By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Great Power Competition Returned

After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” So declared the National Security Strategy that President Donald Trump released in 2017, capturing in a single line the story that American foreign policymakers have spent the last decade telling themselves and the world. In the post–Cold War era, the United States generally sought to cooperate with other powers whenever possible and embed them in an American-led global order. But in the mid-2010s, a new consensus took hold. The era of cooperation was over, and U.S. strategy had to focus on Washington’s contests with its major rivals, China and Russia. The main priority of American foreign policy was clear: stay ahead of them.

Washington’s rivals “are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor,” Trump’s 2017 document explained. As a result, his National Defense Strategy argued the following year, interstate strategic competition had become “the primary concern in U.S. national security.” When Trump’s bitter rival Joe Biden took office as president in 2021, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy changed dramatically. But great-power competition remained the leitmotif. In 2022, Biden’s National Security Strategy warned that “the most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” The only answer, it argued, was to “out-compete” China and constrain an aggressive Russia.

Some hailed this consensus on great-power competition; others lamented it. But as Russia amped up its aggression in Ukraine, China made clear its designs on Taiwan, and the two autocratic powers deepened their ties and collaborated more closely with other U.S. rivals, few predicted that Washington would abandon competition as its guiding light. As Trump returned to the White House in 2025, many analysts expected continuity from the Biden foreign policy.

Then came the first two months of Trump’s second term. With astonishing speed, Trump has shattered the consensus he helped create. Rather than compete with China and Russia, Trump now wants to work with them, seeking deals that, during his first term, would have seemed antithetical to U.S. interests. Trump has made clear that he supports a swift end to the war in Ukraine, even if it requires publicly humiliating the Ukrainians while embracing Russia and allowing it to claim vast swaths of Ukraine.

Relations remain more tense with China, especially as Trump’s tariffs come into effect and the threat of Chinese retaliation looms. But Trump has signaled that he seeks a wide-ranging settlement with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Anonymous Trump advisers told The New York Times that Trump would like to sit down “man to man” with Xi to hammer out terms governing trade, investment, and nuclear arms. All the while, Trump has ramped up economic pressure on U.S. allies in Europe and on Canada (which he hopes to coerce into becoming “the 51st state”) and has threatened to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. Almost overnight, the United States went from competing with its aggressive adversaries to bullying its mild-mannered allies.

Some observers, trying to make sense of Trump’s behavior, have tried to put his policies firmly back in the box of great-power competition. In this view, moving closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin is great-power politics at its finest—even a “reverse Kissinger,” designed to split apart the Chinese-Russian partnership. Others have suggested that Trump is simply pursuing a more nationalistic style of great-power competition, one that would make sense to Xi and Putin, as well as India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

These interpretations might have been persuasive in January. But it should now be clear that Trump’s vision of the world is not one of great-power competition but of great-power collusion: a “concert” system akin to the one that shaped Europe during the nineteenth century. What Trump wants is a world managed by strongmen who work together—not always harmoniously but always purposefully—to impose a shared vision of order on the rest of the world. This does not mean that the United States will stop competing with China and Russia altogether: great-power competition as a feature of international politics is enduring and undeniable. But great-power competition as the organizing principle for American foreign policy has proved remarkably shallow and short-lived. And yet if history sheds any light on Trump’s new approach, it is that things may end badly.

 

What’s Your Story?

Although competing with major rivals was central to Trump’s first term and Biden’s term, it’s important to note that “great-power competition” never described a coherent strategy. To have a strategy suggests that leaders have defined concrete ends or metrics of success. During the Cold War, for example, Washington sought to increase its power in order to contain Soviet expansion and influence. In the contemporary era, by contrast, the struggle for power has often seemed like an end in itself. Although Washington identified its rivals, it rarely specified when, how, and for what reason competition was taking place. As a result, the concept was exceedingly elastic. “Great-power competition” could explain Trump’s threats to abandon NATO unless European countries increased defense spending, since doing so could protect American security interests from free-riding. But the term could also apply to Biden’s reinvestment in NATO, which sought to revitalize an alliance of democracies against Russian and Chinese influence.

Rather than defining a specific strategy, great-power competition represented a potent narrative of world politics, one that provides essential insight into how U.S. policymakers saw themselves and the world around them, and how they wanted others to perceive them. In this story, the main character was the United States. Sometimes, the country was cast as a strong and imposing hero, with unparalleled economic vitality and military might. But Washington could also be presented as a victim, as in Trump’s 2017 strategy document, which portrayed the United States operating in a “dangerous world” with rival powers “aggressively undermining American interests around the globe.” At times, there was a supporting cast: for example, a community of democracies that, in Biden’s view, was a necessary partner in ensuring global economic prosperity and the protection of human rights.

