A Problematic Look at the Hackneyed Idea of a Great Power Competition

Puffed widely on its covers, this is a book that is problematic from its first paragraph, where Simms claims that, ‘traditional “geopolitics” has returned with a vengeances,’ one the footnote explains by saying that whereas ‘strictly speaking “geopolitics” refers to the intersection of geography and international affairs, this book uses the term in its wider, perhaps inflationary sense, to describe interstate rivalry more generally.’

This is quite frankly hopeless. If you want a wider, ‘inflationary’ sense why not look at rivalry within states, much of which has a spatial component. Why ditch the strict, geographical dimension unless you are not competent to handle it as, alas, is the case with so many of those who discuss geopolitics today.

Devoid of an adequate conceptual paradigm (or, indeed, engagement with much of the literature on geopolitics), Simms launches into the hackneyed idea of a Great Power competition lasting apparently until the end of the Cold War. This was replaced, he claims, by ‘a new order based on international law and economic cooperation’, in turn returning to a Great Power system dominated by ‘raw military might.’

An original thinker might start off by querying the nature and extent of dominance by ‘Great Powers’ for much of history or could ask whether the ‘unipolarity’ of the 1990s and its supposed ethos have been overwritten. Indeed, this book is full of cliché.

Take its ahistorical employment of definitions as for example ‘Reach … it is what differentiates a Great Power from the stronger “middle powers,” such as Turkey and Nigeria, which might dominate parts of their wider neighbourhood but lack the capability to project militarily across the world.’ That, of course, would have ruled out China, the leading power, demographically, militarily, economically, and, to many, culturally, for most of state history prior to 1800, not least a major conqueror in the eighteenth century. Simms indeed is not really an historian but, instead, a fluent instance of the facile presentism of so much International Relations work. Not least, there is the selection of historical example to suit a presentism perspective. Thus, for the sixteenth century, a Great Power system is held responsible for the Europeans going in search of new worlds to conquer, which underplays the extent to which the European powers focused most on conflict within Europe itself.

Or take the bold judgment ‘Germany’s introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare brought America into the war in 1917, and – together with the British blockade and mounting domestic unrest – this sealed the downfall of the Reich by 1918.’ Well, how about going with the literature on the failure of the Spring Offensives and the damage this caused for the Germans, or the importance of the ‘100 Days Offensive’ and the breaching of the Hindenburg Line, or the impact of the collapse of the German alliance system.

Scholarship entails assessing different analyses, but The Return of the Great Powers appears unable to reach this bar, preferring assertion to caution. And so on. Simms cites himself to argue that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union was partly driven by racial and ideological animosity, but mainly designed to secure the resources to balance the ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ but it is fair to say that evidence for the animosity is stronger, and Richard Evans’s comments on Simms’s May 15, 2026, review of Jochen Hellbeck’s World Enemy No 1 in the Times Literary Supplement are instructive.

Having briefly argued for the post-Cold War eclipse of the Great Powers and the subsequent return of ‘peer competition’, neither chapter offering any particular insight, the book then moves to consider the ‘almost Great Powers’ – Japan, France (whose range easily reaches to the south-west and South Pacific), Germany, India and the European Union, before discussing the Great Powers of today – China, Russia, the UK and the US (the inclusion of the UK is extraordinary), before assessing the ‘Global Futures of the Great Powers’ in which the argument is that ‘The only thing that seems clear is that our world will continue to be dominated by a small number of powerful states, the Great Powers’. I would suggest that recent and current developments indicate that many other states have agency, and that the same will be true in the future. Simms closes with the claim that the best guarantee of world peace will be restraint in Moscow and Beijing, and that a ‘military challenge to the Western order today cannot succeed and that it would lead – one way or the other – to their complete obliteration’. This clarity is foolish and the confidence silly. There is a simple test for this book. Take away the puffs and the pomp of position in which the author rests, and read this as if written by a postgraduate asking what mark and comments it would receive, and whether Basic Books would publish. I am not sanguine on these heads,

Note: The Return of the Great Powers is also available in audio & e-editions.

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