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Thomas F. Lynch III is a Distinguished Research Fellow in the Center for Strategic Research, Institute for National Strategic Studies, at the National Defense University. He is the editor of Strategic Assessment 2020: Into a New Era of Great Power Competition (NDU Press, 2020) and Strategic Assessment 2025: Evolving Great Power Competition at Mid-Decade (NDU Press, forthcoming).
The dominant geostrategic framework of international relations today is that of a Great Power competition (GPC) among three rivalrous, globally dominant states: the United States, Russia, and China. After more than two decades of mainly cooperation and collaboration, they drifted into de facto competition at the end of the 2000s.1 By the middle of the 2010s, their undeclared but obvious rivalry intensified.2 Fully acknowledged GPC arrived in late 2017 when the United States published its National Security Strategy and declared a formal end to the 25-year era of U.S.-led globalization and active American democratization initiatives.3
This article focuses on the vital interactions of the three contemporary Great Powers. How will their relative power evolve? Where will they compete, and how will this impact geostrategic norms, institutions, and interstate alignments? Finally, will their competition spark direct—and likely catastrophic—armed conflict anytime soon?
Predicting the future always is a fraught endeavor. It is an increasingly difficult task if one defines the future in terms of decades or generations. As a result, this article analyzes the future of contemporary Great Power competition for the remainder of the 2020s. It does so with frequent explicit references to historical patterns—touchpoints—associated with past multistate GPCs during the nation-state period that began in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.
The article begins with a sketch of the important features of this evolving era of multistate GPC and defines why the distribution of geostrategic power in that system is critical to analyzing the way forward. Then, it addresses the salient features of modern Great Power strategic aims and the most likely trajectory of their relative power attributes for the remainder of the decade. It next evaluates the prospects for changes in Great Power identities before 2030 based on forecast changes in relative power. The article concludes with an assessment of the prospects for potentially ruinous near-term direct war between Great Powers.
Competition Structure
Great Power competition describes the dominant feature of the geostrategic environment. It informs strategic options but is not policy-prescriptive.4 Throughout history, Great Powers have displayed three conspicuous attributes. They have unusual capabilities in comparison with other states and use these capabilities to pursue broad and sustained policy interests beyond their immediate neighborhood. Thus, they are perceived by other states as being powerful and having influence—and are treated accordingly. Today, the United States, China, and Russia fit this Great Power description. However, the triangular Great Power structure is not durable.5 One of these Great Powers could decline precipitously and fall from status, thereby altering the structure of global power distribution from three Great Powers to two or even one. Alternatively, another state might amass power capabilities of sufficient quantity and quality to cross the threshold and become a Great Power.
The number and arrangement of Great Powers in the international system condition the strategic environment and frame the policy choices made by these powerful rivals seeking to maximize individual wealth, influence, and security in conditions of uncertainty and anarchy.6 Less powerful states retain agency to seek wealth, influence, and security, but within parameters defined by the interaction of the Great Powers.7
Eras featuring three or more Great Power states—multipolar eras—are the most common since the dawn of the modern-state era in 1648. But their dynamics are unfamiliar to modern statesmen. Multistate GPC is conducted over decades and centuries, not years. Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, and the Ottoman Empire competed as Great Powers across multiple continents from the late 1500s into the early 1700s. Spain, France, and Great Britain (formed in 1707 when England united with Scotland) then continued that competition over American colonies for another century and a half. Russia, Austria- Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire alternatively jousted and clashed from the 1600s to the late 1800s across Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa. Russia, Great Britain, and the Ottoman Empire engaged in a more than century-long “Great Game” in Asia and the Middle East. Imperial Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and the United States were rivalrous Great Powers from the late 1880s to the end of World War II.8
Three-quarters of Great Power transitions since 1500 have culminated with, or involved, a highly destructive period of direct Great Power war.9 War between Great Powers during times of relative transition is not inevitable, but it is a persistent threat. Nuclear weapons may have reduced the risk of Great Power armed conflict, but they have not eliminated that prospect entirely. The risks are growing in an era where an increasing number of nations have nuclear weapons and perceive their use as for more than just deterrence of a nuclear strike by a rival.10 Great Powers may channel or expend their worst animus in competitive activities short of supremely destructive direct armed conflict. Military competition among Great Powers often includes shifting military alliances, arms races, proxy wars, and irregular martial activities.11 Great Powers also constantly joust for relative advantage in four additional categories of interstate competition and contest: politico-diplomatic, economic, ideological, and informational (see table A).
