THE DAWN OF MODERN COMPETITION
In late 2017 the United States made a foreign policy proclamation that many analysts on both sides of the domestic political divide considered overdue. For years national security efforts had focused on counterterrorism operations in the Middle East. The White House’s 2017 National Security Strategy and the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy identified a different leading challenge: “revisionist” competitors—Russia and China, specifically—that posed threats to US interests around the world.
The White House and Defense Department were acknowledging that the post-Cold War period of uncontested dominance had ended and major-power rivalry was again a defining feature of international politics. Their proclamations raised more questions than they answered, however. What does American strategy seek to achieve as the country competes with Russia and China? How will the United States keep itself secure with its primacy on the wane? The world still awaits Washington’s responses.
Leaders in Moscow and Beijing, however, are somewhat clearer in their objectives. In pursuing them, they have made America’s alliances strategic targets. Since the early 2000s, under Vladimir Putin, Russia has viewed the United States as a menacing superpower. In the 2008–2012 period, Russia’s foreign policy became expressly revanchist, with an aim of rending NATO and the European Union. By 2014 Russia had begun to use systematic disinformation campaigns with the goal of destabilizing Western governments and alliances. In the United States and Europe, Russia has covertly supported political candidates and causes opposed to multilateralism and alliances. In its region it has been more bellicose, though it denies using force or else invents pretexts to justify doing so. Russia is a declining power, but it still poses a military threat to NATO’s eastern flank and is a disruptive actor in the West.
In contrast to Russia, China is in a position of strength. It has fashioned a strategy predicated on its economic and military ascent. After decades biding its time, hiding its capabilities, and seeking integration with the West and its neighbors, it has become more assertive. Now China seeks to undermine America’s Asian alliances, which stand in the way of its restoration as the leading power in Asia and its emergence as a global superpower.
Russian and Chinese national security interests are distinct, and their divergent power trajectories mean that their leaders will advance these interests in different ways. But both countries are taking aim at US alliances. China and Russia have each developed conventional military strategies that target US partners and sap the credibility of Washington’s security guarantees. But as states facing a militarily stronger opponent—the United States—Russia and China also pursue their geopolitical aims using means designed to prevent American retaliation. Through maritime law enforcement, economic penalties, hacking, and disinformation campaigns, Russia and China effectively challenge American power without firing a shot. And Moscow in particular uses force in limited, obscure, and deniable ways to avoid triggering US defense commitments. These “subconventional” strategies also aim to exploit and widen existing gaps in American alliances.
Fundamentally, both Moscow and Beijing hope to make their immediate neighborhoods friendlier to their regimes and eventually achieve dominant spheres of influence, although only China really has that power. To reach this goal, they will have to expunge the considerable US influence already in these regions, which requires them to unravel American alliances.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union led many Western analysts to embrace an almost-teleological assumption about Russia’s future: with communists out of power, the people of Russia would disavow empire and move toward a freer economic and political system.1 But the post-Soviet trajectory was not so evident to Russians themselves. No sooner had the flag of the Russian Federation been raised than competing camps began to vie over the new country’s future.
Three schools of foreign policy thought were most prominent. There was the pro-Western view, espoused by liberals who also supported market reforms and democratization. Others argued for a power-balancing approach. They tended to favor some reforms but less alignment with the West. Finally, hardline nationalist-imperialists sought to organize domestic and foreign policy around the restoration of Russia’s greatness and traditional sphere of influence. The liberal-reformists, aligned with President Yeltsin, were initially ascendant. But their leading position was short lived. By 1993 the failure of US-backed economic shock therapy had convinced many policy elites that rapid liberalization was perilous and that Washington was to blame for the difficulties of Russia’s transition.2
For the next decade, Russian foreign policy embraced the balancing approach, as “Slavophiles” gained the upper hand on “Westernizers.” Restoration of Russia to the great power ranks became the central object of foreign policy, and progress toward that goal would be measured by comparing Russia’s global standing to Washington’s.3
As the NATO-enlargement debate demonstrated, Moscow had no compelling reason to fear a US invasion in the 1990s, but antiliberalism and remnants of Cold War competition stoked anxiety nonetheless. As early as 1991, Russian officials had begun to contemplate how the United States might strike the Russian homeland through states formerly in the Eastern Bloc. With these concerns in mind, Russian officials decided that the “near abroad” of former Soviet republics would have to serve as a geographic buffer to guarantee its sovereignty.4 To ensure that NATO was held at bay, Russia would attempt to secure a sphere of influence, dominating its backyard as in Soviet times and ensuring deference from its neighbors.5
The term “near abroad” was never cleanly defined, but analysts understand it to include the former USSR minus the Baltic states and, of course, Russia itself. Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are considered the highest-priority states from a power-balancing perspective. They are followed by Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in a second tier. Under this scheme, Russia prizes the unity of Central Asia and noninterference by other major powers therein. A third tier of priority includes all former Warsaw Pact countries, including the Baltic states.6
For the first decade of the post-Cold War era, Russian leaders saw no conflict between their desire for a strategic buffer and NATO’s for expansion, to which Russia acquiesced. But while Russia accepted NATO’s growth and even sought closer ties to the alliance, it was sidelined from European integration, isolating it politically and economically as it declined. The post-Soviet Russian economy contracted by 43 percent in GDP terms and did not reach 1990 levels again until 2007, when Russia finally paid off its debts.7 By that point Moscow had ushered the country through a painful transition, but great power status was still receding, and its strategic buffer zone appeared elusive.
