Keeping an Eye on the Long Game: Part CI

the essential argument on how to challenge China

You are in for a treat today. One of the best and most substantive arguments about how to approach the challenge presented by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is taking place over at Foreign Policy Magazine.

You have two options here, though I recommend you do both:

1. Get a fresh cup of coffee and come back, because have some meaty pull quotes for ‘ya to read below.

2. Get a fresh cup of coffee, close the door, send the phone to voicemail, and get ready to read all the enclosed links after completing step #1 above. You can’t do the first part of #2 alone, that’s just rude.

So, what kicks things off is a foundational article by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher titled, No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.

I’m happy to reveal my biases; I have a long-standing record of respect and support for Pottinger and Gallagher. That being said, I’d have no problem pointing out areas of disagreement - both of these gentlemen would expect nothing less - but it is real hard for me to find much daylight between their theory of the case about how we should respond to the PRC and the view of the PRC we’ve discussed here since we started the Long Game series back in 2004 on the OG Blog, and then continued it here.

For you old Cold Warriors, it is an entertaining read - especially for those who got their commission in the 1980s. Junior cohort GenX … as JOs we lived the glorious half-decade of 88-92 from when the Soviets started their withdrawal from Afghanistan to the first full year without a Soviet Union. We know the mindset and talking points of the dead-ender Soviet apologists and Western defeatists. We argued with it all through college. … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In reaction - and I use that term intentionally - to Pottinger and Gallagher, Foreign Affairs provided a superb service to us all. We have responses from Rush Doshi on The Biden Plan; Jessica Chen Weiss and James B. Steinberg with The Perils of Estrangement; and my favorite (I kid), Paul Heer’s, A Possible Partner.

In Pottinger and Gallagher’s response to those reactions, they tear them apart - in a gentlemanly manner - better than I can, so I’ll remind you in the end to read their response in whole. It is a tasty little bit of prose.

Seriously, I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

After reading it all, the first idea that came to mind is reports of the death of the China Doves are greatly exaggerated.

I can’t get away from the feeling that, if not the same exact people, but at least the world view of this school of thought is still mad that the USA and its allies won the Cold War against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The West, you see, is bad. Real central planning by The Smartest People in the Room™ hasn’t been tried. People’s First Deputy Friedman can enlighten you further.

Just typing that out makes me feel 22 again. I really enjoyed arguing with the people in the 1980s who, as late as 1984, saw 2010 as a time when the Soviet Union was not only more technologically advanced but was continuing on the march through the world, until, well … of course.

I digress again. Hell, I’m having fun and it’s my substack.

Anyway, back to the substance.

When you read the responses to No Substitute for Victory (BTW, an almost perfect title), you may get a flashback to the 1980s Soviet apologists who snipped and sneered every chance they had at Reagan and those who wanted to defeat the Soviets. I sure did.

What is so refreshing with No Substitute for Victory, and correct, about their focus is their confidence on the one thing that matters - and is possible - victory.

The view to the PRC and the plan forward is a structure and framework that is not only firmly rooted in the PRC as it is, not as we wish it were, but is a solid “Ref. A” that can shape policy, plans, and actions.

Before we dive into the pull quotes, let’s use the short bios from the FA articles to better define the players.

• MATT POTTINGER served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021 and as Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. He is a co-author and editor of the forthcoming book The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.

• MIKE GALLAGHER served as U.S. Representative from Wisconsin from 2017 to 2024 and chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

• RUSH DOSHI is Director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He previously served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

• JESSICA CHEN WEISS is Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell University, a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis, and a former member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.

• JAMES B. STEINBERG is Dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and was U.S. Deputy Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.

• PAUL HEER is Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia.

The opening paragraph of No Substitute for Victory sets the tone. Emphasis is mine;

Amid a presidency beset by failures of deterrence—in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East—the Biden administration’s China policy has stood out as a relative bright spot. The administration has strengthened U.S. alliances in Asia, restricted Chinese access to critical U.S. technologies, and endorsed the bipartisan mood for competition. Yet the administration is squandering these early gains by falling into a familiar trap: prioritizing a short-term thaw with China’s leaders at the expense of a long-term victory over their malevolent strategy. The Biden team’s policy of “managing competition” with Beijing risks emphasizing processes over outcomes, bilateral stability at the expense of global security, and diplomatic initiatives that aim for cooperation but generate only complacency.

“…failures of deterrence…”From Moscow to Beijing to Tehran — this cannot be argued. Sure, people will try - especially Doshi - but it can’t stand up to the follow on question.

