8
“There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” the economist Adam Smith observed: The downslope for a declining power can be long indeed. In hindsight, we know that the Soviet Union lost its best chance to win the Cold War in that struggle’s first decade. By the 1960s, the Soviet economy was starting to unravel; by the 1970s, the political and ideological death spiral had begun. Yet Soviet military power and geopolitical expansion reached their zenith in the late 1970s, concealing from all but the keenest eyes the fatal stagnation of the system. Not until the late 1980s and early 1990s did the empire finally collapse. Even after America got through a Cold War danger zone, it took decades of pressure and stamina to end that rivalry on U.S. terms. As President Kennedy remarked in 1962, Americans might say “we have been carrying this burden for 17 years, can we lay it down?” But “we can’t lay it down, and I don’t see how we are going to lay it down” anytime soon.1
There’s an important lesson for U.S. officials today. Suppose that America succeeds in curbing Chinese expansion and deterring violent aggression during this decade of maximum danger. Suppose that the strength and cohesion of the democratic world grow during the 2020s, as ever-fiercer headwinds batter Beijing. The urgency of the U.S.-China competition might then diminish; the balance of power would become less precarious; the odds that the CCP might prevail would fall dramatically. But don’t count on peace and harmony breaking out.
Even in the best-case scenario, the physical and virtual worlds are likely to be more splintered a decade from now—something closer to the “two worlds” reality of the Cold War than the “one world” dream of the post–Cold War era. The ideological lines will be starkly drawn; key theaters, such as East Asia, might be thoroughly militarized. The future of China itself could even be up for grabs.
In one scenario, a past-its-prime power could opt, after a decade of containment and frustration, to make painful diplomatic concessions and internal reforms: Perhaps Xi will end up being seen as Brezhnev to the Gorbachev who follows. But China could just as plausibly assume the role of a slumping spoiler, causing persistent mischief even as the threat of a hot war lessens and Beijing’s ability to win a cold war fades. The United States could do everything right, Biden’s Asia policy czar commented in 2021, and the China challenge would still prove “enormously difficult for this generation and the next.”2
Indeed, competitions between great powers often have many phases: The taut, suspenseful years of the early Cold War gave way to the comparative respite of détente during the 1970s, which was followed by the resurgent tensions and climactic moments of the 1980s. A stagnating China will still be more economically formidable than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany ever was; a China experiencing a demographic catastrophe will still have hundreds of millions of people more than the United States. All this means America probably will also have to transition from one phase of the competition to another—from a sprint through the 2020s to a strategy for the longer haul.
Getting through the danger zone may mark the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end. So even as the United States faces up to the challenges of a vital decade, it should start preparing for life on the other side.
THE PERILS OF SUCCESS
America doesn’t always have a plan. But when it does, the world gets remade. A U.S. danger-zone strategy will be no exception. It won’t preserve the world we know today. It will fundamentally alter the structure of world politics, and not entirely for the better. The good news is that these changes are fairly predictable. The bad news is that they essentially entail a new cold war.
If America adopts a successful danger-zone strategy, China won’t establish the geopolitically dominant techno-bloc that gives U.S. officials nightmares; America’s digital coalition will be bigger, stronger, and well positioned to prevail in the end. But the world will still become more divided economically and technologically, with America and its allies on one side and a declining but defiant China and its motley crew of autocratic partners—including Russia—on the other.
Decoupling between the two blocs will accelerate, as America and its allies cut China out of supply chains, split the Internet, and fortify the technological defenses of the free world. The U.S.-China trade and tech wars that began in 2017 and escalated in the 2020s will rage on indefinitely. These new “forever wars” may not involve military combat, but both countries will deploy every nonmilitary weapon in their coercive arsenals—tariffs, investment restrictions, technology embargos, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and cyber espionage—to expand their respective spheres and to weaken the rival’s economy. Other countries will find it progressively harder to hedge their bets by maintaining trade and tech links with both blocs. Instead, the United States and China will push partners to pick sides and re-route their supply chains.
As the technological world splinters, the consequences for ordinary people will be profound. When people travel from one bloc to another—assuming they can even get a visa—they’ll enter a different digital world. Their phones won’t work and their favorite websites, including their email server and precious social media apps, won’t be available. Sending files from one bloc to another will be a nightmare. This will be a far better world than one in which Chinese techno-imperialism runs rampant, but it will still be an uglier world than many Americans can imagine today.
