“Probably the most consequential geo-strategic competition we’ve had since the early Cold War.” That’s what Dr. Jonathan Ward said to me at the very start of a program I moderated this week for the Vail Symposium in Vail, Colorado, and it got my attention. Because he wasn’t talking about the war in Ukraine and the wider conflict it portends between the Western world and Russia. No, this Washington analyst, who has advised everyone from the Department of Defense to major members of the Fortune 500, was talking about China, and what he called its overall strategy “to ultimately rise as the dominant superpower.”
“Dominant superpower” means more than it used to. Back during the Cold War, a superpower was defined by its military and to be sure, China’s is on the rise. It is building warships and warplanes like there’s no tomorrow. It already has the largest land army in the world, the largest air force in the western Pacific, the biggest missile force on the planet, and if projections are accurate, China’s navy by the end of the year 2030 will be the world’s largest, half-again bigger than ours. Former White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls it “the largest peacetime military buildup in history.”
Now though, as Dr. Ward writes in his new book “The Decisive Decade,” the dominant superpower will have to prevail in more than just the military sphere, for the competition today is about more than ships and planes and soldiers. We have to go head-to-head in a spectrum of contests: whose industries will lead the world, who will control technology, who will accumulate more allies, whose political ideology will prevail? Some analysts believe the answers to those questions all favor the United States. Tufts University professor Michael Beckley wrote in his book “Unrivaled” that the U.S. has “the best prospects of any nation to amass wealth and power in the decades ahead.” But Dr. Ward believes that despite well-founded American confidence, the answer to every question is still up in the air.
Here’s why: it’s not just China’s military that is on the rise. Although there have been speed-bumps in the road, its entire economy— industry, technology, agriculture— has been on a roll. More nations now count China as their biggest trading partner than count the U.S. In simple terms, China is building, while to compete in what some see as an existential contest, we have to rebuild. Former National Security Advisor McMaster told Congress in February, "We are in a difficult position because we have been underinvested in modernization for… a long amount of time," which led him to conclude, “China poses a greater threat to American interests than did the Soviet Union."
So what do we do about it? How do we prevent ourselves from losing that contest?
The answer might be in the subtitle of Ward’s book: “American Grand Strategy for Triumph Over China.” He proposes a grand strategy in this decisive decade to “design a very clear and effective economic strategy” as he put it at the symposium, because “if we win the economic game, we can convert those gains into military power, rebuild deterrence and get back to… peace through strength.”
Your first thought when you read that might be that he’s saber-rattling. But because of that word “deterrence,” I don’t think he is. Deterrence has been the foundation of America’s strength in the world since the end of WW2. For the duration of the Cold War, it was deterrence— by both sides, to be fair— that kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was the policy I got to know covering arms control talks between the two superpowers in the 1970s and ‘80s: Mutual Assured Destruction, which unequivocally meant that one side could not obliterate the other without being obliterated itself.
So yes, we need a military that will deter China’s, especially with the growing tensions over Taiwan, a democratic Western ally that China insists is part of its own motherland. Dr. Ward’s argument is that China has to know that they don’t have a decisive advantage, that they don’t have a clear chance to attack and, to use their word, “reunify” Taiwan into China. As he put it at Vail Symposium, “We have a vote in this.”
Our vote is not benign. China involved itself on the side of our enemies in the Korean War, then the Vietnam War. Its army has had recent fatal skirmishes with neighboring India. And President Xi has been blunt about his willingness to go to war again if it helps China achieve the dominance it craves. Foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman wrote in April in The New York Times, “The smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.” That got my attention too.
But Jonathan Ward’s point is, we also need an economy that will deter China’s. Admiral Jonathan Greenert, a Chief of U.S. Naval Operations in the Obama years, lays out this plan: “The call to action is for Washington, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street.” In other words, we need to win the contest for technological breakthroughs, for modern industrialization, for overall national wealth. We need to make money for America, not for China. We need to wean ourselves off China. I love my iPhone, but if Apple has to charge more to put it together here instead of in China, that’s a cost that in the long run we need to be willing to bear.
Twenty years ago China’s economy, its Gross Domestic Product, was a small fraction of ours. Today, it’s still smaller, but China is coming on strong and intent on leaving us in its dust. Chinese leaders believe that is their destiny. America’s grand strategy has to be to prevent it.
The challenge is, we’re not going up against an inert force because they have a grand strategy too, and that, as Dr. Ward described it to me, is “to surpass us, to displace us, to overpower us in the Pacific and beyond..” What’s more, although we can’t guess right now what role it will play, there is the friendship that China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin declared for their nations in 2022, with “no limits.”
There have been conflicts on the radar this year in the relationship between China and the United States. First the Chinese balloon— they say weather, we say surveillance and the evidence points to our version— that we shot down over the Atlantic in February. Then the brush-ups last month between their warships and ours in the South China Sea and between both nations’ aircraft flying overhead. It has created a climate of not just competition but confrontation.
That is the backdrop for the position in which we find ourselves today. Our principal adversary aspires to be the world’s dominant superpower. We have to stand in the way of that.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Yes neighbor, I watched the Symposium you moderated last night and the conclusions are what the Joint Chiefs said two years ago: A China invasion of Taiwan within the end of this decade is probable.
Our response to it will be critical to our place in history.
After visiting China before the pandemic, I find it hard to believe that they want to chance anything close to "mutual annihilation." They have built too many wonders that they surely do not want flattened. That said, they are apparently hell bent on being first in AI. As we talk of slowing our progress in that sector, they are not. We fear what the dangerous side of this technology might portend, but there is a monstrous amount of power that can come from it for the good of mankind.