Five years ago – even two years ago – I could never have imagined writing this book. Talk of a new US–Russian Cold War, already in the air, seemed to me wildly exaggerated. Sure, tensions existed, and the relationship had been up and down for years. The two countries were feuding over US plans to put a missile defense system in Europe, the war in Syria, and the refuge Russia had given Edward Snowden. Vladimir Putin had run much of his 2012 re-election campaign on a crude theme of anti-Americanism. And President Obama had grown so frustrated over Russia’s lack of cooperation on a number of key issues that he called off the summit of the two leaders planned for September 2013.

But that the bottom would fall out, and the two countries would careen into a swirl of vituperation, hostility, and confrontation with no end in sight, caught me, and I think most observers, by surprise. True, one or two commentators had for some time insisted that a Putinled Russia was from the beginning in a new Cold War with the West. But most observers thought that either misrepresented the problem in Russia–West relations or misunderstood the concept of cold war. Now, however, suddenly the relationship had crossed a threshold and entered an unexpected but qualitatively different phase. The useful ambiguity of previous years, when neither side was quite sure whether the other was friend or foe (but, left to hope, mostly friend) had vanished. As the angry recriminations of spokesmen on both sides made plain, they were now adversaries, convinced the other side meant to do as much harm to their country as the former’s scheming would allow. Thoughts of cooperating on issues where failure to cooperate bordered on the insane, such as limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, banding together to deal with terrorism, and doing something about climate change, still echoed faintly on both sides. But anything approximating genuine cooperation on the hard issues of the day, such as coping with a Middle East in flames, ensuring that the development of the Arctic’s vast oil and gas reserves remained peaceful, getting a handle on the rising perils in a world of multiple nuclear powers, encouraging mutual energy security in place of increased energy competition, and responding to the rise of China and other new powers, had died – at least until that awful Friday night in November in Paris.

Instead the United States, in something resembling an ersatz containment policy, declared its determination to isolate the Russian regime – driving it out of the G-8, cutting off key arms control negotiations, suspending cooperation in a wide range of working groups, mobilizing allies to do the same, and, with them, applying a broad range of sanctions against Russian political and business leaders as well as key banks and energy entities. Russia lashed out with a bitter denunciation of US foreign policy and declared its willingness to live without the West – characterized in any case as morally corrupt and in economic decline and political crisis. It would use the West’s hostility to develop its own human and material resources and create a more self-sufficient country. It would fashion an alternative universe of partners and allies – first with its nearest neighbors in a Eurasian Economic Union and then with China and the other members of BRICS (Brazil, China, India, and South Africa). And it would not back down: having seized Crimea and fueled the war in eastern Ukraine, it meant to keep supplying the insurgents with more and better armament and doing little to bring about a stable Ukraine at peace.

Something fundamental had happened in US–Russian relations, and more broadly in Russia’s relations with the West, but what? How was this new dark chapter to be understood, its significance assessed, and its likely course judged? As analysts groped for a label, the easy recourse – too easy, because few thought hard about its actual relevance – was cold war. It was shorthand for a relationship gone bad, but whether and how this really paralleled the original Cold War went unexplored. Like the word “war” itself, when employed as “the war on poverty,” a “war on crime,” or the “war against drugs,” the phrase had no conceptual content.

Many others, however, objected to the very use of the term. Calling this latest, admittedly steep deterioration in relations a cold war seemed to them a misappropriation of history, and, worse, one sure to produce misguided policy. Nasty as the relationship had become, it scarcely matched a contest that dominated an entire international system for nearly a half century. This was a feud between a set of Euro-Atlantic states and Russia. China and much of the rest of the world would not be part of it. Nor did a diminished and troubled Russia come close to presenting the challenge to the United States and NATO that the Soviet Union had. Moreover, to the extent that the notion of cold war implied an old-fashioned geopolitical struggle, it made no sense in a world where the threats were stateless terrorism, the economic pathologies of globalization, the mounting sources of global disorder and the growing incapacity of global institutions to deal with them, climate change and the resource conflicts likely to follow, and the violent fire raging in the world of Islam. To make matters worse, if cold war became the mental framework of policymakers, the strategies they were likely to embrace would be overly aggressive and ill-suited to a challenge whose context, character, and stakes bore little resemblance to those in the earlier period.

