Do you remember where you were when the New Cold War ended? Or better yet, did you even know that there was a New Cold War in the first place?

For now, let's just spend a few moments with our memories.

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It's hard to imagine the people who lived through the New Cold War. What were they like? Did the Americans who lived through the New Cold War know what a Blu-Ray disc was? Did the Russians under Putin love their children too? Believe us when we say to you, we hope the Russians did.

A better question would be: What was wrong with those morons? Were people really that stupid? Looking back, those New Cold War peddlers, who operated roughly between 2003 to 2007, appear as ridiculous as those loafing bachelors in Jane Austen movies, who spent years riding their carriages around the countryside looking for someone to marry.

The New Cold War: in February 2008, the phrase has a hair-band/Duran-Duran retro comedy about it. And yet, if we remember right, people back then were really scared about this New Cold War. Nobody we knew, but... Well, okay, actually just a few dozen media whores and Tom Clancy types in Washington and London, along with their counterparts in the Kremlin. There weren't many of them, but they made up for it with sheer 24/7 hard work, building a New Cold War house of horrors, a fun-house ride that can still scare epileptics and Fred Hiatt.

And we're giving you, the reader, an E-Ticket on the New Cold War ride before they close it down to build the new "Mullahs of the Persian Gulf Theme Park" (spinoff movie already in the works, with Johnny Depp as Ahmadinejad). So all aboard for the last tour of NewColdWarLand! Keep your hands and feet inside at all times, folks, and don't touch the audio-animatronic neo-Stalinists as we take you back to 2003. Whooo, scary days, remember? Putin refused to back the Iraq invasion and then had the nerve to steal Yukos away from Cheney. We all knew invading Iraq was the right thing to do; anybody who wouldn't march in with us had to be evil. So the pundits went to work portraying Russia as a toxic mutant, militarizing and going fascist by the day. At the same time, they told their readers—not a very discerning bunch—that Russia was getting weaker all the time. It had to be, because it was rejecting the Magic Market that makes countries strong. They tied up their little mind-puzzler neatly by explaining that it was Russia's weakness that made it dangerous. And we actually believed this. Gosh, we really were lovable, gullible goons back then!

Russia got weaker and scarier every year, reaching a bull market peak in 2007 as the Russian media started hitting back with hysterical hype about Rus's struggle with America. Finally the Russians were playing along! The New Cold War was a hit, a bankable hit!

The spinoff market was sizzling. Serious publishers were paying good money for books like Mark MacKinnon's The New Cold War or Edward Lucas's The New Cold War. By the way, they're totally, totally different books, because they have different subtitles. MacKinnon, going for style, subtitles his with a lovely pair of "R"s and "P"s: "…Revolutions, Rigged Elections, and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union," while Lucas tries for that inclusive, big-tent feel with "…How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West."

Already we hear you snickering: "You've got to be kidding me! Someone published a book in February 2008 about the New Cold War? Those poor bastards! Don't they know it's not 2007 anymore? Next thing you'll tell me is that they carry purse-dogs and drive around in Minis!"

Sadly, these books really are that dated, as if Lucas just published a book called, Sub-Prime Mortgages: They're Not Just A Passing Fad! followed by MacKinnon's Florida Condominiums: The World's Best Investment!

Poor Lucas and MacKinnon missed the market by a few months. What's even more agonizing is that the two authors are aware of their problem. Just two pages into Edward Lucas's The New Cold War, he confesses: "This book was conceived and written over one summer, requiring exceptional efforts from my literary agents…who grasped the urgency of the idea and found publishers willing to bring it out at breakneck speed." He goes on to thank those publishers directly for "effortlessly cramming work that normally takes a year into barely three months."

In other words, the book was a big-time rush job.

MacKinnon's New Cold War is an even sloppier high-speed paste job. The first chapter, a scare-intro about terrifying life under Putin, is rife with factual errors. Just a couple of examples: he wrongly calls Yevgeny Primakov "the longest serving of [Yeltsin's] prime ministers," wrongly dates Putin's move to Moscow to 1997, and absurdly claims that Putin "exported" his managed democracy to Kazakhstan—which has been ruled by one family for over 20 years—and Azerbaijan, a pro-American family dynasty since 1993. MacKinnon may have hoped that his prose is so bad no one would notice the errors. Try reading this sentence aloud: "Russia, under Yeltsin, was a snarly but seemingly powerless bear when dealing with the other former Soviet republics." Snarly the Powerless Bear—didn't our angry divorced babysitter read us that, with the title character talking in her ex-boyfriend's voice? This is the kind of spittle-laced rant that gets typed out ten minutes after deadline.