The same goes for the situation in maritime East Asia. One of the most economically dynamic regions will become highly militarized as country after country follows Taiwan’s example and loads up on advanced missiles, mines, and drones to defend their coastlines from Chinese naval encroachments. East Asian sea lanes will be chock full of warships, including those from other regions, as the United States rallies a vast multinational coalition to protect freedom of navigation and deter Chinese aggression—and China’s navy rushes out to meet them. Close encounters between allied and Chinese forces will be common, and the threat of an armed clash will be ever present. China will face a formidable containment barrier to military conquest, but maintaining that barrier will entail severe risks for all involved.
Ideological competition will also get more vicious. The United States and China aren’t just promoting particular technologies or trade networks; they are espousing different ways of life. If America does things right during the 2020s, China and its cronies won’t be able to debilitate the world’s democracies and start a new century of autocratic ascendancy. But confrontations over governance issues—human rights violations and crimes against humanity in China, legacies of racism in the United States and other democracies—will play out in international bodies, high-profile summits, and public polemics.3 A coup in Latin America or a democratic breakthrough in sub-Saharan Africa will become a geopolitical crisis as well as a political one. Political warfare will intensify, as the CCP meddles aggressively in the domestic affairs of America and other democracies, and Washington returns fire by trying to demonstrate the weaknesses of digital authoritarianism within China and around the world.
The United States will have a relatively strong stance in this contest, as in other areas of rivalry. Yet the outcomes of an effective danger-zone strategy only look good compared to the ramifications of failure.
CHINA IN THE 2030s
What will happen to China as this new cold war unfolds? There’s a lot we don’t know about China’s future, but there are three extremely important things we do know. Collectively, they imply that China will be economically sluggish, internationally hated, and politically unstable by the 2030s.
First, China’s demographic crisis will be kicking into high gear. We discussed China’s long-term demographic problems in chapter 2, but even in the medium term, the crunch will be severe. From 2020 to 2035, China will lose roughly 70 million working-age adults and gain 130 million senior citizens.4 That’s a France-sized population of young workers, consumers, and taxpayers gone—and a Japan-sized population of elderly pensioners gained—in just fifteen years. And then things will get really bad. From 2035 to 2050, China will lose an additional 105 million workers and gain another 64 million seniors.5 As early as 2030, therefore, China will be careening down a demographic mountain and headed toward a cliff.
The speed and scale of China’s population collapse could very well cripple its economy. On average, a country loses 1 percentage point of GDP growth for every percentage point decline in its labor force growth rate—and China’s workforce won’t just stop growing, it will contract nearly 7 percent from 2020 to 2035 and another 11 percent from 2035 to 2050.6 Meanwhile, spending on pensions and health care will need to double as a share of GDP from 2020 to 2035 (and triple by 2050) to keep tens of millions of seniors from falling into abject poverty.7 The financial and physical burdens of providing elder care on an industrial scale will stunt the savings, professional development, and consumption of China’s dwindling population of able-bodied adults.
This dire situation—a population that is rapidly aging and shrinking—effectively rules out both investment-driven growth (China’s current model) and consumption-driven growth (America’s current model that China aspires to adopt). That leaves export-driven growth—a strategy that worked wonders for China during the globalizing 1990s but is poorly suited for a balkanized world of severe trade barriers and militarized sea lanes.
Xi hopes to short-circuit this problem by showering money on emerging markets now to spur future demand for Chinese exports. But those hopes will be dashed by a second inconvenient fact: Most of China’s overseas loans will mature around 2030, and many won’t be paid back.
In the 2010s, the Chinese government doled out roughly $1 trillion in loans and trade credits to more than 150 countries, including 80 percent of the world’s developing countries.8 Most of those loans were scheduled to be repaid within fifteen years.9 But many won’t be, because they were used to fund financially dubious projects in unstable countries. More than half of China’s Belt and Road partners have credit ratings below investment grade.10 The Chinese government itself has estimated that it will lose 80 percent of the value of its investments in South Asia, 50 percent in Southeast Asia, and 30 percent in Central Asia.11
When the bulk of these overseas loans comes due around 2030, Beijing either will have to write off hundreds of billions of dollars in losses—a move sure to infuriate Chinese taxpayers, who will be suffering a severe economic slowdown—or seize assets in partner countries, many of which can barely afford to feed their people. The CCP has set itself up to be despised at home and abroad.
