After eight months of war in Ukraine, the community of Euro-Atlantic (United States, Canada and Western Europe), Asian (Japan, South Korea) and Pacific (Australia and New Zealand) countries entered into a new cold war which opposes it to the nebula of authoritarian and totalitarian states formed by Russia, China, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Hungary and Serbia.
Our time is therefore marked by the wind of a new cold war (or second cold war) which is blowing over the world. The particular feature of this new cold war compared to the previous one is that it unfolds simultaneously with the ongoing hot war in Ukraine.
The other difference is that NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) does not accept the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. NATO opposes the creation of a Russian zone of influence through the use of brute force.
On a higher level, this confrontation and this global polarization were clearly visible during the meeting of the UN General Assembly held last September. At the same meeting, the non-aligned states also spoke out, refusing to ally themselves with East or West, with India in the lead, as a distant echo of the first Cold War.
The Brioni declaration of July 19, 1956, proposed by the Egyptian Nasser, the Yugoslav Tito, the Indonesian Soekarno and the Indian Nehru, marks the origin of the movement of non-aligned countries, which aims to protect itself from the influence of the United States and the USSR. The movement was officially created on 1er September 1961 in Belgrade, at the time capital of Titoist Yugoslavia.
In the same spirit, remember that the first Cold War began on March 5, 1946. According to the International Churchill Society, Russian historians date the start of the Cold War with Winston Churchill’s famous speech delivered in Westminster. College, Fulton, Missouri, USA: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has fallen across the continent. »
Cooperative multipolarity
Nuclear deterrence prevented the cold war between East and West from degenerating into conventional and planetary nuclear war.
Nuclear deterrence was based, implicitly, on the recognition of the zone of domination of the Soviet Union acquired over the states of central and eastern Europe, grouped within the Warsaw Pact. This explains the passivity, even acceptance, of the Western North Atlantic alliance, NATO, during the Soviet Union’s military aggression against Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The first Cold War ended between 1989 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In this case, the most important politician who contributed to the peaceful end of the cold war was the general secretary (the equivalent of the president) of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. He was seconded by US Presidents Reagan and Bush. In our view, having worked actively for a peaceful end to the Cold War gives Gorbachev the contested aura of one of the most important political figures of the 20th century.e century.
Let us remember: the end of the first cold war allowed the liberation of central and eastern Europe and the Baltic States from Soviet domination. During the next thirty years, between 1991 and 2022, these states experienced a period of extraordinary prosperity within the framework of the European Union and other international organizations, what we call cooperative multipolarity.
It is this extraordinary economic prosperity, together with the freedom of civil society, framed by the rule of law, that prompted Ukraine to turn its gaze towards the European Union and the Euro-Atlantic community. After the “citizen revolution” of Maidan (2014), a majority of Ukrainian citizens and part of the political elite of the young country refused to continue supporting the kleptocratic capitalism of the Putin-inspired oligarchs.
look for war
While Gorbachev struggled to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, a junior lieutenant colonel in the KGB, the Soviet Union’s central intelligence service, Vladimir Putin, was stationed in Dresden, East Germany. Needless to say, Putin regretted the Soviet Union’s loss of global influence; this was obviously associated with the difficulties of the end of his first career as an officer.
It now appears that Putin has completely rejected Gorbachev’s democratic, open and transparent political legacy. Since consolidating his power in Russia, Putin has thus completely consigned Gorbachev’s foreign policy to the oblivion of Russian history by seeking, on the contrary, by all means, open war included, to reconstitute the Russian spheres of domination. in the successor states of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s reasoned refusal to organize Gorbachev’s state funeral and to appear only in person before his body clearly reveals the contempt of the man from the Kremlin, as much as the visceral hatred of the Russians, towards of the last secretary of the USSR and his foreign policy. Nothing surprising in this: the foreign policy of Putin, the herald of the new cold war, is in active contradiction with the foreign policy of Gorbachev. This will last as long as Putin remains in power in Russia.