Stacie E. Goddard
“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” So declared the National Security Strategy that President Donald Trump released in 2017, capturing in a single line the story that American foreign policymakers have spent the last decade telling themselves and the world. In the post–Cold War era, the United States generally sought to cooperate with other powers whenever possible and embed them in an American-led global order. But in the mid-2010s, a new consensus took hold. The era of cooperation was over, and U.S. strategy had to focus on Washington’s contests with its major rivals, China and Russia. The main priority of American foreign policy was clear: stay ahead of them.
Washington’s rivals “are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor,” Trump’s 2017 document explained. As a result, his National Defense Strategy argued the following year, interstate strategic competition had become “the primary concern in U.S. national security.” When Trump’s bitter rival Joe Biden took office as president in 2021, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy changed dramatically. But great-power competition remained the leitmotif. In 2022, Biden’s National Security Strategy warned that “the most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” The only answer, it argued, was to “out-compete” China and constrain an aggressive Russia.
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