America's Great-Power Opportunity. Ali Wyne

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СКАЧАТЬ book. I realized soon after I began formulating my proposal that I would need an extended period of uninterrupted time to grapple with great-power competition in a considered manner. The only way I would secure such a window would be to step down from a rewarding job I had at the time, not knowing when I would next find a position. Elmira gave me the courage I needed to take that leap of faith, impressing upon me that some of life’s most compelling opportunities arise when we take a detour and trust that we will be able to navigate the attendant uncertainty.

      Joseph Nye took time out of a frantic schedule to read my first draft and to offer detailed feedback, which proved indispensable as I refined my arguments and produced the final version. Graham Allison urged me to follow my intuition that great-power competition was underspecified, stressing that policy can be only as thoughtful as the constructs underpinning it are rigorous. Joe and Graham have been my foremost mentors and champions for the better part of the past two decades, and I hope they will see in this book the intellectual seeds they have planted in me.

      Two seminars were essential in helping me stress-test and refine my initial arguments. First, Bruce Jones of the Brookings Institution arranged and hosted a discussion with William Burke-White, Tarun Chhabra, Alexandre Marc, William Moreland, and Thomas Wright on June 29, 2020. In addition, Tom took time to participate in a written exchange with me from February to June 2020, on Pairagraph, a vibrant platform that convenes debates on the pressing issues of the day. Second, Sarah Donahue and Grace Headinger of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs arranged and Aditi Kumar hosted a discussion held on July 27, 2020 with some two dozen individuals from across the Belfer network. William d’Ambruoso, Steven Miller, Mina Mitreva, and Jane Perlez all sent detailed written feedback after the session.

I also benefited enormously from conversations with scholars, journalists, editors, and past and present public servants: Emma Ashford, Alyssa Ayres, Caroline Baxter, Robert Blackwill, Brian Blankenship, Nicholas Burns, William Burns, Jessica Chen Weiss, Elbridge Colby, Bernard Cole, Ivo Daalder, Richard Danzig, Benjamin Denison, Abraham Denmark, Rhys Dubin, Naz El-Khatib, Alexandra Evans, Richard Fontaine, Daniel Franklin, Lawrence Freedman, Uri Friedman, Michael Fullilove, John Gans, Francis Gavin, Andrew Goodhart, Jorge Guajardo, Richard Haass, Ryan Hass, Kathleen Hicks, Fiona Hill, Frank Hoffman, Timothy Hoyt, John Ikenberry, Van Jackson, Elsa Kania, Mara Karlin, Michael Kofman, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Mark Leonard, Jessica Libertini, Rebecca Lissner, Kelly Magsamen, Hunter Marston, Michael Mazarr, Michael McFaul, Shivshankar Menon, Jim Mitre, Daniel Nexon, Meghan O’Sullivan, Yashar Parsie, Robert Person, Sara Plana, Ionut Popescu, Patrick Porter, Christopher Preble, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Gregory Sanders, Nadia Schadlow, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Stephen Walt, Odd Arne Westad, and Gavin Wilde.

      Many individuals gave me writing opportunities that allowed me to articulate initial versions of the various arguments I have attempted to weave together: David Barboza, Samuel Bresnick, Daniel Byman, Sarah Canna, Evan Corcoran, Daniel Flitton, Stéphanie Giry, Judah Grunstein, Jacob Heilbrunn, Susan Jakes, Sahar Khan, Alex Lennon, Kathleen Miles, James Palmer, Sam Roggeveen, and Shannon Tiezzi.

      Many others, in addition, gave me speaking opportunities: Bunmi Akinnusotu, John Amble, Wardah Amir, Christopher Ankersen, George Beebe, Colonel Jason (“JP”) Clark, Mick Cook, Meaghan Fulco, Eric Gomez, Nikolas Gvosdev, Paul Haenle, Mark Hannah, Grant Haver, Laicie Heeley, Liam Kraft, Kaiser Kuo, Thomas Lynch, Katherine Mansted, Jennifer Mustapha, Captain Antony Palocaren, Ankit Panda, Johannes Perterer, Asad Rafi, Derek Reveron, Stephen Saideman, Kori Schake, Patricia Schouker, and Ben Watson.