Between 2008 and 2012, Russian foreign policy lurched toward nationalism and imperialism. Foreign and domestic policy became inextricable from Putinism, a conservative doctrine emphasizing the need for a strong state to protect Russia from enemies at home and abroad.8 Russian leaders abandoned their 1990s quest for integration into the prevailing international political system and came to view the United States as uninterested in, or disrespectful of, Russian interests.
Several events motivated this shift. One was the Kosovo War, which helped to solidify in Russia the image of the United States as a rogue superpower.9 Then there was the Baltic states’ 2004 accession to NATO. The Russians also bristled at the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003 without UN imprimatur. Finally, after disputed 2003 elections in Georgia and 2005 elections in Ukraine provoked pro-democracy uprisings—the Rose and Orange Revolutions, respectively—Russian leaders became convinced that the United States was fomenting upheaval on their periphery. It seemed that Washington and its European allies were encroaching upon Moscow’s security through the use of political warfare, drawing few casualties and maintaining plausible deniability. At its annual summit in Bucharest in 2008, NATO pledged that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members—a precarious commitment given these states’ location in the heart of Moscow’s near abroad.10 In 2008 Russia invaded Georgia—its first use of force since its 1989 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
By this point Putin and other Russian leaders firmly believed that the United States had a sinister agenda to thwart Russia’s restoration. In 2010 this view became official Russian military doctrine, as further NATO enlargement was labeled a direct national security threat. In 2015 Russia’s National Security Strategy reiterated that view.11
It would be wrong to claim that deterioration was the only option for US-Russia relations after 2008. At times, the Obama administration’s “reset” seemed like it might stabilize the bilateral slide. Most notably, in 2010 the two countries signed the New START arms control agreement. They also cooperated in attempting to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions and on North Korean nuclear sanctions, and they worked together to accelerate Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).12 President Obama canceled the deployment to Eastern Europe of a planned missile defense system, which detractors viewed as a major concession to Moscow.
But even as the reset was proceeding in fits and starts, Russia’s economy was succumbing to the global financial crisis. The hard-won gains of the post-Cold War period that had brought Russia out of debt evaporated. After much whiplash, the leadership in Moscow concluded that the Western liberal model was utterly bankrupt.13 With its economy on the line, Russia relied more heavily on its oil exports and on kleptocracy. In the words of one scholar, it became “trans-imperial”—part of the globalized world for the sake of its survival, while increasingly corrupt and authoritarian at home.14
Russia also claimed to be increasingly victimized by American political influence. When the Arab Spring seized the Middle East in 2010–2012, officials in Moscow assumed Washington was the puppet master. When Ukraine experienced more upheaval in the 2014 Maidan protests, Russia again saw Americans at work. In Putin’s telling, all sparks of democracy were the product of Western subterfuge. The United Sates was engaged in ideological arson, which might well be a prelude to military intervention.15
By 2012 nationalist-imperialism had recaptured Russian foreign policy. NATO and the EU were targets of pointed ire, and halting the alliance’s further advance had become a central foreign policy goal. Russia also positioned itself as a counterweight to the West by promoting global institutions in which it was a significant or dominant figure. The Kremlin registered few objections to the UN, WTO, and other organizations in which it saw itself as fairly represented. But it backed the Collective Security Treaty Organization as a NATO alternative and the Eurasian Economic Union as a substitute EU. Through these regional institutions, Moscow sought to shore up its near abroad and insulate the region from what it saw as US-led efforts at democracy promotion. Much of Russia’s government is organized toward those same ends: ensuring that the country’s interactions with the outside world do not expose it to liberalizing forces.16
Revanchist Russia has done much more than play defense. In 2014 it began cyber and information campaigns against pro-democracy protests in Ukraine, nonmilitary offensives designed to pave the way for its annexation of Crimea and to bolster pro-Russian forces over demonstrators on the Maidan. Its intervention in the 2016 US presidential elections was an effort to derail the heavily favored candidate, who was likely to support NATO enlargement, further European integration, and popular democratic movements. Moscow’s interference in that year’s Brexit vote was, similarly, a wrench hurled at European unity.
Putin continues to strive for a sphere of influence through direct actions against Western and liberal states and institutions. But Russia’s objective is not to just to disrupt others; its interference is a means toward the ends of survival and restored great power status, however elusive. Putin calls for a more multipolar world—a “new world order” in which Russia is one of several major players.17
Russia’s pursuit of great power objectives is starkly at odds with its stagnation and decline. The Soviet Union boasted demographic stability, despite its devastating war losses. But post-Soviet Russia imploded demographically and economically. Russia’s population fell by 5 million in the first two decades after communism. The economy is expected to grow no more than 2 percent annually for the foreseeable future and will remain highly dependent on hydrocarbon exports.18 On the whole, population and economic data suggest Russia is weak and growing weaker.
