America’s Top Competitor Is Not Russia Or China, But Itself
OVER THE past four years, the construct of “great-power competition” has become a pillar of discussions over the future of U.S. foreign policy, largely transcending ideological divisions in Congress and bringing together observers who might disagree strongly over a wide range of questions—how, for example, to strengthen transatlantic ties, handle Iran’s nuclear advances, and generate more sustained action against climate change. While discussion of great-power competition grew during the second half of the Obama administration—particularly with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and a multifaceted deterioration of U.S.-China relations—the construct did not begin to diffuse widely in policymaking and scholarly circles until the arrival of the Trump administration. The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) concluded that “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great-power competition returned.” The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) affirmed that judgment, observing that “[t]he central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by … revisionist powers.”
The United States is relatively less influential than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and China and Russia are increasingly contesting a post-Cold War settlement that they regard to be overly U.S.-centric. A U.S. foreign policy that revolves around competing with those two countries, however, runs at least three risks. First, reflecting a fear that relative U.S. decline will gain momentum if the United States does not contest them ubiquitously, it could place Washington in a reactive posture. The United States might unnerve allies and partners if they conclude that it regards them principally as instruments in a campaign to challenge its chief competitors—as opposed to teammates in the enterprise of constructing a more durable order. Second, proceeding from a framework of great-power competition could induce overreactions to two serious yet manageable competitors, strengthening a Sino-Russian entente whose momentum Washington has long sought to slow. Third, to the extent that such an orientation casts cooperative pursuits as secondary considerations, even strategic concessions, it could undercut America’s ability to manage the transnational challenges, including climate change and pandemic disease, that increasingly undermine Americans’ welfare.
If, in its post-Cold War triumphalism, the United States discounted the capacity of authoritarian countries to contest its conception of modernity, it now risks overstating their competitive potential—and, in so doing, pursuing a foreign policy that is predicated more upon reacting to their decisions than upon renewing its competitive strengths. To develop the confidence to compete with Beijing and Moscow selectively, taking care that their actions do not come to govern its foreign policy, Washington must find a middle ground between the twin perils of complacency and consternation.
TURNING TO China, given the familiar inventory of its competitive assets and the widespread presumption that it seeks global preeminence, it is useful to consider some of its liabilities as well—not to understate Beijing’s challenge, but to suggest that its resurgence is not so overwhelming a force as to justify a China-centric U.S. foreign policy.
Demographic decline, environmental degradation, and inefficient growth all pose significant hurdles to Beijing’s long-term trajectory. So, too, do the steadily growing concentration of power in the hands of its leader, Xi Jinping, and the attendant impact on the Chinese Communist Party’s capacity to engage in prudent decisionmaking. And the growing vigor with which China inveighs against the configuration of the present order betrays not only the inchoateness of its own conception, but also the extent to which, by its own admission, it has been a principal beneficiary; in early 2016, when she was the chair of the foreign affairs committee of China’s National People’s Congress, Fu Ying conceded that the U.S.-led order “has made great contributions to human progress and economic growth.”
But perhaps the greatest obstacle Beijing faces is growing distrust among the advanced industrial democracies that, while not as collectively predominant as they were at the turn of the century, still wield the preponderance of aggregated power. China’s strategic predicament is not, in fairness, wholly of its own making. The speed and scale of its transformation over the past four decades—and especially over the past two, since its accession to the World Trade Organization—would likely have proven disconcerting even if Beijing had made every effort to sustain a “hide and bide” disposition, engaging externally only as necessary to sustain a baseline level of growth. Up until recently, after all, it had strained credulity to regard such a trajectory as plausible. Just over two decades ago, adducing a wealth of evidence, the then-director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies called China “a theoretical power” whose prominence in Western imaginations belied what he assessed to be its marginality in world order: “China matters about as much as Brazil for the global economy. It is a medium-rank military power, and it exerts no political pull at all.”