      Cliff Kupchan supported this project from the moment I began working at Eurasia Group, and he generously permitted me to take a sabbatical to complete a first draft. Ian Bremmer has nurtured about as stimulating and enriching an environment as one can imagine for those who are trying to process tectonic shifts in geopolitics.

      Meg Guliford introduced me to Katerina (Kat) Kakkis in mid-2019, when Kat was an undergraduate student at Tufts University. Although I brought Kat on board as a research assistant, she soon became a colleague, critiquing every chapter thoroughly and supplying a steady stream of trenchant insights that helped me develop my perspectives on great-power competition. I am excited to see what the future has in store for her.

I submitted my final proposal on February 11, 2020 and received a contract from Polity on February 28, not knowing how profoundly a new virus—still quite contained at the time—would go on to shape our world. My sister and I decamped from Washington, DC to Fredericksburg, VA on March 13, to ride out the pandemic with our parents, and I returned shortly after submitting the final draft. My mother, father, and sister watched as our study room transformed from a tidy den into something of a hazard zone, as my research materials steadily occupied more and more space. They gave me the room (literally and figuratively) that I needed for thinking and the support that I needed for finishing. It is to my beloved family—Ammi, Abbu, and Zaahira—that I owe my greatest debt and I dedicate this book.

Preface

      With the publication of its national security strategy (NSS) in December 2017 and its national defense strategy (NDS) the following month, the Trump administration helped propel the phrase “great-power competition” to the heart of US foreign policy discourse. While this term had been growing more prominent, particularly after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, it had not diffused broadly; it did not figure significantly in government conversations outside of the Pentagon and, although some esteemed scholars urged greater focus on it, great-power competition had yet to become a bedrock of mainstream analysis.¹

      With the release of the aforementioned documents, though, the term quickly became a backdrop of conversations in Washington.² As impressively, if not more, it achieved that status within a fraught political environment, not only transcending sharp disagreements between and within the two main parties over the foreign policy that the United States should pursue but also deepening ideological acrimony more generally, in Congress and among the public. Donald Trump’s election, after all, did not just challenge the core precepts that had undergirded America’s strategic outlook for the better part of the past seven decades; it also surfaced the extent to which the political center on Capitol Hill had narrowed and the degree to which Americans of different ideological persuasions had come to regard one another less as fellow travelers than as threatening strangers.

The frequency with which policymakers and analysts now discuss great-power competition would suggest that they have converged upon a common interpretation. And yet, while increasingly encountering the term in articles, reports, interviews, speeches, and testimonies, I consistently found myself unable to define it succinctly. I initially conceived of this book, then, as an attempt to redress my own ignorance. The more research I conducted and the more conversations I had while drafting it, though, the more I came to conclude that the shared understanding whose existence I had assumed is overstated. The late Colin Gray, one of the foremost strategic thinkers of the past half-century, observed that this discrepancy between invocation and elucidation plagues many a construct: “A problem with popular formulas can be that their familiarity breeds an unwarranted confidence in interpretation.”³

      There are, of course, certain basic propositions with which most observers agree. First, the phenomenon of interstate competition is longstanding. Second, the emergence of great-power competition as a (if not as the) principal analytical basis for formulating US foreign policy nods to the reality that the United States is no longer as influential as it was at the end of the Cold War. Third, acting upon their longstanding dissatisfaction with the settlement that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, China and Russia are challenging US national interests and the postwar order; and they are doing so individually and, increasingly, in concert.

      But disagreements surface soon after one moves beyond these assertions. What is the essence of contemporary strategic competition? Over what is the United States competing? For what is it competing? What policies should it adopt СКАЧАТЬ