What Great-Power Competition Means in US Strategy
CRS traces how 2022 strategy documents framed great-power competition, naming China the pacing challenge and Russia an acute threat.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6, 2026 — U.S. defense debates shifted over the past decade from a post-9/11 focus on counterterrorism toward what official documents call great-power competition or strategic competition. The Congressional Research Service, in a report updated Aug. 28, 2024, wrote that intensified U.S. competition with China and Russia had “profoundly changed the conversation about U.S. defense issues” from what it was during the post-Cold War era.
CRS dates the transition carefully. The post-Cold War period, it says, showed initial signs of fading in 2006-2008 and by 2014 had given way to intensified competition with China and Russia, alongside challenges to elements of the U.S.-led international order built after World War II. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, CRS added, underscored that shift for many observers.
What the 2022 strategy documents said
CRS quotes the Biden Administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy as stating that “the post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” The same strategy, as excerpted by CRS, called the People’s Republic of China “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.” It described Russia as posing “an immediate threat to the free and open international system,” illustrated by the war against Ukraine.
The October 2022 National Defense Strategy, again as quoted by CRS, directed the Defense Department “to act urgently to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the Department’s pacing challenge.” It also said the strategy “accounts for the acute threat posed by Russia.” Defense priorities listed in that document, CRS reports, included defending the homeland paced to the PRC threat, deterring strategic attacks, deterring aggression while being prepared to prevail in conflict — “prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific region, then the Russia challenge in Europe” — and building a resilient joint force.
Those labels are policy terms, not predictions. “Pacing challenge” and “acute threat” describe how the 2022 strategy ranked problems for force planning and budgeting. CRS notes that the same shift pulled grand strategy and geopolitics back to the center of defense debates, along with questions about how many overlapping conflicts the U.S. military should be sized to handle.
On that last point, CRS records testimony from Adm. Michael Gilday, then chief of naval operations, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 12, 2022, that “right now the force is not sized to handle two simultaneous conflicts” and is “sized to fight one and to keep a second adversary in check.” The 2022 defense strategy’s force-planning language, CRS says, pointed in the same direction: defend the homeland, maintain strategic deterrence, and be able to deter and, if necessary, prevail in one conflict while using other tools to deter opportunistic aggression elsewhere.
A companion CRS report on the U.S. role in the world, updated Jan. 19, 2021, described the post-Cold War years as a unipolar moment that later observers judged had given way to renewed competition among the United States, China and Russia.
Great-power competition, as used in these documents, is therefore a description of a planning problem. It identifies China and Russia as the states around which much of U.S. defense strategy was organized in 2022, and it leaves Congress with the question CRS poses throughout the report: whether to accept, reject or modify the funding and force structure that strategy implies. Strategy coverage continues on the geopolitical analysis hub and great-power competition. Related reporting includes the first island chain explainer and Geopolitics.
Sources
- Congressional Research Service: Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense (R43838)
- Congressional Research Service: U.S. Role in the World (R44891)
