3
On the night of June 15–16, 2020, the Galwan River valley, an isolated area along the disputed Himalayan border between India and China, became a high-altitude field of horrors. A hand-to-hand battle in near-blackout conditions took the lives of dozens of Indian and Chinese soldiers. For Beijing, the bloodbath represented a minor tactical victory and a larger strategic defeat.
The causes of the Galwan clash go back decades. Since the 1950s, the two Asian giants have wrestled over the location of their shared frontier in some of the most forbidding, mountainous terrain on the globe. In late 1962, while the world was preoccupied with the Cuban Missile Crisis, China and India fought a major war resulting in a resounding Indian defeat. Since then, New Delhi and Beijing have continued to jockey for advantage, both in the eastern section of the border region, between Burma and Nepal, and in the western section between Nepal and Pakistan. In the years before 2020, the intensity of the dispute gradually ratcheted upward.
In 2017, there was a prolonged military standoff after the PLA began building a strategically located road in territory claimed by Bhutan, which India views as a friendly buffer state. Even more brazenly, China surreptitiously constructed, on land globally recognized as Bhutanese, entire villages with an accompanying PLA presence. In 2019, there was a marked increase in Chinese violations of the de facto border with India.1 Throughout this period, there were also periodic clashes between Indian and Chinese patrols, governed by a long-standing set of implicit rules—no guns, no killing—that kept simmering tensions below a boil. It was that code of conduct that gave way in 2020, with ramifications reaching far beyond the Himalayan frontier.
The fireworks began in May, with Chinese forces briefly occupying swaths of Indian-claimed territory. When Indian forces pushed back, the resulting scrapes were initially conducted according to the familiar rituals. But after dark on June 15, the skirmishing turned deadly. Chinese soldiers attacked an Indian patrol using primitive but brutal weapons, such as sticks studded with rusty nails. According to reports, PLA personnel even tried to crush Indian soldiers by pushing boulders down on top of them.2 A pitched battle ensued, lasting six hours and involving up to 600 troops. What exactly happened in the darkness remains unclear; the governments told sharply contrasting stories in the aftermath. Yet some twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops ended up dead, many of them killed when they fell or were pushed off a mountain ridge into the river valley below.
Viewed narrowly, the episode was a victory for China. It showed how easily the PLA could grab chunks of territory claimed by India and how hard it was for New Delhi to respond without touching off a larger war against a stronger power. Nonetheless, China lost more than it gained.
Indian officials had long been concerned about China’s ambitions. Narendra Modi’s nationalist government had more recently worried that Beijing was using BRI projects in Sri Lanka and Pakistan to pressure India from all sides. After Galwan, the backlash was sharp. Indian crowds destroyed Chinese smartphones and burned effigies of Xi Jinping. The nationalist press called for revenge. Modi warned that “the entire country is hurt and angry. . . . No one can even dare look towards an inch of our land.”3
It wasn’t just rhetoric. To shore up its defenses, India sought emergency purchases of Russian fighter jets and other military assets. To limit digital dependence on a rival, the Indian government banned dozens of Chinese mobile applications, including TikTok and WeChat, and barred Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network trials. Most important, India’s long, slow move toward America accelerated.
The year after June 2020 saw a flurry of diplomacy around the Quad, a U.S.-Australia-India-Japan partnership that looks a lot like an anti-China alliance of Indo-Pacific democracies. In March 2021, New Delhi agreed to be the manufacturing hub for a COVID-19 vaccine initiative aimed at rolling back Chinese influence in Southeast Asia by distributing 1 billion jabs there. At a virtual Quad summit, Modi and his counterparts effectively announced that they would frustrate China’s geopolitical ambitions—by cooperating to preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific—even as they never publicly mentioned China by name.4 In the summer of 2021, India moved tens of thousands of additional troops to the border, while also studying how it might help Washington choke off China’s maritime supply lines in a war.5 U.S. officials began publicly referring to India as a keystone of their counter-China strategy.6
Experts on Sino-Indian relations speculated that Beijing’s motive in escalating the border dispute a year earlier may have been to punish New Delhi for working with America.7 If so, Xi miscalculated—and it wasn’t the first time. The deadly struggle at Galwan was just one example of how China’s aggressive behavior has begun to backfire.
For a generation after the Cold War, China escaped the fate that has befallen so many aspiring Eurasian hegemons—the emergence of a countervailing coalition committed to checking its power. That achievement is now in the past. Thanks to its own overreach, Beijing has made an enemy of the superpower that did so much to assist its rise. It has provoked fear and resistance from countries near and far. The strategic holiday that China enjoyed for decades is over. A strategic vise is tightening as the CCP’s rivals close in on all sides.
THE EURASIAN CAULDRON
Strategic encirclement is a rude awakening for Xi’s China, but it has a familiar feel for those steeped in history. If the past few centuries teach us anything, it is that nations with fish and friends as neighbors have the best chance of claiming global power without provoking global resistance. Those ringed by rivals must constantly fear that expansion will result in their own isolation and defeat. In world politics as in real estate, location matters: Countries that sit comfortably outside the geopolitical cauldron of Eurasia are far better positioned for primacy than those trapped within it.
