Making Net Assessment Work: Evaluating Great-power Competition

Abstract

Great-power competition, we are told, has returned. A preoccupation with the nature, implications and sustainability of American unipolarity in the aftermath of the Cold War has given way to the view that international affairs is fundamentally characterised by strategic competition between great powers. How best to conceptualise and respond to this emerging international contest is a matter of some debate. 1 States compete over many things, and not always in zero-sum ways. In the United States at least, where great-power competition has attained acronym status as ‘GPC’ in security-policy circles, the dominance of this rhetorical frame increasingly risks conflating an assessment of systemic conditions with a strategic goal. 2 Moreover, analysts disagree about what today’s strategic competition is really about does it pit political systems against each other, in a contest between democracy and autocracy? 3 Or is it fundamentally about a power transition, and China’s strategy to replace the US as the global superpower? 4 Is Russia’s military assertiveness a function of either of these systemic contests, or a different, more limited struggle for a sphere of influence? Should we understand the rollback of globalisation and liberal multilateralism in favour of more autarkic national policies as a series of domestic political choices, or as a more fundamental reconfiguring of a liberal-international order that is no longer fit for purpose?.