request—we need to figure out a new alliance framework to deter such

actions from China in the future. China needs to know that bullying won’t
work.
On the security front, there’s little value in the Indo-Pacific in a
replacement for SEATO, the twenty-year attempt to build a Southeast Asia
alliance like NATO that ended in 1977 after never achieving a working
military structure. (One British diplomat called the alliance a “zoo of paper
tigers.”27) Today, too many of the countries across the Indo-Pacific are
already protected by bilateral security pacts with the United States to bother
joining a larger formal security alliance. For example, given that both Japan
and the Philippines have their own security pacts with the United States, it’s
not entirely clear what domestic political appetite there would be for, say,
the Philippines to be treaty-bound to defend Japan if it is attacked.
Instead of a military security alliance in the Indo-Pacific, we should be
looking to build a new—and global—economic security alliance. America
should lead the way in creating a new organization—call it something like
the Treaty of Allied Market Economies (TAME), an “economic NATO”
alliance of European and Indo-Pacific nations with open-market economies.
Together, the partners in this alliance would respond as a unified block to
political and economic pressure from China—or any other economic
aggressor, for that matter. The alliance’s “Article 5” collective economic
defense mechanism would trigger a combination of trade barriers, sanctions,
and export controls that could be used in a coordinated manner to equalize
pressure and retaliate against any aggressor unfairly singling out a member of
the alliance. In some ways, this alliance would look similar to the
coordinated but independent action that the West—including the UK,
European Union, Canada, and Japan—took in levying unprecedented
sanctions against Russia after its Ukraine invasion. As an additional carrot to
joining such an alliance, like-minded members could all share increased
trade benefits in the form of tariff cuts, regulatory cooperation, and enhanced
investment terms. Beyond formal joint economic punishment of an aggressor,
such an alliance could also plan for and commit to repairing and replacing
real economic harms that member countries face when hit with retaliatory
tariffs or trade wars—e.g., a promise by member states to make Australian
lobstermen whole if their market in China is torn away. Such “trade
diversion” often occurs in the market anyway. As one market closes, another
opens—and we know that, in part, because of China’s actions against
Australia. Markets are adaptable and most goods can flow elsewhere,
especially if protectionist tariffs don’t stand in the way. It’s why Australia,
for instance, weathered some of China’s aggressive moves better than
anticipated. In particular, the Australian coal industry—which was also hit
with punishing bans—turned out just fine because coal is such a fungible and
high-demand product. “Once China banned imports of Australian coal in
mid-2020, Chinese utilities had to turn to Russian and Indonesian suppliers
instead. This, in turn, took Russian and Indonesian coal off the market,
creating demand gaps in India, Japan, and South Korea—which Australia’s
stranded coal was able to fill,” Foreign Policy noted. “The result of
decoupling for one of Australia’s core industries was therefore just a game of
musical chairs—a rearrangement of who traded with whom, not a material
injury.”28
One of the reasons that NATO has never had to invoke Article 5 against
another nation-state attack—the only time it’s ever been used was after
September 11 against al-Qaeda—is precisely because of how strong all other
countries know the response from the combined NATO force would be. The
same is true on the economic front. As Daleep Singh, a National Security
Council official who helped coordinate the US response to Ukraine, says,
“The best sanctions are the ones that never have to get used.”29 China might
very well think twice before weaponizing its trading strength if it understood
the combined—and severe—penalties it might face in taking such action and
that even if it did launch a trade war, it wouldn’t necessarily inflict much
economic harm to begin with.
There’s enough evidence of China’s willingness to inflict economic pain
for political gain across Asia and Europe that a well-crafted TAME
organization would likely attract a long line of participants—many countries
across the globe are becoming increasingly concerned about Chinese
belligerent behavior, and there is safety in numbers. While it is unlikely that
some large countries with significant economic dependence on China, such
as France and Germany, would rush to join this new alliance, states that have
already found themselves on the receiving end of Chinese coercion in the
past—such as Australia, Norway, Sweden, Japan, the Czech Republic,
Lithuania, the Philippines, and Taiwan itself, among others—are prime
candidates for initial membership. Over time, as TAME membership grows
in numbers, combined economic power, and market size, it will become a
magnet too attractive for other market economies to avoid, especially if
China continues to engage in brutish bullying tactics around the world.
TAME creation, however, requires American leadership. The only way such
an alliance can come into existence is if the United States—as the world’s
largest economic power—shows the way and commits using its enormous
economic leverage over aggressor states like China on behalf of smaller
aggrieved allied countries. Just like with NATO’s sacred Article 5
commitment, only if we are willing to commit to sacrifice on behalf of others
could we expect to receive reciprocal commitments from them.

GET WOULD-BE FRIENDS OFF THE FENCE

The Pacific and Indian Oceans represent the future of our geopolitical
security and the world’s economic center of gravity. Building a shared vision
for the future of Asia among the nations that rim them will be among the most
important projects facing the coming generations of US diplomats. Much like
the “strong medicine” conversation the United States needs to have with
Europeans to convince them that it is in their interest to deter China, we need
to convince our Asian partners of the same truth.
A key counterbalance to China can be our broader relationships across
Southeast Asia. Figuring out how to appeal to and partner with countries like
Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines—and position them alongside steady
long-standing allies like South Korea and Japan—will be critical to creating
the alliances China will notice. The United States has been pouring new
resources and energy into the so-called Quad, our reinvigorated partnership
with Japan, India, and Australia, and it’s no coincidence that the we created
in 2021 another new security pact, AUKUS, which includes Australia and the
UK. AUKUS emerged as a tactical arms deal to provide Australia with
nuclear-propelled submarines based on highly sensitive UK and US
technology—a deal that unfolded after Australia opted out of procuring
French diesel submarines. The original French deal had not only unattractive
economics for Australia and limited national security benefits compared to
the advantages of building a closer partnership with the world’s primary
superpower—the United States—but it had technical downsides as well.
Nuclear submarines have much longer range and can operate underwater for
much longer than traditional diesel submarines—nuclear subs are effectively
limited only by the supplies of food and water on board. Diesel subs need to
come up to the surface every few days to recharge batteries, which makes
them more vulnerable to detection by overhead reconnaissance assets.
AUKUS was originally formed as an important pact to enhance the submarine
capabilities of Australia, a key ally in the Indo-Pacific, allowing it to
contribute to overall security in the region. It has since been expanded to
cover Australian investments in building additional shipyard capacity in the
United States—itself a vital expansion of our defense industrial base—and
the ability for US nuclear subs to permanently base in Australia, adding to
our military assets in the region. It also now involves the joint development
of other “military capabilities to promote security and stability in the Indo-
Pacific region,” capabilities that will include joint development of
autonomous underwater vehicles, AI and autonomous weapons, hypersonic
missiles, and electronic warfare tools, as well as the development of
quantum technologies.30
The pivot to Southeast Asia should also heavily feature the strengthening
of relations with India, another 1.4-billion-person country that aspires to
global power status. The economic rise of India—the world’s largest
democracy—over the last quarter century has been remarkable, but in certain
ways much more fraught and fragile than China’s, beset as India is by greater
internal political divisions and a challenging domestic political and religious
landscape. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s summer 2023 state visit to
Washington, DC, was marred by awkward questions about the backsliding of
democracy under his leadership. Moreover, the Canadian government’s
accusation in the months following that the Indian intelligence services had
orchestrated the assassination of a Canadian citizen in British Columbia—an
immigrant involved in a separatist Sikh movement in India—threatened to
unravel the slowly developing partnership between India and Western
countries. But the truth is that both China and the United States have a vested
economic interest in India’s continued growth, with its huge emerging
markets and rising consumerism providing new markets for industries. As the
world’s most populous country with a rapidly growing economy, India’s
geopolitical heft will continue to increase as the century progresses. India,
which has its own nuclear arsenal, has made clear that it wants to triangulate
its relations and pursue its own course to global power status. It is wary of
China, wants international respect, and doesn’t want to be vassal of the
United States—nor, as India has made clear, does it want to be tied to a
NATO-like Pacific security structure that would obligate it to act on our
behalf. (After all, unlike the United States, India shares a sometimes tense
land border with China.) At the same time, India is interested in Western
military technologies; as it views China’s growing naval effort in the South
China Sea and its own namesake ocean with great suspicion, it is keen to
modernize its own sea capabilities, like submarines and advanced surface
ships. The United States can provide more defensive weapons and deeper
military integration, as well as a closer economic integration, including
lowering of trade tariffs and ensuring India is treated more like an equal
partner. Already, the Pentagon is touting a rapidly deepening partnership with
the Indian military; as one US official told a briefing, “We now have working
groups on everything ranging from cyberspace and critical technologies to
maritime security, and India is leading in those forums together with the U.S.
and like-minded partners.”31
That mix of wariness and desire for a secure independence is shared by
other countries in the region, like Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore.
They see the benefits of closer cooperation with the United States, but they
want to conduct it on equal terms—even if they don’t have the power or
scale to dictate terms that India might. Thus, securing the Indo-Pacific region
will necessitate the construction of fruitful concentric circles of partners,
where we recognize individual strengths and needs of each country to build a
shared vision for the future of Asia.
Across the Pacific, the United States is scrambling to make up for lost
time and repair long-ignored relationships. Indonesia is the world’s fourth
most populous country, and for decades we barely had a strategy for dealing
with it. The United States is reentering engagement with Indonesia with
baggage from its shameful support of Indonesia’s brutal dictator Suharto and
his death squads—a regime that from 1968 to 1998 killed at least five
hundred thousand and perhaps as many as a million Indonesians. However,
China’s brutishness is also making Jakarta much more wary of Beijing. From
China Coast Guard vessels blocking Indonesian oil exploration in the South
China Sea in 2021 to Chinese fishing boats hoovering up fish in what
Indonesia considers its Exclusive Economic Zone near the northern Natuna
Islands, there are plenty of irritants in that bilateral relationship for the
United States to exploit. Doubling down on investments in Indonesia,
encouraging migration of Western factories from China to Indonesia and other
regional countries through more favorable tariff and tax treatments, building
partnerships on the exploration and processing of its nickel reserves (the
world’s largest) and other critical materials: all of these are opportunities
we should seize to build closer partnerships with a nation that will
undoubtedly play a big economic role in the twenty-first century.
Officials in the Biden administration have been hopscotching across the
Pacific, from Fiji to Vanuatu, and opened a new embassy in the Kingdom of
Tonga. But the results have been mixed, in part because of our own political
challenges. In May 2023 the congressional brinksmanship over the federal
debt limit led Biden to cancel a planned visit to Papua New Guinea, a stop
that would have made him the first-ever US president to visit the Pacific
island, where he was supposed to meet with leaders of eighteen islands.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken went in Biden’s stead and proclaimed,
“America’s future is here in the Pacific.”32
Sometimes, our outreach occurs too late. For example, in March 2023 US
officials were stunned by a draft agreement between China and the Solomon
Islands that appeared to open the islands to Chinese military bases and
stipulated that the nine-hundred-island chain would rely on Chinese help in
dealing with security challenges. Former Australian prime minister Kevin
Rudd called the move “the worst Australian security-policy failure in the
South Pacific since World II, almost certainly making Chinese warships a
more permanent feature in the Coral Sea.”33
The key strategy for winning these countries—or, if not fully bringing
them to our side, at least keeping them out of China’s pocket—is to
emphasize a very simple message: China is only out for China, it is driven
by a Hobbesian, zero-sum view of geopolitics. The United States and our
Western allies are self-interested too, sure, but we play for the good of a
larger global security order. This is not a battle of democracy versus
authoritarianism, or communism versus capitalism, this is a battle over a
predictable, secure, rules-based future versus bowing to China’s whims.
After all, while our overly moralistic messaging of democracy and human
rights promotion may play well at home in Western countries, it often goes
over like a lead balloon in much of the rest of the world. In contrast, no
country and no people—regardless of their preferred system of government
—want to be taken advantage of on the international stage. It’s in that
fundamental contrast—China’s rule by law versus the Western rule of law—
that we have a tremendous opportunity to highlight China’s neocolonialism
and self-serving debt-trap engagements. This is not as a hard message to
deliver as it might have been even a few years ago, given the bribery
scandals and failing infrastructure stories that have increasingly become
associated with the Belt and Road Initiative.
But as we build up our own reputation, it is also vital to take down
China’s. We should not miss an opportunity in our diplomatic engagements
around the world to talk about China’s territorial disputes, aggressive actions
in the Indo-Pacific region, and violations of major political agreements.
Examples are legion, from the decades-early unwinding of the “One Country
Two Systems” agreement with the British following the transfer of Hong
Kong to the 2016 UNCLOS arbitration tribunal ruling over Philippines
maritime rights in the South China Sea. Other Chinese behavior that should
concern many nations around the world includes its support for Russia in its
illegal invasion of Ukraine, detention and prosecution of Uyghur Muslims in
Xinjiang, failure to deliver quality projects via its Belt and Road Initiative
infrastructure, and more. Many countries around the world are suspicious of
America and Europe—not least because of our various shameful histories of
slavery and colonialism. But this is not a battle for perfection. Other
countries do not need to love us (as much as we would like them to) and most
of them, for reasons good and bad, never will. But as long as they hate China
more, they may prefer to partner with us.
We must act like—and actually be—the more trustworthy partner, the one
it’s easy to say yes to.

Footnotes
i
In late 2023, Michael Spavor filed a lawsuit against Michael Kovrig and the Canadian government,
alleging that he was unwittingly entangled in a spy case, an allegation both deny.
ii
Incredibly, European allies might have some wiggle room to avoid war even if China targets Hawaii.
Article 6 of the NATO treaty defines it as covering only European and North American territories “in
the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer,” a definition that leaves
out the fiftieth state. Indeed, since the 1960s the US State Department has admitted that the “collective
defense” requirement wouldn’t apply to attacks on Hawaii. This geographic loophole also allowed
NATO to avoid getting drawn into the Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina in
1982.
 CHAPTER 9

Step Four—Say No to Distractions

IN FOREIGN POLICY CIRCLES, THERE’S ALMOST NO MORE CUTTING joke than “the
Asia Pivot.” During his time in the White House, Barack Obama—raised in
Indonesia and Hawaii—laid claim to being “the first Pacific president,”
deploying the phrase throughout a trip to Asia in November 2009. In fall
2011 he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton embraced what they hoped
would be a sweeping change in American geopolitics, reorienting the country
from its long-standing transatlantic focus to the east. In October 2011 Clinton
declared the era “America’s Pacific Century” in a Foreign Policy article,
saying, “The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or
Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”1 The
following month, during another trip to Asia, Obama formally declared a
“Pivot to Asia,” one that would be marked by the new Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade agreement and US engagement in the East Asia Summit.
“Our enduring interests in the region demand our enduring presence in the
region. The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay,”
Obama told the Australian parliament. “So let there be no doubt: In the Asia-
Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in.”2
And for a short time, the pivot seemed real, supported by new trade
agreement with South Korea, deployments of US Marines to Australia, a new
first-in-a-half-century trip by the secretary of state to Myanmar, and more. A
few weeks after Clinton’s trip, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died, a
transition that only underscored the extent to which Asia, and East Asia
specifically, seemed now to be the global center of gravity. In 2012 Clinton
embarked on another historic visit (this time to Laos), and Obama himself
that year became the first sitting US president to visit Cambodia and
Myanmar.
But then reality interceded. Month after month, year after year, the Obama
administration seemed to be pulled back to Europe and the Middle East.
There was the civil war in Syria, the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi,
the Russian seizure of Crimea and fomentation of an insurgency in eastern
Ukraine, the rise of ISIS, the Saudi war against Yemen, and more. Much as
the United States struggled to escape the pull of events elsewhere in the
world and maintain the focus on Asia, the results were not promising. The
Trump administration tried, too, to “Pivot to Asia,” with a similarly mixed
record of success. There’s a likely apocryphal story about how, when asked
for his view of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied, “It would be a
very good idea.” During a rooftop dinner at Arizona State University’s
Washington, DC, campus in 2019, Jake Sullivan—who had helped launch the
Obama effort eight years earlier—updated the joke: when asked about the
Asia Pivot, he replied, “It would be a very good idea.”
And so it was that almost exactly a decade after Obama’s Australia
speech that an October 2021 NPR headline read, “Long Promised and Often
Delayed, the ‘Pivot to Asia’ Takes Shape under Biden.”3 It was going to be a
centerpiece, in fact, of the Biden administration’s winter 2022 release of its
comprehensive National Defense Strategy. But then another speed bump: a
land war broke out in Europe. The Biden administration ended up delaying
the release of the National Defense Strategy for months. And then, in October
2023, the barbaric Hamas terror attacks on Israel lit the Middle East on fire
in yet another major conflict.