To see why, look at the difference between America and China. The United States didn’t always enjoy “free security” thanks to its geographic isolation: It spent its first century battling European empires and Native Americans for control of the North American continent.8 Yet the fact that this contest was an away game for America’s great-power rivals, which had to defend holdings thousands of miles from their capitals, gave Washington the decisive advantage. By the late nineteenth century, no combination of countries in the Western Hemisphere could meaningfully threaten America’s security. The one European power—Britain—that might have challenged the United States in its own backyard was menaced by Germany and chose to appease the Americans instead.9 The United States was the sole great power in its hemisphere, which allowed it to project that power around the world.
America could build an ocean-going navy rather than heavily fortifying its frontiers. It could enter the world wars of the twentieth century late and allow countries in Europe and Asia to bear the brunt of the fighting and dying. And because the United States was so far away from Europe and Asia, the countries of those regions were less likely to fear being conquered by America than to try to enlist it as an ally against predators closer to home. This was what the countries of Western Europe did in dragging the United States into NATO in the 1940s. It was what China itself did in the 1970s: Mao explained his pivot to America as a way of using the “far barbarians” to keep the “near barbarians” in check.10 By dint of not being located in the Old World, the United States found itself invited to exercise vast influence there.
How America used its power also mattered tremendously. A country founded in liberal political principles created a comparatively liberal geopolitical system. It promoted an open world economy and gave U.S. friends access to the lucrative American market. It created alliances that protected dozens of major countries, turning killing fields in Western Europe and East Asia into zones of relative peace.11 The combination of geography and democracy made America a fairly benign superpower, which gave other countries an interest in supporting its hegemony.
China is cursed by comparison. The Eurasian landmass is a big but crowded space; it is home not to one major power but many. A country that dominates Eurasia would pose a mortal threat to the sovereignty, even survival, of countries located in its shadow, which means that the rise of one powerful nation cannot fail to stimulate a reaction from others. For centuries, aggressively expansionist states within Eurasia have precipitated—sooner or later—counterbalancing by anxious neighbors, who typically compensate for their own relative weakness by aligning with strong offshore allies such as Great Britain and, more recently, the United States.
This is what spelled doom for every Eurasian country that tried to become a global superpower in the modern era. Napoleon’s France conquered much of Europe but fell victim to a combination of rivals led by Great Britain. In the twentieth century, Germany was destroyed (twice) when its European enemies made common cause with the United States. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was thwarted by a ring of rivals from Northeast Asia to Western Europe, all backed by Washington. Hegemonic ambitions have long been the ruin of countries situated within Eurasia: The odds of being cornered and killed by a pack of enemies are high indeed.
China is especially exposed to this predicament. America has land borders with two friendly countries. China is surrounded by twenty nations and faces historical rivals in every direction: Russia to the north, Japan to the east, Vietnam to the south, and India to the west. China’s neighbors include seven of the world’s fifteen most populous countries, four countries armed with nuclear weapons, five countries that have waged wars against China in the past eighty years, and ten that still claim parts of Chinese territory. Additionally, China has America as a neighbor, due to the U.S. alliances, strategic partnerships, and military deployments that dot Asia’s map. China may once have been a Eurasian empire. But today, one Chinese scholar writes, it “suffers from the harshest global geopolitical security situation among the great powers.”12
In fact, geography creates a strategic trap for China. The perception of danger everywhere drives a strong impulse to expand: Only by pushing outward can China secure its frontiers, protect its supply lines, and break the bonds a punishing environment imposes.13 Yet the same impulse will eventually fuel the anxieties of other countries, tempting them to combine against Beijing. And because the CCP exercises power so ruthlessly at home, it faces an inherent challenge in convincing other countries that it would use preeminent power responsibly abroad.
A rising China thus faces a high probability of being encircled and defeated, unless it can somehow escape the fate that has befallen self-aggrandizing Eurasian states in the past. For years, Beijing was fortunate—and skillful—in this respect, but now its luck is running out.
THE END OF CHINA’S STRATEGIC HOLIDAY
China’s strategic holiday began as a matter of Cold War realism: The enemy of America’s enemy became its friend. But hard-boiled realists would have had trouble predicting what happened next. China’s strategic holiday lasted a full generation after the Soviet threat vanished—and after Tiananmen Square demonstrated that the CCP was still willing to take the most abhorrent measures to preserve its rule. Washington’s approach, wrote former State Department official Thomas Christensen in 2015, had been “nearly the opposite of our containment policy toward the Soviets throughout the Cold War.”14 Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of China’s rise was how long it took the world to start pushing back.