In fact, MacKinnon's introductory rant contradicts his other chapters, which demonstrate that Putin was right in calling the NGOs and "independent media" tools of American geopolitical/oil interests. Those chapters are solid and tightly written, but ultimately not as bankable as the New Cold War angle was thought to be, back in the summer of 2007.

In publishing, rush jobs usually mean sensationalism, exploitation, and hackery. Quickies are timed to hit a media event at its peak—to catch a wave and ride it to the Amazon shore. They tend to be glossy, heavily illustrated, and carry titles like Diana: The People's Princess. The danger of the rush-job is that it can look ridiculous not long after being squeezed out. Anyone have a copy of Time magazine's triumphant 21 Days to Baghdad lying around?

As we noted back in a November preview of Lucas' book, there is more than a whiff of sensationalism around his recent Russia writing. And you can't really blame him. You just can't interest the Western mass audience in foreign news without resorting to bombast. A Middle England housewife just isn't going to care about pipeline politics in Central Asia unless KGB oligarchs are in those pipes, on their way to Nottingham to rape and enslave her children.

The funny thing is, even after rushing to finish his manuscript, MacKinnon and his publishers missed their wave. The New Cold War (NCW) hysteria peaked around the Duma elections and the imprisonment of Gary Kasparov in late November 2007. By the time the book came out, fashion trends had changed. First Putin nominated the mild-mannered and liberal-ish Dmitry Medvedev to succeed him as President; and then a couple of weeks later, Time magazine, of all places, published a sober reconsideration of Putin in its "Person of the Year" issue. Just as quickly and easily as that, the NCW hysteria seemed so last year.

Lucas's The New Cold War is the sloppier rush job of the two, riddled with typos and missing punctuation. The index is worse than an Indian train wreck, misdirecting readers and even suggesting they see page 318 in a 261-page book. There is even a different subtitle on the title page—The Future of Russia and the Threat to the West—perhaps reflecting a last-minute decision to somehow make the book less Putin-specific. Too bad nobody had time to tell the printers that they'd switched their advertising slogan.

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But perhaps these books are meant to be enjoyed as kitsch. After all, we live in a time where culture is both sped up and fixated on the past in endless retro-fads. So perhaps we're already ready to re-consume the New Cold War as retro-kitsch. And what better way to do that than to read the more New Cold War-y of the two New Cold War books: the one written by Anglican Russophobe Edward Lucas.

After thanking his editors for getting the book out so fast that they couldn't edit it, Lucas pulls out his costume box of epaulets and funny mustaches, invoking Hitler and Stalin. According to Lucas, there is a new darkness at noon. Similar to the last one—both very dark and quite noon-ish—but this time, the danger lies in the fact that, in Lucas' view, "the West" is so stupid it can only worry about one enemy at a time. Just as the Allied powers grew so obsessed with Germany and Japan in the 1930s that they lost focus on the threat posed by Russia, today a misguided obsession with radical Islam and the War On Terror keeps us from seeing the threat posed by Russia. Again.

Lucas' book drips with Osama-envy. That damn War On Terror has screwed up the journalistic ambitions of every foreign correspondent not based in the Middle East—including, of course, all the Russia specialists, who have to try so much harder to convince the folks back home to spare a little fear and loathing for the Russians, rather than spend their entire hysteria budget on the Muslims. Russia specialists have to beg like the California Almond Growers in that old ad: "A can of Slavophobia a week, that's all we ask!"

Lucas, a true Russiaphobe, has clearly been consuming several six-packs of Slav-hating per week all his life; so for him, the war on terror matters only as it affects the "Russian threat." He decries Guantanamo, the Iraq invasion, and Abu Ghraib—not for being gross violations of human rights and international law, but for providing the Kremlin with "potent propaganda weapons." When Moscow shows "contemptuous disregard for Western norms" it is time for a fiercely contested New Cold War; when Washington does the same, the problem is bad PR.

Lucas isn't an idiot. He's just a bit of a fruitcake (and folks, we say that knowing that if this newspaper calls you a "fruitcake," you are no mere slice of raisin bread). Being fairly bright and totally mad, Lucas realizes he might seem to be overdoing the Russian Threat a bit. Again and again, he shrieks that he is not being hysterical and historically obtuse and just plain wrong! Absolutely not! The book at times seems to be written by two men, a Doctor Strangelove howling for a NCW, and a Doctor Jekyll trying to give him a sedative.

