Back in 2019, Uri Friedman wrote that we “find ourselves—as you will have heard in the corridors of power and conference rooms of think tanks, and read in the government’s strategy documents and the media’s coverage of international relations—in an era of “great-power competition.” “As Friedman noted, “great-power competition” has even” achieved hallowed acronym status—GPC…”

It’s been nearly eight years since the term took off, and international-relations theorists are only just starting to take a close look at its analytical and conceptual dimensions. In this “Whiskey Optional,” Dr. Ali Wynne, Dr. Stacie Goddard, and Dr. Jon DiCicco join Dan for a discussion of where, if at all, “GPC” fits into international-relations theory.

Works mentioned in this episode include: Ali Wynne, America’s Great Power Opportunity (Polity, 2022); Stacie Goddard, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order (Cornell, 2018) & “The Outsiders: How the International System Can Still Check China and Russia,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2022); Jon DiCicco and Tudor Onea, “Great-Power Competition,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, 2023; A.F.K. Organski, World Politics (Knopf, 1958); and Daniel Nexon, “Against Great Power Competition,” Foreign Affairs (2021).