It is also a domestic political shambles. Russia could reasonably be called an electoral autocracy. It has a parliament, but this and other formal institutions hold little sway. Elections are uncompetitive, and the legal checks and balances on Putin’s power are fictitious. If anyone has influence over the centers of power, it is the kleptocrats: the vast elite patronage network, unaccountable to Russian society, that exists to extract payments and convert its wealth into power and access to government.19 This combination of structural decline and rent-seeking autocracy encourages an aggressive foreign policy. Lackluster economic and demographic trends make for a short time horizon: Putin and his associates must secure their gains right away, or they are liable to lose them as the state grows feebler. They are therefore likely to run risks that leaders of a more stable state would not.
One of these gambles is massive military investment, which diverts funds desperately needed in the faltering society. Putin’s is a renovation project, as the Russian military languished for years after the Cold War ended. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow’s 207-division army became just 85 brigades. Forces withdrew from ten countries, and bases were closed in Cuba and Vietnam. The total armed personnel under the Kremlin’s command fell from 3 million to 1 million.20 Military spending plummeted from 21 percent of GDP in the final days of the Soviet Union to 4 percent in the early days of the Russian Federation. By 2006 spending had bottomed out at 3 percent of GDP, and the military was in a state of abject disrepair.21 By 2016, however, a decade of arms buildups had brought spending to 5 percent of GDP. And Moscow has not stopped there. In 2018 the Kremlin announced GPV 2027, a military modernization program focused on improved force mobility and deployability, logistics, and command-and-control systems.22
But while military modernization is a priority, there is no realistic possibility that Russia will spend its way to great power status. Russia’s losses from the financial crisis continue to sting, and oil prices remain low, leaving few resources to draw on. Moscow’s spending on defense dwarfs that on health care and education, yet the United States still outspends it on defense nine times over.23 This has led Russia to take compensatory steps, including relying more heavily on its aging nuclear arsenal and equipping its army for smaller wars.24 Russia also is investing in significant subconventional warfare capabilities.
Reflecting the sense of urgency among Russia’s leaders, the military has been active despite the country’s faltering economic and demographic foundations. Its combat operations in Europe have been efforts to maintain a buffer zone, or at least to blunt Western influence in its near abroad. The 2008 invasion of Georgia silenced talk of NATO membership for that country and for Ukraine. Its 2014 invasion of Ukraine was intended to derail Kiev’s economic integration with the EU. In each case Russia’s leaders saw military action as a justified response to an international system unfairly imposed on them. Russian forces still occupy pieces of Georgia and Ukraine, including the annexed territory of Crimea.
Russia-watchers on both sides of the Atlantic worry that Moscow will next turn on the Baltics, NATO’s eastern flank. The prospect is a grave one, as the NATO-Russia Founding Act forswears the permanent installation of NATO troops or nuclear weapons in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Only local forces are available to defend the borders they share with Russia, which is equal in length to the West German frontier patrolled by eight allied corps during the Cold War. RAND Corporation wargames find that Russian troops could reach Tallinn and Riga, the capitals of Estonia and Latvia respectively, in fewer than sixty hours, snatching a quick victory from the alliance. If NATO came to their aid, Russia might try to cut off air and sea routes around the Baltics. Moscow could also attempt to take just a sliver of Baltic land, perhaps where an ethnic Russian population is especially dense, creating a dilemma over how NATO should respond. NATO would face the unhappy choice between escalation and backing down. The former is potentially catastrophic, as the United States and Russia are the world’s leading nuclear powers. The latter would shatter the alliance.25
In considering whether to escalate, the United States would be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Moscow since it would be acting on behalf of allies rather than itself. Naturally, American leaders and the public at large would be hesitant. Indeed, by extending NATO to include allies whose security the United States cannot fully guarantee, Washington has bifurcated the alliance: it can credibly promise to support its longstanding allies in Western Europe but cannot be counted on to defend the Eastern European allies most in need of protection. The challenges have only grown now that Crimea is in Russian hands, giving Moscow a favorable location from which to strike.26
More likely than a Baltic invasion, however, is aggression against a country auditioning for NATO membership. Moldova is one possible target. Its constitution makes it officially neutral, but Moldovans have long debated reunification with Romania, a NATO member with which they share a language and deep history. If the states were to merge, Moldova would be absorbed by the alliance. Russia maintains troops in the Slavic Transnistria region of Moldova in an effort to keep the country from becoming a NATO member by default.27 Beyond Moldova, Moscow could take further punitive action against Ukraine or Georgia if either is poised to renew a bid for NATO’s protection.
Thus far Russia’s military operations have had their intended effect of halting NATO’s eastward expansion. Russia pointed to the alliance’s openness to Georgian and Ukrainian accession to justify its invasions, and both states’ candidacies have since been derailed. Talk of further enlargement is now muted.28 The political toll has been costly for NATO. By backing down in the East, the alliance heightens fears in the Baltics, where concerns about Russia are acute. The eastern and western halves of the alliance are thus at odds. Western Europe is less concerned about Moscow’s direct military threat, while the eastern allies worry aloud. Without using force against the alliance, Russia has eroded its unity and its capacity to assure members.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, Russia’s geostrategic objectives have taken on an ever-more caustic edge, running headlong into America’s biggest alliance. Moscow endeavors to protect its territory and regime, exert influence in its near abroad, prevent interference in its domestic affairs, and be treated as a great power. But it furthers these goals by fracturing and containing the EU and NATO.
