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The Ukraine War and the crisis in Eastern Europe – Biljana Vankovska & John Ross

Biljana Vankovska discusses with John Ross the effects the Ukraine War is having on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, including dramatic developments in Romania, Serbia, Macedonia and Hungary.

No Cold War Perspectives #4 Video

March 17, 2025

US arrogance created the Ukraine war – Jeffrey Sachs & Vijay Prashad

Jeffrey Sachs discuses with Vijay Prashad how US arrogance provoked the Ukraine War.

No Cold War Perspectives #3 Video
This short video is the third episode in the new series – No Cold War Perspectives videos.

March 14, 2025

South Korea – After the failed coup: Dae-Han Song & Mikaela Nhondo Erskog

Dae-Han Song discuses with Mikaela Nhondo Erskog last December’s attempted coup in South Korea – why it took place, how it was defeated and the effect that will have on the country’s politics.

No Cold War Perspectives #2 Video
This short video is the second episode in new series – No Cold War Perspectives videos.

The video can be watched here.

March 11, 2025

What are the possibilities for peace in Ukraine

By Vijay Prashad

The whole thing is a fiasco. The theatrical drama in the White House’s Oval Office triggered a series of predictable responses around the world. Outrage at US President Donald Trump for his rudeness and ridicule for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy were some of the reactions. Then, the failure of French President Emmanuel Macron to create a European agreement with the United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer and Zelenskyy revealed the absolute dead ends that confront this exhausted war in Ukraine. The question that these discussions provoke is simple: is there an exit for this war?

Permanent war...

March 07, 2025

Europe does not need a domestic Trump clone

By Peter Mertens

What US President Donald Trump did on February 28 to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy typically happens behind closed doors. Now, in Trump’s words, it was “great television.” This is how the US has treated countries in the Global South for years: as neo-colonies expected to meekly say “Thank you” for imposed agreements that plunder their resources. It’s no different from how Trump speaks about Panama, Greenland, or Gaza, complete with repulsive AI animations. The US sees the world as a giant globe of resources that belong to it. This has a name: imperialism. It never truly left; it has simply returned naked and unashamed, trampling the last remaining counterforce that once restrained it—international law.

Domestically, Trump does the same. He seeks to revive the 19th-century capitalism of the “robber barons,” a capitalism without counterweights: no unions, no labor protections, and absolute power to make decisions affecting millions, up to and including deportation. To win this war, he has enlisted Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team.

Zelenskyy’s calm and controlled demeanor in the face of the world’s most powerful president commanded respect, particularly among Global South nations all too familiar with US bullying. But this brings us no closer to peace. “The unwinnable war,” I wrote in Mutiny, “has already fed tens of thousands of young men into the meat grinder at the dawn of their lives.” On the eve of the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting, a deal seemed imminent through which Trump would shift the cost of war to Europe while the US would receive control over Ukraine’s resource-and-mineral extraction via a new fund. This laid bare that this dirty war was never about values—only geostrategic interests and control over resources and fertile land. The question is: Why did the deal collapse at the last minute?...

March 05, 2025

Trump’s Reverse Kissinger Attempt – Vijay Prashad & John Ross

Vijay Prashad and John Ross discuss the momentous shift in the US’s geopolitical orientation that Trump is attempting to achieve – a reverse in direction of the shift led by Kissinger and Nixon in the 1970s.

No Cold War 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 #1 Video
This short video is the first episode in new series – No Cold War 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 videos.

The video can be watched here.

March 05, 2025

Trump 2.0 – The view from China

By Wang Wen

The following article by Wang Wen was originally published in Australia and then republished in 13 languages including Chinese, Arabic, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Malay, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. Wang Wen is Executive Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, Executive Director of the China-US Humanities Exchange Research Center, and an influential writer on foreign affairs in China. It therefore represents an important analysis of the new Trump presidency from a Chinese perspective.

Donald Trump’s second term may not be all bad for all nations, including and especially China. For many Chinese internet users, Trump’s policies have unwittingly strengthened their country. This is why he has earned the popular nickname “Chuan Jianguo,” which means “Make China Great.”

Trump’s first term made at least three notable contributions to China’s rise.