The USA needs an energetic and not a passive policy. We need something goal oriented instead of reactionary to events initiated by our competitors on the world stage.

The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order. … China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.

There’s your elevator speech. That is all you need if you are in a hurry.

In addition to having greater clarity about its end goal, the United States needs to accept that achieving it will require greater friction in U.S.-Chinese relations. Washington will need to adopt rhetoric and policies that may feel uncomfortably confrontational but in fact are necessary to reestablish boundaries that Beijing and its acolytes are violating.

The PRC probes with the bayonet. They understand strength and power, like all authoritarians do.

You can’t choose which reality you find yourself in - but you do have to accept it or it will destroy you.

No country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a cold war is already being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. Rather than denying the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and win it.

…

Like the original Cold War, the new cold war will not be won through half measures or timid rhetoric. Victory requires openly admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never be a reliable partner. Like the discredited détente policies that Washington adopted in the 1970s to deal with the Soviet Union, the current approach will yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying their conviction that they can destabilize the world with impunity.

“Win it.” “Victory.” That is the mindset the moment calls for. Nothing else will suffice.

As for Cold War II: Electric Boogaloo? Don’t threaten me with a good time. I like winning.

Where are we now?

Less than three weeks before invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed a “no limits” security pact with Xi in Beijing. In a prudent step after the invasion, Biden drew a redline by warning Xi in a video call that the U.S. government would impose sweeping sanctions if China provided “material support” to Moscow. Xi nonetheless found plenty of ways to support the Russian war machine, sending semiconductors, unarmed drones, gunpowder, and other wares. China also supplied Moscow with badly needed money in exchange for major shipments of Russian oil. Chinese officials, according to the U.S. State Department, even spent more money on pro-Russian propaganda worldwide than Russia itself was spending.

When the PRC tells you who they are by their words or actions, believe them. They are not a positive player on the world stage and should be called on it. Make no mistake, they gain from the West and Russia bleeding themselves of money, equipment, and blood. The PRC sees all sides as rivals; Russia, the USA and Europe. They gain by letting rivals fight … and the longer the better.

Xi told a seminar of high-level Communist Party officials in January 2021. Xi made clear that this was a useful development for China. “The times and trends are on our side,” he said, adding, “Overall, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” By March 2023, Xi had revealed that he saw himself not just as a beneficiary of worldwide turmoil but also as one of its architects. “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” he said to Putin on camera while wrapping up a visit to the Kremlin. “And we are the ones driving these changes together.”

It’s all right there. All you have to do is read it.

Whether Xi is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design—or, almost certainly, both—it is clear he sees advantage in stoking crises that he hopes will exhaust the United States and its allies. In a sobering Oval Office address in mid-October, Biden seemed to grasp the severity of the situation. “We’re facing an inflection point in history—one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come,” he said. Yet bizarrely—indeed, provocatively—he made no mention of China, the chief sponsor of the aggressors he did call out in the speech: Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Through omission, Biden gave Beijing a pass.

Weakness in the face of a predator invites attack. It almost requires it.

I do so much enjoy the takedown of détente. Ungh, the 1970s. As our universities refuse to teach real history - their review of this part of that besotted decade should be considered a national service.

But the Russians had their own ideas about the utility of détente. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis observed, the Soviets “might have viewed détente as their own instrument for inducing complacency in the West while they finished assembling the ultimate means of applying pressure—their emergence as a full-scale military rival of the United States.” Nixon and Kissinger thought détente would secure Soviet help in managing crises around the world and, as Gaddis put it, “enmesh the U.S.S.R. in a network of economic relationships that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Russians to take actions in the future detrimental to Western interests.” But the policy failed to achieve its goals.

Détente failed the first time. Totalitarian regimes with global power aspirations do not have the same incentives and disincentives that one finds in Model UN seminars and college faculty lounges.

Then, Ronaldus Magnus;

By the time President Ronald Reagan entered the White House, in 1981, Nixon and Kissinger’s invention was on its last legs. “Détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims,” Reagan stated flatly in his first press conference as president, effectively burying the concept.

Détente ran, what, from 1973 to 1981? That was eight years? How long have we tried to be buddies with the PRC?

Well, with today being the 35th Anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, let’s say at least 35 years. If you date it to Nixon visiting Beijing, you can make that 52 years.

Oops.

