As recently as 2010, Barack Obama could observe a strategic landscape where the “major powers are at peace.” Yet if great-power war has not returned, the era of deep great-power peace is over. Relations between the world’s strongest states are increasingly defined by undisguised rivalry and even conflict; there is ever-sharper jostling for power and ever-greater contestation of global norms and principles. From East Asia to the Middle East to Eastern Europe, authoritarian actors are testing the vulnerable peripheries of American power and seeking to restore their own privileged spheres of regional dominance. In doing so, they are putting the system under pressure on all key geographical fronts at once.

China is leading the way. Although Beijing has been a leading beneficiary of a liberal economic order that has allowed it to amass great prosperity, Chinese leaders nonetheless always regarded American primacy as something to be endured for a time rather than suffered forever. America’s preeminent position in the Asia-Pacific represents an affront to the pride and sense of historical destiny of a country that still considers itself “the Middle Kingdom.” And as Aaron Friedberg notes, China’s authoritarian leaders have long seen a dominant, democratic America as “the most serious external threat” to their domestic authority and geopolitical security. As China’s power has increased, Beijing has strived to establish mastery in the Asia- Pacific. A Chinese admiral articulated this ambition in 2007, telling an American counterpart that the two powers should split the Pacific with Hawaii as the dividing line. Yang Jiechi, China’s foreign minister, made the same point in 2010. In a modern-day echo of the Melian Dialogue’s “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” he lectured the nations of Southeast Asia that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

Policy has followed rhetoric. To undercut America’s position, Beijing has harassed American ships and planes operating in international waters and airspace; People’s Republic of China (PRC) media organs warn U.S. allies that they may be caught in the crossfire of a Sino- American war unless they distance themselves from Washington. China has simultaneously attacked the credibility of U.S. alliance guarantees by using strategies—island-building in the South China Sea, for instance—that are designed to shift the regional status quo in ways even the U.S. Navy finds difficult to counter. Through a mixture of economic aid and diplomatic pressure, Beijing has also divided international bodies, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), through which Washington has sought to rally opposition to Chinese assertiveness. All the while, China has been steadily building formidable military tools designed to keep the United States out of the region and thereby give Beijing a free hand. As America’s sun sets in the Asia-Pacific, Chinese leaders calculate, the shadow China casts will only grow longer.

The counterparts to these activities are initiatives meant to bring the neighbors into line. China has islands as staging points to project military power. Military and paramilitary forces have harassed, confronted, and violated the sovereignty of countries from Vietnam to the Philippines to India; China has consistently exerted pressure on Japan in the East China Sea. Economically, Beijing uses its muscle to reward those who comply with China’s policies and punish those who don’t, and to advance geo-economic projects, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and Regional Comprehensive Economic Project (RCEP), designed to bring the region closer into its orbit. Strikingly, China has also abandoned its long-professed principle of non-interference in other countries’ domestic politics, extending the reach of Chinese propaganda and using investment and even bribery to coopt regional elites. Payoffs to Australian politicians are as critical to China’s regional project as development of “carrier killer” missiles.

By blending intimidation with inducement, Beijing is seeking to erect a Sino-centric regional order—a new Chinese tribute system for the twenty-first century. It is trying to reorder its external environment to its own liking, a profoundly normal rising-power behavior that only seems odd or surprising against the abnormal backdrop of the post–Cold War era. It is using the wealth and power the U.S.-led international order helped it develop to mount the most formidable challenge that order has faced in decades. And it is doing so in full cognizance that this implies progressively more acute rivalry with Washington.

Make no mistake—these efforts are having an impact. Chinese coercion short of war has dramatically shifted perceptions of power and momentum in the region, while the Chinese buildup has made the outcome of a Sino-American war more doubtful from a U.S. perspective. “America has lost” in Asia, president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte announced in 2016; Manila must now reposition itself accordingly. Similarly, RAND Corporation analysts assessed in 2015 that “over the next five to 15 years . . . Asia will witness a progressively receding frontier of U.S. dominance.” The region could soon hit a series of “tipping points” at which U.S. commitments to partners such as Taiwan, or even the Philippines and Japan, become less credible. As the power balance shifts, the United States could find itself in a position where it might actually lose a war in the Western Pacific—or it could simply lose the region without a shot being fired as countries make their calculations and accommodate Beijing.

If China represents the greatest long-term challenge to the American-led system, the resurgence of great-power competition is even more acute in Europe. For many Russians, the post–Cold War era was not a time of triumph and tranquility. It was a time of weakness and humiliation, a period when Russia lost its great-power status and was impotent to resist the encroachment of U.S. and Western influence. As Russia has regained a degree of strength, then, it has sought to reassert primacy along its periphery and restore lost influence further abroad, often through measures less subtle and more overtly aggressive than China’s.

