Cold War II [1] [2] (also called the New Cold War [3] [4] [5] or Second Cold War) [6] [7] is a term for a new, post-Cold-War era of political and military tension between opposing geopolitical power blocs, with one bloc typically reported as being led by Russia and the other led by the United States, European Union, and NATO. [8] It is akin to the original Cold War that saw a stand-off and proxy wars between the Western Bloc led by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union, Russia's predecessor. It may also refer to growing tensions between the United States and China.
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states, and the United States with its allies after World War II. A common historiography of the conflict begins between 1946, the year U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow cemented a U.S. foreign policy of containment of Soviet expansionism threatening strategically vital regions, and the Truman Doctrine of 1947, and ending between the Revolutions of 1989, which ended communism in Eastern Europe as well as in other areas, and the 1991 collapse of the USSR, when nations of the Soviet Union abolished communism and restored their independence. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany and its allies, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences.
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.79 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country comprising 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Past sources, [9] [10] [11] such as academics Fred Halliday, [12] [13] Alan M. Wald, [14] and David S. Painter, [15] used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and/or 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War. Some other sources [16] [17] used interchangeable terms to refer to the Cold War of the mid-1970s. Columnist William Safire argued in a 1975 New York Times editorial that the Nixon administration's policy of détente with the Soviet Union had failed and that "Cold War II" was now underway. [18] Academic Gordon H. Chang in 2007 used the term "Cold War II" to refer to the Cold War period after the 1972 meeting in China between US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong. [19]
Simon Frederick Peter Halliday was an Irish writer and academic specialising in International Relations and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Cold War, Iran, and the Arabian peninsula.
Alan Maynard Wald, usually Alan M. Wald or Alan Wald, is an American professor emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and writer of 20th-Century American literature who focuses on Communist writers; he is an expert on the American 20th-Century "Literary Left."
David S. Painter is an associate professor of international history at Georgetown University. He is a leading scholar of the Cold War and United States foreign policy during the 20th century, with particular emphasis on their relation to oil.
In 1998, George Kennan called the US Senate vote to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as "the beginning of a new cold war", and predicted that "the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies". [20]
Enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the process of including new member states in NATO. NATO is a military alliance of twenty-seven European and two North American countries that constitutes a system of collective defense. The process of joining the alliance is governed by Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows only for the invitation of "other European States", and by subsequent agreements. Countries wishing to join have to meet certain requirements and complete a multi-step process involving political dialogue and military integration. The accession process is overseen by the North Atlantic Council, NATO's governing body.
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country located in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, covering an area of 312,696 square kilometres (120,733 sq mi), and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With a population of approximately 38.5 million people, Poland is the sixth most populous member state of the European Union. Poland's capital and largest metropolis is Warsaw. Other major cities include Kraków, Łódź, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin.
Hungary is a country in Central Europe. Spanning 93,030 square kilometres (35,920 sq mi) in the Carpathian Basin, it borders Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Austria to the northwest, Romania to the east, Serbia to the south, Croatia to the southwest, and Slovenia to the west. With about 10 million inhabitants, Hungary is a medium-sized member state of the European Union. The official language is Hungarian, which is the most widely spoken Uralic language in the world, and among the few non-Indo-European languages to be widely spoken in Europe. Hungary's capital and largest city is Budapest; other major urban areas include Debrecen, Szeged, Miskolc, Pécs and Győr.
The journalist Edward Lucas wrote his 2008 book The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West, claiming that a new cold war between Russia and the West had begun already. [21]
Edward Lucas is a British writer and security-policy expert.
Sources disagree as to whether a period of global tension analogous to the Cold War is possible in the future, [22] [23] [24] [25] while others have used the term to describe the ongoing renewed tensions, hostilities, and political rivalries that intensified dramatically in 2014 between Russia and its allies and the United States and its allies. [26]
Michael Klare, a RealClearPolitics writer and an academic, in June 2013 compared tensions between Russia and the West to the ongoing proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. [27] Oxford Professor Philip N. Howard argued that a new cold war was being fought via the media, information warfare, and cyberwar. [4] In 2014, notable figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev warned, against the backdrop of a confrontation between Russia and the West over the Ukrainian crisis, [28] [29] that the world was on the brink of a new cold war, or that it was already occurring. [30] [31] The American political scientist Robert Legvold also believes it started in 2013 during the Ukraine crisis. [32] [33] Others argued that the term did not accurately describe the nature of relations between Russia and the West. [34] [35]
Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan). Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
RealClearPolitics (RCP) is a Chicago-based political news and polling data aggregator formed in 2000 by former options trader John McIntyre and former advertising agency account executive Tom Bevan. The site features selected political news stories and op-eds from various news publications in addition to commentary from its own contributors. The site's founders say their goal is to give readers "ideological diversity" in its commentary section.
The Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict, sometimes also referred to as the Iran–Saudi Arabia Cold War, Middle East Cold War or Middle East Conflict, is the ongoing struggle for influence in the Middle East and surrounding regions between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The two countries have provided varying degrees of support to opposing sides in nearby conflicts, including the civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The rivalry also extends to disputes in Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Morocco, as well as broader competition in North and East Africa, parts of South Asia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
Stephen F. Cohen, [36] Robert D. Crane, [37] and Alex Vatanka [38] have all referred to a "US–Russian Cold War". Andrew Kuchins, an American political scientist and Kremlinologist speaking in 2016, believed the term was "unsuited to the present conflict" as it may be more dangerous than the Cold War. [39]
While new tensions between Russia and the West have similarities with those during the Cold War, there are also major differences, such as modern Russia's increased economic ties with the outside world, which may potentially constrain Russia's actions, [40] and provide it with new avenues for exerting influence, such as in Belarus and Central Asia, which have not seen the type of direct military action that Russia engaged in less cooperative former Soviet states like Ukraine and the Caucasus region. [41] The term "Cold War II" has therefore been described as a misnomer. [42]
The term "Cold War II" gained currency and relevance as tensions between Russia and the West escalated throughout the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine followed by the Russian military intervention and especially the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. By August 2014, both sides had implemented economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions upon each other: virtually all Western countries, led by the US and European Union, imposed punitive measures on Russia, which introduced retaliatory measures. [43] [44]
Some observers, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, [45] judged the Syrian Civil War to be a proxy war between Russia and the United States, [46] [47] and even a "proto-world war". [48] In January 2016, senior UK government officials were reported to have registered their growing fears that "a new cold war" was now unfolding in Europe: "It really is a new Cold War out there. Right across the EU we are seeing alarming evidence of Russian efforts to unpick the fabric of European unity on a whole range of vital strategic issues". [49]
In an interview with Time magazine in December 2014, Gorbachev said that the US under Barack Obama was dragging Russia into a new cold war. [50] In February 2016, at the Munich Security Conference, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO and Russia were "not in a cold-war situation but also not in the partnership that we established at the end of the Cold War", [51] while Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking of what he called NATO's "unfriendly and opaque" policy on Russia, said "One could go as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War". [52] In October 2016 and March 2017, Stoltenberg said that NATO did not seek "a new Cold War" or "a new arms race" with Russia. [53] [54]
In February 2016, a National Research University academic and Harvard University visiting scholar Yuval Weber wrote on E-International Relations that "the world is not entering Cold War II", asserting that the current tensions and ideologies of both sides are not similar to those of the original Cold War, that situations in Europe and the Middle East do not destabilize other areas geographically, and that Russia "is far more integrated with the outside world than the Soviet Union ever was". [55] In September 2016, when asked if he thought the world had entered a new cold war, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, argued that current tensions were not comparable to the Cold War. He noted the lack of an ideological divide between the United States and Russia, saying that conflicts were no longer ideologically bipolar. [56]
In October 2016, John Sawers, a former MI6 chief, said he thought the world was entering an era that was possibly "more dangerous" than the Cold War, as "we do not have that focus on a strategic relationship between Moscow and Washington". [57] Similarly, Igor Zevelev, a fellow at the Wilson Center, said that "it's not a Cold War [but] a much more dangerous and unpredictable situation". [58] CNN opined: "It's not a new Cold War. It's not even a deep chill. It's an outright conflict". [58]
In January 2017, a former US Government adviser Molly K. McKew said at Politico that the US would win a new cold war. [59] The New Republic editor Jeet Heer dismissed the possibility as "equally troubling[,] reckless threat inflation, wildly overstating the extent of Russian ambitions and power in support of a costly policy", and too centred on Russia while "ignoring the rise of powers like China and India". Heer also criticized McKew for suggesting the possibility. [60] Jeremy Shapiro, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution, wrote in his blog post at RealClearPolitics , referring to the US–Russia relations: "A drift into a new Cold War has seemed the inevitable result". [61]
In August 2017, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denied claims that the US and Russia were having another cold war, despite ongoing tensions between the two countries and newer US sanctions against Russia. [62] In March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalist Megyn Kelly in an interview: "My point of view is that the individuals that have said that a new Cold War has started are not analysts. They do propaganda"- [63] Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at the CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute said that the new cold war for Russia "is about its survival as a power in the international order, and also about holding on to the remnants of the Russian empire". Lyle Goldstein, a research professor at the US Naval War College claims that the situations in Georgia and Ukraine "seemed to offer the requisite storyline for new Cold War". [64]
In March 2018, Harvard University professors Stephen Walt [65] and then Odd Arne Westad [66] criticized the term usage as reference to increasing tensions between the Russia and the West as "misleading", [65] "distract[ing]", [65] and too simplistic to describe the more complicated contemporary international politics.
