The ‘Great Game’ enters uncharted territory

I cannot recall a New Year holiday during which I felt less at ease than the one that ushered in 2026.

Even in the opening days of the year, anti-government protests spread across Iran. In Venezuela, U.S. investigative authorities and military forces detained President Nicolas Maduro and transferred him to New York. China hinted at a rare-earth export ban against Japan and shortly thereafter news came out that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi planned to dissolve the House of Representatives. The international environment surrounding Japan feels not merely unsettled, but genuinely stormy and uncharted.

How should we interpret this cascade of events?

I find it useful to imagine how historians writing in 2056 might look back on the year 2026. My working hypothesis is that these early developments will be seen as marking the entry of the global “Great Game” into a new phase — what I call its third phase. Below, I outline the reasoning behind this view.

In its original and narrow sense, the “Great Game” referred to the 19th- and early 20th-century strategic rivalry between the British and Russian Empires for dominance in Central Asia. More broadly, however, the concept can be understood as a recurring global struggle between land powers seeking to expand influence across the Eurasian heartland and sea powers operating along the rimland to contain them.

Since 1945, this Great Game has taken on new forms. For the past 80 years, the world has experienced what might be described — somewhat paradoxically — as a long and relatively stable “interwar period.” I fear that this era of predictability may now be nearing its end.

In the early 20th century, the United States entered the Great Game as Britain’s power gradually waned. After World War II, the rivalry shifted decisively from an Anglo-Russian contest to one between the United States and the Soviet Union. This postwar phase became known as the Cold War.

During the Cold War, the Western alliance framed its struggle against Soviet communism around principles of freedom, openness and rules. That rules-based international order ultimately prevailed, underpinned primarily by U.S. power. Notably, however, the greatest beneficiaries of this system were often not superpowers themselves, but smaller nations such as Japan and those of Europe.

Yet the end of the Cold War brought with it new contradictions. Beginning in the 1990s, the IT revolution and an increasingly ruthless form of global capitalism accelerated economic growth while simultaneously widening social and economic disparities. Societies across the developed world fractured into “winners” and “losers.”

Numerically and politically, the losers far outnumbered the winners. Their growing resentment — often directed at traditional political elites or immigrants — reshaped domestic politics. In the United States, the hollowing out of manufacturing under the free-trade regime proved especially damaging. As America’s relative strength as a sea power gradually declined, China rose to take Russia’s place as the principal challenger.

Thus, the Great Game has evolved once again — from Anglo-Russian rivalry, to U.S.-Soviet confrontation, to the current phase of U.S.-China rivalry.

The “free, open and rules-based international order” that peaked in the 1990s was sustainable only so long as the United States possessed both the capacity and the will to maintain it. As China’s power has grown and America’s relative strength has waned, that burden has become increasingly difficult to bear.

History offers a parallel. At the end of World War II, the British Empire faced a similar reckoning, forced to confront the limits of its power and reconsider its global role. Today, many U.S. strategists — particularly within the Trump administration — appear to share a comparable anxiety about the future of American hegemony.

From this perspective, maintaining a universal, rules-based international order may seem less urgent than rebuilding domestic strength and securing a traditional sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. On that foundation, some argue, the United States should seek accommodation with Russia in order to focus on what they see as the primary long-term challenge: China.

Regardless of U.S. President Donald Trump’s often unpredictable rhetoric and behavior, it seems likely that some around him have instinctively grasped that the United States is entering the third phase of the Great Game — one defined above all by confrontation with China.

As a result, the multilateral international order that smaller nations have relied upon for the past eight decades is likely to erode. This does not mean that the effort to build a free, open and rules-based order has ended altogether. Rather, it may be interrupted. Whether it can be revived will depend entirely on the outcome of this third phase of the Great Game.

Which side will prevail — China or the United States — remains uncertain. This new phase has only just begun and may last another 10 to 20 years. The future trajectory of U.S. national security strategy after the Trump era is equally unclear.

Yet one conclusion is unavoidable. As the maintenance of the free, open and rules-based international order falters — even temporarily — nonsuperpowers and smaller nations, including Japan and those in Europe, must not neglect their responsibility to safeguard their own security, whether in partnership with the United States or, if necessary, independently.

May the year 2026 prove peaceful and fruitful for all readers.