The long game

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has triggered a global backlash. But geography and geopolitics may yet play in Russia's favour.

- PAUL THOMAS

Russian President Vladimir Putin has rolled back history.

Europe is on a war footing for the first time in three-quarters of a century. Every day, we are confronted by images of devastation and barbarism – levelled neighbourhoods, mass graves, railway stations choked with refugees fleeing with whatever worldly possessions they can carry – that we associate with history books devoted to wars fought by generations who will never grow old.

The Cold War, thought to have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, is back and more bitter than ever. While Mark 2 might appear to be less of a winner-takes-all ideological struggle – pluralistic capitalism versus totalitarian communism – it, too, is a face-off-between incompatible world views: democracy versus authoritarianism, globalism versus hypernationalism, a rules-based international order versus might is right.

Those differentiations illustrate why elements of former US president Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement are pro-Putin and/or indifferent to Ukraine’s fate. They also raise the troubling question: which side will America be on if the Maga movement succeeds in its hostile takeover of the Republican Party and Trump is re-elected in 2024?

While the first Cold War condemned humankind to four and a half decades beneath a nuclear sword of Damocles, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (Mad) imposed restraint and reticence on the leaders of the US and USSR.