These major categories are consistent throughout history, but their main competitive elements are not static. These evolve over time and update in accordance with the dynamic aspects of evolving technology, political ideas, and governing structures. To understand the future of GPC over the coming decade, we must evaluate the most likely protagonist trajectory for Chinese, Russian, and American relative power and influence in the competitive categories of the table.
Major Actors and Mechanisms
Our modern era of multistate Great Power rivalry is just entering a second decade. History suggests that it should be expected to ebb and flow for at least several more decades.12 This section addresses how Great Power competitive mechanisms should be expected to evolve for the remainder of the decade.
The United States: Relative Power Trajectory and Competitive Prospects. The United States remains relatively strong in the military hard-power attributes and most of the soft-power attributes necessary to influence—by attraction or coercion—the growth of like-minded global partnerships and continue to play an ascendant role in maintaining international norms of behavior. Its military forces are unmatched in capacity for projection of global power and are likely to remain so for at least the rest of the decade. The relative size of the U.S. economy and its manufacturing base is in long-term relative decline compared with that of China. However, the United States appears to be recovering from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic better than most of the developed world. Growth in American real gross domestic product (GDP) was 2.5 percent in 2023, which was better than expectations and beat the global average.13 The United States also has many other durable economic advantages.
Global financial dominance remains a critical American power advantage and is likely to endure despite increasing international pressure from China to end the dollar’s role as the main currency of international transaction.14 America’s innovation dynamism remains robust, even in comparison to China’s.15 Its demographic profile and immigration policies also are more conducive to long-term economic adaptation and expansion than those of either of its two rivals.16
Core American ideological messages featuring freedom, openness, transparency, and universal human rights resonate in many parts of the world, providing America with an ability to attract other states to act favorably toward U.S. objectives and interests.17 However, American political cohesion has been under duress from domestic polarization catalyzed in part by social-media interference from rival Great Powers.18 America’s long-standing global leadership is challenged by rival narrative projections that paint Washington as directly responsible for regional instability, the primary cause of the uneven distribution of global wealth and power, and promoting a racist vision of universal values that dismisses other cultures and their historical values.19 This narrative clash will continue throughout the 2020s. America’s challenges are offset by Chinese and Russian limitations and liabilities. Neither Russia nor China is likely to supplant the reach of American military and economic power or the generally positive resonance and influence of U.S. values and institutions during this decade.20
China: Relative Power Trajectory and Competitive Prospects. China’s power bases—its tools for international influence through attraction or coercion—have been skewed toward the economic but with clear potential to develop more broadly. China’s trade and infrastructure investment prowess has made it a major force in the economic competitive space. It has declared long-term plans to leverage economic advantage for greater military, political, informational, and ideological capability—a strategy of military-civil fusion.21
China’s current power factors do not present an urgent military threat regionally or globally. But Beijing’s determined focus on military development increasingly threatens U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and will make American military intervention on behalf of strategic partners there more costly over the coming decade.22 China seeks elimination of the U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific, which stands as an obstacle to China’s ambition as the dominant power in the region. Thus, Beijing works to erode U.S. power and influence in the region while seeking to avoid a direct military confrontation.23 China’s People’s Liberation Army can deny U.S. naval and air forces uncontested access to areas near the Chinese coast, and it can hold major U.S. air and naval weapons platforms at risk in East Asia and the Western Pacific.24 However, China will be hard-pressed during this decade to project power outside the so-called “second island chain” of containment (see figure).25 China is rapidly expanding its strategic missile force and its nuclear weapons arsenal in a manner that will create a formidable deterrent posture if sustained into the 2030s.26
China’s historically rapid domestic economic growth slowed between 2018 and 2022 and is likely to remain constrained into the future. After decades of GDP growth of 7 percent or greater, China’s ascent slipped to 2.2 percent in 2020 and 3 percent in 2022.27 China’s GDP growth—notwithstanding suspect Chinese claims that its GDP growth exceeded 5 percent in 2023—is expected to remain sluggish for the remainder of the decade when compared to recent Chinese norms.28 Part of China’s economic slowdown came from almost 3 years of self-imposed “Zero COVID” domestic lockdowns. The slowdown coincides with President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the autonomy of a broad array of businesses and commercial enterprises—a crack-down that is choking entrepreneurship and innovation across China.29 Beijing also confronts a significantly altered global economic environment from the one it enjoyed before 2018.
