After the Age of Trump: Rejecting Competition

Editor’s Note: The New Visions for Grand Strategy Project brought scholars from across the political and ideological spectrum to discuss what the future has in store for the United States in the world. The editors of this series sought to foster a lively debate about America’s global role and strategic futures. Each author in this collection speaks for himself or herself alone, and their views do not reflect the official positions of the Henry L. Stimson Center, or of their own employers. Michael Brenes is the director of the Brady Johnson program on Grand Strategy and a lecturer in history at Yale University.

By Emma Ashford, Senior Fellow, New Visions for Grand Strategy Project

Donald Trump has once again shaken the foundations of U.S. foreign policy. Commentators worried in 2016 that Trump’s election meant the end of the liberal world order — if it had ever existed. To many in Washington, Trump represented a harbinger of a new world, one where liberalism was permanently under siege, nationalism (if not isolationism) reigned, and longstanding U.S. alliances with Europe and Asia would be dismissed as anachronistic. Foreign policy, as national security officials knew it, was over.

That world did not materialize. But in Trump’s second term, it looks more likely. Trump has rejected longstanding shibboleths about how the United States should behave in the world. America’s relationship with its European allies were once sacrosanct. Not anymore. At the Munich Security Conference in February of this year, Vice President J. D. Vance chastised Europeans on free speech and security issues, arguing that “the crisis this continent faces right now…is one of our own making.” Two weeks later, Trump and Vance admonished Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not showing sufficient deference to America’s role in sustaining Ukraine’s fight against Russia. “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump told Zelensky. The Ukrainian president had no business telling the Americans how to support Ukraine. And what about our enemies, China and Russia? It is not clear whether they are enemies anymore. Prospects remain of a “grand bargain” with China are bandied about. Meanwhile, Trump has let Russian President Vladimir Putin continue his war in Ukraine, while implying that Russia should obtain favorable terms in any peace deal.¹

These developments have jarred European and Asian leaders, as well as those inside and outside of the Beltway. Heads of European nations have made conspicuous, unequivocal statements regarding separating their security interests from the United States. The French minister for European and foreign affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, said in March that “Europe must ensure its own defense and its own security, and we must put in place the necessary resources so that we never again have to ask the United States what it can do for European security.”²

Although Trump 2.0 has shattered norms and disabused Washington of its priors, the administration has still found it difficult to make a complete break from the past. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has done little to disengage the United States from wars in the Middle East. The United States is as deeply involved in the Middle East today as it was during the presidency of Joe Biden. Trump might have cozied up to autocrats — Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping — but that does not mean he has treated China and Russia with kid gloves or given them carte blanche to pursue their “spheres of influence.”³ Despite Trump’s comments that the United States will stop aiding Ukraine in its fight against Russia, Washington continues to send arms to Kyiv. Trump has also threatened Putin with additional sanctions if he does not deliver a peace deal. And when it comes to China, Trump has imposed and revoked high tariffs hoping to force the CCP to capitulate to U.S. interests on trade. Great-power competition remains in the form of economic warfare and threats to outpace China.⁴

The only reliable factor in U.S. foreign policy, thus far, is that Trump is unreliable. Indeed, he is primarily preoccupied with two issues: tariffs and immigration. He is otherwise willing to adjust his policies or change his mind to achieve his objectives. Trump will employ both carrots and sticks when it suits him; he will pursue deals and “grand bargains” but abandon them when he feels they are no longer in the United States’ interest. Trump sees the world in transactional terms, but his vision for the United States relies on “illiberal hegemony”: a United States that forces the world to do its bidding — and that wants to be unencumbered by rules, allies, and precedents.⁵ The “Trump Doctrine” entails dictating how the international community should behave to the exclusive benefit of the United States.⁶

The jury is out on how and whether Trump can sustain this approach to U.S. foreign policy throughout his second term. Rather than chasing Trump’s predilections and idiosyncrasies during the next four years, foreign policy analysts have no choice but to accept the capriciousness and insular manner of his decision-making style. Indeed, Trump is reluctant to accept recommendations that do not come from his inner circle of advisors. The U.S. foreign policy community is largely irrelevant to Trump and will remain so for the remainder of his second term.

