The last one year proved itself to be a very tough year, and it brought many new challenges for the international relations. Among these new challenges, the most striking one is probably the Russia’s unleashing a war of aggression on Ukraine. As Russia's invasion stepped up on the 24 February 2022, many Western experts and policymakers predicted that the Ukrainian armed forces wouldn't be able to defend Kyiv, and that it would fall to the invaders before the month ended. Nonetheless, the government and people of Ukraine are still fighting, and you can see evidence of this everywhere you walk in Kyiv thanks to the flag of free Ukraine flying from rooftops. It is clear that we are entering a new era in international relations, one that has revived the horrors and catastrophes of the past and paved the way for "The Return of History," regardless of the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine. Now that a full year has passed since the beginning of the attack, TPQ has devoted this issue to exploring the implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on many spheres, ranging from energy security to agriculture. At the same time, we' are raising the question of whether the current era deserves to be classified as the "new Cold War." If so, who are the competing parties, and in what ways is this new Cold War differs from the one that ended in 1991, with the United States and the liberal world emerging victorious? To come up with sufficient and informative answers for these critical questions, we assembled a large number of extremely valuable articles written by eminent researchers, policymakers, journalists, and young experts. All around the world, from the United States to Russia, and from Türkiye to Sweden, manuscripts came in from our contributors. Hence, it is with great pleasure that we provide you with this very qualified issue, which investigates several facets of the emerging global order from an international perspective. Professor Richard Sakwa investigates the causes of the resurgence of the Cold War and examines the differences between it with the original confrontation. He thinks the Cold War mentality is once again ruling world relations. These arguments suggest that the hope that the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989 would usher in a more universal and permanent peace has largely been disproved; instead, by 2014, the centennial of the beginning of World War I, Europe was once again in the grips of bloody war. The United States and the rest of the Political West, as it had been reshaped by the Cold War, remained on one side. On the other hand, he claims that a considerably diminished Russia has replaced the defunct Soviet Union, and that this is happening alongside a China that is determined to regain its great power position. Professor Li Bennich-Björkman argues that Russia is using bombings, attacks, and cruelty to obliterate Ukraine's history. As a result, she sees the current conflict as a struggle to maintain the recollection of what a peaceful Ukraine looked like, smelt like, tasted like, and felt like. She contends that a split between Russia and Ukraine is inconceivable for Putin because of Ukraine's strategic importance to Russia. Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk understood this as early as 1991. She says that he and other Ukrainian leaders sought to defend Ukrainian territory while assuring Moscow that amicable ties remained a possibility. Russia, she complains, has never undergone a comparable transformation. Professor Ziya Öniş, who believes that we are in the midst of a Neo Cold War, focuses more on the conflict between "the West" and "the Rest." He claims that the clash between democratic and authoritarian capitalism, the defining conflict of the new era, was exacerbated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. According to him, the concerted effort of Western nations to end the conflict was evidence of the resurgence of the democratic club of Western governments and their allies (G7 plus). He also argues that a significant schism in opinion has developed between "the West" and "the Rest" as a direct result of the War. He claims that the Russian War in Ukraine ushers in a new era in the post-Western world, one in which territorial conquests are accepted as the norm, setting the path for more armed clashes in a globe already riven by war. Professor Nicolai N. Petro maintains that the healing of the Ukrainian people is often forgotten among the numerous conflicting narratives that drive the war in Ukraine. He argues that this is because the West is ignoring the "Other Ukraine," whose dissatisfaction with the actions of the Ukrainian government since 2014 has stoked tensions. According to him, the West's reaction to Russia's incursion has focused on punishing Moscow but hasn't done anything to ease the tensions within Ukraine. His work indicates that permanent societal harmony in Ukraine and peace in Europe can be achieved only via reconciliation inside Ukraine. We encourage you to learn more about “A Year Since the Return of History: A New Cold War?”. On behalf of Transatlantic Policy Quarterly, I would like to express my gratitude to all the contributors who committed a significant amount of effort and work. The TPQ team has had a great time putting together this special issue. An important acknowledgment goes to our premium corporate sponsor Tüpraş. In addition, we would like to thank our online sponsor, and the sponsor of this issue, Monaco Economic Board. We also like to thank our other sponsors Gordon-Blair, Halifax, Kalekim, TEB, The Ritz-Carlton, and Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi for their ongoing support.

The 2014 crisis in Ukraine sent a tottering U.S.-Russian relationship over a cliff - a dangerous descent into deep mistrust, severed ties, and potential confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War period. In this incisive new analysis, leading expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, Robert Legvold, explores in detail this qualitatively new phase in a relationship that has alternated between hope and disappointment for much of the past two decades. Tracing the long and tortured path leading to this critical juncture, he contends that the recent deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations deserves to be understood as a return to cold war with great and lasting consequences. In drawing out the commonalities between the original cold war and the current confrontation, Return to Cold War brings a fresh perspective to what is happening between the two countries, its broader significance beyond the immediate issues of the day, and how political leaders in both countries might adjust their approaches in order, as the author urges, to make this new cold war "as short and shallow as possible."

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict, and a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics.For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.

In After the Post–Cold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.

An original history of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics and rekindled the Cold War. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance - a hubris that shaped how the West would treat Russia for the next two decades. But history wasn't over. Putin is a paradox. In the early years of his presidency, he appeared to commit himself to friendship with the West, suggesting that Russia could join the European Union or even NATO. He said he supported free-market democracy and civil rights. But the Putin of those years is unrecognisable today. The Putin of the 2020s is an autocratic nationalist, dedicated to repression at home and anti-Western militarism abroad. So, what happened? Was he lying when he proclaimed his support for freedom, democracy and friendship with the West? Or, was he sincere? Did he change his views at some stage between then and now? And if that is the case, what happened to change him? Putin and the Return of History examines these questions in the context of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics of aggression: the enduring terror of encirclement by outsiders, the subjugation of the individual to the cause of the state, the collectivist values that allow the sacrifice of human lives in battle, the willingness to lie and deceive, the co-opting of religion and the belief in Great Russia's mission to change the world.

An examination of the Cold War from the creation and structure of the postwar settlement to the eventual coming apart of the post war order in the 1980s and early 1990s. James Cronin explores the creation and structure of the postwar settlement and the eventual coming apart of the postwar order in the 1980s and early 1990s. Cronin argues that the current state of the world must be understood against the backdrop of the postwar order that until recently governed, prevented or distorted political and economic change.

In July 1971, US National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, made a secret visit to China to meet top Chinese leaders. This inaugurated a new phase not just in US-China relations but in contemporary history. That visit and the subsequent US-China relationship, including the US decision to invest in China's economic rise and admit it into the WTO, combined to firm up the foundations of China's rise as a world power. For more than four decades, the leadership of the two countries had a secretive pact, which worked well to each other's benefit. The US helped power China's economic growth in the hope that Beijing would turn a new political leaf and adopt Western practices (e.g. democracy). China grew economically and militarily, used its financial prowess to spread its influence across continents, as four generations of Chinese leaders built their nation at the expense of the US. Half a century after Kissinger's historic visit, the US and China are today engaged in a trade war bordering on a new Cold War. Washington is not openly talking about 'de-coupling' from China, which has begun to challenge its global dominance, but it might very well be. China has already established itself as a dominant power across Eurasia. More worryingly, China is militarily and economically threatening its neighbours, including Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Philippines, Indonesia and India. This collection of critical essays examines the impact, consequences and legacy of Kissinger's first, door-opening visit to China and how it has shaped world order.