The United States and China commenced a trade war 2 years before the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, and competitive trade tensions show no signs of abating.30 China also faces a new challenge. Beginning in 2022, the United States has led other Western countries in establishing export restrictions on key technologies like advanced semiconductors and their fabrication precursors. These restrictions sanction development of a vital component for technological innovation and economic development in the highest value areas of modern economies such as 5G and 6G communications, big-data computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous machining.31 Combined, these economic headwinds mean that China must increase domestic consumption for Chinese-produced goods now too expensive for many traditional export markets while at the same time replacing vital access to the Western high-technology inventions and processes that it has relied on for economic expansion during its impressive three-decade ascent. These feats will be difficult, for a painful economic rebalance is certain to constrain Chinese GDP growth below 3 percent for years to come.32
The impressive arc of China’s international economic ascent also flattened in the early 2020s. Its robust and well-received international infrastructure programs, mostly as part of Beijing’s so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), came under stress. Many of Beijing’s BRI projects have not produced the envisioned economic returns, even though some have generated coercive political-diplomatic gains.33 In 2022, the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations introduced a competitor initiative to China’s BRI: the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.34 American-led competition will slow and slim down a Chinese international investment juggernaut and test the attractiveness of China’s state-led equity and development model.
China’s projected economic power advantages are unlikely to fully eclipse those of the United States in the coming decade, and Chinese economic power may not be sustainable in the out-years.35 Beijing must find a way to redress looming weaknesses certain to constrain economic growth, including a fast-aging population, an educational and intellectual culture that limits innovation, and an undersized presence in global financial markets that limits the revenue potential and influence of Chinese financial services.36 China’s efforts to establish the renminbi as an increasingly dominant instrument of international financial exchange will be a critical initiative to watch and will be addressed in a subsequent section.
China’s tools of diplomatic power consistently underperform. China’s coercive use of its economic leverage in abrupt, brusque sanctions and embargoes of trading partners including Australia, New Zealand, and Lithuania set back Chinese diplomacy and drove these partners away and toward deeper economic and security arrangements with the United States.37
China also displays stubborn deficiencies in its ideological, cultural, and communications power posture and influence potential. It has no real multilateral political or military alliances. China’s national narrative focuses on state control and social order over individual liberties in a manner that resonates poorly outside of authoritarian circles despite Beijing’s intense global messaging campaign.38 China’s reflexively defensive posture and relatively limited role in addressing the global pandemic generated mistrust and ill will in many nations.39
China’s power trajectory and mechanisms for future competition indicate that it will remain the biggest rival to the United States but will not surpass America any time soon. However, Beijing seems increasingly likely to entice Russia as a junior partner in its strategic aims as Moscow reaps the bitter fruit of Vladimir Putin’s poor decisionmaking in Ukraine.40
Russia: Relative Power Trajectory and Competitive Prospects. Prior to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia sought to manage its relationship with the United States in Europe, the European Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to deter “supposed” hostile action by weakening the cohesion of these affiliations, alliances, and partnerships. It also had been developing deeper relationships with China, the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the consortium of countries in the BRICS organization (originally composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to challenge U.S. influence abroad.41
Pre-2022, Russia’s relative power capabilities were most heavily concentrated in its military and its activities regarding information manipulation and influence. Its military tools ranged from a formidable nuclear weapons arsenal to significant power projection capabilities from the military and armed mercenary groups, honed over several years in distant, limited gray zone armed actions.42 Moscow’s social-media information operations had generated meaningful disruption against Western leaders, political processes, institutions, and organizations.43 Vast oil and gas reserves combined with expanding global delivery networks and Moscow’s participation in the OPEC+ forum for managing global oil supplies provided Russia with its main point of economic strength. (OPEC+ is a loose grouping of countries that are not part of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] but export crude oil.) Yet Russia’s economic, ideological, and political power always were substandard for a durable global power.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has squandered a significant amount of power and accelerated an already-evident descent in relative power. Punitive Western financial sanctions and a dramatic decoupling of Europe and North America from Russian energy exports bit Moscow hard. Russia’s GDP growth contracted by 3.5 percent in 2022 and another 3.3 percent in 2023, with poor prospects for future growth.44 Moscow’s pariah status with Western states has pushed Russia’s economic future more heavily—and dramatically—into the orbit of China.45
Russia’s military has suffered stag- gering losses in Ukraine. The British government has estimated approximately 450,000 Russian casualties in the first 26 months of the full-scale invasion; the BBC has confirmed more than 50,000 fatalities of Russian soldiers.46 Russia’s military equipment losses have been equally stark, encompassing more than 10,000 armored vehicles, including nearly 3,000 main battle tanks; 109 fixed-wing aircraft; 136 helicopters; 346 unmanned aerial vehicles; 23 naval vessels of all classes; and over 1,500 artillery systems.47 Despite Moscow’s short-run turn to North Korea and Iran to offset some of these extreme equipment and munitions losses and enable the war to continue, experts believe that the Russian defense budget will take years to replace what the military already has lost or otherwise expended in Ukraine.48
Perhaps more important, the narrative of Russian martial prowess and acumen—earned from a series of unconventional warfare actions during the 2010s—was damaged as the world witnessed exceedingly poor performance in high-intensity, state-to-state combat. Putin has somewhat masked this catastrophe by portraying a durable global military relevance for Russia in naval exercises off Japan, launches of intercontinental hypersonic cruise missiles, and the sustained presence of Wagner Group mercenaries and successor paramilitary organizations in countries including Syria, Libya, South Sudan, Chad, and Mali, among others.49
Russian diplomacy also sustains global reach and influence befitting a Great Power. Moscow’s role as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, with veto power, conveys influence and resonates widely. The Russian Foreign Ministry retains a global voice and influence, especially when blaming the United States and Western partners for the economic ills of lesser developed countries across the Global South.50
Down but not out, Russia is most likely to remain a Great Power during this decade despite a steeper descent in relative power than before 2022. At the same time, Moscow’s desperate turn for a lifeline with Beijing increasingly will compromise Russia’s independence and relative stature at the Great Power high table.
