Notes

Introduction

1. David Crenshaw and Alicia Chen, “ ‘Heads Bashed Bloody’: China’s Xi Marks Communist Party Centenary with Strong Words for Adversaries,” Washington Post, July 1, 2021.

2. Kristin Huang, “Mainland Chinese Magazine Outlines How Surprise Attack on Taiwan Could Occur,” South China Morning Post, July 2, 2021.

3. See the video linked in tweet by Jennifer Zeng, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1414971285160005634?s=11.

4. Sarah Sorcher and Karoun Demirjian, “Top U.S. General Calls China’s Hypersonic Weapon Test Very Close to a Sputnik Moment,” Washington Post, October 27, 2021.

5. “Rise of China Now Top News Story of the 21st Century,” Global Language Monitor, December 30, 2019, https://languagemonitor.com/top-words-of-21st-century/global-language-monitor-announces-that-truth-is-the-top-word-in-the-english-language-for-the-21st-century/.

6. Yan Xuetong, “Becoming Strong: The New Chinese Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021; Clyde Prestowitz, The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); Oystein Tunsjo, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Mariner Books, 2018); Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (New York: Other Press, 2017); Ian Bremmer, “China Won: How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future,” Time, November 2, 2017.

7. “Biden Warns China Will ‘Eat Our Lunch’ on Infrastructure Spending,” BBC.com, February 12, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56036245.

8. Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (New York: Public Affairs, 2020).

9. For examples, see Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace the American Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Pavneet Singh, Eric Chewning, and Michael Brown, “Preparing the United States for the Superpower Marathon with China,” Brookings Institution, April 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/preparing-the-united-states-for-the-superpowermarathon-with-china/; Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s, 2016).

10. Xi Jinping, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” Palladium Magazine, January 5, 2013, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guiding-ideology/.

11. Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch, “China’s Overseas Lending,” Journal of International Economics, 133 (November 2021): 1–32.

12. We first published versions of this argument in Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, “Competition with China Could Be Short and Sharp: The Risk of War Is Greatest in the Next Decade,” Foreign Affairs, December 17, 2020; Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, “Into the Danger Zone: The Coming Crisis in U.S.-China Relations,” American Enterprise Institute, January 2021; and Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, “China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem,” Foreign Policy, September 24, 2021. A few other analysts have described similar themes, but the conventional wisdom about China’s trajectory remains mostly intact. For insightful challenges, see Dan Blumenthal, The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2020); Jude Blanchette, “Xi’s Gamble: The Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021.

13. See Robert Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008); and Allison, Destined for War; A.F.K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968).

14. Ed Imperato, General MacArthur: Speeches and Reports 1908–1964 (Paducah, KY: Turner, 2000), 122.

15. Bill Gertz, “U.S. Pacific Intel Chief: Coming Chinese Attack on Taiwan Could Target Other Nations,” Washington Times, July 8, 2021.

1. The Chinese Dream

1. Xi Jinping, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” Xinhua, October 18, 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/download/Xi_Jinping’s_report_at_19th_CPC_National_Congress.pdf.

2. Xi Jinping, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” Palladium Magazine, January 5, 2013, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guiding-ideology/.

3. Avery Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge: China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, China’s Search for Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

4. PPS-39, “To Review and Define United States Policy Toward China,” September 7, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. II: Document No. 122 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian). Hereafter cited as FRUS, followed by year, volume, and document number.

5. “GDP (Constant 2010 US$)—China,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?locations=CN, accessed April 29, 2021.

6. Alyssa Leng and Roland Rajah, “Chart of the Week: Global Trade Through a U.S.-China Lens,” Lowy Institute, The Interpreter, December 18, 2019.

7. John Garnaut, “Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China,” Sinocism, January 16, 2019, https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in.

8. Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.

9. “The ‘One Simple Message’ in Xi Jinping’s Five Years of Epic Speeches,” South China Morning Post, November 2, 2017; Elizabeth Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

10. “China’s Xi Says Political Solution for Taiwan Can’t Wait Forever,” Reuters, October 6, 2013.

11. “China Won’t Give Up ‘One Inch’ of Territory Says President Xi to Mattis,” BBC News, June 28, 2018.

12. Jennifer Lind, “Life in China’s Asia: What Regional Hegemony Would Look Like,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 60.

13. Xi Jinping, “New Asian Security Concept for New Progress in Security Cooperation,” May 21, 2014, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1159951.shtml.

14. Tom Mitchell, “China Struggles to Win Friends over South China Sea,” Financial Times, July 13, 2016. See also Aaron Friedberg, “Competing with China,” Survival, June/July 2018, 22.

15. Fu Ying, “The U.S. World Order Is a Suit That No Longer Fits,” Financial Times, January 6, 2016.

16. Daniel Tobin, “How Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ Should Have Ended U.S. Debate on Beijing’s Ambitions,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 2020.

17. “Commentary: Milestone Congress Points to New Era for China, the World,” Xinhua, October 24, 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-10/24/c_136702090.htm.

18. Hu Xijin, “What Drives China-U.S. Game: Washington Believes Being Poor Is Chinese People’s Fate,” Global Times, September 6, 2021.

19. For instance, “Full Text: China’s National Defense in the New Era,” Xinhuanet, July 24, 2019, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-07/24/c_138253389.htm.

20. See Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace the American Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s, 2016).

21. Nadège Rolland, China’s Vision for a New World Order, National Bureau of Asian Research, January 2020, 6.

22. Liza Tobin, “Xi’s Vision for Transforming Global Governance,” Texas National Security Review, November 2018; Timothy Heath, Derek Grossman, and Asha Clark, China’s Quest for Global Primacy (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2021).

23. Andrew Nathan, “China’s Challenge,” in Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy, ed. Marc Plattner and Christopher Walker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 30–31.

24. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 21.

25. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016.

26. Fareed Zakaria, “The New China Scare,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2020.

27. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Military Expenditure Database, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex, accessed August 2021.

28. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.

29. Nick Childs and Tom Waldwyn, “China’s Naval Shipbuilding: Delivering on Its Ambition in a Big Way,” IISS Military Balance Blog, May 1, 2018; Geoffrey Gresh, To Rule Eurasia’s Waves: The New Great Power Competition at Sea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020); “Navy Official: China Training for ‘Short Sharp War’ with Japan,” USNI News, February 18, 2014.

30. Anthony Esguerra, “U.S. Expert Tells China to ‘Stop Shitting’ in Contested Waters. Literally,” Vice, July 13, 2021.

31. Felipe Villamor, “Duterte Says Xi Warned Philippines of War Over South China Sea,” New York Times, May 19, 2017; Ely Ratner, “Course Correction: How to Stop China’s Maritime Advance,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2017.

32. Paul Shinkman, “China Issues New Threats to Taiwan: ‘The Island’s Military Won’t Stand a Chance,’ ” U.S. News & World Report, April 9, 2021.

33. Liu Xin and Yang Sheng, “Initiative ‘Project of the Century’: President Xi,” Global Times, May 5, 2017.

34. Peter Ferdinand, “Westward Ho—the China Dream and ‘One Belt, One Road’: Chinese Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping,” International Affairs, 92, no. 4 (July 2016): 941–957.

35. Daniel Markey, China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 168.

36. Sheena Greitens, “Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports,” Brookings Institution, April 2020, 2.

37. Jacob Helberg, The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).

38. Elsa Kania, “ ‘AI Weapons’ in China’s Military Innovation,” Brookings Institution, April 2020; Julian Gewirtz, “China’s Long March to Technological Supremacy,” Foreign Affairs, August 27, 2019.

39. “Xi Urges Breaking New Ground in Major Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics,” Xinhua, June 24, 2018; Daniel Kliman, Kristine Lee, and Ashley Feng, How China Is Reshaping International Organizations from the Inside Out (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2019).

40. Hal Brands, “Democracy vs. Authoritarianism: How Ideology Shapes Great-Power Conflict,” Survival, October/November 2018, 61–114.

41. Xi Jinping, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” January 5, 2013, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guiding-ideology/.

42. Jojje Olsson, “China Tries to Put Sweden on Ice,” The Diplomat, December 30, 2019.

43. Anne-Marie Brady, “Magic Weapons: China’s Political Influence Activities under Xi Jinping,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, September 2017, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping.

44. “China Is Becoming More Assertive in International Legal Disputes,” The Economist, September 11, 2021.

45. Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2018).

46. Jay Solomon, “Clinton Presses, Courts Beijing,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2010.

47. Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, “How China Sees America: The Sum of Beijing’s Fears,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2012.

48. Jude Blanchette, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 127.

49. James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 358.

50. Fu Ying, “After the Pandemic, Then What?,” China-US Focus, June 28, 2020, https://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/ after-the-pandemic-then-what.

51. See Barbara Demick, “The Times, Bloomberg News, and the Richest Man in China,” New Yorker, May 5, 2015.

52. Wang Jisi and Kenneth Lieberthal, Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust, Brookings Institution, March 2012, 11.

53. Blanchette, China’s New Red Guards, 128.

54. Li Ziguo quoted in Evan Osnos, “Making China Great Again,” New Yorker, January 1, 2018.

55. Wang and Lieberthal, Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust, 10–11; Evan Osnos, “The Future of America’s Contest with China,” New Yorker, January 13, 2020.

56. Samuel Kim, “Human Rights in China’s International Relations,” in What if China Doesn’t Democratize? Implications for War and Peace, ed. Edward Friedman and Barrett McCormick (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 130–131.

57. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 151.

58. Zhou Xin, “Xi Jinping Calls for ‘New Long March’ in Dramatic Sign that China Is Preparing for Protracted Trade War,” South China Morning Post, May 21, 2019.

59. Marshall to Donald Rumsfeld, May 2, 2002, Department of Defense Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room; Michael Green, By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia-Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

60. Nicholas Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1942), 20–22.

61. Allison, Destined for War, 108.

62. Michael Schuman, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2020), 4.

63. Schuman, Superpower Interrupted, 311.

64. Minxin Pei, “Assertive Pragmatism: China’s Economic Rise and Its Impact on Chinese Foreign Policy,” IFRI Security Studies Department, Fall 2006, https://www.ifri.org/sites/ default/files/atoms/files/Prolif_Paper_Minxin_Pei.pdf.

65. Joshua Kurlantzick, State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism Is Transforming the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 83.

66. See Timothy Heath, “What Does China Want? Discerning the PRC’s National Strategy,” Asian Security, Spring 2012, 54–72; Nathan and Scobell, China’s Search for Security; Brands, “Democracy vs. Authoritarianism.”

67. John Garver, China’s Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 499.

68. Doshi, Long Game; Zhang Liang, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People—In Their Own Words, ed. Andrew Nathan and Perry Link (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 457.

69. Joshua Kurlantzick, “China’s Charm Offensive in Southeast Asia,” Current History, September 2006.

70. Yan Xuetong, “From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement,” Chinese Journal of International Politics, April 2014, 155–156.

71. Jeffrey Bader, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), 80.

72. Yan, “From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement”; Doshi, Long Game.

73. Osnos, “Future of America’s Contest”; Rush Doshi, “Beijing Believes Trump Is Accelerating American Decline,” Foreign Policy, October 12, 2020.

74. Kurt Campbell and Mira Rapp-Hooper, “China Is Done Biding Its Time: The End of Beijing’s Foreign Policy Restraint?” Foreign Affairs, July 15, 2020.

75. “China Says U.S. Cannot Speak from ‘A Position of Strength,’ ” BBC News, March 19, 2021.

76. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, April 9, 2021, https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2021-Unclassified-Report.pdf.

77. Chris Buckley, “ ‘The East is Rising’: Xi Maps Out China’s Post-Covid Ascent,” New York Times, March 3, 2021.

78. Yuen Yuen Ang, “Chinese Leaders Boast about China’s Rising Power. The Real Story Is Different,” Washington Post, April 13, 2021.

79. Buckley, “ ‘East is Rising’ ”; William Zheng, “Xi Jinping Says China Is ‘Invincible,’ Regardless of Challenges Ahead,” South China Morning Post, May 6, 2021.

2. Peak China

1. On these issues, see Chao Deng and Liyan Qi, “China Stresses Family Values as More Women Put Off Marriage, Childbirth,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2021; Grady McGregor, “Is China’s Population Growing or Shrinking? It’s a Touchy Topic for Beijing,” Fortune, April 30, 2021; “China Set to Report First Population Decline in Five Decades,” Financial Times, April 27, 2021; Alicia Chen, Lyric Li, and Lily Kuo, “In Need of a Baby Boom, China Clamps Down on Vasectomies,” Washington Post, December 9, 2021.

2. “Report by Four Chinese Marshals,” July 11, 1969, Digital Archive, Cold War International History Project, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117146.pdf?v=81762c8101f0d237b21dca691c5824e4.

3. See Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and China: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 2007).

4. Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell, China’s Search for Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

5. Gordan H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Redwood City, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1990).

6. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 233.

7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 412.

8. Jinglian Wu, Understanding and Interpreting Chinese Economic Reform, 2nd ed. (Singapore: Gale Asia, 2014).

9. Barry J. Naughton, The Chinese Economy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 179.

10. Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler, “The Hyperglobalization of Trade and Its Future,” Working Paper 13–6 (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2013).

11. World Bank, World Development Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021).

12. For a good comparative account, see Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); David Lampton, Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

13. Ruchir Sharma, “The Demographics of Stagnation: Why People Matter for Economic Growth,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2016.

14. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision, Online ed., rev. 1 (New York: United Nations, 2019).

15. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision.

16. Fang Cai and Dewen Wang, “Demographic Transition: Implications for Growth,” in The China Boom and Its Discontents, ed. Ross Garnaut and Ligang Song (Canberra: Asia-Pacific Press, 2005), 34–52; Wang Feng and Andrew Mason, “Demographic Dividend and Prospects for Economic Development in China,” paper presented at UN Expert Group Meeting on Social and Economic Implications of Changing Population Age Structures, Mexico City, August 31–September 2, 2005; David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Jaypee Sevilla, The Demographic Dividend: A New Perspective on the Economic Consequences of Population Change (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003).

17. Alan Fernihough and Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke, “Coal and the European Industrial Revolution,” Economic Journal, 131, no. 635 (April 2021): 1135–1149.

18. Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–1940,” American Economic Review, 80, no. 4 (September 1990): 651–668.

19. Gordon C. McCord and Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Development, Structure, and Transformation: Some Evidence on Comparative Economic Growth.” NBER Working Paper 19512 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013).

20. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision, Online ed., rev. 1 (New York: United Nations, 2019).

21. Stein Emil, Emily Goren, Chun-Wei Yuan, et al., “Fertility, Mortality, Migration, and Population Scenarios for 195 Countries and Territories from 2017 to 2100: A Forecasting Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study,” The Lancet, 396, no. 10258 (October 2020): 1285–1306; Stephen Chen, “China’s Population Could Halve Within the Next 45 Years, New Study Warns,” South China Morning Post, September 30, 2021.

22. Yong Cai, Wang Feng, and Ke Shen, “Fiscal Implications of Population Aging and Social Sector Expenditure in China,” Population and Development Review, 44, no. 4 (December 2018): 811–831.

23. Nicholas Eberstadt and Ashton Verdery, “China’s Shrinking Families: The Demo­graphic Trend That Could Curtail Beijing’s Ambitions,” Foreign Affairs, April 7, 2021.

24. Guangzong Mu, “Birth Rate Falling Below 1 Percent an Early Warning,” China Daily, December 29, 2021.

25. Amanda Lee, “China Population: Concerns Grow as Number of Registered Births in 2020 Plummet,” South China Morning Post, February 9, 2021; Mu, “Birth Rate Falling Below 1 Percent an Early Warning.”

26. Mary Hanbury, “Adult Diaper Sales in China Could Exceed Infant Diaper Sales by 2025, Research Suggests,” Business Insider, November 29, 2021.

27. See, for instance, “Is China’s Population Shrinking?” The Economist, April 29, 2021; Eric Zhu and Tom Orlik, “When Will China Rule the World? Maybe Never,” Bloomberg, July 5, 2021.

28. Mu, “Birth Rate Falling Below 1 Percent an Early Warning.”

29. Cheryl Heng, “China Census: Millions of ‘Bare Branch’ Men Locked Out of Marriage Face Cost of One-Child Policy,” South China Morning Post, May 17, 2021.

30. Chao Deng and Liyan Qi, “China Stresses Family Values as More Women Put Off Marriage, Childbirth,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2021.

31. Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

32. Nathan Chow, “Understanding China,” DBS Bank, April 9, 2018.

33. Penn World Table, Version 10.0, https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/?lang=en.

34. Chris Buckley and Vanessa Piao, “Rural Water, Not City Smog, May Be China’s Pollution Nightmare,” New York Times, April 11, 2016.

35. China Power Team, “How Does Water Security Affect China’s Development?” China Power, August 26, 2020, https://chinapower.csis.org/china-water-security/; Jing Li, “80 Percent of Groundwater in China’s Major River Basins Is Unsafe for Humans, Study Reveals.” South China Morning Post, April 11, 2018; David Stanway and Kathy Chen, “Most of Northern China’s Water is Unfit for Human Touch,” World Economic Forum, June 28, 2017.

36. Charles Parton, “China’s Acute Water Shortage Imperils Economic Future,” Financial Times, February 27, 2018; China Power Team, “How Does Water Security Affect China’s Development?” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://chinapower.csis.org/china-water-security/.

37. “China Needs Nearly $150 Billion to Treat Severe River Pollution,” Reuters, July 25, 2018; “China Starts 8,000 Water Clean-Up Projects Worth US $100 Billion in First Half of Year,” South China Morning Post, August 24, 2017.

38. Tsukasa Hadano, “Degraded Farmland Diminishes China’s Food Sufficiency,” Nikkei Asia, April 4, 2021.

39. “China’s Inefficient Agricultural System,” The Economist, May 21, 2015.

40. Dominique Patton, “More Than 40 Percent of China’s Arable Land Degraded: Xinhua,” Reuters, November 4, 2014.

41. Edward Wong, “Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food,” New York Times, December 30, 2013.

42. “Halting Desertification in China,” World Bank, Results Brief, July 26, 2021; Jariel Arvin, “Worst Sandstorm in a Decade Chokes Beijing,” Vox, March 16, 2021; Daniel Rechtschaffen, “How China’s Growing Deserts Are Choking the Country,” Forbes, September 18, 2017; Josh Haner, Edward Wong, Derek Watkins, and Jeremy White, “Living in China’s Expanding Deserts,” New York Times, October 24, 2016.

43. Jasmine Ng, “China’s Latest Crackdown Targets Binge Eating and Wasting Food,” Bloomberg News, November 1, 2021.

44. Jude Clemente, “China Is the World’s Largest Oil and Gas Importer,” Forbes, October 17, 2019.

45. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2016).

46. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).

47. Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay.

48. Andrew J. Nathan, “What Is Xi Jinping Afraid Of?” Foreign Affairs, December 8, 2017; N.S. Lyons, “The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning,” Palladium Magazine, October 11, 2021.

49. Tom Mitchell, Xinning Liu, and Gabriel Wildau, “China’s Private Sector Struggles for Funding as Growth Slows,” Financial Times, January 21, 2019. See also Nicholas Lardy, The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2019).

50. Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

51. James Areddy, “Former Chinese Party Insider Calls U.S. Hopes of Engagement ‘Naïve,’ ” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2021; Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

52. “China Is Conducting Fewer Local Policy Experiments under Xi Jinping,” The Economist, August 18, 2018.

53. “What Tech Does China Want?” The Economist, August 14, 2021.

54. Daniel H. Rosen, “China’s Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021.

55. David. H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” Annual Review of Economics, 8 (October 2016): 205–240.

56. Daniel C. Lynch, China’s Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University, Press, 2015), chap. 2.

57. Jeremy Diamond, “Trump: ‘We Can’t Continue to Allow China to Rape Our Country,” CNN, May 2, 2016; Tania Branigan, “Mitt Romney Renews Promise to Label China a Currency Manipulator,” The Guardian, October 23, 2012.

58. Global Trade Alert, https://www.globaltradealert.org.

59. Global Trade Alert, https://www.globaltradealert.org/country/all/affected-jurisdictions_42/period-from_20090101/period-to_20210509.