Trump is both an interregnum and a breaking point in U.S. foreign policy. He presents U.S. policymakers with an opportunity to envision what comes next: how a post-Trump United States can stabilize global affairs, enhance peace, and facilitate prosperity in an increasingly multipolar order. Washington should treat a post-Trump moment as a postwar moment: as a time of rethinking the position of the United States in the world order and rebuilding for the future, one that avoids competition as the ends (rather than the means) of U.S. foreign policy and that recognizes China’s role in global affairs while keeping in mind its strategic differences and irresolvable tensions with the United States. This is the pressing challenge of our times.

US Grand Strategy in an Age of Limits

A new approach to U.S. grand strategy is required at a time when the United States confronts the limits of its superpower status. These limits are not fleeting; they are multiple and enduring.

First, the United States’ overwhelming, unprecedented military power has proven to be ineffective in resolving global conflicts. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan revealed the limits of military power in the past. Although the United States has (once again) turned away from nation-building, its military might will not pay the dividends it once did during the Cold War. During the Biden administration, the United States sought to revive liberal internationalism through arms transfers to allies such as Ukraine. Biden also aimed to deter China’s global influence and constrain terrorist activities.⁷ But ongoing aid to countries like Ukraine and Israel has reinforced stasis. The United States now remains committed to a host of conflicts in which it bears direct responsibility for the outcomes. Protecting allies through arms transfers or security arrangements, as opposed to nation-building, does not shield the United States from foreign wars. Arms transfers do not provide leverage; rather, they involve the United States in difficult conflicts (that can lead to further involvement in those conflicts) or make the country complicit in human rights abuses in countries reliant upon U.S. military aid.

The changing nature of warfare will also impose limits on what the United States can accomplish through military power. The use of small drones and artificial intelligence (AI) have reshaped conflicts like the Ukraine War. Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah in September 2024 revealed how novel, if illegal, means can take down insurgencies and militaries without firing a shot. Examples abound of how large militaries will face challenges in seeking to win conflicts and ensure conventional deterrence in this landscape, where a few hundred, cheap drones can reshape great power relations. Nuclear deterrence, though weakened, remains intact, and has inhibited nuclear aggression on a regional scale. Within this military landscape, America’s multi-billion-dollar investments in the F-35 stealth fighter and B-21 bomber appear to be outdated — a very expensive reminder that Washington is committed to fighting yesterday’s wars with an inflated budget.⁸

Second, America’s economic might is increasingly precarious. Although the United States remains the world’s preeminent economic power, its access to strategic minerals, production of climate technology, control over global manufacturing, and other indicators of economic growth and power are now second to those of China. For its part, although China’s economy slowed after the COVID-19 pandemic — and faces interlocking crises in real estate, consumption, and youth employment — its model of state capitalism has weathered these crises. Moreover, China has maintained growth rates of 5-6%, while generating a surplus of exports in green technology that could spearhead a global revolution in alleviating climate change, the major global problem of the 21^st century.⁹ As Kyle Chan, a researcher at Princeton University, has argued, the United States may be witnessing the birth of a “Chinese Century.”¹⁰ The influence of the Global South will also grow in the coming years. India is slated to be the third-largest economic power in the world by 2030, with BRICS countries and other so-called “middle powers” projected to occupy a greater share of global GDP during the next decades.¹¹ In this economic environment, U.S. influence is destined to wane.

This does not mean that the United States will lose its status as a great power. Even if Trump’s tariffs have a debilitating effect on the global economy, they will not end U.S. preeminence. The American market remains a diverse and attractive one to foreign investors, even if countries like China are currently skittish about investing in more U.S. government bonds because of concerns over Trump’s economic policies.¹² Moreover, U.S. military retrenchment on a global scale is improbable in the foreseeable future. Bipartisan support for reducing the military budget is nonexistent and doubtful in the immediate future, given widespread concerns about China and U.S. readiness for “the next war.”¹³

Given these factors, the United States will endure as a superpower, but in a multipolar world, its influence will not be as dominant and widespread as it was and has been since the Cold War. The Trump and Biden administrations tried to elide, marginalize, or manage the structural impediments to U.S. power. They failed. The latest instantiation of “America First” has continued this precedent. As Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Fellow Stephen Wertheim has pointed out, even if Trump wanted to substantially reduce the military budget and make deals to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, he “is a thoroughly situational man in a deeply structural bind” determined by the limits of U.S. power and preexisting commitments to allies and institutions.¹⁴

Policymakers in Washington, D.C., will need to adjust to these structural and political realities. As Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, a partner at The Asia Group, suggest, “Trump has exposed the growing cracks in the U.S.-led international order. But he is not interested in fixing them — quite the opposite. By the time his second term is over, that old order will be irreparably broken.”¹⁵ The United States will not be able to reassemble the broken parts of the international order to reconstitute a new Pax Americana. Nostalgia for a pre-Trump world order cannot be America’s future.¹⁶ Trump will not engender a revolution in foreign policy — removing American troops from Europe, ending NATO, or abdicating Taiwan to China — but his presidency ensures that the form of liberal internationalism under President Joe Biden, a world framed by “autocracy versus democracy,” will not be popular or obtainable.

The United States needs to find and create new tools to deploy its power to the benefit of global stability, peace, and democracy. American foreign policy has been fixated on retaining primacy at all costs in an age where U.S. primacy is anachronistic. Many in Washington now seek to constrain China to the detriment of U.S. interests — and in ways that have proven futile. This must end. The United States needs to accommodate a multipolar order that no longer has an interest or need for U.S. primacy.¹⁷

In a post-Trump world, the United States should spearhead the creation of new multilateral and international arrangements and institutions that recognize that economic power is located beyond its borders — and is destined to reside in China and nations in the Global South. It must recognize that competition with China for the sake of dominance — or competition as an end unto itself — will forestall efforts to manage and resolve transnational issues like climate change or AI. American primacy cannot achieve American global preeminence in a multipolar world. The future for U.S. foreign policy is one that once more recognizes the importance of multilateral and cooperative frameworks for achieving its ends.

Against Competition

The United States cannot return to an endless era of competition in a post-Trump world. The end of the second Trump presidency could be a moment of profound transformation in United States foreign policy, setting the tone and course of U.S. grand strategy for the next decade or more. Indeed, Washington failed to take advantage of the last paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy—the fall of the Soviet Union — and reverted to old Cold War patterns of competition, this time with the People’s Republic of China.

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States presided over a unipolar order that seemed endless. Policymakers presumed that democratic capitalism would be contagious; autocracies and autarkic economies would succumb to this new era. In response, the United States encouraged the globalization of the world economy, fueling integration of the Global South and the Global North in the hopes that a Pax America could facilitate growth for all. Washington combined a strategy of economic integration with humanitarian intervention. President Bill Clinton sought to stabilize “failed states” in Haiti, Somalia, and other areas of the world, while trying to eradicate terrorism in Africa and the Middle East.

Although most observers believed the unipolar moment — anomalous in global history — would create stability, others worried about a new era of great-power rivalry. The balance of power, so essential to global affairs for centuries, led to nostalgia for the Cold War in some corners of the foreign policy commentariat.¹⁸ Other members of the national security establishment, like the director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall, searched for the next peer rival of the United States, fearing the unipolar moment would not last. Marshall argued in the early 1990s that China would be the major rival of the United States in the next 20 years. He assessed that only China’s growth trajectory, combined with its population and military potential, could challenge the United States.¹⁹

President George W. Bush prepared to challenge China during the early days of his administration. While Clinton viewed China as an economic partner and potential ally — approving Most Favored Nation status for China, integrating it into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which led to the so-called “China Shock” — Bush viewed China as a “strategic competitor.”²⁰ Bush approached China more cautiously than Clinton, and it looked like his administration might take a more aggressive approach to China given his hawkish statements on the 2000 presidential campaign trail.

The September 11, 2001, attacks derailed that effort. The Bush administration invaded Afghanistan and launched a War on Terror that Bush promised would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”²¹ Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, maintained a U.S. presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan during the remainder of his presidency, while ordering an expansive drone warfare campaign against terrorists and terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa.

The United States remade its global alliances and allegiances to fight terrorism. It even recruited China and Russia as allies in its War on Terror, with Bush even calling China an ally “in the global coalition against terror.”²² But while the United States remained focus on the War on Terror, it overlooked the changing structure of international relations, namely the rise of China as a great power. The relationship was symbiotic: China’s continuing and unprecedented growth rates, fueled by cheap exports and devalued currency rates, also facilitated U.S. economic growth. President Barack Obama recognized this fact and sought to maintain cordial relations with China, even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others sought to achieve a U.S. “pivot to Asia.”²³ Washington welcomed China’s rise when it coincided with its own ambitions and interests during the unipolar moment.