China and Russia, in turn, served as the primary antagonists. Although there were cameos by other foils—Iran, North Korea, and an array of nonstate actors—Beijing and Moscow stood out as the perpetrators of a plot to weaken the United States. Here again, some of the details varied depending on who was telling the story. For Trump, the tale was grounded in national interests: these revisionist powers sought to “erode American security and prosperity.” Under Biden, the focus shifted from interests to ideals, from security to order. Washington had to compete with the major autocratic powers to ensure the safety of democracy and the resilience of the rules-based international order.

But for nearly a decade, the broad narrative arc remained the same: aggressive antagonists were seeking to harm American interests, and Washington had to respond. Once this vision of the world was in place, it imbued events with particular meanings. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an attack not just on Ukraine but also on the U.S.-led order. China’s military buildup in the South China Sea represented not a defense of Beijing’s core interests but an attempt to expand Beijing’s influence in the Indo-Pacific at Washington’s expense. Great-power competition meant that technology could not be neutral and that the United States needed to push China out of Europe’s 5G networks and limit Beijing’s access to semiconductors. Foreign aid and infrastructure projects in African countries were not simply instruments of development but weapons in the battle for primacy. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, even the UN World Tourism Organization all became arenas in a contest for supremacy. Everything, it seemed, was now great-power competition.

 

Concert Tickets

In his first term, Trump emerged as one of the most compelling bards of great-power competition. “Our rivals are tough, they’re tenacious, and committed to the long term—but so are we,” he said in a speech in 2017. “To succeed, we must integrate every dimension of our national strength, and we must compete with every instrument of our national power.” (Announcing his candidacy for president two years earlier, he was more characteristically blunt: “I beat China all the time. All the time.”)

But having returned to office for a second term, Trump has changed tack. His approach remains abrasive and confrontational. He does not hesitate to threaten punishment—often economic—to force others to do what he wants. Instead of trying to beat China and Russia, however, Trump now wants to persuade them to work with him to manage international order. What he is telling now is a narrative of collusion, not competition; a story of acting in concert. After a call with Xi in mid-January, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “We will solve many problems together, and starting immediately. We discussed balancing Trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects. President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!” Addressing business leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, that month, Trump mused that “China can help us stop the war with, in particular, Russia-Ukraine. And they have a great deal of power over that situation, and we’ll work with them.”

Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported, “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II. . . . We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.” In March, as members of Trump’s administration negotiated with Russian counterparts over the fate of Ukraine, Moscow made clear its view of a potential future. “We can emerge with a model that will allow Russia and the United States, and Russia and NATO, to coexist without interfering in each other’s spheres of interests,” Feodor Voitolovsky, a scholar who serves on advisory boards at the Russian Foreign Ministry and Security Council, told The New York Times. The Russian side understands that Trump grasps this prospect “as a businessman,” Voitolovsky added. Around the same time, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, a real estate magnate who has been heavily involved in the negotiations with Russia, mused about the possibilities for U.S.-Russian collaboration in an interview with the commentator Tucker Carlson. “Share sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” Witkoff said. “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?”

In pursuing accommodations with rivals, Trump may be breaking with recent convention, but he is tapping into a deeply rooted tradition. The notion that rival great powers should come together to manage a chaotic international system is one that leaders have embraced at many points in history, often in the wake of catastrophic wars that left them seeking to establish a more controlled, reliable, and resilient order. In 1814–15, in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that engulfed Europe for almost a quarter century, the major European powers assembled in Vienna to forge a more stable and peaceful order than the one produced by the balance-of-power system of the eighteenth century, where great-power war occurred practically every decade. The result was “the Concert of Europe,” a group that initially included Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom. In 1818, France was invited to join.

As mutually recognized great powers, members of the Concert were endowed with special rights and responsibilities to mitigate destabilizing conflicts in the European system. If territorial disputes arose, instead of seeking to exploit them to expand their power, the European leaders would meet to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict. Russia had long eyed expansion into the Ottoman Empire, and in 1821, the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule seemed to provide Russia with a significant opportunity to do just that. In response, Austria and the United Kingdom called for restraint, arguing that a Russian intervention would wreak havoc on the European order. Russia backed down, with Tsar Alexander I promising, “It is for me to show myself convinced of the principles on which I founded the alliance.” At other times, when revolutionary nationalist movements threatened the order, the great powers convened to guarantee a diplomatic settlement, even if it meant forgoing significant gains.

