Remember “Great Power Competition?” Lol.
By 
The normie national-security advisors who dominated the first Trump administration needed a way to make Trump’s semi-coherent ramblings legible to the global foreign-policy community. Their answer was “Great Power Competition,” especially as articulated in the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy by its principal author, Nadia Schadlow.
“GPC” took the national-security and foreign-policy commentariat by storm. The concept figured prominently in academic workshops and grants, think tank events and reports, and policy speeches and articles. It went from zero to shibboleth in record time.
But here’s the weird thing: the concept never made a ton of sense, whether as an analytic framework, a basis for grand strategy, or as a description of Trump grand strategy. One did not need to dig very far into the 2017 NSS to find a lot of “traditional” U.S. national-security content that was, at best, out of place even in the first Trump administration.
What made “Great Power Competition” plausible as an organizing theme of Trump foreign policy? The fact that Trump left the national-security bureaucracy pretty much alone. Trump appointments at the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and other key institutions pretty much did their own thing.
Trump might make noise about abandoning NATO or visibly show deference to Putin at Helsinki. But the United States was, as Trump officials assured their counterparts in Europe, also increasing its military support to NATO and providing lethal aid to Ukraine.
Trump might threaten to pull military bases from Korea unless Seoul provided greater “compensation” to the United States, but, Trump officials could argue, he was also the first president to truly understand the China threat. Surely he would never actually abandon key U.S. allies in the region? Look at how happy he was to sell Taiwan practically any weapons-system that it wanted.
Many Republican hawks even found ways to accommodate themselves to Trump’s wobbliness on NATO. China was the true threat, after all. Europe can defend itself, no? Nixon went to China. Maybe Trump can go to Moscow and convince Putin to turn on one of his closest strategic partners—never mind that the actual causes of the Sino-Soviet split, or the fact that it happened more than a decade before the U.S. formed a strategic partnership with Beijing.
I wonder if China hawks like Elbridge Colby realize—or will ever allow themselves to truly understand—how much they’ve been played.
The Trump administration’s “great-power competition” with China, so far, begins and ends with tariffs. No administration truly committed to great-power competition, let alone with China, would, among other things:
- Create a power vacuum for Beijing to fill in arenas such as global public health, international development, and important international organizations;
- Dismantle U.S. state capacity, seek to gut basic research, and freeze all U.S. international anti-corruption efforts;
- Allow a drug-addled narcissist and his junior-league brown shirts to compromise U.S. government computer systems;
- Alienate governments whose cooperation the U.S. desperately needs if it wants to implement effective export-controls on China, let alone those who make important contributions to U.S. intelligence gathering;
- Proposing reductions in U.S. defense spending in order to finance budget-exploding tax cuts; and
- Threaten to abandon Taiwan while talking about a “grand bargain” with Xi.
We’re not getting great-power competition. Trump’s aims are increasingly clear: he wants to form a kleptocrat elite-pact with Putin. The two leaders will help themselves stay in power while they, and supportive oligarchs, maximize the value of the rents they extract and the foreign bribes that they receive.
Why else cease to enforce anti-corruption laws, especially those aimed at preventing kleptocrats from offshoring and laundering wealth? Why else open the door to Russian cyber operations in the United States—does the world’s greatest deal-maker normally negotiate by throwing an entire crop of carrots at a weaker counter-party?
I see that some commentators have started to call Trump’s economic plans “shock therapy,” but they miss the key part of the analogy: in post-Soviet Russia, “shock therapy” allowed emerging oligarchs to strip the state of its assets in the service of personal enrichment. That’s already happening here; Musk orders government agencies to purchases his services, while other billionaires have already found ways to funnel protection money to Trump and his allies.
While the usual suspects argue about Trump’s “grand strategy,” scholars of comparative politics seem better equipped to understand the moment. Hansen and Kopstein, for example, write about Trump’s “patrimonial foreign policy.” While I think they’re too quick to slap the label “patrimonial” on behaviors that are more specific to kleptocratic right-wing populists (e.g., “multipolar populists“) in general, and sometimes Trump in particular, their diagnoses is far more correct than not.
