Did the Cold War ever really end?

Evan Mawdsley

“The Cold War was a product of the 1917 revolution and the Second World War”

Relations between the US and Russian Federation have been cool over the past 10 years, and were chilled further by the 2014 annexation of the Crimea. But those developments are part of a new era. The Cold War meant more than tension between two major states. It evolved over time, but had three essential features. One, a consequence of the Second World War, was global bipolarity. Many major states had been defeated or weakened, leaving the two ‘super powers’. Washington and Moscow assembled alliance systems, especially Nato and the Warsaw Pact. The second feature was ideology, Marxism-Leninism versus liberal-capitalism (or anti-communism). These idea systems bound each bloc together and impeded good inter-bloc relations. Soviet leaders took socialism seriously: it was a buttress of their bloc, especially in eastern Europe, and it won the USSR significant support among leftist political groups, in Europe and then in the anti-colonial movement. The third feature was massive arms procurement, especially nuclear. Such weapons made military conflict on the scale of the Second World War unthinkable. The ‘war’ was therefore a cold one, carried out through ideology rather than fighting.

The world changed profoundly in all three areas, as a result of the collapse of the USSR. First, the blocs were no more, especially the eastern European alliance system. The Russian Federation now lacks close allies or clients. Similarly, with no serious external threat, the US receives only limited support from its own friends. Meanwhile, Marxism-Leninism ceased to be a powerful ideology. The Russian Federation from time to time puts forward an anti-liberal