The United States wasn’t entirely asleep at the switch. After the Cold War, a few sharp-eyed observers realized that a flourishing China could one day become a regional and perhaps a global rival. Several administrations hedged against this possibility by retaining powerful air and naval forces in the Pacific. Yet the United States continued to fuel China’s explosive growth; American officials encouraged Beijing to become more active and influential in global affairs. Far from trying to “hamper and delay” Beijing’s rise, Christensen writes, American policy emphasized economic and diplomatic engagement that helped China keep moving up.15
One reason for this complacency was greed. In the early 1990s, an engagement policy seemed logical because China was a minor military threat and a massive money-making opportunity. With 1.3 billion people, a long coastline in the heart of East Asia, and an authoritarian regime that was willing to repress dissent and trash the environment to make way for big business, China was simply too good to pass up as a consumer market and a low-wage production platform. So Western multinational companies and financiers pressed their governments to integrate China further into global supply chains. Those governments happily obliged, arguing—when they talked about the CCP’s grotesque human rights violations at all—that a more economically open China would eventually become more politically open. “Trade freely with China,” George W. Bush explained, “and time is on our side.”16
That assurance related to a second reason China’s holiday continued—the overweening Western confidence, even hubris, of the post–Cold War era. Aggressively containing China seemed almost gratuitous at a time when America was so dominant. Given that China was still relatively poor and technologically weak—the joke in the 1990s was that it would take a “million-man swim” for the PLA to reach Taiwan—there was no need to suppress its growth. Given that the American-led global economy was making China wealthier, surely Beijing would come to see the value in supporting that system. And given that so many authoritarian regimes had recently fallen to the global march of democracy, surely China would eventually do likewise. America would transform China—turning it into a “responsible stakeholder” or perhaps even a liberal democracy—long before China had a chance to transform the American-led order.17
There were moments when the engagement paradigm wobbled. When the PLA provocatively splashed missiles around Taiwan in 1995–1996, the Pentagon sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to make Beijing back off. China might be “a great military power,” Defense Secretary William Perry remarked, but “the premier—the strongest—military power in the western Pacific is the United States.”18 On the campaign trail in 2000, Bush called China a “strategic competitor” and promised to take a hard line once in office.19 But it mostly didn’t happen, thanks to a third factor—distraction.
The 9/11 attacks diverted U.S. attention for a decade, while making Washington more dependent on Chinese diplomatic support in the war on terror. The Obama administration then sought to recoup lost ground with its “pivot to Asia,” only to be whipsawed by the rise of ISIS and another multiyear war in the Middle East. China remained the problem of tomorrow, or perhaps a generation hence, because today’s problems were so consuming. “China is like that long book you’ve always been meaning to read,” a U.S. intelligence official commented, “but you always end up waiting until next summer.”20
Give credit where credit is due: Chinese strategy encouraged American procrastination. Deng’s hide-and-bide policy eased fears of a “China threat.” The PRC skillfully played the world’s democracies off each other, threatening to buy airplanes from Europe’s Airbus rather than America’s Boeing if Washington got too tough. Even as Chinese strategy gradually became more aggressive, the CCP warned that an American move toward competition would get in the way of bilateral cooperation on nuclear proliferation or climate change. “Cold War thinking,” as Xi’s diplomats derisively phrased it, would obstruct “win-win cooperation.”21
The strategy worked remarkably well, and the CCP exploited its twenty-year grace period to the fullest. China sucked up Western technology and capital, dumped its products in foreign markets while keeping its own market relatively closed, installed Chinese officials atop international organizations, and proclaimed its peaceful intentions while building up its military. It was a master class in how to use the illusion of win-win diplomacy to conceal a ruthlessly win-lose approach to global politics.22 Yet it couldn’t go on forever.
America’s policy of integrating, rather than isolating, a potential rival had been critical to China’s success. But that policy endured after the Cold War only because Washington was so assured in its primacy and so confident that engagement would move China in the right direction. By the aftermath of the global financial crisis, China’s growing power was weakening the first of these pillars while its more muscular, autocratic behavior was eviscerating the second. The pendulum of America’s China policy was set to make another swing, as the CCP began activating all the geopolitical anxieties that had previously lain dormant.
China’s surge of maritime coercion in Asia made it hard to believe that Beijing was reconciling itself to the existing order in the western Pacific. A country that was throwing up a “great wall of sand” in the South China Sea, one U.S. admiral quipped, was not becoming a responsible stakeholder.23 After roughly twenty years, China’s military buildup had reached an alarming level. Respected think-tanks reported that the Pentagon was losing its edge in the Taiwan Strait and other hot spots.24 American military superiority was being “challenged in ways that I have not seen for decades,” Under Secretary of Defense Frank Kendall agreed in 2014. “This is not a future problem. This is a here-now problem.”25
These weren’t the only wake-up calls. Tech gurus such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that Washington could lose the race for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI).26 Meanwhile, Chinese cyberattacks and intellectual property theft were robbing American firms of tens of billions of dollars annually in what recently retired National Security Agency director Keith Alexander called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”27 The launch of BRI in 2013 yielded still more evidence that China was not integrating into the American-led system but creating its own. Finally, the stunning centralization of power under Xi brought a decisive end to the era of reform. If engagement had been meant to produce a mellower, freer China, it seemed to have created a more belligerent, mightier autocracy instead.
In 2015, the Sinologist and sometimes-government adviser Michael Pillsbury captured the new mood. In his best-selling book, The Hundred Year Marathon, Pillsbury argued that America had been duped by CCP hawks who were well embarked on a quest for global dominance.28 Before long, Washington would be immersed in a full-blown “who lost China” debate, with critics deriding the engagement policy as a historic blunder.