THE UNITED STATES WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO FULLY ESCAPE ENGAGEMENT with
the rest of the world—between its far-ranging commercial and security
interests, the country remains (and should remain!) too central to too many
multilateral institutions, international alliances, security agreements, trade
routes, and geographic regions to focus only on the Pacific. While it is
critical to marshal as many of our diplomatic, economic, and military
resources as possible to confront the top challenge of our century—avoiding
a catastrophic war with China while preserving our dominant position in the
Indo-Pacific—we cannot completely ignore other global problems. But we
do need to change how we think about those problems and challenges.
Much as the United States organized its foreign policy during Cold War I
around countering the Soviet Union ideologically and militarily, we need in
the coming decades to view the rest of the world through a simpler lens than
we do today. Namely, we should be closely reevaluating our entanglements
in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, and asking the question:
Does this impact our ability to contain and deter China or does it distract us
from that critical objective?
This is about making hard choices we haven’t forced ourselves to make
over the last generation. America needs to admit it can’t do everything and
can’t be everywhere. Just as we need to emphasize saying yes to our friends,
making it easy for countries to ally with us and counter and blunt China, we
need to be more focused about saying no to distractions. We need a stronger
focus on evaluating core interests and identifying what’s at the heart of our
partnerships and alliances around the world and to treat other questions in
foreign policy not as one-offs but through the lens of dealing with China.
The most prominent of these questions, of course, concern the three other
perennial members of the adversary club: Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Saying no to distractions doesn’t mean ignoring or capitulating to their
demands—but it does mean being cognizant that those three countries present
much smaller challenges to America and our leadership in the world than
China does, especially if we manage to successfully separate our dreams and
desires from actual core interests. They are second-tier powers that can
cause significant regional problems, but not global trouble, and we need to
be better about recognizing this fact. We should not ignore the important
security threats all three pose in their own way—but we must zero in our
attention on resolving and stabilizing the geopolitical rivalry of those three
relationships so we can focus our sustained attention on China.
Most importantly of all, we must also reevaluate and view our
engagement with Russia through the lens of countering China.
The last thirty years have witnessed Russia’s failure (and, frankly,
unwillingness) to anchor itself in the West. Unlike the cases of Germany and
Japan, which landed on stable perches in the Western order after being
vanquished during World War II, the United States tried to cater to Moscow’s
craving for respect following its loss in Cold War I by inviting Russia to join
the G-7 club of developed nations (it has since been kicked out) and by
establishing the NATO Russia Permanent Joint Council in 1997 to assuage
the Russian Federation’s concerns about NATO enlargement in eastern
Europe. As late as 2009 Hillary Clinton touted a possible “reset” with
Russia, presenting Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red button
intended to be labeled “reset.” The fact that the Russian word on the button,
peregruzka, actually meant “overload” ended up being prescient, as despite
all the Western engagement Russia continued to nurse its various grievances,
succumbing to toxic nationalism and imperialism.
US policymakers should nevertheless appreciate that Russia—the world’s
ninth most populous country, one that encompasses 11 percent of the world’s
landmass, a territory almost twice as large as the world’s second-largest
country by landmass, Canada—is not likely to disappear and that we need a
strategy for managing that relationship, if for no other reason than to reduce
tensions between the two largest nuclear states while making it more difficult
for China to benefit from Russia’s weakness. Of course the United States
would love to see a democratic Russia, its transformation into a country
anchored in the Western alliance, one that doesn’t threaten its European
neighbors and participates fully and cooperatively in trade partnerships,
respects human rights and the rule of law at home and abroad, and develops a
practicing free press and robust civil society. That, after all, was the dream
that some harbored throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but it was always
just that, a dream—one never attainable even during the best times of the
relatively friendly Boris Yeltsin.
As much as history has begun to mythologize the Yeltsin thaw, it’s worth
remembering he opposed our policies on Iraq, Iran, and Kosovo (not to
mention the expansion of NATO) and demonstrated highly corrupt and
antidemocratic tendencies from the start of his tenure. Instead, the reality that
the foreign policy community has long refused to confront—a refusal that
continued right up until Russia launched its self-defeating and genocidal
invasion of Ukraine in 2022—is that our geopolitical interests are not
compatible with Russia’s, regardless of who is sitting in the Kremlin.
Too often we tend to personalize politics, thinking that if only there can be
a leadership change at the top of another nation, a geopolitical relationship
can be drastically altered. But such shifts rarely occur since countries have
core interests that persist even across leadership transitions. Paradigm-
altering leaders are the exception rather than the rule on the global stage.
Post-Soviet Russia remained a significant diplomatic irritant, even under
Yeltsin’s leadership, and post-Saddam Iraq hasn’t become the key ally in the
Middle East that the George W. Bush administration predicted.
We mistakenly view the radical change that takes place under leaders like
Mikhail Gorbachev as entirely the result of their personality, when in fact
their remarkable leadership reflects the emergence of the right person at a
unique moment when societal change is already under way. Dramatic shifts in
national posture and policy are usually driven less by personality than by the
recognition of fundamental change in a geopolitical or domestic situation.
Soviet foreign policy dramatically changed direction when Gorbachev took
over from the previous geriatric Communist Party secretaries Chernenko
(1984–1985), Andropov (1982–1984), and Brezhnev (1964–1982).
Gorbachev never wanted to lose Cold War I to the United States, nor did he
want the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he recognized when arriving in the
Kremlin in 1985 that the system had atrophied and was collapsing under the
weight of economic inefficiency, corruption, unaffordable military spending
on the Afghanistan war, and the arms race. He tried to reform the system from
within—with the perestroika and glasnost programs—and adjust the foreign
policy by building a better relationship with the Reagan administration to
pause the unaffordable arms race, but in the end he lost it all: Cold War I, the
Soviet Union, and his own position. He took these gambles and actions not
because he was seeking to tear down the Iron Curtain and embrace a market
economy by pursuing a radically different domestic and foreign policy, but
precisely because he felt these changes were necessary and his best chance
to preserve the status quo—the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and the
communist system itself.
Today, we have to appreciate that regardless of who replaces Putin—and
someday someone will—Russia’s core interest in attempting to dominate its
near-abroad will almost surely be sustained across leadership transitions.
Russia’s centuries-old pursuit of being a great power to be respected and
reckoned with on the world stage is deeply rooted in the Russian psyche—
it’s a feeling that dates back to at least the times of Ivan the Great, the first
self-proclaimed tsar, who ended the Mongol-Tatar domination of Russia in
1480 and, following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in
1453, adopted the idea of Moscow as the third Rome. It was reinvigorated
and permanently seared into Russian mindset by Peter the Great, the first
self-proclaimed Russian emperor, who Westernized and modernized Russia,
turned it into a naval power, and defeated one of the great powers of the day,
Sweden, thereby expanding the Russian empire to capture today’s Baltic
states of Estonia and Latvia, as well as parts of modern Finland and modern
Ukraine. This imperialistic drive has survived the tsars, the Russian
Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks, and the Soviet Communist Party. It
will very likely survive Putin too.
Two generations of Russian elites have refused to come to terms with the
country’s diminished post-Soviet stature. While we often cite Russia’s
renewed international aggression as dating to Putin, it’s worth remembering
that in December 1992, Russian foreign minister Andrei V. Kozyrev stood
before European foreign ministers in Stockholm and blasted them with a
Cold War–style diatribe, threatening that Russia would force former Soviet
republics to join a new Moscow-led alliance. Secretary of State Lawrence S.
Eagleburger later said he had “heart palpitations” listening to the speech, and
the ministers were only let in on the joke a half hour later, when Kozyrev
returned to the podium and said “just kidding,” explaining the speech was
meant to illustrate the Russia the world would face if right-wing nationalists
took power in Moscow.4i
Regardless of how Putin meets his statistically and actuarially inevitable
end, Russia is not likely to transform into a liberal democracy in the
foreseeable future. Nor is it clear that even if Putin falls ill or is cast aside
that the next leader of Russia would be any better, more cooperative, or more
open to Western ideals. Those choices are ultimately up to the Russians
themselves and our ability to influence them has always been and will remain
extremely limited. And even if such an unlikely scenario were to come to
pass, we must recognize that even a liberal reformist Russian president
would undoubtedly continue to pursue policies that are seen as being in the
interest of preserving Russian greatness and independent power on the
international stage as demanded by the Russian populace and elites,
strategies and goals that will inevitably bring almost any future imaginary
Russia into tension with America. No Russian president—no matter if they
are an authoritarian dictator or a Russian version of Thomas Jefferson—
would willingly and happily accept being a junior and relatively powerless
partner or ally to the Western alliance. For that to happen, Russia would have
to come to terms with its own loss of geopolitical power, something that it
has shown little interest in doing. Thus, the United States needs to accept that
we may be dealing with an aggressive and recalcitrant Russia for many
decades—maybe even longer.
At the same time, Russia is too big and geopolitically important as a
major nuclear power to turn it into a permanent, isolated international pariah.
Nor, as examples of perennial irritants and troublemakers from North Korea
to Iran show, is that necessarily a productive path in the first place. After all,
seventy years of attempted isolation of North Korea—a tiny and much less
developed country in comparison to Russia—have not only not led to the
transformation of its brutal dictatorial regime but indeed have made the
regime more threatening as it acquired nuclear weapons and land- and
submarine-based ICBMs to deliver them. It’s hard to imagine that any similar
effort to isolate Russia is a sound long-term solution that will create a less
threatening Russia. Instead, as Russia, increasingly cut off from the West,
becomes beholden to China as a trade partner and key international patron,
we’re watching an intriguing unequal relationship develop—one that just
may present a unique opportunity one day. Russia has already diverted flows
of energy and mineral exports from past markets in Europe to China, its
consumers are increasingly reliant on Chinese imports that have replaced no
longer accessible Western ones, and Chinese currency is playing a major role
in transactions on Moscow’s stock exchange. These changes, and others, are
giving Beijing growing influence over Moscow and turning Russia
effectively into a vassal state of China—a geopolitical reality that will
eventually become a major irritant to Russian leaders and populations
alike.ii5
For all the rhetoric among Russian Moscow- and St. Petersburg–based
elites over the past decade about Russia’s “Turn to the East,” they continue to
see themselves as European and not Asian, and so the only thing worse in
their minds than being a junior partner to the West would be being in a
position of subservience to China. After all, not many Russians are rushing to
teach their kids Mandarin instead of the traditional foreign-language choices
of English, French, or German, and few are interested in vacations or real-
estate investments in China when they’re used to France, Italy, or Spain.
Even as they have found European vacation and shopping destinations
increasingly difficult to access due to sanctions, Russians are flocking in
droves to Istanbul and Dubai, not to China. (Cultural exchanges between the
two countries also remain fairly limited.) Thus, the current warm relationship
between Moscow and Beijing is not only a historical aberration—the two
countries have fought numerous territorial conflicts, the last one wrapping up
as recently as 1969, when Vladimir Putin was eighteen—but one that is
merely a political expediency for both countries. Their marriage of
convenience today is a simple joining of forces to confront their mutual
adversary—the Western alliance led by the United States. It is not
necessarily particularly durable. Beijing has already begun to drive a hard
bargain with Moscow, taking advantage of its need to sell energy to negotiate
substantial discounts, as well as refusing to overtly supply large quantities of
desperately needed weapons and ammunition for Russia to use in its war on
Ukraine. To date, China has tolerated Russia’s independent relations with
India and Vietnam and grudgingly respected the Kremlin’s significant role in
Central Asia, but as China comes to understand and wield its enormous
leverage over Russia, it will seek to shape Russian foreign policy in ways
that serve its own interests. As Sergey Radchenko and I wrote in Foreign
Affairs, “such heavy-handed Chinese policy will give the Russian political
establishment ample reason to rethink their own inveterate hostility toward
the West. Moscow will eventually recognize that it can extend its
international influence and increase its leverage with other powers
(including China) by restraining its aggressive impulses in Europe.”6 How or
when that scenario comes to pass, and whether Putin is atop the government
then, is still unknown, but it’s hard not to think that in the not-too-distant
future Russian elites will realize that Chinese coercion will only hasten
Russia’s collapse as a great power.
As we await that recognition, Washington should “encourage Russians to
at least imagine a future in which Russia is an influential, independent player
on the global stage that seeks to peacefully and profitably coexist with the
West,” Radchenko and I wrote.7 Our goal is not to bring Russia in from the
cold and turn it into an ally against China—such “reverse Kissinger” moves
are unattainable dreams that Russia has no interest in playing along with—
but instead to foster Russian neutrality, a geopolitical state wherein Russia
stands as a nonaligned independent force equidistant from the West and
China. To achieve that end, the United States must communicate to Russia
what it already knows to be true: China is merely looking after its own
interests and cares about Russia only insofar as Russia is an instrument to
achieve China’s goals. We can appeal to Russians’ sense of their own
country’s historical greatness by highlighting to them the benefits of an
independent path, one that doesn’t turn them into a junior partner or
adversary of either the West or China. The carrot we can offer is a renewed
economic and security relationship with the West, a relationship Russia can
use to balance its trade and security dealings with Beijing and reduce
China’s leverage over the medium and long term. But to benefit from those
rewards, the Russian Federation must permanently end its aggression against
Ukraine and cease threatening other neighboring countries. We must be
mindful that Russia may never become a true democracy with a rule of law,
free and open press, and independent judiciary, but such a high bar should not
be a precondition for a Russia that is willing to participate in the wider
world in a cooperative and nondestructive way. In some ways, the US goal
when it comes to Russia remains, after seventy-five years, what George
Kennan articulated at the start of Cold War I: the US must once again embark
on a strategy of “patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian
expansive tendencies.” As Kennan himself recognized, “the Soviet Union
will not last, but Russia will.”8
We need to realistically identify our long-term interests regarding Russia
and work toward that goal. At a minimum, we want Russia to be a country
that obeys and participates in international norms—not invading its
neighbors, not using chemical or radiological weapons for assassinations,
and not undermining democracy abroad through cyber and covert intelligence
operations. Russia is unlikely ever to be our friend, but it also doesn’t need
to be our enemy—in fact, we can continue to have significant disagreements
and conflicts in the diplomatic and geopolitical realms. The goal, rather,
should be to keep those disagreements from triggering actual conflict—either
directly with us or with our partners and allies.
There are, moreover, many areas where we need Russian engagement.
We’re not going to solve climate change without addressing Russian fossil
fuel use and extraction; we’re not going to open up the Arctic and the
Northern Passage trade routes to Asia without Russia; we’re not going to
keep the Iranian and North Korean threats under control without Russian
assistance. Most importantly, the world will become a much more dangerous
place if the United States and Russia are unable to showcase leadership in
the area of nuclear weapons arms control and adhere to their commitments to
ban the testing of nuclear weapons. Should that long-standing arms-control
regime fall, more and more states are likely to procure nuclear weapons—
dramatically increasing the risk of a world-changing nuclear conflict.
Fortunately for the United States, the poor leadership of Yeltsin and Putin
has destroyed Russia’s ability to present an existential conventional threat to
the West either economically or militarily. By being unwilling or incapable
of confronting their country’s runaway corruption and its reliance on an
economy built on extractive industries—fossil fuels like oil and gas, yes, but
also other materials like aluminum, nickel, gold, and diamonds—they’ve
condemned Russia to the fate of a shrinking economic power; the war in
Ukraine on top of ongoing corruption has caused Western business to think
twice about operating inside Russia, just as it has jolted Europe to diversify
the continent’s energy sources away from reliance on Russian oil and gas.
All of these are moves that will reduce Putin’s ability to coerce Europe.
Moreover, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the extent to which
corruption and the atrophying of military leadership over the past several
decades have doomed Putin’s military reforms and wasted hundreds of
billions of dollars. Tactically, the Russian military has shown itself
incapable of modern combined-arms combat and has been forced to rely on
contract mercenaries like the Wagner Group and its recruitment of convicts
for human-wave attacks for the little success it has been able to achieve. It
will take Russia a generation, under the best of economic circumstances
(which are obviously not what it faces today) to rebuild and restock the
decimated Russian military, which has lost thousands of tanks, armored
vehicles, and artillery pieces, as well as hundreds of fighter aircraft and
helicopters.
Now, with a much stronger hand than the United States or Europe had
even five years ago, we need to ensure that Russia—which from 2014 to
2022 has managed in so many instances to wrest our attention from the east—
doesn’t continue to distract us from dealing with China.
Obviously, we cannot pull out of Europe or abandon Ukraine (as some
China hawks, like John Mearsheimer have argued we should), as such a
drastic move would both endanger our Russia containment policy and make it
much harder to extract help and concessions from European countries when it
comes to confronting China—a continent that feels abandoned and
overwhelmed is hardly one happy to help us elsewhere. We must achieve a
balance and view our steps against Russia through the lens of the fight with
China. This strategy calls for several key steps: continuing to provide
military aid to Ukraine to help it defend itself against current or future
Russian aggression; enabling and strengthening our allies, like Baltic and
eastern European states, to allow them to feel secure against any possible
threat from Russia; and setting the terms for future Russian engagement.
The Ukrainian military is undergoing a crash course in the modernization
of its arsenal, doctrine, and training according to NATO standards, while
simultaneously fighting a brutal war against Russian invaders. They have
fought admirably and courageously, defending their country from being
overtaken by the Russians and clawing back a lot of the territory originally
captured. But our task of helping Ukraine transform what used to be a
backward Soviet military into a potent NATO-aligned fighting force is not
yet over. While much has already been done to supply Ukraine’s army with
Western armored vehicles, tanks, and artillery pieces, as well as shift the
country to Western short- and medium-range air defense systems, more work
remains to transform its air force away from obsolete Soviet-era MiG and
Sukhoi fighter jets to Western platforms such as the American F-16 and
Swedish Saab JAS 39 Gripen. The Ukrainian Navy must also develop
capabilities to deter the Russian Black Sea fleet from threatening Ukraine’s
coastline and enforcing blockades against the vital ports of Odesa and Izmail.
Not all of this can be done by the United States—we have to prioritize
critical capabilities, such as anti-ship missile stockpiles, for the potential
fight in Asia—but we can do more to help secure for Ukraine other foreign-
made anti-ship cruise missiles that are of no use to us, such as the French
Exocet or Turkish ATMACA cruise missiles.
We must also push Ukraine to invest in its own indigenous defense
industry. Prior to 2022 Ukraine was on the verge of making great progress
toward developing its own Hrim-2 short-range ballistic missile, a weapon
with a reported five hundred kilometer range, as well as the Neptune anti-
ship missile, which was successfully used to sink the Russian cruiser
Moskva in April 2022. With financial support from the West, Ukraine can
and must build significant stockpiles of these systems to increase its own
security and conventional deterrence. I was shocked during my visit to a
military drone factory in Kyiv in the summer of 2023 to witness a single
machinist there, wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops, working to produce only
one military drone a month. Ukraine surely can and must do better than that in
mobilizing its economy and population to produce critical munitions—
drones, missiles, and artillery shells. In addition to providing durable
security for the country, a stronger indigenous Ukrainian defense industry can
become an important source of economic prosperity for the war-ravaged
country as it can market its weapons systems for export, having demonstrated
their efficacy on the battlefield against Russia.
Similarly, it is important to reassure other countries bordering Russia or
Russian occupied territories—from the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania to
Transnistria in Moldova—of their own security against potential Russian
invasion. To date, these countries have little faith in the ability or willingness
of the major European powers Germany and France to defend them, and so it
is important for us to deploy small battalion-size, trip wire–style units—
ideally jointly with other NATO partners—to these countries to assure them
that the United States is committed to their defense. In exchange, we should
ask for their help in confronting Chinese economic aggression—perhaps by
joining TAME, our proposed economic alliance, and by reducing their own
dependence on China in critical national security areas like
telecommunications.
Looking ahead, we need to start to define what we want from a new
relationship with Russia—what steps can Moscow take to reenter the global
economy and reengage with the future? We have to put options on the table—
they may not take them up today, they may not take them up two years from
now, but they may do so in ten years—and define, openly and explicitly, that
our current sanctions and export controls are not going to be in place forever.
Our goal is not to destroy a country with 140 million people and turn Russia
into permanent adversary. Instead, we need to outline the rules of the road
that we expect Russia to abide by—an outline that could include harsh steps,
like reparations to Ukraine and verifiable destruction of chemical weapons,
but that nonetheless includes a balanced selection of carrots and sticks
necessary to chart a future with Russia.
Part of that roadmap has to be deep engagement with a future generation
of Russians—including the provision of visas and educational opportunities
for those who might find themselves in positions of power at home a
generation from now. And, taking into consideration those who don’t ever
want to return home, are highly educated, and can contribute as immigrants to
the building of our own country, we should make it easier for Russians to
settle in the United States and help advance our economy and scientific
knowledge.
Building that roadmap for future engagement is critical, in fact, to
undermining Putin’s main argument to his country—that the West is out to
destroy Russia—and, longer-term, softening his hold on power. We need to
build a counternarrative that says we’re willing to sit down and talk
whenever Russia is ready to reverse course and drop its imperial ambitions.
So where do our interests align? One obvious area is limiting stockpiles
of nuclear weapons through renegotiating the last strategic arms control treaty
—a START II treaty. Addressing climate change, from the Arctic to the green
energy revolution, is another area where we must cooperate. Even if Russia
stops being a major exporter of carbon fuels, it is going to continue being a
massive exporter of aluminum, nickel, palladium, titanium—all critical
ingredients we need for any transition to green technology and for enabling
advanced manufacturing. A surprising number of US industries and
manufacturers are actually reliant on Russian resources, from solar panels to
nuclear power. Boeing would love to keep buying Russian titanium; the
semiconductor industry needs neon gas that it had been purchasing from
Russia and Ukraine prior to the war. Without steady and predictable access
to Russian resources, many of the key aspects of daily life will quickly
become uneconomical. That, though, is also an opportunity: we can work to
encourage and turn Russia into a major provider to the world of natural
resources that are not destroying the planet but actually helping to save it.
That’s good for them. That’s good for us. And it will be bad for China.

THERE ARE ALMOST NO COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD THAT THE AVERAGE American
misunderstands more than Iran and North Korea, dictatorships in a
multidecade-long pursuit of nuclear weapons. Both exist in the American
mind as caricatures—one a backward regime led by fanatical mullahs, hell-
bent on destroying Israel, the other a Potemkin personality cult led by a brutal
but goofy dictator with a missile fetish and bad fashion sense. In both cases,
the caricatures lead us to misunderstand the countries and what matters to
their rulers.
In this regard, we face the challenge of two brutal regimes that have come
to believe—rightly or wrongly—that their hold on power is dependent in
part on their virulent anti-Americanism. By portraying their countries as
being in an existential fight with the “evil imperialist Americans,” they
attempt to distract their populations from the terrible economic problems they
face on a day-to-day basis. Both are also driven by extreme insecurities—
they are convinced that the United States is pursuing a policy of regime
change, a belief reinforced by our historical proclivities for such missions,
as well as by our periodic and often counterproductive global democracy-
promotion rhetoric, which they see as directed at weakening their dictatorial
rule. It is doubtful that we can change these mindsets and situation in the
foreseeable future, so our policy toward both countries needs to be focused
on protecting our allies and minimizing the criminal and destabilizing activity
that these regimes engage in across the world—whether it’s Iran’s extensive
support to terrorist groups across the Middle East or North Korea’s arms
trafficking, currency counterfeiting, or cryptocurrency theft.
Architecting future relations with North Korea and Iran will involve some
hard choices and recognizing that both countries are, effectively, permanent
nuclear or nuclear-threshold states, as is the case with Iran. For decades, the
United States has pretended to ignore North Korea achieving nuclear power
status—even though the DPRK is now moving steadily toward building at
least two legs of a nuclear triad, land- and submarine-launched ICBMs. And
now the bungling of JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, has placed Iran within
easy shot of its own nuclear weapons. We have to appreciate that in the
history of the nuclear age, no nuclear power with operational and deliverable
nuclear weapons has ever relinquished them. (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan,
and South Africa—the only countries to have ever given up these weapons—
either had no operational control over them, as was the case with Ukraine,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan, or they didn’t have a delivery system, as was the
case of South Africa.) But even if there was a roadmap to denuclearizing,
both Iran and North Korea actually believe their hold on power and regional
security is contingent on their nuclear ambitions, and US foreign policy—
unintentionally—has done much to confirm these concerns in the twenty-first
century. Both Iran and North Korea see the US efforts of Iraq and Libya as
case studies for what they want to avoid; in Iraq, we got Saddam Hussein to
give up his nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War and then invaded his
country again in 2003 and allowed Iraqis to execute him, and in Libya, we
got Muammar Gaddafi to give up his nuclear program in 2003 and then
armed and supported the rebels who overthrew his regime and ultimately
brutally killed him.
North Korea, in particular, has a significant nuclear arsenal—and any
hope that we ever might have had to change or prevent that is long past.
North Korea detonated its first nuclear bomb in 2006 and in 2017 was able
to test a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb; today, it’s estimated to have around
fifty bombs and a large missile arsenal to deliver them, with ICBMs that
could reach US territory (although the accuracy of those weapons is
questionable at best).
The good news is that two decades of North Korea as a de facto nuclear
weapons power has not significantly altered the security situation in Asia. It
did not, contrary to some predictions, cause South Korea or Japan to go
nuclear—in no small measure due to their belief in the US security
guarantees. Nor did it make North Korea an appreciably more respected or
powerful state in the region. It also, importantly, did not make the DPRK
significantly more bellicose—at least by the special sliding scale of North
Korean rhetorical standards. The last act of North Korean aggression against
South Korea that resulted in loss of life was its sinking of the naval corvette
ROKS Cheonan and the artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010—an
event the United Nations called one of most significant since the 1953
Korean War armistice and which resulted in the deaths of around fifty
people, including two civilians. Notably, though, this incident took place
under the rule of Kim Jong Il, and his son Kim Jong Un, who took over from
his father in 2011, has not repeated such active aggression even as he’s
engaged in highly bellicose and colorful rhetoric and a major conventional
and nuclear military buildup.
Within this context, it is clear that denuclearizing North Korea is not a
realistic policy. Our priority going forward with North Korea must be to
make sure that we maintain a credible deterrent in the region to defend our
allies—especially South Korea and Japan—and that we also contain to the
best of our ability North Korean ambitions to engage in illicit arms
trafficking, currency counterfeiting, and bank and cryptocurrency thefts.
Ironically, the Trump administration showed that the United States can sit
down in bilateral and high-level talks with North Korea. The world didn’t
end. We can have a tough negotiation but need to think through what the goals
of that negotiation should be. True, the Trump administration set out too
aggressively, pretending that denuclearization was a realistic end goal,
whereas we need to acknowledge that nuclear weapons are a fundamental
internal and external security guarantor of the Kim family’s brutal
dictatorship.
Our goal with North Korea should be simple: reduce tensions on the
peninsula, specifically those related to the threats posed to South Korea and
Japan by North Korean missile programs and acts of blackmail. This may be
done by offering North Korea economic integration and investments in return
for verifiable agreements on nonproliferation of nuclear and missile
technology to other states, a ban on atmosphere-polluting nuclear testing, a
framework for a responsible and nonthreatening testing of long-range
missiles, and a mutual scaling down of the military presence on the DMZ.
Our focus needs to be on reintegrating of North Korea into the society of
nations and accepting that, while we may abhor the regime and its treatment
of its citizens, our ultimate and driving goal is to reduce the chance of war on
the peninsula and the attendant risk to US public and strategic interests
worldwide.iii
Similarly, much of North Korea’s misbehavior in cyberspace—including
frequent global bank robberies, financial frauds, ransomware schemes, and
other destructive and malicious operations—and its prolific global
counterfeiting, arms trafficking, and drug trafficking operations all comprise
criminal activity designed to procure funds for a regime that’s cut off from all
normal economic trade, banking systems, and commerce. We need that
behavior to stop, and the economic integration offered in a deal like this—
with the possibilities of tourism, trade, and industrial production drawing on
North Korea’s rich mining resources—would offer a path to providing the
regime with much-needed cash in ways that contribute to the global economy
rather than undermine it.
Global reintegration with North Korea would—we hope—lead to
improved lives for North Koreans, who currently face brutal conditions and
widespread starvation. But even if it doesn’t, and the regime chooses only to
reward itself and North Korean elites with its newfound economic benefits
(not only a distinct possibility but perhaps the most likely outcome), America
should nevertheless pursue such a deal, since it would significantly improve
our security and allow us greater focus on the threat that truly matters to
American lives: China. We simply cannot afford to let the perfect be the
enemy of the good.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions date all the way back to the Shah in 1973, and
it’s pursued that goal without crossing the threshold of achieving an
assembled and tested nuclear weapon for longer than any nation on earth.
And along the way it has weathered devastating economic sanctions, the
threat of air strikes and assassination campaigns by Israel, and cyberattacks,
among other hurdles. The decision by the Trump administration to pull out of
the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA), has left Iran finally on the precipice of acquiring nuclear weapons.
It already possesses the knowledge for how to enrich uranium to the required
greater than 90-percent level, and Israeli and American intelligence services
believe it has mastered the detonation designs for the weapon and likely has
made significant progress in miniaturizing such a device for placement atop a
missile. The only thing that stands in the Iranians’ way of actually building
and testing a weapon is an order from the Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s
Supreme Leader, to do so.
For whatever reason, the Islamic republic hasn’t taken that final step.
Perhaps it’s fear of retaliation from Israel (and perhaps the United States) or
maybe fear that crossing the nuclear threshold would likely push their
regional opponents Saudi Arabia or Turkey to immediately pursue nuclear
weapons.iv
Regardless of why Iran hasn’t so far embarked on nuclear “breakout,”
America’s ability to stop Iran from crossing the threshold and becoming a
nuclear power state is likely highly limited, at least short of either war or a
diplomatic breakthrough that gets Iran to rejoin something like the JCPOA
with its temporary limits on the scope of Iran’s nuclear program. Nor are
future cyberattacks, sabotage operations, or aerial or missile strikes on
nuclear sites likely to permanently cripple Iran’s nuclear ambitions—indeed,
the risk is that any such strikes would accelerate the Iranian nuclear program
by creating an incentive for the Ayatollah to retaliate.
That’s not to say that the United States should not continue to engage in
diplomatic negotiations to try to delay that breakout point for as long as
possible, perhaps in the hopes that a successor government may come along
in the future that would recognize a changed world and choose a different
path. However, we should be preparing for a circumstance when a nuclear-
armed Iran will one day emerge in the Middle East.
Just like North Korea becoming a nuclear armed state, Iran turning
nuclear—while certainly not a welcome development by any measure—is
unlikely to drastically remake the Middle East. At least, not as long as the
United States maintains sufficient deterrence and prevents other countries in
the region from going nuclear (making the risk of nuclear conflict in a
powder keg and unstable region much more likely), which might require
providing a mutual defense agreement to Saudi Arabia, just as we’ve done
with South Korea and Japan.
But above all, the priority for both Iran and North Korea is to make sure
they don’t proliferate their nuclear know-how to other countries, as Pakistan
had famously done to both countries in the 1980s and 1990s, when the
“father” of its nuclear weapons program, A. Q. Khan, helped jump-start the
nuclear programs of Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Such additional
proliferation would truly be a nightmare scenario for the United States—and
indeed the whole world. Perhaps one of the greatest diplomatic achievements
of the last half century was the establishment in 1968 of the Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an international protocol that aims to prevent the
spread of nuclear weapons and its technology.v The two decades following
the United States’ and Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons in the
1940s rapidly saw four other countries build nuclear weapons: the United
Kingdom, France, China, and Israel. Had it not been for the NPT and the
durable taboo on nuclear weapons it successfully established, we would
likely live today in a world where many dozens of countries possessed these
world-ending bombs, dramatically increasing the chance of an accidental or
intentional detonation that would deliver horrific death and destruction and
increase the risk of a civilization-ending general thermonuclear war. Each
new weapon and each country that joins the nuclear weapons club makes the
horrific prospect of nuclear war that much more likely. For the sake of the
safety of the entire planet and perhaps even our survival as a species, we
have no choice but to work as hard as possible to limit the number of nuclear
weapon–wielding states to the best of our ability. It’s bad enough to have to
live with nuclear-armed North Korea—and perhaps one day soon a nuclear-
armed Iran—but it would be a geopolitical catastrophe to see those countries
drive the introduction of nuclear weapons to still more countries, either
through those rogue states proliferating this technology to other countries or
as a direct nuclearization response to the perceived threat they present, as
might someday be the case for neighboring states like Saudi Arabia or South
Korea. We must work hard to avoid both scenarios—through security
guarantees for threatened allies and partners and through strengthening
regional deterrence, as well as making it clear to both rogue nations that any
attempts at proliferation will result in devastating consequences.
Ultimately, the key to dealing with Iran and North Korea is to recognize
that the United States has not just finite budgets and military capability but
finite bureaucracy and time. The interagency process through which policy is
made and agreed upon in the United States is slow and unwieldy—there’s
only so much we can get through the system at once and so much that can
occupy the attention of senior leaders. The National Security Council has
only so many directors and senior directors and there are only so many times
you can bring together the two primary tools of the interagency process at the
White House—the so-called Principals Committee meeting, featuring cabinet
leaders, and so-called Deputies Committees, featuring the subcabinet
leadership—in the Situation Room to discuss and decide on pressing issues
before they’re presented to the president for action. We must make room in
that bureaucracy and free up time and attention to focus on the long-overdue
“Asia Pivot,” to make it a reality. That means we can only do so much on the
issues of Russia, Iran, or North Korea—or indeed on any of the other
numerous conflicts around the world, from instability in Venezuela, conflicts
in Ethiopia and Sudan, civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, among three
dozen other global conflicts.
It is important for us to focus on what truly matters. Beyond managing the
rise of China and deterring any attempt by the Chinese to take Taiwan by
force or coercion, our narrow core interests when it comes to the three other
primary state adversaries are at their most basic just this: to contain Russia
while waiting for the day when it realizes, hopefully, that being an isolated
rogue state and vassal to China is not in its strategic interests; delay for as
long as possible Iran’s crossing the nuclear weapons threshold and counter
its regional aggression and support for genocidal terrorists; and maintain
deterrence against North Korean aggression and curtail the DPRK’s
proliferation attempts. On other issues, we have to share the stage and
leadership burden with allies, from sanctions policy against Russia to
conflict resolution diplomacy in Africa and the Middle East.
Perhaps counterintuitively, this also means that we should welcome
greater Chinese diplomatic engagement in the world—at least in certain
circumstances. There was much hand-wringing in US foreign policy circles
when in 2023 China negotiated a diplomatic rapprochement between Iran and
Saudi Arabia, but Sen. Chris Murphy, the head of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee’s Middle East panel, was right to take this development
as a positive. “Not everything between the U.S. and China has to be a zero-
sum game,” Murphy said. “I don’t know why we would perceive there to be
a downside to de-escalation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”9
Indeed, given our lack of leverage over Iran, we could have likely never
negotiated an agreement like that ourselves, and the deal was helpful for a
time in reducing tensions in the Middle East. Besides, if the Chinese decide
to spend their time and efforts negotiating peace agreements in the Middle
East and elsewhere, more power to them—their bureaucratic time and
attention is finite too, so such engagement means they’re spending less time
focusing on taking over Taiwan. We can’t do it all—and that necessarily
means that others, be it friends or foe, have to fill in the hole that our lack of
attention to certain issues will inevitably leave.
In the end, as important as so many of these other international issues feel
on a daily basis, if we get China wrong, none of the other questions will end
up mattering.

