How to Deter a Dragon
How to Deter a Dragon
Dmitri Alperovitch is right about the reality of “Cold War Two” between America and China, but his policy recommendations would harm U.S. interests around the world.
World on the Brink
How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-first Century
by Dmitri Alperovitch, with Garrett Graff
Public Affairs, 400 pp., $32.50
THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IN WASHINGTON national security circles that China is the greatest long-term challenge to the American way of life is notable for three reasons: First, it is bipartisan. Second, it coalesced rapidly, in the span of just a few years. And third, unlike so much conventional wisdom, it is correct. The United States and China are at the beginning of what promises to be a century-defining political, military, and economic confrontation. The rush of scholars, commentators, and policymakers to define the conflict and shape American policy in it can only be compared to the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889.
Dmitri Alperovitch, a cofounder of the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and the chairman of the national security think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator, reaches into antiquity for inspiration in describing the problem of China:
Over two thousand years ago, amid the Third Punic War, Cato the Elder used to finish his speeches before the Roman Senate with his rallying cry, delenda est Carthago: “Carthage must be destroyed.” Today, our rallying cry—the central organizing principle of American foreign, trade, defense and industrial policy this century—must be Sinae deterrendae sunt. China must be deterred.
In his new book, World on the Brink, Alperovitch proposes a comprehensive design for “aggressive deterrence” of Xi Jinping’s China predicated on the notion that the Chinese Communist Party aspires to create a new world order by displacing American hegemony in East Asia. Alperovitch argues that time is short to adopt an adequate defense posture against this hostile Chinese design. (His coauthor, Garrett Graff, is an accomplished journalist and likely deserves some of the credit for the book’s rigorous research and clear prose.)
As with any strategy, the starting point for coming to grips with this confrontation must be a clear-eyed recognition of the foe. Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since 2012, has rededicated the party to its Marxist-Leninist principles, resulting in an ideologically aggressive foreign policy, especially in the Indo-Pacific. But China’s engagement with the world involves more than ideological exertion and extends beyond economic projects like the Belt-and-Road Initiative. Beijing’s vision of a Sino-centric world ultimately depends upon power: its accumulation and, let there be no doubt, its application.
Alperovitch is right to be gripped by the danger posed by the People’s Republic of China. Never before has the American superpower faced something so close to a peer competitor. China, which is second only to the United States in defense spending, has a powerful military capable of winning a regional war to overturn American primacy. Alperovitch contends that “there is no challenge on the geopolitical landscape equal to countering the rise of China and its potential disruption of the global security order” that the United States has maintained since World War II.
Not so long ago, Deng Xiaoping counseled that a weak and impoverished China needed to “hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time.” Deng recognized that avoiding confrontation with the American superpower at that time was crucial to China’s ability to grow rich and strong. “Once China reached the level of developed countries,” he explained, “the strength of China and its role in the world will be quite different.”
It almost goes without saying that the tranquil hide-and-bide epoch has run its course. In 2023, Xi formally replaced Deng’s “hide and bide” with “be proactive and achieve things,” which might include the genocide against the Uyghurs, the oppression of Hong Kong, the harassment of the Philippines, the expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, and a host of other worrying policies. It is a safe surmise that the pronounced friction in Sino-American relations will get worse before it gets better.
The Sino-American rivalry flows naturally from the PRC’s ambition to command greater respect and influence in the world. As China has grown wealthier and more powerful, its leadership has found the American-led order to be “like an adult in children’s clothes,” according to Fu Ying, a foreign policy official in Beijing. “The western-centred world order dominated by the U.S. has made great contributions to human progress and economic growth,” she wrote in 2016. “But those contributions lie in the past.”
In historical terms, there is nothing extraordinary about the desire of a rising power to break out of a system imposed on it by an established power. As the great realist scholar Nicholas Spykman wrote during World War II, “The number of cases in which a strong dynamic state has stopped expanding . . . or has set modest limits to its power aims has been very few indeed.”
The CCP is not unduly paranoid to regard American power as the primary impediment to the growth of Chinese power. The Pax Americana was not devised with the interests of the CCP in mind, and does not reflect its values or practices. A shooting war between these antagonists may not be inevitable, but conflict is.
Alperovitch cites a panel of experts, each with their own name for the strategic competition between the United States and China. “Henry Kissinger said we’re in the ‘foothills of a Cold War,’ while Harvard professor Noah Feldman calls it a ‘Cool War’ and international relations scholar Michael Doyle calls it a ‘Cold Peace.’”
Alperovitch prefers a different analogy: “Cold War II.” This is a fine formulation for a new era of great-power competition that looks vaguely similar to the last time the United States engaged in a protracted global rivalry against a totalitarian superpower. This time around, though, the American position looks more tenuous. The military might of the People’s Liberation Army surpasses any conventional force the Soviet Union was able to field at the height of its power. To complicate matters further, the United States and its principal allies are entangled with China economically to an extent they never were with the Soviet Bloc, which will make even limited military conflict exorbitantly expensive for all involved (and, for that matter, many who aren’t).
World on the Brink offers a succinct analysis of the twilight struggle between Washington and Beijing. It contains much that is sound and little that is original. But what is original is not sound and what is sound is not original. Although it does not break new ground on the nature of this strategic competition, it sheds important light on its scope, particularly in the cyber realm. It documents how China’s economic rise has been greatly enhanced by cybertheft and economic espionage. Cyber attacks, at which China is increasingly proficient, are a powerful method for extending this asymmetric advantage to the domain of national security.
The United States remains a formidable foe for any revisionist power. It would still be recognizable to Theodore Roosevelt, who observed in 1900 that America had become “more and more the balance of the power of the whole globe.” In addition to its colossal size and advantageous geography, its wealth and its military reach, America’s liberal character has garnered it strong and capable allies around the world.
But Alperovitch is rightly concerned by America’s vulnerabilities. He writes with knowledge and passion about the need for the United States to rebuild its defense industrial base after many years of mismanagement and underinvestment. “Today, many U.S. military systems are built with rare earths from China, including magnets in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which rely on Chinese-processed neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium,” he notes. “The defense industrial base’s reliance on China isn’t limited to rare earths, either. As retired air force brigadier general Robert Spalding notes, the propellant of U.S. Hellfire missiles is imported from China.”
Among the many sobering facts laid bare by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of the most urgent is the depleted state of America’s defenses, which leave it ill-equipped for an actual hot war in Europe, let alone a prospective one in the East and South China Seas. America’s productive capacity has expanded rapidly in response to foreign crises before, but it is currently woefully unprepared for large-scale industrial warfare.
Alperovitch makes a compelling case that the “peace dividend” after the Cold War, in which successive Congresses and administrations pared back defense spending, was the most reckless public policy in a generation. Boosting our defense industrial capacity needs to be a top national priority. Failure to do so may tempt the Chinese to seize the opportunity of a distracted and overstretched hegemon to strike Taiwan before the United States has a chance to rearm.
Against the popular view that the United States and its principal allies remain economically superior to their adversaries and therefore have no reason to fear Chinese aggression, Alperovitch rightly insists that U.S. economic dynamism will be insufficient to prevent strategic defeat if we fail to secure our military advantage in the sea, on land, and in the air, as well as in space and cyberspace. China, which already boasts a larger navy than that of the United States, does not even need to achieve military parity with the United States to crack the order it has long guaranteed in the Indo-Pacific. It can bring a range of pressures to bear against recalcitrant neighbors and effectively render U.S. security guarantees moot.
Permitting any sort of Chinese victory against a U.S. ally would shatter the trustworthiness—and the deterrence power—of our defense assurances and obliterate our geostrategic position in Asia. Alperovitch thereby concludes that American hegemony and Chinese hegemony cannot coexist. He begins the book by sketching a scenario in which China launches a war to conquer Taiwan while American officials dither about whether to come to the island’s aid. If China were to succeed in such a scenario, it would “rapidly reconfigure the geopolitical power structures across Asia, the Pacific, and beyond.” Alperovitch rightly notes that “the dominance and influence of the United States would drastically diminish” not just in Asia but across the globe.
The same logic governed American security commitments to Europe in the “first” Cold War, and Alperovitch argues convincingly that “Taiwan is the Berlin of Cold War II.” The democratic outpost represents what Berlin represented to the Soviet Union: the overwhelming military priority to which the Chinese state has staked its credibility. Xi has personally pledged to “reunify” the island with the mainland by any means necessary. If the Chinese manage to absorb Taiwan, by force or the threat of it, it would “herald the emergence of an even more bellicose China, “one confident that might makes right.”
War over Taiwan is the worst-case scenario, followed closely by China’s seizure of Taiwan without a war. Either scenario would gravely injure U.S. interests. The bad news is that both scenarios are possible. The good news is that neither scenario is (yet) inevitable. The optimal strategy for China to reclaim Taiwan would not be a sudden confrontation in the Taiwan Strait that could elicit a devastating military response, but a gradual military buildup that blends intimidation and coercion to eviscerate Taiwanese independence without a shot being fired.
Precious time in Cold War II has already been lost. As Alperovitch reminds us, many Americans, including policymakers, learned the wrong lessons from Cold War I. Too many succumbed to determinism and decided that the American form of government had prevailed over its ideological rivals and would naturally expand throughout the world. This myth about the inevitable liberal triumph led to a short-sighted policy of inviting China into the world economy in the pristine illusion that as the world’s largest single-party state grew rich, it would cheerfully, if gradually, become an open society.