It’s true that engagement failed to tame or transform the CCP. But China had failed, too, by scoring such a catastrophic success. The country’s rise had, finally, destroyed the welcoming global environment that had allowed it to rise in the first place. Countries around the world began bringing China’s long holiday to a close. Leading the way was its one-time ally, the United States.
GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character quips that he went bankrupt in “two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” That’s a good way to describe the collapse of U.S.-China relations.
American officials didn’t wake up one day and discover that China was geopolitical enemy Number 1. Even as Washington was touting the “responsible stakeholder” thesis in the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration was quietly (and very modestly) strengthening America’s military posture in the Pacific. Obama’s Asia pivot involved upgrading American alliances, moving more air and naval forces to the region, and opposing—not very effectively—Beijing’s island-building campaign. But through 2016, engagement was still hanging on: The White House even prohibited the Pentagon from talking publicly about China as a rival.29
The rupture in U.S.-China relations came only in 2017, when a most unconventional president—Donald Trump—shattered the engagement paradigm and ushered in full-spectrum competition. Strategy documents of the Trump era bristled with rhetorical fury. In December 2017, Trump’s National Security Strategy described China as an international outlaw that was reshaping the world in ways “antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” A month later, the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy proclaimed that “long-term, strategic competition” with “revisionist powers” was America’s strategic lodestar. Reports by the National Security Council laid out detailed plans for preventing the CCP from seizing the commanding heights of technological innovation, menacing free societies, and turning the western Pacific into a Chinese lake.30
Not to be outdone, the State Department—emulating George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” at the dawn of the Cold War—issued an even longer missive arguing that the CCP was toxically aggressive by nature. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called for a global alliance of democracies to keep China in its “proper place.”31 This was the most dramatic change in U.S.-China relations since Nixon visited Beijing, and it wasn’t just talk.
A significant bump in defense spending allowed the Pentagon to initiate its largest naval and missile expansion in a generation. Trump hit China with America’s most sustained and aggressive use of punitive tariffs since World War II. Washington layered on the tightest investment and technological restrictions since the Cold War, seeking to cripple Huawei and turn the world away from Chinese 5G providers. The U.S. Congress created the International Development Finance Corporation, a $60 billion answer to BRI, while the FBI was unleashed to go after China’s pervasive espionage and influence campaigns. The bureau, director Christopher Wray announced, was “opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours.”32 CIA director Gina Haspel steered that agency away from a generation-long preoccupation with counterterrorism to focus on the problems presented by big, threatening states.33 The U.S. national security bureaucracy was training its unrivaled capabilities squarely on China.
In multiple areas, U.S. policy became sharp, even confrontational. The United States imposed sanctions on CCP officials engaged in the destruction of Hong Kong’s political freedoms in 2019–2020. The State Department declared that China’s program of mass incarceration, forced sterilization, and systematic abuse of the Uighur population amounted to genocide. The U.S. Navy ramped up its freedom of navigation operations to challenge China’s claims in the South China Sea; arms sales and military support to vulnerable frontline states increased. Trump’s ever-rotating cast of Cabinet officials traveled the world, admonishing audiences in Europe, Africa, and Latin America about the specter of Chinese neo-imperialism. Even trade deals became competitive weapons: The U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, signed in 2019, effectively prohibited its signatories from signing separate free-trade agreements with Beijing. If it seemed that America was racing to make up for lost time in competition with China, that’s because Trump’s aides saw matters in exactly that light.34
Admittedly, American policies weren’t always effective or coherent, which was why Xi’s regime saw as much opportunity as threat in the Trump era. The president’s abrasive, “America First” approach to the entire world—a product of his belief that Washington was being victimized by allies as well as enemies—undercut his anti-China instincts. Upon taking office, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which two previous administrations had seen as a counterweight to Chinese influence. He started trade wars against America’s closest democratic sidekicks, while taking gleeful, destructive pleasure in trashing decades-old alliances. Most bizarre of all, Trump the self-styled strongman admired and occasionally praised Xi’s domestic brutality, even as his administration was seeking to punish those very crimes.35 But whatever the contradictions, Trump had irreversibly broken the mold of U.S.-China relations—and most of Washington applauded him for it.
