WHEN IT became clear that the “Grand Alliance” that defeated the Axis powers during the Second World War would not endure into a postwar “Pax Americana,” American strategists and policymakers were forced to confront the realities—and potential costs—of engaging in an adversarial geopolitical and ideological contest with the Soviet Union. They soon came to understand that defeat would imperil not only the security of the United States but the very “American way of life.” To forge effective strategies to contain the USSR, it would be necessary to contemplate risks and possible losses. With the introduction of nuclear weapons into the mix, it was understood that any clash with the Soviets could be quite destructive in terms of American lives and property. Yet America’s Cold War strategic thinkers did not simply throw up their hands and declare the task to be insoluble. Instead, they came up with the framework for the cost-benefit analysis of superpower competition. From the “concept of tolerable loss” developed by General Robert Richardson to the writings of Herman Kahn, Cold War strategists understood the importance of finding ways of preventing unpleasant outcomes from becoming catastrophic ones. Lampooned by musicians such as Tom Lehrer or spoofed in such films as Dr. Strangelove, this way of thinking about the unthinkable helped to guide U.S. administrations to successfully navigate out of the Cold War with the United States as the sole remaining superpower.

After the collapse of the USSR, American strategists embraced the hope that the application of democratic peace theorems, aided and abetted by globalization, would obviate international rivalries in the twenty-first century by incentivizing rising and resurgent powers to accept their positions within a U.S.-led and managed international system. But countries like China or Russia want to revise that system in directions that the United States does not wish to proceed. While we are nowhere near the conditions of the twentieth-century Cold War, the assessment of the 2018 National Security Strategy—that the world has returned to conditions of “great power competition”—is valid. Yet, while “great power competition” is the new flavor of the month in the U.S. national security community, where are the twenty-first-century versions of Herman Kahn, coldly calculating what and how much America must be prepared to risk to retain its position in the world? For Americans, great power competition remains, for the most part, a bloodless bumper sticker where the United States expects to compete and prevail against its competitors without paying much of a price. The problem, however, is that other great and middle power rivals—China, Russia, Iran, and others—have come to play—and have been prepared not only to pay but also to inflict costs on Washington.

AT THE start of 2020, China’s inability to contain a lethal coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan inflicted the COVID-19 pandemic on the world. And while the virus is not a “weapon of mass destruction” on the scale found in Cold War arsenals, the deaths attributed to the virus in the United States are equivalent to the casualties that would have resulted from the detonation of a small nuclear device in an American city. Whether we like it or not, the coronavirus pandemic is now part and parcel of great power competition, a reality, again, recognized by our competitors. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov complained, “The attempts of some states to use the current situation in order to promote mercenary, momentary interests are evident, to settle scores with undesirable governments or geopolitical rivals.”

The virus has already inflicted its damage on the United States. The challenge for American strategists is how to prevent the pandemic from further weakening the United States and strengthening its rivals. However, there seems to be a curious disconnect on the part of American strategic thinkers, between discussing how great power competition plays out in economic statecraft (the Belt and Road Initiative, the race to build a 5G network) or in gray-zone competition (in cyberspace, for instance) and the unwillingness to address how the damage caused by coronavirus may be turned to American advantage. Perhaps this is a reflection of a lingering idealism (as expressed in spring 2020 by Bill Gates) that while adversaries may choose to hack into each other’s computer systems, when it comes to disease, we can still hold out hopes for a World War II-style grand alliance bringing the nations of the world in common cause to fight a global plague. It may also be that the prevailing narrative—as captured by American expatriate journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams in his reporting from Paris over summer 2020 for The Atlantic—to see the U.S. response to the pandemic as an overwhelming failure while overestimating the success of others in coping with it, shifted the focus away from the more important consideration: not whether the United States has been more successful in dealing with the coronavirus, but whether the virus is inflicting greater costs and challenges for others. As much as many Americans believe that the United States has utterly failed in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, does that justify the assessment of Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Valdai forum in October 2020, that the United States has lost its exceptionality and that the balance of global power is shifting, especially in favor of China and Germany? In other words, have we reached a point where COVID-19 is imposing intolerable or unacceptable losses for the United States—or have other countries reached that point first?