The Future Structure of Great Power Competition: Relative Power Changes Among the Three. The United States, China, and Russia each face major internal structural, economic, and demographic challenges. The choices that each state’s political leadership makes about how to address these domestic dynamics as well as their international challenges will determine the future power they will possess and the future policy options they might pursue. Russia appears to be con- fronting the hard, cold realities from its own challenges first in the 2020s.51
Moscow’s disastrously misjudged military attack of Ukraine stoked the first proxy war of the new Great Power competitive era and put Russia’s fragile relative-power factors under enormous duress, accelerating its decline.52 America and its NATO allies have been able to contest norm-busting Russian military aggression while avoiding a direct armed clash with Moscow. In classic proxy war fashion, the Alliance has equipped and mentored a frontline but technically unallied state in Ukraine with a mix of inexpensive but effective autonomous drones, long-range artillery, air defense, cruise missiles, and proactive cyber capabilities that effectively denied most of Putin’s campaign objectives and exposed Russia as an amazingly incompetent foe in conventional warfare.53
The Russia-Ukraine war also weakened Moscow’s strategic position in Eurasia, as its aggression spooked the formerly neutral European nations Finland and Sweden into joining NATO. American global sanctions and diplomatic initiatives simultaneously have accelerated the already noteworthy ongoing decline of Russian economic status and global influence.54
Bipolar zero-sum certainties are not present in modern multistate GPC.55
Putin’s misguided invasion of Ukraine and obvious depletion there of already limited Russian military and economic power did not inherently benefit America’s strategic interests, nor did it convey certain advantage to China. Instead, Beijing and Washington will compete for dominant influence over the role of and relationship with Moscow in the ongoing decade.56
For its part, China views retention of Russia as a Great Power rival of the United States to be strategically advantageous.57 A chastened but intact Russia diverts at least some American economic attention and military resources away from the Indo-Pacific region and toward the European theater. Moreover, delimited Chinese support for Russia as a declining but relevant Great Power allows Beijing to exact an increasingly heavy price for diplomatic friendship, turning Russia into a vassalized junior partner.
For the cost of a March 2023 photo opportunity in Moscow that made Putin and Russia look less like a global pariah, Chinese President Xi exacted important Russian concessions. That March 2023 visit reportedly gained China exclusive rights and prices on rare minerals and special commodities; the transfer of top Russian weapons technologies; formal Russian diplomatic support to Beijing in its territorial dispute claims in the Indo-Pacific region; and Moscow’s agreement to use the Chinese renminbi as the official currency in bilateral economic exchanges and during all Russian transactions with the middle powers and small states of the less-developed world.58 China can be expected to extract even more favorable terms and conditions from a vassalized Russia should Moscow’s isolation from the West grow more all-encompassing.59
The United States also wants a chas- tened but largely intact Great Power in Moscow. It cannot afford to clean up the mess of a collapsed Russia embroiled in civil war or overtaken by radicalized officials who might resort to using nuclear weapons or enabling their proliferation.60 It would prefer a form of Russian leader- ship capable of reasonable compromise in Ukraine, renunciation of force to intimidate bordering Eurasian states, and retention of sufficient territorial control and governance to stabilize Russia proper while resisting Chinese encroachment or usurpation of key Russian power assets for use by Beijing.61
Washington must guard against a rival’s gaining significant relative power from the accelerating decline of another Great Power.62 Washington should be expected to seek benefits from Russian decline by finding mechanisms to reset bilateral relations with Moscow, most likely after new political leadership there, that help reform Russian behavior and reveal points where Western isolation of Russia could be eased to provide Moscow some alternatives to growing fealty toward Beijing. As in past eras, both of Russia’s contemporary Great Power rivals this decade will seek to gain maximum relative advantage from Russia’s decline without undoing Moscow’s Great Power status or the multipolar global distribution of power.
