These zombies, raising their crumbling limbs from the dank soil of think tanks, university departments and military alliances, are the Cold War hawks. Shaking off the loam of a quarter-century’s irrelevance, they … stagger en masse onto TV news shows and op-ed pages and, we fear, into ministers’ offices, where they foul the air with their very bad ideas. We need to “show strength” and deliver a “robust response,” lest the West appear to be “in retreat” and insufficiently “assertive,” making us “vulnerable” to attacks from those who see our weakness. We should send ground troops marching to the banks of the Dnieper, and aircraft carriers into the Black Sea, because “this is the only language Putin understands.” What these soldiers are meant to do, we’re never really told. It’s time to get the pitchforks. The Cold Warriors have a consistent record of being wrong. They’re wrong about military power… They’re wrong about Russia … They were wrong the last time around …

By Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail