foreign policy

Great-Power Competition in the 21st Century

Senior Analyst, Eurasia Group
Senior Fellow, Brookings
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Ali Wyne

Senior Analyst, Eurasia Group

February 29th, 2020
It is difficult to overstate how different today’s world looks from that which many U.S. observers believed—or at least hoped—would emerge with the Cold War’s conclusion. Transatlantic ties are straining under a confluence of disintegrationist forces, resurgent nationalism within major powers is frustrating global cooperation on a range of pressing challenges, and authoritarian regimes are contesting the U.S.-led postwar order more forcefully while co-opting the advents of the digital age to entrench their rule.
The Trump administration understandably cites the unfulfilled hopes of 1990s-era triumphalism as justification for a new approach to foreign policy, and rightly argues that Washington has focused too heavily on counterterrorism over the past two decades. Noting China’s militarization of the South China Sea and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, moreover, it appropriately exhorts the United States to be more vigilant in repelling those two countries’ challenges to the postwar order. The administration has accordingly promulgated the construct of “great-power competition” (GPC). Despite enjoying broad bipartisan support and capturing a core element of contemporary geopolitics, though, it may not offer the soundest guidance for addressing an increasingly challenging external environment—at least not as presently articulated. First, by jointly framing China, a selective revisionist whose weight in the global economy is growing apace, and Russia, an opportunistic disruptor whose centrality therein is diminishing, the current conception of GPC downplays important structural distinctions between the two. It has also compelled them to partner more vigorously—not only to oppose U.S. foreign policy, but also to undercut global confidence in democratic governance. The United States would be better positioned to slow their rapprochement by adopting differentiated security strategies toward them; emphasizing to each that it neither seeks nor envisions permanently antagonistic ties; and quietly reinforcing concerns that each might have about the other’s long-run strategic intentions. A second, broader, concern about GPC is its scope: it essentially enjoins the United States to commit to a struggle of indefinite duration—one whose contours are nebulous and whose requirements are unspecified. Observers have urged Washington to compete more aggressively in virtually every theater—including Latin America, Southeast Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Arctic—and have conceived of GPC’s functional dimensions in commensurately expansive terms, contending that it entails, to cite a representative conclusion, “nothing short of the world order’s future contours.” If U.S. foreign policy fails to prioritize certain regions and domains or, more concerningly, proceeds from the judgment that a certain preponderance of power obviates the necessity for choice, it will run three risks: strategic incoherence, on account of adopting a “do something” posture rather than pursuing clear objectives; fiscal insolvency, on account of resourcing the defense of peripheral interests despite anemic growth and burgeoning debt; and political resistance, on account of asking the public to support an ill-defined journey that seems disconnected from both their threat perceptions and material realities. GPC can only be as useful a blueprint for U.S. foreign policy as it is clear a construct.
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