When it comes to foreign policy, especially on Russia, the Trump administration is a cacophony of discordant voices. While the president seeks friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin and mutes points of disagreement, prominent members of his administration are pushing for a radical re-orientation of America’s global strategy: a return to the Cold War framework in which Russia and China are treated as major threats to U.S. security.

In his introduction to a policy document called the Nuclear Policy Review, released on Friday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis warned that Russia is adopting “military strategies and capabilities that rely on nuclear escalation for their success.” He added, “These developments, coupled with Russia’s invasion of Crimea and nuclear threats against our allies, mark Moscow’s unabashed return to Great Power competition.”

The phrase “Great Power competition” echoes the administration’s recently released National Defense Strategy, which argues, “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” In plain English, this means that America should focus on defending itself against Russia and China, rather than fighting interminable wars in the Middle East. As Thomas Wright, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, noted in The Atlantic last week, this new policy reflects “a bipartisan consensus ... between mainstream Democratic and Republican foreign-policy experts that [President Barack Obama] had under-reacted to Russian and Chinese assertiveness.”

But if Mattis and the broader American foreign policy establishment see Russia and China as the main threats, Trump is more concerned with terrorism, North Korea, and illegal immigration (which he sees through a national-security prism).

“It has become abundantly clear that President Trump does not buy his own administration’s strategic shift toward great power competition,” Wright wrote. “Compare the new strategic doctrine to three of President Trump’s recent speeches—one that launched the National Security Strategy, his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and yesterday’s State of the Union. In each, there was at most a single, obligatory, passing reference to rivals like Russia and China, with little elaboration.” Wright persuasively argues that America has “two competing national security doctrines—Trump’s and that of his national security team. They are now operating in parallel universes.”