clearer by the day that such challenges undercut global security and—especially in the case of climate change—amplify a wide range of extant threats.
Second, what role should the United States attempt to play in the world? While this question has preoccupied the country for at least eight decades—and, arguably, for many more, if one assesses that the United States became a global, or at least a transpacific power in the late nineteenth century—it provoked an unexpected conversation with the arrival of the Trump administration, which, unlike its postwar predecessors, challenged the judgment that the United States advances its national interests by undergirding a global order. With a deep skepticism of international institutions and multilateral arrangements, the administration embraced an “America First” posture that sometimes appeared to make little distinction between longstanding allies and avowed competitors. It did not so much cause the debates that are occurring in the US foreign policy community as it affirmed their endurance and intractability. In early 2020, Foreign Affairs published an issue with a “Come Home, America?” theme, featuring six responses that weighed the strategic virtues of a more restrained US foreign policy.4 The postwar era has abounded with such conversations, perhaps most notably in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Still, considerations of America’s role in the world have not, until recently, had to contend with the possibility that potent challenges to the resilience of the postwar order would come from its principal architect.
Third, how much effort should the United States put into developing a grand strategy?5 The frequency with which this question is posed has not dulled the vigor with which it is debated. Daniel Drezner, Ronald Krebs, and Randall Schweller argued in a widely discussed article that the absence of “a clear understanding of the distribution of power, a solid domestic consensus about national goals and identity, and stable political and national security institutions” has “rendered any exercise in crafting or pursuing a grand strategy costly and potentially counterproductive.”6 Some critics rejoined that the uncertainty this confluence of phenomena has created has rendered efforts to formulate a grand strategy even more important.7 Complicating this debate, explains Rebecca Lissner, is that, while “most scholars who research and write about grand strategy agree on its basic definition, they employ the concept in markedly different ways.”8
Debates over these three questions occur not only between, but also within, ideological tents that are growing increasingly capacious. Van Jackson observes that “progressives have failed to articulate … how their preferred pattern of foreign policy decisions defines and realizes US interests.”9 Colin Dueck contends, meanwhile, that “[c]onservative nationalists have tended to stress US sovereignty, while conservative internationalists have tended to stress the need for US strategic engagement overseas.”10
But, amid these debates over the contours of US foreign policy, there is at least one high-level judgment that has significant and growing traction in policymaking and analytical circles: namely, that the world has reentered a period of great-power competition. A little over a year before the 2020 presidential election, a member of the National Security Council (NSC) under the Obama administration observed that “there seems to be only one bipartisan consensus in Washington: We are living in a new era of great-power competition. For the United States to win (whatever that means), it must compete—economically, militarily, technologically, and politically.”11
The emergence of a construct that could orient US foreign policy is notable for several reasons: the number and scope of the aforementioned disagreements; the increasing extent to which partisan polarization is undermining America’s ability to pursue a patient, sustained diplomacy that endures from one administration to the next; and the sheer number of crises that compete for policymakers’ attention.
Although observers define the term “great-power competition” in different ways, most interpretations begin with some version of the following judgment: the world’s two foremost authoritarian powers, China and Russia, are increasingly challenging US national interests and undermining the postwar order, individually and in partnership. That conclusion has steadily gained prominence; Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in early 2014, China’s steady militarization of the South China Sea, and the Trump administration’s 2017 national security strategy and 2018 national defense strategy all served as important reinforcements. The judgment grew especially entrenched, though, in the early months of 2020, as a virus that had originated in China’s Hubei Province in December 2019 swiftly morphed into a health-cum-economic emergency of global proportions.
While the COVID-19 pandemic should have occasioned a modicum of great-power cooperation, even if haltingly and begrudgingly, the gravest crisis of the twenty-first century thus far has only intensified mutual distrust, especially between Washington and Beijing but also between Washington and Moscow, as nationalistic impulses in all three capitals increasingly frame cooperative overtures as strategic concessions. Further destabilizing this fraught environment, the United States, China, and Russia are all rapidly modernizing their nuclear arsenals—without, it would appear, having given sufficient thought to the impact of those pursuits on “the delicate calculus of nuclear deterrence.”12
Before considering the analytical underpinnings and prescriptive implications of great-power competition, it is helpful to trace, even if briefly, how this construct came to assume its present centrality in US foreign policy conversations. The end of the Cold War is a good place to start.
A Pyrrhic Victory?
In a September 11, 1990 address before a joint session of Congress, President George H. W. Bush famously proclaimed that “a new world order” was within reach: “A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”13 The August 1991 NSS sustained that prospect, declaring that Americans had “an extraordinary possibility … to build a new international system in accordance with our own values and ideals, as old patterns and certainties crumble around us.”14 A few months later, delivering his first State of the Union address since the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Bush spoke in language befitting the profundity of the moment: “[I]n the past 12 months, the world has known changes of almost biblical proportions.” He went on: “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America.”15
Not all US observers greeted the end of the Cold War with comparable exuberance. In June 1990 a professor at Hofstra University asserted that West Germany and Japan, not the United States, were the true victors, because they had avoided “the treadmills of the arms race and occasional ‘small’ wars.”16 In August, as the disintegration of the Soviet Union was gaining momentum, John Mearsheimer warned that the world would rue the Cold War’s conclusion; that outcome would eliminate the three factors that, in his judgment, had accounted for the absence of a third world war, among them Washington’s and Moscow’s comparable military capabilities and their possession of a vast nuclear stockpile each.17 Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 1993, James Woolsey cautioned that, while the United States had “slain a large dragon,” it now lived “in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” He assessed that those lower-grade threats were more difficult to monitor and counter than the ones posed by a clear antagonist.18 A year later, Robert Kaplan hazarded that the Cold War’s conclusion would unshackle a range of destructive forces that had been overshadowed by, or at least framed within, an overarching struggle between nuclear-armed adversaries. He specifically envisioned “worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger.”19
One concern loomed especially large: had the United States won a Pyrrhic victory? While the implosion of the Soviet Union had eliminated the principal threat to US vital national interests, the central basis for defining America’s
