Second Cold War

• 1. Introduction

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  The phrase "Second Cold War" carries enormous weight, yet no one can agree on when it began. George Kennan, the architect of America's original Cold War containment strategy, issued a warning in May 1998 that the US Senate's vote to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic was "the beginning of a new cold war". He predicted that "the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies". Few listened. Over the following decades, the language of a new Cold War moved from academic journals to UN speeches, from African capitals to the halls of Congress. The core question the documentary will track is not whether a second Cold War exists, but why so many people in so many places now believe it does, what they mean by it, and how it differs from the standoff the world once thought it had permanently escaped.

• 2. A Label With a History

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  The phrase itself is older than most people realize. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used the words "new Cold War" as early as 1955, and a New York Times article the following year warned of Soviet propaganda promoting the Cold War's resurgence. During the original Cold War, academics including Fred Halliday, Alan M. Wald, David S. Painter, and Noam Chomsky applied interchangeable versions of the label to the particularly tense stretches of 1979-1985 and 1985-1991. Columnist William Safire went further in a 1975 New York Times editorial, arguing that the Nixon administration's policy of detente had collapsed and that "Cold War II" was already underway. Academic Gordon H. Chang used the same phrase to describe the period after Richard Nixon's 1972 meeting with Mao Zedong in China, treating a diplomatic thaw as the start of a new rivalry rather than its end. By the time Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in February 2016 that relations with NATO had "slid back to a new Cold War", the phrase had already been cycling through the global conversation for sixty years.

• 3. The 2014 Rupture

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  Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for an insurgency in eastern Ukraine is the moment most analysts point to as the practical beginning of the current rupture. By August 2014, virtually all Western countries, led by the United States and the European Union, had imposed punitive economic, financial, and diplomatic measures on Russia, which introduced retaliatory measures of its own. Mikhail Gorbachev warned that year that the world was on the brink of a new cold war, or that one was already occurring. Carnegie Moscow Center director Dmitri Trenin used the term directly. Not everyone agreed: Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, argued the Ukraine conflict did not fit his definition of a cold war, while Yuval Weber, a visiting scholar at Harvard, wrote in February 2016 that the current tensions were "not similar to those of the original Cold War" and suggested "mini-Cold War" as a more accurate label. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that same month at the Munich Security Conference that the alliance was "not in a cold-war situation but also not in the partnership that we established at the end of the Cold War." The debate over the label was, in its own way, a measure of how disorienting the rupture was.

• 4. The China Dimension

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  Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia mission center, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July 2018 that China under Xi Jinping was waging "a quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, seeking to replace the US as the leading global power. Collins described it as "a cold war by definition", while acknowledging it looked different from the Soviet-era version. Historian Niall Ferguson offered one of the sharpest formulations of that difference, writing in January 2020 that "compared with the 1950s, the roles have been reversed. China is now the giant, Russia the mean little sidekick." Ferguson argued the new contest had "shifted away from trade to technology" and was complicated by the depth of US-China economic ties, which he described as making "decoupling" arguably a "delusion". Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned in December 2023 that deepening fragmentation between the two blocs could lead to "cold war two", with the potential loss of up to 7 trillion from gains from open trade. By January 2025, Ferguson had concluded that the US had been in "a second cold war" with China for at least six years, and that the contest had only intensified during the Biden administration.

• 5. The Multilateral Theatre

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  Africa became one of the most visible arenas where the competing powers were described in explicitly Cold War terms. In July 2022, France, the United States, and Russia all scheduled high-level, multi-country diplomatic visits to the continent at the same time. Associated Press quoted William Gumede of Democracy Works saying "It's like a new Cold War is playing out in Africa, where the rival sides are trying to gain influence". USC professor Brett L. Carter wrote in a September 2023 Foreign Affairs piece that the second cold war, exacerbated by China's influence in African affairs, risked pushing weakened democracies on the continent back toward authoritarianism. Carter noted that while China had been "the Soviet Union's junior partner" in the original Cold War, Russia in the newer contest had "more narrow" interests in Africa than China. In the Pacific, David Panuelo, President of Micronesia, used the term in May 2022 to oppose a proposed cooperation agreement between China and ten island nations, arguing it could create "a new 'cold war' between China and the West". A June 2025 academic analysis of Kenya's relations with China and the United States described Africa's role as not merely reactive to the Second Cold War but "co-constitutive of" it.

• 6. Hybrid War and Hard Comparisons

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  Polish retired general Stanisław Koziej argued in 2024 that Russia's second cold war against the West was "similar to the first one" but employed "a bigger toolbox of activities" including sabotage, cyberattacks, airspace violations, espionage, weaponized migration, disinformation operations, and nuclear blackmail. Reuters senior European security correspondent Sabine Siebold went further, saying the situation "in some ways, even feels hotter than the Cold War in the 80s", because a war involving Russian forces and Western weapons was raging on European territory and many arms control treaties from the 1980s had already collapsed. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in October 2025 that there was no cold war with NATO because the conflict had already developed into a "firey" one. Historian Antony Beevor stated in October 2022 that one of the most worrying aspects of the new era was "a total disregard for diplomatic agreements". Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in July 2024, as Russia responded to US plans to deploy long-range missiles including SM-6 and Tomahawk cruise missiles in Germany, that "all the attributes of the Cold War with the direct confrontation are returning." Russian and US diplomats at that time described their diplomatic relations as worse than during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

• 7. What Makes It Different

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  Academic Barry Buzan wrote in the International Politics journal that, as in the original Cold War, the second is deterred from turning into a direct hot war between superpowers by the threat of mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrence. Proxy wars and half-proxy wars appear in both eras. But a September 2023 journal article in Geopolitics identified a key difference: higher economic interdependence and a new centrality of network-based competition, particularly in infrastructure, finance, production, and digital networks. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Thomas Black noted in March 2026 that China "has a much more developed manufacturing base than the old Soviet Union", and that its manufacturing capabilities have surpassed those of the United States, which "has allowed its industrial base to be hollowed out over the years while supply chains splintered and moved overseas". Historian Yale professor Arne Westad observed that Putin's statements about Ukraine resembled late 19th- and early 20th-century colonial and imperial ideas rather than Cold War ideology. Academic Suisheng Zhao wrote in January 2026 that the second Trump administration had increasingly framed China as "an economic competitor" rather than an ideological adversary, and alleged that Trump envisioned "a world dominated by three great powers" echoing nineteenth-century spheres of influence. Whether the label fits or distorts, it is the language that Kim Jong Un, Gita Gopinath, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and dozens of other world leaders have reached for when trying to name what is happening.