The Domestic Threat: China Beyond the International Arena
The China threat, as it has been called by others, has been the subject of mountains of spilled ink. Yet the threat it poses to the United States has often been painted incompletely. American thinking on threat has failed, in some ways, to fully progress beyond the Cold War and conventional warfare thinking that dominated American strategy throughout the 1900s. As a result, the description of the China threat has often excluded the most potent threat of all: soft power threats to American liberty and ways of life.
True, scholars and pundits point to real threats posed by China. Some point to direct threats to American security posed by China’s growing conventional warfare capabilities (picturing wars as still fought conventionally, as if WWII might repeat itself) and its growing (but still modest, relatively speaking) nuclear threat (recalling the Cold War nuclear arms race). Others point to the indirect threat it poses to traditional and new U.S. allies, and the threat it poses to democracy and individual liberties in allied states (all recalling the 1950s-era, Cold War “domino theory”). Still others paint China as a threat to its own people, pointing to the genocide it is perpetrating within its own borders (often drawing a comparison with Nazi policies and the Holocaust) and exclaiming, justifiably, that it must be stopped.
Each of these is a sufficient reason to mobilize the considerable resources of the United States in defense of its values and its allies abroad. However, none of them speaks to the threat that China poses to what has historically made America strong, and what has historically caused it to weaken itself: its values, and failure to adhere to them.
America Evolving: World War to Cold War
The mere logistics of the Cold War required a new way of thinking about armed conflict. Previous conflict had been deterred by building up overwhelming conventional capabilities, attempting to entrench insurmountable defensive lines, and by arms control treaties meant to limit superiority to maintain equal deterrence. In each case, these attempts failed: the Spaniards lost their Armada, the Germans simply went around the Maginot Line, and the Washington Naval Treaty was violated repeatedly until Japan simply withdrew. With the advent of nuclear weapons, however, deterrence became a very real possibility for the superpowers, because the destructive capabilities of each state were now effectively unlimited.
When war could no longer be reasonably fought on the battlefield between the major powers, new forms of warfare were attempted. Ideological warfare began, with the CIA and KGB seeking to influence elections and politics. There were, of course, the well-known coups and counter-coups. And there was a shift to asymmetric and proxy warfare targeting the enemy superpower, with two famous examples being the Chinese/Soviet support for North Vietnam and U.S. support for the mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. When the battlefield shifted, so did the United States.
America Behind: Soft Power
However, just as American understanding of the battlefield shifted, American tactics did as well. The United States did not always seek to align its values with those it supported, especially at first. It supported the Shah against a (questionably) democratic Mossadegh in Iran, and deposed elected leaders in Guatemala and Brazil in favor of dictators. At the same time, it also often deposed dictators, and instituted democracy in other countries, and argued that elected leaders like those in Guatemala and Brazil were poised to embrace communism, meaning they would have become dictatorial and anti-American if the U.S. had not intervened.
Still, one of the biggest draws for American power was not the American use of proxy warfare, or its direct intervention in other states; it was the use of soft power to lay the groundwork for those goals. The attraction of the American system and way of life was one of the most effective tools of American outreach in history. The eroding faith in communism abroad, the revealing of its lies and contradictions by Radio Free Europe (RFE) and outlets like it, and the allure of American prosperity served to entice, encourage, and even incite revolutions like that of Hungary in 1956 (as Joseph Nye chronicled in Bound to Lead. True, these alone were not enough to topple communism, but they were enough to help turn some allies away from the left-wing populism that communism embodied. RFE could even be used to promise support to those who felt lied-to by their dictatorial governments, though this could also backfire if promises went unkept or exaggerated.
The point made here is not that soft power wins wars alone. Instead, it is that soft power is how the groundwork for winning wars, proxy or otherwise, can be won. It is also the process by which the U.S. maintains allies, maintains prosperity through its values, and maintains its allure to those seeking freedom from the repression of the alternative systems. Those who don’t seek that freedom are free to stay away from the U.S., as is their right, but American freedom has maintained a powerful allure. It is this which China threatens most directly.
