A Colder War With Russia?

To all outward appearances, Russia’s retaliatory expulsions of American and other diplomats followed the old Cold War pattern: A Soviet deed would prompt Western punitive measures. Moscow would blithely deny any wrongdoing, declare itself victimized by a two-faced West and strike back with equivalent measures. So it was, for example, when the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980 over the invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union led an Eastern Bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later. And so it is now again, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Mr. Putin has fully embraced the old Kremlin aversion to ever admitting wrongdoing, whether it’s shooting down a Malaysian jetliner, or killing Alexander Litvinenko, or seizing Crimea, or fighting in eastern Ukraine, or cyber-meddling in Western elections, or doping Olympic athletes. Or using a lethal chemical weapon to poison a double-agent and his daughter in a provincial city in England.