Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

He thinks that preventing anti-authoritarian revolts in other countries will reduce the possibility that they might erupt in China.

China has gone on the ideological offensive in recent years and taken its repression global. Beijing now spends billions of dollars annually on an “anti-democratic toolkit” of NGOs, media outlets, diplomats, advisers, hackers, and bribes all designed to prop up autocrats and sow discord in democracies.

But China’s ideological assault is more profound, for three reasons. First, it capitalizes on a disturbing recent trend. The long arc of history may have bended, since World War II, toward greater freedom. But according to the statistics compiled by Freedom House, authoritarianism has been spreading, and democracy receding, every year since 2006.50

Second, China’s global reach is more pervasive than that of any prior illiberal power.

Likewise, when China applies sanctions against European politicians and analysts who condemn the repression in Xinjiang, when it compels Marriott to fire an American employee who likes a tweet referring to Tibet, or when it passes a law that threatens to punish anyone, anywhere in the world, who supports political freedom in Hong Kong, it is using its market power to attack free speech—the very foundation of democracy—in some of the most advanced societies in the world.

The third and most important factor supercharging China’s efforts is the ongoing digital revolution.

Now imagine that in the hands of the CCP. By combining AI, big data, and cyber, biometric, and speech- and facial-recognition technologies, the Chinese government is pioneering a system that will allow dictators to know everything about their subjects—what people are saying and viewing; whom they hang out with; what they like and dislike; and where they are located at any given time.

This technological revolution threatens to upend the global balance between democracy and authoritarianism by making repression more affordable and effective than ever before.

The evil genius of this “digital authoritarianism” is that most people will be seemingly free to go about their daily lives. In reality, the state will censor everything they see and track everything they do. With old-school authoritarianism, one at least knew where the oppression was coming from. But now people can be nudged and cajoled by invisible algorithms delivering personalized content through social media.

Today, however, repression is not only affordable, it may be profitable, because the same “smart-city” technologies that facilitate strict social control can also be used to improve infrastructure, diagnose diseases, and make the trains run on time.

Many countries already want it, and China has powerful tools to compel those that don’t. Want access to China’s market? Let Huawei install the core components of your 5G network. Want a Chinese loan? Accept Chinese surveillance technology in your capital.

Digital authoritarianism is not a substitute for gulags and genocide; it is an enabler. Political scientists have shown that when dictatorships ramp up digital repression, they also engage in more torture and murder.

Just look at Xinjiang, where smart cities exist side-by-side with concentration camps.59 Chinese security officers man the camps and handle the “reeducation” and forced sterilization, while cameras, biometric scanners, and mandatory cell-phone apps feed data into computers that keep tabs on everything that happens in the province.

Some experts still cling to the belief that China doesn’t actually pose a major threat to democracy, because it doesn’t really care—as the Soviet Union did—whether other countries are ruled by Communists.60 Or they argue that rich and consolidated democracies such as the United States will endure as islands of liberty, even if some weak, partial democracies disappear behind a digital iron curtain.

This couldn’t be more wrong. Digital authoritarianism is creeping into the heart of the liberal world. The use of digital tools to manipulate public opinion, demonize opponents, and mobilize violent mobs of supporters is just as alluring for someone seeking power in a democracy as it is for a dictator.

Even if America and other leading democracies don’t fall prey to this ideological offensive, their power and security would be diminished in a more authoritarian world. It is no coincidence that the strongest links in the strategic chain America is trying to wrap around China are democracies.

Most fundamentally, autocracies have a vested interest in demonizing democracies. Dictators don’t want their people admiring democratic institutions and demanding freedom. The

There is no mystery about what the CCP wants geopolitically, because it has wanted the same things for decades: to make China whole again, turn the East China and South China Seas into Chinese lakes, and grab regional primacy as a springboard to global power.

Globally, the mood has shifted from cautiously welcoming China’s rise to fearing and opposing it, and that has raised a pivotal question for Xi: If the peaceful route to reclaiming territory and expanding influence is closing, is it time to start flexing the military muscle China has spent $3 trillion building over the past three decades?

China fights, not when it is rising, but when its security is deteriorating and its bargaining strength is declining.66 In other words, the CCP typically uses force to exploit a closing window of opportunity or avoid an opening window of vulnerability.

Just look at any of the PRC’s wars. In late 1950, waves of Chinese soldiers attacked U.S. forces in Korea for fear that the Americans would conquer North Korea and build military bases there. China suffered almost a million casualties but to this day celebrates its defense of North Korea as a glorious victory. In 1962, the PLA attacked Indian forces, ostensibly because they built outposts in Chinese-claimed territory in the Himalayas, but really because China felt it was being encircled by the Indians, Americans, Soviets, and Chinese Nationalists. By attacking India, China “killed a chicken to scare the monkeys,”

There would be no uncertainty about the U.S. commitment: Any Soviet attack on Western Europe would mean all-out conflict with the United States.23 At the same time, Truman opted not to make an all-out effort to prevent Communist victories in places considered less important or promising. Case in point: Washington did little to prevent Mao’s Communists from defeating Chiang’s Nationalists, on the assumption that an underdeveloped, poverty-stricken China didn’t weigh heavily on the scales of global power.

wasn’t always easy to distinguish between vital and secondary areas. America could not rebuild Europe without ensuring that Middle Eastern oil remained in friendly hands—or rebuild Japan without protecting its access to markets and resources in places such as Indochina.

The fall of China to Mao’s forces in 1949 may not have been a strategic disaster for America, but it was a political disaster for Truman, who then became less willing to write off other exposed positions in Asia. That reluctance, in turn, led to a gradual expansion of U.S. commitments and led America down a long road to tragedy in Vietnam.

