The peaceful world promised in 1989 after the Fall of the Wall has turned into an international stage of extreme tension, with two ruthless wars and two blocs of nations becoming increasingly defined and opposed.
On Jreshchatyk Avenue, in the center of Kiev, the Cold War never completely ended. The Ukrainian police monitor suspicious pedestrians for Russian informants, ask for documents, frisk, check photos taken with mobile phones. The same happens on trains, in the metro, on buses. We are not at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, the hinge between the Soviet world and the West, but we are facing its extension in space and time. The hunt for spies, now just like decades ago, is the main concern of both sides.
Speaking of spies, 35 years ago, when EL MUNDO was founded, the Berlin Wall was about to fall, and a dark KGB agent stationed in the German city of Dresden couldn't help but be frightened. He listened to radio reports about masses of people heading to the Western borders and besieging the Stasi and the Soviet secret service headquarters, including the three-story yellow-painted building where this agent worked. He then picked up the phone to call Moscow and ask for instructions. No one answered on the other end. The spy was Vladimir Putin, and those days marked the first act of the dissolution of the USSR two years later, "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," according to Putin himself. After a meteoric political career in the shadow of a declining Boris Yeltsin, he himself would assume the Presidency of Russia a decade later.
The planet changes and EL MUNDO keeps reporting it
The implosion of the Soviet Union, which crumbled the largest state on the planet, also ended much of its sphere of influence. Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic countries... Russia's socialist allies fled to the other side, seeking political asylum in the European Union and military protection from NATO. Washington welcomed them with open arms. In May 1998, George Kennan described the U.S. Senate's vote for that NATO expansion as "the beginning of a new Cold War" and predicted: "The Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and this will affect their policies." Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia still remained under Moscow's influence, but their shift towards the West was only a matter of time.
After the Orange Revolution in 2009, in 2014, the Euromaidan finally shook off that servitude, and Russia reacted by taking Crimea and fueling the uprising in the Donbass. Regardless of the changing excuses given by Putin, the large-scale invasion is just a continuation of Moscow's attempt to prevent the definitive loss of geopolitical control over Ukraine, which began precisely the night Putin picked up the phone to call the Lubyanka in Moscow and no one answered. Thieves looted the building years later and stole that phone that, as Indiana Jones would have indicated, should be in a museum.
Is this current conflict a continuation of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire? Yes, and it is not the only poorly resolved conflict whose scar reopens from time to time. Again, if we travel back to 1989, the year this newspaper was founded, we find ourselves in the midst of the First Intifada, a Palestinian popular movement protesting against 20 years of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Two years earlier, in 1987, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin had created the armed group Hamas, which became the protagonist 36 years later in the horrifying attacks of October 7, 2023. Now, those days of riots and stones, poorly closed by agreements that both parties violated, have turned into a war that has left Gaza pulverized, with tens of thousands dead, spreading to neighboring Lebanon and potentially engulfing the entire Middle East if an escalation directly pits Israel against Iran.
In June 2019, University of Southern California professors Steven Lamy and Robert D. English coined the term New Cold War as the new battleground where new conflicts (or old ones) would occur, marked by globalization, global warming, poverty, inequality, and rising populism.
A free and pro-Western Ukraine clashes with Russia's dreams, and a free and pro-Western Taiwan clashes with China's dreams.
If we evade the police raid and continue walking down Jreshchatyk Avenue, we see at Maidan Square thousands of flags representing each of the dead in the current invasion, but the scars of other wars are visible at both ends of the street. Walking north, we come across the chilling ravine of Babi Yar, where the Nazis committed one of the worst massacres of the Jewish genocide in World War II, with mass shootings of 150,000 people. Walking south, we reach the basements of the former Cheka, masterfully described by Manuel Chaves Nogales in The Master Juan Martínez Who Was There, where thousands of suspected enemies of the Soviet state were tortured and executed for years. Although the current conflict is far from both, there is a thread that connects them.
In early May 2022, British historian Niall Ferguson stated that "the Second Cold War began some time ago." He also said that "it is a conflict different from the first, because in the Second Cold War, China is the main partner and Russia is the minor partner." In the Asian context, this rivalry is already tangible.
The major hotspots of instability in Russia, China, and the Middle East stem from poorly resolved conflicts in the 20th century.
Are these the three places, heirs to poorly resolved conflicts in the 1990s, where a hypothetical Third World War could begin, a result of tensions from this Second Cold War? Almost certainly, because nuclear powers could collide in them, but they are not the only ones. Those early readers of EL MUNDO could follow the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia, the fall of dictator Siad Barre, and the subsequent disastrous intervention by the United States. Today, the country remains devastated and in the hands of warlords who divide its spoils.
The world's hotspots have not changed much in 35 years. In 1989, the year this newspaper was founded, the Soviet Union was humiliated in Afghanistan after being defeated by various mujahideen factions, including the troops of the renowned guerrilla fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud, later assassinated by the Taliban, and a certain Osama Bin Laden, who would soon found Al Qaeda with the doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. From the ashes of that war with the declining Soviet Union arose another: a civil conflict that ousted the Taliban from power, whose government provided training camps and shelter to that proto-terrorist militia that would eventually bring down the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, in New York. As a grim twist of fate, the Taliban returned to power in 2021 after expelling the international coalition and toppling the Afghan state that had been set up.
In 1989, the year of the newspaper's founding, the hornet's nest was also ablaze in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein annexed Kuwait in 1990, and a coalition led by the White House under George Bush ousted Iraqi troops over the following year, in the largest international coalition seen to date. It was called Operation Desert Storm and was the prelude to the subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 by George Bush Jr., whose main motive, the search for weapons of mass destruction, was never clear. Without a plan B after taking Baghdad, the region plunged into uncontrollable chaos that still persists, with the most terrible consequence being the birth of the Islamic State, which settled in a territory spanning parts of Iraq and Syria and cost many lives to defeat.
Our early readers also read about the open conflict in the poorest areas of the Republic of Sudan, now South Sudan, and the war not only against Khartoum but between two major militias that led the population into a terrible food crisis in the so-called "hunger triangle." That Sudan, which never fully stabilized, has returned to civil war and once again between militias that have already ravaged the entire capital.