For a glimpse of what this vitriol might look like, consider the global hysteria that erupted when China seemingly, but not really, seized a Sri Lankan port in 2017 after the country defaulted on its loans.12 Charges of “debt-trap diplomacy” reverberated from New Delhi to Tokyo to Washington, droves of countries dropped out of BRI or demanded to renegotiate their contracts, and anti-China political parties swept into power in several partner nations.13 Meanwhile, Chinese citizens wondered aloud why their government was investing, and losing, billions overseas when more than half of China’s population still lived on less than $10 per day.
The backlash coming for China in the early 2030s will be orders of magnitude worse than the Sri Lankan debacle, because it will involve many more countries and a lot more money. Researchers have described China’s recent lending spree as a “twin” of the boom that catalyzed the so-called Third-World Debt Crisis of the 1980s, when dozens of poor countries defaulted on hundreds of billions of dollars of loans and suffered a “lost decade” of zero economic growth.14 The lenders in that case (big banks in a dozen or so rich countries) eventually had to forgive one-third of the debts they were owed. Most of the defaulting countries were forced into IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment” (aka austerity) programs, which triggered riots across the developing world.
Today, China has loaded up those same countries with similar levels of debt as a share of their economies. The only difference is that the Chinese government is far and away the main lender, so it will have to clean up the coming mess and deal with the diplomatic fallout alone. Debt collection is a nasty business. Given the extent of its reckless lending, China could find itself hemorrhaging friends and soft power.
The third thing we know about China is that it faces a looming succession crisis.15 Xi Jinping is an obese smoker with a stressful job and will turn 80 years old in 2033. While he might rule for years hence, actuarial tables suggest otherwise. At the very least, CCP officials will be thinking about a post-Xi era and start jockeying for position in the early 2030s, if not before. Nobody knows how the power struggle will play out, not even Xi, because he demolished the CCP’s few norms of succession and power-sharing when he appointed himself president of everything for life in 2018.
The makeup of China’s post-danger-zone government is therefore a known unknown. It will definitely be in flux. All of the current members of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo standing committee, will be past retirement age by 2027. No young leader has the cachet to fill Xi’s enormous shoes, and time is fading fast for anyone to prove otherwise.
Even if Xi announces his retirement and designates a successor—moves he understandably has hesitated to make considering that 41 percent of the autocrats that abdicated during the past century ended up exiled, imprisoned, or dead within a year of leaving office—his protégé might not make it to the throne.16 Members of Xi’s coalition could splinter into factions; constituencies that were punished or marginalized under Xi could try to reclaim power. Xi’s authority is formidable, but never forget that he had to purge more than a million senior CCP members to get it. As a result, there is no shortage of ambitious and aggrieved capos scheming to replace him.17
China’s history provides little comfort to those hoping for a seamless transfer of power. The PRC has had only one completely formalized and orderly leadership succession in its history: when Xi himself took office in 2012.18 The pre-PRC period isn’t any more reassuring: Half of China’s 282 emperors across 49 dynasties were murdered, overthrown, forced to abdicate, or compelled to commit suicide.19 Less than half of them chose a successor, the majority only in the last years of their reign, and these successors were typically murdered by political rivals.20 In short, violent chaos is common, and anything is possible.
SPOILER ALERT
Although we don’t know who will lead China after Xi or how they will come to power, we do have a sense of the structural forces that person or persons will face once in office: a sluggish economy, strategic encirclement, and, hopefully, a successful U.S. danger-zone strategy. These factors will shape the range of options available to Beijing in the 2030s and after, even if they won’t necessarily determine which course China takes.
Perhaps the best-case possibility is that Xi is replaced by a Chinese Gorbachev—a reformer who eventually proves willing to liberalize at home and retrench abroad. The Soviets initially raged against the dying of the light when they realized they were falling behind the West in the early 1980s. But after mid-decade, the geopolitical pressure and domestic stagnation became unbearable, and the Soviet leadership reluctantly called off the Cold War. Gorbachev’s government slashed aid and loans to allies, withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan, opened up economic sectors to Western corporations, cut defense spending, demobilized half a million troops, and accepted onerous arms-control agreements. Even hardliners signed off on this full-spectrum retreat. As the USSR’s highest-ranking military officer, Dmitry Yazov, later explained: “We simply lacked the power to oppose the USA, England, Germany, France, Italy—all the flourishing states that were united in the NATO bloc. We had to seek a dénouement. . . . We had to continually negotiate and reduce, reduce, reduce.”21
With its superpower dreams in tatters, China, too, might seek détente by easing up in the Taiwan Strait, abiding by international law in the South China Sea, forswearing political meddling in democratic governments, and playing by the rules of an open global economy. The CCP might undertake some political and economic reforms at home, undoing the worst repression of the Xi years in an effort to rejuvenate the system and recharge the CCP’s legitimacy. America and China would still be competitors, of a sort; Xi’s portrait might still hang next to Mao’s in Tiananmen Square. But the CCP would have moved on from his hyper-revisionist agenda.