But by 2015, “great-power competition” re-entered the lexicon as the Obama administration took stock of China’s new status in the world economy. In 2016, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter used the term to discuss the new dynamics between the United States and China.²⁴ The United States sought to manage and constrain China’s growth, even while profiting from it. When Trump took office in 2017, his administration also saw China as a threat — the singular most important threat to U.S. national security. Trump’s National Security Strategy fixated on China and great-power rivalry, but as with his second term, Trump adjusted his rhetoric toward China and President Xi Jinping as his term evolved.

Trump’s policies toward China generated concerns over a “New Cold War.” He placed export controls and tariffs on China’s goods, while members of the Republican Party — and some Democrats — spread conspiracy theories and racist rhetoric toward China, claiming that it deliberately created COVID in a lab in Wuhan or sought to brainwash America’s children through its control of TikTok.²⁵ And when Biden was elected in 2020, he accepted that the notion that great-power competition was here to stay. Biden expanded Trump’s tariffs and export controls, while relying on China rivalry to boost American growth and productivity at home. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and CHIPS and Science Act²⁶ sought to boost America’s competitive edge in climate, technology, and infrastructure to outcompete China and retain the United States’ position as the leading economy in the world.

A framework of great-power competition with China has failed to achieve its stated policy goals —a United States (along with its democratic allies) that deters China’s military, limits its economic power, and controls the future of the global economy—or any productive ends for U.S. foreign policy.²⁷ The Trump and Biden administration’s efforts to slow China’s technological edge in AI have failed. China’s production of Deep Seek could prove to be a cheaper yet effective model of AI. China leads the United States by wide margins in solar technology and electric vehicles, two areas that the Biden administration targeted in its effort to constrain China’s productive capacity. As Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze has suggested, the United States is likely to find it impossible to catch up to China on climate technology or to be the leader in tackling climate change.²⁸ Given China’s share of strategic minerals, it would be absurd to think that the United States could outpace and outperform China in global manufacturing or technology production.

Yet policymakers in Washington believe that rivalry with China is here to stay, that it is the United States’ only future. It is the obligation of the United States to cajole countries to do Washington’s bidding and extract concessions from them that suit U.S. interests. Less than a year into Trump’s second term, its achievements pertaining to securing U.S. primacy are few. The United States has failed to achieve a peace deal to end the wars in Ukraine or Israel, solidify trade rates desired by the Trump administration, inhibit China’s access to strategic minerals and overall trajectory as a rising power, or align the interests of the Global South with U.S. goals.

As was the case during the War on Terror, the United States is now stuck again in another paradigm, or paradox, of its own making. For 15 years, between 9/11 and the end of the Obama administration, the United States believed that it could eliminate terrorism — and all terrorists —from the Middle East, if not the globe. This proved to be an impossible endeavor. Today, the United States is once again trying to achieve something it cannot: constrain China to the benefit of U.S. primacy and force the rest of the world to choose the United States over China. If it continues down this path, competition with China will facilitate public discontent and backlash — and therefore lead the American people to vote more “Trump-like” figures into office — as U.S. foreign policy will prove unable to achieve positive developments for the American people. Instead of resisting the “world as it is,” the United States needs to come to terms with a multipolar order that includes China as a great power and work to ensure that global resources can be shared, transnational crises can be mitigated, global democracy can flourish, and security concerns can be lessened through multilateral and international cooperation.²⁹

Trump-Proofing US Foreign Policy: The Need for a New Multilateralism

Trump’s second term has thus far been disastrous for U.S. foreign policy. His transactional approach to diplomacy depends upon American strength — “peace through strength” — but a
“strength” that relies upon austerity and cost-cutting on domestic spending, while the military budget approaches $1 trillion.³⁰

Trump’s accomplishments have largely been in the realm of scaling down American diplomacy: eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development and slashing personnel in the State and Defense Departments. In doing so, he has ceded the realm of soft power to China, contributing to America’s weakened influence in a multipolar era.³¹ In a post-Trump era, a new generation of U.S. foreign policy leaders will need to remake and replace new institutions of U.S. diplomacy that prioritize multilateral engagement. New staff and organizations will be required to execute a new multilateral vision for American grand strategy.

