The Foreign Service Journal, June 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2021 39 Alexis Ludwig is currently on the faculty of the National War College. Prior to that, he served from 2018 to 2020 as deputy permanent representative at the U.S. Mission to the Organization of American States. He joined the Foreign Service in 1994 and has spent most of his career in overseas missions in the Western Hemisphere and East Asia. Kelly Keiderling is a Senior Foreign Service officer who recently served as deputy commandant at the National War College. She was U.S. ambassador to Uru- guay from 2016 to 2019. During her 30-year career, she’s been assigned overseas to Latin America, post-Soviet Russia, and Anglophone African countries. InWashington, D.C., she has served in the bureaus of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Near Eastern Affairs, Global Talent Management, and Education and Cultural Affairs. The views in this article are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of State, Department of Defense or the U.S. government. GPC— Meaningful Concept or MisleadingConstruct? In this thought piece, two Senior FSOs offer contrasting takes on the phrase widely used to frame foreign policy today. BY AL EX I S LUDWI G AND KE L LY KE I DERL I NG TAKE ONE GPC: National Security Strategy’s “Deep Structure” BYALEXIS LUDWIG ON GREAT POWER COMPETITION TODAY FOCUS T he reemergence early in the 21st century of so- called “great power competition” (GPC) as the central organizing principle for U.S. engagement with the world is yet another instance of there being nothing new under the sun. It amounts to the resurfacing of what might be called the “deep struc- ture” of national security strategy, a structure that has shaped and informed much of the conduct of international relations throughout history. GPC has expressed itself in diverse forms— with different players competing in different ways in different parts in the world—but it has never really gone away. The great power competition of today is characterized by the dramatic rise of Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China as a peer competitor of the United States and, to a lesser extent, by the revanchism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Napoleon’s Delphic prophecy is telling from the vantage point of our own time: “When China rises, the world will tremble” (Quand la Chine s’éveillera, le monde tremblera). The slow-moving shock waves associated with China’s undeniable rise and accompanying geo- political assertiveness are a manifestation of competition that is already well underway. A Constant in History “Great power competition” made its inaugural appear- ance in the first formal work of Western history ever written. In History of the Peloponnesian War , Thucydides describes the prolonged competition and clash between the city-states of Sparta and Athens more than 2,500 years ago. Closer to our age, full-blown great power competition flowered in Europe in the