Arenas and Prospects
The main arenas of Great Power competition for the rest of the 2020s will involve certain territorial regions and multiple borderless activities. This section evaluates three arenas where the Great Powers will compete around the globe to establish both their preferred domain rules and norms and to build out alliances and partnerships that uphold them. It demonstrates that all involve accelerating fragmentation of these formerly globalized domains of state-to-state interaction.
Global Economic Rules, Norms, and Organizations. Global economics integrate the dynamics of trade, finance, and infrastructure development. The post–World War II era featured all three systems built around American-preferred norms of global openness, freedom of access, private corporate enterprise, and the primacy of the American dollar.63 For more than 30 years, China has benefited handsomely from these economic norms and institutions. Beijing values free-flowing trade and finance, but with a model that emphasizes a large state role in economic decisionmaking.64
Beijing remains a supportive member in many of these foundational economic arrangements and organizations.65 But as its relative power has grown, China rejected lower domestic barriers to overseas corporate ownership and has chafed at making its state-led economic decisions fully transparent. Beijing also has aggravated global trade and financial partners with a well-documented pattern of intellectual property theft and disregard for the sanctity of proprietary innovation.66
Since the mid-2010s, China has established parallel institutions and programs to compete with Western institutions in trade, international infrastructure development, and finance. China’s BRI—announced in 2013—and its Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank—begun in 2016—are just two examples of al- ternative economic institutions that the United States and some other Western states have not joined.67 As of 2023, China had brought 140 states into its BRI framework. Notably, the United States and India do not participate in BRI, but many other states simultane- ously participate in BRI programs; those from the legacy International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Asia Development Bank, where all three Great Powers are members; and in the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, where China and Russia are excluded. Likewise, long-standing members of the World Bank and IMF—institutions where America holds sway—have joined 120 participants in the Chinese-led, American-free Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, including Japan, India, and many European countries. The presence of Chinese alternatives foreshadows greater fragmentation of the global economic order in the near term and beyond.
China also has focused on extending the global reach and convertibility of the renminbi as an alternative to the dollar. While Beijing has had success in attracting countries like Brazil to expand bilateral trade denominated in renminbi and coerced Russia into preferred use of the renminbi both in bilateral commercial transactions and in some formerly dollar-denominated commerce between Moscow and other countries of the developed world, it has only begun the complex process of displacing the dollar’s global privilege.68 In 2022, the renminbi accounted only for 2.7 percent of global currency reserves, while the dollar made up almost 60 percent—more than all other national currencies combined. That same year, about half of global trade was denominated in dollars, and a full 88 percent of international currency exchanges involved the dollar.69 Starting from such a deep disadvantage, the Chinese effort at “de-dollarization” will evolve slowly and unevenly for at least the coming decade.70
In some ways, Chinese alternative commercial programs and financial arrangements have filled gaps in the coverage of legacy World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization arrangements. Multifaceted Chinese global economic ex- pansion also is consistent with the pattern of past rising Great Powers. Great Britain and the United States, for example, used growing domestic wealth and status in a globalized effort to extend and expand access to global factors of production and markets for manufactured goods.71
Like China, Russia prefers state-monopolized trade. It does not adhere to norms of freedom or openness in its general commercial activities. Prior to 2022—and despite an array of Western- imposed financial and trade sanctions levied against Russian organizations and individuals, especially since 2014—Russia seemed to accept the basic elements of international trade and financial flows so long as they sustained Putin and his oligarch constituency’s financial interests.72 Extensive Western punitive financial and commercial sanctions following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed that calculus fundamentally and pushed the Kremlin largely out of the American legacy global financial system.73 Moscow began reorienting primary trade routes and economic exchanges into an accelerating alignment with Chinese preferences. Tight economic coupling between Moscow and Beijing will present a significant challenge for Washington, ultimately requiring it to consider less-coercive economic approaches toward Moscow.74 To forestall geostrategic distress from Beijing turning Moscow into its economic vassal, the United States is almost certain to eventually offer Russia some alternative economic incentives for at least partial rapprochement.