Footnotes
i
Kozyrev eventually found the course of Russian politics disconcerting enough in the twenty-first
century that he relocated to America.
ii
It is also a notable—and historically fraught—reversal of roles, given that the Soviet Union spent
decades viewing communist China as its own “poorer cousin.” “Beijing sees its relationship with
Moscow as being of paramount importance for several reasons,” Alexander Gabuev writes in Foreign
Affairs. “Their economic relationship is perfectly complementary: Russia is rich in natural resources but
needs technology and investments, while China can offer technology and investments but needs natural
resources.”
iii
Success may even allow for the United States to scale back and withdraw some of the twenty-seven
thousand American troops that have been a presence in South Korea over a period of decades, a
deployment that causes tensions with the South Korean population and comes at a high annual financial
cost.
iv
This, after all, is one of the main reasons that Israel has maintained an amimut or “nuclear opacity”
policy since it first acquired its nuclear weapons in the 1960s, essentially refusing to acknowledge itself
publicly as a nuclear power and maintaining, over many years, that it “will not be the first country to
introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.”
v
Today, some 191 countries are party to the NPT, all but five in the entire globe: North Korea, India,
Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan.
 Conclusion

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY WAS INFINITELY RELIEVED WHEN HE realized that

Nikita Khrushchev was building a wall through the center of Berlin in August
1961. For more than a dozen years, the divided German city had been the
central flash point of Cold War I, a tiny bastion of Western democracy deep
inside East Germany, enveloped on all sides by the communist Iron Curtain.
During Truman’s presidency, a Herculean airlift had barely kept West Berlin
alive amid a Soviet blockade, and just months earlier in June 1961, in
Vienna, Khrushchev had bullied Kennedy, still reeling from the
embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, over the future of the city.
Month by month in that first year of Kennedy’s presidency, the clouds
over Berlin gathered—and with them, the ominous threat of a nuclear
exchange. It would be near impossible for the United States and NATO to
defend Berlin from a full-on Soviet onslaught, and Kennedy had to weigh
whether he could lead his nation into war to protect the German city. On May
27, 1961, US ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson wrote a
secret telegram to the secretary of state estimating that the world was on a
trajectory where the “chances of war or ignominious Western retreat are
close to 50–50.”1
In Vienna, the Soviet leader berated Kennedy, telling him, “It is up to the
US to decide whether there will be war or peace.” Kennedy responded, “If
that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” The Pentagon began dusting off its
plans for a first strike against the Soviet Union, outlining how fifty-five long-
range bombers would devastate its nuclear capability and knock out eighty-
eight “Designated Ground Zeros”—seventy-two bomber bases and sixteen
ICBM facilities—in a surprise attack that would unfold in just fifteen
minutes. The attack, the Pentagon estimated, would “eliminat[e] or paralyz[e]
the nuclear threat to the United States sufficiently,” while sparing many
Soviet cities and thus preventing an “irrational urge for revenge” by the
Soviet Union, an assessment of dubious quality.2
On July 25, 1961, Kennedy announced a major buildup of US military
forces in Berlin, as well as in Germany and across wider Europe, and
warned against a Soviet move on the city. “The immediate threat to free men
is in West Berlin, but that isolated outpost is not an isolated problem. The
threat is worldwide,” Kennedy told the country in a national televised
address the same day.

We have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded
as an attack upon us all. For West Berlin—lying exposed 110 miles
inside East Germany, surrounded by Soviet troops and close to Soviet
supply lines, has many roles. It is more than a showcase of liberty, a
symbol, an island of freedom in a Communist sea. It is even more than
a link with the Free World, a beacon of hope behind the Iron Curtain,
an escape hatch for refugees. West Berlin is all of that. But above all it
has now become—as never before—the great testing place of Western
courage and will.