For around four decades, the Concert channeled great-power competition into collaboration. Yet by the end of the century, the system had collapsed. It had proved unable to prevent conflict among its members, and throughout three wars, Prussia systematically defeated Austria and France and consolidated its position as the head of a unified Germany, upending the stable balance of power. Meanwhile, intensifying imperial competition in Africa and Asia proved too much for the Concert to manage.

But the idea that great powers could and should take on the responsibility of collectively steering international politics took hold and reemerged from time to time. The concert idea guided U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China as “the Four Policemen” who would secure the world in the aftermath of World War II. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev imagined a post–Cold War world in which the Soviet Union would continue to be recognized as a great power, working with its former enemies to help order Europe’s security environment. And as Washington’s relative power appeared to wane at the beginning of this century, some observers urged the United States to cooperate with Brazil, China, India, and Russia to provide a similar modicum of stability in an emerging post-hegemonic world.

 

Carving Up the World

Trump’s interest in a great-power concert does not derive from a deep understanding of this history. His affection for it rests on impulse. Trump seems to see foreign relations much as he sees the worlds of real estate and entertainment, but on a larger scale. As in those industries, a select group of power brokers are in constant competition—not as mortal enemies, but as respected equals. Each is in charge of an empire that he may manage as he sees fit. China, Russia, and the United States may jockey for advantage in various ways, but they understand that they exist within—and are in charge of—a shared system. For that reason, the great powers must collude, even as they compete. Trump sees Xi and Putin as “smart, tough” leaders who “love their country.” He has stressed that he gets along well with them and treats them as equals, despite the fact that the United States remains more powerful than China and far stronger than Russia. As with the Concert of Europe, it is the perception of equality that matters: in 1815, Austria and Prussia were no material match for Russia and the United Kingdom but were accommodated as equals nonetheless.

In Trump’s concert story, the United States is neither a hero nor a victim of the international system, obligated to defend its liberal principles to the rest of the world. In his second inaugural address, Trump promised that the United States would lead the world again not through its ideals but through its ambitions. With a drive to greatness, he promised, would come material power and an ability “to bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.” What has become clear in the weeks since he gave this speech is that the unity Trump seeks is primarily with China and Russia.

In the great-power-competition narrative, those countries were positioned as implacable enemies, ideologically opposed to the U.S.-led order. In the concert narrative, China and Russia no longer appear as pure antagonists but as potential partners, working with Washington to preserve their collective interests. This is not to say that concert partners become close friends; far from it. A concert order will continue to see competition as each of these strongmen angles for superiority. But each recognizes that conflicts among themselves must be muted so that they can confront the real enemy: the forces of disorder.

Chinese and Russian foreign ministers Wang Yi and Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, April 2025

It was precisely this story about the dangers of counterrevolutionary forces that laid the foundations for the Concert of Europe. The great powers set aside their ideological differences, recognizing that the revolutionary nationalist forces that the French Revolution had unleashed posed more of a threat to Europe than their narrower rivalries ever could. In Trump’s vision of a new concert, Russia and China must be treated as kindred spirits in quelling rampant disorder and worrisome social change. The United States will continue to compete with its peers, especially with China on issues of trade, but not at the expense of aiding the forces that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have called “enemies within”: illegal immigrants, Islamist terrorists, “woke” progressives, European-style socialists, and sexual minorities.

For a concert of powers to work, members must be able to pursue their own ambitions without trampling on the rights of their peers (trampling on the rights of others, in contrast, is both acceptable and necessary to maintain order). This means organizing the world into distinct spheres of influence, boundaries that demarcate the spaces where a great power has the right to practice unfettered expansion and domination. In the Concert of Europe, great powers allowed their peers to intervene within recognized spheres of influence, as when Austria crushed a revolution in Naples in 1821, and when Russia brutally suppressed Polish nationalism, as it did repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century.

In the logic of a contemporary concert, it would be reasonable for the United States to allow Russia to permanently seize Ukrainian territory to prevent what Moscow sees as a threat to regional security. It would make sense for the United States to remove “military forces or weapons systems from the Philippines in exchange for the China Coast Guard executing fewer patrols,” as the scholar Andrew Byers proposed in 2024, shortly before Trump appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia. A concert mindset would even leave open the idea that the United States would stand aside if China decided to take control of Taiwan. In return, Trump would expect Beijing and Moscow to remain on the sidelines as he threatened Canada, Greenland, and Panama.

