Scientific and cultural cooperation and science diplomacy intended to address global challenges and build international partnerships are declining as global values, reflected in the politicization of research funding, shifting patterns and barriers to international co-authorship and transnational research, new limits on sharing data and licensing intellectual property rights, and restrictive visa policies directed at international students and faculty that are altering the flow of academic talent—potentially a tectonic shift in talent mobility.
What are the current and potential outcomes, the winners and losers, in this drift and now lurch toward a bifurcated world of science and academic collaborations? As part of series of Substack postings, the following is adapted from my recent journal article on the emerging neo-academic Cold War.
Politically Charged National Environments
First, and to state the obvious, colleges and universities and their faculty, students and staff increasingly operate in politically charged national and regional environments that not only compromise scientific and other research on global problems, but also constrain talent mobility and data sharing, interfere with academic freedom, reduce institutional autonomy, and erode public trust in universities and their academic cultures.
Whereas once transnational engagement of scientists and their institutions was seen as a universal good, a “transnational paranoia” has now emerged. Unlike the previous Cold War, particularly after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, in a growing number of countries, universities and their academic cultures of free inquiry and autonomy are no longer viewed as assets to be nurtured and supported in the geopolitical race for scientific and technological superiority.
China, for example, has a limited and strategic vision of purpose-driven universities that have severe restrictions on academic freedom and free speech, and that must be closely regulated for fear of a return to the sedition of Tiananmen Square. Beyond the growing number of autocracies, new limits on academic freedom are emerging in liberal democracies as well shaped by geopolitical rivalries and concerns over national security and scientific espionage (see the recently published Free to Think report).
Emerging Siloes of Science Cooperation
A second observation is that the neo-academic Cold War is characterized by a set of emerging, semi-autonomous siloed scientific and academic transnational networks that reflect the multipolar world of geopolitical alliances and competitors—economic and military.
Mapping this new reality is challenging as its contours are evolving, but it essentially aligns with four emerging networks. None are totally isolated and there is fluidity to how they are taking shape, but the trend line points toward semi-autonomous science and technology systems that erode or hinder open science and the vitality of science diplomacy.
The first network is the once dominant U.S. research community that retains a legacy of international academic engagement but is withering under the weight of political attacks and defunding.
The second network centers around China, featuring a state-directed effort to pursue a long-term agenda of scientific and technological self-reliance and domination in key areas such as renewable energy, AI, and quantum computing. China is pursuing strategic alliances aligned with its economic interests, largely in the Global South via its Belt and Road campaign, with Russia serving as a sort of vassal state and maintaining close relations with other autocratic states such as Iran and North Korea.
The third network centers around the European Union. Europe remains the most active in retaining and building transnational academic and research engagement with Western-aligned nations in Asia (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore), as well as in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and increasingly with India as it faces an increasingly hostile Trump administration.
A fourth emerging network is a large group of non- and multi-aligned nations. The increasingly divisive geopolitical world pits many nations in a challenging position, forced to choose sides—for example, aligning with the United States versus China, or continuing to buy Russia’s cheap oil despite Western states’ admonishments to end financial and diplomatic ties. Many other nations with rising standards of living and economic ambitions seek, or now hold, neutral diplomatic positions and are building alliances among their growing numbers.
Emerging Global South Networks
In this geopolitical story, the hegemony of scientific productivity and talent mobility of the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and now China is being eroded by national investments in universities and alternative scientific ecosystems. This is particularly the case among a group of nations largely in the Global South that seek selective transnational engagements (Braveboy-Wagner, 2024). Their ambition is to find collaborators opportunistically among the three primary neo-academic Cold War networks (United States, China, Europe) while also pursuing scientific and academic engagement among themselves.
Brazil, India, and South Africa (three of BRICS’ functioning democracies) are the most significant players in the multi-aligned alliance. Their choice of scientific and technological engagement, and the flow of their students to foreign universities, is being influenced in no small part by the behaviors of Trump and his administration.
In the wake of arbitrary and vindictive tariffs by Trump and imperialistic foreign policies that are eroding the international liberal order, Brazil, India, and South Africa are essentially being pushed away from productive scientific cooperation and student exchanges with American universities. They are seeking new economic and academic alliances elsewhere, developing scientific initiatives focus on expanding collaborative research in emerging technologies such as AI, quantum technologies and computing, vaccine research, and green energy innovation. The goal is to address their particular challenges as well as to bolster the scientific leadership of the Global South (Souto, 2025).
“The emergence of what some call a ‘multipolar world order’ creates space for a broader range of actors to influence the direction of global governance,” note scholars Benedicte Bull and Dan Banik. “The Global South is not merely reacting to these shifts, it is also actively shaping the contours of the new order” (Bull and Banik, 2025).
