Great Power Competition in the Biden Years
Should great power competition be the Biden administration’s top foreign policy priority? Former President Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy identified great power competition as the foremost priority, but President Biden will face many challenges in office, including COVID-19 and domestic extremism. Is great power rivalry still the priority? Matt Kroenig’s recent book, The Return of Great Power Rivalry, informs this debate. Join him in a discussion with Professor Abe Newman and Ambassador Paula J. Dobriansky for a discussion on February 5th at 12:00pm EST, via Zoom. Register for the event at this link.
About the Speakers
Matthew Kroenig is an Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Deputy Director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. He is the author or editor of seven books, including The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters and Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons.
Ambassador Paula J. Dobriansky, a Senior Fellow in the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University’s JFK Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is Vice Chair of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security (Atlantic Council). For over 25 years, she has held high level government positions such as Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, the President’s Envoy to Northern Ireland, Director of European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council, the White House, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. She was the first George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. A member of the Defense Policy Board and Chair of EXIM Bank’s Chairman’s Council on China Competition, she is on the Advisory Board of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Ambassador Dobriansky received a B.S.F.S. summa cum laude from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Abraham Newman is a professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. He currently serves as the Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies.
About the Book
The United States of America has been the most powerful country in the world for over seventy years, but recently the U.S. National Security Strategy declared that the return of great power competition with Russia and China is the greatest threat to U.S. national security. Further, many analysts predict that America’s autocratic rivals will have at least some success in disrupting-and, in the longer term, possibly even displacing-U.S. global leadership.
Brilliant and engagingly written, The Return of Great Power Rivalry argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Drawing on an extraordinary range of historical evidence and the works of figures like Herodotus, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu and combining it with cutting-edge social science research, Matthew Kroenig advances the riveting argument that democracies tend to excel in great power rivalries. He contends that democracies actually have unique economic, diplomatic, and military advantages in long-run geopolitical competitions. He considers autocratic advantages as well, but shows that these are more than outweighed by their vulnerabilities.Kroenig then shows these arguments through the seven most important cases of democratic-versus-autocratic rivalries throughout history, from the ancient world to the Cold War. Finally, he analyzes the new era of great power rivalry among the United States, Russia, and China through the lens of the democratic advantage argument. By advancing a “hard-power” argument for democracy, Kroenig demonstrates that despite its many problems, the U.S. is better positioned to maintain a global leadership role than either Russia or China.
A vitally important book for anyone concerned about the future of global geopolitics, The Return of Great Power Rivalry provides both an innovative way of thinking about power in international politics and an optimistic assessment of the future of American global leadership.