User:NickMartin/SecondColdWarDrafting

Debate over the term

Sources disagree as to whether a period of global tension analogous to the Cold War is possible in the future,^{[1][2][3][4][5]} while others have used the term to describe the ongoing renewed tensions, hostilities, and political rivalries that intensified dramatically in 2014 between Russia, the United States and their respective allies.^[6] Stephen F. Cohen,^[7] Robert D. Crane,^[8] and Alex Vatanka^[9] have all referred to a "US–Russian Cold War".

Sources opposed to the term argue that while new tensions between Russia and the West have similarities with those during the Cold War, there are also major differences,^[10] and provide Russia with new avenues for exerting influence, such as in Belarus and Central Asia, which have not seen the type of direct military action in which Russia engaged in less cooperative former Soviet states like Ukraine and the Caucasus region.^[11]

In June 2014, the North Macedonian Ministry of Defense published an article asserting that the term "Cold War II" was as a misnomer.^[12] In an interview with Time magazine in December 2014, Mikhail Gorbachev said that the US under Barack Obama was dragging Russia into a new cold war.^[13]

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",^[14] 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".^[15] In October 2016 and March 2017, Stoltenberg said that NATO did not seek "a new Cold War" or "a new arms race" with Russia.^[16][17]

In February 2016, a Higher School of Economics 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 destabilise other areas geographically, and that Russia "is far more integrated with the outside world than the Soviet Union ever was".^[18] 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.^[19]

In August 2016, Daniel Larison of The American Conservative magazine wrote that tensions between Russia and the United States would not "constitute a 'new Cold War'" especially between democracy and authoritarianism, which Larison found more limited than and not as significant in 2010s as that of the Soviet-Union era.^[20] Andrew Kuchins, an American political scientist and Kremlinologist speaking in December 2016, believed the term was "unsuited to the present conflict" as it may be more dangerous than the Cold War.^[21]

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.^[22] A University of East Anglia graduate student Oliver Steward^[23] and the Casimir Pulaski Foundation senior fellow Stanisław Koziej^[24] in 2017 attributed Zapad 2017 exercise, a military exercise by Russia, as part of the new Cold War.

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."^[25] 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".^[26] Also in March 2018, Harvard University professors Stephen Walt^[27] and then Odd Arne Westad^[28] criticised application of the term to increasing tensions between the Russia and the West as "misleading",^[27] "distract[ing]",^[27] and too simplistic to describe the more complicated contemporary international politics.

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."^[29] In February 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the withdrawal from the INF treaty would not lead to "a new Cold War".^{[30][31][32][33]}

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^[34]) had increased the potential for the use of nuclear weapons.^[30]

On May 8, 2022, Hoover Institution senior fellow Niall Ferguson said at the Milken Institute Global Conference that "Cold War II began some time ago".^[35] He also said "Cold War II is different, though, because in Cold War II, China's the senior partner, and Russia's the junior partner",^[35] and "in Cold War II, the first hot war breaks out in Europe, rather than Asia."^[35]

Middle East conflicts

In 2013, Michael Klare compared in RealClearPolitics tensions between Russia and the West to the ongoing proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran.^[36] Oxford Professor Philip N. Howard argued that a new cold war was being fought via the media, information warfare, and cyberwar.^[37]

Some observers, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,^[38] judged the Syrian civil war to be a proxy war between Russia and the United States,^[39][40] and even a "proto-world war".^[41] 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".^[42]

In April 2018 relations deteriorated over a potential US-led military strike in Middle East after the Douma chemical attack in Syria, which was attributed to the Syrian Army by rebel forces in Douma, and poisoning of the Skripals in the UK. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, told a meeting of the UN Security Council 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".^[43] 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.^[44]

In February 2022, journalist Marwan Bishara held the US and Russia responsible for pursuing "their own narrow interests", including then-US President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel and Putin's 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for "pav[ing] the way for, well, another Cold War".^[45]

Russo-Ukrainian War