In The Race with No Finish Line, now available from Marine Corps University Press, Martin Skold offers a playbook for the new era of great power competition, filling a gap in the discourse at a crucial moment. As Russia and China seek to challenge the West for global dominance, The Race with No Finish Line helps readers understand how states compete with one another and how to win that competition.
Skold builds his playbook by applying strategic principles to competition for regional hegemony. He fuses classic military strategy with an eclectic mix of business strategy and international relations theory to create a framework, and then applies it to the Dreadnought Race, the Anglo-German naval arms race leading up to World War I. Finally, Skold provides a roadmap for applying the framework to other eras and areas of geopolitical competition, making the book highly relevant to current attempts to contain Russian aggression in Ukraine and Chinese attempts to dominate the South China Sea and Taiwan.
Praise for The Race with No Finish Line
“The value of Skold’s work is defined not only by its study of the past and its unique conceptualization but also by its relevance to an imminent future.”
~Philip Karber, President, Potomac Foundation and Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University
“As the United States reenters an era of sustained great power competition, it greatly needs serious and rigorous studies of how to succeed in this much more perilous context. Martin Skold’s penetrating and lucid study is an important contribution.”
~Elbridge Colby, co-founder and principal, The Marathon Initiative; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development
“The practice of national security requires an understanding of the dynamics of strategy. As the United States finds itself competing in critical regions of the world in this era of great power competition, studies of the strategies that are at play in this competition offer important insights. Martin Skold’s book is an excellent—and readable—guide to the intricacies and application of competitive strategies in such an environment.”
~Nadia Schadlow, Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute; former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy
“Refreshing to see a serious scholar thinking seriously about surviving and winning in the modern world.”
~James Jay Carafano, Vice President, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, and E. W. Richardson Fellow, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, Heritage Foundation
“Martin Skold’s study of regional great power competition is a compelling and precise intervention in the debate about how to understand the return of classical geopolitics. Its quality derives not only from the author’s skill but from its origins. It was conceived when great power competition was unfashionable, and when its return to international politics was dismissed by zeitgeist-sniffers for whom counterterrorism and counterinsurgency were the only games in town. Skold synthesises an impressive array of ideas and literature to create a framework for judgements about the contest between today’s great powers. It builds also on a deeply researched and rich study of the Anglo-German antagonism before 1914. In a growing literature on the subject, The Race with No Finish Line is top of the pack. Read it.”
~Patrick Porter, Professor of International Security and Strategy, University of Birmingham
“As the American unipolar moment seems to draw awkwardly to a close, Martin Skold’s account of the Dreadnought Race between Great Britain and Germany a century ago has an unmistakable contemporary relevance to scholars, statesmen, and commanders. More than a history, in this lucid and probing book Skold offers a framework for understanding great power competitive strategies that deserves attentive consideration.”
~David J. Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World, War Studies Department, King’s College London