A new Cold War is in the offing. But more than a battle of ideologies, it will be a fight between a declining superpower and resurgent countries such as Russia and China that want a return to a more democratic, multipolar world and respect from the West for their sovereignty and national interests.
There is a growing consensus in the international community that the world is on the threshold of a second Cold War. Recent months have seen tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats on a scale that was not witnessed when the previous ColdWar was at its height. In the last week of March, Russia ordered the expulsion of 60 American diplomats. This was after scores of Russian diplomats were designated as persona non grata in several Western capitals.
The threat of a new Cold War is taken seriously in many quarters. As tensions rose between the United States and Russia in the last week of March, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that it was time to revive the Cold War channels of communication that had existed in the last century. “Those mechanisms are dismantled. It is time to revive them again,” he stressed. Otherwise, he warned, there was a danger that things could go out of control “when tensions rise”.
Another strong signal that a newColdWarwas in the offing was the Donald Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review released in February this year. The document provided a blueprint for increasing the already large American nuclear arsenal and the rationale for a more permissive use of nuclear weapons. This was followedbyPresidentVladimirPutin’s State of the Union address on March 1 in which he announced the development of new nuclear and missile systems that had the capability to strike any corner of the world. Putin made it a point to emphasise that the new weapons systems Russia possessed had the capability of piercing the much-vaunted missile defence shields the U.S. had set up all around Russia’s borders. In 2016, the U.S. installed a $800-million anti-missile system in a Romanian military base. During the first Cold War, the base belonged to the Soviet Union.
This story is from the April 27, 2018 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the April 27, 2018 edition of FRONTLINE.
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