60. Sidney Lung, “China’s GDP Growth Could Be Half of Reported Number, Says US Economist at Prominent Chinese University,” South China Morning Post, March 10, 2019; Yingyao Hu and Jiaxiong Yao, “Illuminating Economic Growth.” IMF Working Paper No. 19/77 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2019); Wei Chen, Xilu Chen, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Zheng Song, “A Forensic Examination of China’s National Accounts.” NBER Working Paper No. w25754 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2019); Luis R. Martinez, “How Much Should We Trust the Dictator’s GDP Estimates?” University of Chicago Working Paper (Chicago: University of Chicago, August 9, 2019).

61. Salvatore Babones, “How Weak Is China? The Real Story Behind the Economic Indicators,” Foreign Affairs, January 31, 2016.

62. The Conference Board, “Total Economy Database,” https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase, accessed May 2021.

63. Guanghua Chi, Yu Liu, Zhengwei Wu, and Haishan Wu, “Ghost Cities Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China,” Baidu Big Data Lab, 2015; Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China (London: Zed Books, 2015).

64. “A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty. That’s 50 Million Apartments,” Bloomberg News, November 8, 2018. See also James Kynge and Sun Yi, “Evergrande and the End of China’s ‘Build, Build, Build’ Model,” Financial Times, September 21, 2021.

65. Nathaniel Taplin, “Chinese Overcapacity Returns to Haunt Global Industry,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2019; Overcapacity in China: An Impediment to the Party’s Reform Agenda (Beijing: European Chamber of Commerce in China, 2016).

66. Koh Qing, “China Wasted $6.9 Trillion on Bad Investment post-2009,” Reuters, November 20, 2014.

67. “The Lives of the Parties: China’s Economy Is More Soviet Than You Think,” The Economist, December 15, 2018.

68. A point made well in Barry Naughton, The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2021).

69. Global Debt Monitor, Institute of International Finance, July 16, 2020.

70. Logan Wright and Daniel Rosen, Credit and Credibility: Risks to China’s Economic Resilience (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, October 2018), 1.

71. “The Coming Debt Bust,” The Economist, May 7, 2016.

72. Kan Huo and Hongyuran Wu, “Banks Raise Dams, Fend Off Toxic Debt Crisis,” Caixin, December 1, 2015; Frank Tang, “China Estimates Shadow Banking Worth US$12.9 Trillion As It Moves to Clean Up High-risk Sector,” South China Morning Post, December 7, 2020.

73. Kellee S. Tsai, Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Frank Tang, “China’s P2P Purge Leaves Millions of Victims Out in the Cold, with Losses in the Billions, As Concerns of Social Unrest Swirl,” South China Morning Post, December 29, 2020.

74. “Total Credit to the Non-Financial Sector,” Bank for International Settlements, https://stats.bis.org/statx/srs/table/f1.2, accessed August 9, 2021.

75. Daniel H. Rosen, “China’s Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021.

76. For an extended discussion and sources on the points in this paragraph, see Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 48–52.

77. National Science Board. Science and Engineering Indicators 2020 (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2020).

78. Andrew Imbrie, Elsa B. Kania, and Lorand Laskai, “Comparative Advantage in Artificial Intelligence: Enduring Strengths and Emerging Challenges for the United States,” CSET Policy Brief, January 2020; Will Hunt, Saif M. Khan, and Dahlia Peterson, “China’s Progress in Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment: Accelerants and Policy Implications,” CSET Policy Brief, March 2021.

79. Saif M. Khan and Carrick Flynn, “Maintaining China’s Dependence on Democracies for Advanced Computer Chips,” Brookings Institution, Global China, April 2020.

80. Xiaojun Yan and Jie Huang, “Navigating Unknown Waters: The Chinese Communist Party’s New Presence in the Private Sector,” China Review, 17, no. 2 (June 2017): 38.

81. Daniel Lynch, China’s Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

82. Tom Holland, “Wen and Now: China’s Economy Is Still ‘Unsustainable,’ ” South China Morning Post, April 10, 2017.

83. Jane Cai, “Chinese Premier Li Keqiang Warns of Challenges over Jobs, Private Sector, Red Tape,” South China Morning Post, May 2021.

84. Chris Buckley, “2019 Is a Sensitive Year for China. Xi Is Nervous,” New York Times, February 25, 2019; Chris Buckley, “Vows of Change in China Belie Private Warning,” New York Times, February 14, 2013.

85. Sui-Lee Wee and Li Yuan, “China Sensors Bad Economic News Amid Signs of Slower Growth,” New York Times, September 28, 2018.

86. Lingling Wei, “Beijing Reins in China’s Central Bank,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2021.

87. Data come from Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute. For reporting on these data, see David Shambaugh, “China’s Coming Crack Up,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2015; Robert Frank, “More than a Third of Chinese Millionaires Want to Leave China,” CNBC, July 6, 2018; Robert Frank, “Half of China’s Rich Plan to Move Overseas,” CNBC, July 17, 2017.

88. Christian Henrik Nesheim, “2 of 3 Investor Immigrants Worldwide Are Chinese, Reveals Statistical Analysis,” Investment Migration Insider, February 25, 2018.

89. Data available from China Labour Bulletin, https://clb.org.hk. For reporting, see Javier C. Hernandez, “Workers’ Activism Rises as China’s Economy Slows. Xi Aims to Rein Them In,” New York Times, February 6, 2019; “Masses of Incidents: Why Protests Are So Common in China,” The Economist, October 4, 2018.

90. Chen Tianyong quoted in Li Yuan, “China’s Entrepreneurs Are Wary of Its Future,” New York Times, February 23, 2019.

91. Adrian Zenz, “China’s Domestic Security Spending: An Analysis of Available Data,” China Brief, 18, no. 4 (March 12, 2018).

92. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Domestic Security in China under Xi Jinping,” China Leadership Monitor, March 1, 2019.

93. Simina Mistreanu, “Life Inside China’s Social Credit Laboratory,” Foreign Policy, April 3, 2018.

94. Richard McGregor, Xi Jinping: The Backlash (London: Penguin Ebooks, 2019), chap. 2.

3. The Closing Ring

1. Jeff Smith, “The Simmering Boundary: A ‘New Normal’ at the India-China Border? Part 1,” Observer Research Foundation, June 13, 2020; Robert Barnett, “China Is Building Entire Villages in Another Country’s Territory,” Foreign Policy, May 7, 2021.

2. On the background and the encounter, see Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar, and Sameer Yasir, “Worst Clash in Decades on Disputed India-China Border Kills 20 Indian Troops,” New York Times, June 16, 2020; Charlie Campbell, “China and India Try to Cool Nationalist Anger After Deadly Border Clash,” Time, June 20, 2020; Michael Safi and Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “India Says 20 Soldiers Killed on Disputed Himalayan Border with China,” The Guardian, June 16, 2020; H.B. discussion with Indian official, July 2021.

3. Andrew Chubb, “China Warily Watches Indian Nationalism,” China Story, December 22, 2020.

4. “Defence Ministry Approves Purchase of 33 New Fighter Jets Including 21 MiG-29s from Russia,” Hindustan Times, July 2, 2020; “Huawei and ZTE Left Out of India’s 5G Trials,” BBC News, May 5, 2021; Joe Biden, Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison, and Yoshide Suga, “Our Four Nations Are Committed to a Free, Open, Secure, and Prosperous Indo-Pacific Region,” Washington Post, March 13, 2021; Michele Kelemen, “Quad Leaders Announce Effort to Get 1 Billion COVID-19 Vaccines to Asia,” NPR, March 12, 2021.

5. Sudhi Ranjan Sen, “India Shifts 50,000 Troops to Chinese Border in Historic Move,” Bloomberg, June 27, 2001; H.B. discussion with Indian official, July 2021.

6. Ken Moriyasu, “India and Vietnam Will Define the Future of Asia: Kurt Campbell,” Nikkei Asia, November 20, 2021.

7. Gettleman, Kumar, and Yasir, “Worst Clash in Decades.”

8. C. Vann Woodward, “The Age of Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review, 66, no. 1 (October 1960): 1–16.

9. Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

10. Richard Javad Heydarian, The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (New York: Palgave Macmillan, 2020), 160.

11. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

12. Toshi Yoshihara and Jack Bianchi, Seizing on Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing with China’s Globalizing Military (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2021), 44; Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell, China’s Search for Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

13. Yoshihara and Bianchi, Seizing on Weakness, esp. 44; Robert Ross, “China’s Naval Nationalism: Sources, Prospects, and the U.S. Response,” International Security, 34, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 46–81.

14. Thomas Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: Norton, 2015), xv.

15. Christensen, China Challenge, xiv.

16. “Bush Lays Out Foreign Policy Vision,” CNN, November 19, 1999; David Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.-China Relations, 1989–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

17. Robert B. Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility?” U.S. Department of State, September 21, 2005.

18. Art Pine, “U.S. Faces Choices on Sending Ships to Taiwan,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1996.

19. Thomas Lippman, “Bush Makes Clinton’s China Policy an Issue,” Washington Post, August 20, 1999.

20. H.B. conversation with U.S. intelligence official, May 2016; Aaron Friedberg, Beyond Air-Sea Battle: The Debate over U.S. Military Strategy in Asia (New York: Routledge, 2014).

21. James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 293–296; Dan Kliman and Zack Cooper, “Washington Has a Bad Case of China ADHD,” Foreign Policy, October 27, 2017.

22. Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Vintage, 1998); Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: Norton, 2011).

23. Prashanth Parameswaran, “U.S. Blasts China’s ‘Great Wall of Sand’ in the South China Sea,” Diplomat, April 1, 2015.

24. Eric Heginbotham, Michael Nixon, Forrest E. Morgan, et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015).

25. “China Challenging U.S. Military Technological Edge: Pentagon Official,” Reuters, January 28, 2014.

26. Brian Wang, “Google’s Eric Schmidt Says U.S. Could Lose Lead in AI and Basic Science Research to China,” Next Big Future, November 1, 2017.

27. Giuseppe Macri, “Ex-NSA Head: Chinese Hacking Is ‘The Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History,’” Inside Sources, November 4, 2015.

28. Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: Griffin, 2015); Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018.

29. David Larter, “White House Tells the Pentagon to Quit Talking About ‘Competition’ with China,” Navy Times, September 26, 2016.

30. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12–18–2017–0905.pdf; Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf; “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” February 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IPS-Final-Declass.pdf.

