The 2017 United States National Security Strategy avers that the United States has entered an international competition for leadership against revisionist powers, Russia and China. Both states seek to grow their global influence at the expense of the United States. The National Security Strategy lays out a framework for countering these two strategic competitors, but it fails to answer an essential question: How do you end competition for international—or regional—leadership on favorable terms?

International competition, as a 2018 RAND study pointed out, is an understudied aspect of international relations that lacks an accepted definition. The same study concludes competition is “a common pursuit of power, influence, prosperity, and status at the same time when others are also seeking those things and when supply is limited,” which occurs “short of armed conflict.” Moreover, while there are numerous works on war termination, one strains to recall a study explaining how interstate competitions for leadership or influence end. This essay proposes four archetypes for terminating international or regional competition. That is, how do states win a competition for international or regional leadership or influence?

Competitions for international or regional leadership terminate in one of four ways. First, states can actively remove foes from competition by transitioning competition to military conflict and winning a decisive victory. Second, they can compete via domestic systems to gain a significant economic advantage to render competitors irrelevant. Third, states can remove themselves from competition through fiscal exhaustion or collapse, or fourth, states can undergo domestic political changes, such as revolution, that prevent them from or cause them to opt out of continuing. Each archetype can occur independently but often manifests in combination. States that successfully predict the most likely means of competition termination can ensure that resources and efforts flow to the decisive aspect(s) of the contest.

Diplomatic and influence efforts are continuously present in these competitions. These efforts shape and enable outcomes, and though rarely causally responsible, their fingerprints are all over any competition’s result. The formation of alliances and partnerships can greatly increase a state’s economic and military power relative to competitors at a tempo that can fundamentally change a competition’s trajectory.

Like war, the result of a competition is rarely final. Competitions only terminate for a time. States can restructure governments, revive economies, secure new resources or reform militaries to reemerge as more effective competitors if the underlying impetus for interstate competition remains. Pauses in competition can last for years, decades, or centuries. A renewed ability to compete may be serendipitous like Saudi Arabia’s 1938 discovery of oil or purposefully sought like Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms.

While states use military conflict as an active means to remove others from competition, the other three means of termination occur indirectly. If war is a wrestling match, then international competition is a long-distance auto race. Competitors influence one another over the course, but without physical contact to compel or coerce action. Victory comes from the superiority of systems over time in broad conditions: the car itself must run reliably with speed (economic system), the race team helps achieve and sustain its performance (political system), and capital obtains the best human talent and technology (resources). States win and lose competitions through the strength and adaptability of the internal political and economic systems as often as from adversary action. In truth, many states reach fiscal exhaustion or undergo political change because attempts to compete for influence exacerbate systemic weaknesses; a car may run reliably for years until forced to perform at the limit of its mechanical potential.

Military Conflict

States can conquer or militarily defeat rivals to remove them from regional or global contests for leadership. The Romans employed military force to eliminate Carthage as a competitor through three wars ending with Carthage’s complete destruction. Rome disaggregated the Carthaginians, sold them into slavery, and—as the story goes—sowed salt in Carthage’s fields to prevent it from reinitiating competition a fourth time. Military conquest rarely resolves interstate competition unless one side possesses a decisive military advantage and exploits it. States can broker alliances to gain this level of advantage, or broker them to prevent competitors from doing so.

To end competition, states must win a military conflict so overwhelmingly that they obtain leverage to dictate the formation of the loser’s government, as the Allies did after World War II, but did not after World War I. Victors must maintain their attention on defeated foes or risk their emergence.

Less frequently, states of comparable power can remove one another from competition if one side adopts a particularly poor strategy or lacks sufficient force employment capacity. Alternatively, states with similar military capabilities can incrementally improve their position compared to their competitor through a series of victories that shift the balance of power over time. These gradual shifts in the balance of power often reflect systemic advantages that feed military power.

Economic Supremacy

In addition to conflict, a state can effectively remove a rival from competition by achieving greater productivity gains over a long period. Great Britain and other European powers displaced longstanding regional hegemons China and India from competition by maintaining greater gross domestic product per capita growth rates after 1750 AD. By the mid-19th century, both China and India had lost the means to compete for regional leadership.

The efficiency of the economy, not just its size, matters to national power and competition. In 1900, the Chinese and United Kingdom economies were approximately equal in scale, but the UK was nearly ten times as productive per citizen. States with a larger per capita gross domestic product can levy heavy taxes to support standing armies, diplomatic efforts, and influence operations without greatly affecting their population’s standard of living. They can sustain these efforts for a long time. States with a per capita gross domestic product closer to subsistence levels cannot do so without risking revolt or wide-scale suffering.

A higher gross domestic product per capita—derived from productivity, not natural resource exploitation, like Saudi Arabia—typically indicates that a country invests in human capital, physical capital, and technology more efficiently than peers do with a lower gross domestic product per capita. These efficiency gains translate to more effective militaries, military technologies, and bureaucracies. Once states achieve a substantial productivity gap over their competitors, competitions for international or regional leadership effectively end until the productivity gap narrows.

In the long-term, states producing too many guns at the expense of consumer goods produce less of both and are prone to collapse.

