The 'New Cold War' Is Just Another Excuse for More of the Same Militarism

It is not true that the war in Gaza is part of a new cold war.

Hal Brands tries to shoehorn everything into a new Cold War framework:

Today, a new cold war pits the US and its allies against an axis of Eurasian autocracies. That struggle, too, features some very violent clashes, of which the Israel-Hamas war is the latest, but surely not the last.

It is not true that the war in Gaza is part of a new cold war. The “axis of Eurasian autocracies” that Brands mentions is mostly an invention of hawks in the U.S. that want to lump together several adversaries in different regions to exaggerate the threat they pose. The only way that the war in Gaza can be seen as part of a new cold war is if you start from the assumption that all U.S. adversaries have joined forces and that every conflict involving any one of them, however tangentially, is therefore part of a new global struggle. The assumption is wrong. Brands’ column is propaganda masquerading as analysis.

To the extent that the U.S. is engaged in a Cold War-like rivalry with China, that has nothing to do with the war in Gaza and the war has nothing to do with that rivalry. China is taking a rhetorically pro-Palestinian but otherwise neutral position on the war. The Russian and Chinese governments have presumably enjoyed watching the U.S. further discredit itself in front of the rest of the world as it makes excuses for and provides support to a government committing war crimes against a civilian population, but other than supporting resolutions at the U.N. that the U.S. opposes they haven’t done very much in response to the war. Even the Iranian government has held back from taking any direct actions in support of a group that it has armed. If this is a new cold war in action, it is an entirely one-sided affair where the U.S. backs its client to the hilt and the “axis” sits on its hands and marvels at Washington’s stupidity.