COVID-19 finished the work Trump had started. The CCP’s breathtakingly cynical behavior—first trying to cover up the plague of the century, then exploiting the chaos COVID-19 created to batter its rivals—devastated China’s international reputation. According to leaked Chinese government reports and independent Western analyses, negative views of China soared to highs not seen since Tiananmen Square. The percentage of Americans who saw China unfavorably rose from 47 percent in 2017 to 73 percent in 2020.36 The 2020 presidential election became a contest in China-bashing. And when Trump lost that election, the basic thrust of U.S. policy hardly changed. President Joe Biden, who had once bragged about his close relationship with Xi Jinping, now pledged to prosecute “extreme competition” against the CCP.37
Biden proceeded to act like he meant it. The Pentagon formed an emergency China task force charged with sprinting toward better solutions for countering the PLA’s buildup, as U.S. officials sought to rally allies for a potential defense of Taiwan. The president maintained most of Trump’s sanctions on China, while proposing a $50 billion effort to boost the American semiconductor industry; he began kicking Chinese firms with ties to the PLA and CCP intelligence organs out of U.S. capital markets.38 China-focused legislation, aimed at increasing U.S. investments in scientific research, cutting Beijing out of key supply chains, and otherwise strengthening America’s hand, attracted broad bipartisan support. Biden also threw down the ideological gauntlet, declaring that an epochal struggle between democracy and authoritarianism was under way. Washington must link arms with fellow democracies—on tech, trade, defense, and other issues—to defeat Beijing’s repressive model.39 “It seems that a whole-of-government and whole-of-society campaign is being waged to bring China down,” the PRC’s deputy foreign minister complained in July 2021.40
Admittedly, these measures were merely down payments on a strategy for competition. Yet the harsh reality, from Beijing’s vantage point, was that the CCP had made itself the primary target of a global superpower. “A united front has formed in the United States,” one Chinese military expert wrote: Hostility toward China had become a point of bipartisan accord in Washington.41 And just as the U.S. turn toward China opened so many doors from the 1970s onward, the U.S. turn away from China has helped to close them. Countries that have benefited from the American world order are starting to understand the risks of a system run by Beijing. Almost everywhere China is pushing for advantage, a growing cast of rivals is pushing back.
ON EVERY FRONT
For starters, China has lost any chance of reclaiming Taiwan without a fight. For decades, Beijing thought that it could buy reunification by forging economic links with Taiwan while bribing countries to cut diplomatic relations with the island. But prospects for peaceful reunification are fading fast: It turns out most Taiwanese don’t want to live in a belligerent, neo-totalitarian state.
In 2020, a record 64 percent of the island’s population identified solely as Taiwanese and not Chinese, up from 55 percent in 2018.42 Popular support for unification with China has plunged during the past decade; the Kuomintang political party, seen to favor cozy ties with Beijing, has been repeatedly punished at the polls. Taiwan is also trying, belatedly, to turn itself into a strategic porcupine. In 2020, after watching China swallow Hong Kong, Taiwan’s government approved a 10 percent hike in military spending and a bold new defense strategy.43 Under this plan, Taiwan would acquire huge arsenals of mobile missile launchers, armed drones, and mines; prepare its army to surge tens of thousands of troops to any beach in an hour; back those regular forces with a million-strong reserve force trained to fight guerrilla-style in Taiwan’s cities, mountains, and jungles; and set up a huge network of shelters and massive stockpiles of fuel, medical supplies, food, and water for a population psychologically prepared to ride out a bloody conflict for months. “We will defend ourselves to the very last day,” Taiwan’s foreign minister declared.44 If this plan, which was bolstered by another supplemental defense spending package in 2021, is fully executed, it would make Taiwan extremely difficult to conquer.
The United States is facilitating all of these changes. When the United States and China reestablished diplomatic ties in the 1970s, it seemed certain that Washington would eventually jettison Taiwan. But the relationship endured and has, thanks to Chinese pressure, significantly tightened. America increasingly treats Taiwan as an independent nation in all but name, and the U.S. government is backing up this stance by helping Taiwan’s military.
The Trump and Biden administrations both made it easier for American officials to visit Taiwan; Congress passed a law in 2020 requiring the U.S. government to help Taipei strengthen its presence in international organizations. At the same time, the Trump administration sold nearly $20 billion worth of weapons to Taipei, including missile launchers, mines, and drones that could help an island country repel an amphibious attack. Under Trump and Biden, the Pentagon has put the defense of Taiwan at the center of its military planning; U.S. officials have called their support for the island “rock solid” and hinted ever-less-subtly that America would respond to a Chinese invasion with force.45 The military balance in the Taiwan Strait has changed in China’s favor, but Taipei and Washington are digging in.
So are countries throughout maritime Asia. Japan, the target of Chinese coercion in the East China Sea, is engaged in its most concerted military buildup since the end of the Cold War. It has increased defense spending ten years in a row and made plans to use missile launchers and high-quality submarines, situated in the narrow seas along the Ryukyu Islands, to choke off China’s access to the Pacific.46 The overall balance of naval tonnage now favors Beijing, but Japan still has more large surface combatants than China, including amphibious ships that have been repurposed as carriers for Japan’s rapidly expanding arsenal of stealth F-35 fighters armed with long-range anti-ship missiles.47 Chinese strategists dream of breaking the “First Island Chain”—the strategic cordon of American allies and partners in the western Pacific—but Tokyo can make that a bloody endeavor.
The U.S.-Japan alliance has also assumed an anti-China bent. A succession of American presidents has clarified that the alliance covers the disputed Senkaku Islands, threatening to turn any Japan-China war over those islands into a U.S.-China war. Japan, for its part, has reinterpreted its constitution to allow the Self-Defense Forces to play a more active role in fighting alongside the United States.
