Second Cold War

This article is about present tensions between Eastern and Western blocs. For the 2016 film, see Cold War 2 (film). For other uses, see Cold War II (disambiguation).

The Second Cold War (also called the New Cold War or Cold War II) is a new, post-Cold-War era of political and military tension between opposing geopolitical power blocs, with one bloc typically reported as being led by Russia and the other led by the United States, European Union, and NATO. It is akin to the original Cold War that saw a stand-off and proxy wars between the Western Bloc led by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union, Russia's predecessor. It may also refer to growing tensions between the United States and China.

Past usages

Past sources, such as academics Fred Halliday, Alan M. Wald, and David S. Painter, used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and/or 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War. Some other sources used interchangeable terms to refer to the Cold War of the mid-1970s. Columnist William Safire argued in a 1975 New York Times editorial that the Nixon administration's policy of détente with the Soviet Union had failed and that "Cold War II" was now underway. Academic Gordon H. Chang in 2007 used the term "Cold War II" to refer to the Cold War period after the 1972 meeting in China between US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong.

In 1998, George Kennan called the US Senate vote to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as "the beginning of a new cold war", and predicted that "the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies".

The journalist Edward Lucas wrote his 2008 book The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West, claiming that a new cold war between Russia and the West had begun already.

Russian–Western tensions

See also: Russia–United States relations, NATO–Russia relations, NATO missile defence system, Russia–European Union relations, Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, Syrian Civil War, Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, United Kingdom-Russia relations, and Nuclear arms race

Several countries (green), many of which are NATO members and/or European Union members, introduced sanctions on Russia (blue) following the 2014–2015 Russian military intervention in Ukraine and 2015 Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War

The United States (orange) and Russia (green)

Sources disagree as to whether a period of global tension analogous to the Cold War is possible in the future, while others have used the term to describe the ongoing renewed tensions, hostilities, and political rivalries that intensified dramatically in 2014 between Russia and its allies and the United States and its allies.

Michael Klare, a RealClearPolitics writer and an academic, in June 2013 compared tensions between Russia and the West to the ongoing proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Oxford Professor Philip N. Howard argued that a new cold war was being fought via the media, information warfare, and cyberwar. In 2014, notable figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev warned, against the backdrop of a confrontation between Russia and the West over the Ukrainian crisis, that the world was on the brink of a new cold war, or that it was already occurring. The American political scientist Robert Legvold also believes it started in 2013 during the Ukraine crisis. Others argued that the term did not accurately describe the nature of relations between Russia and the West.

Stephen F. Cohen, Robert D. Crane, and Alex Vatanka have all referred to a "US–Russian Cold War". Andrew Kuchins, an American political scientist and Kremlinologist speaking in 2016, believed the term was "unsuited to the present conflict" as it may be more dangerous than the Cold War.

While new tensions between Russia and the West have similarities with those during the Cold War, there are also major differences, such as modern Russia's increased economic ties with the outside world, which may potentially constrain Russia's actions, and provide it with new avenues for exerting influence, such as in Belarus and Central Asia, which have not seen the type of direct military action that Russia engaged in less cooperative former Soviet states like Ukraine and the Caucasus region. The term "Cold War II" has therefore been described as a misnomer.

The term "Cold War II" gained currency and relevance as tensions between Russia and the West escalated throughout the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine followed by the Russian military intervention and especially the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. By August 2014, both sides had implemented economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions upon each other: virtually all Western countries, led by the US and European Union, imposed punitive measures on Russia, which introduced retaliatory measures.

Some observers, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, judged the Syrian Civil War to be a proxy war between Russia and the United States, and even a "proto-world war". In January 2016, senior UK government officials were reported to have registered their growing fears that "a new cold war" was now unfolding in Europe: "It really is a new Cold War out there. Right across the EU we are seeing alarming evidence of Russian efforts to unpick the fabric of European unity on a whole range of vital strategic issues".

NATO has added 13 new members since the German reunification and the end of the Cold War

In an interview with Time magazine in December 2014, Gorbachev said that the US under Barack Obama was dragging Russia into a new cold war. In February 2016, at the Munich Security Conference, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO and Russia were "not in a cold-war situation but also not in the partnership that we established at the end of the Cold War", while Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking of what he called NATO's "unfriendly and opaque" policy on Russia, said "One could go as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War". In October 2016 and March 2017, Stoltenberg said that NATO did not seek "a new Cold War" or "a new arms race" with Russia.

