How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy

For close to a decade, the U.S. government has been preoccupied with the threat of China, fearing that the country will “eat our lunch,” in the words of President Joe Biden. The United States has crafted its foreign and domestic policy to help constrain China’s military power and economic growth.

This talk will argue that great-power competition with China is misguided and vastly underestimates the costs and risks that geopolitical rivalry poses to economic prosperity, the quality of democracy, and, ultimately, global stability. Great-power competition exacerbates inequality, leads to xenophobia and increases the likelihood of violence around the world. In addition, it distracts from the priority of addressing such issues as climate change while at the same time undercutting democratic pluralism and sacrificing liberty in the name of prevailing against an enemy “other.” A better, saner, more democratically accountable grand strategy of easing tension and achieving effective diplomacy is possible.

Michael Brenes is co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in history at Yale University. His research focuses on U.S. foreign policy, political history and political economy. He is the author of “For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy” (2020) and co-editor of “Rethinking U.S. Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations” (2024). His forthcoming book, co-authored with Van Jackson, is “The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy” (2025).  

His work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Politico, Dissent, Boston Review, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other major publications.

He is currently writing a history of the War on Terror, to be published by Grove Atlantic.