Foreign Affairs - The Multipolar Mirage Why America and China Are the World’s Only Great Powers - Jennifer Lind - December 12, 2025

 Foreign  Affairs

The Multipolar Mirage

Why America and China Are the World’s Only Great Powers

Jennifer Lind

December 12, 2025

A Chinese and a U.S. flag printed on paper, January 2022

Dado Ruvic / Reuters

JENNIFER LIND is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She is the author of Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny.

The churn of great-power politics shapes the world and touches, for good or ill, the lives of people everywhere. Wars among great powers have killed millions of people; victorious great powers have also set up international orders whose norms and rules affect global peace and prosperity. Great powers also intervene in other countries’ politics, covertly and overtly, sometimes violently. In other words, great powers matter.

Polarity—how many great powers there are—matters, too. Consider the past three decades of U.S.-led unipolarity. Freed from the constraining effects of a great-power rival, Washington deployed its forces around the world and conducted military actions in multiple countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. The dangers of bipolarity, however, are different. Superpowers in a bipolar structure compete obsessively, creating spheres and buffers by cultivating protégés and installing puppets. Multipolarity, meanwhile, in which three or more great powers are present, is said to be the most prone to war because alliances are precarious and the fluidity of alignments makes the balance of power harder to estimate.

Although it matters how many great powers there are at a given time, no one agrees on how to define them (and thus count them). People also disagree about the requirements—what a country must do or possess—to be considered a great power. Yet all the time, relative power among countries is shifting. During the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev vowed that his country would “bury” the United States, and many people feared it would. And in the 1980s, Americans watching Japan’s economic boom worried that the United States would be overtaken by the “rising sun.” Today, scholars and policymakers debate whether China will rival the United States as a superpower or is already in decline. The rise of India and the resurgence of Russia, meanwhile, have led many to proclaim the arrival of multipolarity. Widely divergent views about the balance of power are common because power, although foundational to international politics, remains an elusive concept.

To reckon with this challenge, I developed a methodology for comparing national power—one that uses common metrics (GDP, for instance, or military expenditure) in modern and historical data to determine a threshold for great-power status. My study found that arguing about whether China is catching up to the United States misses the point. Great powers have often been far weaker than the leading state—the most powerful country in the global system—but nevertheless engaged in dangerous security competitions. Moreover, my methodology revealed that China today is already more powerful than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Modern China, then, is not just a great power but a superpower.

The world, in short, is bipolar. Many middle powers are influential actors within their regions, but only the United States and China exceed the great-power threshold. This development explains rising tension in U.S.-Chinese relations and suggests that other countries will find it increasingly difficult to stay out of the crossfire of the rivalry. Bipolarity, for instance, helps explain the recent U.S. preoccupation with Latin America, where China has gained significant economic and political influence. As the dynamic between China and the United States grows only more competitive, Washington will find such encroachments intolerable—just as China may similarly refuse to accept U.S. political and military involvement in its own backyard.

GREAT POWER, GREAT MEASURABILITY

My methodology began with a list, generated with help from historians and political scientists, of great powers across different historical systems since 1820. Although scholars often debate definitions of “power” and “great power,” the list reflected a consensus, and established a “ground truth,” about the balance of power over time. Using historical data, I then evaluated which metrics most accurately re-created this list. Each country’s metrics were assessed as a ratio—the country’s power in that metric compared with the power of the leading state during the period being analyzed. For example, the metrics show that the United States was not yet a great power in the early nineteenth century; it still lagged behind the United Kingdom on economic as well as military metrics. These same metrics, however, then illustrate how the United States overtook the United Kingdom to become a great power in the late nineteenth century.

The methodology shows that two economic metrics successfully identify great powers: GDP, as well as a composite metric that multiplied GDP by GDP per capita. Previous scholars have argued that the second metric captures two key dimensions of great power—a state’s economic size versus its wealth. My metrics supported this argument by effectively distinguishing between great powers and other countries. That is, lesser powers scored low on both of these economic metrics, whereas great powers scored high, and there was a large gap between the metrics of great powers and lesser powers. GDP per capita, however, proved a poor indicator of power and failed to separate the great powers from the lesser powers. Many lesser powers have high GDP per capita. GDP per capita is also misleading because it risks obscuring regional heterogeneity. China and India, for instance, have millions of people generating high-incomes as well as regions with very low-incomes. Because it takes the average, GDP per capita obscures this heterogeneity and might misdiagnose a country as middling rather than one with wealthy, technologically advanced regions—regions with latent power and potential geopolitical implications.

