In his timely essay, “The Return of Great Power Competition,” Jerry Hendrix makes the case the United States is ill-prepared to meet the challenges of the emerging multi-polar world order. Brief periods of bipolar great power competition and unipolar dominance—like that of the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—have been exceptional. The return of great power competition on multi-polar axes is very much a return to the historical norm.

But a return to the norm does not mean the nation’s broad historical, cultural, and political commitment to liberalism has become, as Hendrix posits, “the primary complication facing US foreign policy as we complete our transition” to renewed great power competition. Nor should the return of great power competition be characterized as an ideological contest that, for example, once defined the faceoff between communism and democratic capitalism. The coming era of great power competition is with adversaries who intend to achieve their goals through threats, armed force, and fear. The real complication is that the United States has failed to develop a durable national security strategy to confront authoritarian regimes that seek to challenge the territorial integrity and sovereignty of established states, upend the liberal world order, and defy the rule of international law. 

Enduring Interests

Hendrix argues individualism and human rights—that is, the “idea” of America—supplants what other nations identify as their “eternal and perpetual” interests. This ideological bent, or as Hedrix calls it “the philosophical edge,” to the discussion obscures the fact the United States does have enduring national interests in maintaining global peace and stability, encouraging free and open commerce, and promoting liberalism and the rule of law. These enduring interests have as their nexus the promulgation and the execution of national security policy. While some argue Washington’s policy is inconsistent—whipsawed by politics and personalities—no policies of long-standing have ever been adopted that did not serve the nation’s enduring interests. 

The challenges of new great power competition cannot be understated, but neither should they be seen as having “rocked the United States” to its “back foot.” For all the inherent instability and unpredictability of great power competition in this new era, this competition has fully unmasked America’s adversaries. It should disabuse even zealots from advocating new policies of engagement, globalization, and forbearance. The post-Cold War era and optimistic predictions of enduring peace and stability in Europe ended the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Putin’s ill-conceived assault on the sovereignty of a neighboring state dispelled any idea of Russian comity in Europe. China, for its part, has made no secret of its aim to displace the United States as the leader of the liberal world order, in favor of a new order sympathetic to the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party. The United States must now confront these two major axes of power threatening America’s national interests. 

Check Russia

Hendrix argues the United States slashed military power and pursued a policy of democratic expansionism that “invited the current competition” with rising powers China and Russia. This argument ignores the fact these “authoritarian, autocratic states,” in pursuit of their interests, would naturally be in conflict not only with the United States but with the very idea of a liberal world order. It was the return to the norm of a multi-polar geostrategic system that resulted, ineluctably, in competition.

In this renewed competition, proponents of a re-styled policy of containment of Russia may harbor hopes of returning to the future. But there is now no need to contain the spread of a debunked Marxist-Leninist ideology. Putin is, instead, animated by neo-Tsarist imperialism to use force to reconstitute his romanticized version of Russia and empire at the cost of the sovereignty and territory of states from Eastern Europe to the Baltic. His ambitions put autocratic Russia not only in competition with the United States but with what Hendrix notes is a “broad alliance structure made up of self-determined democracies,” with both military (NATO) and economic (EU) power. This US-led alliance must now confront aggression and check Russia’s intent and capability to threaten the stability of the Euro-Atlantic area and animate its proxies in regional conflicts. 

Constrain China

Realist international theory scholar John Mearsheimer once averred that no nation has done more to enable the rise of a peer competitor than the United States has done with China. A series of US policy-making missteps legitimized the regime in Beijing and enabled the rise of modern, autocratic China. The expectations that engagement with Beijing—opened to the democratic and financial institutions and markets of the West—would liberalize China’s leanings, democratize its rule, and make it a true free trade partner proved forlorn hopes. 

Instead, the Chinese party state, led by president for life Xi Jinping, is convinced that the United States has shaped the international order only to ensure America’s hegemony. Unlike Russia, which seeks to compete with the established global order, China fully intends to replace the liberal world order it sees as being wholly inimical to its interests and an impediment to larger ambitions to dominate the Asia-Pacific region. As such, it should not take a Keenan “Long Telegram” warning to alert US leadership to a predatory, revanchist, and militaristic China. US leaders must recognize the need for an over-arching strategy to constrain Beijing’s vaulting ambitions and face China as a peer competitor that threatens America’s enduring interests.

Use All National Means

Leaders aiming to shape security policy for this new era of great power competition will be challenged to craft strategies with staying power. In addition, American strategies that aim to check Moscow’s adventurism and to constrain Beijing’s ambitions must integrate all the levers of national power—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic means. 

The United States can ill afford to cede its leadership role when its national interests and the security of its allies and partners are at stake. 

In broad strokes, this whole of government initiative will require a renewed focus on, and the expansion of, US alliances and partnerships; control of technical, scientific, and manufacturing information combined with defense of the broader US infostructure; a commitment to nuclear and conventional military force modernization and preparedness; and an expansion and hardening of the US economy and enforcement of free trade conventions. Then, too, the ways in which these means are employed, as the following examples will illustrate, must be affordable, scalable, sustainable, and, at times, unconventional.

