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4 May 2022

Opinion – A New Cold War?

Campbell Craig

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a wave of declarations that we are entering a second cold war; these must be added to repeated claims before February of this year that the rise of China is doing the same thing. Are these assertions justifiable? In a word, no. It is possible that we are entering a new era of great-power rivalry, after 30 years or so of US unipolar preponderance, though this is not certain. But that does not mean that we should necessarily call a new season of geopolitical conflict between the US and China, or Russia, or both, a Cold War. The big European powers waged great-power politics during the nineteenth century, yet no one calls this conflict a Cold War.

For the term to have any precise meaning, it needs to be distinguished from great-power rivalries as such. We can do this in two ways. First, it was cold. By that we mean that the US and the USSR never went to war against one another; indeed, it came to an end without the ‘systemic’ war that normally characterises transitions from one international system to the next. Had the two superpowers gone to war over Berlin, or Cuba, or wherever, we would not be calling it a Cold War today, if anyone were still around to call it anything.

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