Plan Noble
A New Strategy for Countering the Chinese Communist Party
“Our victory — your victory — was so close, I wish you could have lived to see it. But you belong to Reach.” -Dr. Catherine Halsey, Halo: Reach
A competition lost means more than a bad scoreboard. A conflict lost is more terrible than the war itself. At the end of it all, you don’t want to find yourself beside a gravestone wishing you could’ve done better or moved faster. It is our duty to pursue a strategy worthy not just of victory in competition and conflict, but of those who might very well perish in the attempt. Competition does not necessarily mean conflict but failing to prepare for either surely means defeat in both. Strong competition is backed by a strong deterrent, and a strong deterrent can only be maintained by a healthy competitor. In the last ten years, as America has slowly awoken to a rising, militaristic, and genocidal Chinese Communist Party, our discourse has focused on the false choice between competing with the CCP vs preparing for war. Which do we choose for battle: hard power or soft power, the pen or the sword? That false dichotomy has cost us time, treasure, and if we continue, a lot of blood. Thus, I have set out to write a China strategy that bridges the gap between competition and conflict, and ensures that we can fight and win from across the Indo-Pacific, while ensuring the US does not “win today but lose tomorrow” in the broader cold war with the PRC. In this marathon, sometimes you have to sprint. In this strategy, I will fuse the near and far term threats of our new cold war, while addressing the evolutions of conflict and competition in the various emerging sectors, regions, and warfare domains.
The public discourse for a counter-China strategy often gets stuck in 1 of 2 bubbles: either everything is about hard power and Taiwan, or everything is about soft power and economic competition. Neither of these is correct, nor useful, for actually winning the competition that both describe with a sense of existential urgency. The fact remains that if we want to compete, deter, fight, and win against the Chinese Communist Party, then soft and hard power must be bonded at the molecular level. We cannot ignore the issues we don’t like, and we can’t ignore the realities and limitations of our own domestic discourse. We cannot ignore climate change nor the modernizing arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army. We must consider everything without falling victim to the age-old trap of defending all things, equally. I’ve spent the last year writing in Breaking Beijing about specific solutions to specific problems within the framework of the US-China competition, now I’d like to bring that all together into one document as a new and original US strategy for global competition with the Chinese Communist Party.
BACKGROUND
Traditionally, US government strategies are nested within supporting documents (i.e. other strategies and relevant guidance). For the purposes of this strategy, I will not do that for two reasons:
1. I don’t want to tie this strategy to any administration or political objectives beyond the end state laid out in this document. I’d prefer this document to be a nonpartisan, free-floating framework for future strategies and present public discourse. If I haven’t made it clear by now in all my previous works, my only objective is the mission: defeat the Chinese Communist Party and keep America a free, democratic shining city on a hill in the process. This isn’t a game of red or blue.
2. This is not a Discord server. The purpose of this strategy is to generate detailed options that are available to all, using solely open-source information. Accessibility is a serious impediment for policy discourse, and Breaking Beijing has been consistent about bringing detailed, serious policy proposals to the public in an accessible, easy to understand way. This is not a think tank paper that only regurgitates buzzwords nor is it an academic exercise that exists only in an alternate reality. It is also not in any way (obviously) a USG document.
With that out of the way, let’s start at the beginning: why are where we are in 2023 with regards to US-PRC relations? If you want a good set of background readings on US-China conflict, I wrote a whole 101 syllabus here. I’ll just hit the EXSUM of the last 70 years below.
Depending on who you ask, the grievances can go back to the 19th Century, but the real start of friction began with the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Red China under Mao created the first “Who lost China? political crisis in the United States. The PRC came to the aid of the North Koreans during the Korean War and US and Chinese soldiers slaughtered each other on the Peninsula. The 1950s saw the first two Taiwan Strait Crises. Maoists and Soviet cadre competed for influence in the developing world as decolonization conflict swept across the planet. The Sino-Soviet split, which occurred for a number of Sino-Soviet relations reasons (ideology, border conflict, personality conflict) and not because of US diplomatic work (we missed the split by about a decade) brought an opening for the US to use the PRC to stretch USSR resources thin. For several decades after, the US had no diplomatic representation in Beijing until Nixon and Kissinger went to China in the 1970s. With the gradual opening of the PRC and the death of Mao, the PRC could begin to development from the impoverished land ravaged by the killings and paranoia of the Cultural Revolution to an industrial powerhouse fueled by Western foreign direct investment, cheap labor, and internal reforms that loosened some party economic controls.