Revisionist powers like China, Russia, and Iran were once considered to be presenting challenges to America in key regions of the world. Some even went so far as to suggest that they were on the verge of displacing the United States. With all our domestic preoccupations, it may be tempting to look inwards but today we have a unique opportunity to pursue geopolitical advantage. A strategist, after all, is called to identify courses of action with a serious chance of leading to satisfactory outcomes—including in times of war or national tragedy. 

IT IS important to separate the generally negative assessment of the response of the U.S. government to the coronavirus pandemic in terms of domestic health policy from how the United States has leveraged COVID-19 in terms of the global balance of power. Indeed, the assessment that the United States has been a geopolitical loser from COVID-19 rests upon two assumptions: that other countries have recovered faster from the deleterious impact of the virus and that the United States squandered a chance at global leadership in responding to the pandemic. During the spring and summer months of 2020, pundits repeatedly predicted that other countries would recover faster from the negative effects of the pandemic than the United States, and that the mantle of global leadership would pass to Beijing or Brussels or even some sort of Sino-European partnership.

None of these prognostications seem as plausible six months later as a second wave of the virus exposes shortcomings all around the world. For all of the talk of how key European and Asian countries would be well along in their recovery, that reality has not occurred. As Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin briefed Putin, “There is no secret that we are running budget deficits and economic growth rates are in decline, just as in other countries.” China claims that it will post a modest rate of growth for 2020—around 2 percent—but this bit of good news does not make up for the various shocks COVID-19 has delivered to the Chinese system.

Of America’s great power competitors, Russia appears to have been hurt the most by the pandemic. Russia itself has been battered by both the first and second waves of the virus, with nearly two million cases that have tested a brittle health care system. After confident announcements over the summer that Russia’s Sputnik-V vaccine would be in place to secure the health of Russians, Putin admitted in the fall that problems resulting from the lack of equipment and industrial capacity would hamper the production and distribution of the vaccine. Moreover, in the wake of a costly energy price war with Saudi Arabia in spring 2020, the pandemic has collapsed global demand for energy, dropping prices below the budgetary break-even point. Russia’s “rainy day” funds can cover budget deficits, but the pandemic will cut into Russian defense spending and on state investments in the new Arctic infrastructure projects on which Putin is hoping Russia’s great power future can be secured.

As for filling the supposed void of U.S. leadership, what events over the course of 2020 have repeatedly demonstrated is that no other major power is willing to bankroll any such aspirations by providing global goods at their own expenses. Pepijn Bergsen of Chatham House has observed the continuing divisions within the European Union and the reluctance of a number of EU states to “sending their taxpayers’ money” to other members of the Union—not to mention to other countries outside the bloc altogether. The European Union cobbled together a joint pandemic response, including the provision of financial aid to member-states, but, as European Commissioner for Budget and Administration Johannes Hahn recently noted in comments to the Financial Times, “This initiative the European Council agreed to in July can really be a game-changer, but it all depends on how well we implement it. We are by no means through.”

China appears to be in stronger economic shape than Europe, but whatever modest gains it has posted are outweighed by the massive collapse in Chinese “soft power” and influence around the world. From the secretive way Beijing concealed the depth and danger of the coronavirus crisis; to its overt attempts to link proffered aid to other countries to acceptance of its political demands; to its ongoing predatory lending practices in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative; other countries, particularly in Europe, have begun to revise their initially rosy expectations that China would become the new responsible stakeholder of the international order. The ratcheting up of tensions with India, the continued clashes with other claimants in the South China Sea, and the increasing repressive actions taken from Hong Kong to Xinjiang have fueled concerns about Chinese ambitions for the future. Significantly, over the last several months, European and Asian partners of the United States have begun to take much more seriously questions about vital supply and technology chains that connect the continent to Chinese sources and how these dependencies may create unwelcome vulnerabilities.

