Others still separate the historic eras. They contend that there are more differences than similarities between the Cold War of the twentieth century and the tensions of the early twenty-first. “I don’t think it would be accurate to say it was just an interregnum, a short little thing, and then we’re back to the way history always is,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia now at Stanford University, told me. “The old Cold War did end.” It was followed, McFaul said, by a “moment of opportunity” when Russia could have consolidated democratic governance at home and integrated into the liberal international order. “Some of us worked on that project—and that project failed, in 2011,” he said, referring to the time just before Putin reclaimed the Presidency and consolidated power.. The Cold War, McFaul said, was replaced by a period of “hot peace.” And it may now be getting much hotter.

The one constant is Moscow’s ambition, Francis Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” told me. Putin has openly lamented the Soviet Union’s collapse as a “huge tragedy. His foreign policy has been really to try to reassemble as much of that entity as possible.” But otherwise, Fukuyama said, the stakes between 1947 and 1989 were higher, and the conflict “much more enveloping” globally. The Cold War was often considered a conflict between rival universalist ideologies. In 2022, Putin is instead seeking “to undermine the belief of Western democracies in their own systems, but he’s actually not trying to pretend that Russia has a superior system that would apply in other countries,” Fukuyama said. The ideological battles of the Cold War have been replaced by more traditional geopolitical competition. “Russia is simply trying to gain influence using the sort of limited military leverage that it has in different parts of the world. But that’s not the Cold War,” Fukuyama said. Russia today, he added, is far weaker than the Soviet empire was, especially as much of Eastern Europe is “pretty solidly aligned with the West.”