#5
Moscow Times
May 16, 2002
Editorial
Ending the End of the Cold War
It seems the Cold War is dead, again.
The latest cause of death was Tuesday's agreement between NATO and Russia to
form a new partnership.
"This is the last rites, the funeral of the Cold War," said British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
The day before, in announcing that a treaty to cut nuclear warheads will be
signed in Moscow next week, U.S. President George W. Bush said the treaty would
"liquidate the legacy of the Cold War."
The thing is that this final demise of the Cold War, which had kept the world
on edge for decades, was not necessarily big news.
The Washington Post buried its report on NATO on page 19.
The New York Times played the news much bigger, running its story on the
front page. But it contained a nice tidbit about a slip of the tongue by U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell. Describing the arms control agreement to
reporters on his plane, Powell inadvertently referred to the "Soviets"
(so perhaps reports of the Cold War's death were premature after all). Powell
explained his gaffe by saying, "When you're as old as I am ..."
The major Russian newspapers, however, didn't consider it terribly
interesting that Russia had agreed to a partnership with its former enemy.
Izvestia's front-page news Wednesday was the death of a head Soviet soccer
coach, while the NATO article was relegated to page 2. Many papers carried no
news of the NATO deal at all.
The issue, in any case, is not burying the Cold War but creating a new
framework and finding a new way to look at the world. This will be much harder,
as Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said when speaking to reporters in Reykjavik:
"We must now together build the new world order, and this will be a long
process, a difficult process."
Part of this process will be recognizing that Russia has its own national
interests, and they do not always coincide with those of the United States and
Europe.
In the meantime, may the Cold War rest in peace.
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