Discover the dimensions of a new Cold War

In 2025, the American and world leaders were preoccupied with wars in the Middle East. The most dramatic thing is that Israel and the United States first bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Some commentators feared that President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran would drag the United States into the “forever wars” in the Middle East that presidential candidate Trump had vowed to avoid. The tragic war in Gaza has become a humanitarian disaster. After years of promises from Democratic and Republican presidents to scale back their engagement in the region, it appears the United States is once again being drawn into the Middle East.

I hope that’s 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 to US national interests, the free world and the world order more generally come not from the Middle East but from autocratic 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 is over. For the United States to succeed in this new era of great power competition, American strategists must first accurately diagnose the threat and then design and implement effective solutions.

The simplistic assessment is that we have entered a new Cold War with Xi’s China and his sidekick, Russian leader Vladimir Putin. There are certainly parallels 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, like the struggle between communism and capitalism in the last century, today there is an ideological conflict between the great powers. The United States is a democracy. China and Russia are autocracies. Third, at least until the second Trump era, these three great powers sought to propagate and expand their influence globally. This was also the case during the last Cold War.

At the same time, there are also significant differences. Superimposed the Cold War metaphor to explain everything about the current US-China rivalry distorts as much as it illuminates.

First, while the world is dominated by two great powers, the United States remains more powerful than China in many aspects of power – military, economic, ideological – and especially when allies are added to the equation. Also unlike the Cold War, several mid-level powers have emerged in the global system—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, among others—that are not willing to exclusively join the American bloc or the Chinese bloc.

Second, although the ideological dimension of great power competition is real, it is not as intense as that of the Cold War. The Soviets aimed to spread communism throughout the world, particularly in Europe and the United States. They were willing to deploy the Red Army, provide military and economic assistance, overthrow regimes, and wage proxy wars with the United States to achieve this goal. So far, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have not employed these same aggressive methods to export their governance model or build an alternative world order. Putin is much more aggressive in spreading his ideology of illiberal nationalism and seeking to destroy the liberal international order. Fortunately, however, Russia does not have China’s capabilities to achieve these revisionist goals.