Moscow has twice humiliated and dismembered former Soviet republics that committed the sin of tilting toward the West or throwing out pro-Russian leaders, first in Georgia and then in Ukraine. Following the latter conflict, Russian president Vladimir Putin invoked the concept of Russkiy Mir, or “Russian World,” staking a proprietary claim to dominance of the states on Moscow’s periphery. To further this project, Russia has also worked to weaken the institutions that maintain European security. It has sought to undermine NATO and the European Union via cyberattacks, military intimidation and paramilitary subversion, financial support for anti-EU and anti-NATO politicians, and dissemination of fake news and other forms of intervention in European and U.S. political processes. In 2016, Russian intelligence operatives reportedly tried to decapitate and overthrow the government of Montenegro to prevent it from joining NATO—a cold-blooded, if unsuccessful, act of competition with the West. In 2013, Russia’s chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov, described such tactics as “new generation warfare.” That label describes a blending of military, paramilitary, economic, informational, and other initiatives to sow conflict and unrest within an enemy state or coalition, and it reflects the deadly serious nature of the struggle in which Russian leaders believe they are engaged.

As Gerasimov’s writings indicate, military muscle and other forms of coercion are not Moscow’s only tools. Russia has simultaneously used energy flows to keep the states on its periphery economically dependent, and it has exported corruption and illiberalism to non-aligned states in the former Warsaw Pact area and Central Asia to prevent further encroachment of liberal values. And while Russia’s activities are most concentrated in these areas, Russian forces also intervened in Syria in 2015 to prop up Bashar al-Assad and expand Kremlin influence in the broader Middle East. Since then, Moscow has worked to position itself as a security patron to countries and actors from Libya to Iran, and thereby create a geopolitical counterpoise to U.S. influence.

In doing all this, Russia has upended the basically peaceful European order that emerged after the Cold War and once again made interstate aggression a tool of regional politics. Its leadership has shown a penchant for risk-taking that has repeatedly thrown foreign observers off-balance; it has adopted bold and creative strategies that play on Western complacency and divisions. Russian leaders have explicitly called for the emergence of a “post-West world order,” leaving little doubt as to their dissatisfaction with any liberal international system based on American primacy. And as with China, these actions have been underwritten by a significant military buildup that has enhanced Russian power-projection capabilities and left NATO “outnumbered, outranged, and outgunned” on its eastern flank. “If I wanted,” Putin reportedly bragged in 2014, “in two days I could have Russian troops not only in Kiev, but also in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Bucharest.”²⁹ That same year, secretary of state John Kerry was mocked for describing Russian behavior as something out of the nineteenth century. Yet what he captured was that Russia was simply behaving like Russia again. It was asserting its great-power prerogatives in ways that seemed anomalous only to those with very short historical memories.

Finally, geopolitical revisionism is alive and well in the Middle East. Iran, the primary state author of that revisionism, is not in the same power-political league as China or even Russia. But it is a proud civilization that never accepted a Middle Eastern order led by Washington, as well as a revolutionary state that has long sought to export its ideology and influence. Amid the vacuum of regional power that was created first by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and then by the Arab Spring, Iran has been making its bid for primacy. “Our borders have spread,” announced Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, in 2011. “We must witness victories in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.”³⁰

Iran has sought those victories by intervening, either directly or through proxy forces, in conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq; by promoting a sectarian agenda that seeks to polarize the region and create wedges for Iranian influence; and by investing in its nuclear program and niche capabilities such as ballistic missiles and special operations forces. As of mid-2018, the nuclear program had apparently been frozen for several years (although how long that would remain the case was becoming increasingly uncertain), but other initiatives have proceeded apace. And if Iran has fewer material means than other revisionist powers, it compensates—like Moscow—with asymmetric strategies and a high tolerance for risk.

Iran used the Syrian civil war, for instance, as an occasion to flood that country with Shia militias, to push its military presence ever closer to Israel’s northern frontier, to arm its proxy, Hezbollah, with ever more advanced missiles and other weapons, and even to launch its first-ever military attacks on Israel itself. Likewise, it used the Yemeni civil war to provide Huthi rebels with the ballistic missiles that they subsequently fired at Saudi Arabia. Through these and other gambits, Iran has come into deeper conflict and even violence with traditional U.S. partners such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and it has fueled—while also benefiting from—intensifying strife across the Middle East. Most worrying, it has steadily ratcheted up the chances of an outright war that could easily take on regional dimensions.

Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions, and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,” supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails, and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold War era.

The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history.

Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers.

Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea. It aspires to the deep European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military power into the Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military relationships in regions as remote as Latin America?

Likewise, China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.

These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay off. This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come.

The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order. Section II from Chapter 6.

Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs in the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Charles Edel is a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and previously served on the U.S. Secretary of State's policy planning staff.

Image: Reuters