Kennedy cautioned the Soviet Union, “I hear it said that West Berlin is
militarily untenable. And so was Bastogne. And so, in fact, was Stalingrad.
Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so. We do
not want to fight—but we have fought before.” The US president promised,
“We cannot and we will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin,
either gradually or by force.”3
Then, just a little over two weeks later, a massive East German operation
began to unfold, as troops and construction teams erected a barrier that
would end up dividing the city for more than a quarter century. In
Washington, as US intelligence and diplomats figured out the plan, the
president expressed a surprising reaction: relief. “Why would Khrushchev
put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy wondered.
“There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole
city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a
wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”4
Kennedy’s intuition proved correct: although Cold War I would continue
through the dark chapter of the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, the
Berlin Wall came to represent the beginning of a turning point as a certain
level of stability entered the geopolitical picture. While there would be tense
moments ahead, and many more proxy conflicts and casualties, the Berlin
Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought to a close the extreme danger of
Cold War I’s first fifteen years. The wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis saw,
for instance, the installation of the so-called red phone, the US-Soviet hotline
(or what the Soviets called the “Soviet-US” hotline) to allow the leaders to
communicate and ease hostilities in future crises. And, with time, détente
took root. The United States and the Soviet Union were able to find a
sustainable solution for the long term—including cooperation in certain
realms and more clearly articulated arms-control agreements and spheres of
influence that each side could live with. It didn’t mean that the hostility was
gone or the Cold War over, but the world didn’t lurch from one crisis to
another.
Today, Taiwan is the Berlin of Cold War II. If Taiwan didn’t exist as a
flash point in the US-China relationship, the entire arc of the next decade
would look different. If the Chinese desire or ability to take Taiwan were to
disappear one day, the points of major contention between America and
China would still be present but become far more limited, focused on areas
such as supply chain resiliency, trade disputes, support for our adversaries,
cyber misbehavior, and human rights. Significant and important concerns, to
be sure, but not ones that would present a real danger of dragging the two
countries into an unimaginably destructive war. That distrust and challenge
could be managed, just as Cold War I was managed for decades after the
establishment of a relative equilibrium and mutual acceptance of core
interests.
If all Taiwan represented to the United States and the world was us losing
some relative power in Asia, many Americans would probably say, “Well,
why should we care about Asia?” Let’s let China be the regional superpower
and be done with it. But Taiwan represents much more than that—and a
failure to secure and fight for Taiwan would make the world more unstable
and a global conflict even more likely. In short, we need today to do the same
dance with Taiwan that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy performed at the
start of Cold War I with Berlin: protect and preserve it as a bastion of
Western alliance and avoid provoking a devastating global conflagration
until an era of stability can take hold.
 We need to recognize political realities: the CCP may persevere for
decades and even generations to come, and even if the Chinese government
becomes more democratic, many of our problems with China will not
automatically disappear. Along the way, our strategy must be to keep trying to
convince China that it’s going to be better off working within the existing
global order, respecting territorial sovereignty, engaging fairly in global
trade, and putting an end to the practice of economic and military coercion of
other nations. We must be realistic that these objectives might not be
achievable for a long time; China may remain adversarial and belligerent for
years, and Cold War II could remain tense. But diplomatic efforts to employ
a carrot-and-stick strategy to punish the malevolent behavior and reward
improvement can produce a détente as China’s escalating systemic
weaknesses force it to compromise, just as the Soviet Union found itself
having to do during sustained periods in 1970s and 1980s. However, it is
equally important to emphasize that if Chinese leaders choose the other path
—conflict and war—it will lead to disaster and the potential destruction of
the Communist Party.
As I said in the Introduction, over the next decade, the United States and
its Western alliance must walk an incredibly thin and delicate line. Every
morning, we want President Xi to wake up and think, “Today’s not the day to
invade Taiwan,” but also to imagine that tomorrow could be, only to have
him to wake up one morning in five, seven, or ten years to the same
calculation that Khrushchev made in August 1961 about Berlin: the window
to invade Taiwan has closed entirely. Stalling day by day is a winning
strategy. Slowing China’s advance down a month here and a year there is
critical, as is letting China make its own mistakes. Just as it was in Cold War
I, time is on America’s side in Cold War II. But we must use that time wisely.
We want to match the response to Deng’s old strategy of “Hide your
strength, bide your time,” with one of our own: “Tone down aggressive
rhetoric but engage in aggressive deterrence,” a twenty-first-century update
of sorts to “speak softly but carry a big stick.”
Conflict is not inevitable, but the likelihood is high, and we need to do
everything we can to avoid it.
Above all, we must avoid two different but related worst-case scenarios
—the two possible outcomes of the scenario from the Prologue, where China
decides that today is the day to invade Taiwan. There is no question that a
conflict between China and the United States would be disastrous for both
countries and the global economy; even a relatively limited war would likely
involve horrendous death toll—including tens of thousands of US military
personnel and civilians—and include attacks on US territory, including the
US mainland itself. It would cause enormous, devastating implications for the
global economy, destroying or interrupting trillions of dollars in economic
activity, paralyzing supply chains as shortages of goods, such as
semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan, ripple across the world. A larger,
escalating war involving two nuclear powers in a region comprising four of
the other seven global nuclear powers—Russia, India, Pakistan, and North
Korea—is a recipe for true calamity, whether intended or accidental.
But if war is the worst, worst-case scenario, there’s another still-terrible
worst-case scenario that must be avoided too: China seizes Taiwan without a
war.
What are the implications if China is allowed to conquer Taiwan without
the United States coming to the island’s aid? First, it will be a disaster for the
Taiwanese, as China will do to them what it has done to Tibet, Xinjiang, and
Hong Kong. (In summer 2023, China’s famous wolf-warrior ambassador to
France predicted that China would have to “re-educate” the Taiwanese
population “to eliminate separatist thought and secessionist theory.”)5 More
broadly, though, such an outcome would rapidly reconfigure the geopolitical
power structures across Asia, the Pacific, and beyond. The dominance and
influence of the United States would drastically diminish. Many nations—
with their faith in our security guarantees and willingness to protect them
severely damaged—would by necessity rebalance their relationship with
both us and China. Yes, some would likely invest more resources in
reforming their defense programs and military to beef up deterrence—Japan,
the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Australia, and India would feel
particularly vulnerable—as a newly confident and geographically uncorked
China starts to project its military power across the region in a more
aggressive way than the PRC has been able to do till now, but those
countries, and others across Asia and the Pacific, would also find more ways
to accommodate the newly emerged preeminent regional superpower, a
superpower able to assert more control over all the regional maritime trade
routes. Our leverage in the most economically important part of the world—
and indeed elsewhere—would decline and China’s increase.
Beyond trade, though, the unopposed seizure of Taiwan would herald the
emergence of an even more bellicose China, one confident that might makes
right. Think of the extent to which China is already telling the world not to
criticize or even question it—whether it’s over the genocide and persecution
of the Uyghurs or over the origins of COVID-19 pandemic—and imagine that
coercion and aggression amplified a hundredfold. A reinvigorated, more
nationalistic China would not tolerate any objections to its policies and go
out of its way to punish any country, organization, or person—with economic,
diplomatic, or military coercion—for engaging in or even tolerating such
rhetoric. It is a world where, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once suggested,
corporate and world leaders would ask first, “What would Beijing think of
this?” rather than “What would America think of this?” or “What is the moral
thing to do?” Recall wild controversies that have plagued organizations from
the NBA to Marriott that have criticized Chinese policies or accidentally run
afoul of its political sensitivities and imagine them again amplified a
hundredfold across not just social but national and international political
domains. Today, the Chinese retaliation against these organizations is only
limited to their market access in China. In the future, a more powerful China
may pressure other countries to take such actions on their behalf.
Ultimately, the world where China can cheaply take control of Taiwan
means a world that is less free. Many countries—from global giants like the
United States and India on down, size-wise, to the smallest Pacific island
nations—will have less freedom of action, freedom of decision making,
freedom of speaking out for human rights, and other core values. It will mean
a world where China will be more powerful and subsequently less just,
where it is shaping, creating, and dictating the global world order,
diminishing the role of the United States and the Western alliance in the
process. It would not be a world we would very much like living in.
Perhaps even more crucially, though, it will be a much more dangerous
world. Failing to stop China from conquering Taiwan is more likely to cause
an even more devastating conflict down the road. Having succeeded with
Taiwan, China may push its luck with other territorial disputes—with
countries like Japan, the Philippines, India, and Vietnam, some of which we
are treaty-bound to defend. Simply put, easing China’s way to a takeover of
Taiwan is hardly likely to be the end of its regional and, indeed, global
bullying campaign.
Those worst-case scenarios, both terrible, are why the single organizing
principle of US foreign policy over this next “decisive decade”—or, in Cold
War I terms, “window of vulnerability”—must be Sinae deterrendae sunt.
China must be deterred.
To achieve this goal, we should organize—through steps outlined in the
pages of this book—toward a goal of a best-case scenario. While it’s easy in
some ways to imagine the specific outcomes of what a loss to China this
century looks like, it might seem harder to imagine the acceptable outlines of
a “victory” that would not entail an—unlikely—complete defeat of China or
the disappearance of the CCP.
Ultimately, America’s goal is to buy time—delay, delay, and delay—for
the Taiwanese. Taiwan must build up its own forces, mobilizing, training,
and arming itself and showing China that a war will be too costly and its
outcome very likely a disastrous defeat of the invasion fleet.
Our job is to buy Taiwan that time. If we can convince Xi, day by day,
week by week, year by year, just like we had convinced Mao and his
successors, that attaining “reunification” with Taiwan is not yet possible, and
certainly not by force, we just might move the ball far enough down the road
where Taiwan and its dream of de facto independence and democracy can
outlive him. That doesn’t mean that the problem will be solved should Xi
leave office, one way or another—as this book shows, the CCP’s ambitions
to possess Taiwan predate Xi and will very likely long outlast him—but Xi
is clearly a throwback to the old mold of Chinese leader, one who is more
likely to take risks and promote his own legacy than anyone since Mao. If he
is replaced by a more responsible or weaker successor or if Taiwan is put on
the back burner by the regime in favor of focusing on domestic issues, that
would give us—and Taiwan—crucial time to build and secure sufficient
defenses in the region that would make even the most aggressive Chinese
leader believe that an invasion is an impossibility.
Then, once the biggest thorn in the US-China relationship—the decades-
long unresolved question of Taiwan—recedes from the top of the agenda, we
can work on building a more productive relationship with China. That new
relationship should not replicate the mistakes of the past—the false hopes
that engagement will lead to democratization and liberalization of the country
—nor should it be based on the premise that the CCP will one day collapse.
(Any of these things would, of course, be welcomed if they occurred, but we
should not build a strategy around hopes and dreams.)
Along the way, we must maintain America’s critical advantages and the
strength of the Western alliance—deterring a calamitous war with China
while preserving our dominant advantages in the Indo-Pacific and globally.
This requires sustaining and strengthening our balance of power vis-à-vis
China—in military capability, as well as semiconductors and the key
technological applications that run on top of them, from AI, biotech and
synthetic biology, space technology, to green technology. On top of that, we
must invest in talent-based immigration that will, combined with China’s
upcoming demographic collapse, help us to neutralize the PRC’s numerical
advantages over time. (Crucially, we must organize to counter China without
creating a new Red Scare and ensure that our political and economic efforts
against the country aren’t allowed to slide into xenophobia and rekindle the
racism that long dogged our engagement with Asia in past generations.) Left
to their own devices, the systemic challenges that the Chinese economy
suffers from—challenges for which the CCP doesn’t appear to have any
solutions—will make China’s bid to become the world’s biggest and most
powerful economy much less realizable.
In one word, this strategy is all about leverage: we must increase our
leverage over China and decrease its leverage over us. Crucially, it is not
about decoupling, for the complete disconnection of our economies is not
only unrealistic but would increase the risk of danger as China would feel
less connected to the West and freer to disregard our interests. Instead, a
successful economic strategy needs to be focused on bringing China tighter
into our orbit by increasing its dependence on our supply chains while giving
us more room to maneuver by simultaneously decreasing our critical
dependence on the PRC. It is a strategy of unidirectional entanglement—the
pursuit of one-way selective decoupling that also increases the coupling in
the other direction to achieve the kind of equilibrium that incentivizes peace.
Of course, we should be fully aware that China is trying to implement the
exact mirror strategy. The winner of this race will very likely determine the
future of the twenty-first century.
A win for us, we hope, would deliver a world not unlike the one inherited
by JFK’s successors in the latter half of the twentieth century, a world
overshadowed by a cold war but one that didn’t daily threaten catastrophe. It
would substantially reduce tensions and the risks of conflict globally if even
a CCP-ruled China is ultimately convinced that it is better off working within
the established rules of the existing international order—including respecting
the territorial integrity of other nations and engaging fairly in global trade.
Tensions and flash points between China and the United States are
unlikely to disappear, just as they didn’t between the United States and
Soviet Union after the Berlin Wall went up and the Cuban Missile Crisis was
resolved, but the United States and China might find themselves in a position
to compete without direct conflict for decades—or longer. We may never be
best friends with China—there’s hundreds of years of history, dating long
before Xi and even the CCP, that make clear China’s relationship with the
West ebbs and flows—but we may still create a productive, albeit still cold,
relationship. A China we can live with and a China that can live with us
means a better, more secure world. We will still face an imperfect and unjust
world—one where brutal and adversarial authoritarian regimes exist and
even prosper—but it will be a world that is on balance wealthier, more
peaceful, and better equipped to deal with other pressing global challenges.
To get there, we must heed the advice and wisdom of the first two
presidents of Cold War I, the two men who preceded Kennedy and dealt with
the early chapters of the Berlin challenge. Harry Truman, as he left office,
said, “When history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold
War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can
win it.” His successor, Dwight Eisenhower, said, as he left office, that his
proudest accomplishment was keeping the peace, adding, “People asked how
it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”6
Focusing and executing on a strategy and keeping the peace is hard, but
both are critical to our success ahead. Devastating war or the establishment
of the “Chinese Century” is not inevitable, but the risks are high. We are a
World on the Brink. All of us—each and every one—should get up each
morning and think about how we can contribute to avoiding the worst-case
scenarios.
 Acknowledgments

THIRTY YEARS AGO, AMERICA WELCOMED A NEW IMMIGRANT FAMILY that left
Russia with not much more than a couple of suitcases. In those intervening
decades, I have been lucky to have experienced the American Dream in its
fullest form—a journey that started for me as a student, then a startup
employee, an entrepreneur, a national security professional, and now a
philanthropist. Some of the proudest days of my life were becoming a
naturalized citizen of this great country and later being asked to contribute in
a small way to enhancing its national security, as an adviser to the
Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Throughout that time, I’ve
been passionate about finding ways to give back to this country that gave me
a home and an opportunity to build a successful and meaningful life.
I see this book as part of that lifelong effort. Since those fateful events of
Operation Aurora in January 2010, I have been concerned about the negative
impact that China’s actions have had on the ability of this country to continue
to grow economically and provide the same opportunities to other Americans
—whether they are native-born or naturalized immigrants. As the decade
went on, I also became increasingly anxious about the prospect of a
devastating war breaking out between these two large countries and the
urgency of finding ways to avoid it. I have spent many years thinking about
these issues, and I want to express deep appreciation to the numerous China,
Taiwan, and other national security experts who have provided me with
invaluable insights and ideas and have been willing to challenge and debate
my own thoughts over the years.
I’m gratefully indebted to the reviewers of the draft manuscripts and other
immensely valuable feedback providers, including the entire brilliant team at
Silverado Policy Accelerator. I specifically want to recognize Maureen
Hinman, Sarah Stewart, Marc Raimondi, Ian Ward, Jen Ayers, Dr. Sergey
Radchenko, Ivan Kanapathy, Patrick Gray, Vartan Sarkissian, Ronnie
Wiessbrod, Heather Adkins, Alex Ionescu, Dr. Thomas Rid, Sandra Joyce,
Matthew Spence, Dan Invegaldson, Tammy Haddad, Gillian Tett, Jim
Schwartz, Thorsten Benner, Thomas Shugart, Jack Watling, Chris Miller, and
Jamil Jaffer. Thank you for dedicating the time to read, provide feedback,
discuss, and analyze the ideas presented in this book. Similarly, thank you to
Howard Yoon, Ben Adams, Shena Redmond, Irina du Quenoy, and the rest of
the team at PublicAffairs who helped turn this idea into a book.
I could not have asked for a more experienced and hardworking partner to
write this book with than Garrett Graff, to whom I owe a deep debt of
gratitude. I want to thank him for his calm and patient guidance of this first-
time author and his constant but gentle pressure against my reluctant nature to
infuse more of myself and my background into this book. From the initial
concept, which he first suggested might work better as a long magazine
article, he persuaded me to expand the ambition and scope. This led to this
labor of love that resulted in printing these pages. I sincerely hope you found
them intellectually stimulating, even if you did not agree with all of what I
said.
To my parents, I will never stop thanking you for having the courage to
uproot your life, sacrifice everything to leave Russia, and bring me to this
country, thus giving me the opportunity to not just succeed but to live. For
who knows—if I had stayed in Russia, perhaps I would be yet another one of
Putin’s victims, being forcefully mobilized to die in the grassy fields of
Ukraine.
Last but certainly not least, to my wife, thank you for bearing with me and
providing extraordinary support, patience, and understanding throughout this
long journey. Your encouragement has been a source of strength and
motivation. This book would not exist without it.
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 Courtesy of the author

Dmitri Alperovitch is a cofounder and chairman of Silverado Policy

Accelerator, a national security think tank. He is also the cofounder of
CrowdStrike, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity companies. He has
been named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Leading Global Thinkers and
MIT Technology Review’s Top 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2013. Alperovitch
serves on the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council and has
previously served as a special adviser to the Department of Defense. He is
the host of the Geopolitics Decanted podcast.

Garrett M. Graff is a journalist and best-selling historian. A Pulitzer Prize

finalist, the former editor of Politico magazine and longtime contributor to
Wired and CNN, and the founding director of the cybersecurity and
technology program at the Aspen Institute, Graff is the author of multiple
books, including the number one national bestseller The Only Plane in the
Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, as well as The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert
Mueller’s FBI, Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday
plans, and Watergate: A New History, among others.
 Praise for
WORLD ON THE BRINK

“An urgent, thought-provoking warning about one of the biggest challenges

facing America today. It also provides practical approaches and well-
reasoned proposals that will enable the US to maintain its global leadership
for the decades ahead. A must-read on the most important issue in the
world!”
—General David Petraeus, US Army (ret.), former commander of the
Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and coalition forces in
Afghanistan; former director of the CIA; and coauthor of Conflict:
The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine

“Alperovitch has long been one of the smartest commentators I know on

Ukraine and Russia. He warned that Moscow would invade Ukraine long
before others and has consistently provided highly prescient observations.
Now, however, he turns his sights on China, and warns of the swelling risk
that it will invade Taiwan in the coming years and spark a crisis in America
as a result—unless active measures are taken to contain this danger now.
Deeply researched and provocative, this is a powerful call to arms for
Washington’s policymakers and a must-read for anyone watching global
affairs, the twenty-first-century tech sector, and international business.”
—Gillian Tett, columnist and editorial board, Financial Times; and
provost, Kings College, Cambridge

“World on the Brink is a clear-eyed analysis of Cold War II and a game plan
for winning it. Alperovitch is the ideal guide to this new era of competitive
geopolitics with tech, computing, and semiconductor chips at its core.
Drawing lessons from Cold War I and Putin’s attack on Ukraine, Alperovitch
shows just how dangerous a brink we stand on. Provocative and insightful,
this is essential reading for understanding the American-made world order
and the threats it faces.”
—Chris Miller, New York Times–bestselling author of Chip War: The
Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

“Alperovitch’s personal story and incredible entrepreneurial success is both

the embodiment of the American Dream and a perfect vantage point to
understand the biggest geopolitical challenge we now face—the rivalry of
China and its state-led economic model. World on the Brink masterfully
navigates the present-day issues in critical materials, semiconductors,
military, and other cutting-edge technologies with insightful historical context
and pragmatic solutions. This is the first book to read if you want to
understand the geopolitical landscape, what choices must be made, and how
that will impact all of us.”
—James Litinsky, founder, chairman, and CEO, MP Materials

“The stakes of Cold War II could not be greater. Alperovitch, one of our
nation’s foremost experts on technology and national security, has skillfully
crafted a game plan for freedom to once again be the victor. This is a book
that needs to be read by all Americans.”
—Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman, Select Committee on the Chinese
Communist Party
 Source Notes