As the Iron Curtain fell and the USSR collapsed under the weight of its own incompetency, the CCP faced its own legitimacy with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. As PLA tanks gunned down and rolled over their own citizens yearning for a democratic breath, the world threw a few sanctions at the PRC but at the end of the day, decided commerce rather than competition was the winning long-term strategy. In reality, we traded dollars for bodies. A few years later, the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis humiliated Beijing enough that they began to undertake and accelerate massive reforms designed at deterring and defeating an American military that could mass combat power a la Desert Storm and sail a Carrier Strike Group through the Taiwan Strait without challenge. The crisis had its own effects on the US: a growing simultaneous sense of invincibility and complacency. At the end of a four-decade cold war, there was no appetite to start another one and bribing the PRC into democracy sounded like a really nice option that didn’t require a new military buildup or arms race. Too bad it didn’t work out that way, and when we knew it failed, enough folks were invested to fight any attempt at righting the ship.
It's easy to say the entire Global War on Terror was a distraction from the CCP fight, but in reality, the current battlespace didn’t begin to form until the Global Financial Crisis from 2007-2009 and the subsequent rise of Xi Jinping in the early 2010s. Xi’s steel boot governance was initially written off as “business as usual” for a power transition in Beijing, but it quickly became apparent that that was not the case. Reversals of economic and governance reforms began to accelerate as Xi created a cult of personality on par with Mao. He initiated the Uyghur genocide, accelerated PLA reforms, the surveillance state, and extraterritorial collection and rendition operations against PRC dissidents, corporations, and Western governments. It was during this period that the GWOT really began to drag resources and attention from the “China Rising” problem. We didn’t get a PRC-focused national defense strategy until 2018. Even then, toxic domestic politics, lack of a deep bench on China after 20 years in the Middle East, DoD scandals like Fat Leonard that gutted PACOM, and the Budget Control Act limited what we could do. The bureaucracy does not turn on a dime. In short, we’ve known about the China Rising problem since the financial crisis, but haven’t really been able to dedicate real resources to the problem until the last couple of years. Now we have to play catch up while managing risk and escalation, we have to battle a global threat that knocks on our front door while also managing crises from the Homefront to the Arctic. What so many people get wrong is the scale of the threat from the Chinese Communist Party: it doesn’t start or end with Taiwan. The threat starts with a Party that suppresses and brutalizes its own citizens in ways that evoke a blend of cyberpunk dystopia and old school viciousness, to include the genocide of the Uyghur people. It is an apparatus that sends its intelligence officers overseas to kidnap dissidents, a party that throws developing nations into insurmountable debt and coerces those states into giving up concessions of land and sovereignty. It is a party whose diplomats threaten humiliation and annihilation to those who oppose it, none more than the peaceful, democratic nation of Taiwan. The CCP is everyone’s problem because the CCP makes everyone their problem. We cannot, and should not, coexist with a genocidal regime that rejects the very principles the modern world is built upon, and wants to rebuild the world order in its own, twisted image from the barrel of a gun.