31. U.S. Department of State, Policy Planning Staff, The Elements of the China Challenge, November 2020; Iain Marlow, “U.S. Security Bloc to Keep China in ‘Proper Place,’ Pompeo Says,” Bloomberg News, October 23, 2019.

32. Christopher Wray, Remarks at Hudson Institute, July 7, 2020, https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/the-threat-posed-by-the-chinese-government-and-the-chinese-communist-party-to-the-economic-and-national-security-of-the-united-states.

33. Haspel Remarks at University of Louisville, September 26, 2018, https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/remarks-for-central-intelligence-agency-director-gina-haspel-mcconnell-center-at-the-university-of-louisville/.

34. Josh Rogin, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2021); Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “Special Report: Trump’s U.S.-China Transformation,” Axios, January 19, 2021.

35. John Bolton, “The Scandal of Trump’s China Policy,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2020.

36. “Internal Chinese Report Warns Beijing Faces Tiananmen-Like Global Backlash over Virus,” Reuters, May 4, 2020; Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries,” Pew Research Center, October 6, 2020.

37. Demetri Sevastopulo, “Biden Warns China Will Face ‘Extreme Competition’ from U.S.,” Financial Times, February 7, 2021.

38. Jim Garamone, “Biden Announces DOD China Task Force,” Defense News, February 10, 2021; Alex Leary and Paul Ziobro, “Biden Calls for $50 Billion to Boost U.S. Chip Industry,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2021.

39. Biden’s Remarks at Munich Security Conference, February 19, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/19/remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-2021-virtual-munich-security-conference/.

40. Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buckley, “Biden’s China Strategy Meets Resistance at the Negotiating Table,” New York Times, July 26, 2021.

41. Dai Xu, “14 Misjudgments: China’s ‘4 Unexpected’ and ‘10 New Understandings’ About the U.S.,” May 26, 2020, https://demclubathr.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/what-china-doesnt-realize-us-china-relations-in-2020-dai-xu-weibo-may-26–2020.pdf.

42. Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, “Taiwanese/Chinese Identification Trend Distribution,” January 25, 2021, https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961.

43. “Taiwan to Boost Defense Budget 10% in Face of China Pressure,” Nikkei Asia, August 13, 2020; Gabriel Dominguez, “Taiwan Developing New Asymmetric Warfare Concepts to Counter China’s Growing Military Capabilities, Says Pentagon,” Janes Defence News, September 2, 2020; Drew Thompson, “Hope on the Horizon: Taiwan’s Radical New Defense Concept,” War on the Rocks, October 2, 2018.

44. “Taiwan Says It Will Fight to the End if Attacked as China Sends More Jets,” The Guardian, April 7, 2021; Yimou Lee, “Taiwan’s Special Defence Budget to Go Mostly on Anti-Ship Capabilities,” Reuters, October 5, 2021.

45. Michael Crowley, “Biden Backs Taiwan, but Some Call for Clearer Warning to China,” New York Times, April 8, 2021.

46. Felix Chang, “The Ryukyu Defense Line: Japan’s Response to China’s Naval Push into the Pacific Ocean,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, February 8, 2021; Ken Moriyasu, “U.S. Eyes Using Japan’s Submarines to ‘Choke’ Chinese Navy,” Nikkei Asia, May 5, 2021; Makiko Inoue and Ben Dooley, “Japan Approves Major Hike in Military Spending, with Taiwan in Mind,” New York Times, December 23, 2021.

47. Mark Episkopos, “Japan Is Investing Big in Its F-35 Stealth Fighter Fleet,” National Interest, May 6, 2021.

48. Dzirhan Mahadzir, “U.S. Marine F-35Bs to Embark on Japan’s Largest Warship,” USNI News, September 30, 2021.

49. “Japan, U.S. Defence Chiefs Affirm Cooperation on Taiwan: Kyodo,” Reuters, March 21, 2021; “Japan Deputy PM Comment on Defending Taiwan if Invaded Angers China,” Reuters, July 6, 2021; “U.S. and Japan Draw Up Joint Military Plan in Case of Taiwan Emergency,” Reuters, December 24, 2021.

50. Birch T. Tan, “Understanding Vietnam’s Military Modernization Efforts,” The Diplomat, November 25, 2020.

51. Michael Beckley, “The Emerging Military Balance in East Asia: How China’s Neighbors Can Check Chinese Naval Expansion,” International Security, 42, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 78–119.

52. H.B. discussion with senior U.S. naval official, January 2018.

53. Jon Grevatt, “Indonesia Announces Strong Increase in 2021 Defence Budget,” Janes, August 18, 2020.

54. Koya Jibiki, “Indonesia Looks to Triple Submarine Fleet After Chinese Incursions,” Nikkei Asia, May 30, 2021.

55. Joel Gehrke, “Philippines’s Duterte Rebukes Top Diplomat for Profanity-Laced Message to China: ‘Only the President Can Curse,’ ” Washington Examiner, May 4, 2021.

56. “Philippines Beefs Up Military Muscle in Wake of Alleged Chinese Aggression in South China Sea,” ABC News, April 21, 2021.

57. Bill Hayton, “Pompeo Draws a Line Against Beijing in the South China Sea,” Foreign Policy, July 15, 2020.

58. Keith Johnson, “Australia Draws a Line on China,” Foreign Policy, May 4, 2021.

59. “ ‘Inconceivable’ Australia Would Not Join U.S. to Defend Taiwan,” Reuters, November 13, 2011.

60. William Mauldin, “India’s Narendra Modi Emphasizes Security Ties in Address to Congress,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016.

61. Abishek Bhalla, “Indian Navy Ends Jam-Packed Year with Vietnamese Navy in South China Sea,” India Today, December 27, 2020; “Anti-Ship Version of Supersonic Cruise Missile Testfired from Andaman Nicobar Islands,” New Indian Express, December 1, 2020; Tanvi Madan, “Not Your Mother’s Cold War: India’s Options in U.S.-China Competition,” Washington Quarterly, Winter 2021.

62. Giannis Seferiadis, “EU Hopes for Tech Alliance with Biden After Trump Huawei 5G Ban,” Nikkei Asia, January 12, 2021.

63. Abhijnan Rej, “France-led Multination Naval Exercise Commences in Eastern Indian Ocean,” The Diplomat, April 5, 2021; Antoine Bondaz and Bruno Tertrais, “Europe Can Play a Role in a Conflict Over Taiwan. Will It?” World Politics Review, March 23, 2021; Josh Rogin, “China Is Testing the West. We Shouldn’t Back Down,” Washington Post, December 23, 2021.

64. Li Jingkun, “Xi Jinping’s U.K. Visit Rings in a Golden Age of Bilateral Ties,” China Today, November 10, 2015; Lionel Barber, “Boris Johnson’s ‘Global Britain Tilts toward Asia,’ ” Nikkei Asia, March 23, 2021.

65. Dalibor Rohac, “The Czechs are Giving Europe a Lesson on How to Deal with China,” Washington Post, September 3, 2020.

66. “Canada Launches 58-Nation Initiative to Stop Arbitrary Detentions,” Reuters, February 15, 2021.

67. Luke Patey, How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Vincent Ni, “EU Efforts to Ratify China Investment Deal ‘Suspended’ after Sanctions,” The Guardian, May 4, 2021.

68. William Pesek, “Singapore’s Trade-War Worries Bad for Everyone,” Asia Times, October 4, 2019.

69. For instance, Mitsuru Obe, “Decoupling Denied: Japan Inc Lays Its Bets on China,” Financial Times, February 16, 2021.

70. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and David Shullman, “China and Russia’s Dangerous Convergence: How to Counter an Emerging Partnership,” Foreign Affairs, May 3, 2021; Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery, “One War Is Not Enough: Strategy and Force Planning for Great-Power Competition,” Texas National Security Review, 3, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 80–92.

71. This paragraph, and the “no limits” quote in the previous paragraph, draws on Hal Brands, “The Eurasian Nightmare: Chinese-Russian Convergence and the Future of American Order,” Foreign Affairs, February 25, 2022.

72. We are indebted to Peter Feaver for this insight.

73. Reid Standish, “China in Eurasia Briefing: How Far Will Beijing Go in Backing Putin?” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 2, 2022.

74. On these ideas, see Jared Cohen and Richard Fontaine, “Uniting the Techno-Democracies: How to Build Digital Cooperation,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020; Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “The Great Game with China is 3D Chess,” Foreign Policy, December 30, 2020; Steve Holland and Guy Faulconbridge, “G7 Rivals China with Grand Infrastructure Plan,” Reuters, June 13, 2021.

75. “GDP Per Capita (current US$),” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD, accessed May 2021.

76. Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 34.

77. “Top China Generals Urge More Spending for U.S. Conflict ‘Trap,’ ” Bloomberg News, March 9, 2021.

78. “Has the Wind Changed? PLA Hawks General Dai Xu and General Qiao Liang Release Odd Articles,” GNews, July 11, 2020, https://gnews.org/257994/; for slightly different translations, see “Xi’s Intellectual Warriors Are Outgunning ‘Realists’ of Deng Xiaoping Era,” Business Standard, August 19, 2020; Dai Xu, “14 Misjudgments.”

79. Minnie Chan, “ ‘Too Costly’: Chinese Military Strategist Warns Now Is Not the Time to Take Back Taiwan by Force,” South China Morning Post, May 4, 2020.

80. Katsuji Nakazawa, “Analysis: China’s ‘Wolf Warriors’ Take Aim at G-7,” Nikkei Asia, May 13, 2021.

81. Steven Lee Myers and Amy Qin, “Why Biden Seems Worse to China than Trump,” New York Times, July 20, 2021.

82. Amanda Kerrigan, “Views from the People’s Republic of China on U.S.-China Relations Since the Beginning of the Biden Administration,” Center for Naval Analyses, September 2021.

83. Richard McGregor, “Beijing Hard-Liners Kick Against Xi Jinping’s Wolf Warrior Diplomacy,” Lowy Institute, July 28, 2020.

4. Danger: Falling Powers

1. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 209.

2. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), xxxii.

3. Marc Trachtenberg, “A Wasting Asset: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,” International Security, 13, no. 3 (Winter 1988–89): 41.

4. Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 172.