The United States cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. As occurred during the past 10 years, the American public is weary of great-power competition for the sake of it, of supporting competition with no end in sight. Americans’ support for U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and Israel — two very different countries with different security issues — has waned.³² Given the public’s declining enthusiasm for a still-popular war like Ukraine, a war in Taiwan will most likely not enjoy the long-term approval of the American public. As Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities Jennifer Kavanagh and Stephen Wertheim suggest, it is better for the United States to “make a plan that enables Taiwan to mount a viable self-defense” but avoids the United States’ getting involved in a shooting war with China — an event that would lead to untold American casualties. The public’s reluctance to support a hot war with China aligns with the fact that only one third of Americans consider China to be an enemy of the United States.³³ With these conditions and potentialities, pursuing a strategy of competition with China (and preparing to respond to a potential amphibious invasion of Taiwan) is both undemocratic and unnecessary.

Instead, the United States needs to prioritize cooperation over competition to address the world’s problems. It should create institutions that are multilateral in scope and purpose and consider the fact that China is here to stay as a global actor, as a great power. During World War II, as the United States helped to establish the UN, it realized that it could not dismiss the Soviet Union’s role in ending the Second World War, nor deny it a sphere of influence in Europe. Even as rifts were growing between the two countries — rifts that led to the Cold War — U.S. policymakers knew they could not relegate the Soviet Union from the Security Council or exclude it from multilateral institutions — at least not without extending an invitation.³⁴

In a similar vein, this era’s new multilateral organizations would support and elevate disenfranchised nations, including many nations in Africa and the Global South, within the international system without shunning China’s status and influence. The United States cannot win allies in the Global South through rivalry with China — it has tried this approach and failed. African and Asian nations see little to gain from an international order that marginalizes their agency within a context of great-power rivalry.³⁵ But great powers can change this system. If Washington wants to gain the sympathies of the Global South, it should support a new form of multilateralism. Engagement from the United States on a new multilateral system will also encourage participation from China — owing to fear that it would lose credibility among nations in the Global South, and fear that the United States would erode its influence in Africa and Asia.

A new multilateralism would help the world to transition out of competition as a framework for global affairs. This needs to be a global, wide-ranging project. As Tim Murithi has noted in Foreign Affairs, Africa has an obligation “to build a coalition of the willing, rallying the rest of the global South and whatever developed countries can be persuaded behind its bid to remake the multilateral system.” A new multilateral system, a remade United Nations, would prevent veto power over issues of collective security; divide institutional power among great and small powers; and provide democratic oversight and accountability over transnational issues of crime, debt, taxes, and trade.³⁶

Africa’s possession of strategic minerals — combined with its increasing share of global GDP ³⁷— provides the Global South with leverage to revise the multilateral system in its favor. When it comes to strategic minerals, the United States, to paraphrase Trump, is not holding the cards. The United States has an opportunity to conduct diplomacy with China on these matters that achieves better results for its economy and security. Indeed, the United States’ “Minerals Security Partnership” includes many U.S. allies in Europe, as well as many prospective ones, but it is missing one key player: China.³⁸ A minerals partnership without China is not a partnership. Washington and Beijing should work together with China on achieving multilateral cooperation on strategic minerals that distributes processing capacity, mitigates labor exploitation and environmental degradation, and establishes international rights to access minerals. Previous international frameworks for sharing nuclear energy — such as the post-World War II Baruch Plan —can provide a model for sharing strategic minerals.³⁹ Even if the United States remains fixated on constraining China’s control over processing of strategic minerals, the only way to achieve that end is through cooperation.

