Why Everyone in Washington Is Talking About Great-Power Competition

Grand narratives about global affairs have a way of seizing Washington, D.C., with sudden force. Not long after World War II, the U.S. government settled on the mission of containing the Soviet Union. The War on Terror commenced within days of the 9/11 attacks. And now we’re in the early, heady days of a newly entrenched narrative, one with no less potential to transform the United States and the world than the policies that flowed from containment and counterterrorism.

We find ourselves—as you will have heard in the corridors of power and conference rooms of think tanks, and read in the government’s strategy documents and the media’s coverage of international relations—in an era of “great-power competition.”

It has even achieved hallowed acronym status—GPC—following in the footsteps of CBRN, COIN, and CVID, to name a few. So how exactly did it come to pass that an “arcane term” as of a few years ago is now “approaching a cliché,” as Elbridge Colby, one of the people who popularized it, told me?

My inbox inundated with invitations to read op-eds about “How the Great-Power Competition Is Extending Into Space” and attend events on “Great-Power Competition and Water Security in Asia,” I set out to find an answer.

In the nation’s capital, over the past year officials and scholars to think through the implications of the framework before they fully endorse it.