World in the News: Cold War

The "Cold War" is making a comeback. Or at least the phrase is. Russia's actions in
Crimea have brought relations with the West to their lowest point since the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991, dusting off a term that fell out of use more than 20
years ago.
The Cold War generally refers to the 40-odd years after World War II, when the
Soviet Union and its eastern allies and the U.S. and its western allies competed for
ideological and military influence over the globe, with no large-scale fighting
directly between the two sides.
But the chilly phrase had been used before that era of nuclear one-upmanship. "The
term had been used a good bit in the 1930s," saysSamuel Wells, a senior scholar at
the Wilson Center who has focused on European Cold War studies. At that time, the
Nazis were beginning to seize territory, and larger European powers were getting
nervous. "The French referred to tense relations with the Germans as la guerre
froide."

Then, in a 1945 newspaper article that was published two months after the U.S.
dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the writer George Orwell
stated that a country with nuclear weapons would be one "which was at once
unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors."

The term "Cold War" gained its full meaningthe ideological division of the world
into two blocs between the Soviet Union and the U.S.in 1947 when famed
journalist Walter Lippmann published a series of articles called "The Cold War" that
popularized the term, shortly after a financier and adviser to President Harry
Truman named Bernard Baruch used it to reflect the new Soviet-U.S. reality.

During a speech to Congress in April 1947, Baruch put it famously, and bluntly: "Let
us not be deceivedwe are today in the midst of a cold war."

James Hershberg, a Cold War expert and a professor of history and international
affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., says that when it
comes to the chill in relations, we are not again in the midst of a Cold War, despite
what the media may say.
"Having bad U.S.-Russia relations is not the same as a new Cold War," says
Hershberg. "That was a broad disagreement on the legitimacy of the international
world order." What we've got now, he says, "is a pure Russian power grab, absent
any of the ideological pretenses and challenges of the Cold War era."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140320-word-in-the-news-coldwar-russia-crimea-orwell/