The Rise and Fall of Great-Power
Competition
Trump’s New Spheres of Influence
BY STACIE E. GODDARD May/June 2025
Published on April 22, 2025
STACIE E. GODDARD is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Associate
Provost at Wellesley College.
“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power
competition returned.” So declared the National Security Strategy that
President Donald Trump released in 2017, capturing in a single line the
story that American foreign policymakers have spent the last decade telling
themselves and the world. In the post–Cold War era, the United States
generally sought to cooperate with other powers whenever possible and
embed them in an American-led global order. But in the mid-2010s, a new
consensus took hold. The era of cooperation was over, and U.S. strategy had
to focus on Washington’s contests with its major rivals, China and Russia.
The main priority of American foreign policy was clear: stay ahead of them.
Washington’s rivals “are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to
change the international order in their favor,” Trump’s 2017 document
explained. As a result, his National Defense Strategy argued the following
year, interstate strategic competition had become “the primary concern in
U.S. national security.” When Trump’s bitter rival Joe Biden took office as
president in 2021, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy changed dramatically.
But great-power competition remained the leitmotif. In 2022, Biden’s
National Security Strategy warned that “the most pressing strategic
challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian
governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” The only answer, it argued, was
to “out-compete” China and constrain an aggressive Russia.
Some hailed this consensus on great-power competition; others lamented it.
But as Russia amped up its aggression in Ukraine, China made clear its
designs on Taiwan, and the two autocratic powers deepened their ties and
collaborated more closely with other U.S. rivals, few predicted that
Washington would abandon competition as its guiding light. As Trump
returned to the White House in 2025, many analysts expected continuity: a
“Trump-Biden-Trump foreign policy,” as the title of an essay in Foreign
Affairs described it.
Then came the first two months of Trump’s second term. With astonishing
speed, Trump has shattered the consensus he helped create. Rather than
compete with China and Russia, Trump now wants to work with them,
seeking deals that, during his first term, would have seemed antithetical to
U.S. interests. Trump has made clear that he supports a swift end to the war
in Ukraine, even if it requires publicly humiliating the Ukrainians while
embracing Russia and allowing it to claim vast swaths of Ukraine.
Relations remain more tense with China, especially as Trump’s tariffs come
into effect and the threat of Chinese retaliation looms. But Trump has
signaled that he seeks a wide-ranging settlement with Chinese President Xi
Jinping. Anonymous Trump advisers told The New York Times that Trump
would like to sit down “man to man” with Xi to hammer out terms
governing trade, investment, and nuclear arms. All the while, Trump has
ramped up economic pressure on U.S. allies in Europe and on Canada
(which he hopes to coerce into becoming “the 51st state”) and has
threatened to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. Almost overnight, the
United States went from competing with its aggressive adversaries to
bullying its mild-mannered allies.
Some observers, trying to make sense of Trump’s behavior, have tried to put
his policies firmly back in the box of great-power competition. In this view,
moving closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin is great-power politics at
its finest—even a “reverse Kissinger,” designed to split apart the Chinese-
Russian partnership. Others have suggested that Trump is simply pursuing a
more nationalistic style of great-power competition, one that would make
sense to Xi and Putin, as well as India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s
Viktor Orban.
These interpretations might have been persuasive in January. But it should
now be clear that Trump’s vision of the world is not one of great-power
competition but of great-power collusion: a “concert” system akin to the one
that shaped Europe during the nineteenth century. What Trump wants is a
world managed by strongmen who work together—not always harmoniously
but always purposefully—to impose a shared vision of order on the rest of
the world. This does not mean that the United States will stop competing
with China and Russia altogether: great-power competition as a feature of
international politics is enduring and undeniable. But great-power
competition as the organizing principle for American foreign policy has
proved remarkably shallow and short-lived. And yet if history sheds any
light on Trump’s new approach, it is that things may end badly.
WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
Although competing with major rivals was central to Trump’s first term and
Biden’s term, it’s important to note that “great-power competition” never
described a coherent strategy. To have a strategy suggests that leaders have
defined concrete ends or metrics of success. During the Cold War, for
example, Washington sought to increase its power in order to contain Soviet
expansion and influence. In the contemporary era, by contrast, the struggle
for power has often seemed like an end in itself. Although Washington
identified its rivals, it rarely specified when, how, and for what reason
competition was taking place. As a result, the concept was exceedingly
elastic. “Great-power competition” could explain Trump’s threats to abandon
NATO unless European countries increased defense spending, since doing
so could protect American security interests from free-riding. But the term
could also apply to Biden’s reinvestment in NATO, which sought to
revitalize an alliance of democracies against Russian and Chinese influence.
Rather than defining a specific strategy, great-power competition
represented a potent narrative of world politics, one that provides essential
insight into how U.S. policymakers saw themselves and the world around
them, and how they wanted others to perceive them. In this story, the main
character was the United States. Sometimes, the country was cast as a strong
and imposing hero, with unparalleled economic vitality and military might.
But Washington could also be presented as a victim, as in Trump’s 2017
strategy document, which portrayed the United States operating in a
“dangerous world” with rival powers “aggressively undermining American
interests around the globe.” At times, there was a supporting cast: for
example, a community of democracies that, in Biden’s view, was a necessary
partner in ensuring global economic prosperity and the protection of human
rights.
China and Russia, in turn, served as the primary antagonists. Although there
were cameos by other foils—Iran, North Korea, and an array of nonstate
actors—Beijing and Moscow stood out as the perpetrators of a plot to
weaken the United States. Here again, some of the details varied depending
on who was telling the story. For Trump, the tale was grounded in national
interests: these revisionist powers sought to “erode American security and
prosperity.” Under Biden, the focus shifted from interests to ideals, from
security to order. Washington had to compete with the major autocratic
powers to ensure the safety of democracy and the resilience of the rules-
based international order.
But for nearly a decade, the broad narrative arc remained the same:
aggressive antagonists were seeking to harm American interests, and
Washington had to respond. Once this vision of the world was in place, it
imbued events with particular meanings. The Russian invasion of Ukraine
was an attack not just on Ukraine but also on the U.S.-led order. China’s
military buildup in the South China Sea represented not a defense of
Beijing’s core interests but an attempt to expand Beijing’s influence in the
Indo-Pacific at Washington’s expense. Great-power competition meant that
technology could not be neutral and that the United States needed to push
China out of Europe’s 5G networks and limit Beijing’s access to
semiconductors. Foreign aid and infrastructure projects in African countries
were not simply instruments of development but weapons in the battle for
primacy. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization,
the International Criminal Court, even the UN World Tourism
Organization all became arenas in a contest for supremacy. Everything, it
seemed, was now great-power competition.
CONCERT TICKETS
In his first term, Trump emerged as one of the most compelling bards of
great-power competition. “Our rivals are tough, they’re tenacious, and
committed to the long term—but so are we,” he said in a speech in 2017.
“To succeed, we must integrate every dimension of our national strength,
and we must compete with every instrument of our national power.”
(Announcing his candidacy for president two years earlier, he was more
characteristically blunt: “I beat China all the time. All the time.”)
But having returned to office for a second term, Trump has changed tack.
His approach remains abrasive and confrontational. He does not hesitate to
threaten punishment—often economic—to force others to do what he
wants. Instead of trying to beat China and Russia, however, Trump now
wants to persuade them to work with him to manage international order.
What he is telling now is a narrative of collusion, not competition; a story of
acting in concert. After a call with Xi in mid-January, Trump wrote on Truth
Social, “We will solve many problems together, and starting immediately.
We discussed balancing Trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects.
President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more
peaceful and safe!” Addressing business leaders gathered in Davos,
Switzerland, that month, Trump mused that “China can help us stop the
war with, in particular, Russia-Ukraine. And they have a great deal of power
over that situation, and we’ll work with them.”
Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump
reported, “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the
fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II. . . . We each
talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit
that we will someday have in working together.” In March, as members of
Trump’s administration negotiated with Russian counterparts over the fate
of Ukraine, Moscow made clear its view of a potential future. “We can
emerge with a model that will allow Russia and the United States, and
Russia and NATO, to coexist without interfering in each other’s spheres of
interests,” Feodor Voitolovsky, a scholar who serves on advisory boards at the
Russian Foreign Ministry and Security Council, told The New York Times.
