WASHINGTON // With the US and Russia trading barbs over who is exacerbating the situation in Syria, Cold War rhetoric is making a return in Washington and Moscow, as an old rivalry over spheres of influence rears its head.
On Wednesday, the US State Department defended remarks by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, after she accused Russia of sending attack helicopters to Syria and warned that the shipment could "escalate the conflict".
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, had earlier denied the accusation and said Russian arms sales to Syria did not violate international law.
Russia supplies Syria only with weapons it can use "in the event of an armed attack on it", Mr Lavrov said in Tehran yesterday.
This was a not-so-veiled reference to Washington's own defence of its recent decision to resume arms sales to Bahrain.
Moscow considers talk in Washington of a "democratic transition" in Syria as cover for a policy of regime change that could eventually affect Iran and even former Soviet states.
Behind Russia's traditional opposition to international interventions - at least when they are called for by the West - it does not want to see its influence in the Middle East diminished even further.
Washington's insistence on humanitarian intervention also has little traction in Russia.
It will no doubt have been noted that while the US is calling for the removal of Syria's president Bashar Al Assad, the administration on Wednesday awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Israel's president, Shimon Peres.
His country has engaged in a 45-year occupation that the US itself has denounced as illegal and whose founding in 1948 created one of the region's biggest refugee population to date, the millions of Palestinians displaced in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
In Washington, meanwhile Moscow's reluctance to pressure Mr Assad to restrain his military is seen as a cynical ploy to allow the Syrian government time to put down the rebellion, leaving the regime - and Syria's alliance with Russia - intact.
Although State Department officials insist that, despite the recent recriminations, there is still "space" for the US and Russia to cooperate over Syria, the spat has exacerbated differences between Moscow and Washington over everything from European missile defence to human rights and international law.
Vladimir Putin, Russia's fiercely nationalist third-term president, and Barack Obama, whose room for manoeuvre as he seeks re-election in November is somewhat circumscribed, are due to meet next week in Mexico at the G20 summit.
Syria is likely to top the agenda, both in front of the cameras and behind closed doors, where talks over the uprising have been continuing for months.
But the "reset" of relations with Russia that Mr Obama has touted as one of his key foreign policy achievements is beginning to look more like a repeat of a rivalry that was thought to have ended nearly quarter of a century ago.
And as the two old rivals square up to one another again, the body count in Syria continues to mount.
