... other side accept defeat. Underlying this is a belief (which appears to be a fateful illusion, more present among American scholars and experts) that war and achieving victory in it have again become possible, with the stakes much lower than during the Cold War, and the prospect of total annihilation itself is enough to deter the weaker party, Russia, from using its nuclear weapons on a massive scale. This is the principal danger these days.
Misperceptions – or lack of clear understanding - between ...
... power" sports diplomacy, before the concept of "hard power" was even "branded." It was the era when the calculations to develop nuclear power—and nuclear weapons—were made with slide rules, not supercomputers. During the same Cold War period, during the global polio epidemic (it was not called a pandemic), the Kremlin allowed millions of Soviet citizens to be tested with the polio vaccine developed by the American doctor, Albert Sabin. This was an amazing diplomatic and humanitarian ...
... restrictions, many opportunities still remain for cooperation in a wide range of areas. The social capital of old ties is still working. However, seeing this as an upward trend would be stretching it. The situation is totally different even from the Cold War, when both the Soviet Union and the US were in confrontation. There was a high mutual interest on both sides then. Restrictions on contact and cooperation were extremely severe. But the trend was different, and reversed into a rapid and exponential ...
On November 9th was the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Time to reflect on the development of the last 30 years and why we are on the verge of a new Cold War today. Perhaps Gorbachev made the mistake of not securing his own design for a New Europe at the time. The United States and the United Kingdom got Germany´s NATO membership, France the euro, Gorbachev $ 13 billion for the withdrawal of troops ...
... of NATO enlargement. And so from the early 2010s, the Kremlin started charting a course that was clearly at odds with its earlier policies of Western integration.
With the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, the breakout from the post-Cold War, Western-dominated order was complete. The takeover of Crimea and support for separatism in Donbass did not presage a policy of reconquering Eastern Europe, as many in the West feared, but it clearly set Ukraine and other former Soviet republics ...
Is the new Containment and its Cold War on our doorstep? Who does it need now and why? To answer that question is to grasp how the previous one ceased.
The end of the Cold War came abruptly, overnight. Many in the West dreamt about it, but nobody really saw it coming. The Warsaw ...
... encirclement; the exit from multilateral arms control agreements; the trade wars and escalation of sanctions; and of course the aggressive and explicit character of official discourse. What kind of picture does emerge?
What is unfolding today is not the New Cold War. The New Cold War was during the Reagan years, in the 1980s, as critically elaborated most notably by Noam Chomsky and Fred Halliday in their published books of that decade. So, what is happening currently has to be the New, New Cold War, or ...
... events. In fact, the year 2018 drew a line in the international arena under what can be called the post-Soviet period. In other words, it is a period when the international system remained within the framework (albeit transforming) established during the Cold War-era confrontation.
Why did it happen now? Were there not enough events in the past century that knocked down the old system and brought new motivations into international practice? There certainly were many such events, but the past twelve months ...
... hours ago said exactly the opposite. This is not the way emerging superpowers are treated. Trump, for instance, can’t afford to do the same with China. He treats Beijing with more respect.
As an aside, the concept of superpowers dates back to the Cold War and is outdated. Even if we think of the United States or even China as superpowers today. Russia certainly isn’t one, because it lacks resources. And even the United States is losing its status.
What I see unfolding is something else ...
... relationship—the only one to have featured strategic arms control—is no longer central to global strategic stability. While Sino-American relations are not nearly as dominant in terms of the rest of the world as U.S.-Soviet relations were during the Cold War. Thus twentieth-century methods of dealing with the issue of strategic stability, such as arms control, are insufficient.
The U.S.-Russia strategic relationship—the only one to have featured strategic arms control—is no longer central to ...
