It’s official. We have just entered into a new Cold War.

On Sunday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev defined bold and assertive guidelines that would define its new approach to international relations. This new policy most notably contains what is effectively the Russian version of the Roosevelt corollary of the United State’s well-known Monroe Doctrine. Re-asserting itself as having special “areas of privileged interests”, Russia is effectively trying to turn back the clock to the pre-Perestroika era when the Soviet Union still had the economic strength to impose its will on Warsaw-pact satellites and other disobedient nations in their global neighborhood.

Insisting that the future “world must be multi-polar,” Medvedev rejected the notion that the any nation, particularly the United States, should be the sole decision-maker on the world stage. Stunningly, very few news organizations have even bothered to report on this latest assertion of Russia’s resurgence on the global stage.

Russia has been retreating for years from its experiment with democracy and liberty after President Clinton initially prescribed economic shock therapy and then largely wrung his hands and shrugged his shoulders while Russia disintegrated into a kleptocracy that fed the oligarchs, impoverished the nation, and devolved Russia into a nuclear armed third-world country.

America needed President Bush & Secretary of State Rice to have a strong, coherent, and comprehensive policy towards Russia that would pull them back from their slow slide back towards an authoritarian regime and a cult of personality. Instead we got a long gaze into Putin’s eyes by which President Bush divined “a sense of his soul.” Since then the Bush administration, full of unilateral righteousness, either ignored or rudely dismissed Russia’s concerns.

President Bush concluded after his new age evaluation of Putin that he was “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.” Given Russia’s recent actions, it appears that was one of the very few conclusions President Bush got right.