Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Cohen

Cohen’s line is less a history lesson than a warning flare about narrative addiction: once the Soviet Union is gone, the story machine still craves a Soviet-sized villain. By marking the moment as “thirteen years after,” he frames the Cold War not as an era that ended but as a habit the American press couldn’t quit. The timing matters: 2004’s Ukrainian presidential election (and the protests that became the Orange Revolution) was genuinely volatile, with real stakes for Ukrainians. Cohen’s provocation is that Western coverage rushed past that local complexity to fit a familiar template: Russia as puppet master, Ukraine as chessboard, the U.S. as moral referee.

“Press establishment” is doing pointed work. He’s not indicting individual reporters but an ecosystem of editors, pundits, and institutional incentives that reward simplified geopolitics. The word “eager” implies desire, not error: a kind of ideological comfort in reviving the Cold War frame because it instantly organizes facts into heroes and antagonists, and it flatters American agency. Calling it “a new cold war” suggests the coverage didn’t merely describe tension; it helped produce it by amplifying confrontation as the default lens.

The subtext is a critique of post-9/11 American confidence paired with strategic amnesia. If Ukraine’s democratic protests become primarily a U.S.-Russia morality play, Ukrainians risk being reduced to props. Cohen is pushing readers to notice how media storytelling can turn a contested election into a proxy battlefield before diplomats ever arrive.