Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: Fair trade or global trade war?

FA 12-12 Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices Daniel Byman The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks Peter Schroeder The Best of Books 2023 This Year’s Top Picks From Foreign Affairs’ Reviewers The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments Marietje Schaake The Self-Doubting Superpower America Shouldn’t Give Up on the World It Made Fareed Zakaria The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments By Marietje Schaake December 21, 2023 British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak greeting U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris in Bletchley, United Kingdom, November 2023 Leon Neal / Pool / Reuters Political leaders are scrambling to respond to advances in artificial intelligence. With applications from marketing to health care to weapons systems, AI is expected to have a deep effect across society and around the world. Recent developments in generative AI, the technology used in applications such as ChatGPT to produce text and images, have inspired both excitement and a growing set of concerns. Scholars and politicians alike have raised alarm bells over the ways this technology could put people out of jobs, jeopardize democracy, and infringe on civil liberties. All have recognized the urgent need for government regulation that ensures AI applications operate within the confines of the law and that safeguards national security, human rights, and economic competition. From city halls to international organizations, oversight of AI is top of mind, and the pace of new initiatives has accelerated in the last months of 2023. The G-7, for example, released a nonbinding code of conduct for AI developers in late October. In early November, the United Kingdom hosted the AI Safety Summit, where delegations from 28 countries pledged cooperation to manage the risks of AI. A few weeks after issuing an executive order promoting “safe, secure, and trustworthy” AI, U.S. President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in mid-November and agreed to launch intergovernmental dialogue on the military use of AI. And in early December, EU lawmakers reached political agreement on the AI Act, a pioneering law that will mitigate the technology’s risks and set a global regulatory standard. Despite broad acknowledgment of the need to shepherd an AI-powered future, when it comes to international cooperation and coordination, political leaders often turn to tools from the past. The most prominent proposals for global oversight of AI seek to replicate multilateral bodies built for other purposes: UN Secretary General António Guterres and others have called for an “IAEA for AI,” for example, that would monitor artificial intelligence the way the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors nuclear technology. Last month’s British-led AI Safety Summit renewed calls for an “IPCC for AI,” referring to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Although the impulse to borrow from previous successes of multilateralism is understandable, simply introducing a new agency will not solve the puzzle of AI governance. The commitments that participants made at the AI Safety Summit, similar to the G-7 guidelines, were mere pledges. And in the absence of binding measures, corporations are left to govern themselves. Investors and shareholders may prefer this outcome, but politicians and citizens should be under no illusion that private AI companies will act in the public interest. The recent fiasco at OpenAI is a case in point: the board of directors’ clash with the executive leadership over the societal effect of the company’s product showcased the fragility of in-house mechanisms to manage the risks of AI. International regulatory bodies are only successful when there are rules to which they can hold companies and national governments accountable. Political leaders should first hammer out the preconditions and content of those laws—and only then fit agencies to oversee regulation. AI’s rapid development, opacity, and changing nature make it substantively different than previous technologies, and it will require novel forms of international oversight. Rather than letting the scope of the challenge discourage them, lawmakers should take it as inspiration to innovate. THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE The achievements of existing international bodies may be worth emulating, but their oversight models do not translate easily to AI. Consider the IAEA. The UN-led watchdog was founded in 1957, but it was only after the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came into force in 1970 that the agency was able to effectively monitor the nuclear weapons programs of participating countries and uphold safety standards. Current conversations about AI governance miss the NPT’s critical role. Political leaders are eager to dream up AI-focused institutions with monitoring capabilities, but an enforceable treaty on AI governance is nowhere in sight. Several major countries have barely made progress on domestic legislation. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and others, including the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have taken inspiration from the IPCC, which synthesizes scientific research on climate change and hosts yearly Conference of the Parties summits. Even before the United Kingdom held its inaugural AI Safety Summit, plans for the new “IPCC for AI” stressed that the body’s function would not be to issue policy recommendations. Instead, it would periodically distill AI research, highlight shared concerns, and outline policy options without directly offering counsel. This limited agenda contains no prospect of a binding treaty that can offer real protections and check corporate power. Establishing institutions that will “set norms and standards” and “monitor compliance” without pushing for national and international rules at the same time is naive at best and deliberately self-serving at worst. The chorus of corporate voices backing nonbinding initiatives supports the latter interpretation. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has echoed the call for an “IAEA for AI” and has warned of AI’s existential risks even as his company disseminates the same technology to the public. Schmidt has invested large amounts of money in AI startups and research ventures and at the same time has advised the U.S. government on AI policy, emphasizing corporate self-governance. The potential for conflicts of interest underlines the need for legally enforceable guardrails that prioritize the public interest, not loosely defined norms that serve technology companies’ bottom lines. Taking the IAEA or IPCC as models also risks ignoring the novelty of AI and the specific challenge of its regulation. Unlike nuclear arms, which are controlled by governments, AI capabilities are concentrated in the hands of a few companies that push products to market. The IPCC’s function as an independent research panel would be useful to replicate for AI, especially given the opacity of company-provided information on the technology. But facilitating research is only one step toward rule making—and effective AI governance requires rules. Politicians and citizens should be under no illusion that private AI companies will act in the public interest. No one can know what AI will be capable of in the future, so the policies and institutions that govern it must be designed to adapt. For one, oversight bodies must be able to enforce antitrust, nondiscrimination, and intellectual property laws that are already on the books. Governments and multilateral organizations should also agree on interpretations of first principles, such as respect for human rights and the terms of the UN Charter, in the context of AI. As AI becomes a greater part of daily life, many fundamental questions lack clear answers. Policymakers must delineate when data harvesting violates the right to privacy, what information should be made accessible when algorithms make consequential decisions, how people can seek redress for discriminatory treatment by an AI service, and what limits to free expression may be required when AI-powered “expression” includes churning out the ingredients for a deadly virus at the click of a mouse. Although international initiatives have received a lot of recent attention, effective multilateralism depends on effective national laws. If the U.S. Congress were to put up legal guardrails for American AI companies, which include many of the leaders in the field, it could set an example for other countries and pave the way for global AI regulation. But with little chance of a deeply divided Congress passing meaningful regulation, the Biden administration’s tools for addressing AI are more limited. So far, the administration—like many governments around the world—has affirmed that AI is subject to existing laws, including consumer protection and nondiscrimniation rules. How regulators will apply these laws, however, is not at all clear. The U.S. government will need to issue guidelines on the contexts in which AI technologies must comply with current laws and ensure that regulators have the skills and resources to enforce them. Agencies that are equipped to determine whether a hotel rejected customers on the basis of their skin color, for example, will need a different set of capabilities to identify a discriminatory algorithm on a website for hotel bookings. In some areas, existing laws have been applied to AI technologies with tentative success: plaintiffs seeking damages from autonomous vehicle manufacturers have drawn on product liability law to make their case. But further developing legal precedents may prove difficult. Regulators often lack access to companies’ data and algorithms, which prevents them from identifying violations of privacy rights, consumer protections, or other legal standards. If they are to govern AI effectively, these restrictions on proprietary information must loosen. Citizens, too, will need guidance on their legal rights when they encounter AI-powered products and systems. In contrast to the United States, the EU will soon be in a strong position to engage other countries on binding rules for AI. The bloc’s AI Act, expected to come into force in 2026, contains measures to mitigate a wide range of risks from AI applications, including facial recognition systems and tools used to infer the likelihood of someone commiting a crime. As the most comprehensive policy of its kind in the democratic world, the EU law will serve as a starting point for multilateral discussions and could become a template for other countries’ domestic legislation. The AI Act does not address the use of AI in the military domain, however, because this policy area is reserved for national governments in the EU system. The EU’s market share gives the bloc significant leverage in international negotiations. But if its 27 member states take different positions on military applications, their disagreement will diminish the EU’s ability to push for global AI standards. BUILDING CONSENSUS Governments want to do something about AI, but their current efforts often lack direction and force. Before setting up new international agencies, officials should put in the hard work of drafting the laws that those agencies will monitor. To start, governments should build an international consensus around a few key points. First, AI must be identifiable. As the technology advances, it is becoming harder and harder to know whether the voice on a customer service line or a text, video, or audio message comes from a person or a computer. And with its use in automated decision-making systems, AI increasingly determines people’s ability to secure employment, loans, and educational opportunities. Whenever companies use AI for these purposes—particularly generative AI, whose output is often difficult to identify as synthetic—they should be legally obligated to disclose its role. To further reduce deceptive or misleading content, legislators should require authentic messages from political leaders to be watermarked as soon as such technology is reliable. Countries must also set limits on the use of AI-enabled weapons, including cyberweapons. The application of international laws to cyber-operations is already a murky area, and AI adds new layers of complexity. The technology increases the advantages of cyberattackers, who can potentially use generative AI to quickly scan large volumes of software for vulnerabilities. An international agreement banning certain targets for weaponized AI, such as cyber-enabled espionage or the spread of disinformation during another country’s election campaign, would set necessary guardrails and promote best practices. Finally, AI regulation cannot be divorced from environmental protection efforts. The massive data centers used for data storage and processing require large quantities of electricity, water, and other resources, and the environmental costs of these sites are growing. Today, companies share only vague estimates of their water and electricity use. A single global reporting standard, with compliance overseen by national governments, would make environmental data available to academic researchers and journalists. This would make it possible for the public to scrutinize AI companies’ consumption of natural resources and for policymakers to impose effective restrictions. TOWARD COOPERATION The G-7 Code of Conduct and other proposals for AI governance are not the first attempts at multilateral cooperation. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, founded in June 2020 and backed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, convenes researchers and practitioners from 25 countries to share their findings and discuss areas for cooperation. Given the geographical limitations of its membership and the lack of binding agreements, GPAI is often criticized as being neither representative nor effective. This modest progress of GPAI—or, recently, of the AI Safety Summit—underscores the difficulty of converging on global norms in a politically fragmented world. Norms will not simply fall into place when countries join a new international institution. Instead, best practices in AI governance will likely develop in one of two ways. In the first, adversarial governments, especially the United States and China, will find common ground on the limited areas of mutual concern, such as the military uses of AI. But if geopolitical rivals are unable to overcome their differences, like-minded democracies will need to lead the way by cementing initial agreements that address specific dimensions of AI regulation. Either way, real progress on international AI oversight will take more than getting policymakers from key countries in the same room. In her account of the IAEA, the scholar Elisabeth Roehrlich identified two essential elements that made nuclear safeguards effective: legal agreements binding the agency and its member states, and technical tools to monitor compliance. AI safeguards, too, will require new and updated laws as well as the resources and technical capacity to enforce them. Today, many political and corporate leaders are trying to jump straight to the end, focusing on overarching institutions rather than the policies that make them work. History is a valuable guide, but it is not a shortcut. MARIETJE SCHAAKE is International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University and International Policy Fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. MORE BY MARIETJE SCHAAKE More: Diplomacy International Institutions Politics & Society Civil Society Law Science & Technology Artificial Intelligence Automation Most-Read Articles Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices Daniel Byman The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks Peter Schroeder The Best of Books 2023 This Year’s Top Picks From Foreign Affairs’ Reviewers The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments Marietje Schaake Recommended Articles The Coming AI Economic Revolution Can Artificial Intelligence Reverse the Productivity Slowdown? James Manyika and Michael Spence AI Is Already at War How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the Military Michèle A. Flournoy The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks By Peter Schroeder December 20, 2023 Russian intercontinental ballistic missile systems being paraded through Moscow, May 2023 Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters To hear U.S. officials tell it, there is little risk that the war in Ukraine will lead to nuclear escalation. “We don’t have any indication that Mr. Putin has any intention to use weapons of mass destruction—let alone nuclear weapons,” said White House spokesperson John Kirby in January. At a Senate hearing in early May, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated that Russia was “very unlikely” to use its nuclear arsenal. Yes, CIA Director William Burns said a February speech, the United States must take Putin’s nuclear saber rattling seriously. But the purpose of such rhetoric, Burns continued, was “to intimidate us, as well as our European allies and Ukraine.” It was not to signal that Russia was actually thinking about using its weapons. Washington’s incredulity is to some extent understandable. The advent of the war triggered fears of outright nuclear conflict between the West and Russia. That period of somewhat frenzied speculation has passed. The war has since settled into a grinding—but conventional—stalemate. To be sure, U.S. officials are still concerned that Russia may use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. “I worry about Putin using tactical nuclear weapons,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in June. The risk, he continued, is “real.” But officials do not appear to believe that the war in Ukraine could lead Russia to use its nuclear arsenal against a NATO state, however furious it is at the West for supporting Ukraine. That is a mistake. U.S. officials have it backward. It is actually quite unlikely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will use a nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, but it is very possible that he will move toward using one against NATO. Unlike the West, Putin may not fear a nuclear standoff: he is well versed in Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the tenets of nuclear deterrence, and possibly sees himself as uniquely suited to navigating a nuclear crisis. And Putin has been remarkably consistent that Russia is willing to use nuclear weapons against NATO to defend its interests in Ukraine. Even eight years ago, in a television interview done a year after Russia invaded Crimea, Putin declared that he had been ready to place Russian nuclear forces on alert to prevent Western forces from interfering in Moscow’s takeover of the peninsula. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Russian nuclear weapons use is not imminent. But if Putin does escalate the war, for instance by attacking NATO with conventional weapons, he will likely move very swiftly, so as not to give the United States a chance to maneuver away from a crisis. Washington will struggle to deter a Kremlin so emboldened. Ukraine is too central to the Kremlin’s ambitions—and too secondary to the United States’—for Putin to believe any American threats. Ultimately, Putin will expect the United States to back down before fighting a nuclear conflict over land so far from home. To avoid the worst, the United States needs to find new ways to prevent Russia from using its arsenal. It must persuade the country’s officials, including ones along the military command chain, to subvert and obstruct decisions that might lead to a nuclear attack. It needs to convince Russian elites that their country can concede on Ukraine without suffering a catastrophic defeat. It must rally other countries, especially neutral ones, to delegitimize nuclear use and convince Putin that he will be making a dreadful mistake if he turns to his nuclear arsenal. And it must do so now. That way, Washington can avoid having to make dangerous decisions later, under the intense pressure of a nuclear standoff. LOCKED AND LOADED Russia has not been bashful about its nuclear arsenal. From the moment the country launched its invasion, Moscow has tried to intimidate the world by gesturing at its weapons. Shortly before attacking Ukraine, Russia carried out an unusually timed exercise of its nuclear launch systems. A year later, in February 2023, it suspended participation in the New START treaty, which regulated how many nuclear weapons Moscow and Washington could have. In March, the Kremlin announced that it would move some of its nuclear weapons into Belarus. In October, Putin suggested that Russia might restart nuclear testing. All the while, Russian government officials have threatened to launch a nuclear attack, as former President Dmitriy Medvedev did in July, when he said Russia could “use nuclear weapons” to conclude the war in a few days. U.S. officials, of course, have paid attention to these threats, but they have not been convinced by them. They imagine that Moscow may use small so-called tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, but not large so-called strategic ones against NATO states. According to Politico, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told U.S. experts in February that there was little fear that Russia would use strategic nuclear weapons in Ukraine or against the West, but some remained concerned that Russia could use tactical weapons. Putin, their thinking goes, might use these weapons to help Russian forces halt a Ukrainian attack that appeared on the verge of taking back Crimea or inflicting a significant defeat that threatened to push Russian forces out of eastern Ukraine. But the growing complacency among U.S. officials is based on a misunderstanding of Putin’s rhetoric and the dynamics that keep Moscow from using nuclear weapons. When Putin invokes his arsenal, he is not trying to warn that Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Rather, his rhetoric is designed to threaten NATO itself. It is a blinking red light, a warning to American decision-makers that Moscow is willing to create a nuclear confrontation with Washington if needed to win in Ukraine. So long as Putin remains optimistic about Russia’s odds, he is unlikely to rock the boat in Ukraine. To see why, consider, first, the state of the battlefield. Tactical nuclear weapons would do little to help Russia break the stalemate. Ukrainian forces are well entrenched along a frontline that extends for roughly 600 miles, and so even dozens of tactical weapons would not be enough to let Russia push through. Even if they were, Russia does not have the maneuverable reserve forces needed to exploit any opening created by these weapons. A nuclear attack would, of course, be a terrifying event for Ukrainians to witness, but it would still not break the will of the Ukrainian people or compel Kyiv to surrender. Ukrainians have fought with tremendous courage through all kinds of atrocities, and a tactical nuclear attack would only be another entry in the register of Russian brutality. Ukrainians have said as much when responding to polls. According to surveys by the Munich Security Conference and Ukrainian think tanks, the country’s public is unwilling to surrender to Moscow and stop fighting even in the face of nuclear threats. If anything, tactical nuclear strikes would hurt Russia’s war effort. Such attacks would likely strengthen the West’s desire to help Ukraine, just as it was starting to ebb. (Western politicians of all stripes have a strong incentive to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used in war.) A nuclear strike might also prompt China and India—the Kremlin’s two most important international partners—to abandon Russia. Both Beijing and New Delhi have already made public statements designed to dissuade Moscow from using nuclear weapons. They would not be happy if Putin ignored them. For Putin, there is little to gain from using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and much to lose. In fact, right now he believes that there is little to gain from using nuclear weapons anywhere. Putin thinks that Russia can win in Ukraine by conventional means. “Almost along the entire frontline, our armed forces, let’s put it modestly, are improving their position,” he said in a December 14 press conference. He also noted that Western support for Kyiv appears to be in decline, declaring that soon, the “freebies” afforded to Ukraine would “run out.” So long as Putin remains optimistic about Russia’s odds, he is unlikely to rock the boat by engaging in escalation. But Putin may not always feel this way. If the West makes a strong, renewed commitment to support Kyiv as it tries to retake all occupied territory and provides Ukraine with long-term financing support and a bolstered defense industry, Putin might decide that he may not be able to grind Ukraine down through attritional warfare. If, in addition, Western economic sanctions finally start to significantly disrupt the Russian economy, Putin may conclude that time is not on his side. Russia’s president might decide to double down instead of waiting Ukraine out. The real escalation risks would then start. ZERO TO SIXTY For the United States and its allies, the first set of escalatory risks might seem like more bluster. The Kremlin, for example, could begin by moving its big, long-range nuclear weapons carriers into deployed and dispersed positions, beyond their normal bases, which are vulnerable to U.S. attacks. It could, for example, send the bulk of its ballistic missile submarines out to sea, move large numbers of its strategic missile forces into the vast Russian forests, and load nuclear weapons onto strategic bombers. Such actions fall well short of actually using nuclear bombs, but they would still be deeply alarming. They would undoubtedly catch Washington’s attention, dramatically heighten tensions, and immediately force Western leaders to account for the risk of nuclear war in their calculus. From there, Moscow might actually begin using force against NATO. It could down a NATO aircraft over an allied country or international airspace. It could attack a NATO ship in the Black Sea. Or it could attack what it claimed were arms convoys bound for Ukraine while they were moving through a country in NATO’s eastern flank. Such steps would quickly expand the scope of the conflict, bringing NATO into the fight. Moscow might augment this step by detonating a nuclear weapon in the open ocean, in what is called a demonstration strike. Finally, in a worst-case scenario—one where the Kremlin sought to shock the world into ending the war in Ukraine quickly and on Putin’s terms—Russia could actually launch a nuclear weapon directly at NATO territory. Although Putin seemed to pour cold water on the idea at an annual forum in October, saying that Russia did not need to lower the threshold for nuclear use, it might look necessary if the war were clearly trending against Russia. Eighty percent of military aid to Ukraine flows through one airbase in eastern Poland, and so that base would probably be a prime target. The United States might then retaliate with a nuclear strike of its own, bringing the world to the edge of destruction. It may not take long, from the time he begins escalating, for Putin to move from sharp nuclear signaling and conventional attack to ordering a nuclear strike. If Putin were to escalate slowly, launching smaller attacks and seeing how NATO reacts, he would risk inciting a conventional conflict—probably with NATO forces intervening directly into Ukraine and possibly within Russia itself—in which the West has a clear advantage. NATO’s conventional forces are superior to Russia’s, and so Putin will not want to give Washington time and space to react, allowing it to bring its capabilities to bear. He will therefore want to reach the nuclear level—where Russia is a peer of the United States—as quickly as possible. Washington cannot deter Putin from escalating. U.S. officials, of course, do not want Moscow to resort to nuclear weapons, even though they seem unconvinced that he will. As a result, they have attempted to scare Russia away from escalating by threatening “catastrophic consequences,” as the White House put it in September 2022, should Putin use his arsenal. But such warnings are unlikely to deter Russia’s president. Putin will see this threat as a bluff; he knows that, ultimately, Washington does not want to risk a nuclear conflict over Ukraine. He is also profoundly committed to winning in Ukraine, to the point where he might decide to rapidly escalate even if he thought the United States was serious about responding with force. He would probably doubt the severity of any U.S. threat and calculate that, in the end, Washington would choose to compromise rather than launch nuclear strikes against Russia itself, which could entail a nuclear response against the U.S. homeland. The unfortunate truth is that Washington cannot deter Putin from escalating to the point where he uses nuclear weapons because of the war in Ukraine. Although he would not take such escalation lightly or dismiss the serious risks for Russia, Putin would anticipate that he could win the war of wills in a nuclear crisis. If it wants to avoid a nuclear standoff, Washington must therefore take a different tack. U.S. policymakers should instead pursue policies aimed at subverting Russia’s decision-making, so that if Putin orders escalatory steps he faces internal pushback. That means they need to try empowering Russian officials who want to obstruct any effort by Putin to go nuclear. Doing so will not be easy, given that U.S.