
In an 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. The journalist Edward Lucas wrote in 2008 that a new cold war between Russia and the West had already begun. Chang in 2007 used the term "Cold War II" to refer to the Cold War period after the 1972 meeting in China between US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. Lindsay and Ivo Daalder described counterterrorism as the "new Cold War". In 2001, foreign policy and security experts James M. 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". 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.

Some other sources used similar terms to refer to the Cold War of the mid-1970s.

Painter, and Noam Chomsky, used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and/or 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War. Past sources, such as academics Fred Halliday, Alan M.