END STATE
It’s cheap to say the end state should be the end of the Chinese Communist Party, and as other commentators have noted (and Russia proves), what emerges from the ashes of one regime can simply be awful in a different way. Therefore, the end state for a US-China strategy should be framed by the near, mid, and far time horizons across the relevant sectors and regions of competition. It would also be easy to say that the objective should be containment, and indeed I’ve endorsed such a plan in the past. Containment should not be a dirty word (it is literally the victim of a years long CCP propaganda campaign to make it so). Containing an authoritarian, aggressive, and genocidal regime bent on exerting its influence around the world and rolling back democratic norms should indeed be a goal, at minimum. But the more closely we look at the world map, beyond simple military basing and into financial and diplomatic influence, we have some work to do before we can even get to containment. Thus, a reasonable end state for our China strategy may look something this:
Our desired end state is a Chinese military (the PLA) incapable of projecting power beyond its borders for imperial ambitions, the denial of a sphere of influence around the PRC that degrades the autonomy of its neighbors, US allies, and non-aligned actors, global institutions that are free of PRC illicit influence or which are driven by PRC policy objectives, and a PRC government (or inheritor) that tolerates democratic reforms, respects the freedoms of all of its citizens and of those around the world, and is an earnest and reliable partner in the international system on areas such as climate change and space exploration. A necessary component of this end state is a United States capable of projecting power into the 1st Island Chain, organizing a coalition of allies across economic, political, and military networks, to promote democracy, free enterprise, and advance human rights abroad while ensuring those values are not lost at home in the heat of competition and conflict.
Based upon the above end state, there are a series of supporting objectives, categories of competition, and time horizons that must be addressed. As none of the above can be achieved overnight, or entirely by US action alone, we must do so with our friends, new and old, around the world. In fact, a China that may one day welcome democracy could only come about after the CCP suffocates under the weight of its own corruption and brutality. Bringing in new allies, promoting democracy in the developing world, and building a new arsenal of democracies are all key to our success across for today and tomorrow. Therefore, we may consider US policy in support of this end state to be setting conditions around the globe for the gradual containment and disruption of the CCP, be it in peace or at war. In short, our goal is to make the world unsafe for the Chinese Communist Party.
Defense: Depth, Dispersion, and WAI
Near: Present-2030
A few months ago, I declared the death of the Davidson Window, but I also proclaimed that the spirit of urgency in the near-term to be alive and well. Whether the window for conflict be 2025, 2027, or 2030, a conflict over Taiwan will require a level of preparation, production, and planning that goes far beyond current efforts. As I’ve written previously, Taiwan is the most likely and most dangerous flashpoint for the US and China. That being said, we have a long way to go before we are ready for such a conflict, and the PLA likely has a few more years too (whether they know that is another story.) There are other areas of concern for flashpoints, but if the needs of the Taiwan campaign are met, then so are the vast majority of operating requirements for other US-China flashpoints. Consider the following objectives for the near-term time frame: (Note that all of these needs also apply to our allies and partners in order to build an arsenal of democracies)
1. Munitions and Logistics: Give me ammo, and if you think it’s enough, triple it. Ukraine reminds us just how much large scale combat can force us to expend in terms of munitions in very shorts periods of time. Gone are the days where a single well-placed hellfire missile can change the course of a campaign. In the case of munitions, we must prioritize long-lead item and multi-year munition procurement. Our stocks are low, in fact they were in many cases unsatisfactory for a Pacific War even before Ukraine and many of those munitions do not have theater overlap (despite what some may tell you). Having spare munitions properly forward-deployed and stockpiled on Day Zero of the war can mean the difference between a fait accompli for the PLA over Taiwan and buying enough time for the American/Allied fleet to arrive and push the PLA back.
2. Local Air Control: The war over Taiwan starts and ends with control of the airspace. Contesting the PLA’s dominance of the airspace in and around Taiwan is key not only to slowing the initial invasion, but ensuring the American counterattack can punch deep enough into PLA lines to have the appropriate effects. Local air control starts on Taiwan, with the *timely* delivery of a range of air defense systems, improving stockpiles of Air-to-air missiles and missile defense interceptors for the fleet, and then the staging, maintenance, and dispersion of friendly aircraft in theater.
3. Dispersion: You’ve read it a thousand times: we will not be able to repeat the massive buildup that accompanied the Persian Gulf War and 2003 Invasion of Iraq without it being heavily contested. For years, commanders and policymakers have advocated for dispersing our forces throughout the Pacific in order to complicated PLA targeting and reducing single points of failure, accelerating that dispersion and more importantly, accelerating the dispersion of supporting logistics is key to ensuring we can keep fighting after a first strike or disrupt PLA decision-making in the first place through complexity.
