Illustration by Ale Lampietti
Small ‘Hot’ Wars Will Define Cold War II
The US and Soviet Union never came to direct blows but fought for decades through proxies and interventions. Today Ukraine, Syria and Gaza are local conflicts with global implications.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is the most recent round in the long-running struggle between the Jewish state and its enemies. It is a fight to determine whether Iran’s “axis of resistance,” or a loose coalition led by the US, has the edge in a vital region. But this conflict also has a larger global salience: It is one of a series of hot wars at the center of the new cold war playing out around the world.
Cold wars are never as cold — never as peaceful — as their name implies. The US-Soviet struggle from 1947 to 1991 featured dozens of civil wars, proxy wars, and even serious conventional conflicts in places from the Korean Peninsula to Central America. These wars roiled entire regions; in a few cases, they threatened to engulf the globe. Today, a new cold war pits the US and its allies against an axis of Eurasian autocracies. That struggle, too, features some very violent clashes, of which the Israel-Hamas war is the latest, but surely not the last.