Discover the new dimensions of the Cold War

In 2025, American World leaders were preoccupied with wars in the Middle East. What is even more interesting is that Israel and the United States first bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. Some commentators fear that President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran will drag the United States into the “forever wars” in the Middle East that presidential candidate Trump has pledged to avoid. The tragic war in Gaza has become a humanitarian catastrophe. After years of promises to scale back from the region by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, it appears as if the United States is being drawn back into the Middle East once again.

I hope this is not the case. Instead, in 2026, President Trump, his administration, the US Congress, and the American people in general must realize that the real challenges facing American national interests, the free world, and the global order in general, come not from the Middle East, but from authoritarian China and Russia. The three-decade honeymoon of great power politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has ended. For the United States to succeed in this new era of great power competition, American strategists must first accurately diagnose the threat and then develop and implement effective prescriptions.

The overly simplistic assessment is that we have entered a new cold war with China under Xi Jinping and his friend, Russian leader Vladimir Putin. To be sure, there are some similarities between our current era of great power competition and the Cold War. The balance of power in the world today is dominated by two great powers, the United States and China, just as the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the world during the Cold War. Second, as with the rivalry between communism and capitalism over the past century, there is an ideological struggle between the great powers today. The United States is a democracy. China and Russia are authoritarian countries. Third, at least until Trump II, these three great powers sought to spread and expand their influence globally. This was also the case during the last Cold War.

At the same time, there are also some important differences. Imposing a Cold War metaphor to explain everything about today’s US-China rivalry distorts as much as it illuminates.

First, while two superpowers dominate the world, the United States remains stronger than China on many dimensions of power — military, economic, and ideological — especially when allies are added to the equation. Also different from the Cold War, several mid-level powers have emerged in the global system – Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, among others – that do not wish to affiliate exclusively with the American bloc or the Chinese bloc.

Second, although the ideological dimension of great power competition is real, it is not as intense as the Cold War. The Soviets aimed to spread communism throughout the world, including Europe and the United States. They were willing to deploy the Red Army, provide military and economic assistance, overthrow regimes, and fight proxy wars with the United States to achieve this goal. So far, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have not used the same aggressive tactics to export their model of governance or build an alternative world order. As for Putin, he is more aggressive in spreading his illiberal nationalist ideology and seeking to destroy the liberal international order. But fortunately, Russia does not have the capabilities that China has to succeed in achieving these reactionary goals.