The world has become an increasingly complex and unstable geopolitical and national security environment, agnostic of which prominent political party has held the reins of power in Washington D.C., or in London, Brussels and other key capitals. That instability has grown over the past decade, indifferent to the liberal or conservative trends in national governments and societal evolution. This year has seen an unprecedented number of elections take place globally, resulting in some predictable and reliable reassertions of liberal-minded democratic leaders. In contrast, other elections showcased an increase of nationalist, center-right representative polities. Americans now know what the next four years will bring in the second Trump administration.
One thing should be abundantly clear for the next presidential administration: the future of global stability will depend on how American grand strategy prioritizes the threat to the rules-based international order emanating from Beijing-led autocracy.
The war in Ukraine has gone over three years, with casualties mounting as old war trenches meet new-world technology. The greater Middle East cauldron continues to boil over amidst proxy wars, enduring sectarian violence, and compounding wars between states and sub-states, with civilian casualties featured as the aftermath. While the world has emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and returned to relative normalcy, supply chains were disrupted, inflation had surged, and global trade was severely impacted, and the effects of that international event can still be felt in the regionalization of trade and production.
It should be recognized that these assorted crises are regional conflicts or regional responses to global events. And indeed, each instance carries transnational impact and consequences. But key to the stability of the ensuing decades will come down to America trusting (and indeed, supporting) her allies to remain stalwart against regional threats while prioritizing the rules-based order’s resiliency against the long-term autocratic intentions of Beijing. Where the United States and democratic states wholesale fail in grand politicking and organization lay in crafting and adhering to long-term strategy. Example: no shortage of ink and discourse has opined on the need for the rules-based order to pivot security capabilities towards strategic competition as the post-9/11 wars came to an end in 2021. But this was born of the reality that the era of countering terrorism and violent extremism became the sole strategic principle of the West. At the same time, adversaries like China and Russia remained wholly engaged in preparation to become the strategic competitors whom the West now contends with.
That very term – strategic competition – itself is so sweeping and inchoate that it too defies explicit definition. But it does constitute a long-term goal: ensuring that liberal democracies remain stolid against long-term threats. In the West, long-term views on geopolitics and the attendant shaping of grand strategy have long been a shortcoming in American policymaking. So much so that American foreign policy swings wildly between our two main political parties and the attendant foreign policy objectives predictably sway from one extreme to the next. Communist China (and that actor should be stated specified here, as the threat is not the Chinese people as a whole) is the long-term danger to American influence abroad. That must remain the focus of American efforts in strategic competition.
Of those regional instabilities outlined previously, Russia is mired in the short-term gains of assimilating Ukraine and adds more casualties to its graveyards. The conflicts between Iran, its proxies, and the coalition of Western-leaning Arab nations as well as Israel, our most important ally in the Levant, is entirely about regional hegemonic competition between Tehran and national rivals like Riyadh. Transnational crime, disinformation, lost trust in democratic institutions, and the challenges of military readiness in a new national security paradigm are further reflections of the unclear grand strategic vector.
These can all be clearly identified as symptomatic to the grand theater of competition between great powers, notably the United States and her allies against the systemic agitation pursued by the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term ambitions. Those ambitions, it should be stated, are aligning national levers of power and international engagements so as to alter the rules-based order to better suit Chinese autocracy and benefit the expansion of the CCP system. Conversely, unlike American efforts to police the world over the past five decades, Beijing has no ambitions for ensuring a safer, more liberal or more just world, it simply wants the global system to ensure the benefits are consolidated to the Chinese state.
The U.S. cannot afford to leave allies unsupported, of course, nor does this analysis argue for any sort of retraction from alliance commitments or continued enabling of partner nations. Decoupling from partnerships and alliances is not the answer. In order to focus on deterring China’s hegemonic ambitions, investiture in those alliances and international mechanisms of security cooperation are key, as those would allow American national security to remain firmly focused on the long-term threat to the rules-based order.
It exceeds the scope of this analysis to query how Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian aggression would look today without the billions of dollars and military equipment provided to deter the threat of all-out war in Europe, but had the West failed to come to Kyiv’s aid, today would showcase a dramatically different outcome. As such, Russia continues to pose a unique threat, demonstrated by their attempts to once again influence an American election this week. But Moscow is controlled on a regime that is now inherently depends on outside support to circumvent Western control measures remain relevant as a former superpower. Dependent, indeed, on increased cooperation with China while begging resources from other nations like Belarus and recently, North Korean troops serving in Russian uniforms in Ukraine.
Russia certainly remains a credible threat, and supporting Ukraine is imperative, but one which our European allies must be trusted to address with the Trump administration’s total endorsement so that American hard power can fully concentrate on ensuring the long-term stability of the international system by focusing on its might on the Pacific arena. The myriad crises abroad concern that rules-based order is inherently regional, but these regional issues inherently benefit Beijing as such challenges occupy American hard power investment. Instead, the incoming Trump administration is best served by prioritizing the main threat and assisting allies in managing the regional crises when and where it can.
Ensuring that the dynamic between the US and China remains a competition and doesn’t rise to the level of conflict is wishful at best, if it lacks the hard and soft power levers to ensure that there is a clear American advantage in the competition arena. As compelling scholarship on the topic has noted, “Status quo powers are, sadly today, the liberal democracies; authoritarian regimes are those agitating for change. Status quo powers will likely ultimately lose in the state of competition since maintaining any status quo is impossible over time.”
If the next American presidency and Congress strategize to maintain the status quo by allowing for short-term reactionary distractions to drive policy or opt for a retraction from its alliance obligations wholesale to focus entirely on domestic priorities, the West will cede the advantage to Beijing to shape the world according to its priorities.
About the Author: Ethan Brown
Ethan Brown is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study for the Presidency & Congress and a visiting fellow at George Mason University National Security Institute. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force, with multiple combat deployments as a special operations forward air controller, and is the author of the “Visual Friendlies, Tally Target” trilogy on air power in the post-9/11 wars. He is on X @Libertystoic and IG @ethanbrownauthor.