Introduction
1. Associated Press, “Salesman: Hackers Use Chinese Company’s
Servers,” CBS News, February 11, 2011,
www.cbsnews.com/news/salesman-hackers-use-chinese-companys-servers.
2. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace
American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 313.
3. Ibid., 333.
4. Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age
of Great Power Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 1.
5. John Richardson, A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,
Department of Defense, Washington, DC, January 2016, available at
https://news.usni.org/2016/01/05/document-cno-richardsons-new-u-s-navy-
guidance.
6. Michael Doyle, Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (New York:
Liveright Publishing, 2023), 12–14.
7. Ibid., 46.
8. Xi Jinping, “Achieving Rejuvenation Is the Dream of the Chinese
People,” speech, National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of
China, November 29, 2012, Beijing,
www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/c23934/202006/32191c5bbdb04cbab6df01e50
77d1c60.shtml.
 Chapter 1: The Road to the Brink
1. Dmitri Alperovitch, “Revealed: Operation Shady RAT” (white paper,
McAfee, 2011),
https://web.archive.org/web/20110804083836/www.mcafee.com/us/resourc
es/white-papers/wp-operation-shady-rat.pdf.
2. Gregory Poling, On Dangerous Ground: America’s Century in the
South China Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 210.
3. International Institute for Strategic Studies, “13th Asia Security
Summit, Singapore, 30 May–1 June 2014: The Shangri-La Dialogue,” August
8, 2019, https://issuu.com/iiss-publications/docs/shangri-la-dialogue-2014.
4. AMTI Leadership, “Highlights from Shangri-La Dialogue 2014,” Asia
Maritime Transparency Initiative, May 28, 2015,
https://amti.csis.org/highlights-from-shangri-la-dialogue-2014.
5. Sally K. Burt, At the President’s Pleasure (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill,
2015), 53.
6. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2000), 359. Chiang’s own fighting took a huge toll:
he drowned half a million Chinese and displaced five million when he
destroyed the dikes along the Yellow River in June 1938, an effort that
allowed his forces to stop the Japanese advance at the four-month battle of
Wuhan that summer.
7. John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom:
America and China, 1776 to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 2016),
281.
8. Ibid., 322, 354.
9. Ibid., 331.
10. John S. Service, The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the
History of US-China Relations (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies,
University of California, 1971), 161–162. The quote from Mitter in the
footnote comes from Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II,
1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 330.
11. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The China Mission: George Marshall’s
Unfinished War, 1945–1947 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 3.
12. Ibid., 242.
 13. Ibid., 237.
14. Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic
Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China (New York: PublicAffairs,
2022), 5.
15. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 6.
16. Rudd, Avoidable War, 21.
17. Ibid., 20.
18. Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the
World (New York: Random House, 2007), xviii.
19. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 11.
20. “Chinese Porcelain,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed
August 11, 2023, www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-
encyclopedia/article/chinese-porcelain; Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the
Middle Kingdom, 10–11.
21. Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, “Who Owns Washington? Gilbert Stuart
and the Battle for Artistic Property in the Early American Republic,” in
Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter
(Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021), chap. 3; Pomfret, Beautiful
Country and the Middle Kingdom, 11.
22. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 13.
23. Ibid., 23, 39.
24. Ibid., 27.
25. Ibid., 20.
26. Ibid., 31.
27. Ibid., 35, 56.
28. Ibid., 36, 84.
29. Ibid., 70–71, 79.
30. Ibid., 92–101.
31. Ibid., 137.
32. Ibid., 116.
33. Ibid., 167.
34. Ibid., 131.
35. Ibid., 133, 134.
36. Ibid., 151.
37. Ibid., 148.
 38. Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 37.
39. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 149, 163.
40. Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003), 111–112.
41. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 406.
42. MacMillan, Nixon and Mao, xix.
43. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 404.
44. Ibid., 421, 424.
45. Ibid., 445; MacMillan, Nixon and Mao, xx.
46. MacMillan, Nixon and Mao, 246.
47. Ibid., 245–261.
48. “Text of Nixon Toast at Shanghai Dinner,” New York Times, February
28, 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/02/28/archives/text-of-nixon-toast-at-
shanghai-dinner.html.
49. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 459.
50. “40 Years of Friendship: From the Personal to the Political, President
Carter Reflects on Our Nation’s—and His Own—Relationship with China,”
Carter Center, January 9, 2019,
www.cartercenter.org/news/features/p/china/president-carter-on-
normalizing-relations-with-china.html.
51. Ibid.
52. “China Policy,” Office of the Historian, US Department of State,
accessed August 11, 2023, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-
1980/china-policy.
53. Taiwan Relations Act, H.R. 2479, 96th Congress (1979),
www.congress.gov/96/statute/STATUTE-93/STATUTE-93-Pg14.pdf.
54. Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in
the New China (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 13.
55. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 449–451.
56. Ibid., 501.
57. Ibid., 480.
58. Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long
March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013), 5.
59. Ibid., 6.
60. Chun Han Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s
Superpower Future (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2023), 153.
61. Frontline, “Transcript: The Tank Man,” aired April 11, 2006, on
PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/etc/transcript.html.
62. Ibid.
63. “Tiananmen Square Protest Death Toll ‘Was 10,000,’” BBC News,
December 23, 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516.
64. “George H. W. Bush, Press Conference, June 5, 1989,” University of
Southern California US-China Institute, June 5, 1989,
https://china.usc.edu/george-hw-bush-press-conference-june-5-1989;
Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 524.
65. Bill Clinton, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the
Democratic National Convention in New York,” speech, July 16, 1992, New
York, American Presidency Project,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-
nomination-the-democratic-national-convention-new-york.
66. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom.
67. Osnos, Age of Ambition, 22, 24.
68. Poling, On Dangerous Ground, 166.
69. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace
American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 69.
70. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 565.
71. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape
Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 7.
72. Joseph Stiglitz, “The Chinese Century,” Vanity Fair, December 4,
2014, www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/01/china-worlds-largest-economy;
“The Chinese Century Is Well under Way,” Economist, October 27, 2018,
www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/10/27/the-chinese-century-is-
well-under-way.
73. Osnos, Age of Ambition, 14.
74. Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 6.
75. Robert Zoellick, “Whither China? From Membership to
Responsibility,” speech, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations,
September 21, 2005, New York, www.ncuscr.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/04/migration_Zoellick_remarks_notes06_winter_sprin
g.pdf.
76. Elizabeth Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New
Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 17.
77. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Review of
Maritime Transport, 2015, https://unctad.org/system/files/official-
document/rmt2015_en.pdf.
78. William Branigin, “U.S. Military Ends Role in Philippines,”
Washington Post, November 24, 1992,
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/24/us-military-ends-
role-in-philippines/a1be8c14-0681-44ab-b869-a6ee439727b7/.
79. Stanley Meyer, “Incident at Mischief Reef: Implications for the
Philippines, China, and the United States,” Strategy Research Project, US
Army War College, January 8, 1996,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA309432.pdf.
80. “Asia Now,” Time, March 8, 1999,
http://web.archive.org/web/20010220044944/www.time.com/time/asia/asia
/magazine/1999/990308/spratlys2.html.
81. Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific
Affairs, Limits in the Seas: China’s Maritime Claims in the South China
Sea, no. 143, December 5, 2014, 6, https://2009-
2017.state.gov/documents/organization/234936.pdf.
82. Jeremy Page and Trefor Moss, “South China Sea Ruling Puts Beijing
in a Corner,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2016,
www.wsj.com/articles/south-china-sea-ruling-puts-beijing-in-a-corner-
1468365807.
83. Chun Han Wong, “China to Continue Construction on Disputed
Islands,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2016, www.wsj.com/articles/china-
flies-military-aircraft-near-scarborough-shoal-1468852659.
84. Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, “China Lands First Bomber on
South China Sea Island,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, May
18, 2018, https://amti.csis.org/china-lands-first-bomber-south-china-sea-
island/.
85. Hannah Beech, “China’s Sea Control Is a Done Deal, ‘Short of War
with the U.S.,’” New York Times, September 20, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/world/asia/south-china-sea-navy.html.
86. Niharika Mandhana, “How Beijing Boxed America Out of the South
China Sea,” Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2023,
www.wsj.com/articles/china-boxed-america-out-of-south-china-sea-
military-d2833768?mod=article_inline.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2020), 66.
90. Poling, On Dangerous Ground, 1.
91. See for instance, Thomas Shugart, “China’s Artificial Islands Are
Bigger (and a Bigger Deal) Than You Think,” War on the Rocks, September
21, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/09/chinas-artificial-islands-are-
bigger-and-a-bigger-deal-than-you-think.
92. Economy, Third Revolution, 38.
93. Jun Osawa, “China’s ADIZ over the East China Sea: A ‘Great Wall in
the Sky?,” Brookings Institution, December 17, 2013,
www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-adiz-over-the-east-china-sea-a-great-
wall-in-the-sky.
94. Mandhana, “How Beijing Boxed America Out.”
95. Doshi, Long Game, 263.
96. Ibid., 2.
 Chapter 2: Distracted and Disoriented
1. “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Met with Leading Russian Writers,”
Government of the Russian Federation, October 7, 2009,
http://archive.government.ru/eng/docs/5108/.
2. Joseph Marks, “The Cybersecurity 202: U.S. Officials: It’s China
Hacking That Keeps Us Up at Night,” Washington Post, March 6, 2019,
www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-
202/2019/03/06/the-cybersecurity-202-u-s-officials-it-s-china-hacking-that-
keeps-us-up-at-night/5c7ec07f1b326b2d177d5fd3.
3. Mikhail Frunze, “Unified Military Doctrine and the Red Army,”
Krasnaya Nov 1 (1921): 94–106, available at
www.patriotica.ru/history/frunze_doctrine.html.
4. National Security Agency, “Reading Gentlemen’s Mail,” March 12,
2018, www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-
documents/history-today-
articles/03%202018/12MAR2018%20Reading%20Gentlemens%20Mail.pdf
.
5. Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama and President Xi of the
People’s Republic of China in Joint Press Conference,” September 25, 2015,
Washington, DC, White House, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-
press-office/2015/09/25/remarks-president-obama-and-president-xi-
peoples-republic-china-joint.
6. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” Atlantic, April 2016,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-
doctrine/471525/.
7. Christina Wilkie, “Biden Sees No Need for ‘a New Cold War’ with
China after Three-Hour Meeting with Xi Jinping,” CNBC, November 14,
2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/11/14/biden-sees-no-need-for-a-new-cold-war-
with-china-after-three-hour-meeting-with-xi-jinping.html.
8. Xi Jinping, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately
Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” Xinhua News
Agency, October 18, 2017,
www.xinhuanet.com/english/download/Xi_Jinping’s_report_at_19th_CPC_
National_Congress.pdf.
9. Erin Banco et al., “‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington
Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine,” Politico, February 24,
2023, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-
oral-history-00083757.
10. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace
American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 17.
11. Ibid., 185.
12. Garrett M. Graff, “The New Arms Race Threatening to Explode in
Space,” Wired, June 26, 2018, www.wired.com/story/new-arms-race-
threatening-to-explode-in-space/.
13. Doshi, Long Game, 39.
14. Ibid., 40.
15. Graham Allison, “Lee Kuan Yew: The Sage of Asia,” Caixin, trans.
the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, March 28, 2015,
www.belfercenter.org/publication/lee-kuan-yew-sage-asia.
16. Doshi, Long Game, 29–30.
17. Ibid., 31.
18. Ibid., 48.
19. Ibid., 72.
20. Deng Xiaoping, “We Must Adhere to Socialism and Prevent Peaceful
Evolution towards Capitalism,” November 23, 1989, available at
Marxists.org, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-
xiaoping/1989/173.htm.
21. Kai He, Institutional Balancing in the Asia Pacific Economic
Interdependence and China’s Rise (New York: Routledge, 2009), 36.
22. Doshi, Long Game, 75.
23. Ibid., 60.
24. Ibid., 85.
25. Ibid., 79.
26. Ibid., 148.
27. Ibid., 156.
28. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs,
September 1, 1997, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1997-09-
01/geostrategy-eurasia.
29. “China’s Coercive Tactics Abroad,” US Department of State,
accessed October 4, 2023, https://2017-2021.state.gov/chinas-coercive-
tactics-abroad/#UnitedFront.
30. Michael H. Hunt, The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 220.
31. Ibid., 220.
32. Ibid., 221.
33. “China’s Coercive Tactics Abroad.”
34. Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “In Tanzania, Beijing Is Running a
Training School for Authoritarianism,” Axios, August 20, 2023,
www.axios.com/chinese-communist-party-training-school-africa.
35. “Two Arrested for Operating Illegal Overseas Police Station of the
Chinese Government,” US Department of Justice, April 17, 2023,
www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illegal-overseas-police-
station-chinese-government.
36. Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “The Chinese Communist Party Is Setting
Up Cells at Universities across America,” Foreign Policy, April 18, 2018,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/18/the-chinese-communist-party-is-
setting-up-cells-at-universities-across-america-china-students-beijing-
surveillance/.
37. George Kennan, “The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the
Secretary of State,” Document 475, FRUS, 1946, vol. 6, National Security
Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21043-long-telegram-
transcript.
 Chapter 3: The Taiwan Dilemma
1. “Taiwanese/Chinese Identity (1992/06~2023/06),” Election Study
Center, National Chengchi University, July 12, 2023,
https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961.
2. Kevin Doyle and Al Jazeera staff, “Is Xi Jinping China’s New Mao
Zedong?” Al Jazeera, October 17, 2022,
www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/17/is-xi-jinping-chinas-new-mao.
3. Peter Hartcher, “‘Untouchable’: How Xi Jinping Became More
Powerful than Mao Zedong,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 25, 2022,
www.smh.com.au/world/asia/untouchable-how-xi-jinping-became-more-
powerful-than-mao-zedong-20221024-p5bs8i.html.
4. See Chun Han Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and
China’s Superpower Future (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2023), 14–19.
5. Nicholas Kristof, “Looking for a Jump-Start in China,” New York
Times, January 5, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/kristof-looking-for-a-jump-
start-in-china.html.
6. Wong, Party of One, 17.
7. Ibid., 17.
8. Ibid., 19–25.
9. Ibid., 27.
10. Ibid., 39.
11. Ibid., 43.
12. Ibid., 44.
13. Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic
Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China (New York: PublicAffairs,
2022), 47.
14. Wong, Party of One, 77.
15. John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom:
America and China, 1776 to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), 91.
16. Neville Maxwell, “How the Sino-Russian Boundary Conflict Was
Finally Settled,” Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 229–253.
17. Alan Wachman, Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s
Territorial Integrity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), xx.
 18. Ibid., 112.
19. Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok, “Blundering on the Brink,”
Foreign Affairs, April 3, 2023, www.foreignaffairs.com/cuba/missile-crisis-
secret-history-soviet-union-russia-ukraine-lessons.
20. Mao Zedong, “The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the Atom
Bomb,” January 28, 1955, conversation between Mao Zedong and the
Finnish ambassador to the PRC Carl-Johan Sundstrom, archived at
wilsoncenter.org, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/mao-
zedong-chinese-people-cannot-be-cowed-atom-bomb.
21. “Discussion between N. S. Khrushchev and Mao Zedong,” October 2,
1959, archived at wilsoncenter.org,
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/discussion-between-ns-
khrushchev-and-mao-zedong.
22. “Full Text of Xi Jinping’s Report at 19th CPC National Congress,”
China Daily, October 18, 2017,
www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-
11/04/content_34115212.htm.
23. Elizabeth Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New
Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3.
24. Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750
(New York: Basic Books, 2012), 2.
25. Jonathan Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xi.
26. Ibid., 23.
27. Ibid., 22, 37–39.
28. Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003), 15.
29. Ibid., 21.
30. Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation, xi.
31. Roy, Taiwan, 31.
32. Mao Zedong, China, the March toward Unity (New York: Workers
Library, 1937), 40; Pomfret, Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,
233.
33. Roy, Taiwan, 62.
34. Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation, 202.
35. Ibid., 18–19.
 36. Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, China’s Search for Security
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xx.
37. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming
Conflict with China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), 57.
38. Westad, Restless Empire, 4.
39. YingHui Lee and Jane Chan, “China-ASEAN Nontraditional Maritime
Security Cooperation,” China Review 21, no. 4 (2021): 11–37.
40. Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, Red Star over the Pacific:
China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, 2nd ed.
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018).
41. Francis C. Prescott, Herbert A. Fine, and Velma Hastings Cassidy,
eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, The Far East: China
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), 460.
42. Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation, 25.
43. “China/Taiwan: Evolution of the ‘One China’ Policy—Key
Statements from Washington, Beijing, and Taipei,” Congressional Research
Service, March 12, 2011, to January 5, 2015,
www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL30341.html.
44. Ibid.
45. “Obama Statement Congratulating Taiwanese President-Elect Ma
Ying-Jeou,” March 22, 2008, available at American Presidency Project,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/obama-statement-congratulating-
taiwanese-president-elect-ma-ying-jeou.
46. “Biden Tells 60 Minutes U.S. Troops Would Defend Taiwan, but
White House Says This Is Not Official U.S. Policy,” 60 Minutes Overtime,
aired on CBS, September 18, 2022, www.cbsnews.com/news/president-joe-
biden-taiwan-60-minutes-2022-09-18/.
47. Paul Mozur and John Liu, “The Chip Titan Whose Life’s Work Is at
the Center of a Tech Cold War,” New York Times, August 4, 2023,
www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/technology/the-chip-titan-whose-lifes-work-
is-at-the-center-of-a-tech-cold-war.html.
 Chapter 4: They Are Weaker Than We Think
1. Erin Banco et al., “‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington
Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine,” Politico, February 24,
2023, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-
oral-history-00083757.
2. Ibid.
3. Brad Lendon, “Russia May Have Lost up to Half of Its Operational
Tank Fleet in Ukraine, Monitoring Group Says,” CNN, February 9, 2023,
www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/europe/1000-russian-tanks-destroyed-ukraine-
war-intl-hnk-ml/index.html.
4. Dmitri Alperovitch and Sergey Radchenko, “Another Russia Is
Possible: The Kremlin Will Eventually Tire of Its Reliance on China,”
Foreign Affairs, August 29, 2022, www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-
federation/another-russia-possible.
5. “Putin Orders Measures to Reverse Mass Wartime Exodus,” Moscow
Times, May 12, 2023, www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/05/12/putin-orders-
measures-to-reverse-mass-wartime-exodus-a81124.
6. “Russia’s Population Nightmare Is Going to Get Even Worse,”
Economist, March 4, 2023,
www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/04/russias-population-nightmare-is-
going-to-get-even-worse.
7. “Unprecedented Migration May Be Only Chance to Beat Russia’s
Population Decline,” Moscow Times, April 13, 2023,
www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/04/13/unprecedented-migration-may-be-
only-chance-to-beat-russias-population-decline-study-a80813.
8. Elena Holodny, “The Rise, Fall, and Comeback of the Chinese
Economy over the Past 800 Years,” Business Insider, January 8, 2017,
www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1.
9. Francis C. Prescott, Herbert A. Fine, and Velma Hastings Cassidy,
eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, The Far East: China
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), document 122.
10. “The Chinese Century Is Well under Way,” Economist, October 27,
2018, www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/10/27/the-chinese-century-
is-well-under-way.
 11. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming
Conflict with China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), xv.
12. Moreover, Chinese cultural preferences for a son meant that during the
height of the one-child policy, parents engaged in selective abortions or even
infanticide, a downstream effect that that left today’s family-aged population
remarkably unbalanced: China has about 104 males for every 100 females,
leaving millions of “excess” heterosexual men family-less.
13. David Stanway, “Bringing up a Child Costlier in China Than in U.S.,
Japan—Research,” Reuters, February 23, 2022,
www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-child-rearing-costs-far-outstrip-us-
japan-research-2022-02-23.
14. Ruchir Sharma, “The Demographics of Stagnation,” Foreign Affairs,
February 15, 2016, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2016-02-
15/demographics-stagnation; Stanway, “Bringing up a Child.” It’s possible
that even these dire numbers are optimistic. The Pew Research Center
suggests that in 2022, China’s fertility rate was even lower, just 1.18 children
per woman. See Laura Silver and Christine Huang, “Key Facts about China’s
Declining Population,” Pew Research Center, December 5, 2022,
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-
declining-population/.
15. Alicia Chen, Lyric Li, and Lily Kuo, “In Need of a Baby Boom, China
Clamps Down on Vasectomies,” Washington Post, December 9, 2021,
www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-birth-control-
vasectomy/2021/12/09/c89cc902-50b8-11ec-83d2-
d9dab0e23b7e_story.html.
16. Xiujian Peng, “China’s Population Is about to Shrink for the First
Time since the Great Famine Struck 60 Years Ago. Here’s What That Means
for the World,” World Economic Forum, July 26, 2022,
www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/china-population-shrink-60-years-
world.
17. Sharma, “Demographics of Stagnation.”
18. Nicholas Eberstadt and Ashton Verdery, “China’s Shrinking
Families,” Foreign Affairs, April 7, 2021,
www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-04-07/chinas-shrinking-
families.
19. “For the First Time since the 1960s, China’s Population Is Shrinking,”
Economist, January 17, 2023, www.economist.com/china/2023/01/17/for-
the-first-time-since-the-1960s-chinas-population-is-shrinking.
20. Simon Scarr, Ashlyn Still, and Jin Wu, “China’s Debt Problem,”
Reuters Graphics, accessed November 10, 2023,
http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/CHINA-DEBT-
GRAPHIC/0100315H2LG/.
21. Engen Tham, Xie Yu, and Ziyi Tang, “Analysis: China’s Debt-Laden
Local Governments Pose Challenges to Economic Growth, Financial
System,” Reuters, March 10, 2023, www.reuters.com/world/china/debt-
laden-local-governments-pose-fresh-challenges-chinas-growth-financial-
2023-03-10.
22. Zhiwu Chen, “How China Keeps Putting Off Its Lehman Moment,”
New York Times, March 26, 2023,
www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/opinion/china-finance-banking-evergrande-
crisis.html. As one Hong Kong analyst explains, Chinese “regulators [have] a
degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only
dream of,” and “the government has virtually unlimited power to head off
crises by directing resources—and apportioning pain—as it sees fit, often by
ordering banks and other creditors to accept losses for the greater good
before things get out of hand.”
23. Stella Yifan Xie, Yoko Kubota, and Cao Li, “China’s Cities Struggle
under Trillions of Dollars of Debt,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2023,
www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-cities-struggle-under-trillions-of-dollars-of-
debt-c341b6e0.
24. “Housing Should Be for Living In, Not for Speculation, Xi Says,”
Bloomberg, October 18, 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-
10-18/xi-renews-call-housing-should-be-for-living-in-not-
speculation#xj4y7vzkg.
25. Zongyuan Zoe Liu and Daniel Stemp, “The PBoC Props Up China’s
Housing Market,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 21, 2023,
www.cfr.org/blog/pboc-props-chinas-housing-market.
26. “China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring to Life after Years of
Empty Streets,” Bloomberg, September 1, 2021,
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-ghost-cities-2021-
binhai-zhengdong-new-districts-fill-up#xj4y7vzkg.
27. Yoko Kubota and Liyan Qi, “Empty Buildings in China’s Provincial
Cities Testify to Evergrande Debacle,” Wall Street Journal, October 4,
2021, www.wsj.com/articles/evergrande-china-real-estate-debt-debacle-
empty-buildings-cities-beijing-11633374710.
28. “China’s Property Slump Is Easing, but the Relief Will Be Short-
Lived,” Economist, January 26, 2023,
www.economist.com/leaders/2023/01/26/chinas-property-slump-is-easing-
but-the-relief-will-be-short-lived.
29. Yen Nee Lee, “The U.S. Will Remain Richer than China for the Next
50 Years or More, Says Economist,” CNBC, March 26, 2021,
www.cnbc.com/2021/03/26/us-will-remain-richer-than-china-for-the-next-
50-years-or-more-eiu.html.
30. Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi, “Introduction,” in Fateful Decisions:
Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, ed. Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 6.
31. Robert A. Rohde and Richard A. Muller, “Air Pollution in China:
Mapping of Concentrations and Sources,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 8 (August
2015): e0135749.
32. Deng Tingting, “In China, the Water You Drink Is as Dangerous as the
Air You Breathe,” Guardian, June 2, 2017, www.theguardian.com/global-
development-professionals-network/2017/jun/02/china-water-dangerous-
pollution-greenpeace.
33. Finbarr Bermingham, “Malaysia Leads ‘Blowback’ against China’s
Belt and Road Initiative,” Global Trade Review, August 18, 2022,
www.gtreview.com/news/asia/malaysia-leads-blowback-against-chinas-
belt-and-road-initiative.
34. Ryan Dube and Gabriele Steinhauser, “China’s Global Mega-Projects
Are Falling Apart,” Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2023,
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apart-11674166180.
35. David Herbling and Dandan Li, “China’s Built a Railroad to Nowhere
in Kenya,” Bloomberg, July 18, 2019,
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-
leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere#xj4y7vzkg.
36. Finbarr Bermingham, “Baltic Countries Fume as China’s Envoy in
France Lu Shaye Questions Sovereignty of Post-Soviet States,” South China
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fume-chinas-envoy-france-questions-sovereignty-post-soviet-states.
37. Daniel Drezner, “Chinese Diplomacy Steps In It Yet Again,”
Drezner’s World (blog), April 23, 2023,
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utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
38. Susan L. Shirk, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 7.
39. Brands and Beckley, Danger Zone, 25.
 Chapter 5: We Are Stronger Than We Think
1. Shane Harris, “The Time U.S. Spies Thought Al Qaeda Was Ready to
Nuke D.C.,” Daily Beast, July 12, 2017, www.thedailybeast.com/the-time-
us-spies-thought-al-qaeda-was-ready-to-nuke-dc.
2. Matt Duroot, “A Record Number of Immigrants Have Become
Billionaires in the U.S.,” Forbes, April 18, 2022,
www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/04/18/a-record-elon-musk-eric-yuan-
peter-thiel-number-of-immigrants-have-become-billionaires-in-the-us/?
sh=4dfeda7a2f4b.
3. See Andrew Higgins and Maureen Fan, “Chinese Communist Leaders
Denounce U.S. Values but Send Children to U.S. Colleges,” Washington
Post, May 19, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-
communist-leaders-denounce-us-values-but-send-children-to-us-
colleges/2012/05/18/gIQAiEidZU_story.html.
4. Alexis Lai, “Chinese Flock to Elite U.S. Schools,” CNN, November
26, 2012, www.cnn.com/2012/11/25/world/asia/china-ivy-league-
admission/index.html.
5. See Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “A U.S. University Insured Itself
against a Drop in Chinese Students,” Axios, August 18, 2020,
www.axios.com/2020/08/18/university-illinois-chinese-students.
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Engineering Statistics, Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2021,
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7. Remco Zwetsloot et al., “China Is Fast Outpacing U.S. STEM PhD
Growth,” CSET Data Brief, August 2021, https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-
content/uploads/China-is-Fast-Outpacing-U.S.-STEM-PhD-Growth.pdf.
8. Chun Han Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s
Superpower Future (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2023), 89.
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https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/1506/.
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14. In the early days of CrowdStrike, I was pushing for a remote work
model long before COVID; I pushed back on my board of directors and
convinced them that seeking out the best people from around the country and
letting them work remotely in 2011 was a great idea. As a result, the first
dozen people that I hired as an initial launch team were based in five states
and two countries.
15. Niall Ferguson, “Crypto and the Dollar Are Partners, Not Rivals,”
Bloomberg, May 1, 2022, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-
01/niall-ferguson-crypto-and-the-dollar-are-partners-not-rivals.
16. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 15.
17. Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the
Founding of the Republic (New York: Knopf, 2008), 9.
18. While the constitution of San Marino, which dates to 1600, is older, it
was never codified as a single document in law. Sean Gorman, “Goodlatte
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September 22, 2014, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/sep/22/bob-
goodlatte/goodlatte-says-us-has-oldest-working-national-cons.
 Chapter 6: Step One—Enable Innovation
1. Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical
Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022), xx.
2. Ibid., xxv.
3. James A. Lewis, Learning the Superior Techniques of the
Barbarians: China’s Pursuit of Semiconductor Independence, Center for
Strategic and International Studies, January 2019, p. 6, https://csis-website-
prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-
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4. Miller, Chip War, 12.
5. Ibid., 21.
6. Rachel Courtland, “Gordon Moore: The Man Whose Name Means
Progress,” IEEE Spectrum, March 30, 2015,
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progress.
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You’ve Probably Never Heard of It,” CNBC, November 24, 2021,
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probably-never-heard-of.html.
8. Saif M. Khan, Alexander Mann, and Dahlia Peterson, “The
Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness,” Center
for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University, January
2021, https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/the-semiconductor-supply-
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9. Miller, Chip War, 66.
10. Ibid., xx.
11. Ben Cohen, “The $1 Trillion Company That Started at Denny’s,” Wall
Street Journal, June 1, 2023, www.wsj.com/articles/nvidia-ai-chips-jensen-
huang-dennys-d3226926.
12. Miller, Chip War, 245.
13. “Taking Stock of China’s Semiconductor Industry,” Semiconductor
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China-highlights-lack-of-accountability.
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Tech Ambitions,” New York Times, July 19, 2021,
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unigroup.html.
19. Jan-Peter Kleinhans et al., “Running on Ice: China’s Chipmakers in a
Post-October 7 World,” Rhodium Group, April 4, 2023,
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23. Garrett M. Graff, “Inside the Feds’ Battle against Huawei,” Wired,
January 16, 2020, www.wired.com/story/us-feds-battle-against-huawei/.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
