Cold War II

Early usages

Past sources, such as academics Fred Halliday and David S. Painter used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War.

EU/NATO members vs. Russia

Some sources use the term as a possible or unlikely future event, while others have used the term to describe ongoing renewed tensions, hostilities, and political rivalry that intensified dramatically in 2014 between the Russian Federation on the one hand, and the United States, NATO, European Union, and some other countries on the other. Michael Klare, a RealClearPolitics writer and an academic, in June 2013 compared tensions between Russia and the West to the ongoing proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Oxford Professor Philip N. Howard argued that the new cold war has a distinct media dimension in that the battles are being fought over control of Russia's media broadcasters and through cyberwar between authoritarian governments and their own civil society groups. While some notable figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev warned in 2014, against the backdrop of Russia–West political confrontation over the Ukrainian crisis, that the world was on the brink of a New Cold War, or that a New Cold War was already occurring, others argued that the term did not accurately describe the nature of relations between Russia and the West. While the new tensions between Russia and the West have similarities with those during the original Cold War, there are also major dissimilarities such as modern Russia's increased economic ties with the outside world, which may potentially constrain Russia's actions and provides it with new avenues for exerting influence, such as in Belarus and Central Asia, which have not brought on the type of direct military action in which Russia engaged in less cooperative former Soviet states like Ukraine or the Caucasus. The term "Cold War II" has therefore been described as a misnomer.

The term "Cold War II" gained currency and relevance as tensions between Russia and the West escalated throughout the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine followed by the Russian military intervention and especially the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. By August 2014, both sides had implemented economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions upon each other: virtually all Western countries, led by the US and EU, imposed restrictive measures on Russia; the latter reciprocally introduced retaliatory measures.

Tensions escalated in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea, and military intervention in Ukraine. Some observers − including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad − judged the Syrian Civil War to be a proxy war between Russia and the US, and even a "proto-world war". 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.”

In an interview with TIME in December 2014, Gorbachev said that the US under Obama was dragging Russia into a new Cold War. 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," while Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking of what he called NATO's "unfriendly and opaque" policy with regard to Russia, said: "One could go as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War."

In April 2015, CNN reported that "russian hackers" had "penetrated sensitive parts of the White House" computers in "recent months." It was said that the FBI, the Secret Service, and other U.S. intelligence agencies categorized the attacks "among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems."

In September 2016, when asked if he thought the world had entered a new cold war, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued that current tensions were not comparable: he noted the lack of an ideological divide between the United States and Russia, said that conflicts were no longer viewed from the perspective of a bipolar international system.

In October 2016, John Sawers, a former MI6 chief, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he thought the world was entering an era that was possibly "more dangerous" than the Cold War, as "we do not have that focus on a strategic relationship between Moscow and Washington.” Similarly, Igor Zevelev, a fellow at the Wilson Center, said, "[I]t's not a Cold War [but] a much more dangerous and unpredictable situation." CNN opined, "It's not a new Cold War. It's not even a deep chill. It's an outright conflict."

Meanwhile, the United States government accused the Russian government of interfering in the 2016 United States elections. The US intelligence community stated that "Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump". Their assessment was made with high confidence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), representing 17 intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) jointly stated that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked its documents to WikiLeaks. Russia said it had no involvement. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that Russia was not involved in the leaks. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in early January 2017 testified before a Senate committee that Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign went beyond hacking, and included disinformation and the dissemination of fake news often promoted on social media. President Barack Obama used the red phone line to directly contact Vladimir Putin and emphasize the importance of the cyber attacks. On December 29, 2016, the U.S. government announced a series of punitive measures against Russia that were said to be "the biggest retaliatory move against Russian espionage since the Cold War" and "the strongest American response yet to a state-sponsored cyberattack". Namely, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on four top officials of the GRU and declared 35 Russian suspected spies in the United States persona non grata and ordered them to leave the country within 72 hours, and announced further sanctions, consisting of both those that would be overt in addition to some that would remain covert into the future.

In January 2017, a former government adviser Molly K. McKew said at Politico that the US would win the "new Cold War" if the War happens. The New Republic editor Jeet Heer dismissed the possibility as "equally troubling[,] reckless threat inflation, wildly overstating the extent of Russian ambitions and power in support of a costly policy," and too centred on Russia while "ignoring the rise of powers like China and India." Heer also criticized McKew for supporting the possibility. Jeremy Shapiro, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution, wrote in his blog post at RealClearPolitics, referring to the US–Russia relations: "A drift into a new Cold War has seemed the inevitable result."