For China and the United States, the close of the Cold War did not mark a dramatic shift. The bilateral relationship had been largely stable since President Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing and President Carter’s decision to recognize the People’s Republic diplomatically. And by the early 1990s, the Chinese economy was intimately linked to the West. Since Deng Xiaoping established the program of “reform and opening up” in 1978, China had increasingly relied on market forces to fuel its growth and had become enmeshed in US-led international institutions. China, moreover, had distanced itself from Moscow during the Sino-Soviet split of the 1950s and 1960s. The collapse of the Soviet Union was concerning to Beijing, but not perilous.
From the Chinese perspective, Deng’s reforms were necessary to preserve the regime and keep the country safe. The reforms also came with a kind of strategic doctrine: China should “hide its capabilities and bide its time.” Deng argued that China should improve its ties with advanced economies in order to boost its own growth. It should not present itself as a military rival to major powers, lest it find itself in a conflict that could derail its rise. In time, Deng and other reformers hoped, international politics would become friendlier to a nondemocracy.29 The “hide and bide” strategy encountered a few hurdles, notably the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, in which government troops mowed down several hundred prodemocracy protesters, the state declared martial law, and the United States and others responded with sanctions and arms embargoes. In spite of Beijing’s human rights violations, the perception generally held that China’s growth was good for the world.
US leaders hoped that China could be guided into the international system as a “responsible stakeholder.”30 This approach had two interrelated objectives. First, by welcoming Beijing into existing institutions and treaties, the United States and its allies would persuade China that its interests lay in adapting to and preserving the international system rather than challenging it. Second, the United States hoped that China’s growing economy would inspire some amount of political liberalization, on the theory that market forces would lead to rule-of-law institutions and a more open government. This pro-engagement approach never subsumed all of US strategy, and policymakers understood that China would only reform so much; Washington always sought to deter aggression in Asia. Nonetheless, enthusiasm for economic engagement sometimes took precedence over security concerns and the instinct to hedge against growing Chinese power.31
By the 1990s China was too strong to be seriously coerced from abroad, and it used its muscle to keep growing. Beijing joined the WTO and pledged market reforms on which it later reneged, as the government remained deeply involved in many aspects of the economy. It kept a tight grip on government-backed companies—so-called state-owned enterprises. Beijing engaged in systematic industrial espionage to purloin foreign technologies, including those with clear military applications. The government also forced the transfer of major innovations in aerospace, chemicals, and high-tech infrastructure from Western companies to Chinese ones.32
Even as China grew, most seasoned observers thought its labyrinthine bureaucracy and managed economy would keep it from the great power ranks. After all, state-led economies did not have impressive track records. Instead its form of Leninist capitalism has proved remarkably resilient, and the Chinese Communist Party has only increased its economic role.33 When the party started plowing some of the country’s newfound wealth into military development in the 1990s, the results came faster than virtually anyone anticipated; US intelligence agencies systematically underestimated the extent of the buildup.34 With its economy revved and its politics stable, Beijing saw itself as uniquely positioned when the Western economic model appeared to stumble.
Chinese foreign policy underwent a decisive shift after 2008, leaving Deng’s hide-and-bide strategy behind. The global financial crisis appeared to weaken the West and expose the frailties of democratic capitalism, and American forces were still mired in Iraq. It seemed to China’s leaders that the United States was in decline, and the moment was opportune for Beijing to begin its push for a leading role on the global stage.35
China’s leaders have long thought of its security environment in concentric rings. The Communist Party’s first priority is the defense of China’s territorial integrity, both from external enemies and from internal separatist movements and instability. This requires China to ensure stability along its borders, in its western province Xinjiang, and in Tibet and Hong Kong. It also demands that Taiwan be prevented from achieving independence.36
With its immediate sovereignty concerns relatively stable, China looked to the next ring of concern: its nearby seas. Beginning in 2009 Beijing adopted a much more forceful stance toward maritime and territorial claims in the East and South China Seas. China started intercepting US military vessels and aircraft operating near its coasts, despite international law guaranteeing freedom of navigation. It has also used its growing coast guard capabilities to intimidate Japanese and Philippine crews around the Senkaku Islands and in the South China Sea. In one of its more brazen acts, the Chinese coast guard escalated a standoff with Philippine fishermen and seized Scarborough Shoal after promising to withdraw from the area, despite the fact that the shoal had long been in Manila’s possession.37
Since his 2012–2013 ascent, President Xi Jinping has consolidated this muscular foreign policy turn. He has made explicit China’s aspirations to become the regional leader, and eventually, a global power. The central foreign policy push of Xi’s first five-year term was construction and militarization in the South China Sea, which he described as a victory at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 2017.38 In the space of just two years, state-owned enterprises transformed seven tiny reefs into artificial islands. Xi’s government then proceeded to construct military outposts atop them. With naval ports, runways, sensors, and anti-air defenses, the artificial island bases can project power in surrounding waters. Although the territories remain disputed, China’s construction is now a fait accompli and militarization continues at a deliberate pace.
