Cold War

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica. Last October, I sat in the office of Klaus Emmerich—the chief union representative at the Garzweiler brown-coal mine, in western Germany—as he shared his misgivings about the country’s celebrated plan to stop burning coal. Germany’s buildup of renewable energy…

MOSCOW —  On a wintry January day in 1990, the grand opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in what was then the Soviet Union was hailed as an emblem of the thawing Cold War. A serpentine line wound through the capital’s Pushkin Square, a throng of thousands waiting patiently for a…

Russian athletes have been barred this year from the Paralympics and the World Cup. The Russian owner of an English Premier League team has seen its sale frozen in the U.K. – and no new tickets can be sold for games. An international cat association even banned Russian cats. And…

Pictures have emerged from inside an abandoned underground bunker in Wales that dates back to the beginning of the Cold War. Dozens of bunkers that were built to be used as Royal Observer Corps (ROC) nuclear monitoring posts remain scattered across northern parts of Wales to this day, though the…

The Panamanian garment worker turned labor organizer, Pan-Africanist, and anti-colonial activist advocated for US and African workers amid a Cold War freeze. February 4, 2022 The American labor movement was built by Black workers, organizers, and activists, from the Rev. Addie L. Wyatt to Lucy Parsons to the washerwomen of…

China: Xi Jinping issues defiant message to foreign powers Sign up to receive our rundown of the day's top stories direct to your inbox Invalid email We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you've consented to and to improve our understanding of you. This may include adverts from…

What exactly does it mean to be free? “Freedom” was the mantra of the Cold War, at least on the Western side of the Iron Curtain. In the American mind, it is most often associated with the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, the country’s secular bible: freedom of the press,…

In December 1988, the leader of the Soviet Union made a remarkable announcement at the United Nations. Mikhail Gorbachev declared the unilateral withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from countries in Eastern Europe. “Further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind,…

Late last year, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal “one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive U.S. national security decisions of the post-Cold War era.” It’s not often that I find myself in violent…

In the minds of U.S. policymakers, America represents all mankind, and everything it does is by definition moral and right. Three decades ago, humanity was enjoying a special Christmas present: the end of the Soviet Union. The communist behemoth had arisen amid the chaos and slaughter of the First World…