First his presidency shattered the image of the US as a paragon of democracy for many Chinese, revealing political chaos and deep societal divisions. For decades some Chinese idealised the United States as a “beautiful country”: the literal translation of the Chinese name for the US. However, Trump’s actions provided what some describe as a “political lesson,” reshaping perceptions and fostering greater appreciation for China’s stability and governance.

Second, Trump helped accelerate China’s push toward technological independence. Over 20 years ago, the Chinese government began promoting innovation in science and technology, though many believed there were no borders in this field....

February 25, 2025

Donald Trump’s Reverse Kissinger Strategy

US President Donald Trump called Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and told him that his government is committed to a peace process in Ukraine. As part of the deal, Trump’s administration made it clear that sections of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea would remain in Russian hands. Speaking at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Trump’s Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that it was ‘unrealistic’ to assume that Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, which means that Crimea would not be part of any negotiations with Russia. NATO membership for Ukraine, he said, was not going to be possible as far as the United States was concerned. The United States, Hegseth told NATO, was not ‘primarily focused’ on European security, but on putting its own national interests first and foremost. The best that the European leaders at NATO could do was to demand that Ukraine have a seat at the talks, but there was very little said against the US pressure that Russia be given concessions to come to the table. Ukraine and Europe can have their say, Hegseth said, but Trump would set the agenda. ‘What he decides to allow and not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, of President Trump’, Hegseth said with characteristic midwestern swagger. The cowboys, he said with his body language, are back in charge....

February 18, 2025

Europe’s 2025 Challenge: Halting NATO’s Failing Attempt to Expand into Ukraine

The New Cold War is rapidly heating up, with severe consequences for people around the world. Our series, Briefings, provides the key facts on these matters of global concern.

From the beginning of the Ukraine war in 2022, countries in the Global South – which contains the overwhelming majority of the world’s population – have opposed US policy towards that conflict. A recent survey found that only two Global South countries have actually implemented US sanctions against Russia over the war, and India increased its oil imports from Russia tenfold during the war’s first year. Global South leaders, such as South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, stated that the US policy of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Eastern Europe lay behind the war.

But, until recently, support for the war seemed firm in the US and among its European allies. This is now changing significantly. Media speculation has focused on Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he could end the war within 24 hours, but much more substantial is evidence of a sharp change in popular attitudes to the war. This provides the basis for hopes to permanently end the war.

The Necessity to Restore Economic Links Across Europe...

January 20, 2025

Briefing: Trump’s Victory is a Morbid Symptom of US Imperial Decline

The New Cold War is rapidly heating up, with severe consequences for people around the world. Our series, Briefings, provides the key facts on these matters of global concern.

On 6 November, Donald Trump was elected as the 47th President of the United States, ensuring he will return next January to the office he vacated in 2021 under the shadow of constitutional crisis and a failed far-right putsch. In doing so, he secured a more decisive and uncontested victory than in his first election in 2016, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton while prevailing in the United States’ Electoral College system – an arcane and profoundly undemocratic mechanism through which as little as 0.03% of the country’s voting population can decide the overall winner, with outsize consequences for the entire world due to US military and economic hegemony.

Shifting electoral trends

This time Trump scored over two million more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris, becoming the first Republican Party candidate in two decades to win the national popular vote. (This outcome had far more to do with the Democrats’ loss of almost ten million votes since 2020 than with the marginal increase in Trump’s support.) More consequentially, Trump swept all seven ‘swing states’ in the Electoral College....

November 25, 2024

No Cold War statement

Add your name to the statement

English

A New Cold War against China is against the interests of humanity

We note the increasingly aggressive statements and actions being taken by the US government in regard to China. These constitute a threat to world peace and are an obstacle to humanity successfully dealing with extremely serious common issues which confront it such as climate change, control of pandemics, racist discrimination and economic development.

We therefore believe that any New Cold War would run entirely counter to the interests of humanity. Instead we stand in favour of maximum global cooperation in order to tackle the enormous challenges we face as a species.

We therefore call upon the US to step back from this threat of a Cold War and also from other dangerous threats to world peace it is engaged in including: withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement; withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Accords; and its increasing disengagement from UN bodies. The US should also stop pressuring other countries to adopt such dangerous positions.

We support China and the US basing their relations on mutual dialogue and centring on the common issues which unite humanity.

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