Having tipped the balance in the South China Sea, Xi moved his sights westward to the next ring of China’s security priorities: the rest of Asia. His new vision for Chinese power is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Launched in 2013, the sprawling infrastructure program comprises more than $575 billion of projects in at least seventy countries. According to official Chinese sources, BRI’s 3,100 discrete projects include roads, highways, ports, dams, and surveillance infrastructure. Development is clustered in South, Southeast, and Central Asia and China itself, and most of the contractors responsible are Chinese firms.39
Through the BRI, Beijing seeks to keep growing economically by exporting excess labor and capital and generating profits for state-backed firms. Presumably, the government also hopes to gain political leverage in the target countries. China may eventually transform ports and other sites for military use, and it likely seeks to build access routes along its western periphery so that it cannot be encircled by rivals.40 The initiative is too amorphous and opaque to permit neat prognosis concerning likelihood of success, and it certainly exposes China itself to major political liabilities. Nevertheless, the Communist Party may hope to use BRI to reestablish China’s dominance in Asia.
A final security target is the international system broadly. A central narrative in China holds that the country was wronged by European colonial powers in the nineteenth century and again in the post-World War II settlement. An ally during that conflict, China was included as a founding member of the UN Security Council. But after the Chinese Civil War, much of the world recognized the legitimacy of only the Republic of China, excluding Beijing from many aspects of international affairs until the 1970s. Chinese strategists remain skeptical of postwar rules and institutions in which they feel disadvantaged. China’s leaders also increasingly claim their right to act unilaterally, arguing that hegemons have the privilege of hypocrisy. To support their position, they point to numerous US violations of, and opt-outs from, international law: the invasion of Iraq, nonratification of UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and so on.
China is now a member of nearly all international institutions and regimes for which it is eligible, but it does not accept many liberal norms.41 China has increased its funding to the UN and is now a global leader on climate change, albeit due to its own self-interest and the US abdication of responsibility for the issue.42 It has insisted on reforms to the International Monetary Fund and G20 but has worked within existing frameworks in the service of these goals. At the same time Beijing has all but broken the WTO by maintaining its nonmarket structure. And China engages in systematic efforts to undermine the international human rights regime, which exemplifies the liberal democratic global governance that it sees as fundamentally threatening. For instance, China has pressed the UN Human Rights Council to prioritize state sovereignty over individual freedoms.43
On the regional level, China is less willing to follow existing structures of security cooperation as it seeks to reestablish itself as a regional great power. From its heterodox interpretation of the Law of the Sea and its South China Sea island-building campaign to its longstanding economic support for North Korea, Beijing has often secured its regional interests by undermining rules without replacing them. In most of these cases, China has not expressly sought scofflaw status. Instead, it uses existing rules to hinder prevailing institutions where they contravene its security interests. In the words of one scholar, China’s international behavior is moderately revisionist without being revolutionary.
Given Beijing’s objective of achieving great power status, it is likely that China will aim to avoid conventional conflict for at least the next ten to fifteen years. (An exception could be a war over Taiwan.) It will continue to take an à la carte approach to international laws as its interests dictate, increasingly flexing its muscles within Asia without courting war. It will accept the basic form of many existing institutions, without necessarily abiding by their liberal norms.44
In all likelihood China’s hand will only strengthen. In 2018 the Chinese Communist Party eliminated presidential term limits, which means that Xi will likely remain in power into the 2030s. Facing no visible domestic opposition, he will be in a position to reestablish China as a regional military leader. Indeed, China has already demonstrated that it can threaten the United States and is willing to do so, in part by undermining American allies.
China’s military budget grew from $21 billion in 1990 to $239 billion in 2017—a ten-fold increase. Beijing has used this bounty to conduct a dramatic defense overhaul. As of this writing, China has three aircraft carriers under development. By the early 2020s, China will have more naval vessels in the Pacific than the United States does. And along with its growing naval presence, China is engaging in more frequent military exercises with a broader range of partners.45
But China is not just doing more. It is also building better. Following the stunning display of US military prowess in the first Gulf War and the American intervention in the Taiwan Straits crisis, China understood that it lacked the capability to fight and win against modern opponents. To correct that, it began investing in a high-tech fighting force, with a focus on precision weapons. In the early post-Cold War years, the United States was the world’s leader in precision weapons, which it demonstrated in strikes against Iraq. Other countries have since adopted these weapons, and China’s defense strategy now relies on them.46
The PLA seeks to neutralize the US military advantage in the Pacific through deterrence and by denying opportunities to intervene decisively, as Washington did in the Taiwan Straits. China’s investments in ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, air defenses, cyber warfare capabilities, and communications and sensor technology all appear to further a central strategic goal. China’s weapons threaten US bases in the Pacific, aircraft carriers at sea, and combat-support assets. These advanced military resources would, for example, make it much harder for US forces to join a conflict to defend Taiwan, a nontreaty ally that nonetheless has substantial political support in the United States. Since the island is just a hundred miles from the mainland, Beijing may be able to establish air superiority before US forces stationed in Japan, Guam, and Hawaii reached the area.47
These anti-access / area denial (A2 / AD) capabilities offer a relatively low-cost means of confounding US alliance strategy. Because they increase the risks of joining a conflict near China’s shores and of maneuvering within the First Island Chain, these capabilities place US security guarantees and therefore allied assurance in doubt.48 China is now powerful enough in conventional and nuclear terms that escalation could be incredibly costly. This puts Washington in a graver position than it finds in the Baltics. Would the United States really be willing to escalate on behalf of allies, knowing that the result could be war with such a well-armed adversary?
