A new Iron Curtain? How Russia’s invasion will reshape the world.

Winston Churchill was out of power in March 1946. He’d lost a general election seven months earlier. But he was eager for a forum to expound his views on the developing post-World War II world, so he accepted an invitation to speak at tiny, out-of-the-way Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

A note scribbled at the bottom of the invitation sold the famous former British prime minister on the unlikely venue. “This is a wonderful school in my home state. If you come, I will introduce you,” wrote U.S. President Harry Truman.

With Truman in attendance Churchill delivered one of his most famous speeches, warning that in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was shaping many governments in its image and drawing them under its influence. The nations of the West, though tired of war, might have a new conflict on their hands.

“From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” Churchill said.

Last week, 76 years after the famous former British prime minister defined the geography of the Cold War with that iconic phrase, another Western leader invoked it to describe what was happening to his country.

The noise of Russia’s assault on Ukraine “is the sound of a new iron curtain which has come down,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 24. His embattled country, he said, would do all it could to try and remain outside that barrier.

Whatever happens in Ukraine now, the geopolitics of the Western world have been profoundly changed by recent events. The brutal Russian invasion and the tough economic and political steps the United States and its allies have taken in response have defined a new conflict that seems all too reminiscent of the worst periods of the Cold War struggle of which Churchill warned.

Is Russia really trying to erect a new iron curtain, with its satellites on one side and what the press used to call the free world on the other? In some ways, that metaphor doesn’t exactly hold, say historians and scholars of international relations. In today’s interdependent world the kind of separation that iron curtain implies won’t be possible. But in some ways the old phrase remains apt.

“The analogy of the iron curtain proves useful in that it reminds us of the many unresolved legacies of the Cold War that animate [President Vladimir] Putin’s sense of grievance about Russia’s loss of status in the world,” writes Pamela Ballinger, professor of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It also mobilizes the language of freedom versus tyranny so central to the Cold War struggle, a language that resonates in the heroic efforts of everyday Ukrainians to defend their homeland.”

Cold War 2.0

Whatever the outcome of the Russian attack on Ukraine, it will draw a scar across the middle of Europe, with a revanchist Moscow on one side and an Atlantic alliance on the other reenergized by Putin’s authoritarian military threat.

This new iron curtain will start at Russia’s long border with Finland in the north, then run down past the Baltic States, jog southwest around Belarus, and turn southeast again to pass through some as yet undetermined route toward the Black Sea. 

“There’s no question that we will see a remilitarized and divided Europe,” says Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and former senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

President Putin appears to be trying to re-create a sphere of influence that will resemble the USSR, says Professor Kupchan. That’s evident in Moscow’s actions in former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, as well as Ukraine, he says.

During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was a hard barrier, symbolized by the barbed wire and guard towers of the Berlin Wall. To NATO allies, it seemed mostly intended to keep the populations of Eastern Europe and the USSR inside, and Western influence out.

That “iron” part of the curtain is probably not coming back. The world is unlikely to divide again into fragmented, independent geographical blocs. Mr. Putin hasn’t prevented Russians from emigrating. Europe has relied on Russian gas for energy – though it’s trying to reduce that reliance in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. Russian diplomats are helping to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal. Addressing climate change and nuclear arms control will require Russian participation.

“There is a kind of irreversible element to globalization that will make a new Cold War feel and taste differently from Cold War 1.0,” says Professor Kupchan.

Holes in the new Iron Curtain 

Given what’s happening in the heart of Europe, there are multiple ways to think about the analogy of a new Iron Curtain, because the analogy has multiple meanings, adds Jessica Weeks, chair in diplomacy and international relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

One is territorial. Whatever happens, Mr. Putin’s new greater Russia will be much smaller than the old Soviet sphere of influence, Professor Weeks says. 

Many of the former Warsaw Pact states are already in the European Union. Poland and the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – are members of NATO.

A second is informational. Kremlin censorship on the level of the Soviet era is no longer possible, but state-directed media still floods the Russian information zone, and the two sides of the new barrier will experience very different geopolitical narratives.

A third could be economic. The Soviet and the West traded very little during the Cold War, and now, due to Western sanctions, they may be separating again. 

How deep the new economic division goes may be contingent on the outcome of the Ukraine invasion. The Russian people might find it difficult to accept a deep plunge in their standard of living. But punitive Western sanctions could thrust Russia back into a period of relative autarky, where it is forced to adapt to relative economic self-sufficiency, says Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Russia might still have some trade ties with the West, particularly in energy, but not in other sectors, says Ms. Ashford.

“The argument for some time now has been that trade and integration is a wonderful tool against conflict – and we are, I think, seeing the limits of that theory,” she says.

A “vortex of instability” 

But there may be one way in which the analogy of a new Iron Curtain falling over Europe is not entirely accurate, and may even be unhelpful, says Michael Kimmage, a professor of Cold War history at Catholic University and a former member of the State Department’s policy planning staff in charge of the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. 

The Iron Curtain metaphor worked during the Cold War years because the borders between blocs were clear and stable. The line was by no means straight – it zigged through the middle of Germany, dividing it into East and West – and it had neutral buffer zones such as Finland. But the divisions were so set that the West and East agreed to them in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, says Professor Kimmage.

In contrast the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ripped a hole in European border stability. No one knows how much of Ukraine Mr. Putin wants to take, and how long he wants to hold it. No one knows if the conflict might spread, perhaps to Poland or the Baltics. No one knows whether other regional players, such as Turkey, will become more assertive in response.

“You have a very uncertain, fluid zone of contestation between the two hostile parties. In that sense, there really is nothing like an Iron Curtain,” says Professor Kimmage.

Instead there is what he calls a “vortex of instability.” 

Following World War II, Soviet leader Josef Stalin at least had a discernible reason behind the Soviet push for an Eastern European sphere of influence. Given the state of the world at the time, he wanted a buffer between the USSR and Germany.

In contrast Mr. Putin has done something less coherent and less likely to succeed, says Professor Kimmage. In the absence of provocation from Ukraine, he has invaded the country with no immediate security pretext. 

Russia has the largest conventional army in Europe, plus nuclear weapons. That ensures it will be able to press forward in Ukraine, even if the invasion has not gone as Moscow expected so far. The Biden administration and other Western governments have done well organizing their response of sanctions but they will have to set clear goals for that approach, according to Professor Kimmage.

“We have to continue to contend with a country that has many different levers of influence, and we’ll just have to think about what that all means in light of this terrible war,” he says.

A lengthening shadow 

In the end the phrase “Iron Curtain” is just an image meant to help illuminate the implications of an act of brutal Russian aggression that many Westerners find inexplicable. The events that have cast a shadow across Europe in early 2022 are very different than those that drove Western geopolitics in the Cold War era. But in a short period of time they have profoundly changed the way the U.S. and its allies think about Europe. 

“It’s certainly the case that we’ve got more of a clear dividing line now than we did two weeks ago between the West and Russia in both political and economic terms,” says Chris Miller, co-director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.