The China Threat, and the Threat from Within
The shift from fighting abroad through traditional media, to fighting a war everywhere at once through cyberspace, has been described everywhere too. “America is not ready to fight in cyberspace,” everyone agrees. We are “behind the curve” (pg. 41) of dictatorships like Russia and China, who have developed more powerful and effective influence operations (though China’s appears to be backfiring now, in some cases). We fret that Russia, or China, or Iran, will succeed in influencing our elections, and subverting the will of the American people.
In the first place, the threat from China extends to this realm. True, election integrity is a serious concern for democracy’s legitimacy, as the 2020 election’s squabbles over voter fraud have demonstrated. Voters must feel their voices are legitimately heard and represented, and foreign influence has a way of altering that.
More importantly, however, China may soon have the allure of its own soft power pulling Americans. This has already begun to reverse the effects of existing “brain drain”, as Chinese-born scientists are pressured or enticed to move back to China. American gridlock has frozen funding for their research, and American intolerance has made them feel unwelcome. Still other Americans have a favorable view of the Chinese system, viewing its relative “success” as indicative of its superiority. While this number has remained small, it is likely to grow if China continues to advance on the United States, and its governance system appears more attractive than continued American gridlock.
The threat to American liberties, and liberties in allied states, cannot be overstated. If Americans cannot demonstrate the success of the American system, its attractiveness will falter in the face of China’s, and a system that allows for genocide and repression will replace it. This ideological threat is more comprehensive than any the Soviets ever posed to American dominance, and it is increasingly lost in the focus on hard power response. Indeed, more than a third of millennials already approve of communism more than capitalism (though the two are not, of course, antonyms).
The death of the American system is not a new fear, nor is the fear that it would allow for populists to do precisely what China is doing. The threat within, i.e. the threat that Americans will do China’s dirty work and abolish our own values for it, is old hat. Senator McCarthy used the external threat of communism to begin the delegitimization and devaluing of American free speech ideals for years. Thankfully, his actions did not last or lead to the end of those ideals, but they were certainly tarnished for long after even that.
Even President Roosevelt, for all his successes against the Nazis and Japan, also interned Japanese-Americans (and others) en masse on the basis of virtually nonexistent intelligence reports, and was sanctioned in doing so by the Supreme Court (which only recently overturned the case, Korematsu, though thankfully this was but a formality).
More recently, candidates have reached Congress espousing claims that American minorities have dual loyalties, or even more shockingly, claiming that Jews seek to have nonwhite immigrants “wipe out” white Americans and repeating unverified and false claims about Muslim immigrants. These individuals have reached the American House of Representatives, and it’s not unthinkable that they could reach the White House; especially since the rhetoric of some recent Presidents has strayed into that territory, to put it lightly.
The China threat is thus not just that we will fail to attract and retain top talent, or that we will stop being an attractive ally to other like-minded democracies, or that we will overreact to the threat itself. It is all of those things and more, and a fundamental challenge to the American way of life. As such, it calls for a fundamental response from the American people and all levels of government.
True, specific policies are difficult to name with such a broad threat, especially when a reorientation of the focus has to come first. The first goal, in that sense, should be the end of gridlock on all areas of consensus related to China. In today’s Washington, when the two parties agree on one thing but not another, frequently both are left unpassed. While a compromise would be ideal, the situation with China (this has been the case with national security issues, as the annual passing of the NDAA demonstrates, even over the veto threat of a President) demands identifying areas of agreement, prioritizing them, and bypassing any and all gridlock on them.
Areas of specific policy can follow: policies like sanctions on Chinese officials, the reestablishment and increase in funding for soft power outreach, increased investment in R&D and economic growth (a measure China will soon surpass us in, if they haven’t already), and more. But first we must recognize the threat if we are to address it, and viewing it as discrete issues like conventional capabilities, nuclear capabilities, and the like, tends to think of warfare in incomplete and outdated fashions. In the fight for the American future, the battlefield is now at abroad, at home, and in the minds of the American people, and the American government should respond accordingly.