If allies’ confidence in the United States erodes, they may increasingly hedge, preferring to retain more political autonomy. This would be a victory for Beijing, which would find it easier to lead a region in which American alliances have a diminished role. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, China’s leaders have become vocal about their distaste for US alliances. Beijing consistently refers to American security guarantees as Cold War relics and makes no secret of its desire to see them gone. Like their twenty-first-century Russian counterparts, Chinese leaders have argued that post-Cold War US efforts to deepen alliance cooperation serve hegemonic purposes—in their case, that Washington is attempting to encircle and contain China.49
At a 2014 regional conference, President Xi called for an “Asia for Asians,” which implied an end to America’s alliances and the birth of a regional security system centered on Beijing. The idea has not taken off, but if China has not been able to cleave away US allies, it is at least making their choices more difficult. Its augmented military challenges the value of US security guarantees, while its growing economic clout makes it a hard partner to refuse. Before long US allies may come to believe they cannot afford to choose Washington over Beijing.50
The United States can live with a more powerful China—indeed, it will have little choice in the matter. Fortunately the two countries probably will not find themselves at war any time soon. Precisely because China desires to become the regional leader and climb to global power status, it will want to avoid major conflict with the United States or its allies. More likely Beijing will slowly but persistently seek to erode America’s alliances. Like Russia, China will continue to employ a strategy that seeks to undercut US security guarantees without testing them directly.
In the last several years, national security analysts have become enchanted with the study of “gray zone” or “hybrid” warfare—a type of conflict that is said to occur in the space between peace and traditional war. This includes low-intensity military campaigns, law enforcement and paramilitary efforts, cyberattacks, economic coercion, and social and political manipulation through espionage and disinformation. A key dimension of gray-zone warfare, as the name suggests, is ambiguity. Belligerents often attempt to shroud and deny their activities.
Much of the discourse over gray-zone competition is too imprecise to be very useful. And breathless public discussion tends to make the problem seem new, which it is not. In the early years of the Cold War, Kennan spoke of “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives,” which he termed “political warfare.”51 Subterfuge has been an element of war since time immemorial. But even if subconventional conflict, when carefully defined and considered in context, is an older challenge than some appear to believe, it is no less a genuine problem.
Gray-zone activities are campaigns used by states and nonstate actors to achieve political goals, mostly through the coordinated use of nonmilitary tools and through incremental advances toward an objective. For the purposes of this analysis, I describe these activities as competitive coercion. They are competitive in that they are deployed by power rivals to advance their political goals. And they are coercive because they compel a change in the political status quo, even if traditional military force is not involved.
Competitive coercion is a puzzling phenomenon. Chief among its vexing features is that it is a product of functioning deterrence.52 Security commitments send a strong deterrent signal—“do not attack my ally or I will attack you”—but also a limited one. Because security guarantees are only invoked under narrow, publicly acknowledged conditions, they create openings for adversaries to exploit. If an adversary knows that an alliance commitment may be triggered by an unprovoked attack on the ally’s homeland, it also knows that it may be able to avoid retaliation by taking actions that are less brazen or that are targeted where deterrence is not operative.
As such, competitive coercion is frequently surreptitious. Although it is premeditated, it is often deployed opportunistically, the better to find the cracks in existing deterrence schemes. And ideally competitive coercion will be hard to detect, at least at first. China’s construction on South China Sea reefs is a good example. China’s building activity was initially inexplicable; only later did it become clear that Beijing was upending the balance of power in the South China Sea with new military installations, and at that point no one could halt its progress.
Competitive coercion is attractive for two related reasons. First, nonmilitary coercion usually has lower upfront costs than military action. Second, because competitive coercion is conflict-avoidant, it comes with fewer risks than combat. In particular, competitive coercion minimizes the prospect of retaliation and escalation.53 Where the challenge to the status quo is difficult to identify, its protectors have few options with which to respond.
Although competitive coercion has long been a tool of power rivals, its current prominence is in some ways a counterintuitive product of relatively recent innovations in global rules and institutions. For instance, the international system now enshrines a strong norm against territorial conquest, and states rarely opt to make formal declarations of war on their adversaries.54 Under such circumstances, it makes sense that rivals would avoid blatant hostilities. But the problem is even more complex. A system based on rules is intrinsically ripe for competitive coercion because rules, through omission, delineate a space in which competitors are free to act. Consider the North Atlantic Treaty. Article V firmly establishes thresholds against conventional military activity but not other forms of conflict, so that rivals can comfortably move their aggression into other domains.