Amidst the deterioration of relations between both sides over a potential US-led military strike in Middle East after the Douma chemical attack in Syria and poisoning of the Skripals in the UK, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, told a meeting of the UN Security Council in April 2018 that "the Cold War was back with a vengeance". He suggested the dangers were even greater, as the safeguards that existed to manage such a crisis "no longer seem to be present". [67] Dmitri Trenin supported Guterres' statement, but added that it began in 2014 and had been intensifying since, resulting in US-led strikes on the Syrian government on 13 April 2018. [68]
In July 2018, Democratic congressman Steve Cohen stated that Russian interference in the US elections amounted to "an act of war" which the US needed to counter with "cyber attacks" against Russia. Cohen argued that Russia "invaded our country" and thus should be "crippled" by retributory cyber attacks that would have "made Russian society valueless".[ relevant? ] [69]
Russian news agency TASS reported the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying "I don't think that we should talk about a new Cold War", adding that the US development of low-yield nuclear warheads (the first of which entered production in January 2019 [70] ) had increased the potential for the use of nuclear weapons. [71] TASS further reported Sergei stating that the withdrawal from the INF treaty would not lead to "a new Cold War". [71] [72] [73]
The US senior defense official Jed Babbin, [74] Yale University professor David Gelernter, [75] Firstpost editor R. Jagannathan, [76] Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group, [77] former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, [78] and some other sources [79] [80] have used the term (occasionally using the term the Pacific Cold War) [74] to refer to tensions between the United States and China in the 2000s and 2010s.
Talk of a "new Cold War" between a United States-led block of countries on the one hand and the putative Beijing-Moscow axis, including explicit references to it in the official PRC′s media, intensified in the summer of 2016 as a result of the territorial dispute in the South China Sea [81] , when China defied the Permanent Court of Arbitration′s ruling against China on the South China Sea dispute, and the US announcing in July 2016 it would deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) in South Korea, a move resented by China as well as Russia and North Korea. [82]
Donald Trump, who was inaugurated as US President on 20 January 2017, had repeatedly said during his presidential campaign that he considered China a threat, a stance that heightened speculations of the possibility of a "new cold war with China". [83] [84] [85] Claremont McKenna College professor Minxin Pei said that Trump's election win and "ascent to the presidency" may increase chances of the possibility. [86] In March 2017, a self-declared socialist magazine Monthly Review said, "With the rise of the Trump administration, the new Cold War with Russia has been put on hold", and also said that the Trump administration has planned to shift from Russia to China as its main competitor. [87]
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In July 2018, Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia mission center, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that he believed China under paramount leader Xi Jinping, while unwilling to go to war, was waging a "quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, seeking to replace the US as the leading global power. He further elaborated: "What they're waging against us is fundamentally a cold war — a cold war not like we saw during [the] Cold War (between the U.S. and the Soviet Union) but a cold war by definition". [88] In October 2018, a Hong Kong's Lingnan University professor Zhang Baohui told The New York Times that a speech by United States Vice President Mike Pence at the Hudson Institute "will look like the declaration of a new Cold War". [89]
In January 2019, Robert D. Kaplan of the Center for a New American Security wrote that "it is nothing less than a new cold war: The constant, interminable Chinese computer hacks of American warships’ maintenance records, Pentagon personnel records, and so forth constitute war by other means. This situation will last decades and will only get worse". [90]
In February 2019, Joshua Shifrinson, an associate professor from Boston University, criticized the concerns about tensions between China and the US as "overblown", saying that the relationship between the two countries are different from that of the US–Soviet Union relations during the original Cold War, that factors of heading to another era of bipolarity are uncertain, and that ideology play a less prominent role between China and the US. [91]
In June 2019, academic Stephen Wertheim called President Trump a "xenophobe" and criticized Trump's foreign policy toward China for heightening risks of the new cold war, which Wertheim wrote "could plunge the United States back into gruesome proxy wars around the world and risk a still deadlier war among the great powers." [92] [93] A Peking University dean David Moser told a Chinese tabloid Global Times that the cold war between the US and China would heighten racial tensions between the societies and would spread among the US universities, affecting Chinese visa students who want to study there. [94] An American University (Washington, D.C.) professor Amitav Acharya told Global Times that the term "new Cold War", which he criticized as one of "catchphrases that risk turning into self-fulfilling prophecies", not be referred to the increasingly complex US–China tensions. Furthermore, Acharya said that the tensions could not be adequately described by a "single factor or phrase" and "the causes [...] are deeper and more structural than just competition over tariffs and technology." [95]
In June 2019, University of Southern California (USC) professors Steven Lamy and Robert D. English agreed that the "new Cold War" would divert parties from bigger issues, like globalization, "climate change, global poverty, increasing inequality," and right-wing populism. However, Lamy said that the new cold war has not been happening, while English said that it already has. [96]
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer serving as President of Russia since 2012, previously holding the position from 2000 until 2008. In between his presidential terms, he was also the Prime Minister of Russia under his close associate Dmitry Medvedev.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was an arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty on 8 December 1987. The United States Senate approved the treaty on 27 May 1988, and Reagan and Gorbachev ratified it on 1 June 1988.