A more immediate problem was that announcing what the United States would not defend could entice enemies to advance there—and that nonvital interests could suddenly become vital when they were attacked. This is what...

To Stalin’s surprise, Truman then decided to enter the fray. He did so not because South Korea itself was vitally important (it wasn’t), but because a failure to thwart blatant aggression there might shatter the confidence Washington was seeking to build in more important areas.

Truman’s decision to intervene was the right one: It saved South Korea from destruction and reassured anxious allies that the West was not entering another age of appeasement. “Thank God this will not be a repetition of the past,” the French foreign minister exclaimed.27 Unfortunately, it also consigned the United States to fighting a bloody, draining conflict in a strategic backwater—a conflict that would escalate dramatically when the United States tried and failed to reunite the entire peninsula in late 1950.

ROUGH AND READY Second, combine strategic purpose with tactical agility. A period of high tensions is no time to be wandering without aim, but neither is it a time to be rigid and dogmatic.

American officials also had to get creative with the tools at hand. In early 1948, Italy’s future hung in the balance: A Communist electoral victory was a real possibility. In response, the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies mounted an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink campaign to keep Italians from voting their country into totalitarianism.

The same went for assembling the free-world coalition. Truman may have labeled the Cold War a contest between democracy and totalitarianism, but he never let the perfect be the enemy of the good in rounding up an anti-Soviet posse.

The best example of this was a departure so radical that it was opposed even by Kennan—the creation of NATO. That alliance was a strategic watershed: It signaled, as unambiguously as America’s constitutional processes allowed, that the United States was fully committed to the freedom of Western Europe.

As late as early 1948, the Truman administration had no intention of creating an “entangling” peacetime alliance. NATO was a European idea pressed upon U.S. officials. It was also a frantic response to fast-breaking crises—namely the Czech coup in February 1948 and the Berlin blockade in June—that terrified the Europeans and convinced the Truman administration that nothing short of a formal defense treaty could buck them up against Soviet pressure.

The key is to take calculated risks—and avoid reckless ones that convince a rival it has no better option than to go for broke.

Launching the Marshall Plan meant kicking obstructionist, fifth-column Communist ministers out of Western European governments, and thereby incurring the wrath—in the form of strikes, riots, and violence—of the radical Left.

But the experience underscored an inherent dilemma of danger-zone strategy: There is no entirely safe course of action. This was why the United States did something even more forward-leaning: It tried, albeit modestly, to undermine the Soviet bloc.

To that end, the United States initially offered Marshall Plan aid to Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe—the calculation being that a hyper-suspicious Moscow would force the satellite states to decline and thereby destroy its own moral authority in the bloc. Washington subsequently beamed radio broadcasts into Eastern Europe to play up the crimes and failings of the Soviet-backed regimes. It waged economic warfare, denying Moscow critical goods that might feed its war machine. The U.S. and UK intelligence services even dropped paramilitary operatives behind the Iron Curtain in hopes of stirring up violent resistance.

with Stalin’s blessing, invaded South Korea two months later, Truman concluded that the Communists would “now use armed invasion and war” to subjugate their enemies.40 U.S. forces blunted, at heavy

From 1950 onward, the United States would settle for a ferocious draw in Korea while undertaking a massive military buildup and a worldwide diplomatic offensive.

The United States had to make the free world more resilient, while avoiding moves that might encourage a now-or-never mentality in Moscow. The experience of 1941—when the American oil embargo convinced Japan to wage war immediately, before the United States was ready—was not one Truman wished to repeat.

This prospect acted as a brake on U.S. policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The United States never tried to roll back the Soviet bloc in Europe militarily: The likelihood of starting a major war was just too great. When it came to rearming the free world, American planners envisioned a carefully constrained West German military that could only operate within NATO, rather than a fully rearmed, autonomous West Germany that could pose “a grave threat to the security of the USSR.”

When Winston Churchill argued that the United States should threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear destruction if it didn’t evacuate Eastern Europe in 1948, and when Douglas MacArthur called on Truman to dramatically escalate the war against China in 1951, the response was the same. “The whole purpose of what we are doing is to prevent world war III,” Truman explained.47

This relates to the fourth and final lesson. Danger-zone strategy is about getting to the long game—and ensuring you can win it. A smart danger-zone strategy won’t necessarily allow you to defeat a tough competitor quickly.

And while the post-1950 military buildup never gave Washington outright military dominance, it did create what Eisenhower called a “real deterrent to aggression”

The free world, an assessment by the National Security Council concluded, now had “such strength” as to prevent decisive Soviet advances—and perhaps, over time, to “cause that system gradually to weaken and decay.”52

But whatever the challenges of this period, America’s danger-zone strategy had succeeded in one fundamental respect: Never again would the balance of power be as precarious as it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

By the 1980s, per capita income in the West was nine times greater than in the Soviet bloc.55 The balance of power remained fluid; the Soviet Union could still menace the free world.

Two other important things happened as the United States crossed the danger zone. One was that America could downshift: It could move from an extremely high-cost strategy geared toward meeting a point of maximum peril to a somewhat lower-cost strategy geared toward meeting a less acute but ongoing challenge.

The other development was that it became possible to occasionally decrease U.S.-Soviet tensions.

By the mid-1950s, the superpowers had started negotiations to control the arms race. During the 1960s and after, Moscow and Washington would agree to limit nuclear testing, cap their nuclear arsenals, and reduce the chances of confrontation in a few hot spots.

Reagan and Bush reassured Gorbachev, would not be attacked: It would be welcomed back into the world community.59 Yet this achievement also happened because the “situations of strength” that Truman, Acheson, and their successors had built meant that the Soviets had no feasible options for improving their position through war.