Vietnam, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria are also seeking a path of multi-alignment to become more significant regional hubs in attracting students and talent. Turkey now tops the list of the most popular destinations for students from the Middle East and North Africa and is increasingly enrolling students from Asia (Cochrane, 2025). There is also the steady growth of regional alliances, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the African Union, which are harmonizing national education systems and easing cross-border movement with significant results (Beal, 2025).
The World Academy of Science, a unit of UNESCO, is also facilitating these growing “South to South” networks. “Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Arab region increasingly face similar development challenges,” notes TWAS director Marcelo Knobel, “and can often learn as much from one another as from traditional partners.”
At the 24th International Conference on Higher Education in Africa in April 2026, nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America agreed to a Global Compact for Research in an attempt to strengthen academic research partnerships among their nations and to pursue more equitable collaborations with universities and nations in Europe and elsewhere (Kigotho, 2026). This included a “10-point framework” intended to guide countries and institutions navigating an increasingly complex and treacherous environment, according to Damtew Teferra, one of the promoters of the agreement (Teferra, 2026).
How effective these agreements will be is an evolving story, with challenges related to funding and diplomacy. Both Europe and China are also continuing and expanding their efforts to engage constructively with universities in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. As Simon Marginson has noted, the current vortex of redefinition offers countries and universities in the Global South and East the chance to “move into shared global leadership” in research and training (Marginson, 2026).
The Gray Zone
Following Brexit, the United Kingdom occupies a “gray zone,” still linked to Europe and the American scientific and academic communities through its network of Anglophone commonwealth nations, but also pursuing isolationist policies related to international students and facing severe budgetary challenges. After years of negotiations, the UK has rejoined the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program, and appears on a path for securing EU research funding similar to before Brexit.
Hong Kong also sits in some sort of intermediate zone with the Chinese Communist Party steadily limiting civil liberties and imposing management controls over its universities; yet thus far, Hong Kong’s universities still maintain semblances of academic freedom and international collaborations that reflect its past under British rule.
Israel also sits in a gray zone in the wake of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the war with Iran. While a relatively small nation in population, it is a significant producer of science and technological innovation but is becoming increasingly isolated, particularly from Europe and much of the Middle East. It largely retains its links with the U.S. scientific community, for now.
Losers – America
A third observation about the neo-academic Cold War is that there are winners and losers. With its tangle of national members, Europe’s response to America’s protectionist agenda—including the dismantling of transnational agreements and the erosion of the rules-based international order—is to invest in its universities, further build its scientific, technological, and military capacity, and engage in international research collaborations, particularly with nations in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. America’s decline as a destination for global talent and as a collaborator in scientific research works to the advantage of Europe’s science and academic ambitions.
The United States is clearly on the loser list. The United States is “in decline as a research partner” and at a “strategic inflection point” states a December 2025 report by the Institute for Scientific Information: “its growth has weakened; its citation impact is falling; it may be losing its dominant lead in global research.
Recent policy statements regarding its overseas links point to negative implications for its own research future and for global networks” (Adams and Filchenko, 2025). Part of this decline is simply the rise and expansion of China and nations in other parts of the world that are building their academic research capacity. But it is also because of Trump’s degradation of federal science agencies, cuts in science funding, and hostility toward attracting international talent.
As noted previously, the arbitrary deportation of students and academics, declining visa acceptance rates, political vengeance campaigns, and the fear provoked by social media vetting in the visa process for “un-American” content, have made American universities significantly less attractive to talented international students and faculty.
Compounding these pressures, the Trump administration is attempting to impose new restrictions on H-1B visas that allow foreign faculty and researchers to be employed at universities, including raising the cost of new applications from a previous maximum of $4,600 to $100,000, making them financially infeasible. In 2025 and into early 2026, approximately 8,000 student visas were revoked (Nash, 2025; Bhatia, 2025b; Doors, 2025).
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled the $100,000 fee an unlawful tax in June 2026, but it has remained in effect for new H-1B petitions requiring consular processing while the government’s appeal proceeds before the First Circuit (Vorys, 2026).
Meanwhile, in the feeder markets of China, South Korea, India, and African nations such as Nigeria, surveys show declining interest in attending American colleges or universities. International talent mobility is shifting significantly away from the United States as other parts of the world offer less costly, more welcoming, and, in some cases, politically safer alternatives of comparable quality. Concern over high U.S. crime rates is also a factor for international students.
By the fall of 2026, these pressures were visible in the enrollment data: NAFSA and JB International estimated that U.S. campuses would enroll as many as 111,000 fewer international students than the prior year, a loss of up to $3.4 billion in economic activity and roughly 40,000 jobs nationwide, with international doctoral-program applications down 21 percent and visa-processing bottlenecks compounding the decline (NAFSA, 2026).
Adding to the headwinds is a series of legislative proposals in Congress to limit or even end international collaborations with Chinese academics. A a bill introduced in May 2026, for example, called the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, if enacted would prohibit U.S. scientists from using federal funding “to enter into, support, or carry out any research collaboration” with any Chinese scientist “associated with” Chinese entities on one of several and expansive U.S. government blacklists (Mervis, 2026).