A cold war is a state of conflict between nations that does not involve direct military action but is pursued primarily through economic and political actions, propaganda, acts of espionage or proxy wars waged by surrogates. This term is most commonly used to refer to the Soviet-American Cold War. The surrogates are typically states that are "satellites" of the conflicting nations, i.e., nations allied to them or under their political influence. Opponents in a cold war will often provide economic or military aid, such as weapons, tactical support or military advisors, to lesser nations involved in conflicts with the opposing country.
Russia–United States relations refers to the bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia. The United States and Russia maintain diplomatic and trade relations. The relationship was generally warm under the Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991–99) until the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, and has since deteriorated significantly. In 2014, relations greatly strained due to the crisis in Ukraine, Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, differences regarding Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, and from the end of 2016 over Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. Mutual sanctions imposed in 2014 remain in place.
Israel–Russia relations refers to the bilateral foreign relations between the two countries, Israel and Russia. Russia has an embassy in Tel Aviv and a consulate in Haifa. Israel has an embassy in Moscow and a consulate-general in Yekaterinburg.
NATO–Russian relations, relations between the NATO military alliance and the Russian Federation were established in 1991 within the framework of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. In 1994, Russia joined the Partnership for Peace program, and since that time, NATO and Russia have signed several important agreements on cooperation. According to Vladimir Putin, he proposed the idea of Russia joining NATO to President Bill Clinton in 2000 during a visit to Moscow, to which Clinton responded that he "didn't mind".
The Syrian Civil War is an ongoing multi-sided armed conflict in Syria fought between the Ba'athist Syrian Arab Republic led by President Bashar al-Assad, along with domestic and foreign allies, and various domestic and foreign forces opposing both the Syrian government and each other in varying combinations. The war is currently the 2nd deadliest of the 21st century.
BRICS is the acronym coined for an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Originally the first four were grouped as "BRIC", before the induction of South Africa in 2010. The BRICS members are known for their significant influence on regional affairs; all are members of G20. Since 2009, the BRICS nations have met annually at formal summits. China hosted the 9th BRICS summit in Xiamen on September 2017, while South Africa hosted the most recent 10th BRICS summit in July 2018. The term does not include countries such as South Korea, Mexico and Turkey for which other acronyms and group associations were later created.
This is a broad timeline of the course of major events of the Syrian Civil War. It only includes major territorial changes and attacks and does not include every event.
The Syrian peace process is the ensemble of initiatives and plans to resolve the Syrian Civil War, which has been ongoing in Syria since 2011 and has spilled beyond its borders. The peace process has been moderated by the Arab League, the UN Special Envoy on Syria, Russia and Western powers. The negotiating parties to end the conflict are typically representatives of the Syrian Ba'athist government and Syrian opposition, while the Western-backed Kurdish forces have stayed out of the negotiations framework. Radical Salafist forces and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have not engaged in any contacts on peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Russia has supported the incumbent Bashar al-Assad government of Syria since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011: politically, with military aid, and since 30 September 2015 also through direct military involvement. The latter marked the first time since the end of the Cold War that Russia entered an armed conflict outside the borders of the former Soviet Union.
Estimates of deaths in the Syrian Civil War, per opposition activist groups, vary between 371,222 and more than 570,000. On 23 April 2016, the United Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria put out an estimate of 400,000 that had died in the war. Based on Syria's pre-war population of 20.8 million from 2011, this represented approximately 2% of Syria's pre-war population.
