[8] Other past sources,[9][10][11] such as academics Fred Halliday,[12][13] Alan M. Wald,[14] David S. Painter,[15] and Noam Chomsky,[16] used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and/or 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War.

Columnist William Safire argued in a 1975 New York Times editorial that the Nixon administration's policy of détente with the Soviet Union had failed and that "Cold War II" was then underway.

[20] In May 1998, George Kennan described the US Senate vote to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as "the beginning of a new cold war", and predicted that "the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies".

[23] In a 2016 op-ed for The Straits Times, Kor Kian Beng wrote that the phrase "new Cold War" between US-led allies versus Beijing and Moscow did not gain traction in China at first.

[26] In his September 2021 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, US President Joe Biden said that the US is "not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs."

Biden further said that the US would cooperate "with any nation that steps up and pursues peaceful resolution to shared challenges," despite "intense disagreement in other areas, because we'll all suffer the consequences of our failure.

"[29] In June 2022, journalist Michael Hirsh used the term "[global] Cold War" to refer to tensions between leaders of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and China and its ally Russia, both countries striving to challenge the US's role as a superpower.

"[34] In the same month, Katrina vanden Heuvel used the term while cautioning against what she perceived as a "reflexive bipartisan embrace of a new Cold War" against Russia and China among US politicians.

She further stated that the West will risk losing "a new cold war" unless it overcomes challenges that would give Russia and China a greater world advantage.

[37] In December 2023, Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned that the deepening "fragmentation" between the two power blocs—one by the United States and European allies; another by China and Russia—would lead to "cold war two", impacting "gains from open trade" and risking potentially loss of up to US$7 trillion.

[38][39][40][41] In The Diplomat June 2024 article, University of Bonn (Germany) professor Maximilian Mayer and Jagiellonian University (Poland) professor Emilian Kavalski opined that the China–Russia relations have been stronger than before and that Xi's China will "fully back Putin’s effort to threaten and undermine [Western] liberal democratic states", threatening European security and dashing any hopes that the relations between the two countries would become further strained.

[42] The US senior defence official Jed Babbin,[43] Yale University professor David Gelernter,[44] Firstpost editor R. Jagannathan,[45] Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group,[46] former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,[47] and some other sources[48][49][50] have used the term (occasionally using the term "Pacific Cold War")[43] to refer to tensions between the United States and China in the 2000s and 2010s.

[51][52][53] Claremont McKenna College professor Minxin Pei said that Trump's election win and "ascent to the presidency" may increase chances of the possibility.

[55] In July 2018, Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia mission center, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that he believed China under paramount leader and general secretary Xi Jinping, while unwilling to go to war, was waging a "quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, seeking to replace the US as the leading global power.

[56] In October 2018, Hong Kong's Lingnan University professor Zhang Baohui told The New York Times that a speech by United States Vice-president Mike Pence at the Hudson Institute "will look like the declaration of a new Cold War".

[62] In January 2020, columnist and historian Niall Ferguson opined that China is one of the major players of this Cold War, whose powers are "economic rather than military", and that Russia's role is "quite small".

[63] In a February 2020 interview with The Japan Times, Ferguson suggested that, to "contain China", the US "work intelligently with its Asian and European allies", as the US had done in the original Cold War, rather than on its own and perform something more effective than "tariffs, which are a very blunt instrument."

"[67] In August 2020, a La Trobe University professor Nick Bisley wrote that the US–China rivalry "will be no Cold War" but rather will "be more complex, harder to manage, and last much longer."

"[68] In September 2020, the UN Secretary General António Guterres warned that the increasing tensions between the US under Trump and China under Xi were leading to "a Great Fracture" which would become costly to the world.

Christensen further advised those concerned about the tensions between the two nations to research China's role in the global economy and its "foreign policy toward international conflicts and civil wars" between liberal and authoritarian forces.

[75] In August 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement condemning US House speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.

[101][102] In February 2016, a Higher School of Economics university academic and Harvard University visiting scholar Yuval Weber wrote on E-International Relations that "the world is not entering Cold War II", asserting that the current tensions and ideologies of both sides are not similar to those of the original Cold War, that situations in Europe and the Middle East do not destabilise other areas geographically, and that Russia "is far more integrated with the outside world than the Soviet Union ever was".

[105] Andrew Kuchins, an American political scientist and Kremlinologist speaking in December 2016, believed the term was "unsuited to the present conflict" as it may be more dangerous than the Cold War.

In March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalist Megyn Kelly in an interview: "My point of view is that the individuals that have said that a new Cold War has started are not analysts.

"[110] Michael Kofman, a senior Research Scientist at the CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute said that the new cold war for Russia "is about its survival as a power in the international order, and also about holding on to the remnants of the Russian empire".

[111] Also in March 2018, Harvard University professors Stephen Walt[112] and then Odd Arne Westad[113] criticized the application of the term to increasing tensions between Russia and the West as "misleading",[112] "distract[ing]",[112] and too simplistic to describe the more complicated contemporary international politics.

[141][142] In October 2016, John Sawers, a former MI6 chief, said he thought the world was entering an era that was possibly "more dangerous" than the Cold War, as "we do not have that focus on a strategic relationship between Moscow and Washington".

[146] Jeremy Shapiro, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution, wrote in his blog post at RealClearPolitics, referring to the US–Russia relations: "A drift into a new Cold War has seemed the inevitable result".

[149][150][151] Soon after, journalist H. D. S. Greenway cited the Russian invasion of Ukraine and 4 February joint statement between Russia and China (under Putin and Xi Jinping) as one of the signs that Cold War II had officially begun.

Furthermore, Westad said that Putin's words about Ukraine resembled, which Harvard journalist James F. Smith summarized, "some of the colonial racial arguments of imperial powers of the past, ideas from the late 19th and early 20th century rather than the Cold War".