“FOREIGN POLICY.COM”
“The biggest question of the coming decades may be whether countries can confine the global competition to the economic and political realms and thus spare themselves and the world from the horrors of the next great war or even the still frightening confrontations of another cold war.
In that context, the blind pursuit of a strategy of great-power competition is irresponsible and shortsighted.”
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“Unfortunately, for all that great-power competition has been Washington’s favorite buzzword in recent years, it remains frustratingly poorly defined. Indeed, most commentators skip right past the big questions (Why are we competing? Competing over what?) and go straight to arguing about how to achieve victory. Since the possible answers to these questions range from the entirely reasonable (i.e., that Western states should engage in collective defense of liberal democracy) to the dangerous and utterly unrealistic (i.e., that Washington should be pursuing regime collapse in Beijing), it’s hardly something we should ignore.
It seems that once again—just as it did during the global war on terrorism in the mid-2000s or when styling the United States as the indispensable nation in the 1990s—Washington’s strategic community is again reorienting itself around a new, poorly theorized model of the world and of America’s place in it. Yet precisely because it is so ill-defined, great-power competition as a strategy—that is to say, competition for its own sake—also has the potential to be highly dangerous.
If great-power competition is instead a means to an end, it’s not at all clear what those ends are.
It is a mark of how recently the notion of great-power competition has entered the Washington lexicon that someone who had fallen into a coma just five years ago might never have heard the phrase. Though the Obama administration’s 2015 National Military Strategy warned of states “attempting to revise key aspects of the international order,” it was not until the Trump era that the term itself entered widespread use. Then-U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in June 2017 that a “return to great-power competition … places the international order under assault,” while the National Security Strategy released later that year noted that “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” Since then, its growth has been exponential.
As a description, great-power competition is accurate; competition among the great powers is a defining feature of the international environment. Whether one is talking about 16th-century rivalries among empires, the imperialist scramble for Africa, or the Cold War struggle between the capitalist and communist blocs, states have always jockeyed for power and influence. But the notion that it is new—or that it is returning as if history were taking its revenge—is somewhat absurd. As the Georgetown University professor Daniel Nexon recently put it, “competition among great powers cannot return, because it never really went away.”
Instead, the “return of great-power competition” is essentially an easier way of admitting that the United States is in relative decline. The unipolar moment—the three-decade period of U.S. global predominance that started with the collapse of the Soviet Union—is ending. In the parlance of political science, other states are beginning to balance against the United States. In layman’s terms, this means that with the United States in relative decline, other states are increasingly willing to take actions they would not have during the 1990s, whether it’s Russian intervention in Syria, Chinese claims to the South China Sea, or European steps to circumvent U.S. sanctions legislation. Irving Kristol, considered the godfather of neoconservatism, once noted that a neoconservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged by reality; some of the loudest voices proclaiming an era of great-power competition are just liberal internationalists who have been mugged by the reality of power politics.
The “return of great-power competition” is essentially a way of admitting that the United States is in relative decline.
Yet if this were all there was to it, the debate surrounding great-power competition would be far less problematic. Scholars and pundits would update their mental models for a more competitive world and move on with their lives. Instead, foreign-policy circles in Washington are increasingly fixated on the notion that the United States must commit to competition with China, Russia, and other states.
Great-power competition is portrayed less as a fact of life and more as a strategy in and of itself. Certainly, some authors do suggest a potential endpoint to great-power competition, such as Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, whose recent piece in Foreign Policy argued that competition between the United States and China would only lessen when the regime in Beijing collapsed. But they are still unclear on why we should pursue an existential Cold War-style struggle with China, rather than a more measured approach of competitive coexistence.
This example is emblematic of the debate on great-power competition as a whole. As a grand strategy—what the Yale University professor John Lewis Gaddis once described as “the calculated relationship of means to large ends”—great-power competition is sorely lacking. For starters, it’s not clear whether competition is itself a means or an end.
The 2017 National Security Strategy, for example, describes the world as an “arena of continuous competition” for which the United States must prepare. Whether it is domestic infrastructure projects, student loan forgiveness, repairs to democratic institutions, or increasing the birth rate, a wide range of policy priorities are now portrayed as essential to the pursuit of great-power competition. This suggests that great-power competition is itself an end. Why the country is compelled to compete in this way typically goes unstated.”
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