In February 2016, a National Research University academic and Harvard University visiting scholar Yuval Weber wrote on E-International Relations that "the world is not entering Cold War II", asserting that the current tensions and ideologies of both sides are not similar to those of the original Cold War, that situations in Europe and the Middle East do not destabilize other areas geographically, and that Russia "is far more integrated with the outside world than the Soviet Union ever was". In September 2016, when asked if he thought the world had entered a new cold war, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, argued that current tensions were not comparable to the Cold War. He noted the lack of an ideological divide between the United States and Russia, saying that conflicts were no longer ideologically bipolar.

In October 2016, John Sawers, a former MI6 chief, said he thought the world was entering an era that was possibly "more dangerous" than the Cold War, as "we do not have that focus on a strategic relationship between Moscow and Washington". Similarly, Igor Zevelev, a fellow at the Wilson Center, said that "it's not a Cold War [but] a much more dangerous and unpredictable situation". CNN opined: "It's not a new Cold War. It's not even a deep chill. It's an outright conflict".

Large nuclear weapons stockpile with global range (dark blue), smaller stockpile with global range (medium blue)

In January 2017, a former US Government adviser Molly K. McKew said at Politico that the US would win a new cold war. The New Republic editor Jeet Heer dismissed the possibility as "equally troubling[,] reckless threat inflation, wildly overstating the extent of Russian ambitions and power in support of a costly policy", and too centred on Russia while "ignoring the rise of powers like China and India". Heer also criticized McKew for suggesting the possibility. Jeremy Shapiro, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution, wrote in his blog post at RealClearPolitics, referring to the US–Russia relations: "A drift into a new Cold War has seemed the inevitable result".

In August 2017, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denied claims that the US and Russia were having another cold war, despite ongoing tensions between the two countries and newer US sanctions against Russia. In March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalist Megyn Kelly in an interview: "My point of view is that the individuals that have said that a new Cold War has started are not analysts. They do propaganda." Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at the CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute said that the new cold war for Russia "is about its survival as a power in the international order, and also about holding on to the remnants of the Russian empire". Lyle Goldstein, a research professor at the US Naval War College claims that the situations in Georgia and Ukraine "seemed to offer the requisite storyline for new Cold War".

In March 2018, Harvard University professors Stephen Walt and then Odd Arne Westad criticized the term usage as reference to increasing tensions between the Russia and the West as "misleading", "distract[ing]", and too simplistic to describe the more complicated contemporary international politics.

Amidst the deterioration of relations between both sides over a potential US-led military strike in Middle East after the Douma chemical attack in Syria and poisoning of the Skripals in the UK, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, told a meeting of the UN Security Council in April 2018 that "the Cold War was back with a vengeance". He suggested the dangers were even greater, as the safeguards that existed to manage such a crisis "no longer seem to be present". Dmitri Trenin supported Guterres' statement, but added that it began in 2014 and had been intensifying since, resulting in US-led strikes on the Syrian government on 13 April 2018.

Russian news agency TASS reported the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying "I don't think that we should talk about a new Cold War", adding that the US development of low-yield nuclear warheads (the first of which entered production in January 2019) had increased the potential for the use of nuclear weapons.

In October 2018, Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told Deutsche Welle that the new Cold War would make the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and other Cold War-era treaties "irrelevant because they correspond to a totally different world situation." In February 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the withdrawal from the INF treaty would not lead to "a new Cold War". As of June 2019, more than 90% of world's 13,865 nuclear weapons were owned by Russia and the United States. In August 2019, the US under Trump administration withdrew from the Treaty, triggering threats from Russia of a new arms race. Later in August 2019, the US launched their first post treaty test missile.

Sino-American tensions

See also: China–United States trade war, China–United States relations, and Group of Two

The United States (orange) and China (green)

The US senior defense official Jed Babbin, Yale University professor David Gelernter, Firstpost editor R. Jagannathan, Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and some other sources have used the term (occasionally using the term the Pacific Cold War) to refer to tensions between the United States and China in the 2000s and 2010s.

Talk of a "new Cold War" between a United States-led block of countries on the one hand and the putative Beijing-Moscow axis, including explicit references to it in the official PRC′s media, intensified in the summer of 2016 as a result of the territorial dispute in the South China Sea, when China defied the Permanent Court of Arbitration′s ruling against China on the South China Sea dispute, and the US announcing in July 2016 it would deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in South Korea, a move resented by China as well as Russia and North Korea.