Granting, then, that it would almost surely have elicited some suspicion, China has nonetheless comported itself in a sufficiently heavy-handed manner over the past two years that, while its share of global exports and its centrality to global supply chains are greater than they were before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, its strategic outlook is more challenged. Stung by international criticism over measures that it took to manage the initial phase of its outbreak—including the silencing of whistleblower doctors such as Li Wenliang—and widespread reports of defects in its shipments of personal protective equipment, it initiated a course of counterproductive foreign policy that endures to the present. It enacted “national security” legislation that undermined Hong Kong’s semiautonomous status, intensified its multifaceted pressure campaign against Taiwan, engaged in clashes across the Line of Actual Control that left twenty Indian soldiers dead, consolidated widely disputed maritime claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea, imposed economic penalties against countries that called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, and countersanctioned prominent European parliamentarians and even think tanks after a Western coalition sanctioned Chinese figures involved in perpetrating human rights abuses against Uighurs.
The consequences of China’s conduct are increasingly apparent: while its partnership with Russia is deepening apace, its relationships with most major powers are either unstable or deteriorating. Long perceived to be muddling along as little more than an abstraction, the Quad—comprising the United States, Australia, India, and Japan—now has clear momentum. The four member countries will not, of course, proceed in lockstep. And it is unclear that shared anxieties over China’s resurgence can impel the grouping indefinitely on their own; the Quad will need to continue undertaking efforts, such as provisioning COVID-19 vaccines to Southeast Asia, that can be justified without invoking Beijing. But China has stimulated what is likely to prove enduring resistance in its own neighborhood.
Further afield, it has imperiled the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with the European Union (EU), over seven years in the making, that was supposed to demonstrate to the incoming Biden administration that China would be able to drive wedges between Washington and Brussels as readily as it did during the Trump administration. While the pact may yet cross the finish line, the European Parliament has halted the ratification process. In addition, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have all taken steps to reduce the role of Huawei in building out their 5G networks. While the EU is unlikely to go as far as the United States in contesting China, it is rethinking the contours of its relationship with Beijing in a manner that would have been difficult to imagine even five years earlier. And, as seen with the September 2021 announcement of the AUKUS security partnership between Washington, London, and Canberra, China will increasingly have to contend with coalitions that bring together Asian and European countries.
A little over a decade ago, the influential international relations scholar Yan Xuetong argued that “the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends.” That China’s self-constraining diplomacy is compelling many major powers to align themselves more closely with the United States creates breathing room for Washington: U.S. foreign policy need not be beholden to the actions of a competitor that is increasingly obstructing its own path.
AS FOR Russia, even if one believes that it is declining or stagnating, it has a range of competitive assets that cement its endurance as a major power: beyond possessing the world’s largest landmass, proven reserves of natural gas, and nuclear stockpile, it ranks fourth in defense expenditures, ninth in population, and eleventh in gross domestic product (GDP). In addition, its status as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council gives it considerable diplomatic leverage.
Moscow has also demonstrated a capacity to challenge Washington in numerous ways: it continues to destabilize and mobilize against Ukraine, supports disintegrationist elements within the EU that seek to dilute transatlantic ties, bolsters a brutal regime in war-torn Syria, conducts hacking operations against U.S. government agencies and corporations, and interferes in U.S. elections with an eye to stoking extant ideological fissures.
And yet, Russia does not have the kind of economic heft that enables China to make global inroads through initiatives such as the Belt and Road or companies such as Huawei. Nor do its scattered disruptions cohere into the kind of sustained challenge that Beijing can mount. Indeed, were China not a significant economic and technological challenger, it is unclear that Moscow’s conduct alone would have yielded the present U.S. focus on great-power competition; it is telling that observers increasingly analyze the competitive challenge that it presents as an adjunct to that which emanates from Beijing.
AS IT considers how to respond to China and Russia, the United States should take heart that its competitive assets are still formidable—often singular. Its demographic outlook is far superior to those of China and Russia, and arguably the most favorable of any major power. Neither the global financial crisis nor the pandemic has dented the dollar’s centrality as a reserve currency. America’s ecosystem of innovation, network of colleges and universities, and capacity to attract extraordinary students, researchers, and entrepreneurs from around the world all remain unrivaled. The United States is the leading producer of both oil and natural gas. It is still the only country that can project force into any corner of the globe. And it has an unparalleled set of alliances, buttressed by a deeply entrenched order.