Alperovitch is well-versed on the subject of China and the history of its encounter with the modern world, but this does not save him from grave analytical errors. The most prominent of these is the theory that, as he puts it, an America enfeebled by its post-9/11 “wars of choice” is compelled to “scale down our ambitions for a worldwide liberal order” and focus on the preeminent threat to America’s “narrow core” interest: China, “the only global adversary who can truly challenge us and displace us as a global economic and military superpower.”
This proposal has distinct echoes of the vaunted “pivot to Asia” that was inaugurated by the Obama administration and ostensibly continued by its successors, but which never materialized. It also smacks of the mid-twentieth century “Asia Firsters,” many of whom were at heart isolationists congenitally skeptical of Europe but forced to become internationalists by the World Wars. Alperovitch stipulates that a strategic reorientation toward the Pacific would not necessitate that America “pull out of Europe or abandon Ukraine.” Either measure, he notes, would offend European allies and discourage their participation in America’s containment of China.
This more sober form of restraint, though, does not avoid the problem bedeviling the general “realist” worldview: It was precisely U.S. retrenchment, in Europe and the Middle East, that begot the two wars now raging in those theaters to begin with. America’s feeble response to Putin’s seizure of Crimea opened the door to the Russian invasion of Donbas, which American policymakers barely noticed. America’s determination to stay out of the Middle East allowed Russia and Iran to prop up Bashar al Assad in Syria, protecting a critical part of Iran’s crescent of influence. The disastrous, shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan likely emboldened both Iran and Russia. If this feeble approach continues, it would put further stress on an open international order.
With the convergence of multiple crises, Alperovitch gives every indication that he would like to see even less American commitment in Europe and the Middle East since he contends that it only detracts from the all-consuming mission to deter China. While abjuring a retreat into Fortress America, he posits that “matching our ambitions to the limits of our power” means accepting “more of the world as it is.” To his credit, for intellectual honesty in support of a bad idea, Alperovitch spells out some of the probable results of this strategic restraint. In order to marshal all available resources to counter the Chinese threat, he explicitly countenances an Iranian bomb, though he elsewhere advises that the United States should “delay for as long as possible Iran’s crossing the nuclear weapons threshold and counter its regional aggression and support for genocidal terrorists.”
On the subject of Ukraine, Alperovitch’s scheme offers little more hope for a decent outcome, either from the standpoint of American interests or American principles. After condemning Vladimir Putin’s war of “genocidal aggression,” Alperovitch asserts that “if one looks at it objectively, Russia has already lost.” Citing Moscow’s enormous battlefield losses, depleted armory, and the “severe” sanctions and exports controls that are “curtailing Russia’s economic growth,” he confidently predicts that the Russian bear has been corralled.
This is one of the most fatuous arguments to come out of the “realist” camp since Russia launched its war of conquest in February 2022, which is saying quite a lot. Russia is no pygmy set to become a “vassal state of China.” Alperovitch, who is the son of Russian immigrants, elides the disconcerting fact that sanctions against Russia are far from universal, which may explain why they have failed to hobble its economy. At a time when Ukraine is still reeling from the demographic and economic shock of the war, Russia has bounced back from its “ruinous” war with a growing economy and record investments in its military capacity.
In the context of widespread calls for the United States to leave the defense of Ukraine to its NATO partners, it’s worth considering how Kyiv would fare bereft of American leadership. Some European powers would fight on their own for as long as they could. Others would likely cut their losses and sue for peace. This process would only accelerate due to the diminution of U.S. military support for Ukraine and NATO’s eastern front. In such circumstances, Europe would be unlikely to ride to the rescue of Asian democracies menaced by Chinese aggression.
It’s also worth considering what the world would look like today had Putin’s initial invasion gone according to plan. If Ukraine’s army had been routed on the battlefield and its government had fallen, Taiwan itself would likely have been subjected in short order to similar aggression courtesy of the CCP. Taiwan’s foreign minister has implied as much. Without Ukrainian valor and allied armor, what now may appear to be a “frozen conflict” on the edge of Europe might have instead been the beginning of World War III.
Alperovitch seems to believe that the American-led international order can survive and even thrive as long as it manages to succeed in what Churchill called “the decisive theater.” But as Putin redoubles his commitment to abolishing the Ukrainian state and annexing its territory into a new Russian empire, and as Iran’s “axis of resistance” ratchets up its holy war against Israel on multiple fronts, the fraying order in key theaters has already begun to signal the end of American hegemony to a watching world.
As the pattern of global disorder “hardens” the Chinese regime’s intent to use force to alter the world as we know it, World on the Brink provides further proof of the emerging national consensus at least notionally agreeing that more needs to be done to deter Beijing. But the book has as many drawbacks as it does assets. A clear-eyed manual for victory in Cold War II will await another author.
If China grows more assertive in the coming years, this book will not become any more valuable since its most impressive feature—the intense focus on deterring China—is also its weakness. The People’s Republic is certainly America’s greatest strategic challenge, but hardly its only one. The United States must rearm, but it must not pivot.
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