By Takashi Shiraishi / Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun

11:00 JST, January 31, 2025

Donald Trump is now in his second term as U.S. president. The world has changed considerably over the course of eight years, since he was inaugurated the first time in 2017.

In his National Security Strategy, released in December 2017, Trump laid out for the first time his view that the world was in an age of “great power competition.” By that time, China, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, had already been making progress toward its goal of “fuguo qiangjun” (rich state and strong army), while Russia had annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula three years earlier — in 2014.

Trump’s notion of great power competition made clear that strategic competition with China and Russia had emerged as the biggest security challenge for the United States. Since then, the “great power competition” has accelerated. It is worth looking at how competition has intensified and in what areas.

One obvious area affected is the geopolitical arena. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the war there has dragged on. In the Middle East, the Islamic organization Hamas staged a terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023, and conflict has been escalating between Israel and the Iran-backed armed groups of Hamas, Hezbollah and others. A full-fledged war may break out between Israel and Iran.

In Asia, China has been actively trying to change the status quo in the areas surrounding Taiwan and in the South China Sea, employing so-called gray-zone tactics to the maximum extent possible.

Iran, North Korea and China are each supporting Russia in their own way. The four countries effectively form a “Eurasian alliance,” posing a challenge to the U.S.-led “free world.” Countries in the Global South, for their part, are basically going their respective ways to pursue their national interests, touting “my country first” policies, without taking sides between the two alliances.

The other area of competition is economic security — or to put it more generally, competition in technology and industry.

The first Trump administration focused on security in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system — which is indispensable for high-speed, large-scale connectivity — and semiconductor........

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