A reinvigorated NATO, at a summit last summer, to which leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand were invited, voiced unprecedented concern about China’s ambitions. Within days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Germany announced a “turning point” in its long-standing relationship with Russia, which would alter its military and energy policies. The blocs in this new cold war are hardening.

That’s for the best banal triumphalism about the Cold War tends to ignore both how close we came to nuclear catastrophe-a spectre that Putin revived last week, when he suspended Russia’s last arms-control deal with the U.S.-and the toll of the proxy wars fought around the globe, which the historian Paul Chamberlin estimates killed more than twenty million people. Officials on all sides, though, downplay analogies to the past. and its allies against Russia and its dominant partner, China. In broad terms, it is a schism between the realms of democracy and autocracy, pitting the U.S. Kennedy called a “long, twilight struggle” over the shape of its future. Not since the Berlin Wall fell has the world been cleaved so deeply by the kind of conflict that John F. Its most senior diplomat, Wang Yi, described the balloon shoot-down as “borderline hysterical, and an utter misuse of military force.” would do,” and ventured that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is “bent on a world war.” Nikki Haley, a Republican contender for the Presidency in 2024, signalled her backing for something close to regime change, telling supporters that “Communist China will end up on the ash heap of history.” China cast the uproar as a sign of America’s decline. In a radio interview, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, speculated that the balloon was “a test to see what the U.S.

By that point, though, the machinery of confrontation was in full gear. The United States shot down three more floating objects in the following days, then announced that there was no sign that any of them were connected to China. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was preparing to board a flight to Beijing, called off his trip and, on February 4th, as the world watched, an F-22 shot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina, where it sank, like a strange emblem of this precarious moment. Joe Biden’s national-security aides were recently at work on a secret mission-how to get the President safely in and out of Ukraine’s capital, ahead of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion-when they got word of a problem closer to home: a suspected Chinese spy balloon had been spotted in U.S.

Why is the cold war called a war