Beijing is waging a bitter information war against the United States—which is losing, despite its natural advantages. Xi and his inner circle see themselves as fighting an existential ideological campaign against the West, as Xi’s words from an official publication in 2014 make clear:

“The battle for “mind control” happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They will have the initiative throughout the competition and combat. . . . When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don’t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.”

What should we do now?

REARM, REDUCE, RECRUIT

What U.S. officials need first is clarity about the contest with China. They have to recognize that rising tensions are inevitable in the short run if the United States is to deter war and win the contest in the long run. Once they have faced these facts, they need to put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.

Xi is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan.

…

Instead of spending about three percent of GDP on defense, Washington should spend four or even five percent, a level that would still be at the low end of Cold War spending.

And our allies should spend at least 3%, some on the front lines, closer to 4% if they expect us to back their play.

Especially in Europe, our allies must increase north of 3%. We should tell them, “Listen, we will 100% back our NATO allies should war come, but you have to be on the front lines and equal players. We have responsibilities as a Pacific nation you don’t have. We can’t do both. You must carry your fair share of the burden. We will maintain combined logistics and training bases with you. We will rotate out units for exercises, but almost everything else is moving back across the Atlantic. If your nation does not carry their fair share of spending, there will be consequences: from NATO’s command structure, to defense cooperation. We are serious, we expect you to be as well.”

Yes, that is a two-decade-old Salamander policy stance. Like a fine wine, it only gets better with age.

They also parallel another line we’ve developed here over the last few years, “No weapon system presently under production shall have its production line go cold until its replacement is under production. We shall fill our shallow magazines as rapidly as possible through expanded, scalable, and distributed production facilities. Prioritize logistics and range.”

The priority should be to maximize existing production lines and build new production capacity for critical munitions for Asia, such as antiship and antiaircraft missiles that can destroy enemy targets at great distances.

After we sold the PRC MIRV technology in the Clinton Coffee Klatch Era, we should have already made this move;

Washington must also halt the flow of American money and technology to Chinese companies that support Beijing’s military buildup and high-tech surveillance system.

We need to purge PRC nationals presently brain-deep in our STEM graduate programs at research institutions of higher learning. We are training their technological elite.

The next is gold-plated, actionable, and doable. Reward our friends; encourage more friends to show up.

…the United States needs to recruit a coalition of friendly partners to deepen mutual trade. Washington should strike a bilateral trade agreement with the United Kingdom. It should upgrade its bilateral trade agreement with Japan and establish a new one with Taiwan, agreements that could be joined by other eligible economies in the region. It should forge an Indo-Pacific digital trade agreement that would facilitate the free flow of data between like-minded economies, using as a baseline the high standards set by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

To overhaul its dilapidated defense industrial base, the United States should turbocharge innovation in the defense industry by recruiting talented workers from allied countries. Every year, the U.S. government authorizes roughly 10,000 visas through the EB-5 program, which allows immigrants to obtain a green card if they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in American businesses. The program is rife with fraud and has deviated far from its intended purpose as a job-creation program, becoming mostly a method for millionaires from China and other places to become permanent residents. These visas should be repurposed as work authorizations for citizens of partner countries who hold advanced degrees in fields critical to defense.

The U.S. government also needs to recruit the next generation of cold warriors to apply their talents to the contest with China. It should start by reversing the crisis in military recruitment—not by lowering standards, promising easy pay, or infusing the force with diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology but by unapologetically touting the virtues of an elite, colorblind, all-volunteer force and challenging young Americans to step up.

We cannot ignore the failures in the intelligence community and the Department of State either;

National security agencies need to cultivate deep expertise in Asia and in the history and ideology of the CCP. The curricula of the service academies and war colleges, as well as ongoing professional military education, should reflect this shift.

We must have civil service reform to remove intellectual barriers and bring in new solutions.

Again, a new Cold War? Why not. We won the first one and people throughout Central and Eastern Europe have self-governance as a result. If we win this one, the Chinese, Uyghur, and Tibetan people will too - maybe.

…however … some people either cannot envision victory, or are intellectually incapable of wanting it.

Let’s dive in to the responses. First with Doshi. First of all, relax Rush;

…they make a bad bet: they contend that the United States should forget about managing competition, embrace confrontation without limits, and then wait for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collapse. This approach risks runaway escalation and could force a moment of reckoning before the United States has taken the very steps the authors recommend to strengthen its defense industrial base and improve its competitive position. Such a strategy would also mean losing support from U.S. allies and partners, who would see it as irresponsible.

What?

• A bet on what has a proven record of success?