Donald Trump, who was inaugurated as US President on 20 January 2017, had repeatedly said during his presidential campaign that he considered China a threat, a stance that heightened speculations of the possibility of a "new cold war with China". Claremont McKenna College professor Minxin Pei said that Trump's election win and "ascent to the presidency" may increase chances of the possibility. In March 2017, a self-declared socialist magazine Monthly Review said, "With the rise of the Trump administration, the new Cold War with Russia has been put on hold", and also said that the Trump administration has planned to shift from Russia to China as its main competitor.

External videos
"Vice President Mike Pence's Remarks on the Administration's Policy Towards China"

In July 2018, Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia mission center, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that he believed China under paramount leader Xi Jinping, while unwilling to go to war, was waging a "quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, seeking to replace the US as the leading global power. He further elaborated: "What they're waging against us is fundamentally a cold war — a cold war not like we saw during [the] Cold War (between the U.S. and the Soviet Union) but a cold war by definition". In October 2018, a Hong Kong's Lingnan University professor Zhang Baohui told The New York Times that a speech by United States Vice President Mike Pence at the Hudson Institute "will look like the declaration of a new Cold War".

Territorial claims in the South China Sea

In January 2019, Robert D. Kaplan of the Center for a New American Security wrote that "it is nothing less than a new cold war: The constant, interminable Chinese computer hacks of American warships’ maintenance records, Pentagon personnel records, and so forth constitute war by other means. This situation will last decades and will only get worse".

In February 2019, Joshua Shifrinson, an associate professor from Boston University, criticized the concerns about tensions between China and the US as "overblown", saying that the relationship between the two countries are different from that of the US–Soviet Union relations during the original Cold War, that factors of heading to another era of bipolarity are uncertain, and that ideology play a less prominent role between China and the US.

In June 2019, academic Stephen Wertheim called President Trump a "xenophobe" and criticized Trump's foreign policy toward China for heightening risks of the new cold war, which Wertheim wrote "could plunge the United States back into gruesome proxy wars around the world and risk a still deadlier war among the great powers." A Peking University dean David Moser told a Chinese tabloid Global Times that the cold war between the US and China would heighten racial tensions between the societies and would spread among the US universities, affecting Chinese visa students who want to study there. An American University (Washington, D.C.) professor Amitav Acharya told Global Times that the term "new Cold War", which he criticized as one of "catchphrases that risk turning into self-fulfilling prophecies", not be referred to the increasingly complex US–China tensions. Furthermore, Acharya said that the tensions could not be adequately described by a "single factor or phrase" and "the causes [...] are deeper and more structural than just competition over tariffs and technology."

Sino-Australian tension

Australia has long considered itself the hegemonic power of the South Pacific region, which is treated by the Australian government as its "sphere of influence" and an area vital to the nations defensive strategy. With the rise of China, there have been tensions regarding the South Pacific of which China is increasingly becoming active in. Several South Pacific nations have already signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative, including Papua New Guinea,Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga. Of the infrastructure already built by BRI included a wharf in Luganville, Vanuatu that could potentially accommodate naval warships. There has been fears that China is intent on building a military base in Vanuatu, one of the few countries that supports Beijing's claim to the South China Sea. Chinese surveillance ships have been deployed to the west Pacific for oceanographic data, though senior Australian and American military officials believe they are also collecting "invaluable data for future defence operations". Australia has also partnered with the US to expand the Lombrum Naval Base to accommodate Australian and American naval ships with some Australian naval vessels to be permanently stationed at the new base.

In early 2019, the Australian Parliament was targeted by a cyber attack in what the Australian Signals Directorate labeled was the work of a 'state actor', China is suspected behind the attack but evidence is not conclusive. Duncan Lewis, the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), told a Senate hearing that "foreign spies are infiltrating Australia" with "unprecedented espionage" against Australia, he also added "in some ways, the espionage problem is probably worse than it was during the Cold War". Australia has been advised by a former top Defence Department official and intelligence analyst, Hugh White, that Australia must consider acquiring a nuclear arsenal if it is to remain independent.

Protest rallies in Australia in support of the Hong Kong protests were watched by "Chinese police cars".

Current status

In June 2019, University of Southern California (USC) professors Steven Lamy and Robert D. English agreed that the "new Cold War" would divert parties from bigger issues, like globalization, "climate change, global poverty, increasing inequality," and right-wing populism. However, Lamy said that the new cold war has not been happening, while English said that it already has.

See also

• World War III

External links

• Quotations related to Second Cold War at Wikiquote
• The dictionary definition of Cold War II at Wiktionary
• Learning materials related to Second Cold War at Wikiversity