Cold war (term)

• 1. Introduction

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  The term "cold war" names a condition most people recognize instantly: two powers locked in hostility, trading threats, money, and spies, but never quite sending armies directly at each other. In March 1938, that precise phrase appeared for the first time in English in an anonymous editorial in The Nation Magazine, under the title "Hitler's Cold War." The subject was Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union. The phrase we now take as almost synonymous with one specific superpower rivalry was, for years, loose and wandering. It described the nervous tension in Europe on the eve of World War II, where armies massed and governments manufactured incidents. It appeared in wartime columns urging cool heads in American politics. George Orwell used it in October 1945 to warn of a "peace that is no peace," a permanent condition he saw gathering between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. Only in April 1947 did Bernard Baruch, an American financier advising presidents, deliver the phrase that fixed its modern meaning: "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." From that speech in South Carolina, the term traveled outward. And it has never stopped traveling.

• 2. A Medieval Misquote

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  Don Juan Manuel, a fourteenth-century Spaniard, is sometimes credited with inventing the phrase. He wrote about the long conflict between Christianity and Islam in terms that several writers have pointed to as the earliest recorded ancestor of "cold war." The problem is that the word he actually used translated closer to "tepid," not "cold." The word "cold" only arrived in the 19th century, carried in by a faulty translation of his work. The original meaning was already softer than people assumed, and the landmark was built partly on mistranslation. Then came a stranger episode. In 1934, an American newspaper applied the phrase to a faith healer bitten by a snake. Medical staff had reportedly credited his survival partly to faith. The newspaper described that as "a truce in the cold war between science and religion." The phrase was available, flexible, and floating free of any fixed geopolitical meaning. It could attach to almost any sustained antagonism that stopped short of open violence. That flexibility would prove remarkably durable.

• 3. The Phrase Finds Its Shape

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  Graham Hutton, Associate Editor of The Economist, gave the term its most extended early treatment in English. His essay, titled "The Next Peace," appeared in the August 1939 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Writing on the eve of World War II, Hutton elaborated on the cold war concept more deeply than any prior English-language invocation. The piece drew at least one sympathetic reply in a subsequent newspaper column. That same summer, the phrase ran through European press coverage describing the atmosphere of arms buildups and mass conscriptions, particularly in Poland. Commentators were unsure whether to call it a "cold war" or a "hot peace." Polish observers described the period as one of "provocation by manufactured incidents." Some speculated that German cold war tactics were designed specifically to weaken Polish resistance before any open invasion. Orwell's 1945 use of the term in Tribune carried the phrase across the end of the war and into the nuclear age. He returned to it in The Observer on the 10th of March 1946, writing that after the Moscow conference the previous December, Russia had begun to make "a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire." The phrase was hardening into something specific.

• 4. Baruch, Swope, and Lippmann

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  Bernard Baruch did not write the speech that launched the phrase into its modern life. The words were composed by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope and delivered by Baruch in South Carolina on the 16th of April 1947. The line that entered history was direct: "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." This was the first time "cold war" was deployed in the sense that has now become fixed, meaning a geopolitical confrontation pursued through indirect means between the USSR and its satellites on one side and the United States and its Western European allies on the other. The phrase might have stayed confined to political speeches had Walter Lippmann, a newspaper reporter and columnist, not run with it. Lippmann published a book simply titled Cold War in 1947, the same year as Baruch's speech. That book gave the term wide currency in public debate. Within a few years, the phrase had migrated from an anonymous 1938 editorial and a medieval mistranslation into the defining label for the central geopolitical contest of the second half of the twentieth century.

• 5. Cold Wars Around the World

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  Since the US-USSR Cold War officially spanned 1947-1991, the term has been applied to a cascade of other conflicts, some historical and some current. Malcolm H. Kerr coined "Arab Cold War" to describe the rivalry inside the Arab world between Nasserist republics defending Pan-Arabism, led by Nasser's Egypt, and the traditionalist monarchies led by Saudi Arabia. Commentators across multiple institutions have also applied the label to the tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In South Asia, several writers and political commentators have used the phrase since 2002 to describe the long standoff between India and Pakistan, two countries that were part of British India until partition in 1947. The Korean peninsula carries its own version. Naval Postgraduate School academic Edward A. Olsen and others called the sustained hostility between North and South Korea the "Korean Cold War." In August 2019, North Korea's government itself used the phrase, warning that US-South Korean military cooperation would "trigger a new cold war on the Korean Peninsula and in the region." British writer Edward Crankshaw applied the term to Sino-Soviet relations after the Sino-Soviet split, a period that also produced what observers called "spy wars" between the USSR and China.

• 6. The Domestic Turn

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  In spring 2017, professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla applied the phrase to the internal politics of the United States itself, coining the term "cold civil war." He aimed it at what he described as a "ruling class" composed of government bureaucracies, the judiciary, academia, media, and Democratic officials, arrayed against what he characterized as the majority of the American people. Journalist Carl Bernstein used the same phrase in 2017 and again in 2019, this time criticizing then-President Donald Trump. In 2017 Bernstein pointed to the Trump administration's treatment of Hillary Clinton during the Mueller investigation. In 2019 he cited Trump's efforts to appeal to his supporters' hostility toward "the other side," whom, Bernstein argued, those supporters wanted "wiped out." Washington Post columnist Matt Bai applied the term in January 2021 to what he called "imminent disunion," describing rural Americans living in a separate reality shaped by "alternative facts" and "reckless leaders." A month after that, in March 2021, media studies professor David A. Love directed the phrase at the Republican Party, accusing it of instigating a cold civil war through voter suppression measures. Not everyone accepted the frame. Tony Woodlief, writing in Governing magazine in October 2021, pushed back against political pundits and their emphasis on class divides, arguing they overlooked data showing substantial common ground among Americans.