Overall, this method provides a quantifiable threshold for identifying great powers. I define “normal” great powers as those falling in the middle 50 percent of the distribution of historical great powers (thereby excluding the strongest and weakest countries). The GDP range for normal great powers is between 17 and 45 percent of the leading state’s GDP, with a median of 27 percent. Thus, countries with more than roughly 27 percent of the leading state’s GDP possess greater economic capabilities than the median great power across history. Whether or not a country can be considered an overall great power depends on how it performs in the other metrics, but this method can reveal whether a country is above or below the basic great-power threshold. It also identifies the dimensions in which a country is stronger or weaker. Such assessments contribute to studies of power transitions in world politics, and create a valuable means of assessing contemporary changes in the balance of power—the extent to which China is declining or India is rising, for example.

SECOND-PLACE SOVIETS

Asking whether China can catch up to or overtake the United States economically is the wrong question, based on this analytical method. Historically, the leading state competed fiercely with other, far weaker great powers, which often possessed only a quarter or a third of the leader’s GDP. China, in other words, does not need to match nor surpass the United States in order to be a great power and competitor. The Soviet Union was a prime example of this reality.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was widely deemed a superpower and major geopolitical competitor to the United States. But the Soviet Union had, at most, about 40 percent of U.S. GDP. Despite this large imbalance, the Soviets posed a threat of regional hegemony in Europe. Moscow managed complex global intelligence operations, supplied arms to insurgents across the globe, quashed national liberation movements in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and spread communist ideology around the world. Although it trailed the United States economically, the Soviet Union preoccupied U.S. national security policy for more than three decades. The United States and the Soviet Union built massive armies, competed in a nuclear arms race, and, during numerous crises, moved the world dangerously close to nuclear war.

China, which today vastly exceeds the Soviet Union in terms of economic power, has the capability to do all this and more. In the composite metric (GDP multiplied by GDP per capita), the normal range for great powers is between eight and 28 percent of the leader’s score, with a median of 15. China today, at 36 percent, has a much higher composite score than normal great powers across history. China’s score also exceeds that of the Soviet Union, which reached only 16 percent at its peak in 1970. China’s relative strength is also captured by the GDP metric: China’s score of 130 percent is far higher than the 27 percent median. Skeptics may rightly question China’s dodgy economic statistics, but even if China’s true GDP is much smaller than it reports, China’s margin above the normal range for GDP is so large that it would still be a great power, and well above the Soviet score of 44 percent.

China falls short of the Soviet Union in just one dimension—military expenditure. The Soviets spent 100 percent of the United States’ military expenditure, whereas China today spends 32 percent. For the Soviets, however, generating such high military spending required devoting a huge share of the economy (as much as 14 percent of GDP) to defense, which ultimately proved unsustainable. China, by contrast, currently spends only about two percent of its GDP on defense, meaning it could ramp up defense spending and yet keep it at a manageable level overall. In short, my metrics suggest that China doesn’t need to catch up to the United States but is already a great-power competitor both economically and militarily—one with power that far exceeds that of the United States’ last bipolar competitor, the Soviet Union.

TWO ON TOP

Critics might doubt whether Beijing can in fact compete, arguing that China’s growth is slowing, its economy is suffering from numerous problems, and increasingly repressive policies by Chinese leader Xi Jinping will harm future innovation. Such observations identify important challenges China’s economy is facing but miss the mark in a few ways.

First, China’s growth plateau was a predictable outcome. Fast-growing economies always slow down at about the middle-income stage, and economies that manage to sustain growth typically settle into levels of about one to two percent per year. As has happened in the past with high-growth economies—in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, for instance—slowed growth can be caused by a number of factors, such as increasingly unfavorable demographics, rising wages, and financial crises caused by years of massive investment. Thus, China’s success isn’t a question of whether it can maintain its sky-high growth rates of the 1990s, but whether its economy can settle into mature and far lower rates of growth.

