What is Great-Power Competition, Anyway?
Alexander Boroff | April 17, 2020
Contemporary US defense policy has a common theme rippling through it. “Great-power competition†is the latest watchword of the defense enterprise. What was an “arcane term†just a few years ago is now firmly entrenched in conventional defense thinking, in large part due to its appearance in the 2017 National Security Strategy. Trickling downward, the 2018 National Defense Strategy mentions this concept (which it calls “long-term strategic competitionâ€) fourteen times. Past this, the 2018 National Military Strategy specifically makes mention of great-power competition three times. In fact, there has been a recent flurry of analysis about the nexus of great-power competition and the COVID-19 pandemic—a sign of the remarkable extent to which the concept is linked to virtually every aspect of defense, strategy, and security.
And yet there is an unfortunate problem that, collectively, the defense establishment (or more accurately, the broader national-security and foreign-policy establishment) seems to have decided to ignore: none of these strategy documents truly define what this phrase means.
https://mwi.usma.edu/great-power-competition-anyway/
