This is late. But we need a definition of what a new Cold War means.

I lived through final two decades of the last Cold War. I get the power competition parallel with what’s developing between US & China. But at no point did US and USSR have a major econ relationship, for one.

I have spent more than a year hearing people deploy the phrase. It sounds ominous. But underlying the first Cold War was a decades-long tension that one mistake might mean the end of life as we know it in a matter of minutes under a mushroom cloud.

I don’t think that’s what people mean when they use Cold War this time around. What people are talking about now is a new era of economic competition. There’s an ideological clash overlaid, of course. But that’s pretty different in terms of threats...

I don’t expect my kids to be going through drills that involve hiding under their desks when they go back to school. I don’t know anyone contemplating building a fallout shelter right now.

I can see a devolution of the world into spheres of influence. But did they ever go away?

If the new Cold War is about tech competition are we just talking about an amplified version of the US-Japan competition of the 1980s and 1990s?

Or do we believe that is about a new cyber arms race?

Underlying the 20th Century’s Cold War was a pursuit of liberty and liberation that drove American foreign policy. Or at least that was the public cover for what could often be much more cynical in practice.

That seems an apt comparison this weekend as people in Hong Kong protest against a new security law and Beijing complains of foreign interference.

But is that clash of ideologies what will drive this new ‘Cold War’?

Again, I just think we need more clarity on what people mean.