The debate over the dynamics of Russian foreign policy has become ever more closely tied to controversy over the ‘regime question’: the problem of the nature of the political system that took shape during Vladimir Putin’s two terms as president between 2000 and 2008. Indeed, it appeared that one could not be understood without the other being taken into account. While foreign policy can never be dealt with in isolation from domestic constraints, the collapse of the one category into the other in the discourse of the late Putin years is reminiscent of the essentialism that characterized debate in the Soviet era. This is just one example of the way in which, in a structural sense, Cold War patterns of thinking have once again surfaced in discussion about Russia and its role in the world. Putin’s second term as president from 2004 was accompanied by ever more insistent suggestions that a new Cold War was in the making. This article will try to place these concerns in context and to provide both an empirical and a theoretical analysis of why the notion of ‘Cold War’ has returned to haunt us once again. It will deal with issues both substantive—namely, whether we are indeed entering a period that can be described as a Cold War—and discursive—why the category of Cold War remains so stubbornly entrenched in our understanding of international politics in general, and in relations with Russia in particular. I will begin by looking at the framework of Russian policy between 2000 and 2006, a period characterized by what we call a ‘new realism’. From here I will move on to the unravelling of the new realism from 2006, and will then consider the features and causes of the putative ‘new Cold War’......
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