At the same time, the re-emergence of Russia has gotten the attention of Eastern Europe. Hungary gets more than half of its natural gas from Russia. Lately, some Hungarians have started to recall an old Cold War joke: After the Hungarian soccer team beat the Soviet team, the Kremlin sent Hungary's leaders a brief telegram that read: "Congratulations on your victory. Stop. Oil stop. Gas stop."

"If you had asked me five years ago, I would have told you the whole story is finished — no more Russian bear," said Pal Reti, editor of HVG, the Hungarian economic magazine. "They have so many problems themselves they would not have time to care about others' problems. But I've found that they have another set of priorities and they now have the muscle" to act on them. Yes, Russia no longer has much of an army or any ideology, but it still has a lot of brutish instincts, and now it has the oil money to push them.

In the post-Cold War world, European integration and economic reform seemed irreversible and certain to make Europe into a world democratic power. But in the post-post-Cold War, Europe can't unite on anything — even on an energy policy — so it is being pushed around by Russia.

"I am very pessimistic about Western Europe — and that is new," remarked Lajos Bokros, a professor of economics at the Central European University in Budapest. Too many Western Europeans "are not competitive enough" and "do not want to implement the reforms." Unless Europe chooses the high-growth Irish model, as opposed to the French, Italian and German models, Bokros added, "the whole European region will decline further and become insignificant and irrelevant for this global game."

For all these reasons, I don't miss the Cold War, but I do miss the post-Cold War. Because this post-post-Cold War world seems infinitely more messy, difficult to manage and full of too many bad guys getting rich, not by building decent societies but by simply drilling oil wells.

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New York Times News Service