The states most likely to draw America into its next major crisis or war are not unknowns. They are the usual suspects: The same handful of states that have threatened the United States repeatedly across decades. Interstate rivals have caused roughly 80 percent of history’s wars and the odds of any given rivalry ending peacefully are little better than a coin toss. Yet America’s key strategy documents since the 2017 National Security Strategy have used phrases like great power competition, interstate strategic competition, and strategic competition without acknowledging the essential difference between a competition and a rivalry. Nor does the U.S. military’s foundational doctrine for navigating competitive relationships — the Joint Concept for Competing — distinguish between a rival and a mere competitor. These are dangerous oversights because competitions and rivalries demand fundamentally different strategies.
Strategic competition describes a relationship in which adversaries pursue incompatible interests without necessarily coming to blows. Strategic rivalry amounts to something worse: A relationship in which two states pursue the same interest — undermining each other’s capacity to compete — through serial disputes and wars that run alternatively hot or cold. A state can manage competitors with diplomacy, deterrence, and economic leverage. Rivals require a strategy of containment or preclusion because what is at stake is not a particular policy outcome but each side’s ability to remain in the game at all.
At least three states — China, Russia, and Iran — currently behave as rivals toward the United States. The first two are actively waging war within the so-called gray zone, that is, below the threshold of armed conflict to avoid directly confronting the U.S. military’s stronger conventional forces. The third rival, Iran, is directly engaged in armed conflict with the United States and has been since at least June 22, 2025 during Operation Midnight Hammer. Such uses of military force, whether above or below the threshold of armed conflict, are fully consistent with the ways strategic rivals endeavor to undermine each other. I seek to explain the differences between strategic rivalry and strategic competition and to explore why the U.S. military will require a distinct strategic approach to deal with rivals.
Rivalry Versus Competition
Political scientists have defined strategic rivals as states that perceive their relationship with another state as more adversarial than cooperative, have the capacity to challenge each other, and repeatedly clash with each other militarily or threaten to do so. Examples fitting these criteria include the relationships between India and Pakistan (for their entire histories as independent states), China and Japan (1873 to 1945, 1996 to present), China and Russia (1816 to 1949, 1958 to 1989), Iran and Saudi Arabia (1979 to present), and Iran and Israel (1979 to present).
Strategic rivalry also encompasses great power rivalry as well as rivalry among violent nonstate actors. Importantly, rivalry conflicts frequently recur among the same sets of states. When rivals go to war, they tend to go to war with each other. They are the proverbial repeat offenders involved in the majority of history’s conflicts. Additionally, as the number of crises increases between rivals, so too does the likelihood of further conflict between them. Rivalries typically unfold in recurring cycles of war — or brief but spirited armed clashes — making them serial in character. They are either enduring or short-lived depending on the power disparities between the rivals and the choices each party makes.
Rivalry conflicts tend to have two primary causes. The first is spatial: the desire to obtain certain territories. The second is positional: the desire to improve regional or global status. Ideology constitutes a distant third cause, since it is often driven by spatial or positional motives. Indeed, spatial and positional motives are also often intertwined. Other causes — ethnic differences, political dissidence, resource scarcity, and market access — arise less often than one might assume. Beijing could enhance its regional and global status with the seizure of Taiwan. Likewise, a Russian victory over Ukraine would gain additional territory for Moscow, but it would also boost Russia’s regional and potentially its global status. Iran may have ideological or religious motivations for pursuing nuclear enrichment and for its hostile actions within the Middle East. However, its principal motive appears to be to become a regional hegemon.
America routinely competes against any number of states every day, including some of its allies and partners. But only three of its competitors rise to the level of rivals: China, Russia, and Iran. (Some might add North Korea to this list, since it poses a nuclear threat to the United States. Nonetheless, Pyongyang lacks sufficient economic and political power to challenge Washington. The United States and China were rivals from the Communist Revolution in 1949 to their normalization of diplomatic relations in 1972. This rivalry renewed with the Taiwan Crisis of 1996 and continues to the present. America and the Soviet Union saw each other as rivals from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The rivalry renewed with Russia after 2007, as the Kremlin’s policies became more revanchist. By the aforementioned criteria, the United States and Iran have treated each other as rivals from the Islamic Revolution of 1979 to the present. While Iran lacks the means to challenge the U.S. military conventionally, its missile arsenals and irregular forces, among other capabilities, have repeatedly challenged U.S. interests in the Middle East, to include deliberately targeting Americans on multiple occasions. In fact, Iran’s unwillingness to halt its nuclear program contributed to U.S. responses in the form of Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury. This rivalry relationship may resume as another serial war well after Operation Epic Fury concludes since much depends on what course of action Iran’s leaders choose to pursue in the years ahead.