Japanese warships and planes often serve as escorts for American warships and planes as they pass through China’s near seas. American F-35s are practicing landings on Japan’s quasi-aircraft carriers.48 Most alarming for China, Japan agreed in 2021 to cooperate closely with America in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Japan’s deputy prime minister declared that such an attack would constitute a threat to the survival of Japan itself, and Washington and Tokyo began drawing up a joint battle plan that reportedly involves U.S. Marines deploying deadly long-range artillery on the southernmost Ryukyu Islands, just 90 miles from Taiwan.49 Meanwhile, Japan has led regional opposition to Chinese economic hegemony by preserving a rump Trans-Pacific Partnership after U.S. withdrawal in 2017. When Chinese leaders gaze across the East China Sea, they see not a small, vulnerable enemy, but a major regional adversary backed by the world’s greatest power.
The countries around the South China Sea are weaker and so are their anti-China efforts. But they are not defenseless, and they are developing military capabilities and strategic friendships to keep Beijing at bay. Vietnam is acquiring mobile shore-based anti-ship cruise missile batteries, Russian attack submarines, advanced surface-to-air missiles, new fighter aircraft, and surface ships armed with advanced cruise missiles.50 With these weapons, Vietnam could destroy ships and aircraft operating within 200 miles of its coast—an area that encompasses the western third of the South China Sea and China’s huge military base on Hainan Island.51 Hanoi has also hosted U.S. warships, and its relationship with America is closer than ever. To the south, Singapore has quietly become America’s major military hub in Southeast Asia, hosting maritime surveillance planes, fast littoral combat ships, and other Pentagon assets. That city-state may not be an American treaty ally, a senior U.S. naval commander once remarked, but it acts like one.52
Elsewhere around the South China Sea, Indonesia increased its defense spending 20 percent in 2020 and an additional 16 percent in 2021 so it could buy dozens of F-16 fighters and new surface ships armed with long-range anti-ship cruise missiles.53 In March 2021, the Indonesian government signed a pact to acquire Japanese defense equipment and jointly develop islands in the South China Sea that China claims as its own. In May, the government announced that it would triple its submarine fleet and buy new corvettes in response to Chinese maritime incursions.54 For good measure, Jakarta declared that it would sink foreign vessels that fish or drill in its claimed waters and has occasionally made good on the threat by blowing up seized Chinese fishing boats on national television.
On the east side of the South China Sea, the Philippines—the primary victim of Chinese coercion in the area—wavered between appeasement and resistance under President Rodrigo Duterte. But the Chinese economic payoffs Duterte sought for selling out Filipino sovereignty never materialized, and frustration with Beijing has increased. In early 2021, Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Jr., went on a profanity-laced Twitter rant about Chinese bullying. In response, the famously foul-mouthed Duterte, who once called Barack Obama a “son of a whore,” decreed that only he was allowed to use obscenities as tools of statecraft.55 Nonetheless, Manila has been ramping up air and naval patrols, conducting military exercises with the United States, and moving to purchase BrahMos cruise missiles from India.56 It also received, under the Trump and Biden administrations, firmer guarantees of what Washington will do to back up Philippine forces if shooting breaks out.57
In short, China has made military gains in the South China Sea, but only by turning many of its neighbors against it. Its assertiveness has also made the fate of that regional waterway a source of global concern: Countries from Japan to Australia to the United Kingdom have sent naval patrols and otherwise opposed China’s dominance of a sea through which one-third of the world’s shipping passes. And American allies in the region are signing defense cooperation agreements that bring them closer to each other at the same time that they draw closer to the United States.
In fact, as China seeks greater arcs of influence, it is confronting greater arcs of hostility. Australia weathered an economic coercion campaign China unleashed upon it in 2020, coming away more determined to harden its society against foreign interference. Its leaders have largely abandoned the pleasant illusion of not having to choose between America and China, in recognition that the alternative to aligning with Washington is subordination to Beijing. Australia is now engaged in its biggest defense overhaul in generations, expanding northern bases to better accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft, investing in long-range conventional missiles, and fighting Chinese influence in the strategically located islands of the South Pacific.58 In 2021, Australia’s defense minister termed it “inconceivable” that his country would not assist America in a war over Taiwan.59 That same year, Canberra concluded a landmark deal with Washington and London to build nuclear-powered attack submarines with U.S. technology. That pact would make the Royal Australian Navy a force to be reckoned with in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea; it would also bind the three English-speaking nations together in an anti-China entente. “Panda huggers” have become an endangered species in Australian politics, while “panda sluggers” roam freely.
The same goes for India, the primary bulwark against Chinese power in continental Asia. Fear of China has gradually been pushing New Delhi toward Washington for a generation, but the pace has undoubtedly quickened. “In every sector of India’s forward march,” Modi declared, “I see the U.S. as an indispensable partner.”60 In 2017, India agreed to revive the Quad, which had been moribund for a decade. The Indian Navy has sent warships alongside those from Vietnam through the South China Sea. It is installing missile launchers on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands—a staging point for a wartime blockade of Chinese commerce—and building vessels armed with some of the most advanced anti-ship missiles in the world.61 Non-alignment is still a powerful ideology in India, but it is no longer a plausible strategy: New Delhi is pursuing an unbalanced triangular relationship in which it leans toward Washington to offset the looming threat from Beijing.
