In the age of great-power competition, where the world doesn’t simply do what the United States asks, action must match rhetoric. Arguably, action matters even more than words, because America’s competitors don’t care what it has to say.
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Tensions persist among today’s great powers—above all the United States and China—and any number of flash points could trigger a conflict between them. These two countries are on a collision course fuelled by the dynamics of a power transition and their competition for status and prestige, and without a change in direction, war between them in the coming decades is not only possible but probable.
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The history of a number of major powers suggests that domestic policies were far more critical to their international standing than any of the clever stratagems, initiatives, ploys, schemes, or interventions they undertook abroad. Indeed, in some cases doing the right thing at home made it possible for the country to survive and recover after completely and disastrously mishandling its relations with others.
The People’s Republic of China operates the largest state-subsidized fishing fleet in the world. The questionable practices of the hundreds of Chinese vessels operating off the west coast of South America illustrate the extent to which competition with an ascendant China is already underway in the maritime domain — and far beyond the South China Sea.
If you had believed the best minds of our times, this was not supposed to happen. But for two decades, China had been winning without fighting, while the US was fighting without winning. Something had to give and it did, in the 2016 American presidential election.
Sooner or later, the world will bend the curve on the coronavirus, and the great power competition will pick up where it left off. The time to start assessing what that means for U.S. foreign and security policy in a post-pandemic world starts now. Washington ought to turn its attention first to those parts of the world most vital to U.S. interests.
Welcome to the age of great-power competition. Much more than a geopolitical bumper sticker, this label describes the foundation of what has become the free world’s new grand strategy, not just for the United States, but for many of our friends, partners and allies as well. It is a competition without precedent. One aspect of this new world disorder—advanced technological competition—is particularly noteworthy. It will be infused throughout the struggle, and if Washington wants to win, America will have to do better.
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.
