WaPo: Mr. Putin’s Vision

Yearning for the halcyon days of the Cold War From the Washington Post:

Mr. Putin suggested that the United States was responsible for “a greater and greater disdain for the principles of international law,” and that consequently “no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.” Tell that to Britain’s Scotland Yard, where investigators are unable to pursue their probe of the murder of one of Mr. Putin’s critics because the two leading suspects are being shielded behind a legal stone wall in Moscow. … Mr. Putin, who has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “catastrophe,” spoke nostalgically about the Cold War: “We are indebted to the balance of power between these two superpowers,” he said. “This was certainly a fragile peace and a frightening one. But . . . it was reliable enough. Today it seems that the peace is not so reliable.” With its soaring oil revenue and its hold over European energy supplies, its modernizing nuclear forces, and its willingness to provide weapons and nuclear technology to such states as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, Russia would regain a status such that the United States would be “afraid to make an extra step without consulting.” That, anyway, is Vladimir Putin’s clearly stated ambition.