The article below was authored by IWP Chairman Owen T. Smith and was published by Newsmax.
This weekend, Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister of Russia, told a peace conference in Germany that strains between his country and the West have pushed the world “into a new Cold War.”
Yet, it was Russia that pushed the world into a new Cold War and possibly into a new world war years ago.
Exactly when the new Cold War started is as unsure as when did the original Cold War started. Although Cold War historians generally trace the start of the Cold War to the end of the Second World War, I argue that it began before, as early as the Yalta Conference in 1944 when Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met to outline what Europe would look like after World War II.
The period between the 1950s and the early 1980s was punctuated by Soviet backed “hot wars” costing tens of thousands American lives and hundreds of thousands civilian lives.
Together U.S. losses in Korea and Vietnam exceeded the First and Second World Wars. In the summer of 1950, troops from the Soviet puppet regime in North Korea stormed across the border between North and South Korea in an effort to bring the entire Korean peninsular under communist control. The same occurred in Vietnam when Soviet backed troops sought to control South Vietnam.