FA: The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition – Trump’s new spheres of influence

Pic.: FA

As Trump returned to the White House in 2025, many analysts expected continuity: a “Trump-Biden-Trump 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, ‘Foreign Affairs’ stresses.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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 with the aim of forging 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.

Trump may be breaking with recent convention, but he is tapping into a deep tradition.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 maintaining 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 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.

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.

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.

Concerts often mask rather than mitigate ideological frictions.

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.

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.

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