The Russian side understands that Trump grasps this prospect “as a
businessman,” Voitolovsky added. Around the same time, Trump’s special
envoy Steve Witkoff, a real estate magnate who has been heavily involved in
the negotiations with Russia, mused about the possibilities for U.S.-Russian
collaboration in an interview with the commentator Tucker Carlson. “Share
sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe
collaborate on AI together,” Witkoff said. “Who doesn’t want to see a world
like that?”
In pursuing accommodations with rivals, Trump may be breaking with
recent convention, but he is tapping into a deeply rooted tradition. The
notion that rival great powers should come together to manage a chaotic
international system is one that leaders have embraced at many points in
history, often in the wake of catastrophic wars that left them seeking to
establish a more controlled, reliable, and resilient order. In 1814–15, in the
wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that engulfed Europe
for almost a quarter century, the major European powers assembled in
Vienna with the aim of forging a more stable and peaceful order than the
one produced by the balance-of-power system of the eighteenth century,
where great-power war occurred practically every decade. The result was “the
Concert of Europe,” a group that initially included Austria, Prussia, Russia,
and the United Kingdom. In 1818, France was invited to join.
As mutually recognized great powers, members of the Concert were
endowed with special rights and responsibilities to mitigate destabilizing
conflicts in the European system. If territorial disputes arose, instead of
seeking to exploit them to expand their own power, the European leaders
would meet to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict. Russia had long
eyed expansion into the Ottoman Empire, and in 1821, the Greek revolt
against Ottoman rule seemed to provide Russia with a significant
opportunity to do just that. In response, Austria and the United Kingdom
called for restraint, arguing that a Russian intervention would wreak havoc
on the European order. Russia backed down, with Tsar Alexander I
promising, “It is for me to show myself convinced of the principles on which
I founded the alliance.” At other times, when revolutionary nationalist
movements threatened the order, the great powers convened to guarantee a
diplomatic settlement, even if it meant forgoing significant gains.
For around four decades, the Concert channeled great-power competition
into collaboration. Yet by the end of the century, the system had collapsed. It
had proved unable to prevent conflict among its members, and over the
course of three wars, Prussia systemically defeated Austria and France and
consolidated its position as the head of a unified Germany, upending the
stable balance of power. Meanwhile, intensifying imperial competition in
Africa and Asia proved too much for the Concert to manage.
But the idea that great powers could and should take on the responsibility of
collectively steering international politics took hold and reemerged from
time to time. The concert idea guided U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s
vision of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and
China as “the Four Policemen” who would secure the world in the aftermath
of World War II. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev imagined a post–
Cold War world in which the Soviet Union would continue to be
recognized as a great power, working with its former enemies to help order
Europe’s security environment. And as Washington’s relative power appeared
to wane at the beginning of this century, some observers urged the United
States to cooperate with Brazil, China, India, and Russia to provide a similar
modicum of stability in an emerging post-hegemonic world.
CARVING UP THE WORLD
Trump’s interest in a great-power concert does not derive from a deep
understanding of this history. His affection for it rests on impulse. Trump
seems to see foreign relations much as he sees the worlds of real estate and
entertainment, but on a larger scale. As in those industries, a select group of
power brokers are in constant competition—not as mortal enemies, but as
respected equals. Each is in charge of an empire that he may manage as he
sees fit. China, Russia, and the United States may jockey for advantage in
various ways, but they understand that they exist within—and are in charge
of—a shared system. For that reason, the great powers must collude, even as
they compete. Trump sees Xi and Putin as “smart, tough” leaders who “love
their country.” He has stressed that he gets along well with them and treats
them as equals, despite the fact that the United States remains more
powerful than China and far stronger than Russia. As with the Concert of
Europe, it is the perception of equality that matters: in 1815, Austria and
Prussia were no material match for Russia and the United Kingdom but
were accommodated as equals nonetheless.