Economically overshadowed competitors do not necessarily cease to be military threats though. In 2015, North Korea’s per capita gross domestic product was just four percent of South Korea’s. Kim Jong-un’s regime has lost the ability to compete for influence or status without threats of force but remains a danger to South Korea. Poor states can invest disproportionately in their armed forces to pose military threats, but only at the expense of their economic potential. In the long-term, states producing too many guns at the expense of consumer goods produce less of both and are prone to collapse. If these states fail to win the competition through military force in the short term, their chances of winning evaporate.

Fiscal Exhaustion or Collapse

Fiscal exhaustion or collapse can cause countries to terminate contests for international or regional leadership. Before its 1991 asset bubble popped, Japan was a staunch economic competitor of the United States because of its miraculous multi-decade economic growth. At the bubble’s peak, Japan’s land value measured four times that of the United States, a country twenty-five times as large. The bubble’s bursting effectively removed Japan as a competitor for global economic leadership. Japan’s economy stagnated for two decades while America’s continued to grow. Between 1991 and 2018, the United States economy grew from $6 trillion to over $20 trillion. In contrast, Japan’s economy grew from $3.5 trillion to roughly $5 trillion. Today, Japan’s economy is smaller than the economy of the United States in 1991.

In another example, the United States fiscally exhausted the Soviet Union by requiring it to maintain unaffordable levels of public expenditure to compete for leadership during the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1990, the Soviet Union consistently devoted more than twice as much of their gross national product to military expenditures as compared to the United States. Despite strong growth after World War II, the Soviet economy never overtook the United States. Over-investment in defense prevented dynamic economic growth and left the Soviets less economically competitive over time. The Soviet command economy continued to inefficiently allocate capital, causing its collapse and the end of its competition with the United States for international leadership in the late 1980s. After the Soviet collapse, Russia took nearly a decade to gain sufficient economic capacity to begin to assert itself regionally outside of the military dimension. It has only begun to seriously compete for international leadership in the last decade.

Domestic Politics

Revolutions or political movements can also remove a country from international or regional competition for dominance. As factions inside a state violently struggle for control, the state is temporarily weakened or distracted from external competition. Revolution pulled Russia out of the World War and limited its participation in great power competition until the 1930s. As the Bolsheviks struggled to assert control internally, client states in the Baltics and Caucuses gained brief periods of independence. Similarly, the Chinese Revolution of 1913 and the subsequent struggle between nationalists and communists removed China as a competitor against Japan for dominance in Asia prior to the Second World War.

Countries can willfully exclude themselves from competition for leadership with other states as well. After World War II, a financially exhausted and war-weary Western Europe accepted American dominance of the international system as the Communist-threat of the Soviet Union loomed to their east. If interests align, acquiescence to the rule of a stronger power can preserve a state’s international influence at diminished cost. At other times, motivation to compete dissipates in response to changes in the geopolitical environment. Under the Soviet threat, and exhausted after two world wars, Western Europe restricted its potential for internal competition through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Economic Community. European states continue to compete for influence, but with institutional constraints that limit the scope and severity of competition possible.

A Competition of Systems

In these archetypes, states remove themselves from competition through errant policy or systemic flaws more often than foreign enterprises force their decline. Like an auto race, countries create and fine-tune their internal systems—political, economic, and military—before the competition ever begins. The driver can affect the race, but the strength and weaknesses of a country’s existing systems and its access to resources have more impact. The longer a competition or war continues, the more systems and resources influence its result.

Internal economic and political decisions are more likely than warfare to cost a state regional or international leadership. Focusing on the wrong aspect of a competition or picking an incorrect strategy can result in decline as quickly as a competitor’s bold moves. Competitors must carefully assess the trajectory of competition before adapting to their opponent(s). If a state changes nothing about its current economic, political, and military systems, is it likely to lose the contest? In what areas is the adversary likely to pose significant challenges? What advantages do adversaries possess that could feasibly result in their victory?

Drastic policy shifts in response to a foe may be equally likely to lead to defeat as a victory if they respond to the wrong problem or respond inadequately to it. There are graveyards of former Fortune 500 companies that confirm this as fact. As rationally bounded human beings, we lack the ability to foresee the full impact of decisions and policies vertically and horizontally through a complex state system. Rapid changes in systems of government, military structure or doctrine, and economic systems test the limits of human foresight and may inadvertently change the system dynamics that provide a nation its comparative advantages in the first place. It is emotionally satisfying to take drastic action to avoid undesirable events, but not always prudent.

States, organizations, and individuals engaged in competition must ask themselves: Will I win or lose this competition if I make no changes to systems or policy? Whether they predict a persistent advantage or imminent decline, they must strive to identify the culprit that will lead them to the winner’s circle or cause their failure. Only then should they consider positive action to cement their advantage or prevent its deterioration.

The United States has a framework for competition against Russia and China, not a published strategy—the 2017 National Security Strategy does not provide a theory of victory that explains how the United States should prioritize resources between instruments of national power to achieve an end state. To create a theory of victory, the United States needs to predict how its competition with Russia and China might end on favorable terms and deliberately apply resources to make it a reality. It should accentuate the system-level flaws of its competitors as it shores up its own. The Soviets misjudged the decisive aspect of their competition with the United States because they failed to predict the competition would terminate through economic means. With careful analysis and introspection, the United States can avoid the same fate by identifying the most likely way its competitions with Russia and China will end.

Jules Hurst is a Strategist in the U.S. Army Reserve. Thanks to Jeff Springman and Adam Twardowski for the helpful comments. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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