Those who had been hopeful, good days never came, but after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the whole world has started worrying about returning to the old bad days of the Cold War. The tension, which the whole world had to face for almost half a century after the Second World War, is now being heard again. When the Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1992, a lot of hope was set. It was said that if the world would now become one polar, then many of its issues would be resolved automatically. The famous political scientist Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to say that the end of history has begun. They believed that the political development of the world was moving towards its final culmination, but nothing like this happened. The world, freed from old sorrows, found new sorrows for itself. At the same time, another political scientist and Fukuyama mentor Samuel P. Huntington gave the theory of clash of civilizations. We spent the subsequent decade or so of developments smelling the clash of civilizations.
For some time both these theories have gone into cold storage and discussions have started about the return of the Cold War. However, till now it was being said that this time there is no Soviet Union, so the Cold War will go on between America and China. China is not known, but America took it very seriously and the organizations like Quad by connecting India were considered as the winds of cold war. But now that the equations have suddenly changed, it seems that the new Cold War is also standing where the previous one had gone to sleep. He is America, he is Russia and he is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is also being said that where did the Cold War end. He just went into a soft phase and came back hot. The war between Russia and Ukraine may end tomorrow, but the fresh tension that has emerged on the face of the world will not leave its mark soon. What will survive after that will be the Cold War.
Russia has an old feud with Ukraine. There is the Tsar and then the gland of the Soviet era, which wants to see many areas under its control. It is also said about Putin that he has started looking at himself like an emperor. In the speech he gave last week, he kept mentioning that history again and again. Then there is also a fear of Russia that because of Ukraine, NATO can reach its door. But America’s problem is bigger than that. The world order that it has been scrambling to build for a long time, its ends are constantly getting tangled. After leaving Afghanistan, now he neither has any such issue nor any such platform, where he can stand and beat his Munadi. A new Cold War erupting with Russia could give its foreign policy the purpose it has been trying to find in China for a long time.
But will this Cold War be the same as it was before? We trace the beginning of the Cold War to 1947, when US President Henry S Truman theorized that America, along with its friends, would do whatever it takes to stop Soviet expansionism. This theory, coined with the ideal of promoting democratic systems around the world, was called the Truman Doctorin. It is a different matter that America supported dictatorships more than democracies to oppose the Soviet Union. To counter the Soviet Union, India’s democracy never suited it as much as the military governments of Pakistan. Two years after this Truman Doctorin, NATO was formed, a military alliance formed to counter the Soviet Union. Interestingly, this military system built to counter the expansionism of the Soviet Union remained intact even after its disintegration, which now seems to be getting its old role back.
Despite this, there are many reasons why the new Cold War of the 21st century is going to be very different from the old Cold War of the 20th century. There were two different ideologies pitted against each other in that Cold War. There were two political, social and economic systems pitted against each other. On the one hand, there was the communism of the Soviet Union, which believed that it had grasped the ultimate truth of the movement of the world and that it was just a matter of time, a few steps, that the whole world would be within its grasp. On the other hand, there was America, which believed that open society and democracy was the ultimate destiny of the whole world. On the strength of this, he will do welfare of the whole world. If the Soviet Union was seeing the future of the world in a communist system, then America thought that the prosperity of the world was possible only through capitalism. But by the passage of 45 years of the Cold War, Soviet communism began to gasp and finally collapsed and collapsed. After that the whole world embraced capitalism very rapidly. Even China, which calls itself a communist, has settled capitalism in its heart.
That is, where we stand in the 21st century, there are no conflicting ideologies that fueled the Cold War for a long time. It is not only about the departure of communism, America also does not seem to talk about allegiance to democracy. That liberalism, which used to be the gamut of the singing of democracy, is also now taking off. We do not know what the new Cold War would be like if there was no rivalry of ideologies. This is where Karl Marx is remembered. Marx said that events happen twice in history, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a squid.
(These are the author’s own views)