Trade and financial disputes are surging as primary flashpoints among the three global powers. As Beijing moves to supplant Washington’s preferred international rules, norms, and processes with a more state-centric model of economic activity, fissures in the international trade and finance order will widen.75 This fragmentation will not yet force medium-sized or small powers to exclusively align with one framework or another.76 At least for the next decade, Sino-American economic competition will feature divergent philosophies without hard boundaries. Lesser states will experience degrees of freedom in economic, political, and security alignment, at least for a while.
Military Influence on Defense and Security Relationships. Throughout modern history, Great Powers have forged military alliances and partnerships to expand strategic reach; enhance deterrence of Great Power rivals and their proxies; and extend power and influence by attraction.77 In past multistate eras, Great Powers frequently established security partnerships among themselves in bilateral or multilateral combinations and in competition with rival Great Powers. Historic Great Power security alliances are often fluid. Great Britain fought against France in iterative Great Power military alliances for two centuries, with an interlude of military partnership against Russia during the Crimean War. Ultimately, Great Britain allied with long-time rival France and other Great Powers—including Great Game strategic rival Russia—against Germany during the early 20th century.78 Great Power military and security alliances with lesser powers also can be fluid. They are important to GPC but most favorable to Great Power interests when tightly coupled in arrangements featuring interoperable military equipment and doctrine; clear command-and-control protocols; and a political-military decisionmaking foundation that clearly specifies duties and obligations in the event of armed conflict.79
The United States has a comparative advantage in forging multinational defense and security alliances and partnerships. Washington has recognized this advantage and moved to deepen historical multilateral security alliances like NATO, expand existing bilateral alliances into multilateral ones (especially in the Indo-Pacific region), extend military partnerships as more tightly coupled alliances, and forge new military partnerships.80 U.S.-endorsed multilateral security partnership initiatives across the Indo-Pacific region are noteworthy and include the multifaceted Quad arrangement with Japan, Australia, and India and the maritime security AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom.81 Many states, especially across the Indo-Pacific, appear keen to join American-led security partnerships. While they wish to continue beneficial economic exchange with China, they also desire a hedge against coercive Chinese influence targeting them or their regional interests.82
China has some experience with bilateral military and security alliances, but far less with multilateral ones. Beijing has long-standing bilateral security partnerships with North Korea and Pakistan. Both have a narrow, regional security focus and feature common military equipment and liaison interactions. China and Pakistan have recurring joint training exercises.83 None of the three have joint combat experience. From the early 2000s, China has conducted multilateral “Peace Mission” drills with Russia and the Central Asian states, sponsored by the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These exercises mainly have focused on suppressing a major insurgency or popular rebellion.84 Since 2023, Beijing has also conducted periodic joint naval exercises with Russia and Iran.85
China’s most important security partnership is its bilateral one with fellow Great Power Russia. Though not a full- fledged security alliance—for neither state has formally promised to defend the other in event of an attack—the Sino- Russian defense relationship has evolved significantly from its 1990s origins. Moscow originally had exploited episodic Sino-Russian exercises to display weapons systems to potential People’s Liberation Army buyers and to gain insights about evolving Chinese military capabilities. Since 2012, Russia and China have conducted recurring naval exercises on at least an annual basis.
The Russia-Ukraine war has deepened this most important security relationship. Dramatic Russian military equipment losses and stiffening Western sanctions are forcing Russia increasingly toward China to revive its armed forces. Inevitably, Russia must buy substantially more Chinese weaponry, including China’s more advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and information technology systems. It also may become beholden to China’s shipbuilding capacity and space infrastructure, and to redress shortfalls in domestic technologies. China will become the partner using joint military drills to showcase its own advanced arms to Russian state firms. Where bilateral military drills and exercises once signaled mutual geostrategic support, they may soon indicate growing Russian fealty to specific Chinese themes and strategic objectives.
Putin’s concessions to Xi during the latter’s March 2023 visit to Moscow signaled Russia’s ongoing slide toward junior partnership in a Chinese-dominated security framework.86 The United States must play close attention to this evolution, calibrating and recalibrating its treatment of Russian leadership in a manner that inhibits a formal Sino-Russian security alliance.
Messaging Capabilities for Diplomatic and Ideological Influence on Political Norms and Values. The current structure of the international diplomatic order, with a multitude of interlocking organizations and institutions, aligns with major American strategic aims and ideological values. These feature an emphasis on globalized rules and norms advocating the primacy of free and open societies, commercial markets, protection of politi- cal rights, and the rule of law in a United Nations–led multinational diplomatic environment for the peaceful, collective resolution of disputes. The structure also features a Western preference for liberal democratic governance.87
Divergent Great Power ideologies and strategic objectives have torn the fabric of globalized norms and procedures, increasingly fragmenting domains once characterized by broad interstate collaboration and coordination. Like the fragmenting domains of trade, finance, and infrastructure investment discussed earlier, once-universal norms for comity and peaceful interactions in the Arctic, in outer space, in cyberspace, and in other domains have splintered along lines of divergent Great Power preferences.
