The Return of Great Power Competition: Why the World Is Starting to Look More Like History Again
What is great power competition and why does it matter now? Former State Department official Wess Mitchell explains the return of geopolitics, China’s rise, and the future of American power.
“The safety and prosperity of the United States will depend on our ability to navigate an era of great power history that looks like not so much the last 30 years, but the 3,000 years that preceded that.”
— A. Wess Mitchell
What if the last thirty years were the exception — not the rule?
For much of the post-Cold War era, Americans were told that globalization, trade, and democratic expansion would gradually replace geopolitical rivalry. The assumption was simple: economic integration would make great power conflict obsolete.
But what if history never actually ended?
In this episode of Waitt, What?, A. Wess Mitchell, American strategist, historian and former
Assistant Secretary of State argues that the world is not entering a new era at all. It’s returning to an old one.
And the consequences of misunderstanding that shift could define the rest of the century.
What Great Power Competition Actually Means
The phrase “great power competition” has become increasingly common in foreign policy circles, but outside Washington, many Americans still hear it as vague jargon.
Mitchell strips it down to something much simpler: “It's normal history.”
For most of human civilization, global politics has revolved around rivalry between the largest and most powerful states.
“The rivalry and interactions of these really big powers is the defining force of history, both for good and for ill,” he says. “It's the actions of those really big powerful states that will determine outcomes, whether it's the peace and prosperity or the potential for the most disastrous and deadly thing known to man, which is a great power war.”
What changed after the Cold War was not human nature but the balance of power.
For roughly three decades, the United States operated without a peer competitor. That created a sense that geopolitics itself was fading.
“We became habituated to the idea that that was normal — that the spread of ideas was going to take geopolitics and competition out of the fabric of human interaction.”
But according to Mitchell, it wasn’t normal at all.
It was temporary.
The Illusion of the Post-Cold War Era
One of the defining assumptions of the 1990s was that economic liberalization would eventually lead to political liberalization.
Trade would soften authoritarianism. Globalization would reduce rivalry. China and Russia, over time, would become more like the West.
“We really were taking our eye off the ball of the bigger powers and potential rivals, Russia and China,” Mitchell says.
That miscalculation now sits at the center of U.S. strategy.
And nowhere is it more visible than in China.
“China is not only becoming very rapidly one of the strongest military and economic competitors in our history and as the Chinese power really congeals and China rises, it's the greatest challenge, I would argue, in the history of the United States.”
Not just because of military power, but because of scale.
Population. Manufacturing. Resources. Technology. National cohesion.
China combines the characteristics of a modern industrial superpower with what Mitchell calls a “civilizational state” — a country with a deep historical identity and strategic continuity stretching back thousands of years.
That gives Beijing something many Western countries increasingly struggle to maintain: Long-term strategic focus.
What Most Americans Don’t See
One of the most important themes in the conversation is that foreign policy is not abstract.
It shapes daily life, even when people don’t realize it.
Mitchell points directly to the consequences of U.S. economic policy toward China.
“Our policies towards China, especially our economic policies over the last generation or so, have cost millions of manufacturing jobs and the closure of tens of thousands of manufacturing plants across the U.S.”
And the damage didn’t stop there.
“From that has stemmed all kinds of social ills, like the opioid epidemic,” Mitchell argues, specifically connecting deindustrialization to broader social decline.
In other words, the effects of global competition didn’t remain overseas.
They came home.
“If you drive through middle America, through little towns and virtually any state in middle America, you see the deprivations of 30 years of deindustrialization.”
Perhaps the most sobering insight in the interview is the United States didn’t just underestimate China, but rather helped build it.
“We pursued the idea of globalization, the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs to China, because they were cheaper,” Mitchell argues. And in the process, “that was a systematic and deliberate program that inadvertently built up the greatest military.”
Not simply a competitor but a rival capable of challenging American dominance across multiple sectors at once.
From semiconductors to critical minerals, the competition is now deeply embedded in the structure of the global economy itself.
Europe’s Decline is America’s Warning
Mitchell also points to another lesson hiding in plain sight: Europe.
Once the center of global power, Europe today struggles with stagnation, demographic decline, and institutional paralysis.
“I'm worried about Europe,” he says. “I think Europe is not on a healthy trajectory.”
As tensions over economic policy, immigration, and national identity continue to reshape political debates across Europe, Mitchell argues that the continent’s leadership has created a dangerous and self-reinforcing dynamic.
“Over the last couple of decades, European leaders have pursued a statist, heavily regulatory approach to the economy. And in parallel, brought in just vast numbers of unassimilated migrants from many of whom come from cultures that are openly antagonistic to Western culture and Western civilization,” Mitchell says. “And that's really a very noxious combination.”
For Mitchell, the issue is deeper than just economics.
“This is not just a material problem, it's not just a bureaucratic question, it's a deeper thing.
It's spiritual in nature. It's civilizational in nature. And there's really been a hollowing out of Europe.”
That doesn’t mean Europe is collapsing tomorrow. But it raises a difficult question for the United States:
Could great powers lose their position gradually without fully realizing it?
“We'll see if they're able to pull up out of their nosedives,” he shares. “I think the prompts from the US, that's been a needed kind of fill-up or impetus for them to take a sober look at their situation.”
America’s Advantages and Its Biggest Vulnerability
Despite the challenges, Mitchell is clear that the United States still holds enormous structural advantages like geography, natural resources, innovation, alliances and an economic dynamism.
“I'd rather have our hand of cards than theirs,” he says, while also identifying what he sees as the country’s greatest long-term weakness.
“The Achilles heel for the US that I really worry about is our debt.”
And the numbers are staggering: “We're now at 30 plus trillion dollars.”
For Mitchell, debt is not just an economic issue. It’s strategic, because eventually, financial weakness limits geopolitical flexibility.
“I know there's different schools of thought on that, but I'm persuaded on a reading of history that it just ain't a good thing to have debt overhangs like that,” Mitchell argues. “We're headed for 50 trillion by like 2035.”
The Bigger Picture: This Isn’t About the Past
At its core, this conversation is not about nostalgia for Cold War thinking. It’s about recognizing that power competition never disappeared.
The United States simply stopped treating it as central.
And now, after decades of assuming history was moving in one direction, geopolitics has returned with force.
“The safety and prosperity of the United States will depend on our ability to navigate an era of great power history that looks a lot more like the history of — not so much the last 30 years — but maybe like the 3,000 years that preceded that.”
An era that may look much more familiar to the rest of human history than Americans expected.
“I think that even if people aren't interested in foreign policy, to use Trotsky's old line about war, I think foreign policy is nevertheless interested in us.”
A Final Thought
If the post-Cold War world taught Americans to believe that globalization would replace rivalry, this episode asks a far more uncomfortable question.
What if competition between great powers was never the anomaly…but peace itself was?
You can follow Samuel Waitt for additional insights on world politics by subscribing to his Substack: samuelwaitt.substack.com and read the book: Waitt, What?: Reflections on Global Politics – available on Amazon.
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