-Russian relations are about as poor as can be. But Washington can start by engaging more with Moscow, odious as that may seem. The only way for U.S. officials, including in the intelligence community, to cultivate dissent among Russian officials is to forge more direct contacts. The United States must also persuade Russian officials that there are paths out of Ukraine that do not end in either victory or a humiliating defeat. Washington could, for example, suggest that only the most senior officials could be punished for starting the war, that any reparations to Ukraine would be limited, and that there is a path for lifting sanctions against Russia and allowing the state to reenter the community of nations. But exactly what such an outcome would entail need not be spelled out explicitly. Top Russian officials simply have to know that their choice is not between capitulation and nuclear escalation. Still, the United States cannot bank on Russian officials to stop Putin from using nuclear weapons. They must simultaneously rally neutral states to pressure Moscow away from escalation. They need to push these states to be clear in their conversations with Russian officials that any nuclear use is illegitimate, and that it would lead to them severing all direct and tacit support for Russia’s war effort. China’s and India’s public warnings about nuclear strikes were both positive signs, but they and other countries—such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, all of which are helping keep the Russian economy afloat—can do more. And they must. Nuclear brinkmanship is a dangerous game, particularly with an authoritarian leader such as Putin. This is no time for complacency. For the world to head off nuclear war, countries will have to persuade Moscow that victory in Ukraine is simply not worth the costs of bringing the world to the precipice—or over it. PETER SCHROEDER is an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He served as the Principal Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council from 2018 to 2022 and was a member of the Senior Analytic Service at the CIA. MORE BY PETER SCHROEDER More: Ukraine Russian Federation Security Defense & Military Nuclear Weapons & Proliferation Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy War in Ukraine Vladimir Putin Most-Read Articles Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices Daniel Byman The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks Peter Schroeder The Best of Books 2023 This Year’s Top Picks From Foreign Affairs’ Reviewers The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments Marietje Schaake Recommended Articles The End of the Russian Idea What It Will Take to Break Putinism’s Grip Andrei Kolesnikov Putin the Ideologue The Kremlin’s Potent Mix of Nationalism, Grievance, and Mythmaking Maria Snegovaya, Michael Kimmage, and Jade McGlynn Europe Must Ramp Up Its Support for Ukraine Abandoning Kyiv Would Embolden Russia—and Lead Only to More War By Norbert Röttgen December 22, 2023 Firing a Swedish-made howitzer at Russian positions in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, December 2023 Thomas Peter / Reuters With Ukrainian forces stalled on the battlefield, and major aid packages for Kyiv blocked by Hungary in the EU and by Republican policymakers in the United States, the Western alliance in support of Ukraine appears increasingly weak and divided. Several scholars and policymakers have assessed this scenario—and reached the conclusion that a pivot to a defensive strategy could eventually bring Putin to the negotiating table. According to that line of thought, a new approach focused on securing territories that Ukraine already controls would consolidate Western support and eventually demonstrate to Russia that it cannot outlast Ukraine’s war effort. But that analysis reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the Russian president and how he thinks. Any Western backtracking will only encourage Putin to double down on his assault on Ukraine. As long as he believes that military success is possible, Putin will refuse to negotiate—and he will keep fighting. With that reality in mind, Western policymakers must revise their approach to supporting the Ukrainian war effort. Ukraine’s partners should move from a halfhearted to a full-throated offensive strategy that provides the embattled country with all the weapons necessary to gain the upper hand and push back Russian forces. Europe, in particular, should do more. This includes delivering the maximum possible quantities of materiel from the EU’s existing stockpiles of relevant weapons systems, boosting military production, and expanding each country’s production capabilities. Specifically, Europe can and should give far more middle- and long-range cruise missiles to Kyiv. Doing so would allow Ukraine to target Russian infrastructure in the occupied territories while shielding its soldiers from the hazards of the frontlines. Europe must also speed up and extend the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, which would enable the country to establish air superiority. Coupled with the dispatch of additional air defense systems, such as Patriot and IRIS-T missiles, such aid would allow Ukraine to effectively pressure Russian forces and win the upper hand on the battlefield. Only then, with Russia on the back foot, will negotiations become possible. Only then will Western policymakers be able to achieve the real criteria for a victory: ensuring that Putin’s war of aggression does not pay off for Russia and that Europe does not continue to be a theater of war. Should the West capitulate to fatigue and infighting, however, it will simply play into Putin’s hands. A Russian triumph would set the stage for further war across the continent, bringing turmoil ever closer to NATO territory. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. AVOIDING SELF-DEFEAT The current situation on the battlefield is indeed alarming for Ukraine and its partners. Russian forces have dug in behind miles of minefields and trenches, making it incredibly difficult and costly for Ukrainian soldiers to gain territory. A stalemate has set in; the conflict, now approaching its third year, has already exacted hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties and is becoming a brutal war of attrition. But those making the case for negotiations with Moscow fail to mention the context in which this worsening situation arose. Kyiv has not achieved major battlefield gains because its partners in the United States and Europe have not provided the necessary weapons to gain air control and effectively penetrate Russian positions and infrastructure in the occupied territories and Crimea. As the war has dragged on, Russia has succeeded in firing up its military industrial complex and adjusting to a wartime economy. Its material capabilities have now surpassed those of Ukraine, which continues to depend on arms supplies from the West. Although Ukraine’s partners have retained stockpiles of certain precision weapons, including Taurus cruise missiles, they are running out of other key materiel—specifically ammunition. Despite early warnings that ammunition would eventually run low, the European Union has failed to increase its production capabilities, owing to a lack of planning and foresight. At the current rate, the bloc will be unable to fulfill its commitment to provide one million shells and missiles to Ukraine by March 2024. And this lag is having consequences on the ground; whereas Russia uses between 25,000 and 30,000 shells a day, Ukraine fires a meager 7,000 shells a day. Facing critical shortages, Ukrainian troops have been forced to ration their use of ammunition. No NATO government would ever put its military in such a position of having to fight a war without sufficient ammunition, precision weapons, and air support. Part of the problem is that many European leaders have failed to clearly state an objective for aid to Ukraine, and have instead pursued a vague and often halfhearted strategy of support. Their incremental approach to assistance hasn’t equipped Kyiv to achieve a major breakthrough during Ukraine’s summer offensive. Policymakers within the German government and the Biden administration, in particular, continue to view the delivery of every weapons system through the lens of how Russia will respond, with the fear of escalation constraining what kind of aid Ukraine receives. The reality is that Russia has already fully escalated in terms of its conventional military capabilities and is unlikely to take the nuclear route for two reasons: first, out of fear of U.S. retaliation; and second, given the opposition of China, Russia’s indispensable ally, to nuclear escalation, a clear redline for Beijing. Putin must not be allowed to imagine that there is any merit to his heinous invasion; if he triumphs, wars of aggression in Europe may well become more common. From the perspective of Kyiv and its partners, this means that at a minimum Ukraine’s prewar boundaries must be reinstated. Kyiv is not only fighting to regain its territory but also defending the fundamental right of self-determination of states, as well as the largely peaceful order that has prevailed in Europe since the end of World War II. It is a goal that liberal democracies in the West and around the world should be united in supporting—particularly throughout Europe, where war has returned to the continent. SHEDDING ILLUSIONS There is widespread agreement among many observers and policymakers that the war in Ukraine can likely only end with negotiations. A satisfactory agreement, however, will not be achieved from a position of Ukrainian weakness. Given Putin’s track record, there is no reason to believe that a defensive approach by Ukraine and its partners would incentivize Russia to move toward a cease-fire, as some, such as Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, have suggested. Quite the contrary: Putin has made it clear that he does not want to negotiate. He wants to win this war, which has become a matter of his political and personal survival. The war has come at a huge cost for Russia, and Putin must have something to show for it. To assume that he might seize the opportunity to stanch the bloodletting is wishful thinking, and has nothing to do with the Putin who has bombed Ukrainian civilians, helped the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launch a horrendous war against his own people, and overseen a brutal occupation of Chechnya in the early 2000s. Unsurprisingly, his price for even opening negotiations with Kyiv is essentially a total Ukrainian surrender. And in return, he promises nothing. Rolling back support for Ukraine would diminish rather than increase Russia’s appetite for negotiations. Putin would gain the upper hand and have no reason to engage in dialogue if he senses the possibility of a military victory. Russia’s expanded military-industrial complex can sustain a years-long war effort; Europe, on the other hand, has not increased its military output and will soon run out of the vital military systems that Ukraine so desperately needs. Knowing this, Putin just needs to wait. Time is on his side. The lack of spine shown here by the United States and the EU could have important consequences for the rest of the world. If the West backed down in the face of Putin’s advances, or revealed that it is not capable of substantially ramping up support for Ukraine, such a failure would signal weakness to China and other revisionist powers such as Iran. It would also send a disastrous message to other key allies such as the Philippines and Taiwan, which rely on U.S. military support for their safety and territorial integrity. Shifting to a dedicated offensive strategy and helping Ukraine succeed against Russia would help deter China in the Indo-Pacific and reassure U.S. and EU allies. Every Republican arguing that the United States must focus on China and leave Europe to the Europeans should keep in mind that allowing Russia to triumph in Ukraine would only encourage the worst, most aggressive instincts in Beijing. CLEAR EYES, FULL AID But just as the United States must not waver in its support for Ukraine, Europe must do more to step up and provide for its own defense—especially given the prospect of the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office. In the event that Trump is reelected, Europeans must be able to sustain the Ukrainian war effort on their own. Europeans cannot escape the geography of our continent; we are not separated by a vast ocean from the war. Thus, we do not have a choice but to ensure a Ukrainian victory. It is our collective peaceful European order that is under attack by Russia. Although single-handedly supporting Ukraine would be considerably more difficult, it is not impossible. Germany’s GDP alone is almost twice as big as Russia’s; the EU’s as a whole is seven times larger. To activate the EU’s potential as a geopolitical player, and to build a sustainable coalition in support of Ukraine, Germany needs to live up to its leadership role in the bloc. It must act as a bridge builder between eastern Europeans who are well aware of the Russian threat close to their borders and western Europeans who feel relatively safe in their homes far away from the Ukrainian frontlines. Although valuable time has been lost, it is not too late for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to act decisively. Scholz has taken some important steps; in 2023, German military support for Ukraine totaled some four billion euros, including weapons systems such as tanks and missile defense systems—a sum that will be doubled in 2024. This large-scale aid is all the more exceptional given Germany’s long-standing pacifism, which has historically led Berlin to refuse to send weapons to conflict zones. But given Germany’s untapped capacity, as well as what a victory for Ukraine and Europe will entail, it is not enough. As long as he believes that military success is possible, Putin will refuse to negotiate. To continue the strikes against Russian infrastructure and supply lines, Ukraine needs cruise missiles such as Taurus systems to hit targets beyond the frontlines, as well as fighter jets to establish air control and air defense to protect its soldiers in the trenches. To date, Germany has withheld Taurus cruise missiles on the grounds that there are still technical challenges that must be resolved in order to restrict the missiles’ range. The real, highly cynical reason for not delivering these weapons is that they are extremely effective, and Scholz fears that the successful use of these weapons could prompt Russian escalation. Although Germany has already delivered several Patriot missile defense systems which now successfully shield the skies above Kyiv, it can and should provide more, at a time when Russia is intensifying its drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. If Berlin feels some consternation regarding the provision of these systems, it must understand that providing Ukraine with all the weapons it needs to wear down and defeat Russian forces is in the security interests of every European state. Scholz’s biggest shortcoming is that he has remained vague when discussing the West’s objectives in its support for Ukraine. He continues to use an ambiguous formula in which, as he has said, “Russia must not win, Ukraine must not lose.” Scholz must call Russia’s war what it is: an attack on peace in Europe that poses an existential risk to Germany and the continent. This kind of explicit support, polling shows, would be met with widespread approval from the German public. CRACKING DOWN Beyond expanding their military production capacity, Ukraine’s partners can and should do much more to slow down Russia’s arms production, starting with the proper enforcement of their own sanctions regimes. Many of the high-precision machines used in Russia to produce systems such as cruise missiles are U.S. and German products. Russia continues to maintain and purchase these machines. This is possible because German authorities do not properly enforce European sanctions. Russia has often managed to evade restrictions by operating through third countries such as Kyrgyzstan, where German exports have skyrocketed since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022. Once there, exports such as machinery, motor vehicles, and parts—which have gone up by more than 5,000 percent—continue on to Russia. Proper enforcement of EU sanctions, including tailoring them in a way to prohibit such circumvention via third parties, would hamper Russia’s ability to repair, maintain, and procure spare parts for this critical machinery, ultimately slowing Russia’s weapons production. In addition, U.S. and European policymakers should do far more to target Russia’s main weapons suppliers: North Korea and Iran. Although North Korea is internationally recognized as the pariah state that it is, the Islamic Republic is treated differently by the international community. There is a rationale behind this behavior; the United States and Europe still hope to renegotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran, after the Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018. But the regime has demonstrated no serious interest in reviving the agreement, having rejected the EU’s proposal for a new deal in 2022. Instead, the Islamic Republic has provided Russia with kamikaze drones since mid-2022, including some 1,700 Shahed drones that year. Russia and Iran have also signed a billion-dollar weapons deal, which aims to build 6,000 drones on a Russian site by 2025. Moreover, the Iranian-made drones used to attack Ukrainian infrastructure and bomb Ukrainian cities are often manufactured using Western components. Washington and Brussels should enact much tougher sanctions on the regime for aiding Russia’s war effort and restrict their own trade with Iran to reduce the chances of delivering commodities that can aid Iran’s drone-making effort. PLAYING THE LONG GAME Because Russian forces have dug deep into trenches and now hide behind miles of mines, much of Ukraine’s war effort no longer takes place along the frontlines. Ukraine now focuses on targeting Russian supply lines and infrastructure within Russian-occupied territory and in Crimea, which holds symbolic importance for the Russian people, especially since Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014. By targeting Putin’s pressure points and aiming to inflict painful defeats on Russia in the Black Sea or in Crimea, Ukraine is hoping to galvanize public sentiment in Russia against the war and its ringleader. Such a shift in public attitudes is a precondition for negotiations; to be willing to talk and compromise, Putin must first be under severe pressure at home. The second precondition is a military one: Putin must also be certain that he can achieve nothing more by force. Ukraine must therefore win the upper hand on the battlefield. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate under the current circumstances would destroy all its hopes to align more closely with the West—hopes that are a little brighter after the EU’s decision to approve negotiations toward allowing Kyiv entry into the bloc. Putin will continue to target and destabilize Ukraine through all means available. It was Putin’s fear, after all, of having another flourishing Western country along Russia’s border that propelled him to attack in the first place. A defensive strategy focused solely on dialogue with Russia is at best fundamentally flawed—and at worst catastrophically naive. Such a strategy would lead to a partitioned Ukraine with no hope of joining NATO, as no NATO country would want to risk being drawn directly into a lingering conflict with Russia. Without NATO deterrence, Putin would be free to recover, regroup, and eventually attack again. And Ukraine would not be the only country at risk of a renewed assault; other states such as Moldova and the Baltic countries would be under constant threat, as well. Europe can prevent this nightmare scenario from happening only if it sheds its illusions and wholeheartedly commits to Ukraine’s defense. NORBERT RÖTTGEN is a member of the German Bundestag and its Foreign Affairs Committee. He served as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee from 2014 to 2021 and was Federal Minister of the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety from 2009 to 2012. MORE BY NORBERT RÖTTGEN More: Ukraine Russian Federation Economics Foreign Aid Security Defense & Military War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy War in Ukraine Most-Read Articles Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices Daniel Byman The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks Peter Schroeder The Best of Books 2023 This Year’s Top Picks From Foreign Affairs’ Reviewers The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments Marietje Schaake Recommended Articles A Ukrainian tank near Bakhmut, Ukraine, December 2023 Europe’s Emerging War Fatigue How to Shore Up Falling Support for Ukraine Susi Dennison and Pawel Zerka Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, right, listening to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, September 2023 There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West Dmytro Kuleba In Dealing With the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, America Has No Easy Way Out Biden Must Take Risks, Talk Straight, and Act Boldly By Aaron David Miller and Daniel C. Kurtzer December 22, 2023 Israeli soldiers near the Gaza border, southern Israel, December 2023 Ronen Zvulun / Reuters Wars in the Middle East rarely end cleanly. Some observers, however, have expressed the hope that the Israel-Hamas war could upend a dangerous status quo and eventually lead to more stability in the region. The war is often compared to the October 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the combined forces of Egypt and Syria, largely because of the magnitude of Israel’s intelligence failures, the Israeli public’s loss of faith in their government, and the national trauma that followed. But the truth is that any meaningful comparison ends there. More than 2,800 Israelis were killed in the Yom Kippur War. Yet that conflict never incorporated the kind of sadistic, indiscriminate torture, killing, and hostage-taking that Hamas perpetrated in October 2023—nor the subsequent large-scale airstrikes by Israeli forces that have already resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. The 1973 war lasted merely three weeks and quickly entered a relatively well-structured disengagement agreement brokered by the United States, launching a process that led to a landmark Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed by two strong leaders: the charismatic, heroic Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and the tough Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. By contrast, the two traumatized societies that emerge from the current war will face a level of anguish, casualties, and devastation that will demand a herculean task of physical reconstruction and psychological healing. As many as 1,400 Israelis and 18,000 Palestinians have died so far. Some 150,000 Israelis and more than 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. In the West Bank, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raids and extremist settler vigilantism have already led to the deaths of over 260 Palestinians, the arrests of nearly 2,000, and the displacement of almost 1,000 from their lands. The ideas that Israel, after completing its military operations to disable Hamas, will make a full exit from Gaza and that the Palestinian Authority (PA) can quickly and authoritatively take over are not realistic. And this war does not have heroic leaders: both sides suffer from profoundly ineffectual governance. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. There is no realistic prospect in the near term of a dramatic, uplifting denouement to the conflict that validates each side’s sacrifices and provides relief and hope for the future. In late October, U.S. President Joe Biden declared that the region must not return to its pre–October 7 status quo. If Biden wants change, however, his administration must undertake bolder policy moves—ones that firmly guide the region toward a two-state solution. Policymakers may wish to avoid bold moves in a fast-changing situation: such moves will be practically difficult and politically risky. But the facts on the ground suggest that the region cannot return to its unstable prewar status quo. Instead, without careful guidance, a new status quo is likely to emerge that will be even more problematic. Only bold American leadership now will support a good outcome in the aftermath of this war. UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM In waging war in Gaza, Israeli officials have stated that their goals are to destroy Hamas and then demilitarize and deradicalize Gaza. What these leaders mean by “deradicalize” remains unclear. But even if the Israelis succeed in destroying Hamas’s military capabilities, they will not simply declare mission accomplished in Gaza and depart. Israel’s leaders have ruled out both Hamas and the PA as governing authorities, and Israel will thus likely remain in Gaza for an extended period. Israel already controls Gaza’s land, sea, and air access, as well as its electromagnetic spectrum. Even if Israel succeeds in ending Hamas’s rule in Gaza, it will undoubtedly want to retain some authority, ensuring at a minimum that all imports with dual-use military purposes are carefully monitored and controlled. Continued friction with the United Nations and other international aid organizations—already high thanks to Israel’s military operations and the deaths of thousands of Gazans, including UN aid workers—is inevitable. If Israel tries to remain in Gaza for an extended time, it will face residual attacks from Hamas and other terrorist organizations and enormous challenges in maintaining law and order. Even as some Israeli officials speak of exiting Gaza, they also talk openly about the necessity of creating long-term “buffer zones” and about Israel’s overall responsibility for security. But the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and those in the Arab states will surely refuse to be subcontractors for Israel’s security operations. Simply put, no bright line will separate war from peace in this conflict. Instead, Israel’s military actions in Gaza will likely transition from an intensive air and ground campaign to more targeted operations, and Israel will be part of the Gazan landscape for some time. Try as Israel might to avoid former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rule—you break it, you own it—an extended Israeli presence in Gaza will inevitably involve taking on more, not less, responsibility for and involvement in the territory’s affairs. And that is likely to inflame tensions with whoever comes to formally govern Gaza. A LIMITED PARTNER On paper, the best option for Gaza’s future over the long term is Palestinian governance led by a revitalized and legitimized PA. The PA already helps cover Gaza’s public-sector employees’ salaries and assists in paying for the area’s electricity. The international community sees it as the legitimate authority in Gaza as well as in the West Bank. Earlier this month, in a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan talked about the role a revitalized PA might play in governing Gaza. But because of its own dysfunction—and, in no small measure, Israeli policies—the PA has become weak and ineffectual. Palestinians perceive it to be corrupt, nepotistic, and authoritarian: in an Arab Barometer survey of Gazans conducted just before October 7, a majority of respondents considered the PA to be a burden on the Palestinian people. Abbas is 87 and in the 19th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term. He refused to hold new elections in 2021 and has increasingly lost touch with young Palestinians. When respondents in the same Arab Barometer poll were asked whom they would vote for if presidential elections were held in Gaza, 32 percent chose the imprisoned Fatah activist Marwan Barghouti and 24 percent chose the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Only 12 percent chose Abbas. During this war, the PA has been unable to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from IDF raids and attacks by settler vigilantes, let alone influence the course of Israel’s operations in Gaza. Hamas’s stock, meanwhile, has risen in the West Bank since its October 7 terror attack and its negotiated release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. For many Palestinians who distrust Abbas and revile Israel’s recent actions, Hamas is becoming the only game in town. Restoring the Palestinians’ faith in the PA will take a great deal of effort and time. It would require the PA to run fair and free elections in the West Bank and Gaza and to convince voters that it really will aim to end Israel’s occupation and create an independent Palestinian state. Should it succeed, Israel would also need to demonstrate its commitment—in words and actions on the ground—to advancing a two-state outcome. And with the current Israeli government, this scenario is impossible. POWER GRAB In one sense, it is not a surprise that the Israel-Hamas war broke out in Gaza rather than in the West Bank. Gaza has often been at the center of tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians: the first intifada began in Gaza in 1987, and in the twenty-first century, Gaza has been the focal point of at least six significant Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition has focused on the West Bank, attempting to create the conditions for annexation. In the first half of 2023, Netanyahu’s government pushed any possibility of a two-state solution further away by advancing or approving permits for 13,000 new housing units in West Bank settlements, the highest number recorded since 2012. The fact that Netanyahu presided over the worst terror attack and the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history, as well as the bloodiest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, has discredited his leadership. Many observers have reasonably presumed that his political career will soon reach its end, as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s did after the Yom Kippur War. But Netanyahu will fight to hang on to power. Facing indictments for breach of trust, bribery, and fraud, Netanyahu desperately wants to avoid jail. Already, he has broken with tradition by suggesting that he will organize the inquiry into the government failures that preceded Hamas’s attack; the resulting inquiry will lack the legal authority of a state commission. For now, Netanyahu retains a comfortable 74-seat majority in the Knesset, and he has shown he is willing to pay any price to extremist and haredi partners to keep his ruling coalition intact. In May 2023, the Knesset passed Netanyahu’s budget, cementing the coalition’s grip on power until 2025. The terms of the emergency government Israel created days after the war broke out foreclosed taking up any legislation unrelated to the prosecution of the war. Netanyahu’s government is likely to survive for some time to come. Netanyahu will continue to come under public pressure to step down. Some well-respected former leaders of Israel’s security establishment have already called on him to resign. If he refuses to do so, however, there is no clear mechanism to remove him from office—even though his trial has now resumed. Should Netanyahu remain in power, the situation in the West Bank is likely to deteriorate. In the meantime, Netanyahu is moving to shore up support among his right-wing partners. In fact, his administration appears to be taking advantage of the attention Gaza is drawing away from the West Bank to pursue more settlement expansion and repress the Palestinians. Since October 7, extremist settlers in the West Bank have been involved in scores of incidents of aggression and intimidation against Palestinians, forcing at least a thousand—including entire shepherding communities—off their land. A third of these episodes involved settlers drawing firearms on Palestinians. In almost half the total incidents, the IDF accompanied or actively supported the settlers. If the IDF succeeds in its war aims by killing Hamas’s top leaders, Netanyahu could even regain some support. Israel’s electorate had shifted to the right well before this war. Hamas’s terrorism may well encourage a further radicalization of the Israeli population. Should Netanyahu remain in power for any extended period, the situation in the West Bank is likely to continue to deteriorate, possibly leading to a Palestinian uprising stimulated in part by extremist settlers. He will also exploit for his own benefit whatever the United States decides to do or not do. If Biden tries to revive the peace process, Netanyahu will likely emphasize what he has already told his Likud Party: that only he can stop the creation of an independent Palestinian state. If, on the other hand, Biden assesses that the chances of a two-state peace process are nonexistent in the near term, Netanyahu will trumpet his ability to convince the Americans to stay out of his way. BINARY OPTIONS For the United States, the policy dilemmas appear terribly complex. But after 56 years of Israeli occupation with no end in sight, these dilemmas need to be settled sooner rather than later. The United States’ choice is binary—either try to help create the conditions for a two-state solution or adjust to a postconflict situation that is worse than the status quo ante, resolves no underlying issues, and probably sets up the conditions for another war. Pushing hard for a two-state solution would be complicated. The United States would have to help orchestrate several critical processes simultaneously: setting in place Gaza reconstruction mechanisms to be ready to operate the day the IDF leaves, bringing reluctant Arab parties on board to help maintain law and order and set up interim governance in Gaza, keeping the remnants of Hamas at bay, compelling the PA to restructure itself so it can regain the confidence of the Palestinian public, and addressing legitimate Israeli security concerns. This course of action by the United States would also be politically risky: it could have the unintended effect of giving Netanyahu a campaign tool to remain in power. Success is far from assured. The United States will be dealing with traumatized leaders who may be unwilling or unable to make big decisions. And the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed many times to create a pathway to peace when the external context was far less fraught than it is today. Even if Netanyahu leaves office, no other top politician in Israel appears eager to embark down a path of peace. As a potential peace broker, the United States also lacks credibility. To move toward a two-state solution, Arabs and Europeans would need to have faith in the United States’ intentions and follow-through. The United States’ vetoes and no votes in the UN Security Council and the General Assembly on resolutions for humanitarian cease-fires have not inspired confidence. And even those allies that trust Washington to implement its plans will wonder what will happen if Biden loses his upcoming reelection bid. But the alternative approach—hoping for a return to the pre–October 7 status quo without a serious effort by the United States to advance the prospects for a lasting peace—could be worse. Even if Netanyahu leaves office, no other current top politician in Israel appears eager to embark down a path of peace. And there are no Palestinian leaders with the gravitas and political weight to engage seriously with Israel in the aftermath of the conflict. Some speak of Barghouti as a potential Palestinian leader, but he is serving five life sentences for murdering Israelis and has no track record in political life that suggests he would be a peacemaker. Stimulating the PA to reform itself is a task beyond the capability of the United States alone. Washington will need to act in concert with others to get the PA to do what it has resisted doing for decades: become less authoritarian, fight corruption, and agree to hold new elections for its presidency and its Legislative Council. Pressuring the PA to reestablish its legitimacy among Palestinians will require significant efforts by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—the so-called Arab Quartet—as well as the EU, which has always played an important role in Palestinian institution building. To bring about this multilateral effort, however, Arab actors will need to see a clear American policy that goes beyond Gaza and focuses on ending the decades-long conflict. CALCULATED RISK But the risks of advocating for a two-state approach are worth taking. Other actors will take the measure of U.S. credibility from what Washington is prepared to do to confront the inconvenient realities that will almost certainly define the postconflict landscape. The Biden administration has the smarts and the backbone to follow through even when the going gets tough. And the going will get tough. A bold effort to push a two-state solution, however, could attract support from Arab states to help ensure basic law and order, interim governance, and reconstruction in Gaza, as well as a safety net for the PA as it embarks on the necessary efforts to reform itself. The question facing the Biden administration is what can it realistically do in the year before the upcoming U.S. presidential elections given the constraints posed by American politics and those it is likely to encounter in Israel, among the Palestinians, and throughout the Arab world. In the near term, the United States can take actions that would help overcome some early obstacles to a two-state solution. First, Biden should continue to press Israel to quickly end its intense ground and air campaign—which is certain to keep causing substantial civilian casualties—in favor of more focused and targeted operations. His administration must also push hard for an increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance that enters Gaza, including by ensuring that the recently opened Kerem Shalom border crossing remains open and pressing for the resumption of negotiations to release Hamas’s remaining Israeli hostages. And the administration must press Israel and the PA to clamp down on violence by extremist settlers and Palestinian militants in the West Bank. The risks of advocating for a two-state approach are worth taking, and the Biden administration has the smarts to follow through. Third, the United States needs to ensure that Israel respects U.S. guidelines on Gaza, including no reduction of Gaza’s territory, no forced relocations of Gazans, and Palestinian governance. U.S. officials should make clear, both in their public statements and in their private contacts with Israelis and others, that Gaza and the West Bank must remain one integral unit and that the PA will eventually resume its governance of Gaza. The United States will also need to be proactive in trying to ensure that conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese border does not erupt into a full-scale war. At least 60,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north of Israel. If the 2006 UN Security Council resolution mandating Hezbollah’s withdrawal north of the Litani River is not enforced, Israel may deploy its military to contain Hezbollah, which could prompt a full-blown war with a terrorist organization far more potent than Hamas. To blunt this risk, the United States will need to maintain the deterrent military forces it dispatched to the region in October 2023. Finally, the Biden administration must make sure that all regional players understand that a two-state solution is the United States’ preferred outcome. It must define a pathway toward that outcome that clarifies what steps each side must take to create the right environment for eventual negotiations. U.S. leaders should tell the Israeli people that it is time for them to face the fundamental choice the country has avoided since 1967: Will Israel occupy Palestinian territory indefinitely, or can it live alongside a Palestinian state? The United States must send the message to the Palestinians that the time has come for them, too, to make a choice: Will they remain under occupation or reform their governance? U.S. leaders must work closely with key Arab countries such as Egypt, the Gulf states, and Jordan to support these shifts. Saudi Arabia, given its interest in normalization with Israel, will have an especially important role to play. THE ONLY GOOD BET Can any of this succeed with the current Israeli and Palestinian leadership at the helm? Not a chance. Netanyahu must go. And Abbas, too. But even if they stay in power in the near term, the United States has stronger options. Biden must not threaten to withhold necessary military assistance from Israel. But he can make it clearer to the Israelis that the continued strength of their relationship with Washington rests on Israel understanding that it cannot reoccupy Gaza, and that their ultimate security guarantee will be a peace agreement with a similarly peace-minded Palestinian state. By framing his rhetoric as the kind of straight talk that Netanyahu avoids, Biden may be able to influence Israeli attitudes without diminishing his chances of reelection in 2024. Most government policy memos, including many we wrote during our service in the U.S. State Department, propose three options: a bold one that suggests moves the policymaker will find difficult to swallow, a status quo option that allows the policymaker to believe that not much needs to be done, and a “Goldilocks” option that proposes just enough action to show muscle but not enough to ruffle feathers. Often, the Goldilocks option is chosen: it affords a sense of movement while incurring minimal risks. Yet there will be no Goldilocks option available in the aftermath of the Israel-Hamas war. Biden should adopt a determined stance—in words and deeds—that seriously advances the prospect of a two-state solution. Should he gain a second presidential term, the groundwork he lays in 2024 toward a more lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will position him well to engage more intensively: the situation cannot be allowed to deteriorate until after the U.S. election season passes. Great political and practical pressures weigh on Biden, should he should choose to be bold. But far greater risks may emerge if he doesn’t. Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions AARON DAVID MILLER is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and a former State Department Middle East analyst and has served as a negotiator in Democratic and Republican administrations. DANIEL C. KURTZER is former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel. He is S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. MORE BY AARON DAVID MILLER MORE BY DANIEL C. KURTZER More: Israel Palestinian Territories Geopolitics Security Defense & Military Post-Conflict Reconstruction Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy Hamas Israel-Hamas War Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Benjamin Netanyahu Most-Read Articles Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices Daniel Byman The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks Peter Schroeder The Best of Books 2023 This Year’s Top Picks From Foreign Affairs’ Reviewers The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments Marietje Schaake Recommended Articles Palestinian children look at the damage at the site of Israeli strikes on houses, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Psychology of Trauma How Insights From Therapeutic Practice Can Help Build Peace Jessica Stern and Bessel van der Kolk After Israeli strikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 2023 A Palestinian Revival How to Build a New Political Order After Israel’s Assault on Gaza Khaled Elgindy Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices By Daniel Byman December 21, 2023 An Israeli soldier at the opening of a tunnel in northern Gaza, December 2023 An Israeli soldier at the opening of a tunnel in northern Gaza, December 2023 Amir Cohen / Reuters If devastation is the goal, Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been a resounding success. More than two months after Hamas killed over 1,100 people on October 7, Israeli air and ground operations have killed some 20,000 Palestinians, many of them children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry. Much of Gaza lies in ruins, with the United Nations estimating that almost 20 percent of the territory’s prewar structures have been destroyed. More than half of Gazans are experiencing severe hunger, unemployment has risen to 85 percent, and disease is spreading. But the statements of a few extremist ministers notwithstanding, Israel’s goals in Gaza are broader and more strategic than inflicting pain on the Palestinians. On December 12, I landed in Israel for a weeklong research trip, joined by colleagues from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and several other experts. In an effort to understand Israel’s goals and strategy, we spoke with current and former Israeli military leaders, senior security officials, diplomats, and politicians, as well as ordinary citizens. The interviewees related their perspectives on October 7, the state of the war today, and the future of their country. Israel’s war in Gaza differs from many other conflicts in that there is not a single finite objective. There is no invading force to be expelled, no territory to be conquered, no dictator to be toppled. Nonetheless, two months on, a more or less clear list of goals is emerging. Israel seeks to destroy Hamas, capturing or killing its leaders, shattering its military capacity, and ending its power in Gaza. It seeks the release of the hostages who were kidnapped on October 7 and remain alive, as well as the bodies of those who have been killed. It wants to prevent another attack, particularly by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. It wants to maintain international support, especially from the United States, and safeguard the diplomatic gains it has made with Arab countries in recent years. And it seeks to rebuild the trust in security institutions that the public lost after the attacks. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Israel’s response can seem confusing to outsiders, but it makes more sense when these competing goals are considered. Each has its own metrics and complications, and some are in direct conflict with one another. So far, the results of Israel’s campaign have been mixed: Israel has hit Hamas hard, but it is falling short in many areas, inflicting a devastating toll on civilians in Gaza and paying a heavy price in terms of international support. Israel’s leaders are often trying to have it all. Instead, they need to make hard choices about which goals to prioritize and which to downplay. Because maintaining U.S support is vital, Israel should focus on targeting Hamas’s leaders more than destroying the group’s broader military forces and infrastructure. It should make more of an effort to reduce civilian casualties. It should seek to deter, rather than destroy, Hezbollah, maintaining larger numbers of forces near Gaza and Lebanon even after active hostilities end to reassure the Israeli people. And it should focus more on who will replace Hamas in Gaza, which requires bolstering the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian technocrats. If Israel instead tries to have it all, it risks having nothing. APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION No visitor to Israel can miss the sense of pain, fury, and mistrust that pervades every conversation. The term “earthquake” came up again and again when I asked about October 7. One Israeli security official declared that “something fundamental broke” in the country that day. (To encourage candor, we agreed to not to identify our interview subjects.) Israelis believe that they cannot go back to a pre–October 7 world, with a hostile and intact Hamas across the border in Gaza. In their eyes, the brutality of the attacks showed Hamas to be beyond redemption, unable to be deterred or contained. The problem goes beyond Gaza, however. With justification, many Israelis blame Iran for Hamas’s impressive arsenal and the innovative methods of its fighters. They fear that Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will also attack Israel, using its exponentially larger rocket arsenal and far more skilled fighters to launch a much more devastating attack on Israel’s north. Since October 7, over 200,000 Israelis have fled areas near Gaza and Lebanon. At the same time, Israelis no longer trust their own security institutions. As one Israeli security official explained, “Before October 7, intelligence told the country, ‘We know Hamas,’ while the military said, ‘We can handle Hamas.’” Both, he added, were wrong. It is now hard for Israeli leaders to reassure the public that next time, the military and intelligence services will keep them safe. To rebuild public confidence, Israeli leaders have vowed to utterly destroy Hamas. Days after the attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued one such pledge. “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth,” he said. “It will cease to exist.” But destroying Hamas can mean many different things in practice. Israelis no longer trust their own security institutions. The focus of Israel’s current military campaign is to destroy Hamas’s military wing, which boasted around 25,000 to 30,000 members before October 7. At the time of my interviews, most Israeli officials estimated that 7,000 of those fighters had been killed in the war. That figure is hard to verify, however, and it may include Palestinians who fought back against invading forces yet were not formally part of Hamas’s military wing. The number of fighters appears to be dwindling further: some Israeli officials told me that more and more are fleeing or surrendering. Although the Israel Defense Forces are inflicting a steep toll on Hamas, the group’s large numbers and ability to blend in with the population make it difficult to eradicate, especially without killing a huge number of Palestinian civilians. Urban warfare is a nightmare for even the best militaries, and the IDF has already lost more than 100 soldiers in its current campaign. Adding to the difficulty, Hamas has located many of its military assets near or in civilian facilities such as mosques and schools. In addition, Gaza has a vast tunnel network, more extensive than Israeli intelligence had originally thought, where fighters can move undetected and leaders can hide. Hamas also has deep roots in Gaza, with decades-old ties to mosques, hospitals, schools, and charities, and since 2007, it has been the government there. The group permeates everyday life in Gaza: the doctor, the police officer, the garbage collector, and the teacher may all have links to Hamas, making it difficult to eradicate the group beyond its military wing. Israel, of course, will not be able to kill every single Hamas fighter. But it may be able to kill enough members, especially leaders and veteran forces, to shatter the group’s military capacity. In this vision of victory, Hamas’s units would no longer be able to fight effectively and launch operations against Israel. And if there were a new government in Gaza, the remnants of Hamas would be more easily suppressed because that administration’s security forces would have a decent chance of finding and suppressing isolated cells of fighters. Hamas also has a vast military infrastructure. This includes not only its tunnel network but also its rockets, missiles, launch pads, and ammunition depots. The assets are everywhere: Hamas has been preparing for an Israeli invasion for more than a decade. Part of the purpose of Israel’s invasion is to destroy this infrastructure, which in turn requires bombing or occupying much of Gaza. There isn’t much publicly available data for quantifying this progress, but it can be measured by the frequency and size of Hamas’s rocket and missile attacks, the quantity of ammunition Hamas fighters have, and the territory that Hamas controls—all of which, according to the officials I interviewed, are steadily shrinking. Some of these observations are visible to outsiders, whereas others require detailed intelligence to judge. HIDE AND SEEK Another metric of success is whether Hamas’s leadership has been destroyed. Israel has a long history of killing terrorist leaders, and Israeli officials have announced plans to assassinate Hamas’s leaders after the war ends. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Hamas’s top official, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking,” and even before October 7, Israeli forces had repeatedly tried to kill Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, as well as his second-in-command, Marwan Issa. The Israeli government reports that it has already killed many Hamas leaders in the current military campaign, with Netanyahu claiming that half of Hamas’s battalion commanders are now dead. Yet like destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, eliminating its leadership is difficult. Deif, Issa, and Sinwar are believed to be hiding underground. More junior leaders are clearly being killed, but at least some of them will be replaced by other competent leaders. Because of the difficulty of destroying infrastructure and killing Hamas members and leaders, most of the Israeli security officials I spoke with estimated that another six to nine months of high-intensity military operations are necessary. Even if the current cohort of leaders is killed, however, Hamas has a deep bench of replacements. Ever since Hamas’s founding in 1987, Israel has routinely killed or jailed its high-level leaders, yet the organization has endured. It has ample lower-level leaders and large support networks to draw on. That said, killing Sinwar and Deif, in particular, would have political value for Israel, even if Hamas replaced them with equally competent and hostile leaders. Both have become symbols of October 7, and an Israeli government could more credibly claim victory if they were killed, even if many of their fellow leaders survived. Beyond any individual leader, Hamas embodies an ideology that will be even harder to eliminate. The idea behind muqawama, or resistance, is that the way to defeat Israel (and, for that matter, the United States) is through persistent military force, a credo also embraced by Hezbollah and Iran. Should Israel devastate Hamas but a strong new organization with the same mindset take its place, Israel will only have replaced one foe with another. In the past, Israel has nearly eliminated individual Palestinian terrorist groups, such as Al Saiqa, a once-strong Baathist group backed by Syria in the 1960s and 1970s whose leader, Zuheir Mohsen, was gunned down by Israeli agents in 1979. Israel has greatly diminished others, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist group famed for its airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s and a hang-glider attack on Israel in 1987. But would-be terrorists simply joined other groups, including Hamas. Smoke rising in Gaza, December 2023 Ronen Zvulun / Reuters The ideology of resistance is popular among Palestinians, and October 7 has made it even more so. Hamas deeply hurt Israel, which many Palestinians, humiliated by decades of occupation, regard with glee. Israel’s destructive military campaign, with its large civilian death toll, has further angered Palestinians, and Hamas’s seizure of hostages has forced Israel to release some detained Palestinians, a goal that past negotiations by moderate Palestinians were unable to achieve. A poll conducted in late November and early December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 82 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank support the attack. Eventually, Palestinians may look at the destruction in Gaza and conclude that violent resistance makes their lives worse, and polls show that there is less support for October 7 in Gaza, which is paying the price of Hamas’s brutality. But so far, support for Hamas has grown. A very different aspect of destroying Hamas involves its long-term replacement as the government of Gaza. Someone must govern the strip and prevent Hamas from returning to power, and Israel has no interest in being a long-term occupier. On this question, however, there is little progress, and if anything, the situation for Israel is worse than on October 7. No outside power wants to act as Israel’s police force in Gaza. U.S. President Joe Biden has called for a “revitalized Palestinian Authority” to govern Gaza. The PA now controls the West Bank and works closely with Israel there on security, but its leadership is incompetent and unpopular. Israel’s harsh policies and expansion of settlements in the West Bank steadily undermined the PA there, and its invasion of Gaza has worsened the organization’s legitimacy problem, as Palestinians admire Hamas’s defiance and see the PA as complicit in Israel’s occupation. “There is no Palestinian leadership,” one interviewee noted acidly, even as he added, “Palestinians must control Gaza.” If the PA were put in charge of Gaza, Palestinians would see it as a handmaiden of the brutal Israeli occupiers. Without significant support from Israel, the PA’s forces would be overwhelmed even by a remnant of Hamas. HELD HOSTAGE Everywhere I looked in Israel, the faces of hostages stared out from posters. Their treatment in Gaza and the need for their release came up constantly in my conversations. Hamas took roughly 240 hostages on October 7, and a little under half have been freed. The remainder, estimated at 129 today, are still in Gaza, and it is unclear how many of them survive. (Israel believes at least 20 of them have died.) At a psychological level, the presence of over 100 hostages is an open wound for Israel. At a tactical level, it complicates the IDF’s operations. To comprehend the scale of the trauma for Israelis, consider how Israel has handled hostage situations in the past. In 2011, it traded more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier whom Hamas had captured, Gilad Shalit. Since October 7, it has already freed around 240 prisoners in exchange for Hamas’s liberating more than 100 of those captured on October 7, including 23 citizens of Thailand and one from the Philippines, as well as many dual nationals. Many of the remaining hostages are young Israeli men of fighting age, and Hamas has vowed to extract a high price for their release—part of the reason that talks collapsed after the initial releases. Remaining hostages also include women whom Israelis believe were raped or otherwise brutalized, and Hamas is reluctant to release them lest they publicize their abuse. Further complicating the hostage problem, perhaps around 30 of the remaining hostages are under the control of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group, or other factions in Gaza. Conducting high-intensity military operations while trying to free prisoners is exceptionally difficult. Just as Hamas places its forces among civilians, it uses hostages as shields. Friendly fire by the IDF has killed some Israeli prisoners, and IDF bombing has undoubtedly killed more. If military operations continue, Israel will likely be able to liberate some of those kidnapped, but it will also lose many in the fighting. THE NORTHERN FRONT Israel has long relied on deterrence to counter its enemies, trying to convince them that any attack would leave them worse off. Measuring deterrence is difficult. Most Israelis would have said before October 7 that Hamas was successfully deterred, but Hamas nonetheless attacked, and its success may inspire other enemies to do so as well. In general, it is hard to understand the risk-reward calculus of a foe, especially a highly ideological one. Even as Israel fights on in Gaza, it has engaged in a back-and-forth with Hezbollah on its northern border, with Hezbollah firing rockets and attacking Israeli border posts and the IDF bombing Hezbollah positions. Israeli leaders hope to demonstrate resolve by making Hezbollah pay a price for its aggression, but they also wish to avoid a larger war while their forces are occupied with fighting Hamas. For now, Hezbollah also seems to want to avoid full conflict, launching limited attacks to show solidarity with Hamas but avoiding a more intense campaign. The devastation of Gaza has probably reinforced deterrence: Hezbollah may not want to risk its strongholds in Beirut looking like the moonscape that is much of Gaza today. Eventually, however, Israel may want to wage a larger war against Hezbollah in the belief that unless it does so, deterrence will not hold and Israel might be surprised again. As one Israeli security official put it to me, “Deterrence is something that lasts until the other side is ready for war.” Hezbollah keeps elite commando units—its Radwan forces—on the Lebanese border with Israel. It also has a substantial rocket arsenal that can reach targets throughout Israel and is big enough to overwhelm the country’s missile defense system. Israel may be able to continue deterring Hezbollah from launching a war, but the threat of rockets and commando attacks—a repeat of October 7, but in the north and from a far more capable foe—keeps Israeli military planners up at night. In early December, in fact, Gallant, the defense minister, threatened to open up a second front against Hezbollah if the group didn’t remove its Radwan units from the border. FOREIGN FRIENDS Israel is a small country, and despite its military prowess, it cannot operate alone indefinitely. It also sees itself as a Western democracy and is sensitive to criticism from other members of that club. So Israeli leaders have looked on with worry as Western support appears to slip. Anti-Israeli protests have broken out across Europe, and 17 of 27 EU members supported a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a cease-fire. Arab leaders, including ones who have recently signed peace treaties with Israel, are very critical of Israel publicly—even if they strongly oppose Hamas and its brand of political Islam privately—because Arab publics are outraged by the Palestinian death toll. Yet the new peace deals with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have held, and there is little sign that they are in jeopardy, even as their leaders’ rhetoric grows more heated. Israel can live with fraying European ties and growing criticism from Arab states, but losing American support would be an altogether different matter. The Israelis I spoke with were uniformly glowing about Biden—a “mensch,” in one interviewee’s words, and, in another’s, “the biggest friend of Israel since Harry Truman,” who was the first world leader to officially recognize Israel. On top of the more than $3 billion Israel receives from the United States in military aid every year, Congress and the White House are now considering a package that would provide a $14 billion supplement. Israel also depends on the United States for munitions, which it needs in Gaza and would need far more of in a war in Lebanon. The United States also regularly provides cover for Israel at the United Nations—for instance, vetoing a recent Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. So far, support for Hamas has grown among Palestinians. But many Israeli leaders worry that American support may not last forever, and those who don’t harbor that fear should. Biden’s own party is increasingly split over Israel’s conduct in the war, the president himself has now criticized “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza, and officials in his administration are pressing for an end to major military operations. The Biden administration has also strongly discouraged a preventive war in the north against Hezbollah, with senior U.S. officials, including Biden, telling their Israeli counterparts not to expand the war. The United States deployed two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean Sea with the explicit purpose of deterring Iran and Hezbollah and the implicit goal of reassuring Israel that the United States has its back—a marked change from before October 7, when many in the Middle East believed the United States was turning its back on the region to focus on China. To maintain strong U.S. support and avoid putting Arab leaders into a box from which they cannot escape, Israel will need to tone down its military operations in Gaza. But a less aggressive and less destructive campaign will make it harder to kill Hamas’s fighters and demolish its infrastructure. In the north, Israel is also constrained. Barring a serious act of provocation by Hezbollah, Israel cannot launch a war in Lebanon and maintain U.S. support. KEEPING THE FAITH Israel was a divided country before October 7, with Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government pushing to weaken the judiciary, expand settlements in the West Bank, and protect the prime minister from allegations of corruption. Now, Israelis are united behind the goal of destroying Hamas, but many hold Netanyahu responsible for failing to prevent the attack and want to see him resign. Israelis’ loss of faith in their leaders might simply seem like normal politics, not anything to do with counterterrorism, but in fact such an outcome represents a major goal of terrorists. Hamas was probably seeking to destroy Israelis’ confidence in their government institutions, and even if that wasn’t a goal, this consequence has surely been a welcome bonus for the group. Absent such confidence, displaced Israelis will not return to their homes near Gaza or Lebanon. And skeptics of the Israeli government will see some of its continued anti-Hamas operations as a way for Netanyahu to keep himself in power, not as a genuine necessity in the fight against terrorism. When it comes to restoring faith in government, Israel has a long way to go. Although Netanyahu has brought some opposition figures into a war cabinet, his own support has plummeted, with a November poll finding that just four percent of Israeli Jews considered him a trustworthy source of information on the war. As operations in Gaza ebb, commissions will investigate the military and intelligence failure on October 7, and the revelations will in the short term no doubt cause Israelis to lose even more confidence in their security institutions. Some confidence will be restored as the IDF and Israeli intelligence services demonstrate their combat proficiency in Gaza, as most Israelis agree they have already by hitting Hamas hard and limiting Israeli casualties. And as a new generation of military and intelligence leaders replaces those who have taken responsibility for the October 7 debacle and promised to resign, some trust should be rebuilt. But in the end, it will probably take years of relative calm for Israelis to regain their faith. NO WAY OUT All of Israel’s goals are difficult to achieve, and some are at cross-purposes. A continued military campaign, which would be necessary to severely degrade Hamas and to help rebuild public confidence in the military, will take months to succeed—and even then, it will be unlikely to kill every last Hamas leader and destroy every last tunnel. Releasing hostages and maintaining U.S. support, however, will be difficult to achieve without reducing military operations. And an intense campaign will not help find a solution to the long-term problem of who will govern Gaza: when the dust has settled, Israel will need a Palestinian partner to run the strip, and destructive military operations diminish its credibility among the population there. Because its goals are difficult to achieve separately and even harder to achieve together, Israel is likely to fall short. Whatever happens, more of Hamas’s leaders and fighters will probably survive than Israel would prefer, and Hezbollah will probably continue its rocket attacks as the war rages in Gaza. Yet a lack of complete success does not mean failure. Hezbollah, like Israel, does not appear to want an all-out war. The October 7 attack has brought Israel and the U.S. government closer and diminished concerns that Washington will abandon the Middle East. But what became clear from my conversations is that Israel’s current approach to Gaza is too ambitious, and the time has come to correct course. In the coming months, Israel should move away from high-intensity operations while continuing to eliminate Hamas’s top leaders through drone strikes, raids by special operations forces, and other means, doing so even if some of Hamas’s military infrastructure and regular forces remain. Israel needs U.S. backing, and that requires limiting civilian casualties in Gaza, greatly expanding humanitarian efforts in the strip, and avoiding an unprovoked war with Hezbollah. To reassure the Israeli population without fully destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel should station more military forces near Lebanon and Gaza. Perhaps most important, Israel and the international community should begin the long process of bolstering the PA and other alternatives to Hamas to govern Gaza. Israel must also accept the reality that in many ways, it is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. Its leaders must make hard choices about which goals to prioritize and which to set aside. One Israeli security official put it to me best: “The only resource in the Middle East more plentiful than oil is bad options.” Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions DANIEL BYMAN is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. MORE BY DANIEL BYMAN More: Israel Palestinian Territories Security Defense & Military Terrorism & Counterterrorism War & Military Strategy Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Hamas Most-Read Articles Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza Time to Make Hard Choices Daniel Byman The Real Russian Nuclear Threat The West Is Worried About the Wrong Escalation Risks Peter Schroeder The Best of Books 2023 This Year’s Top Picks From Foreign Affairs’ Reviewers The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation Regulation Must Start With National Governments Marietje Schaake Recommended Articles At a pro-Palestinian protest in Tunis, Tunisia, October 2023 How the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza Is Changing Arab Views Support Is Falling for America and the Two-State Solution—but Rising for Iran and Violent Resistance Michael Robbins, MaryClare Roche, Amaney A. Jamal, Salma Al-Shami, and Mark Tessler Palestinians protesting in support of the people of Gaza, Hebron, West Bank, October 2023 What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas Before the War, Gaza’s Leaders Were Deeply Unpopular—but an Israeli Crackdown Could Change That Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins The Big One Preparing for a Long War With China By Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. January/February 2024 Published on December 12, 2023 Diego Mallo Over the past decade, the prospect of Chinese military aggression in the Indo-Pacific has moved from the realm of the hypothetical to the war rooms of U.S. defense planners. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has significantly accelerated his country’s military buildup, now in its third decade. At the same time, China has become increasingly assertive across a wide swath of the Pacific, advancing its expansionist maritime claims and encroaching on the waters of key U.S. allies and important security partners, including Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Xi has asserted, with growing frequency, that Taiwan must be reunited with China, and he has refused to renounce the use of force to achieve that end. With the United States distracted by major wars in Europe and the Middle East, some in Washington fear that Beijing may see an opportunity to realize some of these revisionist ambitions by launching a military operation before the West can react. With Taiwan as the assumed flash point, U.S. strategists have offered several theories about how such an attack might play out. First is a “fait accompli” conquest of Taiwan by China, in which the People’s Liberation Army employs missiles and airstrikes against Taiwanese and nearby U.S. forces while jamming signals and communications and using cyberattacks to fracture their ability to coordinate the island’s defenses. If successful, these and other supporting actions could enable Chinese forces to quickly seize control. A second path envisions a U.S.-led coalition beating back China’s initial assault on the island. This rosy scenario finds the coalition employing mines, antiship cruise missiles, submarines, and underwater drones to deny the PLA control of the surrounding waters, which China would need in order to mount a successful invasion. Meanwhile, coalition air and missile defense forces would prevent China from providing the air cover needed to support the PLA’s assault, and electronic warfare and cyber-forces would frustrate the PLA’s efforts to control communications in and around the battlefield. In a best-case outcome, these strong defenses would cause China to cease its attack and seek peace. Given that both China and the United States possess nuclear arsenals, however, many strategists are concerned about a third, more catastrophic outcome. They see a direct war between the two great powers leading to uncontrolled escalation. In this version of events, following an initial attack or outbreak of armed conflict, one or both belligerents would seek to gain a decisive advantage or prevent a severe setback by using major or overwhelming force. Even if this move were conventional, it could provoke the adversary to employ nuclear weapons, thereby triggering Armageddon. Each of these scenarios is plausible and should be taken seriously by U.S. policymakers. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Yet there is also a very different possibility, one that is not merely plausible but perhaps likely: a protracted conventional war between China and a U.S.-led coalition. Although such a conflict would be less devastating than nuclear war, it could exact enormous costs on both sides. It also could play out over a very wide geographic expanse and involve kinds of warfare with which the belligerents have little experience. For the United States and its democratic allies and partners, a long war with China would likely pose the decisive military test of our time. BATTLES WITHOUT BOMBS A military confrontation between China and the United States would be the first great-power war since World War II and the first ever between two great nuclear powers. Given the concentration of economic might and cutting-edge technological prowess in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—all three advanced democracies that are either close allies or partners of the United States—such a war would be fought for very high stakes. Once the fighting had started, it would likely be very difficult for either side to back down. Yet it is far from clear that the conflict would lead to nuclear escalation. As was the case with the Soviet Union and the United States in the late twentieth century, both China and the United States possess the ability to destroy the other as a functioning society in a matter of hours. But they can do so only by running a high risk of incurring their own destruction by provoking a nuclear counterattack, or second strike. This condition is known as “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD. During the Cold War, the fear of setting off a general nuclear exchange provided Moscow and Washington with a strong incentive to avoid any direct military confrontation. Of course, Beijing’s nuclear balance of power with Washington is significantly different from that of Moscow during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union achieved a rough parity in forces. China’s nuclear arsenal is a fraction of the size of the United States’, although Beijing is pursuing a dramatic expansion with the goal of matching the U.S. strategic arsenal within the next decade. Nevertheless, even now the Chinese arsenal is large enough that if China were attacked, it would have sufficient nuclear forces left to execute a retaliatory strike on the United States—thus bringing about MAD. A U.S.-Chinese war would be the first between great nuclear powers. Yet there is strong ground for thinking that a U.S.-Chinese war would not go nuclear. In more than seven decades of conflicts since World War II, including many involving at least one nuclear power, nuclear weapons have been notable chiefly for their absence. During the Cold War, for example, the two nuclear superpowers engaged in proxy wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that remained conventional—despite incurring high human and military costs on both sides. Even in wars in which only one side possessed nuclear weapons, that side refrained from exploiting its advantage. The United States fought bloody and protracted wars in Korea and Vietnam and yet abstained from playing its nuclear trump card. Similarly, Israel refrained from employing nuclear weapons against Egypt or Syria, even in the darkest hours of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The same has been true thus far of Russia in its war with Ukraine, even though that conflict is now approaching the end of a second year of fierce fighting and has already exacted from Russia an enormous price in blood and treasure. This nuclear restraint should not be surprising. During the Cold War, the possibility of a nonnuclear conflict played a significant part in strategic planning on both sides. Thus, U.S. and Soviet thinking addressed not only the threat of nuclear escalation but also the prospect of a prolonged conventional war. To prepare for that kind of war—and thus dissuade the other side from believing it could win such a conflict—each superpower stockpiled large quantities of surplus military equipment as well as key raw materials. The United States maintained an aircraft “boneyard” and maritime “mothball fleet”—large reserves of retired planes and ships that could be mobilized and brought into service as needed. For their part, the Soviets amassed enormous quantities of spare munitions, along with thousands of tanks, planes, air defense systems, and other weapons to support extended combat operations. A working assumption of these preparations on both sides was that a war could unfold over an extended period without necessarily triggering Armageddon. In the event of armed conflict between China and a U.S.-led coalition, a similar dynamic could play out again: both sides would have a strong interest in avoiding uncontrolled escalation and could seek ways to fight by other means. Simply put, the logic of mutually assured destruction would not end at the onset of hostilities but could deter the use of nuclear weapons during the war. Given this reality, it is crucial to understand what a twenty-first-century great-power conflict might look like and how it might evolve. REASONS TO FIGHT There are many ways that a war between China and the United States could start. Given China’s ambition to dominate the Indo-Pacific, such a war would very likely involve the so-called first island chain, the long arc of Pacific archipelagoes extending from the Kuril Islands north of Japan, down the Ryukyu Islands, through Taiwan, the Philippines, and parts of Indonesia. As many in Washington have argued, Taiwan is the most obvious target, given the island’s strategic location between Japan and the Philippines, its key role in the global economy, and its status as the principal object of Beijing’s expansionist aims. China’s military has been increasingly active in the Taiwan Strait, and the PLA has massed its greatest concentration of forces across from the island. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the United States would be compelled to defend the island or risk having key neutral countries and even allies drift toward an accommodation with Beijing. Yet the Taiwan Strait is not the only place a war could begin. China has continued its incursions into Japan’s airspace and its provocative actions in the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines and Vietnam, raising the possibility of a war-provoking incident. Moreover, tensions between North Korea and South Korea remain high. If fighting broke out on the Korean Peninsula, the United States might dispatch reinforcements there, causing Beijing to see an opportunity to settle scores at other points along the first island chain. Or a war with China could start in South Asia. Over the past decade, China has clashed with India along their shared border on several occasions. Despite lacking a formal alliance with the United States, India is a member of the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), the security grouping that also includes Australia, Japan, and the United States and that has stepped up joint military cooperation over the past few years. If India were to become the victim of more significant Chinese aggression, Washington would have a strong interest in defending a major military power and partner that is also the world’s largest democracy. In short, if war breaks out in any of these places, it could draw China and the United States into direct armed conflict. And if that happens, it would be unlikely to end quickly. Take the case of Taiwan. Although it is possible that China could either achieve a rapid conquest before the United States could respond or be stopped cold by a U.S.