Younger moviegoers made "Goosebumps" last week's winner at the box office. But for those of a certain age, the Cold War era depicted in "Bridge of Spies," Steven Spielberg's splendid espionage film, might be the spookiest movie playing.
The drama isn't in the denouement. History has already been written, and the victors are the good guys, including attorney James Donovan (Tom Hanks), whose intrepid integrity is matched by an America unwilling to compromise on core values.
No, it's not the ending that chills, but the never-ending tension of a time when Red Square May Day parades, gray-suited CIA agents, and black-and-white ideology defined geopolitics. The unease isn't just in looking back but ahead, and wondering if U.S.-Russian relations are entering a new Cold War — or worse.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism was supposed to make the era the stuff of history (and, yes, movies). And for a generation or so, the Cold War did seem iced. But recently a revanchist Russia has upended assumptions, and the formal and informal institutions that kept the Cold War from becoming a direct U.S.-U.S.S.R. war have rusted.
"In retrospect, the Cold War was a very clear-cut set of circumstances," said Tom Hanson, a former Foreign Service officer who served in the Soviet Union. Hanson, diplomat in residence at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, added that the period "kind of focused minds on both sides."
Minds may still be focused, but institutions may not be, said Georgetown Prof. Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century."
"We had mechanisms to defuse what could have been very dangerous," Stent said. "But in Russia today we really lack those institutions — you have a highly personalized system of decisionmaking that we don't understand well. But we don't have those channels anymore. Even the military channels have atrophied."
The man personalizing this system is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who seems more id than ideology.