When the Cold War formally came to an end in 1991, the world ushered in a political and economic system that was truly global and more interconnected than ever before. To America, such an outcome was perceived as the ultimate ideological victory for the country, which gave rise to a set of assumptions that included claiming how competition between great powers would inevitably be a thing of the past.

However, the events of the past few years have brought to light that this was in fact incorrect, which had in turn profound implications for American foreign policy. Facing a changing environment in the world around it, the U.S. has been unwilling to accept any potential outcome of its “Pax-Americana” moment in 1991 fading away. This change was formalized by the Trump administration, who in its 2018 National Security Strategy, affirmed “Great Power Competition” as the greatest threat facing America, and thereby has been relentless in invoking Cold War rhetoric.

Since that time, the international environment has only further deteriorated as the crisis in Ukraine has led to a collapse in the U.S.’s and West’s relationship with Russia, leading into what many commentators have described as a de facto “proxy war” in the country.

Inevitably, the U.S. has responded to these events with a bid to push the competition against its perceived rivalries even further. This has led to criticism that the U.S. is happily allowing the achievements of the post-Cold War world to deteriorate and for history to ultimately repeat itself so as to maintain its unilateral hegemonic position at all costs.

As a recent article in the Washington D.C. publication “The Hill” wrote: “The post-Cold War unipolar moment has also now definitively passed, and it is the height of folly to pretend that the world of 2022 is somehow the same as that of 1999,” noting that the U.S. is attempting to push geopolitical competition against adversaries with no grasp of reality whatsoever. This has resulted in “an inchoate foreign policy that is grounded in neither the geopolitical realities of the moment nor a consistent understanding of the American national interest.”

Such comments represent the highly “zero-sum” nature that has characterized U.S. foreign policy since Donald Trump and the idea that making any compromises, deals, or finding a middle ground with perceived opponents is unacceptable. Instead, the full weight of American power ought to be used to try and make adversaries capitulate to one-sided terms through either sanctions or ever-advancing military containment in the view of maximizing U.S. geopolitical gain. This manner of foreign policy thereby is posing a direct threat to global peace and stability.

America’s contemporary attitude to the world is driven by insecurity ignited by a perceived loss of status to others, which in turn has undermined its ability to reason and, therefore, is at risk of turning the world back towards a divided Cold War environment.