Second Cold War

The Second Cold War, Cold War II, or the New Cold War are terms that refer to heightened geopolitical tensions in the 21st century. They have been used to describe the tense relations between the United States and China and, similarly, between the United States and Russia, the primary successor state of the former Soviet Union, which took part in the original Cold War. The terms are sometimes used to describe tensions in multilateral relations. Some commentators have used them as a comparison to the original Cold War, while others have discouraged their use to refer to any current tensions. Cold War#New Cold War (1979–1985) and Cold War (1979–1985) Past sources, such as academics Fred Halliday, Alan M. Wald, David S. Painter, and Noam Chomsky, used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and/or 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War. Some other sources used similar terms to refer to the Cold War of the mid-1970s. Columnist William Safire argued in a 1975 New York Times editorial that the Nixon administration's policy of détente with the Soviet Union had failed and that "Cold War II" was then underway. In May 1998, George Kennan described the US Senate vote to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as "the beginning of a new cold war", and predicted that "the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies". In 2001, foreign policy and security experts James M. Lindsay and Ivo Daalder described counterterrorism as the "new Cold War". Academic Gordon H. Chang in 2007 used the term "Cold War II" to refer to the Cold War period after the 1972 meeting in China between US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. The journalist Edward Lucas wrote in 2008 that a new cold war between Russia and the West had already begun. In an op-ed for The Straits Times, Kor Kian Beng wrote that the phrase "new Cold War" between US-led allies versus Beijing and Moscow did not gain traction in China at first.