In 2025, American and world leaders were preoccupied with wars in the Middle East. Most dramatically, first Israel and the United States 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 pledged to avoid. The tragic war in Gaza had become a humanitarian disaster. After years of promising to reduce engagement with the region from Democratic and Republican presidents alike, it appeared that the US was being dragged back into Middle East once again.
I hope that’s not the case. Instead, in 2026, President Trump, his administration, the US Congress, and the American people more generally must realize that the real challenges to the American national interests, the free world, and global order more generally come not from the Middle East but from the autocratic China and Russia. The three-decade honeymoon from 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, US strategists must first accurately diagnose the threat and then devise and implement effective prescriptions.
READ MORE
This story is from the WIRED World in 2026, our annual trends briefing.
The oversimplified assessment is that we have entered a new Cold War with Xi’s China and his sidekick, Russian leader Vladimir Putin. To be sure, there are some 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, much like the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the world during the Cold War. Second, like the contest between communism and capitalism during the last century, there is an ideological conflict between the great powers today. The United States is a democracy. China and Russia are autocracies. Third, at least until the second Trump era, all three of these great powers have sought to propagate and expand their influence globally. That too was the case during the last Cold War.
At the same time, there are also some significant differences. Superimposing the Cold War metaphor to explain everything regarding the US-China rivalry today distorts as much as it illuminates.
First, while the world is dominated by two great powers, the United States remains more powerful than China on many dimensions of power—military, economic, ideological—and especially so 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 are not willing to join exclusively the American bloc or the Chinese bloc.
Second, while the ideological dimension of great power competition is real, it is not as intense as the Cold War. The Soviets aimed to spread communism worldwide, including in 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 that aim. So far, Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China have not employed these same aggressive methods to export their model of governance or construct an alternative world order. Putin is much more aggressive in propagating his ideology of illiberal nationalism and seeking to destroy the liberal international order. Thankfully, however, Russia does not have the capabilities of China to succeed in these revisionist aims.
A third difference from the Cold War is the degree of economic connectivity between the United States and China and the global economy. Managing that interdependence prudently, rather than seeking to divide the global economy into red and blue teams again, is a new, unique challenge for American foreign policymakers.
A fourth difference is the degree of polarization among Americans, including on foreign policy issues. During the Cold War, American society did split on America’s role in the world, especially regarding the war in Vietnam. However, a consensus prevailed for most of the Cold War regarding the necessity of containment as a grand strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. Such widespread agreement about how to deal with China and Russia today does not exist. Some Americans, including President Trump from time to time, even think that Russian dictator Putin should be courted as a friend, not contained as an adversary.
So far in the second Trump administration, American foreign policy thinkers, both inside and outside the government, have not engaged in a serious discussion about a new grand strategy for prevailing in this new era of great power competition with China and Russia. Tragically, the Trump administration hastily destroyed some of America’s most effective instruments of influence for competing with the Soviet Union last century and China this century, including the US Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, and the multitudes of American nongovernmental organizations previously engaged in advancing democracy abroad. Trump also has shown no interest in strengthening the multilateral economic organizations—the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO—that proved so pivotal in supporting global capitalism during the Cold War and thereafter. His threats against enduring democratic allies, Canada and Denmark, are exacerbating tensions with our allies when we should be strengthening ties with them to address the autocratic axis of China and Russia. Trump has not even made clear whether he seeks to contain or join forces with Putin. His strategy for dealing with China is also very ill-defined. Some in his administration describe the Communist Party of China as an even greater threat to the United States than the Soviets or the Nazis. However, Trump himself never discusses the ideological or military dimensions of competition with Beijing, and instead talks mostly about striking a big economic deal with Xi. Trump has even authorized the export of sensitive technologies to China, rolling back export restrictions from the Biden era.
The year 2026 should mark the end of this moment of strategic uncertainty regarding America’s foreign policy for competing with China and Russia. At the end of World War II, it took American leaders some time to realize the full dimensions of the new era of great competition—the Cold War. We are at a similar moment in history today. The sooner we engage in a serious debate about American grand strategy in the 21st century, the better.
The post Discovering the Dimensions of a New Cold War appeared first on Wired.