4. Infrastructure Protection: As I wrote last month, critical and civilian infrastructure is a viable target for the PLA. While I focused on US infrastructure, the case remains the same for our allies and really starts on Taiwan. Taiwan is especially vulnerable as an island nation with few secure digital connections to the outside world, and relies on more than 90% of its energy from imports. The humanitarian crisis triggered by PLA targeting of infrastructure on Taiwan could accelerate decision-making towards capitulation. Never forget that people are critical infrastructure, and fighting a war while your population dies off is fruitless. The fewer disruptions to infrastructure from nuclear reactors to desalination plants, be it from supply shock, cyber attack, or sabotage, the more time we can buy for ourselves and for our allies to live and fight another day. While we buy more munitions, we have to dedicate funds to building out redundant stockpiles of survival materials and key components for critical infrastructure that may not necessarily be military in nature. The pharmaceutical component shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic should have drilled this lesson into our heads.
5. Defense in Depth (including point defense): No good defense is fought in a straight line. A good defense, and therefore deterrence, has layers (like an onion). In the case of our most dangerous flashpoint, that begins off the west coast of Taiwan with smart mines and sensors, moves through the beaches and cities with more obstacles, sensors, and area-denial weapons, and across the Pacific via the above priorities of work. In order for our near-term deterrence and defense strategy to work, we have to execute all of these priorities, we cannot pick and choose which items to fund. Without one or more, we will fail to defend Taiwan. For more on defending Taiwan, see my previous articles here and here.
Mid: 2030-2040
If the near-term is about using everything we can short of the kitchen sink to deter a conflict we are not yet ready for, then resourcing and actioning policy for the 2030s means maturing the projects we start today for a time period in which we are likely ready to fight, and so is the PLA. In other words, the 2020s are about getting up to speed, and the 2030s will be about keeping pace as the US and China likely reach parity or near-parity in a number of key military categories. Consider the following objectives for the mid-term time frame:
1. Shipbuilding: Presently, the PLA Navy outnumbers the US Navy by a few dozen vessels, but not in tonnage or firepower. The PLA Navy’s firepower is augmented by significant air and ground-based missile forces that provide ample coverage throughout the first and most of the Second Island Chains. By the end of the decade, the vessel-to-vessel firepower gap, particularly under the sea, will be closed dramatically. And that is without factoring in the USN’s global requirements vs the PLA’s singular regional focus (for now). In other words, the longer the US’s failure to expand shipbuilding continues, the more likely the PLA’s naval combat advantage becomes overwhelming. No matter how much money we pour into domestic shipbuilding, repeal the Jones Act, etc., we cannot match the raw industrial might of the PLA Navy because of their commercial production advantage. We cannot do that, alone. But if we do so by reforming our defense acquisitions laws to include allies like Japan and South Korea and expanding AUKUS, we can not only make our navy larger, we can ensure when we lose ships, we have the industrial power and efficiency to get new ships into the fight before the war ends. Our saving grace is the competitive advantage that we bring to our allies, and what our allies can bring to us. Our supply chains are too far integrated *across our alliances* to revert to a dominant “Made in America” policy for our industrial base. If we want to remain the dominant naval power in the long term, we have to build a combined allied fleet worthy of the title.
2. NGAD and Man-Machine teaming: If deterrence by denial is the defense theme of the 2020s, then man-machine teaming is the theme of the 2030s. We’re already testing drone swarms, UGV-tank teams, and a variety of other man-drone concepts. But as I’ve written before, development and deployability are not the same thing. Man-machine teaming will likely hit maturity at the turn of the decade, and then mass battlefield deployment can begin. Countless leaders and thinkers have said it before but we should make it official policy: winning means people fighting at the speed of the machine across all domains of warfare.
