Signs of hope amid the emerging neo-academic Cold War
A new Cold War is emerging and, in turn, a neo-academic Cold War that reflects geopolitical rivalries.
In a recent article in Higher Education Policy, I explored the evolution of this phenomenon as a story tied to a series of global traumas, including 9/11, a diaspora of war and economic refugees, the rise of neo-nationalism and illiberal democracies, the return of Russia and China as geopolitical adversaries of the United States and the European Union, the impact of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and finally the deleterious effects of Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency.
Almost daily, world events offer further evidence of a drift toward a multipolar, rivalry-driven world of semi-autonomous silos of transnational science cooperation and science diplomacy.
Trends in neo-nationalism
On the positive side of the ledger, after shifting towards a pro-Russia, illiberal democracy, Poland has made inroads toward a more centrist, pro-EU government – although the presidency remains in the hands of Karol Nawrocki, an independent backed by the nationalist Law and Justice party, which is now in opposition and has recently split into rival factions.
More recently, Viktor Orbán’s election defeat brings a new government in Hungary – one committed to European values, including support for academic freedom. This has already reopened access to EU science funding and cooperation agreements.
Sweden’s September 13 election also pointed to a modest but meaningful shift toward centre-left politics – the Social Democrat-led bloc narrowly outpolled the incumbent right-wing coalition – reflecting a voter base tired of immigrant bashing and wanting a greater focus on the quality of life of its citizens: schools, healthcare, inflation and the environment.
Coalition talks remain complicated, however, given divisions among the prospective governing partners.
These developments raise hopes of a decline in divisive, populist movements in Europe, often driven by anti-immigrant fervour. A question remains, however, as to how reflective Orbán’s loss is of a general backlash against neo-nationalism in Europe, given the growing popularity of extreme right-wing parties in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
This includes the recent win of the AfD in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, though it fell short of an outright majority.
Meanwhile, America’s higher education community has found solace in a strong track record thus far in battling Trump and his administration in the courts.
And with no major universities signing onto the US administration’s proposed ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education’, which demands an array of concessions in return for favoured status in federal funding, there appears to be growing resistance to unprecedented federal attempts to undermine the autonomy of American colleges and universities.
Fresh from a successful lobbying effort in Congress that avoided Trump’s plans to drastically cut science funding for fiscal year 2026, some higher education leaders and media commentators have voiced a sense of optimism that perhaps the worst is over.
Might Trump and his administration be distracted by a declining US economy, voter concerns over affordability and inflation, his disastrous war of choice against Iran, his falling poll numbers and his intensifying efforts to degrade and manipulate the approaching midterm elections? What if Democrats gain control of the House and the Senate?
Signs of more Trump trouble
There remain worrisome indicators, however, that Trump’s agenda for higher education and science will not ebb.
The Trump administration is creatively expanding its toolkit to attack academic institutions under contested claims of executive power, including most recently harnessing the Internal Revenue Service to remove the non-profit legal status of universities if they don’t satisfy programmatic demands.
It is worth noting that the higher education community’s legal victories have come through civil litigation, which imposes no penalties on the administration for its false claims. Terminated grants are usually tied up for lengthy periods due to appeals, and these legal actions apply only to existing grants.
What about new grants? In the first seven months of 2026, agencies like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation issued only a fraction of the research grants typically awarded over the same period in previous years.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russell Vought, continues to claim that, while Congress has the power to legislate a budget for the federal government, the executive branch has the authority to spend as it sees fit.
It is one thing for universities, their researchers and associations like the Association of American Universities to sue the federal government for existing grants with contractual obligations, and quite another to pursue legal recourse for grants that were never made.
But even if Congress’s full funding is ultimately provided to federal science agencies, an August 2025 Trump executive order grants his political appointees the power to vet and approve all grants and to reject the renewal of existing grants as well as future grants that do not align with the “national interest” or “agency priorities”.
New rules are being developed and contested once again in the courts to give these appointees the power to stop funding for projects deemed to promote “anti-American values”, “gender diversity”, “racial equity initiatives” or “illegal immigration”. The same rules would also divert some academic funding toward industry-specific developmental research.
If Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress in the November midterm elections, it will provide an avenue for investigations and pressure on Trump officials to execute laws so blatantly ignored by the administration. (Note that impeachment requires only a simple majority in the House; conviction and removal from office require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, a margin that will not exist after the midterms.)
But it will not check the administration’s expanding claims of executive authority – claims that the US Supreme Court has, in most instances, either affirmed or simply left to a labyrinth of lower-court appeals.