The Syriac Military Council is an Assyrian/Syriac military organisation in Syria. The establishment of the organisation was announced on 8 January 2013. According to the Syriac Military Council, the goal of the organisation is to stand up for the national rights and to protect the Assyrian/Syriac people in Syria. The organisation fights mostly in the densely populated Assyrian areas of Al-Hasakah Governorate.
The Iran–Israel proxy conflict, or Iran–Israel proxy war and Iran–Israel Cold War, is the ongoing proxy war between Iran and Israel. The conflict is bound in the political struggle of Iranian leadership against Israel and its declared aim to destroy the Jewish state, with the counter aim of Israel to prevent nuclear weapons being acquired by the Iranian government and downgrading its allies and proxies such as the Lebanese Hezbollah party. Iranian forces are operating in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad's government. The conflict gradually emerged from the declared hostility of post-revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran towards Israel since 1979, into covert Iranian support of Hezbollah during the South Lebanon conflict (1985–2000) and essentially developed into a proxy regional conflict from 2005. With increasing Iranian involvement in Syria from 2011, the conflict had shifted from proxy warfare into direct confrontation by early 2018.
The use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War has been confirmed by the United Nations. Deadly attacks during the war included the Ghouta attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the Khan al-Assal attack in the suburbs of Aleppo in March 2013. While no party took responsibility for the chemical attacks, the Syrian Ba'athist military was seen as the main suspect, due to a large arsenal of such weapons. A U.N. fact-finding mission and a UNHRC Commission of Inquiry have simultaneously investigated the attacks. The U.N. mission found the likely use of the nerve agent sarin in the case of Khan al-Assal, Saraqib, Ghouta, Jobar and Ashrafiyat Sahnaya. The UNHRC commission later confirmed the use of sarin in the Khan al-Asal, Saraqib and Ghouta attacks, but did not mention the Jobar and the Ashrafiyat Sahnaya attacks. The UNHRC commission also found that the sarin used in the Khan al-Asal attack bore "the same unique hallmarks" as the sarin used in the Ghouta attack and indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to chemicals from the Syrian Army's stockpile. Those attacks prompted the international community to pressure disarmament of the Syrian Armed Forces from chemical weapons, which was executed during 2014. Despite the disarmament process, dozens of incidents with suspected use of chemical weapons followed throughout Syria, mainly blamed on Syrian Ba'athist forces, as well as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and on Syrian opposition forces and Turkish Armed Forces. There have been a number of evidence-gathering processes developed at the international level
Foreign fighters have fought on all four sides of the Syrian Civil War, as well both sides of the Iraqi Civil War. The conflicts are sectarian, with foreign Sunnis fighting for the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State, foreign Shias fighting for the Syrian government, and foreign leftists fighting for the People's Protection Units.
A number of armed groups have involved themselves in the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
The Iraqi Civil War was an armed conflict which began in January 2014 and ended in December 2017. In 2014, the Iraqi insurgency escalated into a civil war with the conquest of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and in the major areas of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. At its height, ISIL held 56,000 square kilometers of Iraqi territory, containing 4.5 million citizens. This resulted in the forced resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as a massive airstrike campaign by the United States and at least a dozen other countries, participation of American and Canadian troops in ground combat operations, a $3.5 billion U.S.-led program to rearm the Iraqi Security Forces, a U.S.-led training program that provided training to nearly 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, the participation of Iranian troops including armored and air elements, and military and logistical aid provided to Iraq by Russia.
In response to rapid territorial gains made by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) during the first half of 2014, and its universally-condemned executions, reported human rights abuses and the fear of further spillovers of the Syrian Civil War, many states began to intervene against it in both the Syrian Civil War and the Iraqi Civil War. Later, there were also minor interventions by some states against ISIL-affiliated groups in Nigeria and Libya.
Turkey, which had had a relatively friendly relationship with Syria over the decade prior to the start of the civil unrest in Syria in the spring of 2011, condemned the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad over the violent crackdown on protests in 2011 and later that year joined a number of other countries demanding his resignation. In the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey trained defectors of the Syrian Army on its territory, and in July 2011, a group of them announced the birth of the Free Syrian Army, under the supervision of Turkish intelligence. In October 2011, Turkey began sheltering the Free Syrian Army, offering the group a safe zone and a base of operations. Together with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Turkey has also provided the rebels with arms and other military equipment. Tensions between Syria and Turkey significantly worsened after Syrian forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet in June 2012, and border clashes erupted in October 2012. On 24 August 2016, the Turkish armed forces began a declared direct military intervention into Syria pursuing as targets both ISIL and the Kurdish-aligned forces in Syria.
The alternative is a new Cold War—one that renders all talk of global norms obsolete.