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Why did the US Navy revive its Second Fleet?
Summary
A look back at the May 2018 decision to re-establish a command that had been disbanded in 2011.
What prompted the United States Navy to bring back a fleet it had shut down seven years earlier? As of 7 May 2018, the question was fresh: on 4 May 2018, the Navy re-established the United States Second Fleet, which had been disbanded in 2011.
The stated reason was heightened tensions between NATO and Russia. The move placed the revived fleet within a wider debate about the state of relations between the Western alliance and Moscow.
A label for the tensions
The re-establishment was soon read through the lens of what some scholars and journalists have called a Second Cold War, also rendered as Cold War II or New Cold War. These terms describe heightened geopolitical tensions in the 21st century, usually between the United States and NATO on one side and Russia or China on the other. Some commentators have used them as a comparison to the original Cold War, while others have discouraged applying them to ongoing tensions.
For readers in Kyiv and across the region, the decision was one more sign of how the security relationship between NATO and Russia was being described in Washington in early May 2018. The fleet's return to the Navy's order of battle, after a gap of several years, was presented by the Navy as a direct response to those tensions.