Moreover, as we have seen, the structure of deterrence makes competitive coercion especially appealing in the nuclear age. The presence of nuclear weapons on both sides of an escalatory dynamic induces caution in each party, but it may do so disproportionally for a security guarantor, such as the United States, whose threats to escalate are made on behalf of allies instead of its homeland. A guarantor is unlikely to escalate in cases where nuclear-capable rivals coerce allies, given the high stakes.
Finally, alongside the structure of the international order and the dynamics of escalation in the nuclear age, the qualities of individual states can move them to undertake competitive coercion. As discussed below, Russia and China have particular needs and endowments that lead them to favor competitive coercion and to enact it in distinct ways.55
Russia has increasingly resorted to competitive coercion because it seeks to accomplish grand aims using declining power resources. Its preferred tools have been low-to-medium-intensity conventional conflict and information warfare. Moscow does not attempt to deny that this is its strategy, although it often denies individual instances of coercion, stealth being itself part of the strategy. Russian leaders argue that their tactics are proportional because the United States exercises its own competitive coercion in the form of democracy promotion.56
Ukraine has been a frequent target of Moscow’s competitive coercion. Russia made several military incursions into Ukraine before annexing Crimea in March 2014, but much of the fighting was carried out by proxies and unmarked forces. Moscow also backs separatists, whose demonstrations and demands provide pretexts for Russia’s more overt actions. And while Russian troops now hold swaths of Ukrainian territory, including Donetsk and Luhansk in the country’s east, Moscow vociferously denies any military presence in Ukraine and has suffered only mild diplomatic reproaches.57 Moscow acknowledges controlling another Ukrainian territory, Crimea, but argues that it is legally entitled to do so.
No serious analyst doubts that Russia has deployed its military to dissect Ukrainian sovereignty, but not all observers are so careful. Convincing global publics of what should be undeniable is a goal of information warfare, at which Russia has long excelled. President Putin, who had a lengthy career in the KGB and has staffed his government with former intelligence officers, has revamped Russia’s disinformation machine for contemporary pursuits. Russian information warfare exploits domestic and foreign media and recruits ethnic Russians abroad to amplify its messages and obfuscate reality. A primary tactic is to magnify the hypocrisies of Russia’s adversaries in order to undercut the political fortunes of foreign leaders who might take a hard line against Moscow. The proliferation of open-access and otherwise-exploitable media platforms has extended the reach of Russian disinformation at low cost. Several Russian intelligence agencies are now charged with hacking, conducting sabotage, spreading disinformation, and perpetrating systematic blackmail abroad.58
Moscow may attack using informational tools exclusively, as it did during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Its election-related operations against Germany, France, and Britain all sought to aid candidates who would sow European disunity. But Russia also may, as in Georgia and Ukraine, pair such influence operations with low-intensity conflict. Propaganda can be a useful tool for engaging separatists who will aid Russia’s on-the-ground subversion. The combination of disinformation and kinetic operations can be especially hard to counter because its origins and objectives may be poorly understood.59
Like Russia, China has a long history of noncombat operations. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist whose influence in and beyond the domain of war has extended across the globe, esteemed a military that could “win without fighting.” Mao Zedong was known for his asymmetric military doctrine, penning the manual On Guerilla Warfare to help China prevail in the second Sino-Japanese War. Today Beijing continues this tradition with some novel techniques.
One might expect otherwise. President Xi firmly controls the armed forces, law enforcement agencies, state-owned enterprises, state media, and even the legion of paramilitary fishermen known as the “maritime militia.” With his historic accumulation of power, he might be less reticent about using force. Moreover, as a quickly rising power, China has the economic and military resources to advance its aims using conventional arms; unlike Russia, it need not be restrained for lack of capacity. Yet China’s grand strategy is risk averse because it hopes to keep rising.60 As its foreign policy has grown bolder, it has primarily relied on maritime assertiveness, economic pressure, and cyber intrusions rather than direct armed conflict.
Since 2009 China has adopted a more confrontational approach to its maritime domain—activities that date back to the 1970s but that are now more coordinated and sustained.61 Some attribute this muscle-flexing to Xi’s rise; others to China’s growing desire for great power prestige, which could be gained by taking long-claimed territory. Whatever the case may be, China’s competitive coercion relies primarily on its coast guard, its maritime militia, and state-owned companies, while the navy has only a shadowy presence.62 The consummate example is its base construction in the South China Sea. The bases, built covertly on territory disputed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Malaysia, bristle with military platforms that threaten foreign armed forces, support Chinese coercion in the region, extend power-projection capabilities, and secure China’s sovereignty claims. The United States is hamstrung to respond on behalf of its allies when the aggression in question involves a disputed reef rather that the legally acknowledged territory of the ally itself. Without firing a single shot or even deploying many military vessels, Beijing has significantly advanced its goal of dominating regional waters.
