Can Trump avoid a second cold war? Expert weighs in

Investing.com -- Donald Trump’s return to the White House raises fresh questions about whether the U.S. can avoid a renewed Cold War with China and Russia. While some analysts reject the analogy, BCA Research argues that the comparison remains useful, even if imperfect.

“The ‘Cold War’ analogy for U.S.-China rivalry is not perfect, but should not be dismissed out of hand,” said Matt Gertken, chief geopolitical strategist at BCA. The report was co-authored with historian Jeremy Black.

Although today’s geopolitical context differs significantly from the post-WWII era, several factors mirror Cold War dynamics: rising military buildups, economic decoupling, and competing ideologies.

One key distinction is that China and the U.S. remain economically intertwined, unlike the largely disconnected U.S.-Soviet relationship. However, Gertken notes that “interrelations between the U.S. and China (and Europe and Russia) are declining as strategic tensions rise.”

The growing separation is being driven by ideological and economic changes. “China’s reversion to statist economics has been the critical feature of Xi Jinping’s rule since 2012 and the chief trigger of U.S.-China tensions.”

BCA’s report highlights that the Cold War analogy has political utility on all sides. In China and Russia, it helps sustain regime legitimacy amid slowing growth.

In the U.S., it reinforces bipartisan support for industrial policy, military spending, and supply chain revisions. “Both American political parties may continue to return to this trough,” Gertken says, noting that the Cold War framing may also aid European integration efforts.

Still, the Cold War analogy resonates less in Western Europe and North America than in places like Ukraine, Poland, or the Baltic states. It is weaker still across much of what was previously termed the “Non-Aligned World,” where the U.S. was often viewed as “the ally of colonial forces or inheritor of the imperialist mantle,” Gertken notes.

“The liberal West’s insensitivity to the global resonances of the Cold War is often striking,” he added.

The report stresses that nuclear deterrence remains a defining feature of today’s superpower dynamics, preventing direct conflict while sustaining intense competition.

“It is self-evident that the U.S. and Russia, and the U.S. and China, are making sufficient military, technological, and industrial preparations... to justify the notion that they are ‘at war’ in a metaphorical sense but not a literal sense," the report says. 

In the view of Black and Gertken, the Cold War comparison signals more than rhetorical drift. As they write, “the ‘intra-glacial’ period between the ice ages of confrontation is now at a close.”