At one level all of these objections were valid. Looked at from another angle, however, things were not so simple. Indeed, the tensions convulsing Russia’s relations with the United States and its European allies were not recasting the character of international politics or, like a vortex, sucking in a widening circle of other states. Yet, treating this as a key contrast with the original Cold War overlooked how central a single relationship – that between the United States and the Soviet Union – had been to the larger setting. Had there been no US–Soviet rivalry, or had it ended much sooner, there would have been no cold war or, at least, not one that had the same intensity or lasted as long. In much the same way, a poisoned US–Russian relationship, even if no longer the core of the international system, still had the potential to warp and damage key dimensions of international politics – from the management of (or failure to manage) a multipolar nuclear world to the state of play in global energy; from the prospects of peace in the Eurasian heartland to how tension-filled the adjustment to the rise of China and other new major powers would be.

If that seemed a stretch, given the inferior weight of Russia when compared to the Soviet Union, the metric was wrong. Judged by gross but crude measures of power, such as GDP and defense spending, Russia, with a GDP one-eighth the size of that of the United States and defense spending roughly eleven times smaller, was hardly in the same league as it – or as China, for that matter. Add to this the crushing economic crisis seizing the country in 2015, and it was hard to believe that Russia remained a player on a global scale.

Change the measurement, however, and the picture looked quite different. As the world entered the second nuclear age – a new era of multiple nuclear actors in complex relationships – Russia, the other power with half of 92 percent of existing nuclear weapons, had only one peer, and, unless the two of them took the lead, nothing would be done to contain the dangers in a new and vastly more complicated “second nuclear era.” If the measure was stability in and around the Eurasian landmass, again, few countries mattered more than Russia. To the extent that fossil fuels will remain the primary energy source for the global economy through the first half of the twenty-first century, Russia, with 45 percent of the world’s gas reserves, 23 percent of its coal reserves, and 13 percent of its oil reserves, slightly less than half of which it exports – making it the world’s largest energy supplier – obviously had a key role to play. For US policymakers struggling with the headline issues of the day – a Syrian civil war, the Islamic State, Iran’s nuclear program, not to mention the Ukrainian crisis – the actions of no other country raised more concern than those of Russia. And, together with China, both veto-wielding members on the United Nations Security Council, Russia held one of the keys to whether the universal institution counted on to deal with the many cases of regional violence – past and future – would actually be able to perform.

So, a new Cold War between Russia, the United States, and its European partners – if that be the case – is, indeed, a serious matter. Calling the collapse in relations a new Cold War, therefore, has to be justified – particularly when US–Russia potential collaboration against the Islamic State would seem to belie it. That is one purpose of this small book. But the larger reason for the book and the label is to underscore the consequences of what is happening and to place current events in a broader perspective offering a better chance of exiting the exorbitantly costly path the two countries are now on. The failure to recognize the stakes – and, to an extent, the misrepresentation of the stakes – in the Ukrainian crisis simply extends the failure by both sides to weigh properly their stakes in the US–Russian relationship throughout the post-Cold War period. The book’s third purpose is to suggest a course that, were leadership in both countries – and the stress is on both – to adopt it, has a chance of leading away from the current confrontation.

The thesis that underlies what the reader will encounter in the next four chapters is simple, although far from obvious, let alone instantly convincing for many. It consists of three linked propositions. First, the confrontation between the United States and Russia that began over the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 now has a depth and seriousness, making it a cold war, with all of its attendant consequences. Second, the two sides arrived at this point together, having failed over the quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet Union to overcome and often even to address the factors slowly, if fitfully, dragging the relationship down, until the Ukrainian crisis and ultimately Russian actions in that crisis sent the relationship spinning into this new unknown. Third, the only path out of the current impasse must be traveled together; change will not come through the triumph of one side and the capitulation of the other or through the good will and initiative of one side unreciprocated by the other.

Both elements of this thesis – i.e., that the deterioration in relations amounts to a cold war and that each side bears responsibility – will stir strong dissent. Whatever it is, many will argue, the deeply troubled US–Russian relationship is not a cold war, and a fair amount of energy will continue to go into listing the reasons why it is not. The other objection will be still more fundamental: holding both sides responsible for this outcome, many in both countries will insist, ignores the extent to which only one side bears responsibility. In the United States and the West they will stress that Putin’s annexation of Crimea and surreptitious war in eastern Ukraine constitute the sole reason relations have gone over the edge. In Russia an equal number will contend with comparable passion that US interference in the Ukrainian events, abetted by NATO allies, against the background of a US policy increasingly contrary, even hostile, to Russian interests explains everything.

