Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General, announced on Friday that the Cold War is “back with a vengeance”. Although the US and Russia are squaring off militarily in a way that has not been seen for decades, Guterres is wrong. This is not a return to the Cold War. This is something new.
His error is partly a challenge of vocabulary. It may appear pedantic in the context of rapidly escalating geopolitical tensions, but naming a phenomenon is intimately linked to our ability to understand it, and to recognise it as a reality.
When Tolstoy came up with the title Voyna i Mir, War and Peace, for his vast 1869 Napoleonic and Tsarist epic, he – like his contemporaries – worked on the assumption that the two words, together, are all-encompassing. War and peace are like a binary computer code: zero or one, on or off.
In English, at least from a linguistic perspective, he was right. War may be many things, but peace is, by definition, the absence of war.
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