3. Space Doctrine and Systems: I’ve written an entire article on my theory of orbital combat (Collision Warfare) but regardless of whether you subscribe to my theory of space combat, you have to acknowledge that the public space is sorely lacking in space doctrine and general knowledge. We are in space where we were with cyber knowledge in the 1990s and we place ourselves at risk by keeping up the ignorance. Moreover, we have to expand our conception (and acquisition) of space systems capable of not just holding the ultimate high ground, but retaking it if lost. This requires a swath of new infrastructure, public education, and wargaming that we presently do not have. The PLA actively talks about space warfare and how critical it is that they stop us from holding the high ground, we need to be able to talk about these systems and threats in the public domain. We need to be able to accelerate our defensive and offensive space infrastructure today, because it takes time to develop these systems for when orbital warfare really comes into its own in the next decade, if not this decade.
4. WAI across the Domains: By the 2030s, the concept of JADC2 (all the shooters connected to all the sensors) will be to AI integration what zeppelins were to air power: right idea, wrong execution. In order to be dominant tomorrow, we have to really take the gloves off of the smart systems we already have. I wrote recently about the firm red lines of weaponized artificial intelligence, but before those red lines, we should not be afraid to push the limits of how much autonomy we can give *tactical* systems. The future of warfare isn’t about every system being able to speak on the same net at the same time, it’s about systems being able to execute their mission within commander’s intent, in a denied environment, in a combined arms framework. In essence, we should expect out of our machines on the battlefield what we expect out of our warfighters under the same conditions. We will fail horribly if we try to create the perfect strategic warfighting system without starting at the tactical level.
5. Nuclear Modernization: You may not be interested in nuclear warfare, but nuclear warfare sure is interested in you. We’ve been putting off modernizing our nuclear systems for as long as we could, because modernization across the strategic forces will eat a lot of our budget, especially during these budget-constrained and unstable times. Presently, the PRC is rapidly expanding its arsenal, but it won’t be until the 2030s (if they continue their current pace) when they begin to reach parity with us. The Russian arsenal is much more sizeable, but also aging, and their financial and military future doesn’t look too good. Therefore, we should focus our modernization timeline relative to how the PRC develops its nuclear forces. Right now, we can modernize our nuclear forces (believe me, you want our nukes to be healthy, stable, and reliable) at our pace. We don’t need to expand our arsenal or develop new delivery systems, but short of a breakthrough in large-scale point defense (think lasers and railguns), we need to at least maintain what we have and replace the systems that are far too old to consider reliable and competitive. It’s not good for America if we have to have a new nuclear arms race, particularly when our conventional forces need the money.
Far: Flexibility for the 2040s and Beyond
The 2040s are less about concrete objectives and more about initiating the right investment plans that will keep the force flexible and fit to fight for decades to come. The acquisitions and R&D decisions of the 1970s and 80s still play significant roles on the battlefield today. Don’t even get me started on the B-52’s lifespan. It can be incredibly difficult to think about the future in all three terms. We like to choose the most comfortable or the most uncomfortable timelines to focus on, but miss one and the planning for the others will fail just as well. As we focus today on making the most of what we have, the 2040s timeline in this strategy is about ensuring we can fight today while investing for tomorrow. This is where the national security and competition elements of the strategy really begin to overlap. After all, 2040 is less than a generation away. The most important thing we can do for the 2040s, as we have so much to do for the 20s and 30s, is to invest in the right systems so we don’t pay the price on the back end 20 years from now.
Climate Change
A bad thunderstorm can ruin a beach day, especially if you’re unprepared. Writing a national strategy in the 21st century without considering the real, concrete impacts of climate change as mother nature’s shaping operation for conflict is simply malpractice. I’m not here to sell you on a green new deal. In fact, I’ve written before on the real nexus of climate change and national security (both in Breaking Beijing and in EX SUPRA), rather I want to talk about how to plan for conflict and competition as the climate evolves. An apt, if incomplete, comparison to factoring climate change into our strategy is how decolonization might factor into regional strategies during the first cold war. Whether you like it or not, it’s there and you can ignore it at your own risk.