China’s nonmilitary coercion extends beyond the maritime domain. Against US allies including the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea, Beijing has turned to economic pressure, refusing to import or export key products and cutting off tourism. On some occasions it has employed Belt and Road projects coercively by creating unsustainable debt, forcing target states unable to pay to lease projects back to China, as it did with a major port in Sri Lanka. Beijing systematically steals trade secrets—for instance Huawei, a corporate giant with close ties to the state, is accused of pilfering robotics technology developed by T-Mobile. China relies on its foreign investments to advance state interests, seeking to gain ownership in companies making sensitive technologies such as semiconductors or occasionally to buy military-adjacent real estate from which it could spy. And while China has never directly interfered with foreign democratic processes, it does use information campaigns to influence public opinion abroad. The United Front Work Department, part of the state party, co-opts and neutralizes foreign opposition by strategically deploying funding and recruiting the overseas diaspora. The department has undermined protests critical of the Communist Party by organizing counterprotests. It has also funded efforts to persuade foreign politicians to take positions more favorable to China.63
Today Russia and China challenge American alliances with high-end military strategies that aim to exploit a long-dormant credibility problem: the United States can never value an ally as much as it does the homeland. They also seek to undermine US alliances by using coercive nonmilitary tactics designed to skirt the boundaries of Washington’s security guarantees. The alliances themselves are now under threat, as adversaries seek to make them less credible in military terms and nullify them through the use of nonmilitary coercion.
Should America have seen this coming? Some critics look to the last two decades of foreign policy and wonder why Washington devoted so much effort to wars in the Middle East rather than the rising threats of Russia and China. But while there is good reason to question America’s recent wars, there is little evidence to suggest that the United States could have preempted the precise challenges that Russia and China now present, even if it had been less distracted in the early 2000s.
First, recall that through the first decade of the twenty-first century, both Moscow and Beijing appeared inclined to cooperate with the United States, and both seemed to be moving in relatively benign directions. Russia had acquiesced to NATO expansion, only beginning to bristle once the 2004 round was complete. Even then it sought cooperation with the alliance. While antiliberal, anti-American elements had been visible in Moscow for years, so too were officials who supported genuine economic and political reform. For its part, China appeared to be prioritizing its economy and international integration, which seemed to bode well for its prospects as a responsible rising power. Russia’s military was in disrepair, and China’s was too far behind to challenge the United States or its allies directly. US officials recognized the potential of Chinese and Russian challenges but understandably sought to neutralize them through diplomacy and co-optation rather than threats and other bellicose actions.
Second, strategic thought in Russia and China shifted between 2008–2012. Not only had each come to view the United States as irresponsible in its foreign policy adventurism, but the financial crisis allowed both to make the domestic case that the Western economic model was failing and that their respective forms of authoritarian state capitalism would prove more durable.64 While some early signs of this strategic shift were evident in each country’s foreign policy, such as Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, each also displayed continued interest in some forms of cooperation, such as on nuclear issues in North Korea and Iran. Neither became consistently more pugnacious until 2012, when Putin retook the presidency and Xi ascended to it.
Third, to the extent that the United States recognized China’s and Russia’s increasing aggressiveness—as in Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, or China’s growing maritime assertiveness—it was poorly positioned to check them. The 2008 crisis forced Washington to focus resources inward. And widespread opposition to the Iraq War made combative foreign policy unpalatable. The American public wished strongly to avoid overseas blunders and escalatory dynamics, and the Obama administration was not eager to confront directly other major powers. America’s rivals stepped up their assertiveness just as Washington had its own reasons to commit to relative modesty.
Finally, US officials likely had a hard time recognizing the strategic as opposed to tactical nature of Russian and Chinese competitive coercion. Although Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, derailing its NATO membership, there was no clear indication that it would do the same thing in Ukraine six years later in an effort to split the country from the EU. In 2009 China began to harass American military vessels operating near its coasts, but this did not presage its bizarre and systematic island-building campaign five years on. The ambiguity of competitive coercion made it harder to see these offenses for what they were: not isolated incidents but expressions of emerging strategies.
But while American policymakers might be forgiven for their relatively hands-off approach prior to 2012, subsequent inaction is harder to justify. The Obama administration could have done more to craft comprehensive China and Russia strategies in its later years. And under the Trump administration, the risks Moscow and Beijing pose to the United States and its alliances have only become starker, while the US response has been meager. As of 2017 the United States has defined Russia and China as its twenty-first-century great power competitors, but it is yet to determine what precise behavior it intends to deter and defend against. Nor has the United States developed plans that take into account the differences between Chinese and Russian motivations, goals, and capabilities.
Although Russia and China would like to insulate their regions from American influence, only China has the potential to do so. Russia will retain considerable capacity to spoil US objectives, but it lacks the wherewithal to achieve real dominion near its borders. Russia could, however, align with China, a strategy that has some advantages for both in the short-to-medium term and that could make their anti-alliance tactics even harder to parry.65 If Russia provides normative and political cover for China as it pursues regional hegemony, American security and prosperity will be much harder to guarantee.
American alliances are not merely the objects of Russian and Chinese competitive coercion. They are also the answers to aggression in the maritime, economic, cyber, and information domains. But US policy in these areas is poorly coordinated among allies, largely because Washington itself is in disarray. If the United States intends to use its alliances as a means of prevailing in competition, it must find ways to work with allies to deter and defend against nonmilitary incursions. First, however, it must confront the challenges to US alliances that come from within.