The aff makes gpc the dominant security narrative which undermines ALL other foreign policies that makes cooperation IMPOSSIBLE

Biden’s efforts are falling short because, with some exceptions, great power competition is threatening to become a dominant security narrative among U.S. foreign policy elites. The window is still open for alternative narratives – such as “competitive coexistence” – to guide policy. But if the great power competition narrative becomes entrenched, it will be difficult to overturn – and that could produce serious pathologies in U.S. grand strategy.

Security narratives are stories about a country’s strategic environment. They identify what countries play major roles, what they want, and why they might pose a threat to a nation’s interests. In the current narrative of great power competition, the major characters are the U.S., China, and Russia. The U.S., as protagonist, hopes to maintain a liberal world order against increasingly aggressive and assertive opponents.

First, as David McCourt argues, a dominant narrative can obscure important foreign policy disagreements. Even elites who embrace a common narrative of great power competition have important differences. Some urge escalating the fight over Ukraine to counter Russia, while others suggest drawing down or abandoning the fight altogether, in order to devote more resources to China. While some see China and Russia working in tandem, others see opportunities to wedge apart that coalition. While some see opportunities for cooperation with China, especially on economic and environmental issues, others suggest all bilateral relations are now zero-sum.

Second, and relatedly, when narratives become dominant, this gives foreign policy elites the capacity for rhetorical coercion, the ability to use existing narratives to undercut the legitimacy of opposing arguments. Narratives provide ammunition to shut down foreign policy alternatives, even alternatives well worth exploring. Notably, narratives of existential competition – be they the Cold War consensus or Great Power Competition – allow more hawkish politicians to cast any strategy that promotes compromise as illegitimate, a sop to a nation’s enemies.

In this narrative, bargaining becomes impossible under any conditions. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House’s select committee on competition with China, recently warned that the U.S. must prepare for war with a weakening China, because Xi might “get less predictable and do something really stupid.” Just a few months earlier, Gallagher argued that it was a strong China that made China the greatest geopolitical threat to U.S security.

The problem with this emerging narrative’s dominance is straightforward. When rational debate over foreign policy shuts down, elites are more likely to pursue reactive and expansionist foreign policies. Just as the U.S. came to see any attempt to expand Soviet influence as an existential threat, so too might it come to respond to great power opponents in ways that, at the very least, undercut opportunities for cooperation and, at worst, risk violent escalation. As eminent international relations scholar Hans Morgenthau warned in the wake of the Truman Doctrine, once you choose to narrate threats in the language of existential threat, “you must act as though you mean it.”