In Trump’s concert story, the United States is neither a hero nor a victim of
the international system, obligated to defend its liberal principles to the rest
of the world. In his second inaugural address, Trump promised that the
United States would lead the world again not through its ideals but through
its ambitions. With a drive to greatness, he promised, would come material
power and an ability “to bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been
angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.” What has become clear in the
weeks since he gave this speech is that the unity Trump seeks is primarily
with China and Russia.
In the great-power-competition narrative, those countries were positioned as
implacable enemies, ideologically opposed to the U.S.-led order. In the
concert narrative, China and Russia no longer appear as pure antagonists but
as potential partners, working with Washington to preserve their collective
interests. This is not to say that concert partners become close friends; far
from it. A concert order will continue to see competition as each of these
strongmen angles for superiority. But each recognizes that conflicts among
themselves must be muted so that they can confront the real enemy: the
forces of disorder.
It was precisely this story about the dangers of counterrevolutionary forces
that laid the foundations for the Concert of Europe. The great powers set
aside their ideological differences, recognizing that the revolutionary
nationalist forces that the French Revolution had unleashed posed more of a
threat to Europe than their narrower rivalries ever could. In Trump’s vision
of a new concert, Russia and China must be treated as kindred spirits in
quelling rampant disorder and worrisome social change. The United States
will continue to compete with its peers, especially with China on issues of
trade, but not at the expense of aiding the forces that Trump and his vice
president, JD Vance, have called “enemies within”: illegal immigrants,
Islamist terrorists, “woke” progressives, European-style socialists, and sexual
minorities.
For a concert of powers to work, members must be able to pursue their own
ambitions without trampling on the rights of their peers (trampling on the
rights of others, in contrast, is both acceptable and necessary to maintaining
order). This means organizing the world into distinct spheres of influence,
boundaries that demarcate the spaces where a great power has the right to
practice unfettered expansion and domination. In the Concert of Europe,
great powers allowed their peers to intervene within recognized spheres of
influence, as when Austria crushed a revolution in Naples in 1821, and when
Russia brutally suppressed Polish nationalism, as it did repeatedly
throughout the nineteenth century.
In the logic of a contemporary concert, it would be reasonable for the
United States to allow Russia to permanently seize Ukrainian territory to
prevent what Moscow sees as a threat to regional security. It would make
sense for the United States to remove “military forces or weapons systems
from the Philippines in exchange for the China Coast Guard executing
fewer patrols,” as the scholar Andrew Byers proposed in 2024, shortly before
Trump appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and
Southeast Asia. A concert mindset would even leave open the idea that the
United States would stand aside if China decided to take control of Taiwan.
In return, Trump would expect Beijing and Moscow to remain on the
sidelines as he threatened Canada, Greenland, and Panama.
Just as a concert narrative gives the great powers the right to order the
system as they wish, it limits the ability of others to have their voices heard.
The great European powers of the nineteenth century cared little for the
interests of smaller powers, even on issues of vital importance. In 1818, after
a decade of revolution in South America, Spain was faced with the final
collapse of its empire in the Western Hemisphere. The great powers met in
Aix-la-Chapelle to decide the fate of the empire and to debate whether they
should intervene to restore monarchical power. Spain, notably, was not
invited to the bargaining table. Likewise, Trump seems to have little interest
in giving Ukraine a role in negotiations over its fate and even less desire to
bring European allies into the process: he and Putin and their various
proxies will sort it out by “dividing up certain assets,” Trump has said. Kyiv
will just have to live with the results.
THE SUM OF ALL SPHERES
In some instances, Washington should see Beijing and even Moscow as
partners. For example, revitalizing arms control would be a welcome
development, one that requires more collaboration than a narrative of great-
power competition would have allowed. And in this respect, the concert
narrative can be alluring. By turning over global order to strongmen running
powerful countries, perhaps the world could enjoy relative peace and
stability instead of conflict and disorder. But this narrative distorts the
realities of power politics and obscures the challenges of acting in concert.