Yet an alternative, and more likely, outcome is that Xi is replaced by a Chinese Putin, a vengeful streetfighter who oversees China’s transition from aspiring superpower to prickly spoiler. The threat of China as a peer-competitor will be fading rapidly. But in its place will emerge a giant rogue state aiming to defend itself by subverting an international order it can no longer hope to dominate.
Instead of forging its own empire, China will wage guerrilla warfare on the U.S.-led order. Where China once threatened outright military conquest, it will engage in rampant “gray zone” aggression, sending paramilitaries and coast guard and fishing vessels to park themselves on small bits of contested territory, thereby creating facts on the ground without firing a shot. Where China once hoped to dominate technological innovation, it will focus on dominating technological adoption, stealing or importing advanced technology from abroad and deploying it rapidly on a massive scale. Instead of exporting its repressive governance model around the world, China will practice political warfare by proxy, hiring cyber mercenaries on the sly to disrupt U.S. and allied networks and sow chaos in liberal societies. And Beijing will continue to crack down hard on dissent at home. The Uighurs and Tibetans will be detained and sterilized out of existence, and the CCP panopticon will be upgraded and expanded continually. Rather than giving up as its prospects for hegemony dwindle, a post-Xi China would buckle down for a long battle with a superior coalition.
These two scenarios may be the most likely, but they are not the only possibilities. Maybe China will collapse into civil war. Maybe some of its technological moonshots, meant to rescue the country from decline, will pay off. Maybe something totally unexpected will happen. If the short-term threat from China is undeniable, the country’s long-term status remains an open question.
GOING LONG
One thing seems clear: Even after America exits the period of greatest risk, it probably won’t enter a time of tranquility. More likely than not, the United States will still be waging a contest with plenty of ups and downs, no shortage of shocks and surprises. Washington will need to shift gears in the 2030s from a danger-zone strategy to an approach that can last as long as the competition does. In making that transition, ten principles may be helpful.
First, decide what victory looks like. It’s easy to envision what defeat looks like a decade from now: A Chinese-dominated Taiwan that serves as a springboard for regional expansion, entire regions that are technologically handcuffed to Beijing, a world where fragile democracies are overawed by assertive autocracy. The goal of a danger-zone strategy is to prevent the worst from happening—to keep this dystopian future from quickly becoming our reality. But that’s really an interim objective, a way station en route to a destination America has not identified.
Does the United States seek some form of competitive coexistence with a reformed China—a relationship in which elements of rivalry remain, but rules of the road are established and America’s vital interests are protected? Can it accept a scenario in which a smaller and weaker Chinese sphere of influence sits, indefinitely, side-by-side with a larger, more vibrant American one—the type of arrangement that prevailed in Cold War Europe until the Soviet bloc collapsed? Or is the CCP an incorrigible regime with hostility to the American-led world woven into its DNA, in which case competition must continue until that regime evolves from within or its power collapses to the point it can no longer threaten the outside world?22
These are big, sensitive issues. In the harried 2020s, it will be tempting to simply focus on checking Chinese power in the here and now. And, of course, the question of how competition with Beijing ends is not fully America’s to answer: The choices that China’s people and leaders make will be the most critical factor. Yet it would still be a mistake to take a wait-and-see approach.
The United States will need to decide whether a danger-zone strategy is a bridge to a period in which it explores reconciliation or a live-and-let-live approach with a chastened rival—or a prelude to a long, grim campaign against an unredeemable regime. In devising particular policies, American officials must know whether the goal is to integrate a reformed China back into a global order that can be made whole again or simply to maintain barriers to its expansion until the regime changes or its power dramatically declines. And how the United States responds to a changing China, in the 2030s and after, will depend on where America ultimately wants the relationship to go. In the near term, there are always reasons for busy officials to put off abstract questions about how a protracted rivalry might end. In the long term, the United States won’t thrive in competition with China unless it knows what it is trying to achieve.
