President Biden will use his first address before the UN General Assembly to lay out his vision for an era of "intensive diplomacy" with allies and "vigorous competition" with great powers — without a Cold War with China.

Why it matters: Biden will take the podium in New York on Tuesday with his own international credibility in question after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. His administration also is struggling to build international momentum to fight climate change, the pandemic and rising global authoritarianism.

Warning of a potential new Cold War, the head of the United Nations implored China and the United States to repair their “completely dysfunctional” relationship before problems between the two large and deeply influential countries spill over even further into the rest of the planet.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke to The Associated Press this weekend ahead of this week’s annual United Nations gathering of world leaders — a convening blemished by COVID, climate concerns and contentiousness across the planet.

A new cold war, initiated recently by the Chinese regime against the United States, has many similarities with the one launched by the former Soviet Union, but there is also a key difference.

The United States is presently involved in a second cold war. The first one was with the former Soviet Union; the one with the Chinese regime has only just begun. Both cold wars were launched by communist regimes opposed to democratic values and intended to replace the democratic values with their own “red” Marxist values through global conquest.

On July 24th, the Washington State Department of Agriculture issued a Twitter warning about packages of unidentified seeds, apparently originating from China, being sent to multiple Washington residents, unsolicited. The post set off a wave of similar announcements from a number of U.S. states, instructing recipients not to plant any seeds they did not order. The warnings sparked more reports, and it quickly became apparent that this was a national, even international, trend—with packages reported so far in 22 U.S. states, Canada, Australia, and the E.U.

The American founders believed that prolonged rivalry and conflict abroad would eventually degrade the country’s democracy at home. Today, many of the strongest warnings against a “new Cold War” with China have a similar ring.

The New York Times, the Economist and pundits such as Fareed Zakaria have all warned of a “new Red Scare.” The implication is that geopolitical dangers could again cause a narrowing of political expression, a feverish search for internal enemies and a corrosion of the liberties U.S. foreign policy is supposed to defend.

Is America, in lockdown, with 26 million unemployed and entering a new depression, up for a confrontation and Cold War with China?

For that appears to be where the GOP wishes to lead us.

According to Politico, a 57-page memo from Mitch McConnell's senatorial committee instructs GOP candidates to blame the coronavirus pandemic on China, commit to stand up to China, end U.S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing and tell voters "my opponent is soft on China."

Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the barrier that divided West Berlin from East, and enclosed the West from the rest of East Germany.

From 1961 to 1989, the iconic wall stood and symbolized the height of Cold War tensions.

Built by East German officials allied with Soviets, the wall aimed to stop those in East Germany from going to the West and came to represent the ideological differences between the Eastern Bloc and western countries at the time.

Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who became the first person in history to spacewalk in 1965, has died aged 85.

Tethered to a spaceship by a 4.8m (16ft) cable, the Russian floated above Earth for 12 minutes.

"You just can't comprehend it. Only out there can you feel the greatness - the huge size of all that surrounds us," Leonov told the BBC in 2014.

But the outing nearly ended in disaster as his spacesuit inflated and he struggled to get back in the spaceship.

The police who faced protesters in Ferguson, Missouri looked more like soldiers than officers of the peace. In August, citizens squared off with a camouflage-clad police force armed with tear gas and grenade launchers, armored tactical vehicles and rifles with long-range scopes. Since then, government officials and the media have blamed police militarization on a U.S. Department of Defense program, begun in 1997, that provides police with free surplus military gear. But the roots of militarized policing are much older.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday announced escalated U.S. sanctions against Russia in the energy, arms and finance sectors, turning up the heat as European countries agreed to take their strongest steps yet targeting Russia over claims it is fomenting unrest in Ukraine.