The point where another US-Russia cold war could be averted as long been missed and the main debate now is whether this confrontation can still be kept from turning hot. Moscow’s concerns seem genuine enough since it was Washington that never let go of some of the practices of the past and then did whatever it could to rub salt in the former’s wounds by expanding Nato right to the edge of Russia’s borders. Now the west’s main line is that countries like America and some in the European Union are losing sleep over the prospect of a possible Russian military invasion of Ukraine. Russia, on the other hand, has made it amply clear that it has no intention of invading the former Soviet republic but it’s also left no doubt that Nato military drills in its area of influence and also the prospect of recruiting Ukraine into the alliance’s fold are unacceptable and would definitely invite a hard response from the Russian army. And so tension has built to the point where, as so often in the old cold war, the slightest spark can ignite a very large scale war. Surely it is in nobody’s interest to lob ballistic missiles at each other over the matter of Ukraine entering Nato. US President Biden talked tough just the other day and warned of very serious consequences, etc, but now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has not backed down and instead has issued similarly stern warnings of his own, this too has become one of those who-blinks-first games. But since the stakes are very high, the party that appreciates the bigger picture and takes the first or biggest step towards de-escalation would actually be the winner. However, it is still debatable whether even that would get western powers to truly back down. The fact is that Washington has been upset enough about the rise of countries like China and Russia that it’s been trying to deflate both for quite a while now lest they disturb its sole superpower status sometime in the near future. Both the Russians and Chinese understand these issues very well, of course, and must tread very carefully. The world has enough problems already, especially with the pandemic not having fully played out yet, so the least that can be expected of the biggest and richest countries is a show of maturity; which unfortunately seems in very short supply at the moment. *