Second, learn to pace yourself. In any competition, there are times when speed is more important than endurance—when a country has no choice but to run as hard as it can. There was no such thing as “too much,” Acheson said during the awful winter of 1950–51, because “the danger couldn’t be greater than it is.”23 Yet no country can sprint forever.
Acheson’s experience proves the point. Waging the Korean War and undertaking a massive military buildup were necessary responses to a surge of Communist aggression, but they were so costly, in lives and dollars, that they led the Eisenhower administration to seek cheaper, less onerous forms of containment. During the 1960s, the United States so overtaxed itself in Vietnam that it was psychologically, strategically, and economically hobbled for years thereafter. Doing too much, for too long, will eventually make it impossible to do enough.
Looking beyond the 2020s, Washington must find a sustainable strategy. In protracted contests, not competing everywhere is the price of being effective anywhere. America must determine where it will do whatever it takes to stay ahead of Beijing (in the East Asian military balance and the tech rivalry, for instance) and where the energy is not worth the reward (in Central Asia and parts of Africa, for example). American officials should also think about when to surge and when to slow down—what moments might reward a furious dash to close looming vulnerabilities or leave a lagging rival permanently in the dust, and what moments might require taking a strategic breather, even if that means giving the enemy one. Once Taiwan has been turned into a strategic porcupine, the spread of digital authoritarianism has been halted, and America and its democratic partners are clearly leading the contest to produce the world’s key technology and standards, for example, Washington might find a modest respite—even within a competition that will require enduring resolve.
There’s no magic formula for this: Acheson himself learned, when North Korea attacked South Korea, that unexpected challenges can demand unwanted commitments, and that the importance of some positions becomes clear only when they are attacked. But if Washington doesn’t take the issue of pacing seriously, America could thrive in a short race and still stumble in a longer one.
Third, shape the rivalry by shaping the system. The most important thing the United States did during the Cold War was not the destruction it visited upon its enemy but the creation it achieved with its friends. By building a vibrant democratic community from the wreckage of a shattered world, America helped the non-Communist countries resist Soviet coercion even as Moscow’s power grew. By creating an example of relative freedom and prosperity, it eventually forced Soviet leaders and citizens to ask what had gone wrong in their own empire, which then encouraged them to undertake the reforms that brought it crashing down. The United States didn’t win the Cold War by treating that contest as a purely bilateral duel. America blocked Soviet aggression and bankrupted Soviet ideology by shaping a better world for the countries that took its side.24
The world is a lot less shattered today than in 1945, but the point holds. For now, throwing China back will require lots of disruption—breaking supply chains, splitting the Internet, turning maritime East Asia into an armed camp. The United States may have to temporarily downgrade institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, that govern the liberal international order, because those institutions were not designed to deal with an authoritarian predator inside the gates. Looking farther into the future, though, America’s ability to constrain China—and drive home the CCP’s folly—will hinge on the strength, resilience, and attractiveness of the world it builds around Beijing.
This may mean creating new international organizations to replace bodies that China has corrupted. It will require stitching together trade arrangements that promote greater integration and dynamism among countries committed to a world made safe from Chinese aggression. It could involve building out organizations such as the Quad into forums for broader cooperation across an array of issues, and gradually linking and formalizing the democratic partnerships that are already springing up in response to China’s challenge.25 A global coalition of democracies isn’t feasible in the near term, but it could serve as a useful longer-term objective. In general, this approach means reviving the Cold War–era vision of a healthy international order that can benefit all like-minded nations while leaving those that threaten that vision on the outside. In the coming decades, the strongest check on Chinese power will be the bonds between the countries Beijing threatens. Which means that Washington should view the ad hoc groups it must rally today as the beginning of a process of multilateral construction extending for many years to come.
