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Irving Kristol, considered the godfather of neoconservatism, once noted that a neoconservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged by reality some of the loudest voices proclaiming an era of great-power competition are just liberal internationalists who have been mugged by the reality of power politics. In layman’s terms, this means that with the United States in relative decline, other states are increasingly willing to take actions they would not have during the 1990s, whether it’s Russian intervention in Syria, Chinese claims to the South China Sea, or European steps to circumvent U.S. In the parlance of political science, other states are beginning to balance against the United States. global predominance that started with the collapse of the Soviet Union-is ending.

The unipolar moment-the three-decade period of U.S.

Instead, the “return of great-power competition” is essentially an easier way of admitting that the United States is in relative decline. As the Georgetown University professor Daniel Nexon recently put it, “competition among great powers cannot return, because it never really went away.” But the notion that it is new-or that it is returning as if history were taking its revenge-is somewhat absurd. Whether one is talking about 16th-century rivalries among empires, the imperialist scramble for Africa, or the Cold War struggle between the capitalist and communist blocs, states have always jockeyed for power and influence. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in June 2017 that a “return to great-power competition … places the international order under assault,” while the National Security Strategy released later that year noted that “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” Since then, its growth has been exponential.Īs a description, great-power competition is accurate competition among the great powers is a defining feature of the international environment. Though the Obama administration’s 2015 National Military Strategy warned of states “attempting to revise key aspects of the international order,” it was not until the Trump era that the term itself entered widespread use. It is a mark of how recently the notion of great-power competition has entered the Washington lexicon that someone who had fallen into a coma just five years ago might never have heard the phrase. If great-power competition is instead a means to an end, it’s not at all clear what those ends are. Yet precisely because it is so ill-defined, great-power competition as a strategy-that is to say, competition for its own sake-also has the potential to be highly dangerous. It seems that once again-just as it did during the global war on terrorism in the mid-2000s or when styling the United States as the indispensable nation in the 1990s-Washington’s strategic community is again reorienting itself around a new, poorly theorized model of the world and of America’s place in it. Since the possible answers to these questions range from the entirely reasonable (i.e., that Western states should engage in collective defense of liberal democracy) to the dangerous and utterly unrealistic (i.e., that Washington should be pursuing regime collapse in Beijing), it’s hardly something we should ignore.

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Indeed, most commentators skip right past the big questions (Why are we competing? Competing over what?) and go straight to arguing about how to achieve victory. Unfortunately, for all that great-power competition has been Washington’s favorite buzzword in recent years, it remains frustratingly poorly defined. “We must prepare together for a long-term strategic competition,” Biden told conference attendees, adding that “competition with China is going to be stiff.” “We are looking forward, together.” Yet one big plank of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is apparently sticking around: great-power competition. “We are not looking backward,” Biden promised. “America is back,” blared headlines following President Joe Biden’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, an address clearly designed to draw a line under the Donald Trump presidency and mark a new start in trans-Atlantic relations.

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