But these advantages are not self-sustaining; each of them is under some degree of strain. Washington will be best positioned to compete with Beijing and Moscow over the long haul if it demonstrates anew the ability of its democracy to address socio-economic challenges and enlists its allies and partners in an effort to create a more resilient, responsive post-pandemic order—one that can more effectively contain emergencies (such as the next pandemic), mobilize collective action to address systemic threats (such as climate change), and preserve high-level dialogue and cooperative space between advanced industrial democracies and autocratic challengers.
There are many reasons why strategic competition is likely to play out uniquely today, including the high degree of trade and technological interdependence in the global economy, the diminished salience of ideological blocs, and the growing number and severity of transnational challenges that demand a modicum of great-power cooperation. Still, there are at least two lessons the United States might draw from the one experience that it does have with protracted contestation, the Cold War.
The first is that selective competition is more prudent than universal competition. George Kennan observed in a 1967 memoir that when he published his famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, he had assessed there to be only four places besides the Soviet Union where a significant, sustained military buildup could occur: the United States, the United Kingdom, “the Rhine valley with adjacent industrial areas” (Central Europe, roughly), and Japan. He argued that containment’s principal objective should be to prevent them from falling under Communist control. Kennan grew apprehensive, though, as Washington adopted a steadily more encompassing conception of its national interests, expanding well beyond what he had designated to be the core of the postwar order. Christopher Hemmer, professor of international security studies at the Air War College, explains that that evolution was rooted more in psychology than in strategy: the United States came to fear that any Soviet assertion of influence that went unchallenged could undercut its credibility, triggering a systemic erosion of its competitive perch. Washington accordingly ended up contesting Moscow in countries as disparate as Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia.
It was able to do so in part because the Soviet Union was an economically weak challenger: its GDP was only about two-fifths as large as America’s at its peak, and it was not deeply integrated into the global economy. For the better part of the postwar era, indeed, Washington’s margin of preeminence seemed sufficiently pronounced as to obviate the need for prioritization: the Economist mulled near the turn of the twenty-first century that “the colossus is uncertain. Having so much power, it does not know how to behave.” But it would be misguided to interpret the Soviet Union’s collapse as validating post hoc the whole of America’s containment policy: that Washington prevailed neither legitimizes the strategic indiscipline that it exhibited during the Cold War nor suggests that contesting Beijing and Moscow universally would be advisable today.
China’s GDP is already close to three-quarters as large as America’s, and Beijing is an engine of global growth with a commanding position in supply chains. And while Russia is not an economic player of comparable scale, it can both support China’s initiatives and undertake its own efforts to make it appear as if it is outmaneuvering the United States in regions outside the Asia-Pacific, where Washington is looking to implement a long-overdue rebalance. The two of them collectively have ample resources to lure the United States into peripheral contests where its vital national interests are not implicated. In addition, if one believes that they are likely to prove enduring competitors, avoiding a Soviet-style collapse, then Beijing and Moscow could distract Washington for far longer, and at substantially greater economic and strategic cost, than the Soviet Union did. As such, the United States should avoid permissive conceptions of its national interests: its relative decline will require it to be more selective about when, where, and how it contests China and Russia if it is to maintain its composure.
The second lesson that Washington should take from the Cold War is that principally reactive undertakings are unlikely to prove sustainable. Even though NSC-68 is remembered chiefly for its forceful advocacy of containment, the authors of that seminal document appreciated that competition with the Soviet Union would not be tenable as an overarching imperative, only as a nested one: that is, competition had to be waged within—and subordinated to—a forward-looking, constructive effort to garner the support of both the American public and America’s friends. They accordingly urged the United States to pursue “an affirmative program beyond the solely defensive one of countering the threat posed by the Soviet Union.”
In addition to supporting Western Europe’s convalescence with the Marshall Plan, Washington oversaw the establishment of a “hub-and-spoke” security order that undergirded the Asia-Pacific’s recovery. It also presided over the establishment of institutions, the enactment of treaties, and the enshrinement of norms that generated a fledgling postwar order—one that expanded steadily over the course of the Cold War and flourished long after the disappearance of the Soviet challenge that U.S. policymakers had invoked to justify the creation of that system in the first instance. While these efforts strengthened America’s competitive position, Melvyn Leffler notes that they could be justified without invoking Moscow.
