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Second Cold War is a term sometimes used to denote what is seen as a global struggle between the world's
Islamic (primarily Arab) nations, on one side,
and the world's Christian nations (particularly the United States), plus Israel, on the other, which commenced
sometime in the early 1990s.
Rather than having a precise fixed date, the conflict appears to have emerged gradually, in the years following the breakup of
the Soviet Union, generally taken to be the end of the original Cold War. In a conscious analogy with the aforementioned conflict, advocates of the
existence of the Second Cold War often point to the end of a seemingly unrelated war - Operation Desert Storm - as marking the start of the new hostilities: Many Arab nations had fought on the side of the United States against Iraq in Desert Storm (just as the United States and the Soviet
Union had been allies in World War II), and after the fighting ended
(with Kuwait being liberated from Iraq), these
nations expected reciprocation in the form of a more favorable American foreign policy toward them vis-a-vis Israel; when this
failed to materialize, disillusionment set in among many in the Arab world.
This disillusionment turned violent on February 26, 1993, when a bomb exploded in a basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six
people and injuring more than 1,000 others. The act was blamed on Arab terrorists, six of whom were in fact later convicted for planting the bomb. On March 24, 1993, a letter to the editor appeared in the Staten Island Advance proclaiming that the attack marked the
start of a "Second Cold War" between "Islamic extremism" and "Western civilization." This is believed to be the first public use
of the term Second Cold War.
Meanwhile, terrorist attacks continued, albeit sporadically, with notable incidents including the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings (carried out on the same
day, August 7 of that year) and the USS Cole bombing in the port of Yemen on October 12, 2000, in which 17 American sailors
died. These incidents resulted in little in the way of an official reaction, but with the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States entered into overt military conflict with the Islamic world, first by invading Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, and then with Operation Iraqi Freedom, culminating in regime change in Iraq, in 2003.
In the wake of the latter two military operations, some critics have asserted that Second Cold War has become an
inadequate description for the situation, and have come up with a much stronger label - that of the Tenth Crusade - to refer to the widening struggle between Christianity (or, in their view, Judeo-Christianity) and Islam.
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