America's Great-Power Opportunity. Ali Wyne
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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 a nation-state “face” on them, they do not fit as readily into traditional international relations frameworks, even as it grows 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