Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

Our core argument in this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong on both points. Americans urgently need to start seeing the Sino-American rivalry less as a 100-year marathon and more as a blistering, decade-long sprint. That’s because China will be a falling power far sooner than most people think.

The reason for this is China has reached the most treacherous stage in the life cycle of a rising power—the point where it is strong enough to aggressively disrupt the existing order but is losing confidence that time is on its side.

We live in an age of “peak China,” not a forever rising China. Beijing is a revisionist power that wants to reorder the world, but its time to do so is already running out.

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes Henry Kissinger. “They aspire to be the international system.”24 That’s the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today.

deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes the China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”

Building an Orwellian police state is hardly the hallmark of a vibrant economic superpower.

Dai Xu, a senior PLA officer, explained how deadly it could be to provoke the hostility of a superpower with dozens of allies. “Don’t think that the U.S. imperialist is a ‘paper tiger,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a ‘real tiger’ that ‘kills people.’ ” “Once Imperial America considers you as their ‘enemy,’ ” he added, “you’re in big trouble.”

Thucydides is considered the father of the international relations canon, and his explanation of great-power conflict remains at the heart of that discipline. Power transition theory holds that war is likely when a rising country threatens to overtake an established country. As the challenger grows stronger, it destabilizes the existing system. It provokes tests of strength with the reigning power. The outcome is a spiral of hostility. “War is most likely,” one political scientist writes, “during the periods when the power capabilities of a rising and dissatisfied challenger begin to approach those of the leading state.”6

World War I, like every war, had many causes. But at root it was a German preventive war, launched because the kaiser’s government saw no other way of escaping the trap it had laid for itself.

Yet at the climactic moment, imperial German and imperial Japanese leaders did not feel like they were moving up. Stagnation, encirclement, or some combination convinced them that their moment was slipping away. A revisionist power that has begun to fear the future may well act more impulsively than one that thinks tomorrow will be better than today. That’s the real trap we ought to worry about—the trap in which an aspiring superpower peaks and then refuses to bear the painful consequences of descent.

Deng Xiaoping warned that opening the “window” to breathe the “fresh air” of Western commerce would also allow in “flies” in the form of seductive ideas and corrupting influences.45

“Fools learn by experience,” Bismarck said, “wise men learn by others’ experience.” 4

“When history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the cold war,” Truman could brag as he retired in 1953, “it will also say that in those 8 years we have set the course that we can win it.”15 Indeed, the early Cold War is perhaps the best historical example of a successful danger-zone strategy. The specific policies America followed back then can’t simply be replicated now.

First, prioritize ruthlessly. Thinking clearly about where to bet big and where to conserve resources is always important; it can be a matter of life and death when the level of threat is high and the margin for error is low. The key is to prevent near-term breakthroughs that can dramatically shift the longer-term balance of power—and to make early investments that create lasting legacies of strength.

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. When caught in the danger zone, a country needs clear, well-articulated objectives, as well as a rough-and-ready approach to achieving them. It should make the most of good-enough solutions—and friends—that are available today, rather than waiting for ideal ones that may not come along until too late.

“no time must be lost in plucking the torch of world leadership from our chilling hands.”

Third, a little offense is the best defense. Danger-zone strategies involve taking the fight to the enemy by probing its weaknesses or throwing it off-balance. They require bold measures to close off potentially fatal vulnerabilities. But every step must be measured, because heedless provocation can be deadly. 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.

Indeed, it is hard to overstate the impact that Korea had on American strategy. Things that were not possible before, whether dramatic growth in U.S. military spending or the rearmament of former aggressors, became possible amid global crisis. Previous political and diplomatic constraints on American policy fell away. “Korea saved us,” Acheson later remarked: The United States capitalized on the sense of shock and urgency created by autocratic aggression to make investments that ultimately strengthened its position nearly around the globe.44

The aim of a danger-zone strategy was to strengthen the American position by taking necessary risks—not to bring on the apocalypse by taking foolish ones.

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. But it can build a bridge to a more manageable stage of the rivalry, while creating advantages that pay off in the end.

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. By the end of the 1950s, American defense spending had fallen to around 9 percent of gross national product. On average, it continued to fall over the rest of the Cold War.56 The other development was that it became possible to occasionally decrease U.S.-Soviet tensions. Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought the period of greatest Soviet hostility to the West to an end. 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. They would even cooperate to eradicate smallpox and limit the spread of nuclear weapons.

Prioritize ruthlessly; thwart near-term breakthroughs that can have devastating long-term effects. Be strategically deliberate and tactically agile; don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Firm up the defense by playing some offense; take prudent risks but not unduly provocative ones. Think of danger-zone strategy as something that helps you win in the future by avoiding disaster in the here and now.

One such peril is China’s emerging high-tech empire. The United States doesn’t need to counter every Chinese infrastructure project around the world; doing so would be financially ruinous and strategically exhausting. It does need to prevent China from monopolizing what the Pentagon calls “critical” technologies, meaning those with the potential to produce massive economic and military gains, and using that dominance to ensnare nations around the globe.6

History shows that whoever dominates the critical technologies of an era dominates that era.

For now, the United States needs to give up on trying to make Beijing play by the rules of a fair and open economic order, whether by browbeating it with tariffs or enticing it with new trade agreements. Instead, the thrust of U.S. policy should be sharper and narrower: weakening Beijing’s relative technological capabilities. That’s the path to thwarting an authoritarian empire in this era, just as America thwarted a series of authoritarian empires during the twentieth century. The best way of doing this is to forge an informal economic alliance that excludes and outcompetes China.

This approach would capitalize on a key U.S. advantage: China’s war aims are more ambitious, and harder to achieve, than America’s. Whereas China needs to seize control of Taiwan and its surrounding waters to win the war, the United States just needs to deny Chinese forces that control, a mission that modern missiles, mines, drones, and jammers are well suited to perform.48 This strategy would also enhance deterrence by denying China the possibility of a swift victory.

Finally, the United States needs to prepare for war termination as seriously as it prepares for warfighting. A war with a nuclear-armed foe is unlikely to end in a total U.S. victory or a complete Chinese capitulation.62 The better America fares, the more unpredictable a scared CCP may become.

“Fear makes easy the task of diplomats,” John Foster Dulles liked to say—

In protracted contests, not competing everywhere is the price of being effective anywhere.

Once Taiwan has been turned into a strategic porcupine, the spread of digital authoritarianism has been halted, and America and its democratic partners are clearly leading the contest to produce the world’s key technology and standards, for example, Washington might find a modest respite—even within a competition that will require enduring resolve.

shape the rivalry by shaping the system. The most important thing the United States did during the Cold War was not the destruction it visited upon its enemy but the creation it achieved with its friends. By building a vibrant democratic community from the wreckage of a shattered world, America helped the non-Communist countries resist Soviet coercion even as Moscow’s power grew. By creating an example of relative freedom and prosperity, it eventually forced Soviet leaders and citizens to ask what had gone wrong in their own empire, which then encouraged them to undertake the reforms that brought it crashing down.

fourth principle is that America must fight asymmetrically and impose costs relentlessly. The longer the rivalry goes, the more important it is to play to one’s strengths and exploit the enemy’s weaknesses.

Eisenhower wagered, correctly, that Washington would only find its chance to exploit tensions between two ambivalent allies after it had demonstrated that their relationship would produce more pain than profit.34