THE UNITED States must again formulate an affirmative program. With both China and Russia increasingly aiming to depict it as a terminally declining power—riven by ideological divisions and consumed by strategic anxiety—internal rebuilding and geopolitical initiative would furnish powerful rejoinders to that narrative, especially if Washington were to prove capable of undertaking them without having to cite Beijing and Moscow.
That mandate calls for an updated strategic framework—one that the Biden administration is well-positioned to formulate. Compared with the 2017 NSS, its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance differentiates more clearly between the nature and magnitude of the respective challenges that China and Russia present, emphasizes more strongly the need to cooperate with them to manage transnational challenges, and articulates more forcefully the judgment that the United States will be able to advance its national interests most effectively if it focuses on investing anew in its unique competitive advantages. In addition, key officials in the White House have expressed reservations about great-power competition’s soundness as an orienting framework. Kurt Campbell, for example, the Indo-Pacific coordinator on the National Security Council, warned in October 2020 that “[a] singular focus on great-power politics will obscure and distort other critical and immediate matters on the global stage.” And even though America’s strategic frictions with Beijing and Moscow are intensifying, the Biden administration has placed a premium on sustaining high-level dialogue, nodding to the imperatives of circumscribing competitive dynamics and preserving cooperative possibilities.
The next NDS could also contribute to a recalibration. In written responses that she submitted prior to her confirmation hearing to be deputy secretary of defense, Kathleen Hicks stated her belief that the Pentagon “should review and revise” the 2018 NDS. In May 2020, moreover, she observed that
U.S. debates over “great-power competition” obscure the true state of international affairs that is evolving. Military and economic rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia is important to geopolitics, but so is the degree to which other “great powers,” some with nuclear weapons, seek alternative paths, potentially together. France, Germany, India, and Japan are powers in their own right, for example. This is why alliances and economic partnerships are so important in a world of increasing multipolarity.
It is unsurprising that the framework of great-power competition has come to enjoy its present traction: it reflects growing concern over America’s relative decline while offering the United States a seeming opportunity to dust off a familiar playbook. In a 1994 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in honor of his ninetieth birthday, Kennan warned that Washington was at risk of strategic disorientation; because it had spent the better part of the prior six decades facing down frontal challengers—fascist Japan, Nazi Germany, and then the Soviet Union—he concluded that it would struggle to adapt to a world without a decided antagonist in opposition to which it could articulate its objectives and affirm its values.
The United States debated what exactly it should do with its preponderance of power in the 1990s. For perhaps a decade or so after the attacks of September 11, 2001, meanwhile, counterterrorism provided a ballast for U.S. foreign policy, but a partial one at best. On balance, Washington spent much of the quarter-century after the Cold War searching for an orienting successor to the Soviet Union. It would now appear to have found a durable lodestar: even if China and Russia differ from the aggressive military-cum-ideological challengers that it has confronted in the past, they are estimable competitors. But the United States would be remiss to embark upon a poorly defined, steadily more expansive struggle. The management of strategic frictions should be an important component of U.S. foreign policy, not its supreme object.
THE BIDEN administration has an opportunity to loosen the paradigmatic grip of great-power competition on U.S. foreign policy. And the United States, in turn, has an opportunity to overcome the inertia that has long tethered its pursuit of strategic clarity to the maneuvers of external competitors. In according primacy to its renewal, at home and abroad, it would focus more on steps that are fully within its control to take than on decisions—by China and Russia—that are only partially within its control to shape. It would render itself less vulnerable to distractions and position itself to enhance its long-term strategic competitiveness regardless of what actions Beijing and Moscow take. And it would signal confidence in its regenerative capacity, recalling Samuel Huntington’s judgment that the ultimate mark of a great power is its ability to replenish the foundations of its strength. America’s foremost competitor is ultimately not China, Russia, or a Sino-Russian entente, but itself.
Ali Wyne is a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro practice. He is the author of the forthcoming book America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition (Polity, 2022).
Image: Flickr.