“A new Cold War?” This headline has appeared so often this year, and in so many different news media outlets. There is plenty of reason for this, of course. The proxy conflict in the Ukraine is a pretty big deal, without doubt, and it bears much more than a passing resemblance to the roughly 1945-1989 conflict that was dubbed “the Cold War”.

It’s important to note, though, that even before 2014, the headline “A new Cold War?” would appear fairly frequently in those same news media outlets. That’s because hostility between the Russian Federation and the NATO alliance, as well as general awareness of such hostility in the English-speaking world, have been growing for a while now – since at least the 2008 invasion of Georgia, ai would say. Thus whenever Russia would conduct naval exercises off the west coast of France, or make a fuss about missile defense systems in eastern Europe, commentators would speak of either “a new Cold War” or rhetorically ask whether the Cold War had ever really ended.

To be perfectly explicit about it: the Cold War between Moscow and Washington D.C. did not end. The collapse of Realsozialismus from 1989 to, at the latest, 1992 simply marked a new phase in the Cold War. Although Russian state power was diminished in almost every respect and could no longer be considered a superpower, it remained powerful enough to hold onto its sovereignty, and it also held onto enough of its nuclear arsenal to destroy the biosphere more than once – a capacity that, even today, it shares only with the United States. To the extent that elements remained in political power in Russia that wanted to maintain Russia as a great power, there were still seeds of the kind of geopolitical conflict for a slice of the globe’s resources that had characterized the Cold War.

Thus the Cold War entered a new phase after the Berlin Wall fell – and sometime between then and now, it entered at least one new phase again. Ai am not really sure if ai’m qualified to taxonomize the periods of the Cold War in full, but ai know that some people would argue that the prosecution of the Second Chechen War and the rise of Vladimir Putin would constitute a new phase, and ai know a lot of people would argue that the last year’s events in Ukraine would constitute a new phase too. Ai lean towards the invasion of Kartvelia as being rather important, myself.

Now, to be clear, this post has been talking about the Cold War, with a definite article and capital letters. The Cold War is not necessarily the same thing as a cold war. First of all, the Cold War had many moments where it turned hot, so it wasn’t a perfect example of what a cold war is, even if it is pretty “cold” most of the time. A better example of a cold war might be the low-scale conflict that exists on the Persian Gulf between the Gulf monarchies and the United States, on the one hand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran on the other.

Generally, though, the concept of a cold war is pretty vacuous. Like, what is the difference between a cold war and simple hostility between states?