Near: Present-2030
In the near term, we should focus on climate change as a unifying topic of conversation with our Pacific allies. It (and this is an important note for the State Department) is not a topic that should be used as leverage by the CCP to override security, economic, and human rights concerns. Quite simply, when you talk security with our Pacific nation partners, you can’t get in the door without talking seriously about climate change. They might hate the CCP too, but the most immediate threat to them is their disappearing food supplies and shorelines. Given the CCP’s polluting habits and illegal and underreported fishing operations, this is a pretty easy effort to undertake. The more complicated issues stem from environmental remediation and how to handle the future influx of refugees from these nations when the waters can no longer be held back. Many of these states are sparsely populated and isolated, but their distance should not hide them from our focus. We should treat the value of the Pacific and SE Asia states as highly as we did our NATO partners on the continent during the first cold war.
Mid: 2030-2040
Where the 2020s will be spent building relationships and physical barriers (for the rising waters), the 2030s will likely see the beginning of very real, large-scale evacuations and relocations of the civilian populations of our Pacific (and other ) partners. We cannot be caught flat-footed and lose potential allies, to say nothing of the humanitarian and moral obligations of ensuring we don’t create national sacrifice zones in the Pacific when they could be saved. The more we invest today in shoring up our Pacific partners and mitigating potential damage from climate change, the more we save in blood and treasure in the 2030s and beyond. We will have our hands full with the PRC, why create more problems through ignorance when our friends can help us in that fight. While I won’t advocate for a green new deal, a climate Marshall Plan that ensures the very survival of our Pacific partners should be drawn up and prepared as disaster approaches.
Far: 2040-2050
This decade depends largely upon how much we can slow the long-term effects of climate change. Once again, the plan for the 2040s depends largely upon how much we get our act together today, whether it be for the PRC or for the climate. At present rate, much of our national economy will be at risk for a greater series of annual severe weather events, to include, flooding, fires, and drought. A healthy deterrent depends on a healthy economy and domestic political atmosphere. Climate catastrophe does not foster such a healthy environment. If we can’t reduce our emissions for the long term rapidly (and I don’t think we can), then we have to invest in damage mitigation to ensure the long-term survival of our nation. Expect to have to plan for population relocations, industrial and agriculture disruptions, new diseases from warmer environments, resource conflict abroad, and regular supply chain shock.
Human Rights: Be Free, or Be Damned
We can, and must, do two things at once. Becoming the enemy means defeat beyond the battlefield. Upholding the basic principles of liberty, democracy, and equality matter as much at home as it does abroad. Our shared values are what hold us together in the face of the resurgence of authoritarianism around the world. A human-rights centric foreign policy does not mean abandoning hard power, and it should not mean throwing ourselves into every hopeless quagmire. It means holding the feet of our enemies to the fire for their abuses (like Xinjiang and the Russian atrocities in Ukraine), while creating incentives and fostering political environments that do not reward abuses by our allies. We need not repeat the mistakes of last cold war, like Operation Condor, but we can’t be afraid of our own shadow either. Everyone should understand that when we say the CCP hates our freedoms, we mean they hate the rights we enshrine and want for all humanity. The CCP hates our concept of human rights. It shouldn’t be a problem to make that the center of our ideological competition. Be free, or be damned.
Commerce and Innovation in Emerging Technologies
We have a pretty good idea of how to write sanctions. The problem is that we’ve done it so often, and with such great effect, that the ROI has begun to diminish as our enemies catch on and insulate their economies. Insulating the Chinese economy from American sanctions is in fact a major priority for the CCP, and it’s unlikely that sanctions will have a deterring effect the more time goes on. Instead, our sanctions must be geared to punishment, and as I’ve written before, sanctions cannot be executed in isolation. They require diplomatic, industrial planning, and sometimes military coordination in order to have real, long-term effects. I would therefore argue that while sanctions are important to counter-CCP policy, the real money lies in effectively decoupling and *most importantly* relocating our supply chains to our allies before those very supply chains can be used as pain points by the CCP. Just recently, it was reported that the CCP is using export restrictions to hamper Sweden’s development of its own semiconductor industry. The CCP has seen what works, and knows it needs the world to be dependent on its economy more than they value the present world order. In order to counter, contain, and make the world unsafe for the CCP, the primary focus must be on decoupling, supply chain realignment, and high-tech dominance. You can’t do just one of these, they must be planned and executed in concert of the entire system falls apart and prey to the CCP.
