Great-Power Competition Isn’t a Foreign Policy

Abstract

The past year has witnessed two major developments that have trained the sights of US policymakers more sharply on America’s chief strategic competitors. First, the conclusion of a protracted US intervention in Afghanistan would seem to offer Russia and China an opening to make strategic inroads across Central Asia. Second, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has raised the specter of a military confrontation between nuclear-armed powers and revealed China to be, while not actively supporting Russian atrocities, then at least concerningly unmoved by them. Both developments have elicited a vigorous debate in Washington over some of the most fundamental questions of US power, policy, and purpose. How efficacious is military force in achieving political objectives? Which of America’s national interests are vital—as opposed to “merely” important or secondary? What role should the United States aim to play in world affairs? This essay does not attempt to answer them. It aims, less ambitiously, to assess the competitive challenges that Russia and China respectively pose to the United States—an assessment that should inform considerations of the aforementioned questions and, therefore, efforts to sketch the contours of US foreign policy in the early years of this decade. The first section notes that while recent developments in world affairs have understandably deepened America’s focus on Russia and China, it would be risky for the United States to treat “great-power competition” as a comprehensive blueprint for foreign policy when, in truth, that construct is at most a partial