficient, assertive Russia could again play the role of the enemy at the gates.
Post-communist Russia itself has no global ideological agenda beyond stability. Russia does not want a new Cold War. Yet, in a key speech in Munich last year, Putin warned the West that Russia would not tolerate US pretensions to superpower dominance, asking: ''What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious, unacceptable, impossible.''
Russia's demand to be respected as a great power both in its own region, and in a global concert of great powers, is reasonable. China and India make similar demands. Russia is pressing for a legitimate balance of world power on the classic European model. Yet Western voices now seek to re-demonise Russia.
For people like US Vice-President Cheney, the humiliating failure in Georgia is not a signal to reasonably accommodate to Russian interests but an opportunity to revive in US public opinion half-forgotten Cold War antipathies to Russia. What a perfect way to justify the continued high level of US military expenditures, now 45 per cent of the world's total.
These recent events will advantage the Republican right in the US election campaign. Revived anti-Russian fears could wedge either Obama or McCain into an anti-Russian stance after the election.
Whoever wins, Western-Russian relations seem set for difficult years. There is an urgent need for wiser voices in the Western alliance to make themselves heard before things get much worse. A new Cold War does not have to happen, but events are moving that way.
Tony Kevin, a retired Australian career diplomat, served in Moscow (1969-71); UN, New York (1973-76); and as Australian ambassador to Poland (1991-94).