We’ve already made progress decoupling some high-tech sectors like semiconductors, artificial intelligence, materials science, and biotechnology. These are the sectors I would consider the most critical to competition, the future of warfare, (and the future of humanity for that matter.) But while we’ve made progress, it is in many cases incomplete and fragile because it is accomplished by executive order and agency policy rather than legislation. Legislating the new cold war is the most effective, if absolutely frustrating, way to ensure that we can plan for the long term. Executive policy is a band-aid that works in a fix and is sometimes necessary, but cannot be a remedy for every cold war problem. And so, now that we’ve begun decoupling, we must accelerate efforts to realign and build out new supply chains free of CCP control or influence. Here the Arsenal of Democracies returns, as many of our allies have the cash and technology to support new supply chains for many of these technologies. Getting them to agree on export restrictions can sometimes be a challenge, but is an acceptable risk given the alternative. The more we build the supply chains, the less opportunity the CCP has to create its own that enable dependency on Beijing. In this cold war, developing new, secure supply chains for critical technologies is as valuable for American hegemony as building the Panama Canal was more than a century ago.
Beyond the Pacific: Regional Sub-strategies
South Asia: Our most important friend in South Asia is India, even if they don’t always like to be on board with our security and economic policies. We are headed in the right direction, but as far as the Quad goes, they’re the wild card. We have a lot to offer India in terms of military technology, military aid, and economic investment…if they’ll have it. I suspect the relationship going forward will continue to appear fair weather in public and friendlier in private until Beijing really goes off the deep end. Russia’s failures are already proving the need for India to at least reconsider some of its outdated security policies. Winning India’s friendship and alliance is a very slow marathon, and cannot be rushed unless it’s World War III. Energy and other forms of infrastructure investment are the best thing we can offer India, as their aging infrastructure can make or break their defense posture, particularly as they are extremely vulnerable to the coming changes in climate and accelerated extreme weather events. Besides our Pacific Island partners, India should be a major focus for climate resiliency investment. Beyond, India, managing the approaching disaster and failed state that is Pakistan is going to require a lot of diplomatic effort and will likely create a new flashpoint between the US, the PRC, and India over the next few years. Truly, all of South Asia is at serious risk to climate disaster, and if we don’t invest and manage resources in the region properly (and ensure the PRC does not abuse those resources), our security forces will be drained by natural disaster and resource conflict for years to come.
Latin America: It feels as though we only have two settings for Latin America: complete ignorance or overkill. The recent Cuba news regarding PRC activity on the island and elsewhere in Latin America proves that we cannot simply ignore the region and hope it sorts itself out for fear of inciting backlash through involvement. Nor can we allow ourselves to get so paranoid about our backyard that we greenlight Operation Condor 2.0. Stability in Latin America is critical to our own security (and sanity of domestic politics), but we cannot abandon democracy for stability, that will only perpetuate the cycle of violence and poverty that has created the reality many in Latin America face today. In order to counter PRC influence and presence, we need to focus on three areas: security cooperation, critical infrastructure investment, and (surprise) climate resiliency. Security cooperation in this case focuses both on countering the drug trade but also surveilling PRC intelligence and security operations in Latin America, it’s not about ensuring regime stability. A light but persistent footprint throughout the region, regulated by American human rights laws should help keep us from going too far into a quagmire down south. As for critical infrastructure, telecommunications and ports are our focus. Huawei and its compatriots have made big inroads in Latin America, and where the backbone of PRC surveillance goes, so does the rest of its security and influence apparatus. We made inroads in Europe and even Africa in rooting out Huawei, we can follow suit in Latin America while helping bring better communications infrastructure to the developing world. Ports are just as important for ensuring greater development while limiting PRC influence, additionally, those ports are often critical chokepoints for the fentanyl drug trade. Better to fight the poison at a chokepoint than once it hits American streets. Finally, climate investment recommendations are consistent with the ones I’ve made for South Asia and the Pacific. The green movement in Latin America is huge, but so are polluting Western (and PRC) corporations. The least we can do is protect the rainforest, right? Securing water and trees for everyone goes a long way to winning hearts and minds.