Looking beyond the Indo-Pacific, China’s global ambitions are provoking a global response. In 2019, the European Union labeled Beijing a “systemic rival,” while many member states have banned or quietly excluded Chinese technology from their 5G networks.62 Italy, which had shocked its allies by signing on to BRI, effectively reversed that decision in 2021. Western Europe’s three great powers—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—have started sending naval patrols to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. France conspicuously led a Quad military exercise in 2021; in October, naval forces from America, Britain, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands all converged and trained together in the Philippine Sea. In Tokyo, Canberra, London, and Paris, high-ranking officials are starting to whisper about coming to Taiwan’s aid if China attacks.63 The turnaround has been particularly sharp in the United Kingdom. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron heralded a “golden age” of ties with China; through 2019, the United Kingdom was in peril of becoming a technological appendage of Beijing by allowing Huawei to control its 5G networks. Since 2020, however, the tide has turned: Boris Johnson’s government put competition with China at the heart of its “global Britain” strategy while announcing defense spending hikes to match.64
It’s not just the big guys that are fighting back. In 2020, the Czech Republic—a country that knows what it means to be sacrificed on the altar of appeasement—unexpectedly joined the U.S. assault on Huawei. The leader of the Czech Senate visited Taipei and declared, in language reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s celebrated trip to West Berlin, “I am Taiwanese.”65 The following year, Canada launched a 58-country diplomatic initiative to isolate countries that seize foreign nationals as diplomatic hostages—precisely what China had done to two Canadian citizens in 2018.66 Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a diplomatic representative’s office (a step short of an embassy) in Vilnius, while undertaking a campaign against Chinese influence in Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, a transregional group of democracies struck at the heart of the CCP’s rule by imposing sanctions on regime officials involved in the genocide in Xinjiang.
Beijing, true to form, reacted furiously: The CCP slapped counter-sanctions on European officials and even on European think-tanks. The upshot was to derail an EU-China investment deal that Beijing had hoped to use as a wedge between America and Europe. This is “how China loses,” one scholar has perceptively written—through high-handed, reflexive pugnacity that reminds so many countries how much they will hate living in a CCP-led world.67
CHINA’S LENGTHENING ODDS
It is important not to get carried away. Counter-China cooperation has remained imperfect and halting, mostly because so many countries are still hooked on trade with Beijing. China’s economic presence is pervasive in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and other developing regions. Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong pointedly advised Washington in 2019 not to expect countries to simply sever ties to Beijing. “Where is your part of the world, and who will be in your system?” he asked.68
Even close U.S. allies, such as France and Germany, sometimes seem wishy-washy. Still scarred by the memory of one cold war, these countries are eager to avoid a second that once again splits the world down the middle. China exacerbates this hedging by using its economic influence to divide and neutralize regional groupings, whether ASEAN or, on occasion, the European Union. Moreover, what governments want is one thing and what businesses want is another: As Washington and Tokyo sought to limit dependence on China in 2020–2021, U.S. and Japanese investment flowed into that country.69 When it comes to military matters, multilateral consultations on defending Taiwan and securing the western Pacific are still immature—nothing like the deep cooperation, developed through decades of training and fighting, that the Pentagon enjoys with America’s NATO allies. Balancing against China often has the feel of two steps forward, one step back.
China, for its part, has been pursuing hedges against strategic isolation. It has built an entente with Putin’s Russia, another angry, revisionist autocracy with a penchant for aggression and a talent for making enemies. That partnership features deepening economic, technological, diplomatic, and military cooperation beyond what most Western observers would have predicted a decade ago. It features a tacit agreement that Beijing and Moscow won’t make trouble for each other along their once-contested border, so that they can maximize the trouble they make for the United States and its allies across Eurasia and beyond. On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared that their friendship had “no limits”; Moscow’s subsequent attack, and the global security crisis it precipitated, underscored that the balance of power is under strain in Europe and Asia simultaneously. If China and Russia have traditionally struggled to tame their historical rivalry for long, for now their anti-U.S., anti-democracy agendas are binding them together.70
The strategic effects of this alignment are potentially quite important. Just as Germany and Japan—two ambivalent, distrustful partners with fundamentally different long-term visions for the world—profited from the chaos and pressure each other’s advances created in the run-up to World War II, China and Russia benefit from the fact that America cannot fully concentrate on either of its great-power rivals. Sino-Russian ties could get even tighter in the coming years. If Russia faces prolonged isolation thanks to its assault on Ukraine, it will become more dependent, economically and strategically, on China. If Beijing experiences a more energetic form of containment at the hands of Washington and its allies, then calm, productive relations with Russia will become all the more valuable. It is no longer absurd to imagine a scenario in which America’s parallel great-power rivalries, against China and Russia, merge into a single contest against a more coherent autocratic axis spanning a large part of Eurasia.71
Yet even here, not all is well for Beijing. Perhaps Putin is Tojo to Xi’s Hitler—or perhaps he is Mussolini, the weaker but truculent ally whose missteps blow back on the stronger.72 The Russian invasion of Ukraine created problems for China, bringing down international scrutiny and suspicion on Xi for his close relationship with Putin.73 A China that stays close to Russia will be a China that grows more estranged from much of the world. And as Putin’s attack heightens fears of autocratic aggression around the globe, it could precipitate more strenuous balancing against Beijing, as well.
