The modern era of political confrontation in the second half of the 20th -first half of the 21st century is characterized by the transition to the doctrine of global governance wars between conflicting States. The essence of this doctrine is to strengthen one's own governance system as much as possible and critically weaken the enemy's public administration system so that all the links of the state body cease to work effectively and cope with their tasks. The paper reveals the significance of governance wars on the example of the collapse of the USSR, which occurred without any direct military clash, but led to the loss of all strategic advantages for the Russian Federation, its successor. We put forward a structural model of global dominance, according to which governance depends on hard, soft, and smart power; we show that this understanding comes from generalizing J. Nye's concept of soft power. We define the specifics of governance wars: long duration, all-encompassing and uncompromising nature. The following tools and algorithms of modern governance wars are considered: promotion of own ideology; working with local elites; masks syndrome and conspiracy in political elites; control over the information space; color revolutions; proxy wars; destruction of medical sovereignty. We reveal the relationship between governance wars and governance cycles that imply fluctuations in the effectiveness of public administration system both within one country and between countries. We consider five levels of social phenomena: meta, mega, macro, meso and micro levels, and substantiate their two-way hierarchy, when higher-level processes determine the development vector for lower-level processes, and lower-level processes form the mechanisms for implementing higher-level processes. We show that in modern conditions this paradigm is gaining importance, preventing the formation of distorted cognitive patterns in relation to the driving forces of national development.