Resolved: The United States' strategy of Great Power Competition produces more benefits than harms.

Debating a strategy rather than a policy

The resolution evaluates a strategic frame, the official reorientation of U.S. policy around long-term competition with China and Russia, so this is a debate about what organizing ideas do. Pro’s case is that the frame ended two decades of strategic drift, moved defense investment from counterinsurgency to deterring peer rivals, energized alliances, and drove industrial policy (semiconductors, critical minerals) that pure market thinking never would have. Frames set budgets, and this one funded the right things. Con’s case is that frames also shape how policymakers think. Competition logic turns every domain into a battlefield, crowds out cooperation on problems that need it, and produces the confrontations it predicts.

What cooperation loses

Con’s most concrete harms are the global goods that rivalry starves: climate coordination between the two largest emitters, pandemic preparedness, and arms control agreements lapsing without renewal. Add the spillover from treating everything as a security issue (export controls splitting the technology commons, chilled scientific exchange, stigmatized diaspora communities) and the domestic cost of threat inflation. Pro’s usual rebuttal is that competition and cooperation can coexist, since rivals negotiate when they have leverage, and that the engagement strategy before competition demonstrably failed to change rivals’ behavior. On this view, the naive position is nostalgia for engagement.

Winning the counterfactual

"More benefits than harms" implies a comparison to some alternative, and rounds get much tighter when teams name theirs. Pro should make Con specify: retrenchment, renewed engagement, or issue-by-issue pragmatism? Each has documented ways of failing. Con should refuse the binary and argue that the alternative is ordinary statecraft that doesn’t treat everything as security: compete where interests clash, cooperate where they align, and stop letting a slogan make the choice. The side that owns the counterfactual usually owns the final focus.