Cold War II (also called the New Cold War or Second Cold War) is a term used to describe an ongoing

state of political and military tension between opposing geopolitical power-blocs, with one bloc typically
reported as being led by Russia and/or China, and the other led by the United States, European Union,
and NATO. It is akin to the original Cold War that saw a stand-off and proxy wars between the Western
Bloc led by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union, Russia's predecessor.

Some sources use the "Cold War II" term as a possible or unlikely future event, while others have used
the term to describe ongoing renewed tensions, hostilities, and political rivalry that intensified
dramatically in 2014 between the Russian Federation on the one hand, and the United States of America,
NATO, European Union, and some other countries on the other. . Journalist Edward Lucas wrote the 2008
book The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West, claiming that the new
Cold War between Russia and the West has begun.

While the new tensions between Russia and the West have similarities with those during the original Cold
War, there are also major dissimilarities such as modern Russia's increased economic ties with the outside
world, which may potentially constrain Russia's actions and provide it with new avenues for exerting
influence, such as in Belarus and Central Asia, which have not brought on the type of direct military
action in which Russia engaged in less cooperative former Soviet states like Ukraine or the Caucasus
region. The term "Cold War II" has therefore been described as a misnomer.

In February 2016, a National Research University academic and Harvard University visiting scholar
Yuval Weber wrote on E-International Relations that "the world is not entering Cold War II", asserting
that the current tensions and ideologies of both sides are not similar to those of the original Cold War, that
situations in Europe and the Middle East do not destabilize other areas geographically, and that Russia "is
far more integrated with the outside world than the Soviet Union ever was". In September 2016, when
asked if he thought the world had entered a new cold war, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued that
current tensions were not comparable: he noted the lack of an ideological divide between the United
States and Russia, saying that conflicts were no longer viewed from the perspective of a bipolar
international system.

The term "Cold War II" gained currency and relevance as tensions between Russia and the West escalated
throughout the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine followed by the Russian military intervention and
especially the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. By August 2014, both sides had
implemented economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions upon each other: virtually all Western countries,
led by the US and EU, imposed restrictive measures on Russia; the latter reciprocally introduced retaliatory
measures.

Some observers − including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad − judged the Syrian Civil War to be a proxy war
between Russia and the United States, and even a "proto-world war". In January 2016, senior UK government
officials were reported to have registered their growing fears that "a new cold war" was now unfolding in
Europe: "It really is a new Cold War out there. Right across the EU we are seeing alarming evidence of
Russian efforts to unpick the fabric of European unity on a whole range of vital strategic issues."

In an interview with Time magazine in December 2014, Gorbachev said that the US under Obama was
dragging Russia into a new Cold War. In February 2016, at the Munich Security Conference, NATO Secretary
General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO and Russia were "not in a cold-war situation but also not in the
partnership that we established at the end of the Cold War", while Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev,
speaking of what he called NATO's "unfriendly and opaque" policy with regard to Russia, said: "One could go
as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War." In October 2016 and March 2017, Stoltenberg
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repeatedly said to, respectively, BBC News and then CBS News that NATO would not seek "a new Cold War"
or "a new arms race" with Russia.

Talk of a "new Cold War" between a United States-led block of countries on the one hand and the
putative Beijing-Moscow axis, including explicit references to it in the official PRC′s media,
intensified in the summer of 2016 as a result of the territorial dispute in the South China Sea, when
China defied the Permanent Court of Arbitration′s ruling against China on the South China Sea
dispute, and the U.S. announcing in July 2016 it would deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area
Defence (THAAD) in South Korea, a move resented by China as well as Russia and North Korea.

Donald Trump, who was inaugurated as US president on 20 January 2017, had repeatedly said
during his presidential campaign that he considered China a threat, a stance that heightened
speculations of the possibility of a "new cold war with China". Claremont McKenna College professor
Minxin Pei said that Trump's election win and "ascent to the presidency" may increase chances of
the possibility. In March 2017, a self-declared socialist magazine Monthly Review said, "With the rise
of the Trump administration, the new Cold War with Russia has been put on hold", and also said that
the Trump administration has planned to shift from Russia to China as its main competitor.

In July 2018, Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia mission center, told
the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that he believed China under paramount leader Xi Jinping,
while unwilling to go to war, was waging a "quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, seeking
to replace the U.S. as the leading global power. He elaborated: "What they're waging against us is
fundamentally a cold war — a cold war not like we saw during THE Cold War (between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union) but a cold war by definition." In October 2018, United States Vice President Mike
Pence in a global press was also regarded as declaring a new cold war between the U.S. and China.