Just as a concert narrative gives the great powers the right to order the system as they wish, it limits the ability of others to have their voices heard. The great European powers of the nineteenth century cared little for the interests of smaller powers, even on issues of vital importance. In 1818, after a decade of revolution in South America, Spain was faced with the final collapse of its empire in the Western Hemisphere. The great powers met in Aix-la-Chapelle to decide the fate of the empire and to debate whether they should intervene to restore monarchical power. Spain, notably, was not invited to the bargaining table. Likewise, Trump seems to have little interest in giving Ukraine a role in negotiations over its fate and even less desire to bring European allies into the process: he and Putin and their various proxies will sort it out by “dividing up certain assets,” Trump has said. Kyiv will just have to live with the results.

 

The Sum of all Spheres

In some instances, Washington should see Beijing and even Moscow as partners. For example, revitalizing arms control would be a welcome development, one that requires more collaboration than a narrative of great-power competition would have allowed. And in this respect, the concert narrative can be alluring. By turning over global order to strongmen running powerful countries, perhaps the world could enjoy relative peace and stability instead of conflict and disorder. But this narrative distorts the realities of power politics and obscures the challenges of acting in concert.

For one thing, although Trump might think that spheres of influence would be easy to delineate and manage, they are not. Even at the height of the Concert period, the powers struggled to define the boundaries of their influence. Austria and Prussia consistently clashed over control of the German Confederation. France and Britain struggled for dominance in the Low Countries. More recent attempts to establish spheres of influence have proved no less problematic. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roo­sevelt, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill envisioned peacefully co-managing the post–World War II world. Instead, they soon found themselves battling at the boundaries of their respective spheres, first at the core of the new order, in Germany, and later at the peripheries in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Today, thanks to the economic interdependence brought on by globalization, it would be even more difficult for powers to neatly divide the world. Complex supply chains and streams of foreign direct investment would defy clear boundaries. And problems such as pandemics, climate change, and nuclear proliferation hardly exist inside an enclosed sphere, where a single great power can contain them.

Trump seems to think a more transactional approach can circumvent ideological differences that might otherwise pose obstacles to cooperation with China and Russia. But despite the ostensible unity of great powers, concerts often mask rather than mitigate ideological frictions. It did not take long for such rifts to emerge within the Concert of Europe. During its early years, the conservative powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, formed their own exclusive grouping, the Holy Alliance, to protect their dynastic systems. They saw the revolts against Spanish rule in the Americas as an existential threat, one whose outcome would reverberate across Europe, and as thus requiring an immediate response to restore order. But leaders in the more liberal United Kingdom saw the rebellions as fundamentally liberal, and although they worried about the power vacuum that could arise in their wake, the British were not inclined to intervene. Ultimately, the British worked with an upstart liberal country—the United States—to cordon off the Western Hemisphere from European intervention, tacitly supporting the Monroe Doctrine with British naval might.

It is not a stretch to imagine similar ideological battles in a new concert. Trump might care little about how Xi managed his sphere of influence, but images of China using force to crush Taiwan’s democracy would likely galvanize opposition in the United States and elsewhere, just as Russia’s aggression against Ukraine angered democratic publics. So far, Trump has been able to essentially reverse U.S. policy on Ukraine and Russia without paying any political price. But an Economist-YouGov poll conducted in mid-March found that 47 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the war, and 49 percent disapproved of his overall foreign policy.

When great powers attempt to suppress challenges to a prevailing order, they often provoke a backlash, spawning efforts to break their grasp on power. National and transnational movements can chip away at a concert. In nineteenth-century Europe, the nationalist revolutionary forces that the great powers attempted to contain not only became stronger throughout the century but also forged ties with one another. By 1848, they were strong enough to mount coordinated revolutions across Europe. Although these revolts were put down, they unleashed forces that would ultimately deal a fatal blow to the Concert in the wars of German unification in the 1860s.

The concert narrative suggests that great powers can act jointly to keep the forces of instability at bay indefinitely. Both common sense and history say otherwise. Today, Russia and the United States might successfully impose order in Ukraine, negotiating a new territorial boundary and freezing that conflict. Doing so might produce a temporary lull but probably wouldn’t generate a lasting peace, since Ukraine is unlikely to forget about its lost territory and Putin is unlikely to be satisfied with his current lot for long. The Middle East stands out as another region where great-power collusion is unlikely to foster stability and peace. Even if they were working together harmoniously, it is difficult to see how Washington, Beijing, and Moscow would be able to broker an end to the war in Gaza, head off a nuclear confrontation with Iran, and stabilize post-Assad Syria.

A screen promoting the Russian armed forces in Moscow, February 2025.