• “..confrontation without limits…” - that is a just plain bad-faith misrepresentation, but now that I think about it more, better than “…appeasement without limits…”

• Would it lose support? Really? Standing strong against the PRC would upset Japan, The Philippines, Australia, Vietnam, and others who are looking for someone strong to help them resist PRC aggression? Who is Doshi talking to?

As Pottinger and Gallagher mention in their reply, Doshi is a good representing for the Biden Team;

…the administration does not share the authors’ assumption that the contest with China can end as decisively and neatly as the Cold War did.

What, in victory? This is the same mindset that never saw the nature of the USSR. They believed, as the screenwriters of 2010: the Year We Make Contact did, that the USSR was the future, the stronger force, as opposed to the authoritarian beast cracking under its own structural weaknesses.

…China is the first U.S. competitor in a century to surpass 60 percent of U.S. GDP. The country boasts considerably greater industrial and technological strength than the Soviet Union did and is deeply enmeshed in the global economy. It cannot be wished away.

Of course, which as long as it is an authoritarian power trying to smash the human face with a boot, it must be opposed and defeated, just like the USSR was.

American objectives do not require China’s political transformation, and there is no guarantee that the end of communist rule would produce a more restrained China. The end of communist Russia, after all, eventually gave way to Putin’s Russia.

…and Putin’s Russia is must less of a threat to everyone than the USSR. Thanks for making our point Rush.

Russia is but a fraction of a threat the Soviet Union was when I filling out PQS books as she fell apart. The death of the USSR brought about self-determination to the long suffering people of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and almost Belarus.

This paragraph was a mistake on Doshi’s part. It tries too hard.

…the authors’ proposal for a $20 billion annual deterrence fund that would “surge and disperse sufficient combat power in Asia” for five years is genuinely novel. It is also more achievable than their call to effectively double the defense budget. A deterrence fund could complement the Biden administration’s new Replicator Initiative, which seeks to field thousands of unmanned autonomous systems within two years. It could also turbocharge U.S. investments in asymmetric capabilities, such as long-range missiles and advanced mines.

The first two sentences are solid, he should have stopped there.

• “Replicator” is simply an attempt to work around our accretion encumbered and unworkable acquisition program to get some drone tech to the front. It isn’t going to solve everyone hard problem. It won’t do all that much in two years. There are not magic beans.

• There is nothing “asymmetric” about long-range missiles and improved mines. I cannot think of two more symmetrical weapons systems out there, besides perhaps aircraft and magazine-fed rifles.

Pottinger and Gallagher provide an important service to the China policy debate by presenting a good-faith critique of the current approach. But what is most useful about their argument is not the areas of difference with the Biden administration but the areas of overlap. U.S. policy toward China will need bipartisan foundations to succeed. Their essay shows that regardless of where one starts in the China debate, at the moment, most policymakers are arriving at a similar set of common-sense policies.

This is the best paragraph, and the final one, from Doshi. He is spot on. We need a bipartisan approach - but both sides have to be bipartisan. I had my issues with parts of Doshi’s article, but if you read it twice and mark bits off, you can, as he states, see “…bipartisan foundations…’

Next to Weiss and Steinberg.

…history has shown that U.S. efforts to bring about change through pressure are as likely to consolidate authoritarian rule as to undermine it. 

I’m sorry, but you are going to have to show your work. I am familiar with the slant in the teaching of history at your two institutions, so … again … you need to give us some examples because the former Soviet Republics (most of them) and the former members of the Warsaw Pact have some receipts they’d like to show you.

They castigate the Biden administration’s approach as a throwback to détente, which the United States used to manage risk with the Soviet Union during the 1970s, but theirs is a revival of the “rollback” of the 1950s, which pushed the rival superpowers to the precipice of nuclear Armageddon.

That is simply a misrepresentation of what is on offer here. Not the 1950s (which was an awesome decade of American power and prosperity) but the 1980s, you know, the decade we won the Cold War in.

1950s and 1980s? Again, don’t threaten me with a good time.

The Cold War is a chilling reminder of the perils of unconstrained rivalry.

No, the Cold War is a heart-warming reminder of victory.

Pottinger and Gallagher’s nostalgia for the Cold War and their call for a new generation of cold warriors could be issued only by those who have no memory of how dangerous that war often was.

Speak for yourself. I have great memories of the Cold War and how we won it. It was great. Remember?

Sure, The Smartest People in the Room™, a fair number of them with Cornell and SAIS on their CV who failed to see the end of the Cold War, screwed up the peace in the 1990s with Russia and set the table for the PRC’s rise, but we didn’t know that at the time.

