The Dueling Ideas That Will Define the 21st Century

It was catnip for policy analysts: Henceforth, the Biden administration signaled recently, the U.S. government would refer to its approach to China and other adversaries by a new name. Out was the Trump-era term, great-power competition. In was strategic competition. The assessments of what it all meant poured forth.

But lost in the debate was the fact that the U.S. government appeared to be tweaking the semantics of the organizing principle of its foreign policy and grand strategy—competition with China, whatever adjective one appends to it—without wrestling with the more fundamental question of whether it had landed on the right paradigm for understanding the 21st-century world, and America’s role in it.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal this summer punctuated the end of the post-9/11 era, if any doubt of its obsolescence remained. The developments left unresolved a separate but related matter, though: What’s coming next?

Before great-power competition captivated Washington’s imagination, Barack Obama and others a different framework for the future: one defined by to humanity such as climate change, pandemic disease, economic and financial crises, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and cyberweapons, which could be dealt with only through international cooperation, particularly among the world’s most powerful countries. It’s an alternative vision of