![]() George Kennan, a key architect of the cold war in 1946-47, was the first person to come up with the term ‘New Cold War’ to describe the new state of the world. And Moscow’s sales of advanced weaponry to Beijing starting from the 1990s were soon complemented by joint military drills. In the face of Washington’s bullying, Russia and China increased their collaboration. ![]() China, for its part, chose to prioritise its economic development while engaging in a steady military build-up, albeit at far lower level relative to its economy than either the US or Russia. Whereas the United States opted early in the 1990s to keep a level of military readiness tailored for a simultaneous confrontation with Russia and China, Russia reverted to increasing its military expenditure from the turn of the century when, thanks to the new surge in hydrocarbon prices that coincided with Vladimir Putin’s accession to power, Russia started recovering from the economic low it had reached in the 1990s. This is an excellent definition of what we now call a cold war, in which the decisive factor is that both sides maintain a readiness for war and bolster it constantly by building up their military force. In both cases, Bernstein was referring to the German Reich’s massive investment in armaments – a situation he described in 1914 as one of ‘non-war’ rather than ‘true peace’ – during which the German state engaged in an arms race with its neighbours. His coining of the concept is rarely acknowledged though: it appears twice under Bernstein’s name in printed record, first in the late 19th century and then in 1914, on the eve of the war ( 1). In fact, the first recorded use of the term ‘cold war’ in its contemporary meaning was made before the first world war by the German socialist leader Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932). Contrary to what many believe, it is not a reference to the specific ideological and systemic confrontation between the two global empires that emerged from the second world war. This difference between old and new means the notion of cold war itself needs clarifying. ![]() The second bloc has been replaced, in this new phase, by an alliance of convenience between a Chinese state that is still ruled by a ‘communist’ party, albeit in a country deeply integrated in the world capitalist market, with the private sector contributing 60% of its GDP, and a Russian state whose ruler is regarded as a beacon by the global far-right and where the boundaries between private and state sectors are as porous as in other nepotistic rentier states. The term New Cold War, however, refers to a new phase of global tensions in a world that is no longer characterised by ideological opposition between one bloc of states based on liberalism and free enterprise and another based on ‘communist’ rule and state ownership of the economy. Nowadays, historians refer to the cold war as we know it as a single period that started after the end of the second world war and ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, culminating in the unification of Germany in November 1990 and dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. The détente of the 1970s did not put an end to the first cold war it was no more than a temporary respite in a succession of hotter and cooler phases in global tensions since 1945. The term Second Cold War fell out of use because it had never really been warranted in the first place. His first term in office was marked by a heated discourse against the ‘evil empire’ along with a sharp increase in military expenditure. ![]() Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine launched on 24 February last year and the ongoing war that has been raging since then in eastern Ukraine have had not just material but also semantic consequences: use of the expression ‘New Cold War’ to describe the present state of international relations has reached a new high.Īlready, in the 1980s, the term ‘Second Cold War’ was used to designate the flare-up in tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union which resulted from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, followed a year later by the election of Ronald Reagan as US president.
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