Ronald O'Rourke epub Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress

The post-Cold War era of international relations—which began in the early 1990s and issometimes referred to as the unipolar moment (with the United States as the unipolar power)—showed initial signs of fading in 2006-2008, and by 2014 had given way to a fundamentallydifferent situation of renewed great power competition with China and Russia and challenges bythese two countries and others to elements of the U.S.-led international order that has operatedsince World War II.The renewal of great power competition was acknowledged alongside other considerations in theObama Administration’s June 2015 National Military Strategy, and was placed at the center of theTrump Administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) and January 2018National Defense Strategy (NDS). The December 2017 NSS and January 2018 NDS formallyreoriented U.S. national security strategy and U.S. defense strategy toward an explicit primaryfocus on great power competition with China and Russia. Department of Defense (DOD) officialshave subsequently identified countering China’s military capabilities as DOD’s top priority.The renewal of great power competition has profoundly changed the conversation about U.S.defense issues from what it was during the post-Cold War era: Counterterrorist operations andU.S. military operations in the Middle East—which had moved to the center of discussions ofU.S. defense issues following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and which continue tobe conducted—are now a less-dominant element in the conversation, and the conversation nowfeatures a new or renewed emphasis on many issues, all of which relate to China and/or Russia.