As of September 2026, the SIRA Act remained pending in committee, having advanced no further than its introduction in the Senate the previous May (Congress.gov, 2026).
Winner – Europe
The European Union is one of the winners. A few months after Trump’s second inauguration, in the wake of federal cuts for academic research, universities in twelve European capitals launched programs aimed at poaching scientists, promising faculty, and students from American universities. The European Commission also announced a €500 million package to make Europe “a magnet for researchers” and targeted U.S.-based scholars (European Commission, 2025).
Similar programs to attract talent from the United States have been announced by Australia, Canada, and Japan. The pull is measurable: applications from U.S.-based scientists for European Research Council Starting Grants climbed from 116 in 2025 to 169 in 2026, twenty of which won awards, and at least twenty-one researchers currently based in the United States and Canada have announced plans to relocate their labs to Europe (Saka, 2026).
Europe is building momentum in its international academic collaboration in the wake of America’s disengagement. Trump’s retreat is accelerating a longer trend of deferring to Europe to lead “Big Science” international projects and collaborative agreements including CERN, but also new projects in thermonuclear energy, including a $3 billion laboratory to explore subatomic particles, and sponsorship of the All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance.
“Inattention to the nuts and bolts of science and technology diplomacy has undermined the ability of the United States to be a destination country for major physics projects,” states Cole Donovan, a former Associate Director in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. “Leadership in the field now comes from Europe and Asia, where smaller countries with smaller budgets have no choice but to work together to build major projects” (Donovan, 2025).
While the United States has decimated programs and personnel that focus on transnational research cooperation in the State Department and other agencies, the EU is investing in and promoting science diplomacy as “part of the EU’s priority of leveraging our power and partnership for a global Europe” (European Commission, 2023).
Winner – China
The other big winner—and the biggest—is China. The erosion of American soft power capabilities, including dismissive attitudes toward science diplomacy and restrictions on foreign talent at universities and elsewhere in society, affords China greater opportunities to expand its geopolitical influence. As noted, Xi’s government is increasing investments in universities, and in specific scientific fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
Xi also sees advantage in promoting selected forms of academic transnational engagement, seeking to partially fill the vacuum of scientific leadership left by the myopic policies of Trump. In April 2026, Xi announced plans for China to deepen international cooperation in basic science, including international exchanges and cooperative research projects largely in the Global South, and that China will play a more active role in global science and technology governance (Wang, 2026a).
A month later, and with the United States defunding and disengaging with UN agencies, China and UNESCO announced an elevated role for China in a new 2026–2029 cooperative agreement on a landmark STEM institute (Wang, 2026b).
China has become the world’s most prolific research publisher, with international co-authorships growing from 6,000 in 2000 to more than 163,000 in 2024. Yet over the past two years, the number of international co-authorships by Chinese academics has declined—reflecting, in part, the country’s growing scientific self-reliance, but also perhaps political tensions with the United States and Europe. We will know more about these trends, and whether they are accelerating once we have data from 2025 and onward.
At the same time, what we do know is that Chinese academics are shifting in the geographic location of their scientific collaborations. Co-authorship with U.S. scholars has declined over the past five or more years but is expanding with academics in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and in Latin American nations such as Brazil (Adams and Filchenko, 2025; OECD, 2025).
The Big Loser – Meeting Global Science Challenges
The deepest cost of the emerging neo-academic Cold War falls on the shared scientific enterprise now required to address genuinely borderless problems. Climate change, pandemic preparedness, antimicrobial resistance, biodiversity collapse, and now of increasing urgency the governance of frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence do not respect the boundaries of the four networks described above.
Yet the infrastructure best suited to solving them—open data sharing, freely mobile talent, co-authored research, and trusted channels of science diplomacy—is precisely what is fraying as nations retreat into strategic and defensive postures.
This is the paradox of the moment. Never has the need for coordinated global science been greater, and never has the political appetite for supporting it seemed weaker. Money and prestige are flowing toward technologies with clear military or economic payoff—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology—while collaborative work on climate adaptation, ocean health, and public health surveillance struggles for funding and international buy-in.
Bifurcated data standards, restricted access to samples and genomic sequences, and duplicated rather than shared research infrastructure all raise the cost, and lower the speed, of scientific discovery precisely when acceleration is most needed.
The multipolar and semi-autonomous networks emerging from this fragmentation may still produce breakthroughs—China’s investment in renewable energy, Europe’s expanding role in Big Science, and the Global South’s growing scientific ambition all promise real gains.
But absent renewed commitments to open science and functioning channels of science diplomacy across geopolitical blocs, the world risks solving its most pressing global challenges more slowly, more unevenly, and at greater cost than necessary—a loss shared by all, regardless of which network ultimately claims the mantle of scientific leadership.
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John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education and is on the faculty of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. 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.