In this transition, the Chinese economy indeed faces major challenges, including a troubled real estate sector, massive debt, and the problem of what scholars call “involution”—hypercompetition among firms over shrinking profit margins. Nobody can predict how effectively the CCP will handle these challenges, but declarations of “peak China” are premature. Previously, skeptics have argued that China’s regime would be toppled, or its economic growth torpedoed, by a variety of maladies—public backlash in response to repressive COVID-19 policies, for example, or the costs of mitigating environmental devastation. These predictions were not borne out. Most important, assuming that one’s competitor will collapse, particularly when that competitor has a leadership as adaptive and capable as China’s, is a poor guide for policy.

Arguing about whether China is catching up to the United States misses the point.

Other skeptics argue that Xi’s policies—tightening controls on civil society, increasing oversight of the private sector (as seen in the tech industry crackdown after 2020), and pursuing a variety of other “neo-authoritarian” approaches—undermine China’s innovative capabilities. Innovation is indeed vital for Chinese geopolitical competitiveness, and great powers must compete at the technological cutting edge. If Xi pursues policies that stymie innovation, China will struggle to keep up. But many of Beijing’s policies seem to be working. Heavy investment in highly-skilled human capital, as well as research and development, has created an advanced workforce. Large government investment in key sectors such as green energy, robotics, and biotechnology has helped Chinese firms innovate and become more commercially competitive. And Xi’s neo-authoritarianism has not prevented China’s success in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and communications, supercomputing, and other technology arenas. In fact, in many sectors, China is not merely competitive with the United States but is vying for dominance.

Critics of the bipolar assessment might also argue that the world is actually multipolar. Russia, after all, invaded neighboring Ukraine in 2022, and its alliance with China has powerful geopolitical consequences. Germany and Japan are prominent economically, technologically, and diplomatically, and there is a growing group of influential middle powers that includes Brazil, India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey. Indeed, in 1990, middle powers produced about 15 percent of global GDP, whereas in 2022 they produced about 30 percent. Militarily, too, they are more capable. Whereas in 1990, middle powers accounted for about seven percent of global military spending, the 2022 figure was about 15 percent.

The increasingly influential role of middle powers, however, should not be confused with multipolarity, because none of these middle powers exceeds the great-power threshold for economic and military power. Germany’s and Japan’s low rates of military mobilization have kept them out of the great-power ranks. Whether they follow through on pledges to increase defense spending and break the great-power threshold as a result remains uncertain. Russia sits below the threshold, too. If Russia were a great power, it would have defeated Ukraine and threatened regional dominance over western Europe, as the Soviets did in the Cold War. India may someday reach great-power status if it continues to grow economically and increases its military expenditures, but it currently sits below the great-power bar. Only China and the United States currently exceed both the economic and military thresholds for great-power status.

BACKYARD BATTLES

In these early years of the bipolar era, competition between China and the United States is growing across every domain: trade, finance, technology, global governance, and military power. The reverberations of this rivalry are being felt all over the world, proving the political scientist Barry Posen’s assertion that in a bipolar order, “peripheries disappear.” The United States, for example, is worrying about China’s gains in the Middle East, where Beijing is increasingly becoming an important economic, technological, and security partner despite the United States’ many long-standing relationships there.

The first rule of bipolarity, however, is secure your backyard. Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela has pursued close economic ties with China, and recent U.S. military pressure in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific is in part a warning to Caracas and other governments in the region about the consequences of cozying up to Beijing. Earlier this year, the Trump administration similarly signaled to Panama that continuing to allow Chinese firms to control strategic infrastructure at the Panama Canal would prompt U.S. military action. Latin America felt the sting of bipolarity during the Cold War, and, in the emerging superpower competition between China and the United States, it is starting to feel it again.

In East Asia, China will likely move to enforce its own version of the Monroe Doctrine. Beijing will continue to use incremental tactics and economic coercion against neighbors to pressure them to decouple or distance themselves from Washington. In coming years, the extent to which Beijing attempts to eject the United States from its region politically and militarily will likely define the principal arena of U.S.-Chinese strategic rivalry. “Don’t make us choose” has been the mantra of many East Asian countries, including some U.S. treaty allies. But under bipolarity, the luxury of choice is not one afforded to small countries in a superpower’s backyard. Countries will be forced to choose, and choose correctly according to their neighbor, or risk the consequences. The return of bipolarity means it’s time to remember—with regret and trepidation—the nature, intensity, and global reach of superpower competition.

Topics & Regions: United States Asi