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The geostrategic framework of international relations at mid-decade remains heavily conditioned and shaped by Great Power Competition (GPC) between three rivalrous, globally dominant states: the United States, China and Russia. After more than two decades of mainly cooperation and collaboration, these Great Powers drifted into de-facto rivalrous competition at the end of the 2000s. By the middle of the twenty-tens, their undeclared but obvious rivalry intensified, and their major interactions shifted from those of cooperation and collaboration to competition, confrontation and preparation for potential armed clash. Fully acknowledged GPC arrived in late 2017 — after a decade of de-facto GPC contested by China and Russia but poorly understood in Washington — when the United States published a dramatically new National Security Strategy and declared a formal end to the 25-year era of United States-led globalization and pro-active, world-wide American democratization initiatives.
Some elements of legacy collaboration between the Great Powers persist in selected international organizations, agencies and activities, but serious disagreements about strategic goals and legitimate means to achieve them underpin a structure that features intensifying competition and greater confrontation than witnessed for decades. By 2018, the U.S., China and Russia were engaged in fully-acknowledged, global Great Power rivalry.
In October 2022, the Biden Administration published its NSS. The 2022 update did not reject the Trump NSS diagnosis of a new geostrategic era of Great Power competition. Instead, the October 2022 NSS accepted it. However, the Biden Administration did end the Trump Administration’s “American First” policy approach toward GPC that it believed too often resulted in “America alone” impacts. The Biden approach that came to be known in many quarters as “Strategic Competition.” Under Biden, Strategic Competition featured a vigorous program of security, economic, information, and diplomatic competition with China and Russia, working closely with allies and partners against these rivals, and with specific attention to reinvigorating both American domestic economic competitiveness and the attractiveness of American strategic partnership. The Biden administration approach believed that the United States would succeed in competition with China over time by enhancing its domestic competitiveness while working more closely with friends and partners and avoiding the strategic error of posing stark, binary choices to would-be partners and friends.
From 2021 through 2024, the debates about GPC’s relevance to the international geostrategic framework subsided. They were replaced by debates about what America could do to succeed in this strategic competition between large, rivalrous powers. The second Trump administration entered office with a different view about the best path forward in GPC. The Trump 2.0 approach was only emerging in 2025, but nascent administration activities suggest that significant change will occur. The new administration indicates that it will expand and evolve an “America First 2.0” agenda with less reliance on American global alliances and partnerships, more focus on defending the American homeland, and a greater willingness to broker arrangements that afford today’s Great Power strategic rivals with primacy in their immediate geographic regions. One January 2025 analysis forecast that American strategy in the late 2020s may turn toward one where the U.S., “…is to be ruthlessly pragmatic about values, tough with allies and open to deals with opponents…”
Strategic Assessment 2025 will explore the evolution of this fully acknowledged strategic competition among and between the Great Powers at mid-decade. Its chapters feature primary analysis amplifying the reciprocal and dynamic interaction of the policies, strategies, capabilities, and influence of the mid-decade's three great powers: the United States, China and Russia. Strategic Assessment 2025 will project the trajectory of major trends in this strategic competition for the remainder of the decade — through 2030. Its authors — subject matter experts all — will explore the most salient features of strategic Great Power competition over the course of fifteen original chapters. In addition to this introductory chapter, one chapter focuses on historical analysis of past trends in multi-state global Great Power competition, two frame the global strategies and power capabilities of today’s Great Powers, five focus on today’s Great Power competitive posture and power capabilities in critical functional areas and activities, another five focus on evolving Great Power competition in critical geostrategic regions, and a concluding chapter draws together major insights for the future of Great Power competition for the remainder of the decade.