On climate change, the United States can work with China to assist vulnerable nations, such as Vanuatu and other small island states, in mitigating climate’s effects on both the Global South and the Global North. Climate change is the existential threat of our time. No one wins in a “competition” to resolve the issue. There are only losers, with all countries suffering to one degree or another. Current international efforts on climate change are performative or lack enforcement mechanisms. The United States and China have failed to hold each other accountable if carbon emissions and sea levels continue to rise. Efforts like COP⁴⁰ and UN initiatives on climate are not enough. The United States, China, and the other largest carbon emitters can take the lead on climate for the benefit of the Global South — which will benefit their own economic interests. But, if not, ideas abound on how to guarantee that great powers share accountability in the international system for ignoring climate change: from a global tax on billionaires, to a general global carbon tax, to a revised UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation that prioritizes climate change.⁴¹ Debt relief to Global South nations should coincide with climate change relief efforts, and both can be accomplished by working through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). International cooperation on these two fronts would help to elevate the interests and priorities of the Global South in a multipolar world, strengthening Asian and African countries and lessening migration and refugee crises, thus moderating the xenophobia and ethnonationalism in the West that fuels today’s hyper-partisan politics.⁴²

In a post-Trump world, the temptation will be for the United States to maintain its global influence through primacy, to revert to a renewed form of great-power competition. This would be a mistake. The United States has found that the tools of the Cold War past do not work — bipolar competition is outdated. It should be relegated to a bygone era. Great-power competition, in all its forms, has become a distraction from the reality that a multipolar world is on the horizon, and competition for the sake of American or Chinese interests will not manage it. Nor do many countries in the Global South want to live in such a world.

In an increasingly multipolar world, it is time for Washington to think creatively about its options, limits, and capabilities. A more cooperative and inclusive U.S. grand strategy is needed to deal with the challenges that confront the United States now and those that will persist for generations to come. These changes are unlikely to take place under Donald Trump, but the time to begin planning for them is now. For the United States to operate effectively in a multipolar order, its foreign policy leaders must reimagine multilateralism, ensuring that great powers avoid competition, tackle pressing international issues like climate change, and create a more inclusive and stable world order that addresses the concerns of the Global South.

