Available retrospective accounts overwhelmingly treat the COVID‑19 pandemic, not the onset of a US–China “Cold War II,” as the defining and most historically important development of 2020.

1. How 2020 is framed in histories and retrospectives

   • General overviews of the year 2020 describe it as beginning the decade “with the COVID‑19 pandemic,” emphasizing its global social and economic disruption, lockdowns, and the worst recession since the 1930s, with other events presented as secondary. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Academic and professional reflections on 2020 similarly say the year “has been heavily defined by the COVID‑19 pandemic,” again foregrounding the pandemic as the central historical fact of the year. (journals.cambridgemedia.com.au)
   • Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year choice for 2020 explicitly states that pandemic “defined the context for all the many other consequential events of the year,” underscoring that COVID‑19 shaped how virtually every other development in 2020 is remembered. (prnewswire.com)
   • Books and long‑form histories of 2020, such as Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID, also frame 2020 primarily as “the tragic year… fighting against the COVID‑19 pandemic.” (en.wikipedia.org)

2. Status of the ‘Cold War II’ / US–China framing

   • The idea of a Second Cold War / Cold War II involving the US, China, and/or Russia is widely debated. Some analysts and historians (e.g., Niall Ferguson) argue that a second cold war with China exists and has been underway for several years, but they do not single out 2020 as a unique formal starting point. (hoover.org)
   • Others explicitly reject the Cold War analogy, arguing that US–China competition does not constitute a new cold war at all. Thomas J. Christensen’s “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” is a prominent example. (foreignaffairs.com)
   • Even within 2020 commentary, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi spoke of relations being on the “brink of a new Cold War,” while multiple scholars in the same period argued that US–China rivalry would not be or become a Cold War, illustrating a lack of consensus that 2020 marked a clearly recognized “Cold War II.” (en.wikipedia.org)

3. Comparison of perceived historical importance

   • By 2025, early historiography and public memory consistently cast COVID‑19 as the epoch‑making event of 2020, with lasting effects on global health, demography, economics, politics, and everyday life. It is treated as the context in which other developments—including US–China tensions—occurred. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • In contrast, while there is growing literature on intensifying US–China rivalry and talk of a “new Cold War,” these works rarely describe “the beginning and recognition of Cold War II in 2020” as the single most historically important event of that year, nor is there a consensus that 2020 is the formal start date.

Because (a) the dominant historical and cultural record so far clearly identifies the COVID‑19 pandemic as the central event of 2020, and (b) the notion of a 2020‑dated, widely recognized “Cold War II” is both contested and not treated as the primary defining event of that year, the prediction that future historians would judge the beginning/recognition of US–China Cold War II as the most historically important development of 2020 is not borne out by current evidence.