 You're watching News Made Easy, I'm Anindya Chakravarty and this is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the beginning of Cold War 2.0. That's what many in the western media including journalists and analysts are saying right now. This is the revival of the Cold War. And when the western media says it, what happens? It gets reproduced, regurgitated in media across the world including in India our perspective of global events is usually informed by what the west sees. And if we have to understand and we think about this as Cold War 2.0 then we also have to know what Cold War was. And many of you viewers here were probably too young to even know what it was. It was the period largely after 1950 onwards when the world got divided between two big powers. The Soviet Union which is called the East Bloc and the USA which was called the West Bloc. The USA, Europe and its allies which were on the western side. And the East Bloc which included Eastern European nations, the Soviet Union and many newly decolonized, newly independent countries across the world. Of course, India and some others who had formed the non-aligned movement were often supported by the Soviet Union in its conflict with other countries. Take the wars between India and Pakistan. The US had continuously and consistently backed Pakistan and the USSR, the erstwhile USSR had always backed India. Therefore, India's tilt was always towards the Soviet Bloc even though officially we were part of the non-aligned movement. That Cold War was also between what one could call developed capitalist forces and socialism. Because across the developing world, many countries which were in some ways not formally but informally aligned with the Soviet Bloc were looking for new ways to develop their economies and they were trying to create new nation states. And that is when they had aligned with the Soviet Bloc. So there was a certain progressive zeal on the East Bloc whereas to a large extent the USA backed and supported regressive anti-democratic forces across the world. If today there is a new Cold War, this is a completely different animal altogether. Because today there is no division between a Bloc which supports post-colonial states in their struggle against imperialism, against colonialism. But there are two Blocs that are developing now and maybe three Blocs where both of these sides have certain imperialist tendencies urges. Now, let's take the current instance particularly. Why are we saying is this a revival of Cold War? Because the Cold War was marked by what was called mutually assured destruction or man. Because there were these two forces, two powers which had huge amounts of nuclear arsenal. Today there is Russia which was supposed to be denuclearized after the Soviet Union collapsed and the target was that it would be denuclearized by 2010. That process did not take place. There is Russia, huge nuclear power. There is China in the East which is now in terms of purchasing power parity way ahead of the US in terms of its economy. And the question that everyone is asking in the Western Bloc, the US Bloc is can Russia and China come together? Is it possible that China and Russia which have declared that their ties are eternal, they are going to go on forever. Can Russia and China form a Bloc which becomes a power Bloc on the East? One, a highly nuclearized power with lot of nuclear weapons at its command which is Russia. And an emergent massive economy which is China probably in purchasing power parity terms the biggest economy in the world. And within this, there is also the fight over the dollar. Even today, despite the fact that China has emerged as one of the biggest economies in the world, it is the biggest consumer in the world. It's the biggest supplier of manufactured goods in the world. The US dollar and euro are the reserve currency for 80% of all the value of currency in the world. So there is still a huge control that the US has over the global economy. And that is what is under pressure right now. That is the context in which people are talking about the second cold war. Alright, the second cold war was also in some senses triggered by one particular thing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has led a unipolar world. It has literally done whatever it had wanted. It invaded Afghanistan despite the fact that there was no evidence at that point that 9-11 was done by Afghans or backed by the Taliban. It invaded Iraq despite the fact that now it is very clear that the so-called weapons of mass destruction were all fake. There was no evidence to prove that there was anything like that. It invaded Iraq. It has continued to maintain huge sanctions against Iran because it does not politically agree with Iran. And it had bombed Libya. She called the regime change there. It has violated the airspace of Syria repeatedly. It bombed parts of Syria. And we know what happened in Yugoslavia as well. And American capital has spread across the world today. Capitalism, American style capitalism has become the thing that everyone accepts in the world as the only form of a only correct way to run an economy across the world. And this is where I'm going to show you this map. Look at this world map. You will see that when we talk about countries or regions and we say that their national or regional aspirations and interests, we are actually talking about the elites of these places. Look at how much the top 1% of the population own in most of these countries. You see those yellow parts are where there is still a relatively lower amount of wealth owned by the top 1%. But look at those deep red parts. Everywhere in the world today, and this is taken for the world in equality database, everywhere in the world today, the top 1% control economies and control wealth. And it is the fight that they have to control global assets and resources. We know that the Cold War was partly triggered by America's attempt to control oil resources across the world and the Soviet Union's attempt to stop that. The new Cold War, if there's any, is going to be the war over the new resources. Of course, oil is one of them, but oil is not that important any longer because every time there is a disruption in oil supplies, you will see that there's a limit to which oil prices don't rise in every country. Major oil producer now, consumer now, has started producing its own oil. The US produces a huge amount of oil on its own, shale oil that it produces on its own. Russia has huge oil and gas supplies. China is a major importer of oil, but it also has big shale oil reserves. If it wants to, it can develop them over the next few years and maybe a decade or so. But look at the future of the world economy and it is going to be driven by batteries because there are eco-friendly green mandates that countries across the world have given to move away to clean energy. And clean energy is essentially electricity that's derived from batteries and not by burning hydrocarbons or coal and things like that. That is largely dependent on a few minerals. Lithium is one of the biggest of them. There's bauxite, there's cobalt. These few minerals are going to determine who's going to capture the next oil of the future, which is lithium. And lithium is largely produced in certain Latin American countries. Its big miners are Australia, China and Latin America. And there is a fight going on right now as to how to control it, how to produce these batteries and this fight could well be the future imperialist wars that we see. One of the things that India will face, India's problem will be where to align, how to align because both sides are no longer powers which support national governments. These are not powers which support anti-imperialist governments and you will have to become some sort of a dependent client if you need anything from them. And this is a difficult moment for India. The US government administration has kind of criticized India's stand on Russia but it has to explain why it has never taken India's side on various conflicts that India has faced in the recent decades. The fact is that Russia has continuously backed India and Russia could well support India when it comes to its energy needs and India has to balance these needs right now. So any future Cold War that we see, a Cold War 2.0 is going to be very different from the Cold War of the past. This is a Cold War where both sides are going to be dominated by imperialist expansionist forces. The so-called democratic forces of the US and Europe which basically wants a unipolar command over the rest of the world and on the other hand are the more authoritarian autocratic forces of Russia and perhaps a part of the way in which China is going to expand as well. That is where the rest of the world is going to get caught and the rest of the world will have to fall in line and understand how to fight. The only way to beat this is democratic processes, democratic people struggles across the world. The only way to ensure that this doesn't break out into various local wars across the world.