Challenges would also come from other states, especially from rising “middle” powers. In the nineteenth century, rising powers such as Japan demanded entrance to the great-power club and equal footing on issues such as trade. The most repressive form of European domination, colonial governance, eventually produced fierce resistance all over the world. Today, an international hierarchy would be even more difficult to sustain. There is little recognition among smaller countries that the great powers have any special rights to dictate a world order. Middle powers have already created their own institutions—multilateral free trade agreements, regional security organizations—that can facilitate collective resistance. Europe has struggled to build its own independent defenses but is likely to double down to provide for its own security and to aid Ukraine. Over the last several years, Japan has built up its own networks of influence in the Indo-Pacific, positioning itself as a power more capable of independent diplomatic action in that region. India is unlikely to accept any exclusion from the great-power order, especially if that means the growth of China’s power along its border.

To deal with all the problems that great-power collusion poses, it helps to have the skills of an Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian leader who found ways to manipulate the Concert of Europe to his advantage. Bismarck’s diplomacy could even pull apart ideologically aligned allies. As Prussia prepared to go to war against Denmark to wrest control of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, Bismarck’s appeals to Concert rules and existing treaties sidelined the United Kingdom, whose leaders had pledged to secure the integrity of the Danish kingdom. He exploited colonial competition in Africa, positioning himself as an “honest broker” between France and the United Kingdom. Bismarck was opposed to the liberal, nationalist forces that were sweeping through mid-nineteenth-century Europe and was thus a reactionary conservative—but not a reactive one. He thought carefully about when to crush revolutionary movements and when to harness them, as he did in his pursuit of German unification. He was incredibly ambitious but not beholden to expansionist impulses, and often opted for restraint. He saw no need to pursue an empire on the African continent, for example, since that would only draw Germany into a conflict with France and the United Kingdom.

Alas, most leaders, despite how they might see themselves, are not Bismarcks. Many more closely resemble Napoleon III. The French ruler came to power as the 1848 revolutions were winding down and believed that he had an exceptional capacity to use the Concert system for his ends. He attempted to drive a wedge between Austria and Prussia to expand his influence in the German Confederation, and he tried to organize a grand conference to redraw European boundaries to reflect national movements. But he thoroughly failed. Vain and emotional, susceptible to flattery and shame, he found himself either abandoned by great-power peers or manipulated into doing the bidding of others. As a result, Bismarck found in Napoleon III the dupe he needed to push German unification forward.

In a present-day concert, how might Trump fare as a leader? It’s possible he could emerge as a Bismarckian figure, bullying and bluffing his way into advantageous concessions from other great powers. But he might also get played, winding up like Napoleon III, outmaneuvered by wilier rivals.

 

Cooperation or Collusion?

After the Concert was established, the European powers remained at peace for almost 40 years. This was a stunning achievement on a continent that had been wrecked by great-power conflict for centuries. In that sense, the Concert might offer a viable framework for an increasingly multipolar world. But getting there would require a story that involves less collusion and more collaboration, a narrative in which great powers act in concert to advance not merely their own interests but broader ones, as well.

What made the original Concert possible was the presence of like-minded leaders who shared a collective interest in continental governance and the aim of avoiding another catastrophic war. The Concert also had rules to manage great-power competition. These were not the rules of the liberal international order, which sought to supplant power politics with legal procedures. They were, rather, jointly generated “rules of thumb” that guided the great powers as they negotiated conflict. They established norms about when they would intervene in conflicts, how they would apportion territory, and who would be responsible for the public goods that would maintain the peace. Finally, the original Concert vision embraced formal deliberation and moral suasion as the key mechanism of collaborative foreign policy. The Concert relied on forums that brought the great powers into discussions about their collective interests.

It is hard to imagine Trump crafting that sort of arrangement. Trump seems to believe he can build a concert not through genuine collaboration but through transactional dealmaking, relying on threats and bribes to push his partners toward collusion. And as a habitual transgressor of rules and norms, Trump seems unlikely to stick to any parameters that might mitigate the conflicts among great powers that would inevitably crop up. Nor is it easy to imagine Putin and Xi as enlightened partners, embracing self-abnegation and settling differences in the name of the greater good.

It is worth remembering how the Concert of Europe ended: first with a series of limited wars on the continent, then with imperial conflicts erupting overseas, and, finally, with the outbreak of World War I. The system was ill equipped to prevent confrontation when competition intensified. And when careful collaboration devolved into mere collusion, the concert narrative became a fairy tale. The system came crashing down in a paroxysm of raw power politics, and the world was set ablaze.

 

For updates click hompage here