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Why did the US Navy revive its Second Fleet?
Summary
A look back at the May 2018 re-establishment of a command that had been disbanded in 2011, and the tensions cited for it.
What did it mean when the United States Navy brought back a fleet it had shut down seven years earlier? On 10 May 2018, that question was still fresh, six days after the decision was announced.
On 4 May 2018, the US Navy re-established the United States Second Fleet, which had been disbanded in 2011. The stated reason was recent heightened tensions between NATO and Russia.
The move was reported as part of a wider pattern that some scholars and journalists have described, using terms such as Second Cold War, Cold War II or New Cold War, for heightened geopolitical tensions in the 21st century. These terms usually set the United States and NATO on one side and Russia or China on the other. Not everyone accepted the comparison: some commentators used the labels as a parallel with the original Cold War, while others discouraged applying them to ongoing tensions.
For readers in Kyiv and neighbouring capitals, the significance of the announcement lay in its stated rationale. The US Navy itself pointed to NATO-Russia tensions as the reason for restoring the command, rather than to any single incident.
