What the Russian president had to say about the United States of America at a security conference in Munich on Saturday might have made people wonder whether the Cold War was still being fought. This was the strongest indictment of American “hyper-force” that Mr Vladimir Putin has made during his seven years as president. The immediate provocation was the missile shield project for which the Pentagon is negotiating sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. This was the latest instance of what Mr Putin described as the US’s “dangerous” and “untrammelled use of the military in international affairs”. The new US defence secretary, Mr Robert Gates, talks of this project as a protection for the US’s “friends and allies” in central Europe from what Iran might come up with in the near future. But Mr Putin suspects that the missiles are directed more at Kremlin’s arsenal. This coincides with Russia revealing its ambitious plan for a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and a revamped radar system to match its economic resurgence with “combat readiness”.

Chechnya had made Messrs Bush and Putin co-warriors in the ‘war against terror’. But signs of the US trying to fill the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet Union seem to have provoked Russia into feeling possessive about the countries of the former Warsaw bloc. And the revival of its economy has emboldened Mr Putin to come up with a more confrontational stance against the US. As for Warsaw and Prague (the “new Europeans”), the new US presence in their midst, in spite of hostile public opinion, makes them feel safer. Watching Nato expand into former-Soviet eastern Europe, Mr Putin would certainly use the United Nations to confront the “Euro-Atlantic” West in order to oppose stronger sanctions against Iran and the Kosovo independence plan.