An important caveat to this trend came this past Monday, when the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to impose new US Postal Service mail-ballot rules nationwide, with the justices concluding that state election officials lacked sufficient time to implement the rules before the midterms.
So far, however, there have been few instances of the court limiting executive authority in science funding and interventions into the autonomy of America’s universities and colleges.
One outcome: Research areas such as climate change, mRNA vaccines, human foetal tissue and health disparities among racial groups are simply not being funded by the federal government. The peer review process that has been the hallmark of American science has already been severely compromised.
Another outcome is an already large decline in international student enrolment and obstructions to international research collaborations. Nations from those in the European Union to Brazil are questioning the costs and benefits of interacting with American universities and academics.
Encouraging meta-trends
Yet beyond this discouraging story in the US, broader global countervailing forces offer resistance to academic nationalism. First is the hopeful resilience of the open science movement. The proliferation of preprint servers, open-access publishing mandates and openly licensed datasets have made knowledge increasingly difficult to wall off within national boundaries.
The norms of open science – peer review, reproducibility, data sharing – are inherently transnational and encode a vision of knowledge as a commons that runs directly counter to the securitisation impulse driving the new Cold War paradigm.
Another countervailing force is the durability of transnational research networks and collaborative institutions. Decades of co-authorship ties, shared graduate training and joint conference culture have created webs of scholarly loyalty.
Globally, joint authorship is shifting from bilateral partnerships to multilateral associations. Bodies like CERN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a wide array of bilateral research foundations continue to function as sites of genuine cooperation precisely because their mandate is to produce knowledge that no single nation can generate alone.
These networks also create informal channels of scientific exchange that can survive formal decoupling – the diaspora scientist with collaborators on both sides of a geopolitical divide and the journal editor who quietly maintains editorial boards across adversarial blocs. Social capital accumulated over generations does not dissolve with a ministerial decree.
Researcher mobility and the scientific diaspora have also, for decades, fostered persistent integration among researchers internationally. Large numbers of the world’s most productive researchers have been trained in countries other than those where they now work. Many maintain active professional relationships across borders despite government edicts.
This diaspora acts as a bridge, carrying tacit knowledge, methodological norms and personal trust across divides that official policy has tried to harden. Efforts to restrict this mobility through visa denials, security clearances and talent programme blacklists have had real effects, but they have also generated a backlash from universities and scientific societies that depend on international talent for their competitiveness.
These countervailing forces, together with the possibility of rebuilding international diplomatic norms and a renewed desire for collaboration in science and other realms, provide a measure of hope for the resilience of open science.
The immediate term?
But in the immediate term, geopolitical tensions and rivalries are rising, not ebbing, with implications for the global economy, military conflict and competition for spheres of international influence – and, as I argue in the longer Higher Education Policy article, for the shape of distinct networks of scientific cooperation and research.
It is a complex and nuanced phenomenon, captured in part by the decline in democratic nation-states that generally value open societies and open science, and the increase in neo-national movements and illiberal democracies, as well as a resurgence of autocratic regimes.
Even among robust democracies, perceived national security risks as well as economic sanctions against rogue states are shaping the contours of the neo-academic Cold War.
Narrowing paths for science cooperation means greater self-reliance but also a declining ability to build the scientific expertise that depends on interaction among scientists and scholars.
Silos of economic and research engagement may also result in an even more dysfunctional world with greater wealth disparities and political conflict, an inability to deal with the next pandemic, and an even larger diaspora related to climate change, environmental degradation and political repression.
This includes a diaspora of academics fleeing autocratic regimes or repressive policies now emerging even in once-stalwart defenders of academic freedom like the United States.
Within this milieu, AI lurks as a path to some new modernity that includes remarkable medical discoveries and a revolution in science as well as some form of severe disruption to labour markets, expanding worrisome tools for national security states and, if you believe the current alarms from the AI industry, a possible destruction of humanity itself.
Mitigating climate change and regulating AI pose monumental challenges that require international cooperation and the values of open science.
AI doom scenarios might serve as a catalyst for reversing the drift away from open science and science diplomacy, but the larger geopolitical trends are not promising.
John Aubrey Douglass is a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education and is on the faculty of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is the lead author of Neo-nationalism and Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press) and is currently completing work on the book Turning Points in American Higher Education: From the rise of the publics to the age of Trump (De Gruyter/Brill). This piece is part of a series of adaptations from his recent article “The neo-academic Cold War: Political traumas and transnational paranoia” published in Higher Education Policy.
This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.