{"id":289690,"date":"2025-03-17T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=289690"},"modified":"2025-03-11T07:16:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T07:16:46","slug":"is-this-the-beginning-or-the-end-of-a-new-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/03\/is-this-the-beginning-or-the-end-of-a-new-cold-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany.\u00a0 (Photo: Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

10 Mar 2025\u00a0<\/em>– When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6th to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called<\/a> this time \u201ca turning point in history.\u201d Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.<\/p>\n

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?<\/p>\n

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned<\/a> that \u201can iron curtain has descended\u201d across Europe.<\/p>\n

On March 2nd, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared<\/a> that Europe must turn Ukraine into a \u201csteel porcupine.\u201d President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to \u201cguarantee\u201d any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a \u201cbackstop,\u201d meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.<\/p>\n

Russia has repeatedly said it won\u2019t agree<\/a> to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said<\/a> on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”<\/p>\n

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a \u201ccoalition of the willing,\u201d the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the \u201ccoalition of the billing\u201d because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.<\/p>\n

Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began<\/a> to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.<\/p>\n

Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn\u2019t begin to withdraw<\/a> Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed<\/a> genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.<\/p>\n

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling \u201cWar on Terror\u201d for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic<\/a> Defense Secretary, General \u201cMad Dog\u201d Mattis, who declared<\/a> the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon\u2019s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama\u2019s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats<\/a> and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.<\/p>\n

In 2003, France\u2019s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition<\/a> to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement<\/a> to say that they would \u201cnot let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schr\u00f6der, French President Jacques Chirac said<\/a>, \u201cEverything must be done to avoid war\u2026 As far as we\u2019re concerned, war always means failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected<\/a> and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France<\/a>, Germany<\/a> and Italy<\/a> continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war<\/a> policy.<\/p>\n

Former German Chancellor Schr\u00f6der took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine\u2019s request to meet with Putin. In an interview<\/a> with Berliner Zeitung<\/em> in 2023, Schr\u00f6der confirmed that the peace talks only failed \u201cbecause everything was decided in Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schr\u00f6der \u201cDo you think you can resume your peace plan?\u201d<\/p>\n

Schr\u00f6der replied, \u201cYes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany\u2026 Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock; and Estonia\u2019s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU\u2019s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European<\/a> and U.S.<\/a> arms manufacturers.<\/p>\n

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schr\u00f6der today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won\u2019t the call<\/a> for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a \u201cwelfare state to a warfare state\u201d only feed the rise of the European hard right?<\/p>\n

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden<\/a> and Trump have warned<\/a>, lead to World War III?<\/p>\n

When Trump\u2019s foreign policy team met with<\/a> their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.<\/p>\n

The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.<\/p>\n

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.<\/p>\n

It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say<\/a> that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a \u201creverse Kissinger\u201d scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested<\/a>, that would perpetuate America\u2019s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.<\/p>\n

The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.<\/p>\n

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr\u00f6der in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.<\/p>\n

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said<\/a> back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must \u201cseize the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Medea Benjamin is cofounder of <\/em>CODEPINK for Peace<\/em><\/a>, and author of several books, including <\/em>Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of<\/em> Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of<\/em> War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict<\/a>, available from OR Books in November 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies, with a new iron curtain through what was the heart of Ukraine? Or can the US and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":289691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1061,433,1268,91,278,961,70,172],"class_list":["post-289690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-cold-war-ii","tag-europe","tag-european-union","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289690"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289693,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289690\/revisions\/289693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}