AMERICAN PURPOSE
Ukraine: The Return of the Cold War
Michael Mandelbaum
March 25, 2022

For twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the world, and especially the United States, enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace. Preparations for great-power war, the anticipation of it, and negotiations with such a war in the background were largely absent from the foreign policies of the strongest powers. The war in Ukraine makes it clear that that happy period has ended. Now it is a matter of urgency to assess how that conflict will proceed and what American and Western policy toward it should be. One way to make such assessments is to refer to America’s most recent experience with great-power competition, the Cold War, which has a good deal both to teach and to suggest. READ MORE