The Foreign Service Journal, June 2021

40 JUNE 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL China’s rise as a comprehensive peer competitor of the United States became an incontrovertible fact with the ascension of President Xi Jinping to power in 2013. early 19th century when Napoleon’s France took the continent by storm, overreached and then was forced into retrenchment by its great power rivals Britain, Russia and Prussia. Following the unification of German states under Bismarck, World War I and World War II reflected, at the most fundamental level, the reverberations of great power competition between a rising Germany and its continental rivals, most notably France, Britain and Russia. The world wars also marked the definitive rise of the United States as a new great power on the block. The Cold War, which remains the central geostrategic reference for the baby boomer generation in power today, was characterized by the U.S.-led democratic West against the Communist East bloc, led by the Soviet Union. That Moscow explicitly sought, as a matter of ideology and policy, to destroy the Western system and to replace it with global communism, turned Cold War GPC into a kind of life-or-death struggle that shaped nearly every aspect of our engagement with the world. The collapse of the USSR and the emergence of the so-called “new world order” saw the United States suddenly—and tem- porarily—thrust into the role of sole remaining superpower. In the absence of clear great power competition and, by extension, a clear set of strategic priorities, it became a time for recalibra- tion and reconfiguration—more disorder than order. The 9/11 terror attacks unleashed the “global war on terror,” which played a stopgap role in organizing our global engagement for the bal- ance of this transition. Reemergence of Overt Great Power Competition in the 21st Century China’s rise as a comprehensive peer competitor of the United States became an incontrovertible fact with the ascen- sion of President Xi Jinping to power in 2013. Xi ended China’s long era of low-profile strategic patience (the so-called “peace- ful rise”), unmasking Beijing’s broader ambition to equal and even to overtake the United States across all dimensions of power by 2049. China’s deeply ambivalent approach to the U.S.- led liberal international order—using elements of that order to achieve its more narrow national aims, while also building parallel structures of its own—only reinforced the fact that GPC was upon us. At the same time, Russia’s provocative behavior as a wounded power intent on reasserting its sphere of influ- ence, undermining the liberal international order and harassing the United States and its allies, signaled a broader reversion to historical mean. Former President Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy marked an overt, even bare-knuckled recognition of this fact. The document described a “competitive world” in which “China and Russia challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and pros- perity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.” The NSS further emphasized: “The competitions and rivalries facing the United States are not passing trends or momentary prob- lems. They are intertwined, long-term challenges that demand our sustained national attention and commitment.” Whatever one’s view of the nuances and subplots, GPC had returned in earnest. The Biden administration is unlikely to alter this underly- ing structure, even as it seeks to open the strategic aperture to include critical global issues—climate change being the central one—that will require great power cooperation as well as com- petition . This is because there is now broad consensus across the U.S. political spectrum about the implications of China’s rise and Russia’s continuing effort to find its footing after the breakup of the USSR, and the challenges they (separately and together) pose to the liberal international order, in particular, and to democracy and freedommore broadly. The Biden administration’s Interim National Security Stra- tegic Guidance document, published in March, underscores this basic policy continuity: “China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive. It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system. Russia remains determined to enhance its global influence and play a disruptive role on the world stage.” Summing up, the Biden strategic guidance document pro- ceeds to set forth an agenda that “will strengthen our enduring