 26. Ibid.
27. Martijn Rasser and Kevin Wolf, “The Right Time for Chip Export
Controls,” Lawfare, December 13, 2022,
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28. Mackenzie Hawkins, “Commerce Secretary Warns of Semiconductor
Glut Due to China’s Subsidies,” Bloomberg, July 26, 2023,
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semiconductor-glut-due-to-china-s-subsidies?in_source=embedded-
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31. Hyman Kublin, “Commodore Perry and the Bonin Islands,” United
States Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 78/3/589 (March 1952),
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 Chapter 7: Step Two—Defend Innovation
1. Associated Press, “Biden Visits Lockheed Plant as Weapons Stockpile
Strained,” WSAZ, May 3, 2022, www.wsaz.com/2022/05/03/biden-visit-
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2. Alex Horton, “For Ukrainian Troops, a Need Arises: Javelin Customer
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3. Bernd Debusmann Jr., “How ‘Saint Javelin’ Raised over $1m for
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4. “President Biden Thanks Employees at Javelin Production Facility in
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5. Missy Ryan, “In Race to Arm Ukraine, U.S. Faces Cracks in Its
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6. Eric Lipton, “From Rockets to Ball Bearings, Pentagon Struggles to
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7. Teresa Mettela, Luis Martinez, and Nathan Luna, “US, Allies Scramble
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 9. Sébastien Roblin, “The Air Force Admits the F-35 Fighter Jet Costs
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12. Ronald O’Rourke, “Navy CVN-21 Aircraft Carrier Program:
Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, May
25, 2005, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA472563.pdf.
13. Justin Katz, “Navy Seeks $3.6 Billion over 5 Years for 64 Hypersonic
Conventional Prompt Strike Rounds,” Breaking Defense,
https://breakingdefense.com/2023/03/navy-seeks-3-6-billion-over-5-years-
for-64-hypersonic-conventional-prompt-strike-rounds/.
14. Alastair Gale, “Japan to Spend Billions on U.S. Tomahawk Missiles
in Military Buildup,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2022,
www.wsj.com/amp/articles/japan-to-spend-billions-on-u-s-tomahawk-
missiles-in-military-buildup-11671784716.
15. Shane Harris, “Own the Sky,” Washingtonian, November 1, 2010,
www.washingtonian.com/2010/11/01/own-the-sky.
16. Thomas Newdick, “Air Force Says KC-46 Is A ‘Lemon’ That It’s
Trying to Make Lemonade Out Of,” Drive, February 2, 2021,
www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39047/air-force-says-kc-46-is-a-lemon-
that-its-trying-to-make-lemonade-out-of.
17. Harris, “Own the Sky.”
18. Ryan, “In Race to Arm Ukraine.”
 19. Jonathan Chang and Meghna Chakrabarti, “‘The Last Supper’: How a
1993 Pentagon Dinner Reshaped the Defense Industry,” On Point, aired
March 1, 2023, on NPR, www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-
supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry.
20. Lipton, “From Rockets to Ball Bearings.”
21. John Tirpak, “The Distillation of the Defense Industry,” Air & Space
Forces, July 1, 1998, www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0798industry.
22. Lipton, “From Rockets to Ball Bearings.”
23. John Mintz, “How a Dinner Led to a Feeding Frenzy,” Washington
Post, July 4, 1997,
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/07/04/how-a-dinner-led-
to-a-feeding-frenzy/13961ba2-5908-4992-8335-c3c087cdebc6.
24. Tirpak, “Distillation of the Defense Industry.”
25. Mintz, “How a Dinner.”
26. John Tirpak, “For Defense Industry to Surge Production, Here’s What
It Needs, Leaders Tell Congress,” Air & Space Forces, February 8, 2023,
www.airandspaceforces.com/defense-industry-surge-production-needs-
leaders-tell-congress; Mintz, “How a Dinner.”
27. Chang and Chakrabarti, “‘Last Supper.’”
28. Lipton, “From Rockets to Ball Bearings.”
29. Ryan, “In Race to Arm Ukraine”; Mark Cancian, “Industrial
Mobilization: Assessing Surge Capabilities, Wartime Risk, and System
Brittleness,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 2020,
https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-
public/publication/210108_Cancian_Industrial_Mobilization.pdf.
30. Tirpak, “For Defense Industry to Surge Production.”
31. “U.S. Defense Spending Compared to Other Countries,” Peter G.
Peterson Foundation, April 24, 2023, www.pgpf.org/chart-
archive/0053_defense-comparison.
32. “HIMARS versus Ships—Lockheed Martin Is Looking into Launching
LRASM from the Ground,” Technology.org, November 29, 2022,
www.technology.org/2022/11/29/himars-versus-ships-lockheed-martin-is-
looking-into-launching-lrasm-from-ground.
33. Seth Jones, “The U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a
Possible Conflict with China,” Center for Strategic and International Studies,
January 23, 2023, https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-
to-deter-conflict-with-China.
34. Gordon Lubold, Nancy A. Youssef, and Ben Kesling, “Ukraine War Is
Depleting U.S. Ammunition Stockpiles, Sparking Pentagon Concern,” Wall
Street Journal, August 29, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-war-
depleting-u-s-ammunition-stockpiles-sparking-pentagon-concern-
11661792188?mod=article_inline.
35. Jones, “U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared.”
36. Gordon Lubold, Doug Cameron, and Nancy A. Youssef, “U.S. Effort
to Arm Taiwan Faces New Challenge with Ukraine Conflict,” Wall Street
Journal, November 27, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-effort-to-arm-
taiwan-faces-new-challenge-with-ukraine-conflict-11669559116?
mod=article_inline.
37. “Taiwan to Buy 400 US Anti-ship Missiles to Face China Threat—
Bloomberg News,” Reuters, April 17, 2023, www.reuters.com/world/asia-
pacific/taiwan-buy-400-us-anti-ship-missiles-face-china-threat-bloomberg-
news-2023-04-17.
38. “Arm Sales: Congressional Review Process,” Congressional
Research Service, updated June 10, 2022,
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL31675.pdf.
39. Jones, “U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared.”
40. Editorial Board, “Will China Keep Its Cyber Promises?,” Washington
Post, October 21, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-china-
keep-its-cyber-promises/2015/10/21/c0c8e422-7775-11e5-a958-
d889faf561dc_story.html.
41. “Cyber Safety Review Board Releases Report on Activities of
Global Extortion-Focused Hacker Group Lapsus$,” Homeland Security,
August 10, 2023, www.dhs.gov/news/2023/08/10/cyber-safety-review-
board-releases-report-activities-global-extortion-focused.
42. Maggie Miller, “Lawmakers Ask Whether Massive Hack Amounted to
Act of War,” Hill, December 18, 2020,
https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/530784-lawmakers-ask-whether-
massive-hack-amounted-to-act-of-war/.
43. “COMAC Launches C919 Inaugural Flight,” Aviation Week, May 5,
2017, https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/comac-
launches-c919-inaugural-flight.
44. Kathleen Claussen, “Trading Spaces: The Changing Role of the
Executive in U.S. Trade Lawmaking,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal
Studies 24, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 345–368.
45. Chad P. Bown and Douglas A. Irwin, “The GATT’s Starting Point,” in
Assessing the World Trade Organization, ed. Manfred Elsig, Bernard
Hoekman, and Joost Pauwelyn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2017), 45–74.
46. “USTR Releases Annual Report on China’s WTO Compliance,”
Office of the United States Trade Representative, February 24, 2023,
https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-
releases/2023/february/ustr-releases-annual-report-chinas-wto-compliance.
47. Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Politics, and
Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and
Innovation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, Office of the United
States Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, “Executive
Summary,” March 22, 2018,
https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/enforcement/301Investigations/301%20Dra
ft%20Exec%20Summary%203.22.ustrfinal.pdf.
48. Ibid.
49. “Presidential Proclamation on Adjusting Imports of Steel into the
United States,” Trump White House, March 8, 2018,
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-
proclamation-adjusting-imports-steel-united-
states/#:~:text=Among%20those%20recommendations%20was%20a,achiev
e%20long%2Dterm%20economic%20viability.
 Chapter 8: Step Three—Say Yes to Our Friends
1. Fen Hampson and Mike Blanchfield, The Two Michaels: Innocent
Canadian Captives and High Stakes Espionage in the US-China Cyber War
(Toronto: Sutherland House, 2021), 20.
2. Garrett M. Graff, “Inside the Feds’ Battle against Huawei,” Wired,
January 16, 2020, www.wired.com/story/us-feds-battle-against-huawei/.
3. Chun Han Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s
Superpower Future (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2023), 89.
4. “Xi Pledges Reform to Ensure Independent, Fair Judicial System,”
China Daily, October 28, 2014, www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-
10/28/content_18817323.htm; Wong, Party of One, 90.
5. Edward Wong, “China Rebukes U.S. over Criticism of Civil Rights
Lawyer’s Detention,” New York Times, May 7, 2015,
www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/world/asia/pu-zhiqiang-china-detention.html.
6. Hampson and Blanchfield, Two Michaels, 40–42.
7. Ibid., 21–22.
8. Drew Hinshaw, Joe Parkinson, and Aruna Viswanatha, “Inside the
Secret Prisoner Swap That Splintered the U.S. and China,” Wall Street
Journal, October 2, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-china-meng-
kovrig-spavor-prisoner-swap-11666877779.
9. Ibid.
10. Garrett Graff, “How the US Forced China to Quit Stealing—Using a
Chinese Spy,” Wired, October 11, 2018, www.wired.com/story/us-china-
cybertheft-su-bin.
11. Dan Levin, “Couple Held in China Are Free, but ‘Even Now We Live
under a Cloud,’” New York Times, January 1, 2017,
www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/world/canada/canadian-couple-china-
detention.html.
12. Graff, “How the US Forced China to Quit Stealing.”
13. Levin, “Couple Held in China Are Free.”
14. Hinshaw, Parkinson, and Viswanatha, “Inside the Secret Prisoner
Swap.”
15. Ben Westcott, “Australia Angered China by Calling for a Coronavirus
Investigation. Now Beijing Is Targeting Its Exports,” CNN, May 27, 2020,
www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/business/china-australia-coronavirus-trade-war-
intl-hnk/index.html.
16. “Australian Lobster, Timber Halted by Chinese Customs Checks,
Fuels Trade Dispute Concerns,” Reuters, November 2, 2020,
www.reuters.com/article/australia-china-trade-int/australian-lobster-timber-
halted-by-chinese-customs-checks-fuels-trade-dispute-concerns-
idUSKBN27I10Q.
17. Claire Fu and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “China Wine Tariff Pushes
Australia’s Grape Growers into Crisis,” New York Times, March 16, 2023,
www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/business/china-wine-australia.html.
18. Ben Westcott, “How China Is Devastating Australia’s Billion-Dollar
Wine Industry,” CNN, February 18, 2021,
www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/australia-china-wine-tariffs-dst-intl-
hnk/index.html.
19. Amy Chang Chien, “First Pineapples, Now Fish: To Pressure Taiwan,
China Flexes Economic Muscle,” New York Times, June 22, 2022,
www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/business/china-taiwan-grouper-ban.html.
20. Andrew Higgins, “In an Uneven Fight with China, a Tiny Country’s
Brand Becomes Toxic,” New York Times, February 21, 2022,
www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/china-lithuania-taiwan-
trade.html.
21. Editorial Board, “A Lobster Lesson in Geopolitics,” Wall Street
Journal, November 1, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/a-lobster-lesson-in-
geopolitics-australia-china-trade-dispute-hong-kong-11635804837.
22. Higgins, “In an Uneven Fight.”
23. Bethany Allen, Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy
to Confront the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2023), xxiv.
24. Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an
Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2021), 61.
25. Timothy Rich, “Parsing Taiwanese Skepticism about the Chinese
Invasion Threat,” Global Taiwan Institute, June 29, 2022,
https://globaltaiwan.org/2022/06/parsing-taiwanese-skepticism-about-the-
chinese-invasion-threat/.
26. Eric Cheung, “If War Breaks Out… I Will Just Become Cannon
Fodder,” CNN, January 20, 2023, www.cnn.com/2023/01/20/asia/taiwan-
mandatory-military-service-conscription-intl-hnk-dst/index.html.
27. John J. Tierney Jr., “Reviving SEATO,” Institute of World Politics,
August 25, 2020, www.iwp.edu/articles/2020/08/25/reviving-seato/.
28. Jeffrey Wilson, “Australia Shows the World What Decoupling from
China Looks Like,” Foreign Policy, November 9, 2021,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/09/australia-china-decoupling-trade-
sanctions-coronavirus-geopolitics/.
29. Erin Banco et al., “‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington
Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine,” Politico, February 24,
2023, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-
oral-history-00083757.
30. For details, see, for example, “FACT SHEET: Implementation of the
Australia–United Kingdom–United States Partnership (AUKUS),” White
House, April 5, 2022, www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-
releases/2022/04/05/fact-sheet-implementation-of-the-australia-united-
kingdom-united-states-partnership-aukus/.
31. David Vergun, “U.S., India Rapidly Expand Their Military
Cooperation,” US Department of Defense, June 20, 2023,
www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3433245/us-india-
rapidly-expand-their-military-cooperation/.
32. “Secretary Antony J. Blinken at the U.S.-Pacific Islands Forum
Dialogue,” U.S. Department of State, May 22, 2023,
www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-the-u-s-pacific-islands-forum-
dialogue/.
33. Kevin Rudd, “A Decade of Solomons Blunders Rolled Out the Red
Carpet for Xi Jinping,” Asian Financial Review, April 21, 2022,
www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/a-decade-of-solomons-blunders-rolled-
out-the-red-carpet-for-xi-jinping-20220419-p5aebh.
 Chapter 9: Step Four—Say No to Distractions
1. Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October
11, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century.
2. “Remarks by President Obama to the Australian Parliament,” White
House, November 17, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-
press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament.
3. Greg Myre, “Long Promised and Often Delayed, the ‘Pivot to Asia’
Takes Shape under Biden,” Morning Edition, aired October 6, 2021, on
NPR, www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043329242/long-promised-and-often-
delayed-the-pivot-to-asia-takes-shape-under-biden.
4. Norman Kempster, “Just Kidding, Russian Says after Cold War Blast
Stuns Europeans,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1992,
www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-12-15-mn-2214-story.html.
5. Alexander Gabuev, “China’s New Vassal,” Foreign Affairs, August 9,
2022, https://archive.ph/IwbCJ#selection-1435.0-1438.0.
6. Dmitri Alperovitch and Sergey Radchenko, “Another Russia Is
Possible: The Kremlin Will Eventually Tire of Its Reliance on China,”
Foreign Affairs, August 29, 2022, www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-
federation/another-russia-possible.
7. Ibid.
8. “A Kennan for Our Times: Celebrating the Legacy of George F.
Kennan,” Wilson Center, February 13, 2018,
www.wilsoncenter.org/microsite/3/node/67031.
9. Alexander Ward, “‘Win-Win’: Washington Is Just Fine with the China-
Brokered Saudi-Iran Deal,” Politico, April 6, 2023,
www.politico.com/news/2023/04/06/china-saudi-iran-deal-00090856.

Conclusion
1. Llewellyn Thompson, telegram, U.S. Department of State, May 27,
1961, available at
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/publications/berlin_crisis/bcdoc.html.
2. Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s
Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2017), 116.
3. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American
People on the Berlin Crisis,” July 25, 1961, available at the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum, www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-
resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/berlin-crisis-19610725.
4. Kenneth P. O’Donnell, David F. Powers, and Joe McCarthy, Johnny,
We Hardly Knew Ye: Memoirs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little
Brown, 1972), 303.
5. Finbarr Bermingham, “Chinese Envoy to France Lu Shaye Doubles
Down on Taiwan ‘Re-education’ Aims,” South China Morning Post, August
8, 2022, www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3188192/chinese-
envoy-france-lu-shaye-doubles-down-taiwan-re-education.
6. “A Presidential Farewell: Truman’s Farewell Address to the Nation,”
January 15, 1953, available at the Truman Library Institute,
www.trumanlibraryinstitute.org/farewell-address/; Peter Lyon, Eisenhower:
Portrait of the Hero (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 854, as well as quoted
in Stephen Ambrose, “Epilogue: Eisenhower’s Legacy,” in Eisenhower: A
Centenary Assessment, ed. Guenter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 251.
PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the
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