History suggests that such domain fragmentation is the norm for intensifying Great Power rivalries.88 For example, key elements of the electromagnetic spectrum like the telegraph and the telephone evolved during a period of multistate GPC where the rivalry was not intense. In that Victorian era, the technological dominance of one Great Power—Great Britain—was unrivaled. Thus, London and its Great Power competitors could collaborate in shared international communication norms favored by London for mutual wealth gains. But mid-decade in the 1900s, Great Britain and Imperial Germany’s intensifying rivalry eroded confidence in the value of a shared electromagnetic domain, focused on relative gains and losses, and led to domain fragmentation.89
Cyberspace today is fragmenting as Great Power rivalry intensifies. The rise of the cyber domain parallels—but does not exactly match—that of the electromagnetic domain 100 years ago. The cyber domain rose on a backbone of American-driven technology, rules, norms, and procedures in an era where no other nation possessed the relative power to contest American technological know-how or preferred norms and rules for the global Internet.90 America nurtured cyberspace as an international medium of commercial and scientific exchange with common adherence to liberal Western laws, norms, and procedures. Washington’s values underpinned a globalized technological revolution.91 Despite the relative comity and cooperation across the Internet in this early era, the states of the world never did generate a comprehensive legal or normative framework for governing acceptable conduct in cyberspace.92 Even then, the level of distrust among major states was too high to conceive of a legally binding cyber treaty or durable nonbinding norms and confidence-building measures.93
As with the case of the electromagnetic domain, global cyberspace has become contested among today’s three Great Powers. Since at least 2008, the Russian state has directed coercive peacetime cyber campaigns aimed at weakening America’s relative power in four major areas: public confidence in the safety of American critical infrastructure, the integrity of the American electoral system, the social stability of American society, and average Americans’ trust in their government.94 Beijing has thrown up the so-called “great firewall of China” to prevent the free flow of global information into the hands of Chinese citizens. It also conducts strategic cyber competition against the United States to enhance China’s relative economic wealth.95 China has pursued a deliberate campaign of cyber espionage against American firms and their partners both in China and abroad, focused on the brazen theft of intellectual property along with sensitive commercial data and processes.96 China’s strategy for cyber operations can be characterized as controlling information at home and stealing secrets abroad.97
Russia and China are today threatened by the American preference for the free and open exchange of ideas with little restriction and a global communications architecture that features consensus-based cooperation. They prefer closed and restrictive communications and exchange, with the state having the right to control the flow of information within and across its borders.
As American cyberspace analyst Clint Watts puts it, the world has entered an era of three separate cyber domains: a free and open one preferred by America and its partners; a largely closed, tightly constrained, and self-interested one preferred by Beijing; and a highly manipulated, intimidated, and coerced one preferred by Russia.98 A June 2022 Council on Foreign Relations report succinctly noted that the competition for Internet data in cyberspace is the new locus for Great Power strategic competition short of armed conflict, and cyberspace fragmentation is here to stay.99
The fragmentation of cyberspace under pressure from growing Great Power rivalry is consistent with the history of fragmentation and separation of global domains of state-to-state interaction under growing geostrategic duress.100 As with the electromagnetic domain and others before it, the cyber domain promises a trajectory of in- creasing fragmentation until a major geostrategic shock—like a direct armed clash between great powers—reframes global power distributions and relationships in a manner that may once again be favorable to a cooperative and collaborative norm.101
Prospects for Cataclysmic Direct Armed Conflict
Direct Great Power war is an ever-present and dangerous risk during historic periods of multistate Great Power rivalries, although not a normal occurrence during their early decades.102 The exceptions normally feature severe miscalculations by leadership about the capabilities and intentions of a rival Great Power.103 As tensions rise and as mechanisms recede for coordination and collaboration between or among Great Powers, it takes extraordinary statesmanship to compete effectively with a rivalrous Great Power and not antagonize it to the point where highly destructive direct armed conflict becomes unavoidable.104
The most frequent strategic miscalculations are those when one Great Power generates extremely inflexible and time-sensitive war plans or when a Great Power poorly signals a rival contemplating a direct military clash that it will use armed conflict directly against that rival should it resort to arms. The start of World War I after less than two decades of Great Power rivalrous competition came from grave miscalculations featuring both errors. Imperial Germany crafted an extremely brittle war timetable, the Schlieffen Plan, requiring a preemptive military invasion of Western Europe to knock out France and England before their Triple Entente partner Russia could mobilize to Germany’s east.105 Simultaneously, Great Britain fueled German impatience and impetus to rashly attack because London sent Berlin and Paris mixed signals about whether it would deploy a full British army to the continent to stand with France.106 The eruption of Great Power wars during the early decades of strategic competition is atypical. The World War I exception demonstrates that agile, flexible wartime plans and clear signaling of when a Great Power will resort to direct armed conflict against a rival are two antidotes to the ever-present risk of unintended Great Power war during periods of intensifying geostrategic competition.
