As regular COTTonLINE readers have undoubtedly guessed, I love words, particularly new words or neologisms. Reading an article about U.S.-China relations in Bloomberg View, I came across a term, new to me, used to describe the less-than-friendly relations between the two nations: the Cool War.
Obviously, the intent is to describe something less fierce than the Cold War often was. We trade with China, cooperate with them in certain arenas, but also oppose their attempt at hegemony in the South and East China Seas, their cyber attacks and their far-from-stellar human rights practices. A web search shows the term has been around for a year or more but I just encountered it for the first time.
The author of the Bloomberg View article, Noah Feldman, has written a book with that title, so the article is likely a promotional effort for the paperback edition coming out 1 September 2015. Cool War was also the title of a 1982 science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. It didn't catch on as descriptive of what was happening geopolitically in the 1980s, before the Soviet system fell.