5. Robert Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 65.

6. Jack S. Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,” World Politics, 40, no. 1 (October 1987), 83; A.F.K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968).

7. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); Robert Strassler, ed., Landmark Thucydides, 16.

8. Gideon Rachman, “Year in a Word: Thucydides’ Trap,” Financial Times, December 19, 2018.

9. Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Anchor, 1996), 44; Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969).

10. For the data underlying this section as well as a longer description of selection criteria and specific cases, see Michael Beckley, “When Fast-Growing Great Powers Slow Down: Historical Evidence and Implications for China,” National Bureau of Asian Research, January 2021.

11. There is a parallel to the famous J-curve theory of revolution, which holds that revolts tend to occur not after decades of misery, but when an economic slowdown follows a sustained expansion. James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review, 27, no. 1 (February 1962): 5–19.

12. John Chipman, French Power in Africa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Pierre Lellouche and Dominique Moisi, “French Policy in Africa: A Lonely Battle Against Destabilization,” International Security, 3, no. 4 (Spring 1979): 108–133; Andrew Hansen, “The French Military in Africa,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 8, 2008.

13. Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York: Norton, 1997), 366; Jennifer Lind, “Pacifism or Passing the Buck? Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy,” International Security, 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 92–121.

14. David O. Whitten, “The Depression of 1893,” EH.net, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-depression-of-1893/; Charles Hoffman, “The Depression of the Nineties,” Journal of Economic History (June 1956): 137–164.

15. David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 27.

16. Marc-William Palen, “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890–1913,” Diplomatic History, 39, no. 1 (January 2015): 157–185.

17. Benjamin O. Fordham, “Protectionist Empire: Trade, Tariffs, and United States Foreign Policy, 1890–1914,” Studies in American Political Development, 31, no. 2 (October 2017): 170–192.

18. Healy, U.S. Expansionism, 176; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); Kevin Narizny, The Political Economy of Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), chaps. 2–4.

19. See Patrick McDonald, The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, the War Machine, and International Relations Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kent E. Calder, Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

20. Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 205.

21. Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21, 24.

22. Dale Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 108; Brian Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69; Stephen Anthony Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 18.

23. The following paragraphs draw on Beckley, “When Fast-Growing Great Powers Slow Down.”

24. Valerie Bunce and Aida Hozic, “Diffusion-Proofing and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” Demokratizatsiya 24, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 435–446.

25. Anders Aslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 240; Kathryn Stoner, Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

26. E. Wayne Merry, “The Origins of Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Clash of Russian and European Civilization Choices for Ukraine,” in Elizabeth A. Wood, William E. Pomeranz, E. Wayne Merry, and Maxim Trudolyubov, eds., Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), ch. 1.

27. Elias Gotz, “It’s Geopolitics, Stupid: Explaining Russia’s Ukraine Policy,” Global Affairs, 1, no. 1 (2015): 3–10.

28. Samuel Charap and Timothy J. Colton, Everyon Loss: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (New York: Routledge, 2017).

29. Christopher Miller, Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018): 140–145; Daniel Treisman, “Why Putin Took Crimea: The Gambler in the Kremlin,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016; Gotz, “It’s the Geopolitics, Stupid.”

30. Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War, chaps. 4–5; Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008).

31. Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–14; Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 464; Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, xxvii; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003), table 1b, 48–49.

32. David Calleo, The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and the World Order, 1870 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

33. This was why Bismarck considered the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871 to have been a mistake—it ensured lasting French enmity.

34. Charles Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 370.

35. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 372–402; Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967); “Bernhard von Bulow on Germany’s ‘Place in the Sun,’ ” 1897, https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=783.

36. Eyre Crowe, “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany,” January 1, 1907, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memorandum_on_the_Present_State_of_British_Relations_with_France_and_Germany.

37. Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 420.

38. Immanuel Geiss, German Foreign Policy 1871–1914, Vol. IX (London: Routledge, 1976), 121.

39. Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 55.

40. Copeland, Economic Interdependence, 125.

41. Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 33; Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 403–482.

42. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 213–214.

43. Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke; Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” International Security, 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 108–146.

44. Dale Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 70; Allison, Destined for War, 80–81; Hew Strachan, The First World War: Volume I: To Arms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

45. Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security, 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 81.

46. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 5–14.

47. Copeland, Economic Interdependence, esp. 126–131; Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New York: Vintage, 2013), 12.

48. Volker Berghahn, Imperial Germany: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 266.

49. Van Evera, “Cult of the Offensive,” 69, 66, 68; Fischer, Germany’s Aims.

50. See Annika Mombauer, Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16.

51. Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Holl-weg’s Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Central European History, 2, no. 1 (March 1969): 58.

52. Mombauer, Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents, 459; Copeland, Origins of Major War, 79–117; Immanuel Geiss, “The Outbreak of the First World War and German War Aims,” Journal of Contemporary History, 1, no. 3 (July 1966): 75–91.

53. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 81.

54. Jarausch, “Illusion of Limited War,” 48.

55. Jack Snyder, “Better Now than Later: The Paradox of 1914 as Everyone’s Favored Year for War,” International Security, 39, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 71.

56. G.C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modern Japan, 1867–1937 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), 91.

57. Kenneth Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 163.

58. LaFeber, The Clash, 148; Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (New York: Routledge, 1987).

59. Masato Shizume, “The Japanese Economy During the Interwar Period: Instability in the Financial System and the Impact of the World Depression,” Bank of Japan Review, May 2009, chart 1.

60. Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War, 6.

61. Nobuya Bamba, Japanese Diplomacy in a Dilemma: New Light on Japan’s China Policy, 1924–1929 (Ontario: UBC Press, 2002), 56, 62.

62. Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper, 2001), 227.

63. Akira Iriye, “The Failure of Economic Expansion: 1918–1931,” in Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy, ed. Bernard Silberman and H.D. Harootunian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 265.

64. S.C.M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 110–113.

65. Christopher Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League, and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931–1933 (London: Macmillan, 1972), 32; Michael Green, By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia-Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 152.

66. James Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 208; Michael Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

67. Kenneth Colegrove, “The New Order in East Asia,” Far Eastern Quarterly, 1, no. 1 (November 1941): 6.

68. Green, By More than Providence, 156.

69. See esp. Bix, Hirohito, 308; Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy, 286–290; J.W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139.

70. Pyle, Japan Rising, 176.

71. Bix, Hirohito, 374; Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (New York: Vintage, 2013), esp. 23–57.

72. S.C.M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 185.

73. Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, 91–114.

74. Pyle, Japan Rising, 192.

75. See esp. Iriye, Origins of the Second World War; also Robert Dallek, Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013).

76. Jonathan Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 16.

77. Dallek, Franklin Roosevelt, passim; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 10; Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 260.

78. Paine, Japanese Empire, 153; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, 162–262.

79. Jeffrey Record, Japan’s Decision for War in 1941: Some Enduring Lessons (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2009), 25.

80. Ernst Presseisen, Germany and Japan: A Study in Totalitarian Diplomacy, 1933–1941 (The Hague: Springer, 1958), 241–243.

81. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 183.

82. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 182; Scott Sagan, “The Origins of the Pacific War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 903–908.

83. Paine, Japanese Empire, 148–149; Bix, Hirohito, 400, 406–407; LaFeber, The Clash, 197–200; Hosoya Chihiro, “Britain and the United States in Japan’s View of the International System, 1937–1941,” in Anglo-Japanese Alienation, 1919–1952, ed. Ian Nish (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

84. Sagan, “Origins,” 912.

85. Ikuhiko Hata, “Admiral Yamamoto’s Surprise Attack and the Japanese Navy’s War Strategy,” in From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941–45, ed. Saki Dockrill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 65.

86. Hotta, Japan 1941, 201.

87. Sagan, “Origins,” 893.

88. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Penguin, 2014), 3.

5. The Gathering Storm

1. John Feng, “China’s Xi Jinping Says Soon No Enemy Will Be Able to Defeat the Country,” Newsweek, May 6, 2021.

2. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Internal Security & Grand Strategy: China’s Approach to National Security Under Xi Jinping,” Statement before the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission, January 2021.

3. Xi Jinping, “National Security Matter of Prime Importance,” Xinhua, April 15, 2014, http://www.xinhuanet.com//politics/2014-04/15/c_1110253910.htm.

4. Xi Jinping, “Safeguard National Security and Social Stability,” Qiushi, April 25, 2014, http://en.qstheory.cn/2020-12/07/c_607612.htm.

5. Xi, “Safeguard National Security and Social Stability.”

6. Alastair Iain Johnston, “China’s Contribution to the U.S.-China Security Dilemma,” in After Engagement: Dilemmas in U.S.-China Security Relations, ed. Jacques Delisle and Avery Goldstein (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2021), 92–97.

7. “The CCP Central Committee-Formulated Proposal for the 14th Five-Year National Economic and Social Development Plan, and 2035 Long-Term Goals,” Xinhua, http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-10/29/c_1126674147.htm.

8. Jude Blanchette, “Ideological Security as National Security,” CSIS, December 2, 2020.

9. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Preventive Repression: Internal Security & Grand Strategy in China Under Xi Jinping, unpublished manuscript, 2021.

10. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Counterterrorism and Preventive Repression: China’s Changing Strategy in Xinjiang,” International Security, 44, no. 3 (Winter 2019–20): 9–47.

11. This paragraph and the phrase “Lenin trap” draw from Walter Russell Mead, “Imperialism Will Be Dangerous for China,” Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2018.

12. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books, 2020).

13. Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch, “China’s Overseas Lending,” NBER Working Paper 26050 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2019).

14. Daniel H. Rosen, “China’s Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021.

15. See Luke Patey, How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

16. James Crabtree, “China’s Radical New Vision of Globalization,” NOEMA, December 10, 2020; “China’s “Dual-Circulation” Strategy Means Relying Less on Foreigners,” The Economist, November 7, 2020.

17. Andrew Rennemo, “How China Joined the Sanctions Game,” The Diplomat, February 8, 2021.

18. Matt Pottinger, Testimony Before the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, April 15, 2021, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/Matt_Pottinger_Testimony.pdf.

19. “Time Holds the Key to 6G,” NewElectronics, December 14, 2020, https://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-technology/time-holds-the-key-to-6g/232997/.

20. Michael Brown, Eric Chewning, and Pavneet Singh, “Preparing the United States for the Superpower Marathon with China,” Brookings Institution, April 2020.