The ongoing second decade of multistate GPC can be expected to follow historic patterns. The three Great Powers will indirectly test each other’s military strengths short of a direct armed clash while forming and reframing military alliances, supporting partners in proxy wars, and participating in arms races.107 Each of these forms of military competition short of armed conflict risks escalation into direct clash. But even the “hard cases” can be managed short of Great Power war.108
The Russia-Ukraine war provides one example. The United States and Russia are deeply involved in that intense proxy war, Moscow directly and Washington indirectly.109 Both Great Powers took deliberate steps to avoid a direct armed clash. The United States emphasized that it would defend every inch of NATO partner territory, leaving Moscow with no doubt that a wider war into Western Europe would mean direct combat with the United States.110 At the same time, the United States carefully metered military plans and weapons used by Ukraine during Kyiv’s righteous defense against Russian aggression. Washington and NATO partners limited Ukrainian access to weapons that would be highly capable of striking at Russia proper, discouraged overt cross-border military operations by Ukraine into Russian territory, and refrained from formally stationing NATO country forces or advisory groups in Ukraine.111
Taiwan is the other major “hard case” that could trigger direct Great Power war in the coming decade. But a Sino-American war over Taiwan can be deterred. Washington will need to ensure that Beijing knows that any attempt to resolve the Taiwan issue with military force would have extremely high costs for China and would include direct U.S. military intervention.112 Beginning in 2021, President Joe Biden made public statements indicating that direct American military engagement would occur should China invade Taiwan or try to strangle its viability with military means.113 For all China’s impatient rhetoric over Taiwan, analysts view Beijing as fundamentally risk-averse when it comes to any near- term military clash with the United States. This is in part because China recognizes that the People’s Liberation Army has had no actual combat experience for more than 40 years and the U.S. military features globally tested, battle-hardened forces and doctrines that are hard for China to properly prepare for in war game simulations.114
At the same time, Washington and Beijing can avoid deadly direct armed conflict if both craft flexible war plans that avoid rigid timelines or escalation ladders and that build in space for leadership communication before any direct military confrontation. Over the coming decade, to prevent a Taiwan scenario from triggering a war unwelcomed in Washington or Beijing, there is a need for bilateral political and military negotiations that build up guardrails to inhibit direct armed confrontation and develop protocols that deescalate accidental military incidents.115
The specter of direct, catastrophic Great Power war will loom over this era of multistate GPC. But Great Power aversion to such a risky clash in the early decades of their competition most likely will inhibit rash decisionmaking or accidental war for the foreseeable future.
Conclusions: The Future of GPC
Past eras of multistate Great Power competition inform future expectations. The remainder of this decade and the early part of the next will feature intensifying competition in the Sino-American dyad. Russia will decline. Its missteps in Ukraine will hasten a long-forecast decay in relative power, but it will remain a Great Power. Washington and especially Beijing each will work to preserve Moscow’s Great Power status while jousting to gain the most from Russia’s descent. China will continue a strategic rise in relative power but at a slower pace than before the United States began disengaging from selected sectors of the Chinese economy. The United States will experience a decline in relative power but at a slowing tempo, as Washington and its partners more severely limit formerly unfettered Chinese access to global markets and high-end technologies.
China and the United States will vigorously contest global rules, norms, and procedures in a competition that will fragment multiple global domains but is unlikely to produce a decisive outcome. The fragmentation of globalized chains and networks will increase costs of interchange among the Great Powers and all states in the international system. Middle and lesser powers will seek opportunities to mix and match their allegiances—partnering with one Great Power on some activities, and with another for separate interactions.
Finally, direct Great Power war will loom as an unintended and undesirable outcome. However, it remains unlikely to erupt absent leaders’ severe miscalculation of relative power ratios, excessively brittle war plans, or misunderstanding of where and when rival leaders would resort to a direct armed clash. JFQ