Thus, the pandemic has made Russia more susceptible to U.S. sanctions pressure, while common concerns about Chinese activity are providing a new rationale for rebuilding and reconnecting ties with the United States. European partners who were envisioning a greater equidistance from the United States are now, in the wake of the pandemic, looking to secure investment and supply chains across the Atlantic than with the dragon of the East.

Among the revisionist states, none has taken the battering of the Islamic Republic. There are lessons here for the Biden presidency that should not be ignored. Despite all the lamentations, Trump’s Iran policy has had its share of successes precisely because it shattered long-standing assumptions. Many in the foreign policy establishment insisted that should Trump abrogate the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, America would stand alone, incapable of multilateralizing its economic sanctions. But in the end, the European leaders complained, and the European businessmen complied. The next pillar of wisdom to fall was the notion that should America walk away from the deal, Iran would rush to the bomb. The mullahs have accelerated aspects of their nuclear activities, but the Islamic Republic is still years away from having a bomb. The sabotage of Iran’s nuclear installations by unknown actors have moved the atomic goalpost further out of Tehran’s reach. And finally, the notion that Trump’s killing of Iran’s famed Revolutionary Guard commander Qasem Soleimani would spark a war. Instead, it provoked a missile attack on an unoccupied portion of a U.S. military base in Iraq with sufficient forewarning from Tehran.

The American-imposed sanctions have devastated Iran’s economy which shrank by 7.6 percent in 2019 and another 6 percent in 2020. Its oil exports have declined from 2.5 million barrels in the aftermath of the Iran deal to 133,000. President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged in August 2020 that the American sanctions have caused Iran a loss of $214 billion dollars in revenue. Trump has succeeded in draining Iran’s treasury as no president before him.

Since his election in 2013, Rouhani had an idea about how to revive Iran’s economy while keeping its politics quiet. He would not engage in structural reforms that could spark unrest. Despite its ideological professions, the regime relies on an elaborate welfare state to keep its sullen citizens at bay. An arms control agreement, he thought, would pave the way for Western commerce and investments. Iran would dispense with sanctions, export its oil, and retrieve its frozen funds. None of this was sound economic planning in a nation saddled with a bloated budget, onerous subsidies, and rampant corruption. But this was less about economics than politics. And then it all came crashing down once Trump reinstated the sanctions. To be fair, even before the re-imposition of sanctions, most international investors were not rushing back to a country that was committed to destabilizing the Middle East in name of Islamic salvation. 

Iran’s failure to resuscitate its economy through foreign subsidy has led Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to push forth his crackpot theories. “I strongly believe that the key and remedy to the country’s problems stands in promoting internal production.” Once more, this is more about politics than economics. The notions of self-sufficiency and self-reliance have been hallmarks of the regime’s rhetoric since its conception in 1979. But, for Khamenei, if Iran is to remain a pristine revolutionary state then it has to segregate itself from the global economy. He has even spoken of dispensing with oil, a commodity whose price is determined by factors beyond any single nation’s control. By relying on internal markets and trade with neighboring states such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is to be immunized from Western pressures. The problem with this theory is that Iran needs oil revenues and it cannot provide for a nation of eighty-five million people by relying on its own markets and the local states. Khamenei’s ideas can only impoverish an already stressed nation.

In the midst of all this, Iran was one of the first countries to be affected by coronavirus—which its leaders have done much to mismanage. Even the unreliable statistics coming out of Iran are horrific—the country is coping with over 600,000 cases and 35,000 deaths (as of November 2020)—but some sources believe that the real number may be three times higher than official statistics. Khamenei and the hardliners have used a variety of conspiracy theories to explain the spread of the contagion and the means of addressing it. Khamenei has led the charge by claiming that the virus “is specifically built for Iran using genetic data of Iranians, which [the United States] obtained through different means.” And as for the cure, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, recently displayed a device called Mustaan that he claimed could detect the coronavirus. In the meantime, the pandemic continues to spread with spikes in infections and deaths, with Mohammadreza Zafarghandi, the head of the Medical Council, warning that Iran is now facing a “catastrophic mortality rate.”

