OPINION:
Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s assertions to the contrary, and because of Beijing’s deliberate actions, we are in another Cold War. Our strategy to win this one will require modernized deterrence and containment — not engagement — strategies to preserve our democracy and the current world order.
But first, two quotes: “Insanity is doing the same thing [engagement] over and over again and expecting different results,” Albert Einstein once said.
And Winston Churchill said: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing [containment] — after they’ve tried everything else.”
The U.S.-China relationship models both of these. We have tried various forms of engagement for 40 years without success, until the last administration recognized the need for a different approach: containment. As much as we all hoped the Obama administration’s “engage, bind, balance” strategy would bring Beijing around to our way of thinking, after 40 years of failure, we have to recognize Einstein’s wisdom. Churchill would say a modernized containment is the right thing.
Chinese Communist Party gaslighters and influencers have done good work keeping us from acknowledging this, putting the blame on us with language like “that’s Cold War thinking” and “you’re trying to contain us,” to which well-meaning but naive interlocutors reflexively reply “no, it’s not so!”
It wasn’t until about 2018 that the U.S. began to abandon the effort to engage China in a global system that creates the most good for the most people, and moved toward containment, closing a Chinese Consulate that was grossly abusing its Vienna Convention privileges, kicking out 60 journalists (leaving 100 in place, when there were only 30 from the U.S. in China), limiting the activities of its diplomats — all in the name of reciprocity. Call it containment, call it reciprocity: The relationship is unbalanced and in need of tough love. We must find the lowest common denominator and rebuild from there.
Those who argue that containment is the wrong path should reflect on what Beijing is doing to box the U.S. and others out of resource-rich Africa and elsewhere. The more we brought China into international bodies like the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and the Human Rights Council, the more those bodies have come to serve Chinese interests. It is past time to isolate and contain this cancer of new-type communism.
The post-Soviet peace dividend was squandered through wishful thinking, exemplified by endless unproductive engagement (dialogue), revolving-door personnel policy, and a fear of returning to the tense days of mutually assured destruction. But ignoring the problem isn’t going to make it go away; on the contrary, it has made it worse.
After 40 years of failure, it’s time to dust off the proven body of knowledge on how two diametrically opposed governance concepts can exist simultaneously until the judgment of history decides a winner … again.
An updated version of Cold War deterrence strategy has been quietly gaining prominence in the Defense Department and elsewhere. There doesn’t seem to be the same allergy to deterrence, possibly because we’re thinking mainly in terms of nuclear deterrence. Given China’s multipronged attack on liberal democracy and market economics, new Cold War deterrence thinking needs to be expanded to include information and economic deterrence (for example, mutually assured information destruction and an economic Article V).
So what do we have to show for the last 40 years of trying to engage China, hoping engagement would change it?
Through its superior influence tools, or “magic weapons” — kudos to New Zealand researcher Anne-Marie Brady for highlighting this — the Chinese Communist Party has operated unopposed in free and open democratic societies. Containment must begin with either getting reciprocal information access to China and its citizens or denying its political warfare entities access to our systems.
We did this well during the first Cold War — we recognized and contained Soviet disinformation (active measures) meant to weaken us. Yet today, we still allow TikTok unhindered access to American children and voters, even though we know it’s designed to create instability and undermine confidence in democracy. India banned it and 200 other Chinese apps in a week; we’ve been debating TikTok for three years. At least some of the modern world’s insanity can be attributed to political disinformation operations meant to mislead and divide us. It’s time to contain them.
The recent Biden administration idea of assertive transparency is a good first step toward Information containment. In the past, public diplomacy was reluctant to expose Chinese malfeasance, allowing Beijing to explain away the intentional violation of U.S. sovereign airspace as an errant weather balloon. We have the surveillance payload and should have exposed the disinformation for what it was, undermining China’s credibility and legitimacy. Assertive transparency takes the initiative in the Information domain, leaving Beijing to react to us, exposing and containing Chinese disinformation.
A recent essay in Foreign Affairs asserts that the U.S. has been operating without a strategy to deal with China. During my time in the Obama administration, we gave the “engage, bind, balance” strategy our best effort, but it was doomed to fail since the engage and bind pillars both require China’s cooperation, which was obviously not forthcoming.
So we’re left with balance: Use a mix of hard and soft power to contain and deter China.
We know how to do this; we work with allies and partners (Beijing only has clients) to identify, surround and eliminate China’s corrosive activities in our open systems. This is the same strategy that George Kennan proposed to isolate and contain Soviet malfeasance; we’ve just been loath to admit the return to great power competition. But the adversary gets a vote, and the time for soft diplomacy has expired.
It’s time to admit the failure of the many handcrafted, artisan strategies that haven’t survived in the real world and get busy with modernized deterrence and containment strategies. Churchill was right.
• David R. Stilwell is a retired Air Force brigadier general with extensive experience in national security affairs. He most recently served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 2019 to 2021.
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