Opinion | Is a new cold war between the West and Russia called for? Definitely not
- It was the West that made the mistake of emphasising a military threat that did not exist, expanding Nato and not listening to Russia’s fears
- What is needed now is not a new cold war but wise Western leadership on how to treat Russia
George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, was the first person to use the phrase “Cold War” in a 1945 article, written after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He argued that “the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy”.
He counted the United States and western Europe as one, the Soviet Union as the second and China as the third. He concluded that the atomic bomb “is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’”.
China and Russia have a fair relationship. China and the US are perhaps doing nothing much more than annoying each other and the bonds of commerce still bind both populaces close together.
To me, a new cold war is nonsense on stilts.
George Kennan, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union and the author of the containment doctrine towards Moscow, insisted that Stalin had no intention of rolling his tanks into western Europe. Robert Legvold summarises Kennan’s views on the Soviet Union in his book, Return to Cold War, “The threat it posed was political … a threat requiring a political and economic response, not a military one.”