Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

Second, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good enough. A danger-zone strategy is a race against the clock, and the China threat is escalating faster than business-as-usual in Washington can keep up. Securing U.S. interests will require embracing second-best solutions, adapting old capabilities for new purposes, and assembling imperfect coalitions on the fly. Think of this as “strategic MacGyverism”—using the tools we have or can quickly summon to defuse geopolitical bombs that are about to explode.

Third, playing defense requires a good offense. The United States cannot get through the danger zone without calculated risk-taking. It must be willing to anger China, bait it into strategic blunders, and selectively roll back its power. The CCP won’t abandon its lofty ambitions anytime soon, so Washington must focus on selectively degrading China’s capabilities and blocking its opportunities for aggrandizement.

History shows that whoever dominates the critical technologies of an era dominates that era.7 Britain was able to build an empire on which the sun never set largely because it mastered steam, iron, and the telegraph before other nations. American hegemony today is due in no small part to U.S. superiority, first in steel, electronics, aerospace, and chemicals and more recently in information technology. Now China aims to use preeminence in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, quantum computing, and synthetic biology to leap ahead of its competitors and force other countries to do its bidding.

Today, the United States needs to reestablish a free-world economic bloc, this time aimed at China. This is not a sweeping call for de-globalization; bloc members would still trade with China in most sectors and could reduce tariffs on low-value Chinese goods.9 Nor is it a call for the sort of economic unilateralism the Trump administration often practiced. Rather, it entails re-globalization—deepening integration among the United States and its allies—to blunt Chinese economic leverage and pursue a strategic, multilateral decoupling in the technologies and resources that matter most.10

it will be hard to win a worldwide subsidy war against a mercantilist CCP, especially when the battlefield—in regions from Southeast Asia to Latin America—is densely populated with corrupt leaders and regimes. The more proactive approach is to go to the source by using the blend of offensive and defensive measures we advocate to keep Beijing from dominating key industries in the first place.

A final requirement of this strategy, then, will be rapidly developing free-world production networks for critical resources that China currently dominates, including rare earths and

An example is U.S. promotion of a telecommunications policy called “Open RAN.”21 Under this approach, policy makers are developing common industry standards that foster greater compatibility between different types of 5G equipment. The goal is to prevent Huawei—or any other 5G equipment provider—from dominating global telecommunications infrastructure. American firms (particularly those that make relevant software) would benefit from this approach, but so would Huawei’s competitors in Finland, South Korea, and other countries.

Step one is for America and its allies to aggressively hack digital authoritarian systems, thereby undermining their effectiveness. One redeeming quality of high-tech police states is that they have myriad points of failure.

The CCP currently enjoys the best of both worlds. It runs a closed network at home that prevents Chinese citizens from reaching foreign websites and limits Western companies from entering China’s digital market. Yet it also selectively accesses the global Internet to steal intellectual property, meddle in democratic elections, spread propaganda, and hack critical infrastructure. It’s a digital-age version of the Soviet Union’s infamous Brezhnev Doctrine: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is up for grabs.

“Internet Freedom League.”33 Under this system, countries that adhere to the vision of a free and open Internet would stay mutually connected, while countries opposed to that vision would face restricted access or be shut out. In essence, the league would be a digital version of the Schengen Agreement,

Instead of waiting for a Chinese invasion to start and then surging missile-magnet aircraft carriers into the region, the Pentagon could use what is, in essence, a high-tech minefield to decimate China’s invasion forces and cut their communications links as they load in mainland ports or putter across more than 100 miles of open water. These diffuse networks of loitering munitions and jammers would be difficult for China to eliminate without starting a region-wide war. They would not require large crews, logistics tails, or the procurement of fancy platforms. Instead, they could be installed on virtually anything that floats or flies, including legacy platforms and repurposed cargo ships, barges, and aircraft.47

to defeat a technologically superior American adversary—depends heavily on “system destruction warfare.”50 This means destroying America’s forward-deployed aircraft while they’re parked on the tarmac and preventing a surge of U.S. forces from other regions by paralyzing their lines of communications and logistics. To prevent China from making this theory work, the United States must scatter its forces across dozens of small operating sites in East Asia and reduce its reliance on non-stealthy weapons systems that require anything more than episodic communication or data flow. The few big bases that remain must be outfitted with hardened shelters, robust missile defenses, and fake targets to absorb Chinese missiles.

