Putin's Cold War

At least you know where you are with Vlad "the Impaler" Putin. The president's anti-American rant at the Munich Wehrkunde security conference last weekend was immediately compared to Khrushchev's outburst at the United Nations in 1960, when the intemperate Soviet leader took off his shoe and banged its heel on the table.

But the comparison is wrong. Far from losing his temper, this cold-blooded ex-KGB colonel knew exactly what he was doing.

Mr. Putin is a past master at using fear to gain his goals in politics. Like Machiavelli — from whom he has learnt far more than he has from Marx — he believes that "it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both," and that "a prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal."

The target of Mr. Putin's intimidation on this occasion was not identical with the subject of his denunciation. America is not afraid of Russia or its president. Instead, Robert Gates, confident of his country's strength, responded to the provocation with courtesy. Whether it was wise to offer even the hint of an apology for his predecessor's policy I rather doubt. But in any case Mr. Putin's remarks were not addressed to an American audience.

No, Mr. Putin knew precisely where his speech would have its impact — on his German hosts. They, too, were courteous in public, but in private they were appalled.

Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the serpentine course of German Ostpolitik involved a delicate balancing act. While Germany was growing stronger, as was superficially the case throughout the Cold War, it still needed its American allies to ensure that it did not become Europe's nuclear battlefield.

Yet this reliance on American taxpayers to foot the bill for German defense did not prevent the government of Helmut Kohl — which held sway for most of the 1980s and 1990s — from turning itself into Russia's main banker, supplier, and customer.

This cosy business relationship was scarcely disturbed by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the reunification of Germany was in effect a business deal, struck between Mr. Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Caucasus.

The Germans fantasized that they could bankroll Russia's peaceful transition to democracy, and thereafter reap the benefits of exploiting a nascent capitalist economy. It was a quasi-colonial symbiosis: Russia was to be Germany's wild East.

Under Mr. Kohl's Social Democratic successor, Gerhard Schröder, the power relationship subtly changed. Now Germany was becoming dependent on Russian oil and gas, while its own economy was struggling. When Mr. Schröder left office, he took a job running a gas pipeline controlled by Russia's Gazprom. President Putin had the former chancellor of Germany on his payroll.

The chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel — an East German who experienced communism first-hand — is much more suspicious of Mr. Putin. But she is too weak to do much about it. When the Russian president inveighed against NATO's expansion last Saturday, he was careful to quote a former NATO secretary general, Manfred Wörner of Germany, who in 1990 promised that no NATO army would be stationed east of German soil. This was of course at a time when it was still unthinkable — at least for NATO bureaucrats — that former members of the Warsaw Pact, such as Poland, let alone the Baltic states, still living under Soviet rule, could join NATO.

The Russian president also rewrote the history of the Cold War, by claiming credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Apparently it was the Russians, with their famous "democracy, freedom and openness," who tore down the wall.

Many Germans do not know that it was only the resolute resistance of Ronald Reagan, ably supported by Margaret Thatcher, that made a bloodless victory in the Cold War possible. They would rather believe the lie now peddled by Mr. Putin, because their anti-Americanism has blinded them to the fact that modern Germany is essentially an Anglo-American creation.

Ms. Merkel does not believe this lie — but she is not brave enough to say so. She knows her people. Tough talk by Russian leaders sets off allergic reactions in Mitteleuropa. Poles look to America, Hungarians look to Germany, Germans look to their checkbooks.

Already there is talk of a new Cold War. Perhaps the old one never really ended.

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CORRRECTION: In this column on January 31, 2007, I identified Ian Black as the author of an unsigned editorial in the London newspaper, the Guardian, which included the words, "A nuclear Iran is easier for Israel to contemplate than a Palestinian leader who wants peace." I am happy to accept Mr. Black's assurance that he did not write the article in question and, despite his job description on the paper's Web site, no longer writes editorials on foreign policy for the paper.