A New Cold War With Russia Is Unnecessary

By Jonathan Power, InDepthNews

George Orwell, the author of “Animal Farm”, the satire on how a dictatorship can slowly but steadily evolve in a democratic society, and “1984”, a novel about a future dystopian dictatorship, was the first person to use the phrase “Cold War” in a 1945 newspaper article, written just 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 US and Western Europe as one, the Soviet Union as the second and China as the third. He concluded that “the atomic bomb is likely to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a peace that is no peace”.

I think he got it nearly right, or so it seems as a new Cold War begins to erupt between the West and Russia, and China spars with the US over Taiwan, the South China Sea and its islands. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. China and the US are, I think, doing nothing much more than annoying each other and the bonds of commerce, finance, deadly virus eradication, global warming and student exchanges bind both the elites and the populaces close together.

To me, the idea of a new Cold War with Russia and adding China today is nonsense on stilts. Even more, the original one.

George Kennan, the former US ambassador to Moscow and the famed author of a Foreign Affairs article on how to contain the Soviet Union, always insisted, as most contemporary historians do, that Stalin had no intention of rolling his tanks into Western Europe…