My frail hope is not to persuade those who hold one or both views that mine has more merit, but that they will engage the argument honestly, if only to strengthen their own. For others, Russians and Americans, with open minds, the hope would be that they come away from the book with a deeper appreciation of the stakes involved, ready to bring a broader perspective to the current crisis in relations and, whether accepting the specific policy prescriptions offered here, persuaded that the leadership of both countries needs to rethink the trajectory they are on and alter course.

The argument unfolds in four parts. Chapter 1 explores alternative ways of understanding what has happened in US–Russian relations and makes the case that, carefully considered, the notion of cold war best captures the scale and nature of the collapse. Fundamental differences between the original Cold War and the present situation are obvious and noted, but in five crucial respects what is happening today mirrors what happened then, particularly in the early phase of the original Cold War. These five parallels, I argue, bring then and now into the same universe. But, rather than leave it at that, I weigh with some care the various reasons said to disqualify the use of the concept. Next, in pursuit of the book’s second purpose, I explore what I fear are the very large and underappreciated consequences of the new Cold War. These are introduced not to diminish the significance of the Ukrainian crisis, but to give a larger context to events and the stakes involved.

Chapter 2 reverses the perspective and considers ways to think about the original Cold War that shed light on the new Cold War. Its purpose is not to reassess the Cold War, to share what the new Cold War history teaches us about key Cold War events, or to engage the arguments among Cold War historians over the origins, end, and course of the Cold War. There are excellent books that do that (Leffler and Westad, 2010; Westad, 2013; Service, 2015; Wohlforth, 2003; Gaddis, 2005, 1997; Zubok and Pleshakov, 1996; Haslam, 2011; Kremenyuk, 2015). Rather, it is to exploit different angles used to understand the original Cold War with the aim of enlarging the framework available for assessing today’s confrontation. In addition, there are important insights to be had in contemplating the principal “why” questions concerning the Cold War: why it occurred, why it took the shape that it did, why it lasted as long as it did, and why it ended when and as it did. These are also considered in chapter 2, because it is from them that comes a better sense of the Cold War’s legacy and of the lessons contained in the history of those years.

Chapter 3 then turns to an explanation for how the new US–Russian Cold War has come about. The road, it argues, has been long and sinuous, marked by phases, with one phase containing the seeds deepening the damaged and distorted character of the next. The Ukrainian crisis is the dramatic exclamation point in the process, but it is not where the story begins. However, it is unique, because it represents a fundamental break in the sequence of phases. The phasing is over. The Ukrainian crisis has eliminated the prospect that any time soon the two countries will return to the good moments and the bad, to the ups and downs that characterized the previous stages in the US–Russian relationship. The intense hostility and tension of 2014–15 may well subside over the next two or three years, and the two countries may well get back to an active, if uneasy interaction. Unfortunately the alternative chance of the confrontation exploding into something much worse also exists, although the degree to which both by early fall 2015 seemed to be settling into a stalemate makes this less likely. But, even if what the future holds is an easing of the standoff, the two will still remain estranged, and each will continue to view the other as an adversary, no longer a potential partner in dealing with the major foreign policy challenges each country faces. And a good deal of each country’s policy will focus on dealing with the other in those terms.

The thread, having wound from the definition of the problem and an assessment of its scale and significance through the perspectives and lessons derived from the original Cold War and an exploration of the path leading to the new one, ends in chapter 4 with thoughts about what would be necessary were the two countries determined to work their way out of the current impasse. That is, were they ready, as this book urges, to make the new Cold War as short and shallow as possible – thus, addressing the third purpose of this book. The course urged, as I recognize, is not where priorities are in either country. Nor is the mood among political leaders, politicians, the media, and publics in either likely to shift quickly in this direction.

History’s kaleidoscope, however, will continue to turn – as it did dramatically on November 13, 2015. Predicting how the force of events – including the unnerving realization that the Islamic State is no longer a local but now a global threat – may reshape the political landscape within either one or both countries or between them remains an uncertain occupation. Surely the menace posed by the Islamic State argues for military cooperation between the United States and Russia and a closer alignment on ending the fighting in Syria. But getting from there to any real softening of the deep mistrust and animosity between the two is quite another matter. Only if leaders on both sides step back, focus on the costs of their new Cold War, and consciously set about shifting course will they begin to lead their two countries out of the morass described in the pages to follow.