it is succeeding? What would durable strategic arrangements with China and Russia entail? Even a simple list of foundational questions would be far more exhaustive.
It is plain enough to see that the United States confronts a more competitive external landscape. It is more vexing to decide how Washington should adapt. There is a gap, in brief, between description and prescription: while great-power competition captures an important element of geopolitics, articulations of that construct generally do not do enough to illuminate the challenges the United States should prioritize in competing with China and Russia—or the trade-offs it should accept to that end. Many envision instead an all-encompassing contest that will occur in perpetuity, broaching virtually every geographic theater and functional domain.
The management of strategic tensions with China and Russia will be essential to shaping America’s role in the world. But a foreign policy that is predicated upon contesting their actions risks being reactive. Rather than relying upon Beijing and Moscow to furnish its strategic objectives, Washington should identify the contours of the order it would like to help bring into existence alongside its allies and partners—and only then, having formulated an affirmative vision, consider where selective competition with those two countries might contribute to its execution. Selective, because the United States should not and need not compete with them everywhere. Selective, because it will be unable to advance its own vital national interests if it concludes that cooperation with China and Russia on transnational challenges is impossible and that the pursuit of collaborative possibilities signifies competitive weakness. And selective, because neither the American public nor America’s friends will be inclined to participate in an unrestricted competition with Beijing and Moscow.
Whether the United States will be able to formulate a more forward-looking conception of foreign policy remains to be seen. There is little doubt, though, that discussion of great-power competition will continue to grow. There was already a prodigious volume of commentary about it in October 2019, when I submitted the first draft of my book proposal. That volume has increased steadily over the past two and a half years and, as observers assess the Biden administration’s unfolding approach to strategic competition, it will surely continue to grow.
Since I have already mentioned both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, I hasten to note that I have tried to avoid writing a partisan text. There are, of course, likely to be important differences between a Republican-led and a Democrat-led foreign policy. Considering, though, that concerns over China and Russia are growing on a bipartisan basis, the concept of great-power competition is likely to influence America’s approach to world affairs for at least the next few decades. It accordingly demands rigorous nonpartisan examination.
While I have attempted to offer several reasons why I believe that it would be mistaken to adopt great-power competition as the guiding framework for US foreign policy, I am not looking to convince readers of any one critique. I hope, more modestly, that, if they consider those critiques in their totality, they will appreciate the importance of interrogating that framework more rigorously and will consider different ways of conceptualizing how the United States understands its role in the world. One senses in the embrace of great-power competition a relief of sorts that Washington can once more define itself on the basis of its challengers, as it did most notably during the Cold War. There are, however, more compelling and sustainable ways for it to cultivate its identity, two of which readily come to mind: first, reaffirming the promise of its democratic example; and second, contributing to an order that can better withstand the stresses of globalization. The United States is unlikely to recover the degree of preeminence it inherited after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. If it focuses on those two undertakings, though, there is every reason to believe that it will be able to reinvent itself: America’s great-power opportunity is to play a role in the world that will enhance its strategic position no matter what decisions China, Russia, or any other competitor makes.
Fredericksburg, VA
December 15, 2021
Notes to Preface
1 1. One example is Thomas J. Wright’s All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
2 2. Uri Friedman, “The New Concept Everyone in Washington Is Talking About,” Atlantic (August 6, 2019).
3 3. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 21.
1 Searching for a Post-Cold War Ballast
The final draft of this book was completed in fall 2021, shortly after the Taliban stormed back to power in Afghanistan. Though most observers had anticipated that the drawdown of US forces would encourage the organization to reassert itself, the speed with which it advanced—and with which the Afghan army collapsed—stunned even the most pessimistic of them: on August 15, just nine days after it had captured its first provincial capital, the Taliban entered the presidential palace in Kabul.
The outcome elicited a heated debate in Washington. Some observers argued that the United States should have maintained a small military presence in Afghanistan to hold the Taliban at bay. Others concluded that it should have accepted defeat and cut its losses far sooner. Some feared that the Taliban’s resurgence would undermine US credibility in world affairs. Others believed that it was the decision to stay in Afghanistan for so long that called America’s judgment into question. Some warned that America’s departure would only exacerbate instability in the Middle East and make it harder for Washington to rebalance to the Asia-Pacific.1 Others assessed that it was precisely this kind of argument that had kept the United States preoccupied while China’s resurgence was transforming world affairs. Although America’s intervention in Afghanistan has concluded, the reckoning over what lessons Washington should learn is likely just beginning.2
The Rise of a Unifying Construct
That reckoning, in turn, both shapes and reinforces a much broader debate US observers have been having about the foreign policy that Washington should pursue in a world of growing disorder. While the debate itself is longstanding, it has acquired growing urgency as America’s relative decline has become more apparent and as domestic political currents have called into question some of the assumptions that had long guided the country’s engagement abroad. Jessica Mathews observes that “the shock of failure in America’s longest war may provide an open moment to reexamine the lengthy list of earlier interventions and to reconsider US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era more broadly.”3 Consider three questions.
First, how should it respond to particular challenges, geographic and functional? Turning to the former, China has emerged as an increasingly formidable competitor, especially within the Asia-Pacific, but increasingly beyond. Russia has hived off territory in its near abroad; has promulgated disinformation campaigns aimed at undercutting the internal cohesion of western democracies; and has supported Bashar al-Assad’s brutal rule in Syria. The Middle East is plagued by civil wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria; by fragile security environments in Afghanistan and Iraq; and by a resurgent Islamic State. The European Union is contending with disintegrationist forces from within and strategic pressures from without. North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities are advancing. The scope and complexity of this problem set raise other questions. How should the United States apportion its strategic equities across different regional theaters, and how can it achieve more balanced burden-sharing security arrangements with its longstanding European and Asian allies and partners?
On the functional front, how should the United States incorporate transnational challenges such as climate change, pandemic disease, and cyberattacks into its assessment of today’s geopolitical landscape? Because it is harder to put
