US Navy revived its Second Fleet amid NATO-Russia tensions
A look back at the May 2018 decision to re-establish a command that had been disbanded in 2011.
What did it mean when the United States Navy brought back a fleet it had shut down seven years earlier? By 7 May 2018, the answer was already set out: on 4 May 2018 the Navy re-established the United States Second Fleet, which had been disbanded in 2011.
The stated reason was the recent heightened tensions between NATO and Russia. The step was presented in that context, as a response to a more strained security relationship rather than as a routine administrative change.
The move came to be grouped with other developments under the label Second Cold War. Scholars and journalists have used that term, along with Cold War II and New Cold War, to describe heightened geopolitical tensions in the twenty-first century, usually between the United States and NATO on one side and Russia or China on the other. Some commentators have used the terms as a comparison with the original Cold War, while others have discouraged applying them to ongoing tensions.
Looking back from 2026, the re-establishment of the Second Fleet on 4 May 2018 remains a concrete marker of how the NATO-Russia relationship was being described at the time.