The pressure of sanctions has had an impact on Iran’s imperial footprint. Democratic Party leaders once assured that no matter how stressed its economy, Iran would sustain its foreign policy adventurism. In the past year, Iran has reduced its support to militias in Iraq and Syria as well as its most prized and lethal protégé, Lebanon’s Hezbollah. As a Syrian fighter in an Iran-backed armed group confessed, “The golden days are gone and will never return … Iran doesn’t have enough money to give us.” The killing of General Soleimani has also hampered Iran’s operational capability. He was unique in terms of his expertise in mass murder and ability to forge agreements among bickering militia leaders—his absence now complicates Iran’s proxy war strategy throughout the region.

In the meantime, the Sunni world is sorting itself out against Iran. The looming threat of the Islamic Republic has already pushed the Gulf rulers toward Israel in terms of intelligence cooperation. For long, the received wisdom suggested that the plight of the Palestinians would thwart formal diplomatic ties between Jerusalem and Arab capitals. Yet the region has once more surprised Washingtonians set in the way. Both the United Arab Emirates and, more importantly, Bahrain have now formalized ties with Israel. The latter is of particular interest given its status as a virtual Saudi protectorate, as it would not have made such a leap without Riyadh’s approbation. More such normalizations are likely to occur, as Iran sustains its animosities while other states in the region decide to pursue mutual benefit with Israel, especially in terms of trade and development.

Today, the Islamic Republic is a regime without a constituency. During the past two years, Iran has been rocked by a series of demonstrations that must have frightened the regime. Unlike the previous protest movements, the recent spate of demonstrations are not upper-middle-class urbanites complaining about political repression and Islamic cultural restrictions. This is now the revolt of the poor, the constituency in whose name the revolution was waged; a cohort that was supposed to be tied to the regime by piety and patronage. In 2018, when the regime tinkered with fuel subsidies, massive protests engulfed all of its major cities. A year later marchers took to the streets and chanted “Death to Khamenei,” and “The clerics should get lost.” Nor were the regime’s imperial ventures beyond reproach as the demonstrators yelled, “Leave Syria, think about us!” and “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran.” The guardians of the revolution had assumed that imperialism would burnish their credentials at home and help deflect attention from their misrule. It appears that, unlike the mullahs, most Persians don’t wish to spend their meager resources on Arab civil wars—not especially when a pandemic is raging through the country and the related economic impact threatens further impoverishment. U.S. sanctions were not enough to cause a collapse in Iranian power; it took the impact of the coronavirus to change the regional balance of power in a direction that actually favors U.S. interests.

AMERICANS CONTINUE to suffer the ravages of COVID-19, but America’s human and economic losses have not fundamentally changed the global balance of power. Instead, after the “plague year” of 2020, the United States is paradoxically in a much stronger position. The revisionist powers are not on the verge of displacing the United States. Indeed, through their truculence and aggression, they have created regional blockings against them. nato stands more robust against the Russian Federation than in the past and America’s European allies are more inclined to view Beijing in negative terms. Asian countries are banding closer together and with America, given China’s belligerence in the South China Sea and along its disputed frontier with India. In the Middle East, the Gulf Arab states and Israel are drawing closer together to thwart Iran’s malign influences.

Predictions that Russia or China would take the lead in the fight against the pandemic—especially in the provision of a vaccine—have not panned out. Instead, countries around the world are clamoring for forging new trade, technological, and health alliances with the United States. Coronavirus has created a geopolitical window for renovating America’s position in the international system—one which Washington should exploit.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a Professor at the Naval War College and the Editor of Orbis. The views expressed here are his own.

Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Last Shah: America, Iran and the Collapse of the Pahlavi Dynasty.