As the most dangerous adversary, China’s attacks are especially effective. They are crafted to avoid retaliation, disguise their intent, hide their fingerprints and make progress only incrementally to stay below the threshold that would otherwise cause even a meek target to defend itself.
Sharing a page from the same general playbook, China’s partners—Russia, Iran and North Korea—are similarly waging below-threshold wars. Common attacks across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific include energy blackmail, cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, economic coercion, information operations, hostage diplomacy and political interference. Worse still, authoritarian states are actively supporting one another in their escalating attacks. Different regions, same global war.
Hostile states’ below-threshold warfare is especially insidious in the economic domain and, again, China leads the pack. Using malign investment, trade and other economic tools, it has systematically acquired foreign technologies and sensitive assets that are essential to amassing its coercive power and making itself a (near) peer rival to the US.
The military effects that flow from its economic warfare are dangerously underappreciated. Having secured critical chokepoints in military supply chains and made itself the world’s manufacturing hub, China can now stop US allies and partners alike from producing critical weapons at scale, if at all. It has, moreover, erased the technology gap that once deterred it from making credible military threats, and has positioned itself to execute sabotage and espionage attacks on the critical resources and assets that allied militaries need to mobilise, communicate and fight.
China’s greatest success in its decades-long quiet war is its systematic erosion of the ability of US allies and partners to defend themselves. Its very highest ambition is now within sight: ‘winning without fighting’.
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