On one page, Lucas berates Russia apologists for failing to see the massive threat over the eastern horizon. On the next, he retreats from the implications of his own rhetoric. After suggesting that the Russian threat is more sinister than that posed by Al Qaeda, he takes care to stress that Russia is "not a military menace to the West." Rather, the problem is one of "bombast, bullying, and bribery." (Ah, the three "B"s! Apparently both of our featured authors are fans of alliteration.) Russia, he explains, "has dropped three Soviet attributes from its foreign policy: a messianic ideology, raw military power, and the imperative of territorial expansion." In its place it has embraced trade and investment, exactly as the West has always argued it should. Instead of nuclear weapons and massive heavy tank divisions, the NCW is "fought with cash, natural resources, diplomacy and propaganda… The new cold war is in part a struggle for market share."

If most people find the thought of a suitcase nuke in lower Manhattan more frightening than a growing Gazprom portfolio of downstream German energy assets, well, they obviously haven't spent enough time hanging out in the Polish foreign ministry cafeteria listening to Western-educated bureaucrats griping about Russia's imperial intentions, the way Lucas has.

The multiple personality disorder on display in Lucas's The New Cold War is fascinating to watch. You imagine a harried Lucas talking to his finger throughout the frenzied process of getting the book out before Putin steps aside. "Tony says that there's a New Cold War. Isn't that right, Tony? 'Yes, Mr. Lucas. Raw Dloc! Raw Dloc!'"

Tony says: "Raw Dloc! Raw Dloc!"

One minute, Lucas calmly suggests there will be no return to the Cold War we had in the past. And the next, Lucas pops up across the room, crying, "The most catastrophic mistake the outside world has made since 1991 is to assume that Russia is steadily becoming a 'normal' country." Munich '38! Yalta '45! Raw Dloc! Raw Dloc!

So when were the seedlings for this catastrophic mistake planted? Here Lucas must act gingerly, without laying too much blame on Yeltsin's grave. The Economist correspondent is a big fan of the first post-communist President. According to Lucas' narrative, Putin betrayed the proud legacy of the freedom fighter Boris Yeltsin, whose "three immovable principles were free speech, friendship with the West, and [keeping] the

Communists out of power." As for all those murdered journalists during the 1990s and that whole dissolving and shelling an elected parliament thing, not to mention the first war in Chechnya or the stolen 1996 elections—well, those were different times. The Lollapalooza years. People talked differently back then, so we can't judge them. Better not to dwell too much on the distant past. Better to focus on Russia's trajectory starting, oh gosh, I dunno…say, around 1999? Is that too random? Too much dwelling on the 90s confuses the simplistic narrative of a good pro-Westerner and an evil New Stalin.

Because Putin turned his back on the Yeltsin legacy of freedom and peoples' friendship with the West, Lucas believes Russia "now stands little chance of avoiding long-term decline." Here's that same "Russia is weak and thus terrifying" paradox that so many New Cold Warriors peddled during that bygone era. It's a mystery to us how any reader can be dumb enough to fall for it.

Aside from its logical problems, its first claim—that Russia is "weak"—is simply, clearly false. Regardless of what you think of the state of freedom and democracy in Russia today (and Lucas is right about this part of his story; it has gotten worse, even though it all started under Yeltsin), Russia is not the same feeble basket-case it was under his hero Yeltsin. It's posted some of the world's best and most consistent growth rates every year since 2000. Many foreign companies are posting their best—or, in the case of Ford, their only—profits in Russia's booming economy. Moscow holds the second largest foreign currency reserves in the world. In Lucas' own words, the country's finances are "dizzyingly good." Even Russia's slow-motion demographic disaster shows signs of turning around, which even the biggest optimists didn't expect. The idea that Russia is on the verge of long-term decline isn't just wishful thinking; it's simply a lie told by NCW peddlers because if their readers ever found out that Russia was getting stronger under Putin, then they might start to think that perhaps, just maybe, Putin wasn't all so bad for Russia. And if Putin hasn't been so awful for Russia, then the entire moral argument collapses, and the New Cold War comes down to a simple battle for power between two petrodollar gangs, one based in Houston and the other in Moscow.

Lucas can't figure out where he comes down on this, so like so many other NCW pushers, he comes down on both sides: on one page, Russia is alternately a doomed and fatally corrupt basketcase, on another it's a "…nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia…with a global weight not seen since the 1950s." Except for the fact that women are allowed to drive in Russia and the Putin government doesn't fund Wahhabite terror worldwide and none of the hijackers on 9/11 were Russian… Except for those minor differences, the Saudi comparison is a useful and suggestive one. Countries with natural resources tend to use them strategically and to their benefit. Like the Saudis and OPEC. Other countries try to break that control. Like the U.S. This is how the world works and how it has always worked.