Finally, the United States needs to make China realize that a Taiwan war could go big as well as long. The more allies and partners America can bring into the fight, the less appetizing that fight will look to Beijing. The PLA may talk big about nuking Japan if Tokyo gets in the way of a Taiwan invasion, but it can’t really relish fighting a global superpower and its mightiest regional ally at the same time.56 Similarly, the Indian and Australian navies could help Washington choke off Beijing’s energy imports as they pass through the Strait of Malacca. Key European powers—especially the United Kingdom and France—can contribute a few submarines or surface combatants to a naval war in the western Pacific; they can lend their well-honed cyber expertise to help defend critical Taiwanese systems. They can also impose painful economic sanctions in the event of Chinese aggression.57

Winning that sort of conflict means, first, making sure that America and Taiwan don’t run out of ammo. The United States can prepare by loading up on long-range missiles capable of wrecking China’s most valuable ships and aircraft from afar. For Taiwan, the vital weapons are short-range missiles, mortars, mines, and rocket launchers. Beyond stockpiling these munitions, the United States and Taiwan need to develop the production capacity to crank out new weapons in wartime, the way America has done in nearly every other major conflict in its history.

Beijing would still have many ways to coerce Taiwan and the United States even if they sent China’s amphibious fleet to the bottom of the strait. China could try to strangle Taiwan economically with a blockade or cripple U.S. and Taiwanese electrical grids and telecommunications networks with cyberattacks.58 China could also try to bomb Taiwan into submission and perhaps even use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons—a tactic that Beijing’s rapid nuclear buildup is making somewhat more feasible and, potentially, more attractive.

By conducting exercises with allies and partners that demonstrate an ability to choke off Chinese maritime commerce, the United States can threaten to turn an extended war into an economic catastrophe for the CCP.59 By developing the ability to conduct severe cyberattacks on China’s critical infrastructure—and the CCP’s political control mechanisms—the United States can threaten to bring the war home to Beijing. By preparing to sink Chinese naval vessels up and down the western Pacific, and to target whatever bases and other global military infrastructure Beijing has built, the United States can force the CCP to risk a generation of military modernization and expansion in any war over Taiwan.60 And although the United States would obviously prefer to keep a war over Taiwan non-nuclear, it needs to have the limited nuclear options—the ability to use lower-yield weapons against ports, airfields, fleets, and other military targets—that would allow it to credibly respond to, and thereby deter, Chinese nuclear threats.61 In sum, Washington should confront Beijing with a basic proposition: The longer the war continues, the more devastation America will inflict on China and its ruling regime.

Every time America has tried to disengage from Europe, disaster has struck.

Peace on the continent that produced Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, and Putin cannot be presumed.

the three main power assets the United States needs to counter China—a free world economic bloc, security community, and democracy protection regime—would be crippled by a breakdown of order in Europe that consumes and divides America’s allies there. China projects its influence across multiple regions and aims to achieve global primacy. Competing with Beijing requires rallying an international alliance of leading democracies, and many of the world’s most powerful liberal states are European. That alliance will not stand if Europe falls into chaos.

The United States must use the vivid specter of autocratic aggression to spur investments and collective action that previously seemed unthinkable, including accelerated Japanese and German rearmament, more detailed and robust operational planning for multinational military operations against China and Russia, deployments of advanced missiles previously banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on allied territory near Russia and China’s borders, enhanced solidarity on technological and innovation issues, and the preloading of fierce economic penalties—such as sanctions and an oil blockade—to be used if China invades Taiwan.

Above all, America—including some of its stodgiest bureaucracies—must summon wartime agility, speed, and purpose to preserve a fragile peace. America’s near-term vulnerabilities have become sufficiently pronounced that it no longer has the luxury of delay. The choice, then, is between doing things that are hard now or doing things that are even harder once China has achieved strategic breakthroughs—or simply broken the system.

The U.S.-China trade and tech wars that began in 2017 and escalated in the 2020s will rage on indefinitely. These new “forever wars” may not involve military combat, but both countries will deploy every nonmilitary weapon in their coercive arsenals—tariffs, investment restrictions, technology embargos, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and cyber espionage—to expand their respective spheres and to weaken the rival’s economy.

For a glimpse of what this vitriol might look like, consider the global hysteria that erupted when China seemingly, but not really, seized a Sri Lankan port in 2017 after the country defaulted on its loans.12 Charges of “debt-trap diplomacy” reverberated from New Delhi to Tokyo to Washington, droves of countries dropped out of BRI or demanded to renegotiate their contracts, and anti-China political parties swept into power in several partner nations.

The United States didn’t win the Cold War by treating that contest as a purely bilateral duel. America blocked Soviet aggression and bankrupted Soviet ideology by shaping a better world for the countries that took its side.24

If the United States shows, over the next decade, that China cannot get its way in the Taiwan Strait or other hot spots—and that nonstop coercion simply blows back on the CCP—there could emerge opportunities to selectively tamp down tensions. But perhaps the best reason to pursue negotiation as part of competition is that the former can be a means of winning the latter.

This relates to a ninth point: Be ready to extend the olive branch. America won’t succeed over a short or a long competition without exerting a lot of pressure. The United States must repeatedly frustrate Beijing’s attempts at expansion; it must make China pay dearly for attempts to upend the status quo. But the goal of competition is not to remain in a state of tension forever; it is to achieve a better status quo. Doing so, in the context of rivalry with a nuclear-armed great power, may eventually require holding a hard line with a soft touch.