Notes

1
J. D. Vance, Speech At Munich Security Conference, February 14, 2025, https://securityconference.org/assets/02_Dokumente/01_Publikationen/2025/Selected_Key_Speeches_Vol._II/MSC_Speeches_2025_Vol2_Ansicht_gek%C3%BCrzt.pdf; Peter Baker, “Trump Berates Zelensky in Fiery Exchange at the White House,” New York Times, February 28, 2025.
2
Interview given by M. Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, to France Inter (Paris, March 3, 2025), https://franceintheus.org/spip.php?article11661.
3
Monica Duffy Toft, “The Return of Spheres of Influence,” Foreign Affairs, March 13, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/return-spheres-influence.
4
Political scientist Stacie Goddard has predicted that an era of “great-power collusion” will displace great-power competition. I disagree. The great-power competition framework of the Biden years is certainly dead. Nonetheless, great-power competition is alive and well during the second Trump administration in a new form, with new parameters. See Stacie Goddard, “The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/rise-and-fall-great-power-competition
5
Barry Posen, “The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/rise-illiberal-hegemony
6
Adam Wren, “Vance Outlines the ‘Trump Doctrine’ at Political Dinner in Ohio,” Politico, June 24,
2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/24/vance-iran-trump-doctrine-ohio-dinner-00422304
7
The journalist George Packer went so far as to call this policy the “Biden Doctrine.” See George Packer, “A New Theory of American Power,” Atlantic, November 21, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/american-foreign-policy-in-wartime/671899/.
8
Michael Brenes, “How America Broke its War Machine,” Foreign Affairs, July 3, 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-america-broke-its-war-machine.
9
Van Jackson, “The Chinese ‘Consumption Problem’ Problem,” Un-Diplomatic Substack, August 4, 2025, https://www.un-diplomatic.com/p/the-chinese-consumption-problem-problem.
10
Kyle Chan, “In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant,” New York Times, May 19, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/opinion/china-us-trade-tariffs.html.
11
Dani Rodrik, “Middle Powers Will Make a Multipolar World,” Project Syndicate, November 11, 2024, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/middle-powers-means-multipolar-world-not-us-hegemony-or-us-china-bipolarity-by-dani-rodrik-2024-11.
12
“How China is Quietly Diversifying from US Treasuries,” Financial Times, May 2, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/fdad7e0b-aa23-4b7b-8f1a-fc1d48468631.
13
Dexter Filkins, “Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?” New Yorker, July 14, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/21/is-the-us-ready-for-the-next-war?_sp=caea2319-deb0-4340-b658-37a979a8273e.1753216074296
14
Stephen Wertheim, “Trump is a Situational Man in a Structural Bind,” New York Times, July 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/opinion/trump-america-foreign-policy.html.
15
Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, “Absent at the Creation?,” Foreign Affairs, June/July 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/absent-creation-rebecca-lissner.
16
Matthew Duss and Nancy Okail, “America Is Cursed by a Foreign Policy of Nostalgia,” Foreign Affairs, December 3, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-cursed-foreign-policy-nostalgia.
17
See Emma Ashford, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).
18
John J. Mearsheimer, “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” Atlantic, August 1990, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/foreign/mearsh.htm.
19
Van Jackson and Michael Brenes, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 63.
20
Jackson and Brenes, The Rivalry Peril, 70.
21
George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” September 20, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html
22
“U.S. China Stand Against Terrorism,” October 19, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011019-4.html
23
Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/
24
“The New Era of Great Power Competition” Vox, April 16, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11421352/ash-carter-deterrence-power-competition
25
For an example of these theories, see Tom Cotton, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China (Broadside Books, 2025).
26
The CHIPS and Science Act stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science.
27
Lanxin Xiang, “Biden’s Misguided China Policy,” Stimson Center, July 3, 2024, https://www.stimson.org/2024/bidens-misguided-china-policy/.
28
Adam Tooze, “Only China Can Now Lead the World on Climate,” Financial Times, December 5, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/fe397ced-432c-430f-b6e4-336ba5084e5b
29
Ben Rhodes, “A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/biden-foreign-policy-world-rhodes.
30
U.S. Government, DOD, “Senior Officials Outline President’s Proposed FY26 Defense Budget,” U.S. Department of Defense, June 26, 2025, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/4227847/senior-officials-outline-presidents-proposed-fy26-defense-budget/.
31
“Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” gives ICE unprecedented funds to ramp up mass deportation campaign,” CBS News, July 10, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-funding-big-beautiful-bill-trump-deportations/; Camilo Montoya-Galvez, “Trump’s Soft-Power Retreat Scrambles U.S.-China Race,” Axios, July 17, 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/07/17/trump-china-retreat-soft-power
32
“Slim Majorities of Americans Still Support Aiding Ukraine,” (Chicago Council on Public Affairs, March 20, 2025), https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/slim-majorities-americans-still-support-aiding-ukraine; Megan Brenan, “32% in U.S. Back Israel’s Military Action in Gaza, a New Low,” Gallup, July 29, 2025, https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-military-action-gaza-new-low.aspx.
33
Jennifer Kavanaugh and Stephen Wertheim, “The Taiwan Fixation,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-fixation-kavanagh-wertheim; Stephen Wertheim, “A New Cold War With China Won’t Help the U.S.,” Financial Times, July 17, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/b324ad8a-a912-4822-b054-f95a8effe74b.
34
On this point, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
35
Huong Le Thu, “How to Survive a Great-Power Competition,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/beijing-survive-great-power-competition; Jorge Heine, “Not Picking Sides and the ‘New Neutrals’: Active Nonalignment, Great Power Competition, and the Global South,” Journal of World Affairs, (2025), 1(1): 7-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/29769442251324710 (Original work published 2025).
36
Tim Murithi, “Order of Oppression,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/africa/global-south-un-order-oppression.
37
“9 of the 20 Fastest-Growing Economies Worldwide in 2024 Will Be in Africa,” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 6, 2024), https://carnegieendowment.org/carnegie-africa-program-newsletter/9-of-the-20-fastest-growing-economies-worldwide-in-2024-will-be-in-africa?lang=en.
38
U.S. Government, Department of State, “Minerals Security Partnership,” https://www.state.gov/minerals-security-partnership.
39
On the history of the Baruch Plan, see McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 166-195.
40
COP30, the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is set to take place in Brazil in November 2025.
41
Michael Franczak, “Who Pays for Climate Action?,” Foreign Policy, June 3, 2024, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/03/climate-finance-small-island-states-taxes-adaptation/.
42
Michael Brenes and Van Jackson,
“Trump and the New Age of Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, January 28, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trump-and-new-age-nationalism.