Frederic J. Brown/Pool via AP
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, second from right, joined by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, right, at the opening session of U.S.-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska, March 18, 2021.
It’s been called “a faddish catch phrase,” “approaching a cliché,” and “Washington’s favorite buzzword.” Great-power competition was an organizing principle of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, and then—unusually for any of the Trump team’s policies—was widely and quickly embraced by Washington experts. But when it comes to the policy itself, the only consensus is that nobody can agree on what exactly it means, but everyone in the Biden administration seems to be talking about it.
The Trump Department of Defense published the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) that was the first document of its kind to declare that competition with Russia and, more importantly, China was the new driver of U.S. foreign policy. Biden’s Pentagon appears to agree. During his confirmation hearing, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the document “is absolutely on track for today’s challenges.” Colin Kahl, the third most powerful civilian official at DOD, praised the NDS in his confirmation hearing precisely because it emphasized the imperative of strategic competition with China. President Biden himself has warned Beijing that it should expect a period of extreme competition from the U.S. during his presidency.
The rhetoric may have been slightly toned down since the Trump years, but administration officials Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan took part in a contentious press conference with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska in March. Many of Biden’s economic and technology policies toward China have been continuations of Trump’s approach, and have been aimed at pushing back against Beijing’s increasing influence in these arenas. The president has even used competition with China to rationalize bold domestic proposals on infrastructure and American jobs.
But to scholars, it appears as if great-power competition (GPC) is nothing more than a descriptor of a fact of international relations: that great powers will compete for influence and to promote their divergent interests. If this is the case, then why has the term taken on such a prominent mantle in national-security debates and become the dominant prism through which so many issues are debated in the nation’s capital?
In part, GPC has become so popular among policymakers precisely because of its definitional flexibility and political ambiguity. It is an easy, convenient frame for policymakers and other experts from across the political spectrum to embrace because it can serve to justify their preferred policy outcomes.
In contrast to other theories of international relations, like interdependence, realism, or bipolarity, there is no precise definition of GPC. “Great-power competition is not a term in international-relations scholarship. We would never capitalize it.” says Dan Nexon, professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. “You can’t pull something off of the shelf to get a set of theories on what this looks like, how it affects behavior, and what we ought to do about it.”
Insofar as its utility in defining the current state of U.S. foreign policy is concerned, great-power competition is best understood as a descriptor rather than a prescriptor. That is, GPC can help us define the current state of geopolitics, but cannot necessarily inform policy choices.
The adoption of this framework reflects that American power has relatively declined throughout the last two decades, while China’s influence has grown. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union provided pretext for American power projects—arms races, proxy wars abroad, and messaging about freedom. Without the USSR, the unipolar structure after the Cold War has meant that the United States did not necessarily need a similar justification to exert influence around the globe.
But now the value and extent of American power is being questioned in a more sustained way. “One could argue that the United States has been searching for a post-Soviet ballast since the end of the Cold War,” says Ali Wyne, senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro practice. In the form of China, they may have found that ballast.
This move began in 2012, when the Obama administration announced an “Asia pivot,” in which U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the realms of trade, diplomacy, and technology, would be rebalanced to focus more on China and the rest of the Asia-Pacific. “While U.S. foreign policy towards East Asia during Obama’s second term was not highly confrontational rhetorically, U.S. policy was essentially what we could call a hedging policy, and that didn’t change under the Trump administration,” says Nexon.
The Trump administration, though, made this “pivot” more explicit, partly because the president was able to couch his “tough on China” rhetoric in his persona as a political outsider. The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) declared that the postwar consensus on China—that integrating it into the global economy would democratize and liberalize the country—was dead. Instead, the document read, “Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others.”
Trump’s confrontational stance on China was part of a larger critique of the foreign policy pursued by past administrations, both Democratic and Republican, and he was among the first prominent politicians to openly voice that opinion. Trump also persistently disseminated anti-Chinese rhetoric and sentiment into the American political mainstream.
Though many of Trump’s views on foreign policy were discarded by the national-security establishment, this one in particular stuck because it capitalized on bipartisan anxieties over China’s militarization of the South China Sea and an authoritarian turn at home. As Wyne explains, “It took concerns that had been growing on a bipartisan basis and codified them at the highest levels of U.S. grand strategy.”
While Trump’s own attitude toward China was instinctual, unfocused, and inconsistent, the larger security apparatus and Trump’s advisers gave it needed legs. Because it was adopted by these security professionals, the conclusions were taken more seriously.