Indeed, the overall trends are clear and, from the CCP’s perspective, ominous. An assortment of actors is joining forces to check China’s power and put it in a strategic box. Expect more of this in the future.
Groups of the world’s most innovative countries could set technological standards that discriminate against Chinese companies and perhaps even exclude them from Western production and digital networks. A shifting coalition of democracies could begin protecting liberal systems worldwide while naming, shaming, and sanctioning China for human rights abuses. An expanded Quad could coordinate intelligence and military action in the event of Chinese aggression, while a revitalized Anglosphere could pursue deepening technological and security cooperation at Beijing’s expense. A coalition of wealthy Western countries, perhaps centered on the Group of 7, could pool their development and infrastructure resources to compete with BRI. In the wake of COVID-19, supply chain alliances that seek to move production from China to friendly countries such as India or Vietnam may well proliferate.74
There probably won’t be a single, overarching anti-China coalition akin to NATO or the Grand Alliance during World War II. Yet the world is already on its way to forming multiple, overlapping anti-China coalitions through which like-minded countries address issues of shared concern. And this strategic backlash is something China cannot afford.
China may have passed the United States by some measures of GDP, but by other crucial indices it is still quite weak. Per capita GDP is a crucial measure of how much wealth a country can extract from its population to pursue global power: By this standard, the United States was six times richer than China in 2019.75 According to estimates of total wealth (as opposed to annual output) issued by the United Nations and the World Bank, America is by far the plusher power—and China’s prospects will only worsen if its economy weakens.76 Even by metrics more favorable to Beijing, Washington and its allies still account for a clear majority of the world’s military spending and economic output.
No country, and certainly not a stagnating autocracy, can fight at such a disadvantage forever. The CCP can only achieve its long-term goals if it divides the countries opposing it. But its actions are uniting them instead.
This cruel arithmetic is beginning to dawn on Beijing. In 2021, Defense Minister Wei Fenghe predicted that the coming years would see a contest between “containment and counter-containment”: China would seek to break the bonds of American hegemony, while Washington and its allies would work to preserve the existing order.77 A few observers—those who aren’t too terrified of Xi to obliquely criticize him—have been more explicit. Dai Xu, a senior PLA officer, explained how deadly it could be to provoke the hostility of a superpower with dozens of allies. “Don’t think that the U.S. imperialist is a ‘paper tiger,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a ‘real tiger’ that ‘kills people.’ ” “Once Imperial America considers you as their ‘enemy,’ ” he added, “you’re in big trouble.”78
Other Chinese analysts, including some with impeccably hawkish credentials, have sent the same message. Retired major general Qiao Liang is considered one of the intellectual fathers of the CCP’s approach to contesting American influence. But in 2020 he warned that behaving too aggressively could endanger China’s great rejuvenation. COVID-19 may have created a “short tactical window” for China, but that window “is not big enough to solve the strategic dilemma it will face in the future.”79 Yuan Nansheng, a former diplomat and CCP stalwart, likewise argued—by way of the historical analogies that offer a safer means of criticism—that “having enemies on all sides” is a recipe for disaster.80 America’s “multilateral club strategy,” agreed Yan Xuetong in July 2021, was “isolating China” and causing severe difficulties for its economic development and diplomatic relations.81 By late 2021, one American think-tank reported, there was a consensus among Chinese analysts that Washington was “employing multilateral institutions and closer relationships to U.S. allies and partners as a way to contain the PRC.”82
As veteran China-watcher Richard McGregor has written, Xi is now facing a quiet backlash of his own, with some subordinates worrying about where his policies are taking the country.83 Chinese officials may be looking covetously at the post–COVID-19 world. But they must also be concerned that China is energizing a collective hostility it cannot overcome.
History does not repeat itself, Mark Twain observed, but it does rhyme: Basic patterns reappear even though the past never looks exactly like the present. Looking to history is particularly fruitful in understanding where all of this leaves China and America today.
China is, in many ways, a power that has already risen: It has, or will soon possess, some truly formidable geopolitical capabilities. But China is also “risen” in the sense that its best days are probably behind it. The CCP is now running head-on into domestic and global problems that will make it devilishly difficult for Beijing to achieve its grandest strategic goals over time. Put simply, it is hard to see how a country with so many metastasizing cancers, and so many wary rivals, can forever outrun all the resistance its behavior has begun to provoke.
That may seem like good news, from an American perspective. But it’s not entirely reassuring. As China’s problems really take hold in the coming years, the future will come to look darker and darker for Beijing. The twin specters of economic decay and geopolitical encirclement will stalk CCP officials remorselessly. And that’s when we should get really worried. What happens when a country that wants the world concludes that it might not be able to get it peacefully? The answer, history suggests, is nothing good.