Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were involved in creating "dialogue" between the Soviet Union and the US during the late 1980s. Photo: Mark Lennihan / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.When Russian troops entered Syria in 2015, many people started talking about the inevitability of a military conflict between the US and Russia. In mid-April 2017, President Donald Trump declared that Vladimir Putin, Russia and Iran “would pay a high price” for a chemical attack on the city of Douma that killed several dozen people. The US announced that it was preparing for a retaliatory missile strike on Syrian army bases, drawing a threat from Russia’s Ambassador to Lebanon that Russia would shoot down America’s Tomahawk missiles in response.
The American public are used to treating their president’s outrageous tweets as a joke (Trump on missiles: “Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!”), but in these circumstances Trump’s warning sounded like a return to the apocalyptic mood of the Cold War. After all, in Vladimir Putin Trump is facing another unstable character who, unlike him, doesn’t have to answer to the state and the public. It was Putin who first resorted to the nuclear threat as a tool of international politics when he stated in 2015 that he was prepared to put Russia’s nuclear weapons on standby during the Crimea crisis in 2014.
The Western allies’ April 2018 rocket attack on Syrian bases was, nevertheless, successful, and Russia, fortunately, kept out of it (at least officially: the anti-aircraft defence forces that shot down the Tomahawks could have been commanded by Russian officers). The war with the west was postponed and the period up to and after Putin’s recent re-inauguration (or until after the Football World Cup) can be seen as a time of relative quiet.