-led coalition, these outcomes are hardly assured. As Russia discovered in Ukraine in 2022, rapid subjugation, even of an ostensibly weaker power, can be harder than it looks. But even if Washington and its partners are able to prevent the PLA from seizing Taiwan through a fait accompli, Beijing still might be unwilling to accept defeat. And like the United States, it would possess the means to continue fighting. Given the high stakes, neither side can be counted on to throw in the towel, even if it suffers severe initial reverses. And at that point, the course of events would be determined not only by the intentions of the two great powers themselves but also by the responses of other countries in the region. In contrast to the Cold War, in which the two superpowers were each supported by rigid alliances—the U.S.-led NATO and the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact—the current situation in the Indo-Pacific is a geopolitical jumble. China has no formal alliances, although it enjoys close relationships with North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia. For its part, the United States has a set of bilateral alliances and partnerships in the region based on hub-and-spoke relationships, with Washington as the hub and Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand forming the spokes. Yet unlike the members of NATO, which are obligated to view an attack on one as an attack on all, these Asian allies have no shared defense commitment. In the event of Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, then, the responses of U.S. partners in the region are less than certain. It is reasonable to assume that Australia and Japan would join the United States in coming to the victim’s defense, given their close alliance with the United States, their ability to project significant military power abroad, and strong interest in preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific community of nations. But other powerful countries could influence the war’s character—arguably, the two most important being India (on the side of the United States) and Russia (on the side of China). Just as the local Asian and European wars in the late 1930s expanded to become a global war, so might a war with China overlap with the war in Ukraine or a conflict in South Asia or fighting in the Middle East. What happens in the early stages of the war could also determine the constellation of powers on each side. The party that is judged to be the aggressor could alienate fence sitters that view the war from a moral perspective. States with more of a realpolitik view, on the other hand, might ally themselves with whichever side achieves early success (as Italy did in World War II), or they may decide against joining their natural partners should those partners suffer significant setbacks. Following Ukraine’s successful initial defense against Russia’s invasion in the spring of 2022, many countries in the West, including historically neutral countries such as Finland and Sweden, rallied to Kyiv’s support. Similarly, if China were unable to quickly secure its objectives, traditionally neutral countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam might join efforts to resist Beijing’s aggression. RESTRAINING ORDERS Once a war has broken out, both China and the United States would have to confront the dangers posed by their nuclear arsenals. As in peacetime, the two sides would retain a strong interest in avoiding catastrophic escalation. Even so, in the heat of war, such a possibility cannot be eliminated. Both would confront the challenge of finding the sweet spot in which they could employ force to gain an advantage without causing total war. Consequently, leaders of both great powers would need to exercise a high degree of self-control. To keep the war limited, both Washington and Beijing would need to recognize each other’s redlines—specific actions viewed as escalatory and that could trigger counterescalations. Efforts toward this end can be enhanced if both sides can clearly and credibly communicate what their redlines are and the consequences that would be incurred for crossing them. Even here, problems will arise, as the dynamics of war may alter these thresholds. For example, if the PLA proves effective at using conventionally armed ballistic missiles to attack U.S. air bases in the region, Washington could decide to strike Chinese missile sites, even at the risk of hitting nuclear-armed PLA missiles kept at the same location. Moreover, individual coalition members will likely have their own, unique redlines. Consider a situation in which PLA air and sea attacks on major Japanese ports threaten to collapse Japan’s economy or cut off its food supplies. Under these circumstances, Tokyo may be far more willing to escalate the war than its coalition partners. If Japan has the means to escalate, it could do so unilaterally. If it lacks them and Washington refuses to escalate on its behalf, Tokyo might decide to seek a separate peace with Beijing. To avoid this predicament, the coalition could pre-position air and missile defenses, as well as countermine forces, at Japanese ports, and Japan could stockpile crucial imported goods, such as food and fuel. Nevertheless, previous wars suggest that belligerents have often been able to limit their warfighting methods to prevent unnecessary escalation. Following China’s intervention in the Korean War, for example, U.S. forces had the capability to conduct airstrikes across the border in Manchuria, which served as a staging ground for Chinese forces threatening to overwhelm U.S. troops on the peninsula. But U.S. President Harry Truman turned down requests to attack these targets in order to avoid triggering a wider war with the Soviet Union. Similarly, in Vietnam, U.S. leaders declared North Vietnam’s main port of Haiphong off-limits to U.S. forces, despite its strategic importance. As was the case with Korea, it was feared such attacks could spark a wider conflict with China or the Soviet Union. In both cases, this restraint was maintained even amid wars that cost tens of thousands of American lives. Given the potential for uncontainable nuclear escalation, it is not unreasonable to assume that both China and the United States would err on the side of caution when considering how and where to intensify military operations. But the imperative on both sides to avoid nuclear escalation would not only create parameters for the objectives sought and the means employed to achieve them. It would also set the stage for a conflict that could likely be prolonged since both sides would have very significant resources to draw on to keep fighting. In this way, the war’s containment in one respect would also facilitate its broadening in others. A WAR OF WILLS What strategy might a U.S.-led coalition pursue in a limited but extended war with China? Broadly speaking, there are three general strategies of war: annihilation, attrition, and exhaustion. They can be pursued individually or in combination. An annihilation strategy emphasizes using a single event or a rapid series of actions to collapse an enemy’s ability or will to fight, such as occurred with Germany’s six-week blitzkrieg campaign against France in 1940. By contrast, an attrition strategy seeks to reduce an enemy’s war-making potential by wearing down its military forces over an extended period to the point that they can no longer mount an effective resistance. This was the primary strategy the Allies employed against the Axis powers in World War II. An exhaustion strategy, finally, seeks to deplete the enemy’s forces indirectly, such as by denying it access to vital resources through blockades, degrading key transportation infrastructure, or destroying key industrial facilities. A classic example of this was the U.S. Civil War. Early in that conflict, both the Union North and the Confederate South hoped that a strategy of annihilation would succeed, such as by winning a decisive battle or seizing the enemy’s capital. These hopes proved ill founded, and over time the Confederacy adopted an exhaustion strategy, hoping to extend the war to the point that its adversary’s will to persevere would run out, despite the Union’s far greater military power. In turn, relying on its advantages in manpower, industrial might, and military capabilities, the North combined an attrition strategy with an exhaustion one. It sought to reduce the Confederacy’s armies directly through attrition by persistent military battles and indirectly by blockading Confederate ports and destroying the South’s arsenals and transportation infrastructure. In this way, the Union deprived the Confederacy of the resources and recruits needed to offset its combat losses while convincing Southerners that they could not achieve their goal of secession. In a war between China and the United States, the strategy of annihilation carries unsustainable risks. Because both sides have nuclear weapons, an annihilation strategy based on an overwhelming military attack to destroy the enemy’s ability to resist could easily become a mutual suicide pact. That risk would also hobble efforts by either side to pursue an attrition strategy, which could similarly lead to nuclear escalation. Both belligerents would thus have an incentive to pursue strategies of exhaustion, supported when possible by attrition, to erode the enemy’s means and, perhaps more important, its will to continue fighting. Such an approach would seek to inflict maximum pressure and damage on the enemy without risking escalation to total war. The United States must convince China that it can prevail in a long war. In shaping these strategies, China and the United States would need to consider carefully where they choose to fight. For example, to avoid crossing redlines, the two sides might accord each other’s homelands (including their respective airspaces) limited sanctuary status. Instead, they might seek horizontal, or geographic, escalation. Thus, the conflict could spread to areas beyond the first island chain or South Asia to locations where both China and the United States could project military power, such as in the Horn of Africa and the South Pacific. The war would also likely migrate to those domains that are less likely to pose immediate escalation risks. Warfighting in domains associated with the global commons, for example, might be considered fair game by both sides. These could include maritime operations (including on the sea’s surface, under the sea, and on the seabed), as well as war in space and cyberspace. Both sides might also wage war more aggressively on and above the territories of minor powers allied with China or the United States, such as the Philippines and Taiwan. In the war’s early phases, military targets might well have priority for both sides as the PLA attempts to win a quick victory while the U.S. coalition focuses on mounting a successful defense. If so, economic targets like commercial ports, cargo ships, and undersea oil and gas infrastructure would initially be accorded lower priority. As the war becomes protracted, however, each side would increasingly seek to exhaust the other’s war-making potential through economic and information warfare. Actions toward this end might involve blockades of enemy ports and commerce-raiding operations against an enemy’s cargo ships and undersea infrastructure. One side could impose information blockades on the other by cutting undersea data cables and interrupting satellite communications, or it could use cyberattacks to destroy or corrupt data central to the effective operation of the adversary’s critical infrastructure. Another way the belligerents could keep the war limited would be to restrict the means of attack used. Attacks whose effects are relatively easy to reverse may be less escalatory than those that inflict permanent damage. For example, employing high-powered jammers that can block and unblock satellite signals as desired could be preferable to a missile strike that destroys a satellite ground control station located on the territory of a major belligerent power. By offering the prospect of a relatively rapid restoration of lost service, such attacks might prove effective at undermining the enemy’s will to continue the war. The same might be said of seabed operations that shut down offshore oil and gas pumping stations rather than physically destroying them or naval operations that seize and intern enemy cargo ships rather than sinking them. To the extent such actions are feasible, they can preserve key enemy assets as hostages that can be used as bargaining chips in negotiating a favorable end to the war. Bringing the conflict to a close would be an important challenge in its own right. With the prospect of a decisive military victory out of reach for either side, such a war could last several years or more, winding down only when both sides choose the path of negotiation over the risk of annihilation, an uncomfortable peace over what would have become a prohibitively costly and seemingly endless war. TORTOISES, NOT HARES To prevail in a war with China, then, the United States and its coalition partners will need to have a strategy not only for denying Beijing a quick victory but also for sustaining their own defenses in a long war. At present, the first goal remains a formidable task. The United States and its allies—let alone prospective partners such as India, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam—appear to lack a coherent approach to deterring or defeating a Chinese attack. If China seizes key islands along the first island chain, it would be exceedingly difficult for the United States and its partners to retake them at anything approaching an acceptable cost. And if China is successful, it may propose an immediate cease-fire as a means of consolidating its gains. To some members of a U.S.-led coalition, such an offer might appear an attractive alternative to a costly fight that carries the risk of catastrophic escalation. Still, Washington and its potential partners have the means and, at least for now, the time to improve their readiness. The United States should give priority to negotiating agreements to position more U.S. forces and war stocks along the first island chain, while allies and partners along the chain enhance their defenses. In the interim, U.S. capabilities that can be employed quickly, such as space-based systems, long-range bombers, and cyber weapons, can help fill the gap. But U.S. strategists will also need to plan for what happens next, since preventing a Chinese fait accompli may serve only as the entry fee to a far more protracted great-power war. And unlike the initial aggression, that confrontation could broaden across a wide area and spill over into many other spheres, including the global economy, space, and cyberspace. Although there is no model for how such a war might play out, Cold War strategic thinking shows that it is possible to address the general question of a great-power conflict that extends horizontally and involves a variety of warfighting domains. A joint U.S.-Philippine air operation in the South China Sea, near the Philippines, November 2023 Philippine Air Force / Reuters In the 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. military developed an integrated set of operational concepts, or war plans, to respond to a conventional Soviet invasion of Western Europe. One, called AirLand Battle, envisioned the army and air force defeating successive “waves” of enemy forces advancing out of the Soviet Union through Eastern Europe. In this scenario, the U.S. Army would seek to block the Soviet frontline forces while a combination of U.S. air and ground-based forces—combat aircraft, missiles, and rocket artillery—would attack the second and third waves advancing toward NATO’s borders. Simultaneously, the U.S. Navy would employ attack submarines to advance beyond the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom maritime gaps to protect allied shipping moving across the Atlantic from Soviet submarines. And U.S. aircraft carriers would deploy to the North Atlantic with their combat air wings to defeat Soviet strike aircraft. To preclude the Soviets from using Norway as a forward staging ground, the U.S. Marine Corps also prepared to deploy quickly to that country and secure its airfields. These concepts were based on a careful and systematic study of Soviet capabilities and strategy, including war plans, force dispositions, operational concepts, and expected rate of mobilization. Not only did these concepts guide U.S. and allied military thinking and planning; they also helped establish a clear defense program and budget priorities. The principal purpose of these efforts, however, was to convince Moscow that there was no attractive path it could pursue to wage a successful war of aggression against the Western democracies. Yet nothing like these plans exists today with respect to China. To develop a comparable set of war concepts for a great-power conflict with China, the United States should start by examining a range of plausible scenarios for Chinese aggression. These scenarios—which should include various flash points on the first island chain and beyond, not just those pertaining to Taiwan—could form the basis for evaluating and refining promising defense plans through war games, simulations, and field exercises. But U.S. strategists will also need to account for the enormous resources that will be needed to sustain the war if it extends over many months. As Russia’s war in Ukraine has revealed, the United States and its allies lack the capacity to surge the production of munitions. The same holds true regarding the production capacity for major military systems, such as tanks, planes, ships, and artillery. To address this critical vulnerability, Washington and its prospective coalition partners must revitalize their industrial bases to be able to provide the systems and munitions needed to sustain a war as long as necessary. A protracted war would also likely incur high costs in global trade, transportation and energy infrastructure, and communications networks, and put extraordinary strain on human populations in many parts of the world. Even if the two sides avoided nuclear catastrophe, and even if the homelands of the United States and its major coalition partners were left partially untouched, the scale and scope of destruction would likely far exceed anything the American people and those of its allies have experienced. Moreover, the Chinese might hold significant advantages in this respect: with China’s very large population, authoritarian leadership, and historic tolerance for enduring hardship and suffering enormous casualties—the capacity to “eat bitterness,” as they call it—its population might be better equipped to persevere through a long war. Under these circumstances, the coalition’s ability to sustain popular support for the war effort, along with a willingness to sacrifice, would be crucial to its success. Leaders in Washington and allied capitals will need to convince their publics of the need to augment their defenses and to sustain them in peace and war until China abandons its hegemonic agenda. A DIFFERENT KIND OF DETERRENCE To paraphrase German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, wars can take one of three paths and usually elect to take the fourth. In the case of China, it is difficult to predict with any precision how, when, and where a war might begin or the path it will take once it does. Yet there are many reasons to think that such a conflict could remain limited and last much longer than has been generally assumed. If that is the case, then the United States and its allies must begin to think through the implications of a great-power war that, while remaining below the threshold of nuclear escalation, could last for many months or years, incurring far-reaching costs on their economies, infrastructure, and citizens’ well-being. And they must convince Beijing that they have the resources and the staying power to prevail in this long war. If they do not, China may conclude that the opportunities afforded by using military force to pursue its interests in the Asia-Pacific outweigh the risks. ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, JR., is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He is the author of The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers. The AUKUS Wager More Than a Security Pact, the Deal Aims to Transform the Indo-Pacific Order Charles Edel Patrolling a U.S. ballistic missile submarine in Busan, South Korea, July 2023 The Illusion of Great-Power Competition Why Middle Powers—and Small Countries—Are Vital to U.S. Strategy Jude Blanchette and Christopher Johnstone How to China-Proof the Global Economy America Needs a More Targeted Strategy By Peter E. Harrell January/February 2024 Published on December 12, 2023 U.S. dollar and Chinese yuan banknotes, January 2023 U.S. dollar and Chinese yuan banknotes, January 2023 Dado Ruvic / Reuters Sign in and save to read later Print this article Send by email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-proof-global-economy-america Get Citation Request Reprint Permissions Play Download Article China’s emergence as the United States’ leading rival has upended long-standing tenets of international economic policy. For decades, policymakers in Washington assumed that economic engagement would draw Beijing into the Western order while providing business opportunities for U.S. companies. Thus, the United States pressed China to open its market to U.S. investors, accepting in return that at least some types of U.S. manufacturing would move to China. And in 2001, supported by the United States, China joined the World Trade Organization. Behind these efforts lay a larger assumption about the power of economic policy to transcend geopolitics. Not only would the establishment of a global trading regime allow goods and services to move across borders without regard to political differences or geopolitical competition, but by anchoring China in a rules-based trading system, economic engagement would also serve as a moderating force on the Chinese government and ultimately spur political change. Through the early years of this century, many in Washington assumed that this logic was prevailing: China was becoming successfully integrated into the world economy, and it was sustaining extraordinary economic growth at home. At the same time, China’s comparatively technocratic leadership in the 1990s and 2000s promoted private enterprise, and there were hopeful signs that it would allow Chinese society to gradually open up. By the early 2010s, however, this progress had stalled. As Beijing reasserted state control of Chinese society and adopted a more confrontational policy internationally, Washington began to challenge China’s actions. Thus, successive administrations have imposed tariffs, sanctions, and other coercive economic measures in an effort to alter Chinese behavior. But these punitive steps have been no more successful than earlier economic policies in prompting economic or political reforms. Meanwhile, under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, China’s geopolitical rivalry with the United States has intensified. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Today, it is clear that Washington’s economic approach to Beijing has not worked. But the United States cannot simply return to the divided economic model that prevailed during the Cold War, an era in which the West had few economic ties to the Soviet Union and most of the nonaligned countries had little economic clout. A contemporary global economic order must address not only the West and its rivalry with China but also the rise of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other middle-power countries that now play a significant part in global economic growth but have little interest in formally aligning with either China or the United States. Confronted with this increasingly complex and multipolar world order, Washington must find a new approach to its international economic strategy. Rather than pursuing economic policies intended to change China, the United States should accept that the Xi regime will not change. Instead, it should actively manage the economic relationship with China in ways that can advance specific U.S. interests and respond to evolving geopolitical demands. As the Biden administration has recognized, the United States must start by reducing its reliance on China in major supply chains and ensuring that the West keeps its edge in sensitive technologies. But to sustain its advantage in an era of intense competition with Beijing, Washington must embrace a more sophisticated economic model. It needs to tailor policies to targeted, achievable goals and use a variety of creative tools to accomplish them. It must establish new trading relationships with like-minded partners, but it must also use financial diplomacy to draw nonaligned and developing countries closer to the United States. Success will be measured not by the extent to which the United States can convince China to liberalize and embrace the U.S.