For one thing, although Trump might think that spheres of influence would
be easy to delineate and manage, they are not. Even at the height of the
Concert period, the powers struggled to define the boundaries of their
influence. Austria and Prussia consistently clashed over control of the
German Confederation. France and Britain struggled for dominance in the
Low Countries. More recent attempts to establish spheres of influence have
proved no less problematic. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt, the
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
envisioned peacefully co-managing the post–World War II world. Instead,
they soon found themselves battling at the boundaries of their respective
spheres, first at the core of the new order, in Germany, and later at the
peripheries in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Today, thanks to the
economic interdependence brought on by globalization, it would be even
more difficult for powers to neatly divide the world. Complex supply chains
and streams of foreign direct investment would defy clear boundaries. And
problems such as pandemics, climate change, and nuclear proliferation
hardly exist inside an enclosed sphere, where a single great power can
contain them.
Trump seems to think a more transactional approach can circumvent
ideological differences that might otherwise pose obstacles to cooperation
with China and Russia. But despite the ostensible unity of great powers,
concerts often mask rather than mitigate ideological frictions. It did not take
long for such rifts to emerge within the Concert of Europe. During its early
years, the conservative powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, formed their
own exclusive grouping, the Holy Alliance, to protect their dynastic systems.
They saw the revolts against Spanish rule in the Americas as an existential
threat, one whose outcome would reverberate across Europe, and as thus
requiring an immediate response to restore order. But leaders in the more
liberal United Kingdom saw the rebellions as fundamentally liberal, and
although they worried about the power vacuum that could arise in their
wake, the British were not inclined to intervene. Ultimately, the British
worked with an upstart liberal country—the United States—to cordon off
the Western Hemisphere from European intervention, tacitly supporting the
Monroe Doctrine with British naval might.
It is not a stretch to imagine similar ideological battles in a new concert.
Trump might care little about how Xi managed his sphere of influence, but
images of China’s using force to crush Taiwan’s democracy would likely
galvanize opposition in the United States and elsewhere, just as Russia’s
aggression against Ukraine angered democratic publics. So far, Trump has
been able to essentially reverse U.S. policy on Ukraine and Russia without
paying any political price. But an Economist-YouGov poll conducted in
mid-March found that 47 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s
handling of the war, and 49 percent disapproved of his overall foreign policy.
When great powers attempt to suppress challenges to a prevailing order,
they often provoke a backlash, spawning efforts to break their grasp on
power. National and transnational movements can chip away at a concert. In
nineteenth-century Europe, the nationalist revolutionary forces that the
great powers attempted to contain not only became stronger throughout the
century but also forged ties with one another. By 1848, they were strong
enough to mount coordinated revolutions across Europe. Although these
revolts were put down, they unleashed forces that would ultimately deal a
fatal blow to the Concert in the wars of German unification in the 1860s.
The concert narrative suggests that great powers can act jointly to keep the
forces of instability at bay indefinitely. Both common sense and history say
otherwise. Today, Russia and the United States might successfully impose
order in Ukraine, negotiating a new territorial boundary and freezing that
conflict. Doing so might produce a temporary lull but probably wouldn’t
generate a lasting peace, since Ukraine is unlikely to forget about its lost
territory and Putin is unlikely to be satisfied with his current lot for long.
The Middle East stands out as another region where great-power collusion
is unlikely to foster stability and peace. Even if they were working together
harmoniously, it is difficult to see how Washington, Beijing, and Moscow
would be able to broker an end to the war in Gaza, head off a nuclear
confrontation with Iran, and stabilize post-Assad Syria.
Challenges would also come from other states, especially from rising
“middle” powers. In the nineteenth century, rising powers such as Japan
demanded entrance to the great-power club and equal footing on issues such
as trade. The most repressive form of European domination, colonial
governance, eventually produced fierce resistance all over the world. Today,
an international hierarchy would be even more difficult to sustain. There is
little recognition among smaller countries that the great powers have any
special rights to dictate a world order. Middle powers have already created
their own institutions—multilateral free trade agreements, regional security
organizations—that can facilitate collective resistance. Europe has struggled
to build its own independent defenses but is likely to double down to
provide for its own security and to aid Ukraine. Over the last several years,
Japan has built up its own networks of influence in the Indo-Pacific,
positioning itself as a power more capable of independent diplomatic action
in that region. India is unlikely to accept any exclusion from the great-power
order, especially if that means the growth of China’s power along its border.