Weiss and Steinberg were a disappointment.

Let’s see what Paul Heer contributes.

CCP leaders are focused on winning hearts and minds in a multipolar world, especially outside the West, and they recognize that trying to establish Chinese global hegemony and impose their own system on the rest of the world would be counterproductive to that goal. They also recognize that it would be destabilizing, prohibitively expensive, and probably unachievable and unsustainable.

Wait…what? Is the bullying in the South China Sea not happening? Is Belt and Road debt traps not a thing? Strip-mining the world’s fisheries just a conspiracy theory? Are Uyghurs and Tibetans just high-maintenance girlfriends?

Maybe it gets better?

Pottinger and Gallagher also cite a remark Xi made to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023: “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.” Although this is now routinely quoted in media reports as evidence of Xi and Putin’s malign agenda, there is a “game of telephone” dynamic at work: the quote is an English translation of a Russian translation of an impromptu remark Xi made in Chinese. Much has been made of the remark, but it seems more like an offhand comment, or even a garbled translation, than a declaration of a grand scheme.

You mean Pottinger, who is fluent in Mandarin, was too lazy to listen to the source material? We are to ignore what Xi actually said, but instead listen to a guy who was part of the intelligence effort in the first two decades of this century that got the PRC wrong?

Hard pass.

Well, that was even worse.

I give Doshi a solid B. Weiss and Steinberg a C+. I will give Heer an incomplete. I will require him to resubmit his work after quiet reflection following a couple of weeks without watching MSNBC or CNN prime-time shows or reading the WaPo or NYT.

I’ll let him have the Wall Street Journal as long as he does not avoid the editorial page. If he is caught not following the rules, he will have to read just the NY Post. There will be health and welfare checks. Trust but verify, of course.

After all that, but in a more intellectual and professional manner than my mini-Fisking above, Pottinger and Gallagher replied to their critics. You really need to read the whole thing, but I can’t help but pull a few things out and roll in ‘em.

In short, global events driven by Xi and his “axis of chaos”—Russia, Iran (and its terrorist proxies), North Korea, and Venezuela—are simply overwhelming Biden’s China policy. As the Biden team frets about admitting that the United States is now in a cold war, Beijing is leading it into the foothills of a hot one.

Exactly right. The Biden team is overwhelmed and not doing well. The left-of-center foreign policy establishment is not helping because they are not just intellectually vapor-locked with the world being itself and not responding to lounge-theory; they are in deep denial about where we find ourselves;

Jessica Chen Weiss and James Steinberg argue against waging a cold war with Beijing because cold wars are dangerous. We don’t deny they are dangerous. The problem is that the United States is already in one—not because Americans desired or started it, but because Xi is laser-focused on prevailing in a global struggle in which “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph,” as he put it in a quintessential secret speech shortly after rising to power.

When people tell you who they are, believe them. Don’t make excuses for them in order to make them artificially fit your theories of convenience.

The critique of our article by Paul Heer, who once served as the U.S. intelligence community’s top Asia analyst, is the true outlier in this debate. Whereas Weiss and Steinberg acknowledge (albeit with conspicuous understatement) that Beijing “is at odds with many of the United States’ key international partners” and “pursues economic policies that harm American workers and companies,” Heer sees an altogether different regime. In his telling, Beijing is “focused on winning hearts and minds in a multipolar world” and seeking to “maximize China’s power, influence, and wealth relative to the United States”—although he grants that Beijing is doing this “ruthlessly and relentlessly.”

Again, if you want to see why “we” missed the nature of the PRC’s rise this century, see the above. They remember everything, but learn nothing - intellectually stuck in aspic;

…Heer’s optimistic assessment reads like something that might have been written about China a quarter century ago. It would have been wrong back then, too, but it would have been easier to excuse, given Beijing’s disciplined policy of strategic deception at the time.

Complete lack of reflection.

Pottinger and Gallagher correctly diagnose the Cold War;

It stands to reason—and Cold War history is replete with examples—that the weaker a communist dictatorship becomes, the more manageable a threat it becomes for Washington. Hence, the United States should first do nothing to strengthen the CCP’s power and confidence, which are sources of its aggression.

Their final line should be kept handy by everyone. Use early and often when discussing what we should do in response to the PRC.

China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.

With apologies to Hillel; this is the whole truth of this competition; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.

Again, well done by Foreign Affairs. We need more of this.