-led international order but by Washington’s ability to maintain its economic leadership, strengthen alliances, and avoid catastrophic outcomes. BEIJING UNBOWED Over the last five decades, the United States has wielded both inducements and threats in its economic statecraft toward China. Shortly after U.S. President Richard Nixon began the process of full normalization with Beijing, in 1971, Washington bet that greater economic ties would benefit the economic and strategic interests of the United States. Opening China’s market to U.S. business, policymakers thought, would also gradually promote political reform and geopolitical moderation in Beijing. The essence of this policy was summed up in a 2005 speech by Robert Zoellick, the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, on China’s emergence as a “responsible stakeholder” within the global economic order. “For fifty years, our policy was to fence in the Soviet Union while its own internal contradictions undermined it,” he said. “For thirty years, our policy has been to draw out the People’s Republic of China.” The U.S. strategy undeniably succeeded at bringing China into the world economy. By 2014, China had overtaken Canada as the United States’ largest trading partner, and by 2023, China had achieved that status with more than 120 other countries as well. China itself experienced an economic rise that was unparalleled in modern history, becoming the world’s second-largest economy in 2010 and lifting more than 800 million of its citizens above the World Bank’s poverty line. After Xi ascended to power in 2012, however, it became apparent that Washington’s China strategy was no longer advancing U.S. economic and strategic interests. For one thing, between 1999 and 2011, expanding trade with China had cost the United States an estimated two million or more jobs, according to a prominent 2016 study by the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. And instead of opening its economy to U.S. imports and investment, Beijing was limiting foreign access even as it used subsidies and other policy measures to enhance its own industries at the expense of foreign competitors. In sectors where China did open its market, it often required U.S. companies to form joint ventures with local Chinese partners and to manufacture in China rather than import products and services from the United States. Even when profitable for the U.S. companies in question, these requirements tended to leave American workers on the sidelines. China’s rise has made it more, not less authoritarian. By the early 2010s, China had also become much more assertive on the world stage. It had expanded its maritime claims in the South China Sea, embarked on a massive modernization of its military, and ramped up its industrial and political espionage capabilities around the world. At the same time, the Chinese government had expanded domestic repression and built a vast censorship and surveillance apparatus, contradicting Western policymakers’ assumptions that the spread of technology would result in greater individual freedom and more limits on the state. Indeed, China soon became a leading exporter of the technology of repression. In short, China’s economic transformation was making Beijing more, not less, authoritarian, giving it new resources to buttress the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. Starting near the end of the Obama administration, Washington tried to reverse these trends by weaponizing the economic ties it had built. In 2015, for example, the U.S. government threatened to impose sanctions against China for its rampant intellectual property theft. Three years later, U.S. President Donald Trump launched a trade war against Beijing—ultimately placing tariffs on more than 80 percent of U.S. imports from China. He also began a campaign against Huawei, the Chinese telecom company, whose 5G networks were deemed to threaten U.S. information security, and tried to ban TikTok, WeChat, and several other Chinese apps from operating in the United States. (U.S. courts ultimately blocked this plan.) Picking up where Trump left off, President Joe Biden imposed new human rights sanctions on Beijing and in late 2022 enacted sweeping restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor equipment to China. Yet these coercive measures proved no more successful in changing China’s behavior than the decades of inducements that preceded them. Although Beijing offered minor trade concessions to Trump in exchange for limiting further U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, it continued to undercut the competitiveness of U.S. and other Western companies. And the Chinese government has proved similarly intransigent in the face of Biden’s pressure. U.S. bans on imports from China’s Xinjiang Province may have reduced U.S. imports made by forced Uyghur labor, and U.S. export controls on advanced chip technology may have slowed China’s ability to produce chips. But in both cases, Beijing has responded by developing other markets and expanding its own domestic investments rather than altering the policies that led to the U.S. restrictions. MORE TOOLS, LESS RISK As the Biden administration’s China policy has taken shape, there has been much discussion about “de-risking,” or reducing U.S. dependence on China for many important goods. On paper, the strategy provides a useful corrective to the economic policies of the past few decades. Since the 1990s, trade liberalization has given China outsize influence over certain U.S. supply chains and allowed China to use U.S. technology for its military and repressive apparatus. Aided by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 and other measures, de-risking uses domestic investments, export controls, and investment screening to secure U.S. supply chains and deny China access to a handful of leading-edge technologies such as semiconductors. But the current strategy has been deployed too narrowly. Although Washington should not seek to cut off all or even most trade with China, it needs to reduce its dependence on its rival in a number of other critical sectors. For example, the United States continues to rely on China and Chinese supply chains for widely used pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. And although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has provided incentives to build clean energy technologies and electric vehicles in the United States, the U.S. government needs to make sure that Chinese companies are not abusing these measures by setting up U.S. factories in order to entrench Chinese control over key components. To be effective, then, de-risking must be applied to a greater variety of goods and employ a wider range of methods. Tariffs are ripe for innovation. Rather than using them to gain leverage over Beijing, Washington should design them to promote specific U.S. strategic interests. For example, Washington could impose higher tariffs on resources and products for which the United States and its allies have developed strategic dependence on China such as critical minerals, batteries, and electric vehicle parts—not to mention China’s EVs, which have already begun to flood Western markets. The reality is that without protectionist measures, mines and green technology manufacturing facilities in the United States and partner countries often cannot compete with low-cost Chinese-owned counterparts, which receive subsidies from Beijing and are subject to few environmental regulations. A semiconductor factory in Binzhou, China, July 2023 CFOTO / Future Publishing / Getty Images Washington also needs to better integrate tariffs with the Biden administration’s industrial policy. Take semiconductors. As the United States has put pressure on China’s advanced chip industry, China has ramped up production of older types of semiconductors that remain critical for U.S. defense, industrial, and automotive applications. The United States may need tariffs and other tools to ensure that China does not establish a monopoly on these chips. Meanwhile, Washington should cut tariffs on Chinese products, such as clothes and furniture, that raise prices for U.S. consumers while providing little strategic benefit. In the long run, a smarter policy will also require restrictions on Chinese components and Chinese companies involved in critical international supply chains, even if the final products are made in a country other than China. Another crucial tool is technology policy. To defend its economic leadership, the United States needs to remain at the forefront of innovation in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies. Keeping that edge will require more investments at home in education, research, and manufacturing but also more limits on Beijing’s access to these technologies and the investments that support them. In addition to advanced semiconductor technology, the government should place export controls on biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and other sectors to prevent China from stealing or copying U.S. advances and then reinforcing U.S. dependence on it for vital products. Perhaps most urgent is better oversight of the use of Chinese digital products and data-gathering technologies in the United States. Washington has few regulations governing Americans’ use of Chinese apps and software. Although the Federal Communications Commission has made progress in restricting the use of Chinese telecom network infrastructure and in banning some Chinese surveillance cameras and similar devices, the country remains vulnerable to Chinese espionage and intrusion. For example, the U.S. government continues to purchase computers from Chinese companies, despite the security risks and the fact that Beijing has largely banned U.S. computers from Chinese government agencies. When it comes to Chinese apps and software that are widely used in the United States, Congress should enable the U.S. government to conduct security audits and impose measures—bans, in exceptional cases—to protect U.S. data and give Americans confidence about the security of the apps they use. And Congress needs to enact better protections against data brokers—companies that trade in personal or corporate data—and that are currently allowed to sell sensitive personal information about U.S. citizens to buyers all over the world, including in China. As Washington develops new regulatory tools, it must also maintain open lines of communication with Beijing. Amid an intensifying geopolitical rivalry, economics is no longer an effective ballast in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. But as U.S. economic strategy toward China shifts from trying to induce changes in the Chinese market to actively managing economic ties, there are serious risks of misunderstandings or unintentional provocation. Direct and open dialogue can reduce the chances of escalation. NARROWER DEALS, WIDER IMPACT In response to rising competition from China, much of the U.S. foreign policy community has urged the United States to strike new trade deals with international partners. Many policymakers have called for joining an amended Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the multilateral pact that the Obama administration helped negotiate but that the United States never ratified. Others have called for new bilateral deals with countries in regions from Africa to Europe. The theory is that by entering comprehensive trade agreements, the United States could deepen relationships and enforce regulations that check Beijing’s global influence. With strategically nonaligned countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, new trade deals could help draw them into the U.S. economic orbit. In turn, a deal with Japan or the United Kingdom could further strengthen U.S. cooperation with a core ally. Yet the domestic implications of such trade agreements are challenging. Already, Biden’s industrial policy, including subsidies for manufacturing semiconductors and clean energy technologies, has raised tensions with existing U.S. trade commitments, and the policy is continuing to evolve. U.S. policies toward the digital economy and the technology sector are also in flux, with many domestic agencies embracing greater regulation. The rise of artificial intelligence, meanwhile, threatens to disrupt a wide variety of industries, from software design to health care, and will require new approaches to copyrighting and other forms of intellectual property protection. As a result, new trade agreements could bind the United States to rules that might conflict with evolving domestic priorities. Instead of seeking broad accords, Washington should adopt a narrower, more targeted approach to trade by pursuing deals in sectors where interests clearly converge. One example is the critical minerals agreement that the United States has begun to negotiate with Japan and other countries, as well as the European Union: in the coming years, the United States will face a staggering increase in demand to support the clean energy transition; mineral-producing countries seek greater access to the U.S. market. In reaching a deal with these countries, Washington can also negotiate higher environmental and labor standards. Many other sectors are ripe for dealmaking. A medical supply chain agreement with Israel and several countries in Europe could help reduce the United States’ dependence on China for crucial pharmaceutical ingredients. A deal on electronics could help companies shift manufacturing away from China and increase the security of devices sold in the United States. Washington could also pursue an industrial policy agreement with other G-7 members to guarantee transparency and develop shared standards for subsidies to ensure that multinational companies do not play allied governments against one another. Instead of broad trade accords, Washington should seek targeted deals. A sectoral trade strategy would also allow the United States to think more creatively about the kinds of commitments it seeks from partner countries. Beyond such traditional measures as lower tariffs and standardized customs processes, an agreement aimed at a particular sector could encompass expedited permitting for major projects, such as mining and manufacturing infrastructure. It could also provide access to U.S. financing tools—such as the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and even Defense Production Act funding—that could support the development of key manufacturing and other infrastructure. With a sectoral approach, the United States could link trade priorities more directly to national security strategy. For example, as part of an agreement on industrial policy with close allies, Washington could offer expedited U.S. government approvals—such as from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the interagency body that reviews investments for national security risks—to companies based in those countries that are seeking to invest in sensitive areas of the U.S. economy. It could also refrain from imposing export controls on sectors that are covered in a trade deal, a move that would signal to companies and entrepreneurs that national security tools will not impair cross-border business ties. In contrast to the old model of global trade, which did little to promote the clean energy transition, U.S. trade policy also has to address climate change. And since China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, generating twice the quantity the United States does, any climate-oriented trade policy must address China. There are several ways to do this. The EU is already moving forward with a carbon border adjustment mechanism, which will use tariffs to protect lower-carbon, but higher-cost, European producers from carbon-intensive foreign competitors, including China. The United States should join with partners in Europe and elsewhere to develop a polluter import fee on greenhouse-gas-producing goods to ensure that domestic efforts to reduce emissions do not simply result in offshoring to China and other countries that have laxer emissions rules. Indeed, climate-focused trade policies can give China economic incentives to decarbonize even if geopolitical tensions make it otherwise reluctant to do so. Although sectoral trade deals should be the main emphasis of U.S. policy, Washington is also under pressure from allies to revive the languishing World Trade Organization. In recent years the United States has downplayed the WTO and blocked the appointment of judges to its appellate body—effectively gutting its ability to issue binding decisions on global trade. This approach reflects the widespread view in Washington that the WTO suffers from conceptual problems at its core: WTO rules, for example, were designed to require member countries to generally treat one another equally for trade purposes, meaning that the U.S. should treat China no differently than it treats allies such as Germany. This approach reflects the optimism of the early post–Cold War era, when policymakers envisioned a new global economic order, but it makes little sense in an era of geopolitical rivalry. Moreover, the Biden administration’s subsidies for semiconductors and clean energy technologies may well violate WTO rules, although to date, the United States has persuaded its allies to refrain from bringing a legal challenge against them. For the WTO to remain relevant, its other members will have to agree on new mechanisms that allow it to respond to geopolitical tensions and the now pressing need for green industrial policies. One option is to update the text of WTO rules to allow greater flexibility for national industrial policy and to encourage amicable dispute resolution. Another option—potentially more realistic given that rule changes require unanimous agreement from WTO members—is for the G-7 countries to reach an informal agreement that forbids them from using the WTO to challenge certain policies or requires them to appoint judges committed to more flexible interpretations of the existing WTO rules. SECURITY WITHOUT FIREWALLS In adopting a sectoral approach to trade, U.S. policymakers need to give special attention to the Internet and the cross-border flows of technology it enables. From the earliest years of the Internet, the United States has generally resisted regulating it, under the assumption that the digital economy would develop faster without government interference and that government institutions are poorly equipped to keep up with the latest innovations. Indeed, for much of the past quarter century, the relative lack of rules and restrictions spurred rapid advances, allowing U.S. tech companies to establish dominant global positions. In recent years, however, national security concerns have pushed Washington and its allies to reevaluate this hands-off approach. China and Russia have erected national firewalls to the Internet and used government access to devices, network infrastructure, and cameras to surveil tens of millions of citizens in real time. China is also actively exporting its Internet surveillance technology, with companies that build network infrastructure, such as Huawei and ZTE, continuing to win bids around the world even as the United States pressures countries to avoid them. And Chinese and Russian hacks have continued to target Western firms and Western governments. Washington has responded to these threats in several ways. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has stepped up its vetting of proposed foreign purchases of U.S. companies, considering whether the buyer might get access to U.S. data. In some cases, CFIUS may require a U.S. company acquired by a foreign one to store its data and information on computers in the United States and to avoid sharing them with its new owner. Banning or otherwise restricting TikTok continues to be a topic of lively debate in state capitals and Congress. Representatives have proposed placing new limits on the export of U.S. data to China, measures that should be adopted but that must be carefully tailored to address security risks without disrupting legitimate business. The EU, India, and an assortment of countries, meanwhile, are adopting data localization requirements of their own. Whether imposed by the U.S. government or its counterparts in other countries, these restrictions reinforce the fragmentation of the Internet, even among close allies. U.S. Senator Mark Warner unveiling legislation to ban TikTok, Washington, D.C., March 2023 Bonnie Cash / Reuters To counter this trend, the United States and like-minded countries should develop a new approach to Internet governance. The United States and the EU took a step in this direction in 2022, when they, along with several dozen other countries, endorsed the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, a joint statement underscoring the need for a collective response to data security risks. The declaration envisioned the creation of a common approach to address online threats, regulate cross-border data flows, ensure that members rely on trusted network infrastructure and avoid technology that poses national security risks, and enforce unfettered access to the Internet itself. The United States and its partners should work to translate that vision into a meaningful set of commitments. Similar regulations are needed for technologies that have broader security implications and that have become flash points in Washington’s competition with Beijing. These include many technologies that could transform the global economy over the next decade: semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing technologies, and 3D printing. For now, these technologies are dominated by a small group of advanced industrial countries—and China. Most high-end semiconductors, for example, are made in Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Among Western countries, artificial intelligence research is centered in the United States, with France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom also having important research centers. These countries also control much of the computing power needed to effectively train advanced AI systems. China and the United States currently have the lead in quantum computing, with Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and the EU also in the game. To harness the convergence of interests among these countries, the United States should form a new critical technologies club that would both support the development of these products and regulate their export to China. The United States has long promoted and participated in multilateral export-control regimes, going back to efforts after World War II to limit exports of dual-use goods—products that have potential military as well as civilian applications—to Soviet bloc countries. But a club devoted to regulating advanced technologies could expand these kinds of controls to other areas to ensure that the West remains ahead of China not only in the military domain but also in crucial areas of economic innovation. DOLLARS, NOT DEBTS A better approach to containing China and its influence in the world cannot be based on sectoral trade deals and export controls alone.To bring developing countries closer into alignment with the West, the United States also needs to find more ways to provide economic and infrastructure support to its partners. New forms of international financing will be especially important, not only for driving the clean energy transition and promoting sustainable development but also for offering countries a more attractive alternative to partnering with China. Starting in 2019 and 2020, as the Trump administration highlighted the risks of China’s global lending policies, many governments and analysts began giving more scrutiny to the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s vast infrastructure financing program. Beijing’s opaque lending practices and “debt trap” diplomacy have often left borrowing countries in thrall to China. Nonetheless, the Chinese government has been able to use the Belt and Road Initiative to promote its geopolitical interests because the program has often served legitimate financing needs. Those needs will be even greater in the coming clean energy transition. A high-level expert report prepared for the UN’s 2022 climate conference, COP27, found that developing countries need at least $1 trillion a year to finance the costs of adapting to climate change; a 2023 UN report found that these countries face a $4 trillion financing gap to meet sustainable development goals. The reality is that if the United States and its allies do not meet these needs, China will. Over the past year, Washington has responded to the financing problem by pushing the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other multilateral institutions to expand their lending capabilities and create new tools to address climate change. But Washington must appropriate enough funds—a step only the U.S. Congress can take—to ensure that the World Bank and IMF reforms are successful, and it needs to overhaul its bilateral investment and development tools. To better compete with Beijing, Washington should make more creative use of the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank, which promote U.S. private sector investment in the developing world. For example, the government could direct these programs to offer concessional lending—loans offered on more favorable terms than prevailing market rates—so they can close deals more quickly in foreign countries. Washington can also provide more capital to partners and allies by expanding the use of sovereign loan guarantees. By offering a U.S. government backstop to entities that loan money to a foreign government, sovereign loan guarantees unlock additional financial resources for emerging or fragile economies. In recent decades, however, the United States has used them sparingly: since the 1990s, it has offered them to only seven countries, with the most recent guarantee—to Ukraine—issued in 2022. But because global interest rates have risen over the past year and are poised to stay high, sovereign loan guarantees offer an attractive way to provide direct financing to partner governments. Washington needs to overhaul its investment in the developing world. Finally, the United States needs to prepare for an emerging global financial order in which the dollar remains dominant but Washington’s ability to leverage that dominance is waning. Much of the focus of U.S. economic policymakers has rightly been on the positive side of the international agenda—how capital can be deployed to meet global needs and opportunities. But successive administrations have grown increasingly effective at weaponizing U.S. control of the global financial system, whether by disrupting trade with Iran and North Korea in response to their nuclear programs or by using sanctions to put intense financial pressure on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In recent years, China, Russia, and a number of developing countries have identified Washington’s weaponization of the dollar as a threat and worked to establish alternative reserve currencies. From a macroeconomic perspective, these efforts have largely failed, but the goal of these rivals is not actually to supplant the dollar as the dominant unit of exchange. Instead, they have a narrower and more achievable objective: developing a non-dollar-denominated payments network that would allow them to continue basic trade and financial activities should they lose access to the dollar. What these countries seek, in other words, is not a new dominant currency, but a viable one that could be used for their trade as needed. Measured against that goal, these efforts show some signs of success. Already, Russia’s experience following the 2022 sanctions shows that a country with sufficient financial clout can maintain both internal stability and international financial ties with China, India, and other countries across the developing world, even when most of its major banks have been kicked off Western financial networks. Beijing is creating an alternative payment system for its energy imports and global exports in case it becomes the target of Western sanctions. Over the long term, the United States is unlikely to prevent the emergence of these rival networks. But it can actively reinforce the dollar’s position in global trade and finance and slow the rise of alternatives. In 2022, for example, the United States was able to curtail Russia’s attempt to expand its cross-border Mir electronic payment system to Turkey and other countries by warning of sanctions against non-Russian banks that connected to it. These threats have not stopped Russian trade, but they have ensured that more of it remains potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. A SHARPER EDGE As Washington embarks on what could be years of geopolitical competition with Beijing, Americans have reasons to be optimistic. This is not because the United States is likely to “win” the competition the way it won the Cold War with the dramatic collapse of the Berlin Wall, at least on any time horizon relevant to U.S. policymakers. Indeed, the next decade seems likely to offer neither victory nor defeat since the odds of China fundamentally changing its geopolitical course, at least while its current government remains in power, are minimal. Yet the United States is well positioned to maintain its edge in leading economic domains. China’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and erratic crackdown on its business sector have sapped Chinese economic confidence and encouraged talented technologists and entrepreneurs to relocate abroad. Although Xi’s government will undoubtedly tap the wealth created by the hard work of the Chinese people, and China will continue to use its economic strength to make alliances abroad, many analysts now suggest that China’s growth will be substantially slower in the years to come than it has been over the past three decades. Closed societies also tend to be less conducive to innovation, and in view of Beijing’s efforts to insulate itself from the outside world, China may find its pace of technological advances slowing as well. U.S. companies, meanwhile, have opened a lead in AI, and American universities continue to attract talented students from around the globe, a vital source of innovation that U.S. policymakers should do more to encourage. And smart domestic investments and macroeconomic policies have given the United States the strongest post-COVID economic recovery of any major developed nation. To position itself for success in the long term, however, the United States will need to develop a more effective economic strategy toward its close allies and other partners across the globe. New and better economic tools and more targeted international trade and finance policies can prevent Beijing from displacing the U.S.