The U.S.-China confrontation is not another Cold War. It’s something new.

But looking backward to the Cold War obscures more than it illuminates about U.S.-China competition today. The Soviet Union and the West formed coherent blocs — in Europe, for instance, NATO stood on one side and the Warsaw Pact on the other. Nonaligned countries in key strategic regions were relatively few and far between. The name of the game was to contain the other’s expansion while finding new allies where one could. Contested spaces saw proxy wars and battles for alignment, and little economic activity took place between blocs.

Virtually none of these characteristics are present in today’s world.