Josh Keefe of International Business Times wrote that an increasing military presence in Eastern Europe led multiple US and Russian experts "to fret about a new Cold War." Also in reference, Keefe exemplified the events affecting US–Russia relations under Obama with the Russian reset, an attempt to improve the US–Russia relations; Putin leading the 2012 Russian presidential election; Russia's asylum grant to Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents from the US's National Security Agency; US and Russia imposing sanctions on each other over the Ukrainian crisis; the Iran nuclear deal; and the alleged Russian involvement on the 2016 US presidential election, where Donald Trump won the US presidency.

United States vs. China

A US politician Jed Babbin, a Yale University professor David Gelernter, a Firstpost editor R. Jagannathan Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group, and some other analysts use the term to refer to tensions between the United States and China.

Financial Times also speculated the new Cold War between the two nations by citing the increased Chinese military activity in the South China Sea. Chinese media speculated a new Cold War by citing events occurred in July 2016, like the US deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) in South Korea and The Hague-based arbitrary tribunal ruling against China's favor on the South China Sea dispute.

Other analysts, including ones interviewed by The Straits Times, rejected the "new Cold War" reference to the US–China relations, mostly "citing obstacles such as a lingering distrust between [China, Russia, and North Korea]." Nevertheless, the analysts suggested US and China to ease tensions between the two countries. Jin Canrong from Renmin University (金灿荣) said, "China remains committed to building a new type of major-power relationship with the US that avoids conflict and focuses on cooperation." Wang Dong from Peking University dismissed the "new Cold War" talks as "media sensationalism" and further told the newspaper his reasons to reject the claim: "[F]or one thing, the two are highly interdependent, economically and socially, and, for another, the cost of rushing into a new Cold War for nuclear powers like China and the US is prohibitively high." Chen Jian from Cornell University said, "A new Cold War is not going to happen if neither side makes serious mistakes, including mistakes related to misperceptions of a new Cold War."

Besides the South China Sea dispute, South China Morning Post columnist Shi Jiangtao said in January 2017 that some other experts cited trade relations between the US and China, the Taiwan situation, and the China–North Korea relations as possible emergence "of a new cold war" between the US and China.

Donald Trump, who was inaugurated the US president on 20 January 2017, has stated he considers China a threat, increasing speculation talks of the possibility that would affect the relations. A Claremont McKenna College professor Minxin Pei said that Trump's election win and "ascent to the presidency" may increase chances of the possibility.

Novel risks and measures for preventing escalation

The current world differs from the world during the original Cold War and decision-makers might make problematic decisions based upon their knowledge of this period. US arms expert Theodore Postol warns that the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident could be averted to become a nuclear catastrophe as relations between Russian and the United States were relatively trusting in 1995 and that if a similar incident occurred today it could quite possibly lead to a nuclear exchange. European Leadership Network (ELN) chair and former British defense minister Des Browne notes that that especially civilian pilots don't know how to deal with risky encounters between Eastern and Western troops that according to an ELN report are becoming more common and mainly occur in the air and that "one of these incidents could easily escalate". He also states that there's a "need to find a mechanism in which we can talk at the highest level". Brown, former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and former US Senator and veteran of international disarmament policy Sam Nunn jointly recommend "that reliable communication channels exist in the event of serious incidents". Head of NATO Allied Command Operations in Europe Philip Breedlove calls for a new "red telephone". Nunn states:

Trust has been eroded to the point of almost being destroyed. You got a war going on right in the middle of Europe. You got a breakdown of the conventional forces treaty, you got the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty under great strain, you got tactical nuclear weapons all over Europe. It’s a very dangerous situation.

Nunn also states that hybrid warfare makes everything − including tactical nuclear weapons − more dangerous. US diplomat Richard Burt confirmed that hybrid warfare raises the danger of nuclear weapons being used as "both American and Russian nuclear arms are essentially on a kind of hair-trigger alert" with "both sides have a nuclear posture where land-based missiles could be authorized for use in less than 15 minutes" and the situation of hybrid warfare being "a dangerous state of play". Ivanov points out that "in the Cold War, we created mechanisms of security. A huge number of treaties and documents helped us to avoid a big and serious military crash. Now the threat of a war is higher than during the Cold War". Similarly former United States Secretary of Defense William Perry states that progress made after the fall of the Soviet Union to reduce the chance of a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia was getting unravelled and estimates that the probability of a nuclear calamity would be higher today than during the cold war. Decision-makers might assume that warfare between some of the world's major powers can be limited to fourth-generation, asymmetric or hybrid warfare because − for instance − such might seem to be the most rational way of conduct.