21. Chris Miller, “America Is Going to Decapitate Huawei,” New York Times, September 15, 2020.

22. Richard Aboulafia, “China’s Potemkin Aviation Can’t Survive Without Washington’s Help,” Foreign Policy, February 16, 2021.

23. Julian Gewirtz, “The Chinese Reassessment of Interdependence,” China Leadership Monitor, June 1, 2020.

24. Nina Xiang, “Foreign Dependence the Achilles’ Heel in China’s Giant Tech Sector,” Nikkei Asia, January 31, 2021.

25. Gewirtz, “Chinese Reassessment.”

26. Paul Mozur and Steven Lee Meyers, “Xi’s Gambit: China Plans for a World Without American Technology,” New York Times, March 20, 2021.

27. Mozur and Meyers, “Xi’s Gambit.”

28. Lingling Wei, “China’s New Power Play: More Control of Tech Companies’ Troves of Data,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2021; Emily Weinstein, “Don’t Underestimate China’s Military-Civil Fusion Efforts,” Foreign Policy, February 5, 2021.

29. Matt Pottinger and David Feith, “The Most Powerful Data Broker in the World Is Winning the War Against the U.S.,” New York Times, November 30, 2021; also Jonathan Hillman, “China Is Watching You,” The Atlantic, October 18, 2021.

30. Catherine Clifford, “Google CEO: A.I. Is More Important than Fire or Electricity,” CNBC.com, February 1, 2018.

31. Hal Brands, “China’s Lead in the AI War Won’t Last Forever,” Bloomberg Opinion, November 12, 2019; “Artificial Intelligence,” Accenture, https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/artificial-intelligence-summary-index; Jim Garamone, “Esper Says Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Battlefield,” DOD News, September 9, 2020.

32. Gregory Allen, “Understanding China’s AI Strategy: Clues to Chinese Strategic Thinking on Artificial Intelligence and National Security,” Center for a New American Security, February 2019.

33. Jonathan Hillman, The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future (New York: Harper Business, 2021).

34. Henry Ridgwell, “U.S. Warns Information-Sharing at Risk as Britain Approves Huawei 5G Rollout,” Voice of America, January 29, 2020.

35. Hillman, Digital Silk Road, esp. 2–3; also Abigail Opiah, “China Mobile International Launches First European Data Centre,” Capacity, December 20, 2019; Max Bearak, “In Strategic Djibouti, a Microcosm of China’s Growing Foothold in Africa,” Washington Post, December 30, 2019; Jonathan Hillman and Maesea McCalpin, “Huawei’s Global Cloud Strategy,” Reconnecting Asia, May 17, 2021.

36. Hillman, Digital Silk Road, 2–3.

37. Valentina Pop, Sha Hua, and Daniel Michaels, “From Lightbulbs to 5G, China Battles West for Control of Vital Technology Standards,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2021.

38. Quoted in Pop, Hua, and Michaels, “From Lightbulbs to 5G.”

39. Will Hunt, Saif M. Khan, and Dahlia Peterson, “China’s Progress in Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment: Accelerants and Policy Implications,” CSET Policy Brief, March 2021.

40. Derek Scissors, Dan Blumenthal, and Linda Zhang, “The U.S.-China Global Vaccine Competition,” American Enterprise Institute, February 2021.

41. See Tim Culpan, “China Isn’t the AI Juggernaut the West Fears,” Bloomberg Opinion, October 11, 2021.

42. Varieties of Democracy Project, 2019, version 9, https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemcy19.

43. John Garver, China’s Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 479.

44. World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” GDP Per Capita Growth Rate, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators, accessed August 10, 2021.

45. Quoted in George J. Church, “China: Old Wounds Deng Xiaoping,” Time, January 6, 1986.

46. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). For data, see the Mass Mobilization Project, https://massmobilization.github.io.

47. M.E. Sarotte, “China’s Fear of Contagion: Tiananmen Square and the Power of the European Example,” International Security, 37, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 156–182; Karrie J. Koesel and Valerie J. Bunce, “Diffusion-Proofing: Russian and Chinese Responses to Waves of Popular Mobilizations Against Authoritarian Rulers,” Perspectives on Politics, 11, no. 3 (September 2013): 753–768.

48. Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, “The Long Arm of the Strongman: How China and Russia Use Sharp Power to Threaten Democracies,” Foreign Affairs, May 12, 2021.

49. Elizabeth C. Economy, “Exporting the China Model,” Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing on The “China Model,” March 13, 2020.

50. Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy Under Seige (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2021).

51. Robert Kagan, “The Strongmen Strike Back,” Washington Post, March 14, 2019.

52. See Yaroslav Trofimov, Drew Henshaw, and Kate O’Keeffe, “How China Is Taking over International Organizations, One Vote at a Time,” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2020.

53. Hal Brands, “How Far Will China’s Surveillance State Stretch?” Bloomberg Opinion, August 12, 2020; Jonathan Kearsley, Eryk Bagshaw, and Anthony Galloway, “ ‘If You Make China the Enemy, China Will Be the Enemy’: Beijing’s Fresh Threat to Australia,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 18, 2020.

54. See the articles in the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Democracy collectively titled “The Road to Digital Unfreedom”; Richard Fontaine and Kara Frederick, “The Autocrat’s New Toolkit,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2019.

55. Tiberiu Dragu and Yonatan Lupu, “Digital Authoritarianism and the Future of Human Rights,” International Organization, 75, no. 4 (February 2021): 991–1017.

56. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports,” Global China, Brookings Institution, April 2020.

57. Alina Polyakova and Chris Meserole, “Exporting Digital Authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese Models,” Brookings Institution Policy Brief, August 2019.

58. Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright, “The Digital Dictators: How Technology Strengthens Autocracy,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.

59. Ross Andersen, “The Panopticon Is Already Here,” The Atlantic, September 2020.

60. Jessica Chen Weiss, “A World Safe for Autocracy? China’s Rise and the Future of Global Politics,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019.

61. “Democracy Under Siege,” Freedom House, 2021, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege.

62. Michael J. Mazarr, Abigail Casey, Alyssa Demus, et al., Hostile Social Manipulation (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019); Jeff Kao, “How China Built a Twitter Propaganda Machine Then Let It Loose on Coronavirus,” ProPublica, March 26, 2020.

63. Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf, 2008).

64. As Franklin Roosevelt warned in his 1940 State of the Union Address.

65. Zheng Bijian, “China’s Peaceful Rise to Great Power Status,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005.

66. For two of many examples, see Thomas J. Christensen, “Windows and War: Trend Analysis and Beijing’s Use of Force,” in New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy, ed. Robert S. Ross and Alastair Iain Johnston (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), chap. 3; M. Taylor Fravel, “Power Shifts and Escalation: Explaining China’s Use of Force in Territorial Disputes,” International Security, 32, no. 3 (Winter 2007–2008): 44–83.

67. Michael Peck, “Slaughter in the East China Sea,“ Foreign Policy, August 7, 2020.

68. Helene Cooper, “Patrolling Disputed Waters, U.S. and China Jockey for Dominance,” New York Times, March 30, 2016.

69. Paul V. Kane, “To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan,” New York Times, November 10, 2011.

70. Michael O’Hanlon, “Why China Cannot Conquer Taiwan,” International Security, 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 51–86.

71. Thomas Shugart, First Strike: China’s Missile Threat to U.S. Bases in Asia (Washington, DC: Center for A New American Security, 2017).

72. Michael Beckley, “China Keeps Inching Closer to Taiwan,” Foreign Policy, October 19, 2020.

73. Samson Ellis and Cindy Wang, “Taiwan Warns China Could ‘Paralyze’ Island’s Defenses in Conflict,” Bloomberg, September 1, 2021.

74. Thomas H. Shugart III, “Trends, Timelines, and Uncertainty: An Assessment of the State of Cross-Strait Deterrence,” Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, February 18, 2021.

75. Mackenzie Eaglen and Hallie Coyne, “The 2020s Tri-Service Modernization Crunch,” American Enterprise Institute, March 2021.

76. Sydney Freedberg, “U.S. ‘Gets Its Ass Handed to It’ in Wargames: Here’s a $24 Billion Fix,” Breaking Defense, March 7, 2019.

77. Oriana Mastro, “The Taiwan Temptation: Why Beijing Might Resort to Force,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021, 61.

78. Mastro, “The Taiwan Temptation.”

79. Xi Jinping, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” Delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, October 18, 2017.

80. Gabriel Collins and Andrew S. Erickson, U.S.-China Competition Enters the Decade of Maximum Danger: Policy Ideas to Avoid Losing the 2020s (Houston: Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, 2021), 35.

81. “A Conversation with US Indo-Pacific Command’s Adm. Philip Davidson,” American Enterprise Institute, March 4, 2021, https://www.aei.org/events/a-conversation-with-us-indo-pacific-commands-adm-philip-davidson/.

82. Alison Kaufman and Daniel Hartnett, “Managing Conflict: Examining Recent PLA Writings on Escalation Control,” CNA China Studies, February 2016, 68. For an example, see Guangqian Peng and Youzhi Yao, eds., The Science of Military Strategy (Beijing: Military Science Publishing House, 2005), 327.

83. Tara Copp, “ ‘It Failed Miserably’: After Wargaming Loss, Joint Chiefs Are Overhauling How the U.S. Military Will Fight,” Defense One, July 26, 2021.

84. Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery, “One War Is Not Enough: Strategy and Force Planning for Great-Power Competition,” Texas National Security Review, 3, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 80–92.

85. Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission, U.S. Institute for Peace, November 2018, 14. The members of this commission included several high-level appointees in the Biden administration. One of the authors of this book (Brands) was the lead author of the report.

86. The phrase is adapted from Eaglen and Coyne, “2020s Tri-Service Modernization Crunch.”

6. What One Cold War Can Teach Us About Another

1. Benn Steil, Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 15.

2. Editorial Note, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. III: Document No. 133 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian). Hereafter cited as FRUS, followed by year, volume, and document number.

3. PPS-1, “Policy with Respect to American Aid to Western Europe,” May 23, 1947, Box 7, Charles Bohlen Papers, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD; also John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 264–270.

4. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 239.

