U.S. Inflexibility and 'Great Power Competition'

If there is no willingness to be flexible in dealings with other major powers, “great power competition” is a short road to great power conflict.

Peter Beinart makes an interesting observation about the way most U.S. policymakers understand “great power competition” with China and Russia:

What prevails today in Washington’s halls of power is a defense of unipolarity dressed up as a recognition that unipolarity is dead. In both parties, top officials herald the return of great power competition but resist meaningful great power accommodation [bold mine-DL]. What they mean when they say the US must compete with Russia and China is that the US must prevent Russia and China from altering the frontiers of American dominance established in the 1990s, when China’s GDP was roughly one-third as large as America’s and Russia was flat on its back.

The resistance to accommodation is bound up with our political culture’s disrespect for diplomacy and compromise, but it is mostly a relic of the first decade and a half after the Cold War when U.S. policymakers tricked themselves into thinking that they didn’t have to accommodate any other powers. This reached its peak during the early Bush years when Karl Rove was talking about “creating” our own reality. Back then, U.S. policymakers grew used to thinking that U.S. power was either effectively unlimited or so vast that it could overcome almost any obstacle, and they weren’t shy about using it. Now that the obstacles are bigger, major powers are more formidable than before, and the U.S. has fewer advantages than it once did, the U.S. hasn’t adapted to the new realities.

We see an inflexibility born of pride today in the insistence that the U.S. and its allies should make no alterations to NATO’s “open door” and in arguments that the U.S. must increase its commitments in East Asia to contain a much more powerful China. Right now, the U.S. is still considering expanding its defense perimeter in the face of major powers that are stronger than they were twenty years ago. The U.S. and its allies refuse to rule out further NATO expansion even when everyone can see that the alliance cannot defend the states in question. Something has to give somewhere.

There is still a fixation on the idea that the U.S. and its allies are the ones that dictate terms to others. The others are not supposed to have a say, much less tell us how things are going to be. U.S. hegemony is disappearing, and in some respects it has already ended, but the mental habits of hegemonists are stuck in the early to mid-2000s when the U.S. could still ignore what these other powers wanted in their own regions. Many of these policymakers don’t know how to break out of those habits and many don’t want to try, and so we get the usual song-and-dance about appeasement as a substitute for serious analysis.

If there is no willingness to be flexible in dealings with other major powers, “great power competition” is a short road to great power conflict. As long as the U.S. defines its broader interests in a way that put it on a collision course with two other major powers at the same time, it will be actively courting that conflict on at least two fronts at a time when it lacks the means to make good on all of its many commitments. The U.S. is overstretched, and if it doesn’t relearn how to accommodate other major powers it risks exhaustion and disaster. The solution to this predicament is to adjust U.S. strategy, scale back its commitments, and focus on protecting vital interests instead of trying to recreate a “unipolar moment” that will never come again.