In 2025, American and world leaders are distracted by wars in the Middle East. Most surprisingly, Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities first. Some commentators fear that President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran will drag the United States into the “endless wars” in the Middle East that presidential candidate Trump has promised to avoid. The terrible war in Gaza has become a humanitarian disaster. After years of promises to reduce engagement in the region from both Democratic and Republican presidents, it appears the US is being dragged back into the Middle East once again.

I hope not so. However, in 2026, President Trump, his administration, the US Congress, and Americans in general must realize that the real challenges to America’s national interests, the free world, and global order generally do not come from the Middle East but from autocratic China and Russia. The three-decade honeymoon from great political power following 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 strategic leaders must first accurately diagnose the threat and then formulate and implement effective prescriptions.

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, just as the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the world during the Cold War. Second, just like the fight between communism and capitalism in 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 Trump’s second term, all three of the major powers seek to spread and expand their influence around the world. That was also the case during the last Cold War.

At the same time, there are also some important differences. Deploying Cold War metaphors to explain everything about the US-China rivalry today is as distorted as it shines.

First, while the world is dominated by two great powers, the United States remains more powerful than China in many dimensions of power—military, economic, ideological—and especially when allies are added to the equation. Also different from the Cold War, several mid-level powers emerged in the global system—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, among others—that did not want to join only 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 throughout the world, including in Europe and the United States. They are ready to send in the Red Army, provide military and economic aid, overthrow regimes, and fight proxy wars in the United States to achieve that goal. To date, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have not used these same aggressive methods to export their governance model or establish an alternative world order. Putin is more aggressive in spreading his ideology of illiberal nationalism and seeks to destroy the liberal international order. Fortunately, however, Russia does not have China’s ability to succeed in these revisionist goals.