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101 Foreign Aff. 64 (2022)
The Cold War Never Ended: Ukraine, the China Challenge, and the Revival of the West

handle is hein.journals/fora101 and id is 506 raw text is: 64 10 i E Ai The Cold War Never Ended Ukraine, the China Challenge, and the Revival of the West Stephen Kotkin Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 BY RIC IARD) OVERY. Viking, 2022, 1,040 pp. oes anvone have a right to be surprised? A gangster regime in the Kremlin has declared that its security is threatened by a much smaller neighbor -which, the regime claims, is not a truly sovereign country but just a plaything of far more powerful Western states. To make itself more secure, the Kremlin insists, it needs to bite off some of its neighbor's territory. Negotiations between the two sides break down; Moscow invades. The year was 1939. The regime in the Kremlin was led by Joseph Stalin, and the neighboring country was Finland. Stalin had offered to swap territory with the Finns: he wanted Finnish islands to use as forward military bases in the Baltic Sea, as well STEPHEN KOTKIN is John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941-1990s, the last in his three-volume biography. as control of most of the Karelian Isthmus, the stretch of land at the southern end of which sat Leningrad. In exchange, he offered an expansive but boggy forest in Soviet Karelia, bordering Finland far to the north of the isthmus. To Stalin's surprise, despite serial modifications of his origi- nal demands, the Finns rejected the deal. Finland, a country of around four million people with a small army, spurned the Soviet colossus, an impe- rial power with 170 million people and the world's largest military force. The Soviets invaded, but Finnish lighters stalled the poorly planned and executed Soviet attack for months, ad ministering a black eve to the Red Army. Their resistance captured imaginations in the West; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other European leaders hailed gallant Finland. But the admiration remained rhetorical: Western powers did not send weapons, let alone intervene militarily. In the end, the Finns kept their honor but lost a grinding war of attrition, ceding more territory than Stalin had initially demanded. Soviet casualties exceeded those of the Finns, and Stalin em- barked on a belated top-to-bottom reorganization of the Red Army. Adolf Hitler and the German high command concluded that the Soviet military was not ten feet tall, after all. Now flash forward. A despot in the Kremlin has once again authorized an invasion of yet another small country, expecting it to be quickly overrun. He has been expounding about how the West is in decline and imagines that although the decadent Americans and their stooges might whine, none of them 1: IA 1 S

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