Is the Cold War back?

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) trashed Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed published Thursday on Pravda.ru, an online successor of the Soviet-era Kremlin mouthpiece. The Russian president, McCain wrote, coddles tyrants (including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad), jails dissidents, and rigs elections. "Russians deserve better than Putin."

The broadside was McCain's response to Putin's recent opinion article in The New York Times, in which he ridiculed U.S. foreign policy and the idea of "American exceptionalism."

Feel the chill? A few short years after President Obama set out to reboot Washington's faltering relations with Moscow, a Cold War mentality appears to be creeping back.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

As recently as 2006, 73 percent of Americans saw Russia as an ally or friend. Just 20 percent considered it an adversary. Now, according to a new Gallup poll, more Americans see Russia as a foe than an ally (50 percent vs. 44 percent). That's the first time in a decade that the balance has tilted so anti-Russia.

Blame Putin, and his open clashes with President Obama, over everything from his sheltering of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to his protection of Assad. Putin's recent leadership on seizing Syria's chemical weapons may have won him some points with the U.S. public, says Matt Vasilogambros at National Journal, but a majority still have an unfavorable opinion of him.

In some ways, this does feel like the old Moscow-Washington rivalry. Yehuda Lukacs says at the Boston Herald that Putin is sponsoring fervently anti-U.S. regimes the Syria, Iran, and elsewhere in an attempt to reclaim the influence Moscow lost when the Soviet Union fell.

Russia indeed seems to be seizing every opportunity to tweak the U.S.. But does this really mean we're back to where we left off when the Soviet Union collapsed? "The answer is no," says Richard N. Haass at the Council on Foreign Relations. Putin's Times op-ed was just a "victory lap" after his proposal spared his ally, Assad, from a looming barrage of American missiles. The bottom line, though, is that Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, is no match for the U.S. militarily or economically, Haass says, so, "Putin will not want the competition to get out of hand."