-led international order and help Washington adapt to geopolitical rivalry in a multi-aligned world. Even if they cannot force Beijing to change, U.S. policymakers can ensure that Washington maintains its economic and technological advantage and draws a larger share of the world its way. In doing so, they can further the interests of the United States and those of its partners, regardless of the choices China makes. PETER E. HARRELL is a Nonresident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Senior Director for International Economics and Competitiveness at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council from 2021 to 2022. The Perils of the New Industrial Policy How to Stop a Global Race to the Bottom David Kamin and Rebecca Kysar China’s Hidden Tech Revolution How Beijing Threatens U.S. Dominance Dan Wang RESPONSE Thinking Like a State What Makes Foreign Policy Rational? By John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato; Keren Yarhi-Milo January/February 2024 Published on December 12, 2023 Flags outside NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, November 2023 Flags outside NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, November 2023 Yves Herman / Reuters Sign in and save to read later Print this article Send by email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url https://www.foreignaffairs.com/responses/thinking-state-mearsheimer Request Reprint Permissions Download Article In response to Why Smart Leaders Do Stupid Things By Keren Yarhi-Milo Essence of Decision Making By John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato Yarhi-Milo Replies By Keren Yarhi-Milo Essence of Decision Making John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato Surprisingly, for an article assessing the prevalence of rationality in international politics (“Why Smart Leaders Do Stupid Things,” November/December 2023), Keren Yarhi-Milo’s review of our book, How States Think, never offers its own definition of the term. Yarhi-Milo does, however, argue that irrational leaders resort to mental shortcuts, otherwise known as heuristics, or succumb to their emotions. But even this description of irrationality is wanting because it focuses on individuals and says nothing about irrationality at the collective or state level. For us, rationality has both an individual and a collective dimension. Rational leaders are homo theoreticus. They employ credible theories about the workings of the international system and use them to understand their situation and determine how best to navigate it. Rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a deliberative process, one marked by vigorous and uninhibited debate. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Yarhi-Milo suggests that we think realism is the only credible theory out there. Thus, if leaders act on the basis of theories other than realism, they are not acting rationally. But that is simply wrong. Our book is not a brief for realism. We emphasize that there are several credible realist and liberal theories and that leaders acting on the basis of any of them are rational. Indeed, Yarhi-Milo notes that our inventory of credible theories includes the various liberal theories underpinning NATO expansion and the U.S. grand strategy of liberal hegemony, which sought to expand membership in international institutions, foster an open world economy, and spread democracy around the globe. Ultimately, Yarhi-Milo commends our definition of rationality. In her opinion, our book proves that “leaders rely on theories, both credible and not, to help them make decisions” and “proves the importance of process, something overlooked by scholars, in determining whether a leader or a state made a rational decision.” Moreover, she employs our definition to assess the rationality of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s decision to appease Nazi Germany at Munich in 1938, the George W. Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in 2003, and Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. In essence, she recognizes that credible theories and deliberation are the hallmarks of rationality. That said, she disagrees with us about the facts of each of those cases, which leads to the vital issue of evidence. ROUTINE RATIONALITY To back our claim that states are routinely rational, we carefully examined ten cases of foreign policy decision-making—five grand-strategic decisions and five crisis decisions. They included imperial Germany’s strategy before World War I and its behavior during the July Crisis of 1914, Japan’s strategy before World War II and its decision to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the United States’ decisions to expand NATO and pursue liberal hegemony after the Cold War. All the states we examined were rational in the sense that their policymakers were guided by credible theories and that the choices made emerged from a deliberative decision-making process. This is a particularly significant finding given that each of the cases is commonly cited as an instance of irrational decision-making and thus would usually be thought to undermine rather than support our claim that states tend to act rationally. It is striking that Yarhi-Milo does not challenge our interpretation of any of these supporting cases. She does, however, maintain that we “ignore vast primary and archival data,” a flaw she contends undermines our claims. Given that she does not mention any specific evidence we fail to cite in our cases, it is hard to know what to make of this assertion. Regardless, we scrutinized a copious and sophisticated amount of secondary literature, which clearly reflects the primary record and supports our arguments. This is not to say that all states are rational all the time. In fact, we identified four cases in which leaders were not rational, embracing noncredible theories and failing to deliberate. Yarhi-Milo challenges our interpretation of two of those cases. In the first, Chamberlain’s decision to appease Adolf Hitler at Munich, she simply misrepresents our argument. According to her, we argue that the United Kingdom appeased Germany based on the belief “that Hitler’s expansionist intentions were limited and that Berlin wanted to avoid war.” In fact, we explain that the British cabinet opted for appeasement because it had decided earlier—irrationally—to gut the British Army, leaving it unfit for a continental war. Sadly, rationality is no guarantee of peace. In the second case, the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, Yarhi-Milo maintains that the Bush administration in fact based its policy on a credible theory and engaged in a deliberative process. “Bush and his team had real conversations,” she writes, adding that “the administration followed a clear theory: that it needed a preventive war to stop Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons.” She is wrong. Two of the key theories underpinning the decision to invade—forcible democracy promotion and the domino theory—had been discredited before 2003. And it is widely agreed that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shut down the deliberative process—for example, by refusing to engage in meaningful discussion about what would happen in Iraq and the surrounding countries after Baghdad fell and pressuring the intelligence community to support their views. Yarhi-Milo clearly disagrees with our core claim that most states are rational most of the time. Rather, she maintains that there is abundant evidence of leaders resorting to heuristics, succumbing to their emotions, and failing to deliberate. One might have expected her to point to such evidence in our ten cases. After all, these decisions are often said to be exemplars of irrationality. But she does not. We are not surprised, since our analysis of those cases reveals no evidence of leaders employing mental shortcuts, being overwhelmed by their emotions, or failing to engage in robust and uninhibited debate. In the absence of evidence from these cases of states acting irrationally, Yarhi-Milo points to the Russian decision to invade Ukraine as a clear example. She asserts that Russian President Vladimir Putin had an “emotional fixation” with controlling Ukraine and speculates that he may have acted the way he did “because he perceived himself as being in a domain of losses, making him less risk averse.” But she provides no supporting evidence for either conclusion. Yarhi-Milo also claims that Putin shut down the deliberative process in the run-up to war, writing, “Dissenting ministers and military officers were shown the door, went into exile, or disappeared.” There is no evidence to support this assertion: not a single minister or top general was fired, let alone forced to leave the country. Yarhi-Milo’s claim is also starkly at odds with what William Burns wrote in a 2008 message to the State Department when he was the U.S. ambassador to Moscow: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” Putin attending a meeting in the Krasnodar region, Russia, November 2023 Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters Yarhi-Milo seeks to buttress her claim about the ubiquity of irrationality by arguing that it is supported by an impressive body of literature “that draws from psychology and behavioral economics, uses primary source materials, and features experimental data on elites.” We do not dispute that many political psychologists, including Yarhi-Milo, have produced careful historical studies on how leaders think and especially on how they form their beliefs and how those beliefs affect their behavior. But those studies do not directly address the question on the table: whether states are rational in formulating grand strategy and navigating crises. To be sure, some political psychologists do speak to the question at hand, but they merely rely on anecdotes. They do not offer systematic evidence that mental shortcuts were at work even in their canonical cases of supposed irrationality: Germany’s decision to go to war in 1914, the United Kingdom’s decision to appease the Nazis at Munich, Germany’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, and Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor that same year. As for experimental data, political psychologists themselves acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between how subjects behave in low-stakes experiments and how leaders behave in the real world when faced with truly consequential decisions. Individuals answering survey questions for a small reward will act more blithely than state leaders making life-and-death choices for their country. Such data are a poor substitute for historical evidence. THE INEVITABLE COMPETITION Given her conclusions about the pervasiveness of irrationality, Yarhi-Milo unsurprisingly predicts that the United States and China will be irrational in their dealings with each other. Washington will use “mental shortcuts” to navigate the relationship, while Beijing’s “mercurial leaders may miscalculate or act in irrational and neurotic ways,” with tragic consequences. Clearly, we disagree, as we expect both sides to behave rationally, like other great powers before them. Nevertheless, as history shows, rational states invariably compete for security and sometimes go to war with each other. Sadly, rationality is no guarantee of peace. That is the real tragedy of great-power politics. JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. SEBASTIAN ROSATO is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. They are the authors of How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. Yarhi-Milo Replies Keren Yarhi-Milo Mearsheimer and Rosato illuminate a point in their rebuttal that I admittedly did not fully contend with in my review: that they differentiate between the rationality of individuals and that of the state. Mearsheimer and Rosato argue that through the presence of “credible theories” and a “deliberative process,” the noise of bias is removed—as well as the noise of emotions, heuristics, and updated beliefs based on those credible theories—leading to collective rationality at the state level. But the authors never empirically test any of their assumptions. Rather, they merely assume that any biases are canceled out when individual views are put through the machinery of the state. Even in the cases they identify, the authors do not offer a compelling set of mechanisms for how the aggregation of opinions eliminates individual bias. Perhaps that’s because there are no foolproof mechanisms. By itself, the presence of deliberation will not eliminate biases—and under some conditions, it may even reinforce them, as scholars of political psychology have demonstrated. There is ample evidence that deliberation can, in fact, lead to groupthink (greater conformity) or even group polarization (whereby individual beliefs are intensified). In a study published in International Organization, the political scientist Joshua Kertzer and his colleagues conducted experiments in which online respondents were asked to make foreign policy decisions individually or in groups. The study found that groups are not less biased or more rational than their individual members. It also found that groups are just as susceptible as individuals to classic biases, that the structure of groups does not significantly change the magnitude of the bias, and that diverse groups perform similarly to more homogeneous ones. In other words, the mere presence of deliberation does not necessarily lead to greater rationality. SOURCES AND METHODS Mearsheimer and Rosato’s second main criticism is that scholars in my field of political psychology “rely on anecdotes” to substantiate our claims. This is simply not true. Other scholars—among them Janice Gross Stein, Elizabeth Saunders, Rose McDermott, and Jack Levy—and I have studied thousands of primary documents and used them to illustrate patterns of biases across time and space. We look at how policymakers selectively attend to different types of signals and fail to update beliefs in response to new information. And we examine how these psychological biases and dispositions, in turn, shape the decisions leaders make during crises. Political psychology is in fact an exceptionally sophisticated discipline. A recent wave of scholarship in the psychology of decision-making was able to show not just the systematic presence of biases in how policymakers assess information but also the foundations of such biases. For example, in research published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and I used a survey experiment of 89 current and former members of the Israeli Knesset to discover systematic differences in how decision-makers assign credibility to various kinds of signals during crises. Leaders vary significantly in their perceptions of the credibility of signals, and the variability depends on their foreign policy dispositions rather than their levels of military or political experience. This kind of evidence can back up careful archival research on the decision-making process. And it is only through this kind of nuanced research that we can understand the sources of biases and misperceptions, and test these and other hypotheses. By itself, deliberation will not eliminate biases. In their response, Mearsheimer and Rosato say the review did not offer an alternative definition of rationality. Although many different definitions of rationality exist in the political science literature, it is safe to say that any good definition must be, at a minimum, falsifiable. And Mearsheimer and Rosato’s is not. More specifically, it cannot differentiate between meaningful deliberation and the performative ritual of deliberation. There are certainly some cases in which decision-makers clearly do not follow a “deliberative process,” such as when leaders actively shut down debate, and there are certainly some cases in which people speak truth to power, and analysts can observe leaders shifting their views. But most cases of deliberation fall in between, so it is typically very hard to falsify claims that a debate is both vigorous and unconstrained. Dictators serve as prime examples. Authoritarian leaders often hold events that appear to be deliberative but that actually come after a decision has already been made. They may host discussions, but they are not searching for new information or alternative viewpoints that contradict their theories so much as looking for evidence that they are right. They are creating an echo chamber instead of a team of rivals. Such a process cannot be described as rational in any true sense of the word. Consider Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine and the United States’ to invade Iraq. Mearsheimer and Rosato deem the former rational because it entailed deliberation and yet deem the latter irrational because it lacked such a process. This claim defies common sense. On February 21, 2022—just days before the invasion of Ukraine—Putin did convene a meeting of his Security Council. But that meeting was simply for show, a fact clear to anyone watching. And many people watched: Moscow had the meeting televised. During it, every member of Putin’s council declared they agreed with his policy. No one voiced even an ounce of dissent. U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping meeting in Woodside, California, November 2023 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters As I stated in my review, the disastrous policymaking process of U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration in Iraq really did involve deliberation and bureaucratic infighting. For example, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki debated whether to invade Iraq and, if they did, what would be the appropriate force size. But this process did not eliminate biases. It may have actually reinforced them because biases were so entrenched in every decision-maker’s mind. As numerous postmortems revealed, Bush’s advisers failed to consider all competing explanations for Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow UN inspectors to verify that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction program. And it was not just the advisers who became overly convinced that Saddam had these weapons. As the political scientist Robert Jervis noted, the intelligence community “did try to see the world as Saddam did and so believed that he had great incentives to get WMD.” I fail to see how the deliberation in the Iraq case represents irrational decision-making whereas deliberation in the Russia case does not. If Putin’s deliberative style is uninhibited and vigorous, as the authors suggest, it is unclear what constrained deliberation would ever look like in practice. If the authors think there was more deliberation based on credible theories in the prelude to war in Ukraine than in the prelude to war in Iraq—and that is what makes the former rational and the latter irrational—then the whole purpose of assigning rationality based on the author’s criteria should be called into question. It is impossible to know where they draw the line—and therefore where readers should draw the line, as well. To see why, consider the case of current U.S.-Chinese relations. Why do Mearsheimer and Rosato believe that the United States will “behave rationally” this time, when they believe the United States did not in the case of the Iraq war? What is it in their theory that should lead us to expect that leaders in Washington and Beijing will not be victims of the biases or misperceptions that characterized the decision-making process in Washington and Baghdad in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion? IMPAIRED JUDGMENT To assume in the absence of strong theory and evidence that level-headed rationality will prevail is dangerously naive. At the very least, experts should be skeptical of the idea that the Chinese Politburo will base any decision on credible theories and engage in uninhibited deliberation when it comes to Taiwan. Any serious analysis of the U.S.-Chinese interaction that ignores how both countries could unintentionally misperceive each other’s signals, miss windows of opportunity, pay selective attention to information in times of stress, and act on heightened emotion would be, at best, incomplete. At worst, it would be dangerously misleading. Political scientists and policymakers still have much to learn from Mearsheimer and Rosato’s new book. Our points of disagreement are genuine theoretical and disciplinary debates that deserve further investigation. And I firmly believe that rationalists and political psychologists can and should work together on these issues. As scholars, we must approach world events and leaders with humility given how much we do not know. Only through careful theory building and rigorous analysis of primary sources can we make sense of how leaders—and states—think. What Russia Got Wrong Can Moscow Learn From Its Failures in Ukraine? Dara Massicot Smoke from a Russian airstrike in Lviv, Ukraine, March 2022 Playing With Fire in Ukraine The Underappreciated Risks of Catastrophic Escalation John J. Mearsheimer The Self-Doubting Superpower America Shouldn’t Give Up on the World It Made By Fareed Zakaria January/February 2024 Published on December 12, 2023 Matt Chase Sign in and save to read later Print this article Send by email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/self-doubting-superpower-america-fareed-zakaria Get Citation Request Reprint Permissions Play Download Article Most Americans think their country is in decline. In 2018, when the Pew Research Center asked Americans how they felt their country would perform in 2050, 54 percent of respondents agreed that the U.S. economy would be weaker. An even larger number, 60 percent, agreed that the United States would be less important in the world. This should not be surprising; the political atmosphere has been pervaded for some time by a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to a long-running Gallup poll, the share of Americans who are “satisfied” with the way things are going has not crossed 50 percent in 20 years. It currently stands at 20 percent. Over the decades, one way of thinking about who would win the presidency was to ask: Who is the more optimistic candidate? From John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, the sunnier outlook seemed to be the winning ticket. But in 2016, the United States elected a politician whose campaign was premised on doom and gloom. Donald Trump emphasized that the U.S. economy was in a “dismal state,” that the United States had been “disrespected, mocked, and ripped off” abroad, and that the world was “a total mess.” In his inaugural address, he spoke of “American carnage.” His current campaign has reprised these core themes. Three months before declaring his candidacy, he released a video titled “A Nation in Decline.” Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign was far more traditional. He frequently extolled the United States’ virtues and often recited that familiar line, “Our best days still lie ahead.” And yet, much of his governing strategy has been predicated on the notion that the country has been following the wrong course, even under Democratic presidents, even during the Obama-Biden administration. In an April 2023 speech, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, criticized “much of the international economic policy of the last few decades,” blaming globalization and liberalization for hollowing out the country’s industrial base, exporting American jobs, and weakening some core industries. Writing later in these pages, he worried that “although the United States remained the world’s preeminent power, some of its most vital muscles atrophied.” This is a familiar critique of the neoliberal era, one in which a few prospered but many were left behind. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. It goes beyond mere critique. Many of the Biden administration’s policies seek to rectify the apparent hollowing out of the United States, promoting the logic that its industries and people need to be protected and assisted by tariffs, subsidies, and other kinds of support. In part, this approach may be a political response to the reality that some Americans have in fact been left behind and happen to live in crucial swing states, making it important to court them and their votes. But the remedies are much more than political red meat; they are far-reaching and consequential. The United States currently has the highest tariffs on imports since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. Washington’s economic policies are increasingly defensive, designed to protect a country that has supposedly lost out in the last few decades. A U.S. grand strategy that is premised on mistaken assumptions will lead the country and the world astray. On measure after measure, the United States remains in a commanding position compared with its major competitors and rivals. Yet it does confront a very different international landscape. Many powers across the globe have risen in strength and confidence. They will not meekly assent to American directives. Some of them actively seek to challenge the United States’ dominant position and the order that has been built around it. In these new circumstances, Washington needs a new strategy, one that understands that it remains a formidable power but operates in a far less quiescent world. The challenge for Washington is to run fast but not run scared. Today, however, it remains gripped by panic and self-doubt. STILL NUMBER ONE Despite all the talk of American dysfunction and decay, the reality is quite different, especially when compared with other rich countries. In 1990, the United States’ per capita income (measured in terms of purchasing power) was 17 percent higher than Japan’s and 24 percent higher than Western Europe’s. Today, it is 54 percent and 32 percent higher, respectively. In 2008, at current prices, the American and eurozone economies were roughly the same size. The U.S. economy is now nearly twice as large as the eurozone. Those who blame decades of American stagnation on Washington’s policies might be asked a question: With which advanced economy would the United States want to have swapped places over the last 30 years? In terms of hard power, the country is also in an extraordinary position. The economic historian Angus Maddison argued that the world’s greatest power is often the one that has the strongest lead in the most important technologies of the time—the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century. America in the twenty-first century might be even stronger than it was in the twentieth. Compare its position in, say, the 1970s and 1980s with its position today. Back then, the leading technology companies of the time—manufacturers of consumer electronics, cars, computers—could be found in the United States but also in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea. In fact, of the ten most valuable companies in the world in 1989, only four were American, and the other six were Japanese. Today, nine of the top ten are American. What is more, the top ten most valuable U.S. technology companies have a total market capitalization greater than the combined value of the stock markets of Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. And if the United States utterly dominates the technologies of the present—centered on digitization and the Internet—it also seems poised to succeed in the industries of the future, such as artificial intelligence and bioengineering. In 2023, as of this writing, the United States has attracted $26 billion in venture capital for artificial intelligence startups, about six times as much as China, the next highest recipient. In biotech, North America captures 38 percent of global revenues while all of Asia accounts for 24 percent. Of the ten most valuable companies in the world, nine are American. In addition, the United States leads in what has historically been a key attribute of a nation’s strength: energy. Today, it is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas—larger even than Russia or Saudi Arabia. The United States is also massively expanding production of green energy, thanks in part to the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. As for finance, look at the list of banks designated “globally systemically important” by the Financial Stability Board, a Switzerland-based oversight body; the United States has twice as many such banks as the next country, China. The dollar remains the currency used in almost 90 percent of international transactions. Even though central banks’ dollar reserves have dropped in the last 20 years, no other competitor currency even comes close. Finally, if demography is destiny, the United States has a bright future. Alone among the world’s advanced economies, its demographic profile is reasonably healthy, even if it has worsened in recent years. The U.S. fertility rate now stands around 1.7 children per woman, below the replacement level of 2.1. But that compares favorably with 1.5 for Germany, 1.1 for China, and 0.8 for South Korea. Crucially, the United States makes up for its low fertility through immigration and successful assimilation. The country takes in around one million legal immigrants every year, a number that fell during the Trump and COVID-19 years but has since rebounded. One in five of all people on earth who live outside their country of birth live in the United States, and its immigrant population is nearly four times that of Germany, the next-largest immigration hub. For that reason, whereas China, Japan, and Europe are projected to experience population declines in the coming decades, the United States should keep growing. Of course, the United States has many problems. What country doesn’t? But it has the resources to solve these problems far more easily than most other countries. China’s plunging fertility rate, for example, the legacy of the one-child policy, is proving impossible to reverse despite government inducements of all kinds. And since the government wants to maintain a monolithic culture, the country is not going to take in immigrants to compensate. The United States’ vulnerabilities, by contrast, often have ready solutions. The country has a high debt load and rising deficits. But its total tax burden is low compared with those of other rich countries. The U.S. government could raise enough revenues to stabilize its finances and maintain relatively low tax rates. One easy step would be to adopt a value-added tax. A version of the VAT exists in every other major economy across the globe, often with rates around 20 percent. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a five percent VAT would raise $3 trillion over a decade, and a higher rate would obviously raise even more. This is not a picture of irremediable structural dysfunction that will lead inexorably to collapse. BETWEEN WORLDS Despite its strength, the United States does not preside over a unipolar world. The 1990s was a world without geopolitical competitors. The Soviet Union was collapsing (and soon its successor, Russia, would be reeling), and China was still an infant on the international stage, generating less than two percent of global GDP. Consider what Washington was able to do in that era. To liberate Kuwait, it fought a war against Iraq with widespread international backing, including diplomatic approval from Moscow. It ended the Yugoslav wars. It got the Palestine Liberation Organization to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel, and it convinced Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to make peace and shake hands on the White House lawn with the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat. In 1994, even North Korea seemed willing to sign on to an American framework and end its nuclear weapons program (a momentary lapse into amicable cooperation from which it quickly recovered). When financial crises hit Mexico in 1994 and East Asian countries in 1997, the United States saved the day by organizing massive bailouts. All roads led to Washington. Today, the United States faces a world with real competitors and many more countries vigorously asserting their interests, often in defiance of Washington. To understand the new dynamic, consider not Russia or China but Turkey. Thirty years ago, Turkey was an obedient U.S. ally, dependent on Washington for its security and prosperity. Whenever Turkey went through one of its periodic economic crises, the United States helped bail it out. Today, Turkey is a much richer and more politically mature country, led by a strong, popular, and populist leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It routinely defies the United States, even when requests are made at the highest levels. Washington was unprepared for this shift. In 2003, the United States planned a two-front invasion of Iraq—from Kuwait in the south and from Turkey in the north—but failed to secure Turkey’s support preemptively, assuming it would be able to get that country’s assent as it always had. In fact, when the Pentagon asked, the Turkish parliament declined, and the invasion had to proceed in a hasty and ill-planned manner that might have had something to do with how things later unraveled. In 2017, Turkey inked a deal to buy a missile system from Russia—a brazen move for a NATO member. Two years later, Turkey again thumbed its nose at the United States by attacking Kurdish forces in Syria, American allies who had just helped defeat the Islamic State there. Scholars are debating whether the world is currently unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, and there are metrics one can use to make each case. The United States remains the single strongest country when adding up all hard-power metrics. For example, it has 11 aircraft carriers in operation, compared with China’s two. Watching countries such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey flex their muscles, one can easily imagine that the world is multipolar. Yet China is clearly the second-biggest power, and the gap between the top two and the rest of the world is significant: China’s economy and its military spending exceed those of the next three countries combined. The gap between the top two and all others was the principle that led the scholar Hans Morgenthau to popularize the term “bipolarity” after World War II. With the collapse of British economic and military power, he argued, the United States and the Soviet Union were leagues ahead of every other country. Extending that logic to today, one might conclude that the world is again bipolar. Visitors standing before the Star-Spangled Banner in Washington, D.C., June 2023 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters But China’s power also has limits, derived from factors that go beyond demographics. It has just one treaty ally, North Korea, and a handful of informal allies, such as Russia and Pakistan. The United States has dozens of allies. In the Middle East, China is not particularly active despite one recent success in presiding over the restoration of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Asia, it is economically ubiquitous but also draws constant pushback from countries such as Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea. And in recent years, Western countries have become wary of China’s growing strength in technology and economics and have moved to limit its access. China’s example helps clarify that there is a difference between power and influence. Power is made up of hard resources—economic, technological, and military. Influence is less tangible. It is the ability to make another country do something that it otherwise would not have done. To put it crudely, it means bending another country’s policies in the direction you prefer. That is ultimately the point of power: to be able to translate it into influence. And by that yardstick, both the United States and China face a world of constraints. Other countries have risen in terms of resources, fueling their confidence, pride, and nationalism. In turn, they are likely to assert themselves more forcefully on the world stage. That is true of the smaller countries surrounding China but also of the many countries that have long been subservient to the United States. And there is a new class of medium powers, such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia, that are searching for their own distinctive strategies. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has pursued a policy of “multi-alignment,” choosing when and where to make common cause with Russia or the United States. In the BRICS grouping, it has even aligned itself with China, a country with which it has engaged in deadly border skirmishes as recently as 2020. In a 1999 article in these pages, “The Lonely Superpower,” the political scientist Samuel Huntington tried to look beyond unipolarity and describe the emerging world order. The term he came up with was “uni-multipolar,” an extremely awkward turn of phrase yet one that captured something real. In 2008, when I was trying to describe the emerging reality, I called it a “post-American world” because it struck me that the most salient characteristic was that everyone was trying to navigate the world as U.S. unipolarity began to wane. It still seems to be the best way to describe the international system. THE NEW DISORDER Consider the two great international crises of the moment, the invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, his country was humiliated during the age of unipolarity. Since then, mainly as a result of rising energy prices, Russia has been able to return to the world stage as a great power. Putin has rebuilt the power of the Russian state, which can extract revenues from its many natural resources. And now he wants to undo the concessions Moscow made during the unipolar era, when it was weak. It has been seeking to reclaim those parts of the Russian Empire that are central to Putin’s vision of a great Russia—Ukraine above all else, but also Georgia, which it invaded in 2008. Moldova, where Russia already has a foothold in the breakaway Transnistria republic, could be next. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine was premised on the notion that the United States was losing interest in its European allies and that they were weak, divided, and dependent on Russian energy. He gobbled up Crimea and the borderlands of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and then, just after the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing Russian gas to Germany, decided to frontally attack Ukraine. He hoped to conquer the country, thus reversing the greatest setback Russia had endured in the unipolar age. Putin miscalculated, but it was not a crazy move. After all, his previous incursions had been met with little resistance. In the Middle East, the geopolitical climate has been shaped by Washington’s steady desire to withdraw from the region militarily over the last 15 years. That policy began under President George W. Bush, who was chastened by the fiasco of the war he had started in Iraq. It continued under President Barack Obama, who articulated the need to reduce the United States’ profile in the region so that Washington could take on the more pressing issue of China’s rise. This strategy was advertised as a pivot to Asia but also a pivot away from the Middle East, where the administration felt the United States was overinvested militarily. That shift was underscored by Washington’s sudden and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. The result has not been the happy formation of a new balance of power but rather a vacuum that regional players have aggressively sought to fill. Iran has expanded its influence, thanks to the Iraq war, which upset the balance of power between the region’s Sunnis and Shiites. With Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime toppled, Iraq was governed by its Shiite majority, many of whose leaders had close ties to Iran. This expansion of Iranian influence continued into Syria, where Tehran backed the government of Bashar al-Assad, allowing it to survive a brutal insurgency. Iran supported the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Israel’s occupied territories. There is a difference between power and influence. Rattled by all this, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and some other moderate Sunni states began a process of tacit cooperation with Iran’s other great enemy, Israel. That burgeoning alliance, with the 2020 Abraham Accords as an important milestone, seemed destined to culminate in the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The obstacle to such an alliance had always been the Palestinian issue, but the retreat of Washington and the advances of Tehran made the Arabs willing to ignore that once central issue. Watching closely, Hamas, an ally of Iran, chose to burn down the house, returning the group and its cause to the spotlight. The most portentous challenge to the current international order comes in Asia, with the rise of Chinese power. This could produce another crisis—far bigger than the other two—if China were to test the resolve of the United States and its allies by trying to forcibly reunify Taiwan with the mainland. So far, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s hesitation about using military force serves as a reminder that his country, unlike Russia, Iran, and Hamas, gains much from being tightly integrated into the world and its economy. But whether this restraint will hold is an open question. And the increased odds of an invasion of Taiwan today compared with, say, 20 years ago are one more signal of the weakening of unipolarity and the rise of a post-American world. Yet another indication of the United States’ reduced leverage in this emerging order is that informal security guarantees might give way to more formal ones. For decades, Saudi Arabia has lived under an American security umbrella, but it was a sort of gentleman’s agreement. Washington made no commitments or guarantees to Riyadh. Were the Saudi monarchy to be threatened, it had to hope that the U.S. president at the time would come to its rescue. In fact, in 1990, when Iraq menaced Saudi Arabia after invading Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush did come to the rescue with military force—but he was not required to do so by any treaty or agreement. Today, Saudi Arabia is feeling much stronger and is being courted actively by the other world power, China, which is its largest customer by far. Under its assertive crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom has become more demanding, asking Washington for a formal security guarantee like the one extended to NATO allies and the technology to build a nuclear industry. It remains unclear whether the United States will grant those requests—the question is tied in with a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel—but the very fact that the Saudi demands are being taken seriously is a sign of a changing power dynamic. STAYING POWER The international order that the United States built and sustained is being challenged on many fronts. But it remains the most powerful player in that order. Its share of global GDP remains roughly what it was in 1980 or 1990. Perhaps more significant, it has racked up even more allies. By the end of the 1950s, the “free world” coalition that fought and would win the Cold War was made up of the members of NATO—the United States, Canada, 11 Western European countries, Greece, and Turkey—plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Today, the coalition supporting Ukraine’s military or enforcing sanctions against Russia has expanded to include almost every country in Europe, as well as a smattering of other states. Overall, the “West Plus” encompasses about 60 percent of the world’s GDP and 65 percent of global military spending. The challenge of combating Russian expansionism is real and formidable. Before the war, the Russian economy was about ten times the size of Ukraine’s. Its population is almost four times larger. Its military-industrial complex is vast. But its aggression cannot be allowed to succeed. One of the core features of the liberal international order put in place after World War II has been that borders changed by brute military force are not recognized by the international community. Since 1945, there have been very few successful acts of aggression of this sort, in marked contrast to before then, when borders around the world changed hands routinely because of war and conquest. Russia’s success in its naked conquest would shatter a hard-won precedent. The China challenge is a different one. No matter its exact economic trajectory in the years ahead, China is a superpower. Its economy already accounts for close to 20 percent of global GDP. It is second only to the United States in military spending. Although it does not have nearly as much clout as the United States on the global stage, its ability to influence countries around the world has increased, thanks in no small measure to the vast array of loans, grants, and assistance it has offered. But China is not a spoiler state like Russia. It has grown rich and powerful within the international system and because of it; it is far more uneasy about overturning that system. Traders working at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, July 2023 Brendan McDermid / Reuters More broadly, China is searching for a way to expand its power. If it believes that it can find no way to do so other than to act as a spoiler, then it will. The United States should accommodate legitimate Chinese efforts to enhance its influence in keeping with its rising economic clout while deterring illegitimate ones. Over the past few years, Beijing has seen how its overly aggressive foreign policy has backfired. It has now pulled back on its assertive “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” and some of the arrogance of Xi’s earlier pronouncements about a “new era” of Chinese dominance has given way to a recognition of America’s strengths and China’s problems. At least for tactical reasons, Xi seems to be searching for a modus vivendi with America. In September 2023, he told a visiting group of U.S. senators, “We have 1,000 reasons to improve China-U.S. relations, but not one reason to ruin them.” Regardless of China’s intentions, the United States has significant structural advantages. It enjoys a unique geographic and geopolitical leg up. It is surrounded by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors. China, on the other hand, is rising in a crowded and hostile continent. Every time it flexes its muscles, it alienates one of its powerful neighbors, from India to Japan to Vietnam. Several countries in the region—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea—are actual treaty allies with the United States and host U.S. troops. These dynamics hem China in. Washington’s alliances in Asia and elsewhere act as a bulwark against its adversaries. For that reality to hold, the United States must make shoring up its alliances the centerpiece of its foreign policy. Indeed, that has been at the heart of Biden’s approach to foreign policy. He has repaired the ties that frayed under the Trump administration and strengthened those that didn’t. He has put in place checks on Chinese power and bolstered alliances in Asia yet reached out to build a working relationship with Beijing. He reacted to the Ukraine crisis with a speed and skill that must have surprised Putin, who now faces a West that has weaned itself from Russian energy and instituted the most punishing sanctions against a great power in history. None of these steps obviate the need for Ukraine to win on the battlefield, but they create a context in which the West Plus has substantial leverage and Russia faces a bleak long-term future. THE DANGER OF DECLINISM The greatest flaw in Trump’s and Biden’s approaches to foreign policy—and here the two do converge—derives from their similarly pessimistic outlooks. Both assume that the United States has been the great victim of the international economic system that it created. Both assume that the country cannot compete in a world of open markets and free trade. It is reasonable to put in place some restrictions on China’s access to the United States’ highest-tech exports, but Washington has gone much further, levying tariffs on its closest allies on commodities and goods from lumber to steel to washing machines. It has imposed requirements that U.S. government funds be used to “buy American.” Those provisions are even more restrictive than tariffs. Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods; “buy American” prevents foreign goods from being bought at any price. Even smart policies such as the push toward green energy are undermined by pervasive protectionism that alienates the United States’ friends and allies. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, has argued that rich countries are now engaging in acts of supreme hypocrisy. Having spent decades urging the developing world to liberalize and participate in the open world economy and castigating countries for protectionism, subsidies, and industrial policies, the Western world has stopped practicing what it has long preached. Having grown to wealth and power under such a system, rich countries have decided to pull up the ladder. In her words, they “now no longer want to compete on a level playing field and would prefer instead to shift to a power-based rather than a rules-based system.” U.S. officials spend much time and energy talking about the need to sustain the rules-based international system. At its heart is the open trading framework put in place by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947. The statesmen who came out of World War II saw where competitive nationalism and protectionism had led and were determined to prevent the world from going back down that path. And they succeeded, creating a world of peace and prosperity that expanded to the four corners of the earth. The system of free trade they designed allowed poor countries to grow rich and powerful, making it less attractive for everyone to wage war and try to conquer territory. China is not a spoiler state like Russia. There is more to the rules-based order than trade. It also involves international treaties, procedures, and norms—a vision of a world that is not characterized by the laws of the jungle but rather by a degree of order and justice. Here as well, the United States has been better at preaching than practicing. The Iraq war was a gross violation of the United Nations’ principles against unprovoked aggression. Washington routinely picks and chooses which international conventions it observes and which it ignores. It criticizes China for violating the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea when Beijing claims sovereignty over waters in East Asia—never mind that Washington itself has never ratified that treaty. When Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal with Iran signed by all the other great powers, despite confirmation that Tehran was adhering to its terms, he wrecked the hope of global cooperation on a key security challenge. He then maintained secondary sanctions to force those other great powers not to trade with Iran, abusing the power of the dollar in a move that accelerated efforts in Beijing, Moscow, and even European capitals to find alternatives to the dollar payment system. American unilateralism was tolerated in a unipolar world. Today, it is creating the search—even among the United States’ closest allies—for ways to escape, counter, and challenge it. Much of the appeal of the United States has been that the country was never an imperial power on the scale of the United Kingdom or France. It was itself a colony. It sits far from the main arenas of global power politics, and it entered the twentieth century’s two world wars late and reluctantly. It has rarely sought territory when it has ventured abroad. But perhaps above all, after 1945, it articulated a vision of the world that considered the interests of others. The world order it proposed, created, and underwrote was good for the United States but also good for the rest of the world. It sought to help other nations rise to greater wealth, confidence, and dignity. That remains the United States’ greatest strength. People around the world may want the loans and aid they can get from China, but they have a sense that China’s worldview is essentially to make China great. Beijing often talks about “win-win cooperation.” Washington has a track record of actually doing it. KEEP THE FAITH If the United States reneges on this broad, open, generous vision of the world out of fear and pessimism, it will have lost a great deal of its natural advantages. For too long, it has rationalized individual actions that are contrary to its avowed principles as the exceptions it must make to shore up its own situation and thereby bolster the order as a whole. It breaks a norm to get a quick result. But you cannot destroy the rules-based system in order to save it. The rest of the world watches and learns. Already, countries are in a competitive race, enacting subsidies, preferences, and barriers to protect their own economies. Already, countries violate international rules and point to Washington’s hypocrisy as justification. This pattern unfortunately includes the previous president’s lack of respect for democratic norms. Poland’s ruling party spun Trump-like conspiracy theories after it lost a recent election, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s claims of election fraud drove his supporters to mount a January 6–style attack on his country’s capital. The most worrying challenge to the rules-based international order does not come from China, Russia, or Iran. It comes from the United States. If America, consumed by exaggerated fears of its own decline, retreats from its leading role in world affairs, it will open up power vacuums across the globe and encourage a variety of powers and players to try to step into the disarray. We have seen what a post-American Middle East looks like. Imagine something similar in Europe and Asia, but this time with great powers, not regional ones, doing the disrupting, and with seismic global consequences. It is disturbing to watch as parts of the Republican Party return to the isolationism that characterized the party in the 1930s, when it resolutely opposed U.S. intervention even as Europe and Asia burned. Since 1945, America has debated the nature of its engagement with the world, but not whether it should be engaged to begin with. Were the country to truly turn inward, it would mark a retreat for the forces of order and progress. Washington can still set the agenda, build alliances, help solve global problems, and deter aggression while using limited resources—well below the levels that it spent during the Cold War. It would have to pay a far higher price if order collapsed, rogue powers rose, and the open world economy fractured or closed. The United States has been central to establishing a new kind of international relations since 1945, one that has grown in strength and depth over the decades. That system serves the interests of most countries in the world, as well as those of the United States. It faces new stresses and challenges, but many powerful countries also benefit from peace, prosperity, and a world of rules and norms. Those challenging the current system have no alternative vision that would rally the world; they merely seek a narrow advantage for themselves. And for all its internal difficulties, the United States above all others remains uniquely capable and positioned to play the central role in sustaining this international system. As long as America does not lose faith in its own project, the current international order can thrive for decades to come. FAREED ZAKARIA is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS, on CNN, and the author of the forthcoming book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present. The Real Washington Consensus Modernization Theory and the Delusions of American Strategy Charles King Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy at a presidential debate, Simi Valley, California, September 2023 The Politics of Looking Strong Americans Like Tough Talk More Than Tough Action Jeffrey A. Friedman