"Cold war" was a term coined in the atomic age to refer to a conflict in which the two nations do not actually engage with each other militarily. I don't know how one pulls "back from the brink" of not going to war.

The carnage of the Cold War was not done in America or the USSR, but in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Afghanistan, Argentina, Cambodia. And the two nations came too close to nuclear exchange too many times -- most often, it was the Soviets who pulled back, not the US.

However, I think what a bunch of the left is worried about is any competition between nation-states. This is why they are worried about a "new cold war" even though there is zero evidence (nor the material conditions for) proxy wars as there were between the US & USSR.

What the left actually objects to is any disentangling of Chimerica, a trade arrangement begun in the 1990s under the neoliberal Clinton administration which benefitted the PRC at the expense of American workers. Any attempt to reempower American workers is, to them, "the brink."

The left now deploys the rhetoric of peace to defend highly lucrative production chains that exploit foreign workers, empower a world-historically oppressive regime, deindustrialize the US and chasten US low-wage labor. They are the ideological foot-soldiers of neoliberalism.