This isn’t to say that Washington should go easy on China; a fourth principle is that America must fight asymmetrically and impose costs relentlessly. The longer the rivalry goes, the more important it is to play to one’s strengths and exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. Similarly, the key to bankrupting a rival is to drive up the price it must pay to defend its interests. The path to success in protracted struggle, longtime Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall observed, is to steer that struggle into areas of relative advantage while making the enemy spend exorbitantly to stay in the game.26
The United States should thus cultivate assets that bring unparalleled advantages, such as the dollar’s global dominance—which is critical to any long tech war—and the network of alliances that allows Washington to orchestrate global pushback against Beijing. It should promote targeted responses to global Chinese initiatives, such as joining forces with other democracies to promote a select number of high-quality infrastructure initiatives, rather than fighting Beijing for the allegiance of every kleptocratic regime. It should identify areas in which small U.S. investments—such as providing technical expertise to countries assessing Chinese investment and financing—can frustrate larger, expensive CCP endeavors.27 And it should pursue strategies that allow it to impose asymmetric costs—such as turning the western Pacific into a “no-man’s sea” or using tech cutoffs to break firms and industries that Beijing has built at a steep price.28
The United States can also impose costs by taking advantage of the mistakes that high-handed, prickly autocrats are prone to make. Beijing has a habit of blowing up at the slightest criticism, thereby reminding other countries how unpleasant Chinese hegemony will be. That tendency is rooted in Xi’s regime, which seems to have trouble distinguishing between behavior that works for a dictator at home and behavior that wins allies abroad. And it opens up a world of possibilities for the United States to engage in subtle, strategic needling—such as working, as it did with the Europeans and other countries in 2021, to slap multilateral sanctions on repressive Chinese officials—and then to profit from the diplomatic self-harm that follows.
Indeed, any strategy should make the CCP pay for its greatest vulnerability: the brutal, corrupt, and increasingly totalitarian nature of its rule. The United States doesn’t need to pursue regime change to make Beijing work harder and spend more to defend its domestic authority. Such a policy could involve spoofing the government’s digital control mechanisms, speaking out on behalf of those abused by the CCP regime, coordinating multilateral sanctions against repressive officials, and finding ways of introducing unbiased news into the Chinese information ecosystem, as the West did to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Washington might also consistently highlight the most awful characteristics of the regime in global forums, to create trade-offs between the domestic control the CCP requires and the international prestige it craves. If this triggers Chinese outbursts that hurt Beijing’s own cause, so much the better. China’s hypersensitivity to domestic challenges and international condemnation is itself a weakness that America can exploit.
Fifth, continually invest in your key sources of strength. During the 2020s, Washington will be grabbing whatever tools it can find to break China’s momentum. Capabilities that take years to develop won’t do much good; advice along the lines of “First, get your house in order” is really just a counsel of paralysis. That advice does, however, become more relevant as a struggle drags on.
At the Cold War’s end, America was cashing in on investments it had made over decades: the alliances it had built, the cutting-edge military capabilities it had developed, even the institutions it had created, such as the U.S. Information Agency, with the superpower rivalry in mind. The advanced weapons featured in the Reagan buildup were often the fruits of government-funded research and development in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States could mobilize its allies for a climactic offensive because it had long poured its energies into those relationships. America had competitive capital to spend at a crucial moment because it had assiduously amassed that capital over many years.
The United States will only stay ahead of China if it repeats this feat: rebuilding government capabilities in areas, such as information warfare and economic statecraft, that will be central in a new age of rivalry; recapitalizing the innovation ecosystem that underpins U.S. economic and military excellence; and continually tending to its alliances so that they are strong enough to handle the demands placed upon them. This last point is crucial: America’s China strategy requires lots of help from friends that will have to take risks and absorb costs of their own in contending with Beijing. That places a premium on diligently doing the day-to-day labor of alliance management, of showing that the United States remains committed to those allies’ security, and of pursuing—when it comes to tech, trade, or any other issue—an approach that promotes America’s own interests by also promoting the interests of its friends. The United States can go it alone, as President Trump seemed to envision, or it can beat China. It cannot do both things at once.
What about addressing America’s domestic dysfunction? This brings us to a sixth principle: Use a new era of global tension to ignite a new era of self-improvement.
America’s internal problems are real, and the United States won’t profit from China’s decline if the domestic foundations of its own power also collapse. A list of repairs would include revamping immigration policy to ensure a growing population with plenty of high-skilled workers, reinvesting in education and basic research, revitalizing the country’s physical and digital infrastructure, combating corruption, and mitigating polarization that has effects ranging from political gridlock to political violence.29 The great strength of America’s democracy is resilience, and the country has come through worse periods before—during the 1930s, when the future of capitalism and democracy were in doubt, or even the late 1960s, when domestic upheaval and violence were rampant. Yet domestic rejuvenation will be essential to prosecuting Sino-American rivalry.
