The world, we are told, is entering a new era of “great-power rivalry.” Or at least, it was supposed to be.
The most recent US National Security Strategy, issued by President Joe Biden’s administration in 2022, confidently asserted that “the post-Cold War era is definitively over,” and that we were entering an era defined by “competition between the United States and the world’s largest autocracies” — namely, China and Russia.
The strategy explicitly states that the US does not seek a “new Cold War,” but its framing of the world as an ideologically driven competition between democracy and autocracy makes it hard to avoid the comparison, particularly since the same superpowers are involved this time around, just with a little economic and political rebranding.
But is the Cold War the right analogy for what’s happening now? There is no shortage of alternatives. Pointing to Vladimir Putin’s territorial aggression, Ukraine’s leaders and their defenders have cast their comparison to World War II, with Russia now in the role of Hitler’s Germany. (Putin himself wouldn’t argue — he just portrays the other side as the Nazis.) Perhaps, some cautious “realists” suggest, the entangling alliances drawing Western countries into conflict make this moment more like the lead-up to World War I. Certainly the reemergence of trench warfare on the European continent for the first time in decades makes it hard to resist the comparison.
To suggest as the Biden administration has that we’re entering a new age of superpower conflict, whatever historical comparison you reach for, is also to argue that we’re turning the page on an era in which America’s main national security concern was not other powers, greater or lesser, but non-state terrorist groups. There was reason to think this after the decimation of al-Qaeda and ISIS. But the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel were a shocking reminder that, while we might not be interested in…
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