Evidence since 2023 shows that competition with China framed as great/strategic power competition has in fact functioned as a primary organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy and strategy.

1. China-centered competition as core of official strategy. The 2022 National Security Strategy (still operative through the following years) explicitly states that a competition among major powers is underway and identifies China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge,” the only state with both the intent and capability to reshape the international order, and says the U.S. must “out-compete” China. It describes the era as one of “strategic competition with major powers,” clearly elevating this competition—especially with China—above other threats.【2†turn2search1】【2†turn2search2】 Independent summaries stress that this competition with China suffuses the document.【2†turn2search0】【2†turn2search4】

2. Defense planning built around China as the pacing challenge. The unclassified 2022 National Defense Strategy and related Pentagon statements repeatedly call China the “overall pacing challenge” and “most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades,” saying U.S. force planning, modernization, and posture are set with that yardstick in mind.【0†turn0search2】【0†turn0search5】 Analyses of this framing note that U.S. defense planning, industrial policy, and global posture now revolve around how to keep up with and outpace Beijing, explicitly treating China-centric competition as the benchmark for strategy.【0†turn0search9】

3. Congressional and bureaucratic structures explicitly organized around competition with China. In January 2023, the House created the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, mandated to study and make recommendations across economic, technological, and security domains of U.S.–China rivalry.【2†turn2search14】 That a standing select committee is framed entirely around "strategic competition" with China is strong evidence that this concept has become a central organizing lens in official policy deliberations.

4. Foreign-policy professionals explicitly describe GPC as the central organizing principle. A U.S. Foreign Service Journal article (June 2021, still widely cited in subsequent debates) flatly describes the re-emergence of “great power competition” as “the central organizing principle for U.S. engagement with the world,” specifically highlighting the rise of Xi’s China as the main peer competitor.【4†turn4view0】 Later commentary and book reviews on U.S. strategy in the era of “great power competition” and “strategic competition” treat this frame as the widely accepted deep structure of U.S. grand strategy, even when arguing it is a flawed or dangerous organizing concept.【3†turn3search0】【3†turn3search4】

5. Ongoing China-focused competitive framing across regions and issues. Analyses of U.S. policy in regions like the Middle East complain that great power competition with China is increasingly the lens through which Washington views local issues—implicitly acknowledging that this frame is driving policy.【1†turn1search10】 Other scholarship and commentary in 2023–2025 describe the United States as entering a full-fledged "great-power contest" or “great-power rivalry” with China that dominates policymakers’ thinking about alliances, technology controls (e.g., chips), and economic statecraft.【1†turn1search1】【2†turn2news12】【2†turn2search6】

6. Caveats that do not overturn the prediction.

   • The Biden team nominally shifted terminology from “great power competition” to “strategic competition” in some documents,【3†turn3search3】【3†turn3search13】 and the NSS also emphasizes transnational threats (climate, pandemics) alongside competition.【2†turn2search3】
   • Some 2024–2025 analyses argue that the great-power-competition frame is misguided or even in decline under newer approaches (e.g., more homeland-focused defense, spheres-of-influence bargaining).【0†turn0news16】【1†turn1search11】【1†turn1search9】

   But these critiques presuppose that great/strategic power competition with China is the prevailing paradigm they are arguing against, which reinforces—rather than refutes—Sacks’s claim that it has become the organizing principle.

Taking all of this together: by the mid‑2020s, China-centered great/strategic power competition clearly shapes U.S. national security strategy, defense planning, congressional structures, and much of the foreign‑policy debate. That matches Sacks’s prediction that this concept would become the primary organizing framework of U.S. foreign policy over the years after March 2023, even if the preferred official label is often “strategic competition” rather than the exact phrase “great power competition.”