To deal with all the problems that great-power collusion poses, it helps to
have the skills of an Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian leader who found ways
to manipulate the Concert of Europe to his advantage. Bismarck’s
diplomacy could even pull apart ideologically aligned allies. As Prussia
prepared to go to war against Denmark to wrest control of Schleswig-
Holstein in 1864, Bismarck’s appeals to Concert rules and existing treaties
sidelined the United Kingdom, whose leaders had pledged to secure the
integrity of the Danish kingdom. He exploited colonial competition in
Africa, positioning himself as an “honest broker” between France and the
United Kingdom. Bismarck was opposed to the liberal, nationalist forces
that were sweeping through mid-nineteenth-century Europe and was thus a
reactionary conservative—but not a reactive one. He thought carefully about
when to crush revolutionary movements and when to harness them, as he
did in his pursuit of German unification. He was incredibly ambitious but
not beholden to expansionist impulses, and often opted for restraint. He saw
no need to pursue an empire on the African continent, for example, since
that would only draw Germany into a conflict with France and the United
Kingdom.
Alas, most leaders, despite how they might see themselves, are not
Bismarcks. Many more closely resemble Napoleon III. The French ruler
came to power as the 1848 revolutions were winding down and believed that
he had an exceptional capacity to use the Concert system for his own ends.
He attempted to drive a wedge between Austria and Prussia to expand his
own influence in the German Confederation, and he tried to organize a
grand conference to redraw European boundaries to reflect national
movements. But he thoroughly failed. Vain and emotional, susceptible to
flattery and shame, he found himself either abandoned by great-power peers
or manipulated into doing the bidding of others. As a result, Bismarck
found in Napoleon III the dupe he needed to push German unification
forward.
In a present-day concert, how might Trump fare as a leader? It’s possible he
could emerge as a Bismarckian figure, bullying and bluffing his way into
advantageous concessions from other great powers. But he might also get
played, winding up like Napoleon III, outmaneuvered by wilier rivals.
COOPERATION OR COLLUSION?
After the Concert was established, the European powers remained at peace
for almost 40 years. This was a stunning achievement on a continent that
had been wrecked by great-power conflict for centuries. In that sense, the
Concert might offer a viable framework for an increasingly multipolar
world. But getting there would require a story that involves less collusion
and more collaboration, a narrative in which great powers act in concert to
advance not merely their own interests but broader ones, as well.
What made the original Concert possible was the presence of like-minded
leaders who shared a collective interest in continental governance and the
aim of avoiding another catastrophic war. The Concert also had rules to
manage great-power competition. These were not the rules of the liberal
international order, which sought to supplant power politics with legal
procedures. They were, rather, jointly generated “rules of thumb” that guided
the great powers as they negotiated conflict. They established norms about
when they would intervene in conflicts, how they would apportion territory,
and who would be responsible for the public goods that would maintain the
peace. Finally, the original Concert vision embraced formal deliberation and
moral suasion as the key mechanism of collaborative foreign policy. The
Concert relied on forums that brought the great powers into discussions
about their collective interests.
It is hard to imagine Trump crafting that sort of arrangement. Trump seems
to believe he can build a concert not through genuine collaboration but
through transactional dealmaking, relying on threats and bribes to push his
partners toward collusion. And as a habitual transgressor of rules and norms,
Trump seems unlikely to stick to any parameters that might mitigate the
conflicts among great powers that would inevitably crop up. Nor is it easy to
imagine Putin and Xi as enlightened partners, embracing self-abnegation
and settling differences in the name of the greater good.
It is worth remembering how the Concert of Europe ended: first with a
series of limited wars on the continent, then with imperial conflicts erupting
overseas, and, finally, with the outbreak of World War I. The system was ill
equipped to prevent confrontation when competition intensified. And when
careful collaboration devolved into mere collusion, the concert narrative
became a fairy tale. The system came crashing down in a paroxysm of raw
power politics, and the world was set ablaze.
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