Knowing how rivalries begin is just as important as understanding how they end. The key is a rival’s capacity to compete. An analysis of post-1815 strategic rivalries reveals that 76 cases (55 percent) ended peacefully, that is, with a deescalation of the competition and without either side relinquishing its competitive capacity or submitting to the other. However, 62 cases (45 percent) ended with one side losing its capacity to compete and acknowledging that loss. In 48 of those 62 cases (77 percent), this loss occurred by means of a decisive military defeat or an economic or political collapse caused by the protraction of the struggle. In 14 of the 62 cases (23 percent), the rivalry ended when one side forfeited the competition without a fight and acknowledged the superior competitive capacity of the other. In short, the odds of a rivalry ending without the application of decisive coercive pressure are little better than a coin toss.
Why Strategic Rivalry Matters
Rivals play for higher stakes. They do not just compete. They endeavor to weaken each other or worse. Strategic rivalries are basically serial wars and strategic rivals are repeat offenders — literally the usual suspects. When dealing with America’s three strategic rivals, U.S. strategists need to understand two things: None of America’s rivals appears willing to deescalate at the moment and one has already drawn the United States into yet another armed conflict. This cycle will repeat itself unless U.S. strategists find ways to reduce the respective capacities of America’s rivals to compete. The United States needs a strategy that will knock its rivals out of the game and break the cycle though not necessarily by taking on all three at once or by doing so alone. America needs a comprehensive strategy that combines containment and preclusion. Containment amounts to applying coercive pressure to erode a rival’s capacity to compete, leading to an economic or political collapse similar to that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Preclusion calls for positioning U.S. forces where they can best deny a rival the resources it needs to continue competing. In some ways, the United States is reducing Iran’s military capacity to compete, especially regarding nuclear arms, through Operation Epic Fury. But to avoid simply “mowing the grass,” that is, removing a regime’s leadership and reducing some of its military capabilities, this operation should be tied to a larger strategy of containment or preclusion, or both. Otherwise, Iran will reconstitute and another operation will have to be launched but the circumstances may make it more difficult next time.
Understanding what strategic rivalries are and that rivals typically “return for more” would enable U.S. strategists to reduce the guesswork involved in force-sizing — in force structure and allocation — and in contingency planning. After the Cold War, the U.S. military struggled to rationalize all three of these areas because its chief threat of forty five years had collapsed. That rivalry had gone into remission. But it returned after roughly two and a half decades, putting the peace dividend on the wrong side of the coin toss. In the meantime, the defense establishment dropped its major theater war force-sizing construct in favor of a capabilities-based metric. It eventually returned to a facsimile of the former. But it could have avoided the switch in the first place by sizing U.S. forces to contend with America’s three strategic rivals, while setting aside some portion of those forces for contingencies. Granted, competition ceased for two of those rivals: from 1972 to 1996 for China, and from 1992 to 2007 for Russia. But its rivalry with Iran remained active, save for a brief period of cooperation against the Taliban, and actually intensified after President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, more commonly known as the “Axis of Evil” speech, in 2002. A rivalry might slide into remission but that does not mean the disease is gone.
Knowing that rivals habitually fight each other can simplify the task of preparing for the unexpected in strategic planning. While pundits wrote about the shift from bipolar to multipolar world, America’s two missing rivals gradually returned to the stage. History suggests that a rival’s aggressive behavior should never come as a surprise. Planners should count on it. Force-sizing, force allocation, training and procurement should be based on it. Mapping other countries’ strategic rivalries — such as the one between Israel and Iran — can help reduce uncertainty as far determining which contingencies warrant higher priorities. Prioritizing rivalries can also help planners and operators downstream by identifying high percentage foes against which key assets, such as interceptors and minesweepers, should be counted. Likewise, giving priority to rivals for intelligence gathering will help ensure all data on high percentage foes remain up to date. Simply put, prioritizing strategic rivals can reduce strategic uncertainty and increase the odds that the right weapons are in the right places at the right times.
To seize the proverbial low hanging fruit, senior U.S. military leaders ought to order a revision of the Joint Concept for Competing. At a minimum, the document needs an annex on strategic rivalry as well as expanded coverage on the types of military actions needed to support containment and preclusion. Such information would provide U.S. forces with better baseline guidance.
Conclusion
Interstate rivalries account for 80 percent of history’s wars. America is currently engaged in three such rivalries — with China, Russia, and Iran. Rivalries are more than strategic competitions and rivals are more than competitors. Rivalries amount to serial wars and rivals equate to repeat offenders, the usual suspects. Rivalries end peacefully only 55 percent of the time and through coercive pressure 45 percent of the time, a veritable coin toss. To prevail against its rivals, the United States needs a comprehensive strategy that both contains and precludes. The U.S. military can reduce strategic uncertainty by sizing and allocating its forces against America’s list of repeat offenders. The United States should want to conclude its three current rivalries peacefully. But none of its rivals appears inclined to deescalate at this point. Nor can the United States allow itself to forfeit, or to lose, to any rival power. It also cannot afford to delude itself into believing something has ended when it has not.
Antulio J. Echevarria II Ph.D. is the director of the Center for Strategic Competition at the U.S. Army War College and is a former U.S. Army officer. He has published six books and over 120 articles on strategic matters.
Image: Gemini