The coalescence around this view was most notable in the December 2017 NSS, which definitively asserted that “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition [has] returned.” The NDS published one month later solidified that view: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism,” it read, “is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
Despite pronouncing much of its foreign policy “restorative,” or primarily motivated by reversing the perceived ills of Trumpism, the Biden administration appears to agree that great-power competition will be the primary framework for defining its relationship with the world. “Those documents sent an important interagency signal. If the NSS and the NDS both argue that it behooves the United States to reorient its foreign policy around the intensification of great-power competition, then the gears of bureaucracy begin turning to reflect that inclination,” Wyne told me. Ever since then, it has latched on in Washington as the defining feature of foreign policy for the upcoming era.
The adoption of this framework reflects that American power has relatively declined throughout the last two decades, while China’s influence has grown.
So how should U.S. policy be organized in the world? The Biden team has relied on competition with China as a “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon often calls it. Advocates of limiting U.S. military interventions abroad and downsizing base presence find the logic of GPC lacking. “There’s been an effort among folks who are now in the Biden administration to ask how to shore up the legitimacy of America’s large role in the world. This is an issue that can make American power seem to have a purpose,” says Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow with the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Great-power competition can appeal to practically anyone because it allows them to make several different, sometimes even conflicting, arguments about how the United States should conduct itself, both in foreign and domestic policy domains. Its malleability is why the announcement to withdraw troops from Afghanistan can be greeted with headlines like “How the Afghanistan Withdrawal Costs the U.S. with China,” while others can make the opposing claim, that “the time spent by senior officials and the resources invested by the government in finding, chasing, and killing terrorists invariably come at the expense of other tasks: for example, addressing the challenges of a rising China.”
Even the increasingly loud and bipartisan voices pushing for a more restrained approach to how the United States deploys its military power can find use in GPC framing. It is now possible to promote military withdrawal from the Middle East or elsewhere because those same resources are more useful for dealing with the challenge posed by other great powers. “Ending ‘forever wars’ becomes an argument for better competing with China,” says Nexon. “It’s just too tempting.” At the same time, as China looks to expand its own influence into the Middle East and Africa, those in favor of a more muscular U.S. approach can argue for the imperative of matching China’s footprint in these various arenas around the world.
Matt Duss, foreign-policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, sees a useful parallel with the “war on terror,” the last vague term that served a similarly omnipotent role in national-security discourse. “If we look at the last 20 years and the global war on terror, the anti-terrorism discourse created a lot of negative consequences for our own politics,” he told me. These consequences included bloated defense budgets, wars on multiple continents, and civil liberty crackdowns in the United States. If we are not careful, Duss believes, we could be on course to repeating those mistakes by pursuing a zero-sum approach to our relationship with China.
For the Biden administration, this dynamic has mostly played out on the domestic front rather than in foreign policy so far. This approach has caused a surprising realignment within American politics. Kori Schake, a former Bush administration official and current senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that in addition to being an effective political ploy that aims to consolidate support for Democratic policy preferences, Biden’s arguments have the added benefit of being correct, in that the best way to counter China’s challenge is to strengthen the United States.
But Duss contends, “The argument for investing in American infrastructure, investing in American jobs, and strengthening American democracy is because it’s good to invest in American jobs and strengthen American democracy. It doesn’t have to be justified on the basis of a foreign threat.”
To be sure, China’s economic and technological might, in particular, will pose an important challenge to the United States. The old consensus on Beijing was indeed misguided. The benefits of trade policies with China largely served corporations, and certainly not American workers. Economic policies controlled by powerful companies and rich individuals have made the U.S. too dependent on Chinese manufacturing. China’s mercantilism does have a demonstrable and detrimental effect on our national economic well-being, to say nothing of the government’s authoritarianism and human rights abuses. These realities may inform U.S. foreign-policy debate, but must not control the terms of that debate.
This is not a new phenomenon. Washington has a tendency to adopt catchall phrases and terms to define different eras of foreign policy, and the national-security apparatus is constantly searching for the next common threat—and great-power competition fills that void. In the first decades of the postwar world order, the neoliberal consensus that opening China to the world would yield positive results for everybody, both economically and politically, reigned. It is now agreed upon almost universally that that policy failed. The new consensus represents a near 180-degree turnaround and crystallized almost as soon as the last one deteriorated, signaling that what it means and what its effects could be are questions that have not been seriously grappled with. Great-power competition presents us with a compelling question: How can the United States navigate a world in which the limits of its power are clear? What declaring that “we are in an era of great-power competition” does not do is provide any meaningful answer.
