Should we be worried about the dispute between Putin and Biden?

Someone hit a nerve, then. When an ABC interviewer asked U.S. President Joe Biden whether he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “killer”, they could hardly have expected such an unequivocal and indeed undiplomatic response as: “I do”.

Neither did the Kremlin. So taken aback was the Russian leadership that they recalled their ambassador from Washington DC. Even in the very depths of the Cold War, during the long diplomatic tenure of Anatoly Dobrynin, such as step was left untaken, whatever provocations were coming from the Americans. During the Cuba crisis and all the way through wars in Korea and Vietnam, the ambassadors stayed in place.

Yet two words from Mr Biden seem sufficient to plunge relations into the deep freeze. It was a personal remark, and returned in kind. Mr Putin, obviously hurt, retorted:  “I remember in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard we used to say: it takes one to know one. And that’s not a coincidence, not just a children’s saying or joke.

“We always see our own traits in other people and think they are like how we really are. And as a result we assess [a person’s] activities and give assessments.”

Mr Putin added: “As he said, we know each other personally. What would I reply to him? I would say: I wish you health. I wish you health. I say that without any irony or joke.”

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Elsewhere Russian officials expressed surprise that a man in Mr Biden’s position should have spoken about the Russian in this way, and one of Mr Putin’s political associates remarked that it was “a triumph of US political insanity and old-age dementia of their leader”. Nice.

It is odd, for one thing, because very few leaders of any country that has deployed troops can be said to be entirely free of responsibility for the deaths of service personnel and civilians, whatever justifications might exist. That certainly applies to American and Russian leaders, and continues to do so. Mr Putin, with his background as a KGB agent in the old East Berlin, may well have even closer knowledge of lethal action, and it is no secret that his agents, direct or indirect, have been involved in murder and attempted murder at home and abroad, not least the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the Skripals in Salisbury.

There is also the evidence of Russian connivance in the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government in Syria and the downing of civilian flight MH17 over Ukraine, probably out of incompetence by Russian informal agents. Such a hard man as Mr Putin seems to be unduly sensitive about such allegations. Mr Biden, at least, has probably not ordered or tolerated any assassinations.

It could simply be that Mr Putin is still not used to the reset in relations after the departure of the mostly more amenable President Donald Trump. The contrast is deep and striking: where Mr Trump even rubbished his own security services in favour of taking Mr Putin’s word about interference in US politics, Mr Biden seems not to care even for the usual diplomatic niceties. It’s been a shock.

The upshot of this sudden slide in Russian-American relations is difficult to judge. In recent decades, especially before the arrival of President Trump, America was in warm or at least tolerably good relations with the third global superpower, China, and similarly well-disposed to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union three decades again. Russia continued to have an uneasy relationship with China, dating back to the 1960s and the Sino-Soviet split, superficially about Marxist ideology but in reality old fashioned geopolitical rivalry. America’s successful superpower “triangulation”, pioneered in the Nixon-Kissinger era, and China’s re-entry to the world economy in the 1990s led to something of a golden age in intentional affairs, despite some bitter regional wars:  the “end of history”.

The world is now in the situation where the three superpowers are, to a greater or lesser extent, in a state of mutual antagonism, and the world is slipping into a multi-layered new Cold War, with the likes of India, Japan, Europe and Britain looking on, wondering precisely how to navigate this new and more dangerous landscape. It doesn’t look like the leaders of China, Russia or America have much idea ,either.