The latter, fortunately, can help with the former. The China threat won’t magically create national unity, and the precedent of McCarthyism reminds us that fear can turbocharge the self-destructive impulses of even the strongest democracies. But the United States has previously used foreign challenges as an impetus to internal renewal, whether by creating a world-class university system during World War II and the Cold War or attacking state-sponsored segregation as a means of winning the ideological fight with Moscow.30 The China threat is, in a limited way, starting to revive this tradition: It is already spurring greater investment in semiconductors, scientific research and development, and other areas the United States ought to be emphasizing even if the CCP didn’t exist.31
Reforms that seem impossible in times of peace can become possible amid the harsh demands of rivalry. The United States can once again win a twilight struggle if it makes the most of the domestic opportunities that foreign crises create.
Seventh, make negotiation a part of competition. The principles we’ve offered so far are meant to ensure that America can keep its edge over a declining but formidable power. Washington will need to work hard and play tough to make that happen. It will also need to talk to the other side.
To be sure, U.S. officials should have a healthy skepticism about the odds of diplomatic breakthroughs in the next few years. Moreover, negotiations with a secretive adversary are always fraught: There is an extensive record of authoritarian regimes, including China’s, signing and then cheating outrageously on solemn international accords.32 Countries that leap too enthusiastically into negotiations usually end up paying a price. Yet whatever strategic objective America chooses, careful negotiations can still serve important ends.
On several issues, from limiting climate change to regulating the military uses of emerging technologies, some cooperation may prove fruitful because the absence thereof could prove disastrous. If the United States shows, over the next decade, that China cannot get its way in the Taiwan Strait or other hot spots—and that nonstop coercion simply blows back on the CCP—there could emerge opportunities to selectively tamp down tensions. But perhaps the best reason to pursue negotiation as part of competition is that the former can be a means of winning the latter.
Negotiations can be a way of probing a rival’s intentions and finding out whether it is still committed to objectives inimical to our own. Judicious diplomacy can dial down the intensity of the contest at moments when Washington might otherwise struggle to keep up: During the 1970s, for instance, U.S.-Soviet talks capped the nuclear arms race while America was winded after Vietnam.33 Not least, periodically exploring whether cooperation is possible can help convince America’s citizens and allies that competition remains necessary by showing that it is not Washington that is preventing peace. Truly transformative diplomacy—the type that ends a rivalry—typically follows, rather than precedes, a strategy of sustained, cutthroat competition. But prudent negotiations can make a long rivalry a bit safer and less burdensome for America, and thereby make it more likely that the country will stick with that rivalry long enough to win it.
An eighth point involves a counterintuitive approach to the unholy entente between Russia and China: Pushing your rivals together may be a prelude to pulling them apart. So long as Russia and China are on their current trajectories, with their current leadership, there probably isn’t much the United States can do to induce a breakup. Trying to pull a “reverse Kissinger”—using clever diplomacy to peel Putin away from Xi, in imitation of the U.S. opening to China during the 1970s—wouldn’t work. Sino-Russian relations aren’t nearly combustible enough to produce the sort of blowup that happened in the late 1960s, and any bid to buy Moscow’s cooperation through geopolitical concessions would just destabilize Europe at a crucial time. A related approach, one of dramatically reducing the U.S. commitment to NATO to focus exclusively on Asia, would blow a gaping hole in America’s global posture and alienate many of the European democracies Washington needs on its side against Beijing.
There are times, as during World War II, when the United States doesn’t have a good alternative to containing two dangerous rivals simultaneously. That’s the situation in which Washington finds itself today.
In the near-term, unfortunately, a policy of dual containment may encourage closer Sino-Russian cooperation. Yet here a different legacy of the Cold War becomes relevant. During the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower calculated that a policy of maximum pressure was more likely to rupture the Sino-Soviet relationship than one of eager engagement, because pressure would force the lesser ally—Beijing—into a reliance on the stronger—Moscow—that would eventually make both parties queasy. Eisenhower wagered, correctly, that Washington would only find its chance to exploit tensions between two ambivalent allies after it had demonstrated that their relationship would produce more pain than profit.34
Today as before, it is hard to imagine that two continent-sized, globally ambitious, geopolitical jackals can remain close friends forever. And today as before, the best way of highlighting Sino-Russian differences may be encouraging a closer embrace.
If the United States and its allies wish to promote an eventual strategic rethink in Moscow, they must first prove that Russia’s policy of geopolitical revisionism and alignment with Beijing will not pay—and that the alternative to tolerable relations with the West is ever-increasing dependence on a China whose abrasiveness and ambition know few bounds. In the same vein, distancing Beijing from Moscow may require showing, repeatedly, that Russian adventures will make life harder for China by stimulating greater fears of autocratic aggression and rallying democracies everywhere to strengthen the order Xi aims to overturn.
