Napoleon supposedly said that when China rises, the world will quake. The tremors are already being felt. The United States is at a “critical inflection point,” according to Dmitri Alperovitch and Garrett Graff in their new book, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century. We have reached “a moment where the United States and its Western allies are confronting seriously for the first time the implications of the economic and military rise of China.”
The stakes are unimaginably high. China’s ambitions may begin with Taiwan, but they don’t end there. Indeed, Beijing seeks to displace the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower, hoping to gain a decisive say over the world’s affairs. Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the most destructive conflict in modern history. But a Sino-American war would be unlike anything that the U.S. has experienced. Fortunately, the authors suggest steps the U.S. can take to prepare for and hopefully prevent a war that would shatter the world.
China’s path to dominance begins with Taiwan, the first step in a key island chain, and what the late Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously called an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” Should China successfully seize the island, it would surely destroy its democracy, just as it has done in Hong Kong. But it would also leave America’s friends, some of them treaty allies, vulnerable. The world would change rapidly, and not for the better. To underscore this unpleasant fact, Alperovitch recounts taking part in a war game in which longtime allies abandon the U.S. after China takes Taiwan. As the 19th-century British politician Lord Palmerston famously observed: “Nations don’t have allies, they have interests.” In the fallout from the storm of a Chinese invasion, the U.S. might look around and find many of its friends to be of the fair-weather variety.
Alperovitch, the book’s primary author, begins by imagining a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan in 2028 by forces of China’s People’s Liberation Army. Such an event is hardly unthinkable. Xi Jinping, the longest-serving and most powerful Chinese leader since Mao, has called for the Chinese military to be able to seize Taiwan by 2027.
His orders are being carried out. China has been engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history, its spending and focus revealing its objective: gaining hegemony over the Indo-Pacific, the region that will account for the majority of the world’s GDP. By dominating the Pacific, China can dominate the world’s economy, forever altering the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
Nor should there be any doubt as to how Beijing would wield its newfound power. The ruling Chinese Communist Party has used economic blackmail against countries like Australia and Lithuania, among others, that have had the temerity to criticize its policies. Private entities, from Hollywood and the NBA to small businesses, have also found themselves victims of China’s wrath. An emboldened China would subject citizens in lands far away to its whims about their now-only-notionally-free rights to speech and economic activity.
What will it take to prevent this sorry state of world affairs? Many Americans might not understand what a war with China would look like. To his credit, Alperovitch spells out how dire things could get, with casualties unlike anything that the U.S. has experienced in living memory, if ever. “There is no small, contained war with China,” he notes. “Any such war is a naval war, a missile war, a space war, and a cyber war. It is also, almost certainly, one that pulls in allies and U.S. territory almost from the start — it’s hard to believe that any fight with the United States over Taiwan would not include preemptive or retaliatory strikes against our military facilities in Japan, Guam, Hawaii, and perhaps even the U.S. mainland.”
A war with China would be catastrophic, with consequences that many Americans would find beyond intolerable. In China, the U.S. faces a peer competitor with capabilities surpassing any of America’s previous foes, including Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. Its industrial might and economic heft provide it with a potential that the U.S. hasn’t faced in its entire history. As Rush Doshi, a well-regarded China expert and strategist, observed, “For more than a century, no U.S. adversary or coalition of adversaries reached 60 percent of U.S. GDP” — a figure that China surpassed more than a decade ago. Further complicating matters, key U.S. supply chains, including those related to national security, are dependent on China, giving Beijing the ability to strangle America possibly. China also possesses tremendous strength in emerging domains of warfare, including cyber and space.
Thankfully, Alperovitch doesn’t avoid the difficult questions — or their often-devastating answers. Such straight talk is rare in today’s foreign policy debates. But given the stakes, it is a necessity. The U.S. is poorly prepared for a great power conflict, particularly one with China. America’s defense industrial base has atrophied, the victim of neglect, monopolization, and excessive red tape. In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has lacked focus, fiddling away precious time and resources. By contrast, China has steadily built up its capabilities, often aided and abetted by those in the West who saw in Beijing a business opportunity. “We are late waking up to this challenge from China,” he warns.
World on the Brink serves as an alarm bell. It successfully highlights aspects of Sino-American competition that have long been overlooked by policymakers — for example, the significance of rare earth metals and critical minerals. Better still, it does so engagingly, which is no mean feat given the technical and hypothetical and jargon-laden way these discussions usually are written about.
World on the Brink isn’t all doom and gloom. Indeed, while the authors freely acknowledge the dire state of America’s current position, they do not conclude it’s time to throw in the towel. Instead, they note, America has “just been playing the wrong cards and following the wrong strategy.” Yet, “America’s more powerful than many even in our country think it is.” And “crucially, our adversaries are weaker than many believe they are.”
China’s totalitarian system, with its centralized planning, repression of dissent, and endemic corruption, is deeply flawed. Beijing faces looming demographic and economic challenges of its own. Indeed, by 2050, China’s population will have fallen by a hundred million people, the equivalent of losing an entire Egypt or Vietnam. Real estate companies account for a “whopping 30 percent of China’s GDP, while it never exceeded 13 percent of U.S. GDP at the height of the financial crisis.” And far from offering a model for the future, many nations increasingly look at China as both a bully and an uncertain bet.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
However, what does exist is a crucial window in which Beijing has the wind at its back and Washington and its allies are woefully unprepared. This is a period of maximum danger, and we are living in it.
The U.S. needs to focus and prioritize, and right now. China is America’s only peer competitor, its capabilities dwarfing other opponents such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Accordingly, allies must be encouraged to take on more of the defense burden. We are in an era of hard choices, and we need to act like it. This means “tough love” and “pointed conversations” with some of our friends, encouraging them to do more, both for their sake and ours. What the world will look like in this century will largely be determined by how the U.S. manages China’s rise today. Deterring a catastrophe, starting as soon as possible, is going to be hard and costly, but a lot less costly than having to fight and win a war later — or losing it.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst.