Africa: Africa faces many of the same developing world problems as Latin America, except the cases of poverty, resource loss, crimes against humanity, and corruption are often far more severe. However, Africa also has a burgeoning youth population and countries like Nigeria are leading the charge in developing an African tech sector. I could write entire articles (and I should) on how to help raise the varied and diverse African regions up and out of PRC influence. I only have so much space, so I’ll keep Africa as one subregion here, but understand the most important competition factor here is resource conflict. Colonization made Africa the greatest victim of resource conflict, and as climate change accelerates issues like water shortages and drought, conflict will only become more frequent as a booming population and lack of resources like water and grain collide with bloody result. The best thing the US can do here is expand technology aid and work to improve desalinization, forestry, and modified agriculture efforts to keep conflict at bay until we can replace PRC foreign direct investment and reduce African exposure to predatory CCP lending and strong man diplomacy.
Europe: The war in Ukraine will likely determine much of how Europe approaches China in the next decade. Several EU countries and the UK are grappling with the China problem and are offering competing, and often very lame or unfeasible, strategies to make friends with or counter the CCP. Should Ukraine emerge victories and Russia in shambles, it is very likely that the hawks of Europe will emerge with newfound influence, but the continent will still remain divided by the economic cost of competition (and because Germany remains laughably broken politically). The US should continue what it has been doing, keeping NATO strong in Europe, keeping the Russians in check, and focusing diplomacy on specific partners (like the Dutch) who have an oversized role in specific elements of competition (like semiconductor manufacturing). I’m of the opinion the best thing Europe can do to counter the CCP is keep the Russians down, and the second best thing is to keep Huawei and other PRC tech companies out of their networks, PRC companies out of their banks, and PRC investors out of their strategic ports. These all tie into the other components of our strategy one way or another, but Ukraine remains the big question for how difficult Europe will be when it comes to the CCP.
The Arctic: The Arctic and climate are inseparable, and as any climatologist will tell you, what happens in the Arctic impacts the globe. Competition in the Arctic is twofold: one part comes from the opening of the sea routes and resources from climate change, and the other part comes from the decline of Russian influence and rise of PRC influence in the Arctic as the result of the war in Ukraine. Russian failures in Ukraine have accelerated PRC access and influence in the Arctic, as seen by the recent Arctic maritime security agreement between both countries. Prior to Russia’s implosion, such a deal would have been unthinkable. Moreover, many Russian Arctic units were obliterated in Ukraine earlier in the war. While real PRC presence in the Arctic is likely a 2030s problem (they have to push out beyond the 1st Island Chain first), their political and economic influence is increasingly being felt and the war in Ukraine may determine how fast that influence becomes dominant. Outside of Russia, the other Arctic nations are all US-friendly. While we have our differences on Arctic policy, we can all agree a PRC-friendly Arctic is not in our interests. If we can take the time to focus on securing our Northern flank through infrastructure investment (both military and civilian) and strengthening institutions that help govern the Arctic, then we can more easily focus on ensuring we have the resources and dedication to compete, deter, and win in the Pacific.
Conclusion
I named this strategy Plan Noble after the fictional Spartan team from the Halo universe. I’m sure you think that’s nerdy as hell, but Halo: Reach is a fantastic campaign and Halo: Fall of Reach is one of the best science fiction novels in my opinion. (And besides, how much stuff does DoD name after Star Wars) In the canon, NOBLE team perished during the fall of Reach but through NOBLE’s efforts and sacrifice, the eventual key to victory is safely evacuated off the planet before the Covenant glass the surface. This strategy is titled Plan Noble because you don’t want to have to be put in a position where you’re betting on NOBLE to save the day. With the right plan, properly resourced, you can prevent things from ever getting that dire. Over the last decade, we have squabbled and bit at the edges of decent counter-CCP strategy, never really settling and investing in a specific end state and objectives. We’ve been reactionary, divided, and distracted. Plan Noble combines the our critical objectives with our best combined, competitive advantages, while acknowledging the wide variety of battlefields and atmospheres in which were are competing with the PRC. With Plan Noble, we can make the world unsafe for the Chinese Communist Party.
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