Or perhaps the silly Saudi analogy is just another embarrassing example of Lucas' Osama envy. Maybe he's just bitterly convinced that he can't get the Skraelings' attention for any length of time unless he puts a burqa on his bogeyman. (We can play the alliteration game too, see fellas?)

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Luc-Oil

When Lucas finally gets down to the bubblin' crude—oil, that is—his split personality disappears. What emerges is a self-assured fire-breathing hydrocarbon superhero, the Paul Revere of pipeline politics, screeching a warning to a jaded, wary crowd. And Europe has good reason to be wary of Russophobia. It depends on Russia for a third of its gas imports, a number set to rise. So the major European powers are not interested in a New Cold War. This drives Lucas to despair: "The contest [between Russia and the West]," he writes, "resembles a battle-hardened chess grandmaster playing against a bunch of inattentive and squabbling amateurs." Well, you can always count on an Anglo Russia-baiter to drag out the chess set. And since none of us know or care about that tedious game, we tend to allow totally absurd analogies like this one to slide by us, eager as we are to get past the chess part.

If you can snap yourself out of a chess-induced daze, you can see how ridiculous this claim is: Western oil execs bargaining for foreign supplies are "a bunch of inattentive…amateurs"? They've been called a lot of things, but not that.

They're just doing what the market tells them to do: going for the biggest supply at the lowest price. But Lucas can't handle that. Suddenly and psychotically abandoning his faith in the sacred Free Market, Lucas urges Europe to undertake a lot of expensive state-sponsored energy projects, like building pipelines from the Middle East and Central Asia to southeastern Europe, all in order to bypass Russia.

Not only is it anti-free-market, it's bad geopolitics. The Middle East and Central Asia as bastions of democracy? Sure, dude. They'd never dream of embargoing our oil supplies for political leverage.

No, only a Russian company like Gazprom would be so vile. Or worse yet, a Russian-German partnership like Nord Stream, the German-Russian project that will deliver gas directly to Germany via a Baltic Seabed pipeline. The project bothers Lucas so much that he reaches back into his costume box: He approvingly quotes his friend Radek Sikorski (whose wife is the notorious neocon propagandist Anne Applebaum) who compares Nord Stream to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Ah, dear old Sikorski, that champion of freedom! Lucas assumes none of his readers will know that when he was Poland's deputy foreign minister in the late 90s, Sikorski set up a scheme to trap visiting expat Poles into staying in Poland via the "passport trap," one of the creepiest neo-Soviet programs ever devised in post-Communist Eastern Europe.

In Lucas' mind, Russia is the only real evil to be feared. So Lucas simply can't understand why any country would do business with Russia and Gazprom, finally attributing Germany's engagement in Nord Stream up to "fear, resentment and guilt." This is truly profound national psychoanalysis. Yes, it must be the guilt! It couldn't be anything else, such as the prospect of having gas delivered right to one's door without having to worry about some stupid war in the Balts. Ah, those poor, guilt-ridden Germans, guiltily warming their feet by the gas fire!

Europe's hopeless lust for the Russian energy-whore is so horrifying to Lucas that he is forced to find comfort in scenarios predicting the imminent exhaustion of Russia's vast oil and gas reserves. Indeed this is another running feature of NCW russophobia: "Yeah, well, just wait till Russia's resources run out/the price of oil drops! It's gonna happen too, just you wait. That's what Tony says, at least, dontcha Tony? 'Raw Dloc! Raw Dloc!' See? Tony says they're gonna run out of gas in about 200 years, and that's good enough for me!"

It's true that 43 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves won't last forever, or even the century. Some studies show that as early as 2020, Russia could need to keep all of its gas for domestic use. But if these numbers are accurate, there's not much use in getting so riled up, is there? Why not just write a book about alternative energy? Answer: it ain't scary enough. And if it ain't scaring John Q Public, then John Q Public ain't gonna lay down $20 bucks to buy it. Besides, free market nut cases get nervous talking about that hippie stuff. Every time they bring it up they can see their hero Cheney sneering at them, and it makes them feel faint.

So Lucas's only idea for fighting Russia's massive resource advantage is a kind of "Better Stone-Aged Than Sovereign Democracy" policy, the Episcopalian equivalent of suicide bombing: he argues that we stop buying Russian fuel altogether. If frozen toes and cold baths once a month are good enough for us Brits, they're good enough for the rest of you softies!

