By Andrew Latham
The concept of “great-power competition” (GPC) is now firmly entrenched at the heart of U.S. defense thinking. Indeed, what was an arcane academic term just a few years ago has now achieved the status once enjoyed by the term “containment.” It has become the key organizing principle around which foreign policy debates revolve and foreign policy itself is conducted.
But the frame of great-power competition is deeply problematic.
First, as a description of the current international order, it distorts as much as it reveals. The GPC frame is in effect an amalgam of geopolitical assumptions and strategic prescriptions cobbled together out of the raw materials furnished by two supposedly analogous eras: the inter-war period and the Cold War.
From the 1930s, adherents to the GPC framework have derived the core belief that democratic recession, deglobalization and the disintegration of international order encouraged the emergence of authoritarian revisionists bent on overturning the existing international order. From the post-war era, they have smuggled in the view that the United States is once again able to renovate the institutional architecture of world order in ways that reflect its interests and values while addressing the unique challenges of the current moment. And from the Cold War, they have inherited the belief that the U.S. in engaged in a full-spectrum, existential competition with a superpower adversary.
The result is a kind of geopolitical pastiche — a picture of contemporary international order that combines the sense of existential dread associated with the interwar years with order-building hubris of the immediate post-war years and the pervasive anxiety that defined the Cold War. The fundamental problem with the GPC frame is that it takes an obvious truth – that great powers compete with each other under conditions of anarchy – and, through misanalogy, distorts that truth in ways that paint a profoundly misleading portrait of the contemporary international order.
This piece was originally published in The Hill on September 29, 2022. Read more HERE.