Energy Efficiency

Mr Gorbachev recently told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia.

From NATO’s expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington’s proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr Gorbachev said.

‘We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them, the United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently.’

Yet if Washington blames Mr Putin’s self-aggrandising rhetoric for the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War, for Mr Gorbachev the blame lies entirely with the administration of President George W Bush.

Gorbachev said ‘I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world’, no doubt to comments by Robert Gates (the US defence secretary), who told a congressional committee that America needed to boost military spending to counter myriad threats including the ‘uncertain paths of China and Russia’.

Those comments caused uproar in Russia, with pro-Kremlin newspapers claiming they heralded the start of a new Cold War.

Tensions have already been heightened by a US proposal to build a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to counter a nuclear strike by Iran.

Mr Gorbachev said ‘it is a very dangerous step; the Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted; erecting elements of missile defence is taking the arms race to the next level’.

Relations have further deteriorated after NATO promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, a move interpreted as an attempt to extend America’s sphere of influence into Russia’s backyard.

For a man hailed as one of the heroes of the 20th century, Mr Gorbachev, now 77, often sounded like the ageing hardliners he struggled against in the Kremlin during the 1980s.