Mikhail Gorbachev — 'It All Looks as if the World Is Preparing for War'

It does, doesn't it. Although the war drum seems to be beating from the US and is being picked up by NATO. Naturally, those threatened are reacting.

Time
Mikhail Gorbachev: 'It All Looks as if the World Is Preparing for War'
Mikhail Gorbachev

Russ Wellen — Gorbachev Was Just Too Far Out Front of the United States

A different take on the collapse of the USSR and a story of opportunity lost. Regrettably, this story continues to unfold as the US pushes a policy of global neo-imperial hegemony.

Foreign Policy in Focus
Gorbachev Was Just Too Far Out Front of the United States

Russ Wellen

Mikhail Gorbachev — A New Cold War Order?

The Cold War’s end was supposed to mark the beginning of a path toward a new Europe and a safer world order. But, instead of building new European security institutions and pursuing the demilitarization of Europe – as promised in NATO’s London Declaration of 1990 – the West, particularly the United States, declared victory. Euphoria and triumphalism went to Western leaders’ heads. Taking advantage of Russia’s weaknesses and the lack of a counterweight, they refused to heed warnings against claiming a monopoly on global leadership 

The events of the past few months are the consequences of shortsightedly seeking to impose one’s will while ignoring the interests of one’s partners. A shortlist of such faits accomplis would include NATO enlargement, the war in Yugoslavia (particularly Kosovo), missile-defense plans, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. As a result, what was a blister has now turned into a festering wound.…

Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily. And, as different as they are, they share one key feature: none has a military solution. Yet political mechanisms to solve these problems are lacking or dysfunctional, even as the continuing global crisis should persuade us to seek – without delay – a new model that can ensure political, economic, and environmental sustainability.…

Project Syndicate
A New Cold War Order?

Mikhail Gorbachev | last head of state of the Soviet Union

Mikhail Gorbachev — world on brink of new cold war over Ukraine

Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine have put the world on the brink of a new cold war. 

The former leader of the Soviet Union said: “We must make sure that we get the tensions that have arisen recently under control.”… 

The 83-year-old former leader has accused the west – particularly the US – of “triumphalism” after the collapse of the communist bloc. 

Gorbachev called for new trust to be built through dialogue with Moscow and suggested the west should lift sanctions imposed against senior Russian officials over its actions in eastern Ukraine.

The Guardian
Mikhail Gorbachev: world on brink of new cold war over Ukraine

Branko Milanovic — The origins of the Second Cold War: an essay in interpretation

It is a truism that the origins of the Second World War are to be found in the way the First World War ended. The same is true for the Second Cold War whose beginnings we are witnessing these days. The way the First Cold War ended was sufficiently ambiguous that it gave rise to two narratives which are incompatible and have led to the current impasse. That they would eventually do so was, I think, clear to many people for years although some (like myself) thought that it was bound to happen later, with a post-Putin rise of Russian nationalism.

What are the two narratives? …

globalinequality
The origins of the Second Cold War: an essay in interpretation
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at LIS

See also Pepe Escobar, A chessboard drenched in blood, July 23, Asia Times Online.