5. For this reason, the Soviet Union doesn’t technically qualify for inclusion in the set of cases presented in chapter 4. But as this chapter shows, there are still strong parallels between the problems the Soviet Union presented for America in the early Cold War and the strategic dilemmas a bellicose, insecure China creates today.

6. Office of Strategic Services, “Problems and Objectives of United States Policy,” April 12, 1945, Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS).

7. Kennan to Secretary of State, February 22, 1946, FRUS, 1946, Vol. I: Document No. 475.

8. X (Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, 566–582.

9. Harry S. Truman’s Statement, February 6, 1946, American Presidency Project (APP), University of California–Santa Barbara.

10. Robert Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 151; Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 7.

11. Hal Brands, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 16; Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 87–90, 96–99.

12. PPS 33, “Factors Affecting the Nature of the U.S. Defense Arrangements in the Light of Soviet Policies,” June 23, 1948, State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, Vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1983), 289.

13. Samuel F. Wells, Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 251.

14. Memorandum for the Record, January 24, 1951, in FRUS, 1951, Vol. I: Document No. 7; Marc Trachtenberg, “A Wasting Asset: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,” International Security, 13, no. 3 (Winter 1988–89): 5–49.

15. Harry S. Truman, Farewell Address, January 15, 1953, APP.

16. “President Harry S. Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress,” March 12, 1947, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.

17. Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 124–128.

18. Harry S. Truman, Address, September 2, 1947, APP.

19. Harry S. Truman’s News Conference, January 29, 1948, APP; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), chaps. 2–3.

20. PPS-13, “Resumé of World Situation,” November 6, 1947, FRUS, 1947, Vol. I: Document No. 393.

21. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 199.

22. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 112.

23. See Forrest Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesmen, 1945–1959 (New York: Penguin, 1989), 334.

24. Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 37–41; Shu Guang Zhang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Confrontations, 1949–1958 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 40–42.

25. Michael Schaller, “Securing the Great Crescent: Occupied Japan and the Origins of Containment in Southeast Asia,” Journal of American History, 69, no. 2 (September 1982): 392–414.

26. Bruce to State, June 26, 1950, FRUS, 1950, Vol. II: Document No. 99; William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), passim, esp. 30–36.

27. Irwin Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 195.

28. Memorandum of Conversation, January 8, 1952, Box 99, President’s Secretary’s File, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 406–418.

29. Marshall in James Forrestal Diary, November 7, 1947, Box 147, James Forrestal Papers, Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library (SMML), Princeton University.

30. George Kennan, “Planning of Foreign Policy,” June 18, 1947, Box 298, Kennan Papers, SMML.

31. Gaddis, George F. Kennan, 254–255; Joseph Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, February 21–June 5, 1947 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964); Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), 212–225.

32. Dunn to Secretary, February 7, 1948, FRUS, 1948, Vol. III: Document No. 511; Dunn to Secretary, June 16, 1948, FRUS, 1948, Vol. III: Document No. 543; Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

33. Because the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, no treaty can commit the United States to use force automatically. The North Atlantic Treaty did the next best thing. The operative text states: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and that each country will respond with “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”

34. “Meeting of the Secretary of Defense and the Service Chiefs with the Secretary of State 1045 Hours,” October 10, 1948, Box 147, Forrestal Papers, SMML.

35. Michael Lind, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107.

36. Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Robert Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

37. CIA, “Threats to the Security of the United States,” September 28, 1948, CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (CIA FOIA).

38. “The World Position and Problems of the United States,” August 30, 1949, Box 299, Kennan Papers, SMML.

39. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, “Almost Successful Recipe: The United States and East European Unrest Prior to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,” February 2012, Electronic Briefing Book 581, National Security Archive; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

40. NSC-68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” April 12, 1950, President’s Secretary’s Files (PSF), HSTL; “Statement by the President on the Situation in Korea,” June 27, 1950, APP.

41. Trachtenberg, “Wasting Asset,” 21.

42. “Estimated U.S. and Soviet/Russian Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–94,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1994, 59; Allan Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 2012), 467–491.

43. Memorandum for the President, August 25, 1950, Box 187, National Security Council Files, Truman Library.

44. Quoted in Julian Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 102.

45. Report on “Soviet Intentions” Prepared by Joint Intelligence Committee, April 1, 1948, FRUS, 1948, Vol. I, Part 2: Document No. 14.

46. NIE-17, “Probable Soviet Reactions to a Remilitarization of Western Germany,” December 27, 1950, CIA FOIA.

47. Radio Report to the American People, April 11, 1951, APP; also Douglas to Lovett, April 17, 1948, FRUS, 1948, Vol. III: Document No. 73.

48. Stueck, Korean War, 205–206.

49. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 156; Dean Acheson, “Soviet Reaction to Free World’s Growing Strength,” Department of State Bulletin, October 20, 1952, 597.

50. Ambassador in France (Caffery) to Secretary of State, July 3, 1947, FRUS, 1947, Vol. III: Document No. 182.

51. Eisenhower to Harriman, December 14, 1951, Box 278, Averill Harriman Papers, Library of Congress; Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, chap. 4.

52. NSC 135/3, “Reappraisal of United States Objectives and Strategy for National Security,” September 25, 1952, Box 169, National Security Council File, Truman Library.

53. Table 3.1, “Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940–2024,” in Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, 50–51, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/hist-fy2020.pdf; Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

54. NSC Meeting, December 21, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. II, Part 1: Document No. 143; Mira Rapp-Hooper, Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

55. Giovanni Arrighi, “The World Economy and the Cold War, 1970–1990,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, ed. Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 28.

56. Table 3.1, “Outlays by Superfunction and Function,” 51–52; Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). This was true even during the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, when defense spending hovered around 6 percent of GNP.

57. See John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

58. Herbert Meyer to William Casey, “What Should We Do About the Russians?” June 28, 1984, CIA FOIA.

59. On the 1970s and 1980s, see Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

60. Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (New York: Knopf, 2018), 68–69.

7. Into the Danger Zone

1. H.B. discussion with U.S. official, May 2021.

2. David Lynch, “Biden Orders Sweeping Review of U.S. Supply Chain Weak Spots,” Washington Post, February 24, 2021; Carla Babb, “Pentagon Launches Effort to Better Address China Challenge,” Voice of America, June 9, 2021.

3. Uri Friedman, “The New Concept Everyone in Washington is Talking About,” The Atlantic, August 6, 2019.

4. “Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference,” March 25, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/03/25/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference/.

5. See Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, “America Needs to Rediscover Strategic MacGyverism,” National Interest, March 27, 2021.

6. Bruce A. Bimber and Steven W. Popper, What Is a Critical Technology? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1994).

7. George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

8. Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security, 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001): 35.

9. For example, the United States applies a 25 percent tariff to American chips that are assembled, tested, and packaged (ATP) in China and exported back to the United States. These tariffs harm U.S. chipmakers such as Intel, even though low-value-added ATP activities in China pose little risk of technology transfer. Meanwhile, Chinese chipmakers export few chips to the United States, so they are less affected by these tariffs.

10. See Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden, “Maybe It Won’t Be So Bad: A Modestly Optimistic Take on COVID and World Order,” in COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation, ed. Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), chap. 16.

11. Melissa Flagg, “Global R&D and a New Era of Alliances,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, June 2020, https://cset.georgetown.edu/research/global-rd-and-a-new-era-of-alliances/.

12. A point also made by Aaron Friedberg, “An Answer to Aggression: How to Push Back Against Beijing,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020.

13. Daniel Kliman, Ben Fitzgerald, Kristine Lee, and Joshua Fitt, “Forging an Alliance Innovation Base,” Center for a New American Security, March 29, 2020.

14. On this point, see Derek Scissors, “The Most Important Number for China Policy,” AEIdeas, January 3, 2022.

15. For a list of critical technologies, see Emma Rafaelof, “Unfinished Business: Export Control and Foreign Investment Reforms,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Issue Brief, June 1, 2021.

16. Rob Schmitz, “U.S. Pressures Europe to Find Alternatives to Huawei,” NPR.org, February 15, 2020.

17. Stu Woo and Alexandra Wexler, “U.S.-China Tech Fight Opens New Front in Ethiopia,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2021.

18. Brarini Chakraborty, “China Hints at Denying America Life-saving Coronavirus Drugs,” Fox News, March 13, 2020.

19. Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, The Crisis of American Power: How Europeans See Biden’s America (Berlin: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2021).

20. “Mapping the Future of U.S. China Policy,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://chinasurvey.csis.org, accessed August 2021.

21. James A. Lewis, Testimony Before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, “5G Supply Chain Security: Threats and Solutions,” March 4, 2020.

22. The statistics in this paragraph come from Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), chap. 3.

23. Chris Miller, “Weaponizing Advanced Technology: The Lithography Industry and America’s Assault on Huawei,” paper prepared for the America in the World Consortium, June 2021.

24. Miller, “Weaponizing Advanced Technology.”

25. Derek Scissors, “Partial Decoupling from China: A Brief Guide,” American Enterprise Institute, July 2020.

26. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “China: The Risk to Academia,” July 2019.

27. U.S. Cyber Command, for instance, has adopted this approach in protecting American networks. See Erica Borghard, “Operationalizing Defend Forward: How the Concept Works to Change Adversary Behavior,” Lawfare, March 12, 2020.

28. See Thomas Wright, “Joe Biden Worries that China Might Win,” The Atlantic, June 9, 2021; Jacob Helberg, The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).

29. This paragraph draws on Hal Brands and Charles Edel, “A Grand Strategy of Democratic Solidarity,” Washington Quarterly, March 2021.

30. Tim Hwang, “Shaping the Terrain of AI Competition,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, June 2020.

31. See, on the latter point, Derek Scissors, “Limits Are Overdue in the U.S.-China Technology Relationship,” Statement to Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, March 4, 2020.

32. Daphne Psaledakis and Simon Lewis, “U.S. Will Not Leave Australia Alone to Face China Coercion—Blinken,” Reuters, May 13, 2021.

33. Richard A. Clarke and Rob Knake, “The Internet Freedom League: How to Push Back Against the Authoritarian Assault on the Web,” Foreign Affairs, August 12, 2019.

34. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), xvii.

35. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Digital Economy Report 2019: Value Creation and Capture: Implications for Developing Countries (New York: United Nations Publishing, 2019), 2.