But that sort of talk goes down better in North Korea than in free-market countries, as poor Lucas realizes. "Now the fellow travelers are capitalists," writes Lucas, speaking about accountancy firms, individual investors, and public relations officials. Although he doesn't use the word, he implies strongly that they are traitors. Lucas has an ally in this view in Tony Blair, who left office with a Eisenhower-esque exit warning in which he urged Western firms to stay away from the Russian werewolf. Don't believe it when you see profits to be made and resources to be traded: when there's a full moon out, those natural gas reserves and IPOs turn into werewolves, and they… KILL YOU! Raw Dloc! Raw Dloc! Tony, no!

Needless to say, it's an argument that would bring destruction to the West's economy and total world war if applied everywhere equally. Which is why Lucas issues no similar warnings about trade with China, a prison-labor state with a human rights record that makes Vladimir Putin look like Bishop Tutu. Nor are there any harsh words for Russia's fellow BRIC state Brazil, which still hasn't gotten around to eradicating human slavery.

Lucas doesn't agonize over the human rights records of other states because they're not his beat, so why should he talk up the threats they represent? It's bad enough trying to compete with those loudmouth Muslims!

But it's even simpler than that. Lucas is not really upset that the seized assets of Yukos were snatched up as Rosneft shares on the London Stock Exchange; he's upset because Rosneft and Gazprom have Europe by the balls and there's nothing much anybody can do about it. Lucas comes close to saying this at times, but he can't be too bald about it. Hence his amusing bleatings about Russia's "inattention to the moral and ethical basis of capitalism."

That, of course, is what this is all about: the nerve of Russia to get back up on its feet on its own terms. It's just plain offensive.

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Boogeyman Fever, Dead as Disco

February, 2008: The New Cold War is over. The boogeyman Putin is taking a Deng Xiaoping-ish seat behind the stage, and his replacement is a cuddly liberal who dresses a lot like Lucas's friends dress, and who comes from the same crowd of Petersburg liberals as Lucas's heroes.

Even the stridently anti-Putin Newsweek has jumped aboard the new story, as evidenced in their recent "Russia's Mighty Mouse" article, which suggests that Medvedev is going to chart his own liberalish course, leaving NCW peddlers like Lucas as high and dry as if they'd arrived in Moscow today with a container of Levi's 501s, thinking that they're going to make a killing selling blue jeans outside the Metro exits.

While Lucas and MacKinnon may look ridiculous having jumped aboard a fad as it was passing, what their embarrassing predicament really reveals is something about our sordid profession, and the difficulty of journalistic entrepreneurship. How do you sell a book, let alone an article, to the fiercely myopic and ignorant United States market, the only market that really pays cash to journalists? Marketing fear ain't easy in a fear-competitive environment. During the Clinton years, the market for fear was fairly wide open to the best fear-monger, no matter how ridiculous the fear-object was. You may have forgotten, but back then a lot of people seriously believed that Clinton was going to invite the UN blue helmets to occupy America, disarm the white male population, and force every household to quarter a homosexual underneath their child's bed. That fear story sold hugely in America, and it still lingers today. (Which raises another problem journalists have: trying to sell anything grounded in reality to a nation of Evangelical morons.)

Books about Russia, on the other hand, have never quite sold what the publishers hoped they would. Even big books like Hoffman's Oligarchs or his Washington Post colleagues' Kremlin Rising only hit big in Wonk World, not in Barnes & Noble where the money's made. Once Russia stopped scaring the shit out of Americans 20 years ago, it's been a hard sell. With the War On Terror-those damned cinematic Mullahs, with their flowing script and flashing scimitars!—it's downright impossible.

Pity poor Edward Lucas. Or better yet, pity Mark MacKinnon, who at least wrote a fairly decent historical account of how those "color revolutions" were actually carried out, only to let some editor contaminate his research with a tacked-on title and first chapter putting him out on the street as just another NCW street whore. And it didn't even work!

But most of all, pity US, the journalist-scavengers, damn it! We're the real victims here. With the collapse of this New Cold War market bubble, every Russia-based writer is left holding our irrelevant, no-news dicks. Under our breaths, we're cursing the appointment of Medvedev as much today as we cursed Russia's impossible rebound under Putin, because it's bad for business. Our business.

Sure, we're enjoying watching Edward Lucas take such a humiliating dive—but only until we remember that we're going down with him. And then we shake our little fists, along with Edward Lucas and Mark MacKinnon and the rest of our colleagues in the Russia-watching community, at the merciless Kremlin: "Damn you, Putin! You've foiled us again! We're not through with you though… Not by a longshot. We'll get you yet! Isn't that right Tony? 'Yes, Mr. Lucas! Raw Dloc! Raw Dloc!"