Description
According to the United States’ 2018 National Defense Strategy, “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security”. This focus on great power competition with China and Russia poses a series of yet largely unanswered questions for International Relations, Security Studies, and American Foreign Policy scholars. This paper provides a “first cut” examination of the possible implications of this shift for US counterterrorism policy and the place of remote warfare therein. It is structured around answering three overlapping research questions: (1) Will the renewed focus on inter-state competition impact those elements of national security most closely associated with remote warfare, principally counterterrorism? (2) As the US, Russia, and China vie for influence in the global south, will the core practices of remote warfare – drones, Special Operations Forces, security cooperation programmes, and private military and security contractors - be repurposed to support great power competition? And (3) will the existing patterns of military cooperation in the global south, which since 9/11 have been organised mainly around combatting transnational terrorist organisations, be reconfigured to counter Russian and Chinese influence? In answering these questions, this paper makes a timely contribution to this emerging vein of International Relations scholarship, being the first paper to examine the particular intersection of Great Power competition and remote warfare.