36. Tom Wheeler, Time for a U.S.—EU Digital Alliance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2021).

37. Jonathan Hillman, The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future (New York: Harper Business, 2021), 226–233. On the concept of “swing states,” see Richard Fontaine and Daniel Kliman, “International Order and Global Swing States,” Washington Quarterly, Winter 2013.

38. Hillman, Digital Silk Road, 228.

39. “Chinese Smartphone Brands Expanded India Market Share in 2020,” Reuters, January 27, 2021.

40. James Rogers, Andrew Foxall, Matthew Henderson, and Sam Armstrong, Breaking the China Supply Chain: How the “Five Eyes” Can Decouple from Strategic Dependency (London: The Henry Jackson Society, 2020), 26.

41. Rajesh Roy, “India Offers $1 Billion in Perks to Entice Computer Makers from China,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2021.

42. Rush Doshi, “Taiwan’s Election Is a Test Run for Beijing’s Worldwide Propaganda Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, January 9, 2020.

43. Michael Crowley, “Biden Backs Taiwan, but Some Call for a Clearer Warning to China,” New York Times, April 8, 2021.

44. Michael Mazza, “Shoot It Straight on Taiwan,” War on the Rocks, August 3, 2021.

45. See, for instance, Eric Sayers and Abe Denmark, “Countering China’s Military Challenge, Today,” Defense One, April 20, 2021.

46. Michael A. Hunzeker, “Taiwan’s Defense Plans Are Going Off the Rails,” War on the Rocks, November 18, 2021.

47. Captain R. Robinson Harris, U.S. Navy (Ret.), Andrew Kerr, Kenneth Adams, et al., “Converting Merchant Ships to Missile Ships for the Win,” Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute), January 2019.

48. On the basic asymmetry, see Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great-Power Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

49. Sulmann Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Burgess Laird, “War Control: Chinese Writings on the Control of Escalation in Crisis and Conflict,” Center for a New American Security, 2017; Alison Kaufman and Daniel Hartnett, “Managing Conflict: Examining Recent PLA Writings on Escalation Control,” Center for Naval Analysis, 2016.

50. Jeffrey Engstrom, Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).

51. Chris Dougherty, More than Half the Battle: Information and Command in a New American Way of War, Center for a New American Security, May 2021.

52. Lee His-min and Eric Lee, “The Threat of China Invading Taiwan Is Growing Every Day. What the U.S. Can Do to Stop It,” NBC News, July 9, 2021; James Timbie, “Large Numbers of Small Things: A Porcupine Strategy to Use Technology to Make Taiwan a Harder Target Against Invasion,” Hoover Institution, September 2021.

53. See Dan Blumenthal, “The U.S.-Taiwan Relationship Needs Alliance Management,” National Interest, December 18, 2021.

54. Abhijnan Rej, “Marine Raiders Arrive in Taiwan to Train Taiwanese Marines,” The Diplomat, November 11, 2020.

55. See Michael Chase, Jeffrey Engstrom, Tai Ming Cheung, et al., China’s Incomplete Military Transformation: Assessing the Weaknesses of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015).

56. “China Threatens to Nuke Japan over Possible Taiwan Intervention,” Times of India, July 20, 2021.

57. For a longer discussion of this point, see Hal Brands, “Europe Needs to Embrace China’s Threat to the World,” Bloomberg Opinion, April 29, 2021; Franz-Stefan Gady, “How Europe Can Help Defend Taiwan,” Nikkei Asia, December 17, 2021.

58. See, for instance, Lonnie Henley, “PLA Operational Concepts and Centers of Gravity in a Taiwan Conflict,” Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, February 2021.

59. For a balanced assessment of this option, see Sean Mirski, “Stranglehold: The Context, Conduct, and Consequences of an American Naval Blockade of China,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 36, no. 3 (July 2013): 385–421.

60. See Michele Flournoy, “How to Prevent a War in Asia,” Foreign Affairs, June 18, 2020.

61. Elbridge Colby, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War: A Strategy for the New Great-Power Rivalry,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2018.

62. Joshua Rovner, “A Long War in the East: Doctrine, Diplomacy, and the Prospects for a Protracted Sino-American Conflict,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, 29, no. 1 (January 2018): 129–142.

63. Maria Sheahan and Sarah Marsh, “Germany to Increase Defence Spending in Response to ‘Putin’s War’—Sholz,” Reuters, February 27, 2022.

64. David Shlapak and Michael Johnson, Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2016).

65. See Edward Fishman and Chris Miller, “The New Russian Sanctions Playbook: Deterrence Is Out, and Economic Attrition Is In,” Foreign Affairs, February 28, 2022.

66. Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery, “One War Is Not Enough: Strategy and Force Planning for Great-Power Competition,” Texas National Security Review, 3, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 80–92.

67. As Biden administration officials pointed out: See White House, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, February 11, 2022.”

68. Kori Schake, “Lost at Sea: The Dangerous Decline of American Naval Power,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2022; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 393–394.

69. Quoted in Hal Brands, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 43.

70. See, for example, “Chinese Engineers Killed in Pakistan Bus Blast,” BBC.com, July 14, 2021.

71. On the rarity of “accidental war,” see Marc Trachtenberg, “The ‘Accidental War’ Question,” paper presented at Center for International Security and Cooperation, March 2000, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/inadvertent.pdf.

72. Jacob Stokes and Zack Cooper, “Thinking Strategically About Sino-American Crisis Management Mechanisms,” War on the Rocks, September 30, 2020.

73. Kevin Rudd, “Short of War: How to Keep U.S.-Chinese Confrontation from Ending in Calamity,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021.

74. As the Obama administration was sometimes accused of doing, and as former Obama administration officials sometimes advocate even today. See Alex Ward, “Ben Rhodes is Worried About Joe Biden’s Climate Change and China Policies,” Vox, April 23, 2021.

8. Life on the Other Side

1. John F. Kennedy, Television and Radio Interview, December 17, 1962, American Presidency Project (APP).

2. David Brunnstrom and Humeyra Pamuk, “China, U.S. Can Coexist in Peace but Challenge is Enormous—White House,” Reuters, July 6, 2021.

3. As happened at the Anchorage meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials in March 2021.

4. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision, Online ed., rev. 1 (New York: United Nations, 2019).

5. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision.

6. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision; Ruchir Sharma, “The Demographics of Stagnation: Why People Matter for Economic Growth,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2016, 18–24.

7. Yong Cai, Wang Feng, and Ke Shen, “Fiscal Implications of Population Aging and Social Sector Expenditure in China,” Population and Development Review, 44, no. 4 (December 2018): 811–831.

8. Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch, “China’s Overseas Lending.” NBER Working Paper 26050 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021).

9. Horn, Reinhart, and Trebesch, “China’s Overseas Lending.”

10. Christopher Miller, “One Belt, One Road, One Bluff,” American Interest, May 23, 2017.

11. “The Belt-and-Road Express,” The Economist, May 4, 2017.

12. Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, “Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt-trap Diplomacy’: How Recipient Countries Shape China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” Chatham House Research Paper, August 19, 2020.

13. Tanner Greer, “The Belt and Road Strategy Has Backfired on Xi,” Palladium Magazine, October 24, 2020.

14. Horn, Reinhart, and Trebesch, “China’s Overseas Lending,” 33–34.

15. For an excellent analysis of possible outcomes, see Richard McGregor and Jude Blanchette, “After Xi: Future Scenarios for Leadership Succession in Post-Xi Jinping Era,” a Joint Report of the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies and the Lowy Institute, April 22, 2021.

16. Alexandre Debs and H.E. Goemans, “Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War,” American Political Science Review, 104, no. 3 (August 2010), table 2.

17. Richard McGregor, Xi Jinping: The Backlash (Melbourne: Penguin, 2019).

18. The transition from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin in the 1990s was not completely formal. Deng continued to rule behind the scenes for years after he “retired” in 1989, despite the fact that his only official position was chairman of the Chinese Bridge Playing Association. The transition from Jiang to Hu Jintao in the early 2000s was not completely orderly. Jiang handed over the CCP general secretaryship and presidency to Hu Jintao in 2002 but retained his role as chairman of the Central Military Commission (China’s equivalent of commander in chief) until 2004. This would be as if George H.W. Bush had remained commander in chief of the U.S. military until two years into Bill Clinton’s presidency.

19. Yuhua Wang, “Can the Chinese Communist Party Learn from Chinese Emperors?” in The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power, ed. Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), chap. 7, table 1.

20. Wang, “Can the Chinese Communist Party Learn from Chinese Emperors?”

21. Quoted in Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security, 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001): 46.

22. This paragraph draws on analysis in Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “America Will Only Beat China When Its Regime Fails,” Foreign Policy, March 11, 2021, a piece that is more nuanced than the title suggests. In addition, some of the principles discussed in this section draw on Hal Brands, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).

23. Memorandum for the President, December 15, 1950, Box 136, Paul Nitze Papers, Library of Congress.

24. Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (New York: Knopf, 2018).

25. Hal Brands and Charles Edel, “A Grand Strategy of Democratic Solidarity,” Washington Quarterly, March 2021.

26. Andrew Marshall, “Long-Term Competition with the Soviets: A Framework for Strategic Analysis,” RAND Corporation, April 1972.

27. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace the American Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

28. The phrase is referenced in Eugene Gholz, Benjamin Friedman, and Enea Gjoza, “Defensive Defense: A Better Way to Protect U.S. Allies in Asia,” Washington Quarterly, Winter 2020.

29. For a sobering analysis, see Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, “The Fragile Republic,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020.

30. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

31. “Congress Is Set to Make a Down-Payment on Innovation in America,” The Economist, June 5, 2021.

32. See Eric Croddy, “China’s Role in the Chemical and Biological Disarmament Regimes,” Nonproliferation Review, 9, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 16–47. More recently, China violated its commitment not to change Hong Kong’s political system for fifty years after it reabsorbed that territory.

33. John Maurer, “The Forgotten Side of Arms Control: Enhancing U.S. Advantage, Offsetting Enemy Strengths,” War on the Rocks, June 27, 2018.

34. See John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

35. See Richard Nixon, “Asia After Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, October 1967.

36. Franklin Roosevelt, Address at Charlottesville, Virginia, June 10, 1940, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/WorldWar2/fdr19.htm.

37. X (Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, 566–582.