Comment by MathMonkeyMan

The strong force is short range for a different reason. It's called [confinement][1]. The strong force gets stronger as you pull color charges apart. At some point the energy is so high that it's very likely that corresponding matching-color particles will exist, and so now there two pairs of close charges, instead of one pair of far charges.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_confinement