For all the acrimony in Washington today, the city’s foreign policy establishment is settling on a rare bipartisan consensus: that the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. The struggle between the United States and other great powers, the emerging consensus holds, will fundamentally shape geopolitics going forward, for good or ill.
Some great power relationships are indeed reverting to a more tooth-and-nail kind of competition. China and Russia are ever more determined to claim the status and influence they believe is their due. But the response likely to emerge from these strategies, a reaction with deeper roots in U.S. foreign policy than the views of any one administration, deserves a more significant debate.
It has become abundantly clear that President Trump does not buy his own administration’s strategic shift toward great power competition. Compare the new strategic doctrine to three of President Trump’s recent speeches—one that launched the National Security Strategy, his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and yesterday’s State of the Union. In each, there was at most a single, obligatory, passing reference to rivals like Russia and China, with little elaboration.
Is Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America great again” mere campaign rhetoric in the tradition of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” George H. W. Bush’s “a kinder, gentler nation,” and Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning in America again”? Or do such renaissances really occur in history? The Roman Republic and Empire together lasted for more than 1,000 years. Yet at various times throughout this period, Rome was declared finished—like during the Punic Wars (264-146 BC), the Civil Wars of the late Republic (49-31 BC), and the coups and cruelty of the 12 Caesars (49 BC-AD 96), especially during the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.
When a rising power challenges an incumbent one, war often follows. That prospect, known as the Thucydides trap after the Greek historian who first described it, looms over relations between China and the West, particularly America. So, increasingly, does a more insidious confrontation. Even if China does not seek to conquer foreign lands, many people fear that it seeks to conquer foreign minds.
The present political dynamics in the Middle East are unsettled and kaleidoscopic. But in the interests of brevity, leaving aside smaller players, and before we think about the role of the United States and Russia, the basic configurations of power in the region since the 2011 Arab Spring can be simplified in terms of five loose groupings.
The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once called the epoch stretching from the French Revolution of 1789 to World War I’s outbreak in 1914 as the “long 19th century.” A little over a decade ago, people began to speculate about an emerging “Asian century,” driven by an unstoppable China and enabled by America’s supposed inevitable decline. But with China’s economy in turmoil, key East Asian “tiger” economies like Malaysia and Thailand floundering, and even Singapore facing questions about the vitality of its economic model, is this “Asian century” coming to a premature end?
Deeper ties with middle powers like Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and South Korea are important for India at a time when the magnitude of the United States’ global influence is declining due to the rapid growth of China and the improving growth trajectories of numerous middle powers. Collaborating with these countries can help India progress from being a South Asian power to an Asian and eventually global power.
Russia and China have been slowly enhancing their partnership for decades. Years of public diplomacy initiatives and trust building exercises have helped create a relatively positive image of China in Russia. At a time when the Kremlin-controlled media’s anti-Western rhetoric has reached a fever pitch, average Russian citizens are more open to China than ever before. Lastly, Chinese policymakers and diplomats, accustomed to working with Russians, are well-aware of Russia’s insecurities about being the junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship and are extremely careful to use rhetoric that implies a cooperation between equals under the paradigm of “new great power relations.”
