NATO Just Officially Restarted The Cold War

Ever since the unfortunate geopolitical events of the late 1980s/early 1990s, especially the dismantling of the Soviet Union, geopolitical experts, journalists, historians and authors have been debating when exactly the Cold War ended (or whether it did at all). Some claim it ended when Mikhail Gorbachev took power, with others saying it never stopped, but was put on a decades-long pause. Whatever anyone’s point of view may be, the Cold War has officially restarted, or perhaps a new one has been initiated, depending on one’s standpoint regarding this matter.

While the old Cold War was “black and white” (or should we say “red and blue”) with a very clear distinction in ideology, politics, economic systems, etc., the new one is quite ambiguous. The USSR, with a formal goal of spreading the socialist revolution, was known as the “Red Menace” since the heydays of McCarthyism. Despite mindboggling losses resulting from the Nazi German (and pan-European) invasion, the superpower managed to not just recover after having nearly 30 million of its people brutally murdered and much of the country itself destroyed, but also establish a robust military and (geo)political bloc – the Warsaw Pact.

Opposing it was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known by its infamous acronym – NATO. A supposedly “defensive alliance” aimed against the USSR, it was formed in 1949, over half a decade before the Warsaw Pact (1955), its now-defunct competitor in Europe. The (old) Cold War saw an ever-mounting rivalry between the blocs, mainly in Europe, but spilling over elsewhere through numerous proxy wars, which threatened to push the world into a conflict of such a massive scale it would’ve made the Second World War look like a bloodless skirmish in comparison. By the late 1980s, the conflict subsided, coming to an abrupt, but definite (or so we thought at the time) end in 1991.

While Russia went through what can only be described as a sort of contemporary “Time of Troubles”, by the time the country reconsolidated itself, its leadership truly believed the Cold War was history. And yet, the other side thought otherwise. Despite numerous Western officials stating NATO wouldn’t expand eastwards, including the then US State Secretary James Baker telling Mikhail Gorbachev it “won’t move an inch to the east”, the alliance did exactly that, expanding nearly 41 million inches (over 1000 km) to the east, including to former Soviet Baltic republics, reaching Saint Petersburg without firing a single shot. That is unless we count the dismantling and the illegal aggression on Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s.

https://southfront.org/nato-just-officially-restarted-the-cold-war/