America cannot bear the full weight of an arms race with this era’s great powers and their proxies. The cost and complexity of modern weapons systems require long-term funding that will prove unsustainable as the nation’s budget deficits continue to mount. In addition, the nation no longer has the manufacturing base to forge the weapons of war on a pace with China. China, for example, boasts the world’s largest ship building industry. That industry has sent to sea the world’s largest navy, coast guard, and armed merchant fleet, the People’s Maritime Militia.

But the United States need not be the only arsenal of the democracies that confront the Russia-China axis. Hendrix is correct when he notes that combining the economic and military power of democratic nations “creates an aggregated force that also exceeds that of the new authoritarian bloc.” Alliances, then, are in America’s interest and essential to global peace and stability. 

Moreover, authoritarian states understand the collective power of defensive alliances. Robust defensive alliances and partnerships change the calculus in Moscow and Beijing when considering the risk and reward of armed aggression. The United States, then, must continue to support pro-democracy and open trade alliances and security partnerships in the Euro-Atlantic region and seek to develop the Partnership for Peace program along NATO’s southern flank. Similarly, Washington ought to expand the breadth of its Indo-Pacific initiatives. 

US policymakers would do well to assess capabilities to share or withhold information and protect its competitive value. Future policy should restrict the exchange of technical, engineering, and manufacturing information related to national security industries and enact strict export controls. It should also reappraise practices that provide hundreds of thousands of student visas to the citizens of competing states and their proxies. The time has also come for the United States to “re-imagine” robust capabilities to defend the infostructure from manipulation, degradation, and outright assault. Unheard of in the Cold War era, the contest for control of the infosphere is now as compelling as the need to dominate the air-land-sea-space battlefield. 

This new emphasis on information technologies cannot come at the expense of the Cold War prioritization of nuclear weapons but must be paired with a renewed deterrence strategy. National security policy to counter aggression and the threats posed by nuclear states must be backed by a powerful and credible nuclear deterrent. Most of the US nuclear arsenal dates to the Cold War—no nuclear warheads have been built since then. Modernization efforts are years behind schedule and a crash program to redress this failing is imperative now.

US conventional forces must also be modernized and with greater emphasis on new capabilities. Combat in Ukraine, the Black Sea, and the Red Sea are evidence of the new warfare environment of the twenty-first century. Cheap, plentiful drones; long-range, long-dwell, unmanned, and autonomous platforms; and AI-driven sensor-to-shooter systems are among the new weapons platforms now needed. The nation must be prepared to field a military force with asymmetric capabilities that deny its adversaries the power of numbers.

Finally, national economies are the driving force of great powers. Without the unparalleled growth of the Chinese economy, Beijing could not have enlarged and modernized its military forces. The United States needs to regain its competitive economic advantages by rebuilding the base of American manufacturing. There is a pressing need to derisk critical economic sectors, like advanced electronics, by restoring, reshoring, and friendshoring national security industrial capacity. In this economic competition, the United States will also need to disentangle its supply chain from producers in China. Literally, thousands of essential items are at risk when Chinese firms are the major suppliers.

Leadership and Will

Hendrix claims the current generation of US leaders “lack the personal experience, or even an intellectual grounding, to deal with the emerging challenges” of a return to great power competition. His assessment, shaped by the observation that today’s leaders “matured during a unipolar moment” of US dominance, is only partially correct. Today’s leaders were schooled in the Obama administration that preferred to “lead from behind,” and eschewed a role to be at forefront in world affairs.

The leadership challenges Hendrix notes are also yoked to the recurring call to isolationism in American politics. Obama’s strategy of leading from the rear and Trump’s “America First” mantra signal an aversion to unilateralism in foreign affairs on one hand, and an impulse to retreat from globalism, on the other. The problem, of course, is America’s failure to lead from the front or the rear leaves a vacuum behind. The United States can ill afford to cede its leadership role when its national interests and the security of its allies and partners are at stake. 

This lack of leadership is exacerbated by partisanship that impedes the formulation of and implementation of an enduring and effective national security strategy. During the last era of great power competition—the bipolar confrontation between the US-led West and the Soviet Union—a broad consensus actuated national security. Politics stopped at the water’s edge. Consistent, determined, and resolute leadership enacted the strategy of containment, and all the means of national power were aligned to policies consistent with that strategy. Bipartisan support approved treaties of alliance, communicated a message of solidarity, funded a robust national defense, and spurred the growth of the American economy that made it all possible. There is no such consensus today. 

Hendrix has suggested “all that was shall be again.” The United States can, in fact, craft and implement policies needed to defend its enduring national interests from its adversaries, in the same way American leaders once crafted policies to contain communism and undercut the Soviet nations enslaved by its false promises. 

US policymakers have the means at hand to achieve the ends of confining and constraining the aggression and ambitions of great power competitors. Now, leaders must find the will to make it so.