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News > World

Russia and US at a 'Dangerous Threshold'

  • U.S. President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a 2013 meeting

    U.S. President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a 2013 meeting | Photo: Reuters

Published 11 October 2016
Opinion

As tensions between the former Cold War adversaries continue to rise, there are growing concerns of a third world war.  

The recent rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia have come to a “dangerous threshold,” according to former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.

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His comments are part of a growing chorus of concerns that tensions between the Cold War rivals over crises in Syria and the Ukraine have escalated in recent months and could be approaching the unthinkable: a head-on military conflict between the two nuclear powers and their allies. 

“I think the world has approached a dangerous threshold. I would prefer not to suggest any particular schemes, but I want to say: we need to stop,” said Gorbachev on Monday, adding that there was a “collapse of mutual trust,” where both sides need to resume dialogue.

He said that diplomacy and dialogue need to be renewed between Washington and Moscow and that the two sides need to work together to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues.

“The nuclear-free world is not a utopia, but rather an imperative necessity. But we can achieve it only through demilitarization of politics and international relations," Gorbachev said on the 30th anniversary of the Reykjavik summit where he and then-President Ronald Reagan met to de-escalate the arms race between the Soviet Union and the U.S.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Bild on Saturday that the current multipolar world was “more unpredictable” because unlike during the Cold War, both sides were not respecting “red lines.”

"The current times are different and more dangerous," said he said. "In spite of all the frustration, disappointment and deep distrust on both sides … We must continue to search for ways to put an end to the insanity in Syria. The U.S. and Russia must continue to talk."

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Similar comments were echoed by Russian political analyst, Vitaly Zhuravlev, during an interview with Sputnik.

“In the 1950s and the 1960s, there were certain rules defining how the Cold War was waged, which cautioned against unleashing a military conflict and demonizing political figures. All these rules are being ignored now, in a sign that the situation is becoming more and more uncontrollable,” said Zhuravlev.

Alexander Krylov, an analyst at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies, compared the volatility of the current standoff to the Suez Crisis of 1956, or the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Krylov noted that the since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has wanted to continue “playing a dominant role across the entire globe. When this doesn’t work, as is the case in Syria, Washington gets severely irritated.”

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