This is, admittedly, a strategy for the long run. Protracted rivalry sometimes requires making bets that may not pay off for many years.
This relates to a ninth point: Be ready to extend the olive branch. America won’t succeed over a short or a long competition without exerting a lot of pressure. The United States must repeatedly frustrate Beijing’s attempts at expansion; it must make China pay dearly for attempts to upend the status quo. But the goal of competition is not to remain in a state of tension forever; it is to achieve a better status quo. Doing so, in the context of rivalry with a nuclear-armed great power, may eventually require holding a hard line with a soft touch.
One reason the Cold War ended quietly and triumphantly is that America knew when to take yes for an answer: Once the Soviet Union started retrenching and reforming in the late 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations used a mix of carrots and sticks—continued geopolitical pressure, high-level summitry, lavish public praise, and promises of better diplomatic and economic ties—to keep them coming. It also pays to consider, in advance, the possibilities for breaking through entrenched hostility: Richard Nixon was primed to conduct the opening to China in the early 1970s because he had been thinking about such an opportunity for years.35
At some point, a China that has been successfully contained and strained may once again start changing in ways that make it less threatening to the United States. That won’t be the time to let America’s guard down. It will, however, be the moment to encourage constructive moves.
The United States will have to convince a future China—whether it is run by Xi’s disciples, a reformer within the CCP, or an altogether different regime—that moderation will help rather than harm its national security. It will have to demonstrate that as China becomes less aggressive and repressive, it will enjoy a better relationship with the world. If Washington makes the right moves in this decade and after, it can win the competition. But that will require sustaining enough coercion to convince Beijing that fundamental changes are necessary, as well as offering—when the time is right—enough conciliation to convince it that those changes are desirable.
Finally, be patient. Getting through the danger zone requires an ethos of urgency and action: “Signs and signals call for speed,” said Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, another moment when the world hung in the balance—“full speed ahead.”36 The period after that, however, will reward the incremental accumulation of advantage in a contest that may not end anytime soon.
The long haul can be very long indeed. Kennan preached patience in the late 1940s because he thought the Cold War might last ten to fifteen years.37 It took more than forty instead. During that period, the level of danger waxed and waned, but the necessity of bearing uncomfortable burdens and navigating the murky area between war and peace was a constant. Containment delivered a remarkable payoff, but that victory took decades to achieve.
America’s task, in this decade, is to prevent a peaking China from imposing its will on the world. Yet strategic urgency must be followed by strategic patience: Washington’s reward for getting through the danger zone could be a ticket to a longer struggle in which America’s advantages prove decisive only over a generation or more. That may seem like a meager prize for a country that likes quick, decisive solutions. But it is surely worth winning, in view of the perils that America and the world confront today.
Acknowledgments
This book is a product of the extraordinary institutions whose support allowed us to write it; namely, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Tufts University, and the American Enterprise Institute, where we first hatched the idea for the project in one of the Foreign and Defense Policy team’s regular seminars. It is also a product of exchanges with numerous individuals who helped shape our views, even if they might violently disagree with those views. An incomplete list would include James Baker, Sasha Baker, Jude Blanchette, Jason Blessing, Dan Blumenthal, Tarun Chhabra, Zack Cooper, Mackenzie Eaglen, Nicholas Eberstadt, Charles Edel, Francis Gavin, Michael Green, Adri Guha, Toby Harshaw, Jonathan Hillman, Robert Kagan, Colin Kahl, Klon Kitchen, Rebecca Lissner, Oriana Skylar Mastro, Andrew May, Evan Montgomery, Danielle Pletka, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Ely Ratner, Mary Sarotte, Kori Schake, Andrew Shearer, Derek Scissors, David Shipley, James Stavridis, James Steinberg, Jake Sullivan, and Thomas Wright. Dan Kurtz-Phelan at Foreign Affairs, Cameron Abadi at Foreign Policy, and Prashant Rao at The Atlantic published articles in which we began developing some of the ideas featured in this book. At Norton, John Glusman and Helen Thomaides were a delight to work with, as was our agent, Rafe Sagalyn. John Bolton (not that John Bolton), Zach Wheeler, and Emily Carr provided valuable research assistance. Our greatest thanks go, of course, to our families, who continued—during this as during previous projects—to show us far more strategic patience than we deserve.