Thomas F. Lynch III
The dominant geostrategic framework of international relations today is that of a Great Power competition (GPC) among three rivalrous, globally dominant states: the United States, Russia, and China. After more than two decades of mainly cooperation and collaboration, they drifted into de facto competition at the end of the 2000s.1 By the middle of the 2010s, their undeclared but obvious rivalry intensified.2 Fully acknowledged GPC arrived in late 2017 when the United States published its National Security Strategy and declared a formal end to the 25-year era of U.S.-led globalization and active American democratization initiatives.3
This article focuses on the vital interactions of the three contemporary Great Powers. How will their relative power evolve? Where will they compete, and how will this impact geostrategic norms, institutions, and interstate alignments? Finally, will their competition spark direct—and likely catastrophic—armed conflict anytime soon?
Predicting the future always is a fraught endeavor. It is an increasingly difficult task if one defines the future in terms of decades or generations. As a result, this article analyzes the future of contemporary Great Power competition for the remainder of the 2020s. It does so with frequent explicit references to his- torical patterns—touchpoints—associated with past multistate GPCs during the nation-state period that began in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.
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