If you take the elasticity inherent in the term gray power, and if you take the elasticity

inherent in the term competition, well, the concatenation of the terms is only going to amplify

that elasticity. The essence of strategy is about accepting trade-offs, difficult trade-offs, painful

trade-offs, unpalatable trade tradeoffs, unpalatable tradeoffs,

but accepting tradeoffs. And if you predicate your foreign policy on a construct that either

discounts the imperative of tradeoffs or ignores them altogether, I think you run the risk

of accelerating your relative decline.

Hey, welcome back to the Modern War Institute podcast. I'm John Amble, editorial director at

MWI, and my guest on this episode is Ollie Wine. He is a senior analyst at Eurasia Group,

who has written and published widely on a range of issues, notably China and Grand Strategy.

He has also appeared on the podcast before. About two years ago, he joined for a discussion

about great power competition.

He has continued to think and write extensively about competition since then and has just

published a book on the topic called America's Great Power Opportunity.

When the idea of great power competition really began to gain traction with the publication

of the 2017 National Security Strategy and

the 2018 National Defense Strategy, it was in many ways a conceptual outline of a strategy.

Since then, the policy and analytical communities have been at work essentially building

out a more robust framework around the idea.

Ollie's book, I think, is an important step forward in that process, and the discussion in

this episode highlights some of the key issues surrounding the effort to craft and

implement strategy in an increasingly competitive world.

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