America’s Navy,
You live in the land of the blind, comforted in the darkness by your weaponry, your history, and your hubris. You believe you understand the threat and that all your competitors in this new Great Power contest are enveloped in the same blinding fog of future war. But we are not equal: you are at a disadvantage in this game—you are beholden to a past age and must predict and anticipate changes as they proliferate and develop across a world system toeing the edge of collapse, as we rise on its demise.
You struggle with visions of possible futures, believing that sheer force of will and dollars will protect your position in the maelstrom as you gently “transform” to “meet” the threat.
Sadly for you, your linear assumptions are wrong. Your blindness to the nature of the future is not a universal condition, for we have an eye, and with that eye we see much.
You decry our advances in the South China Sea—but do little. You race to build 355 ships—by 2040-something. You proclaim agility and rapid development as core priorities—but take 25 plus years to field the F-35. Your military-industrial-congressional complex lurches in every profitable direction to employ, to please, to self-justify. Adorable.
In China, we have a saying: “Kill with a borrowed knife”—have a third party do what would be . . . inappropriate for you to do yourself. Generally, this involves allies, proxies, or enemies of our enemies; however, in this case, the knife is yours. We will destroy you with strategic terrorism: fears will beget fears, spending, and decline. We will fuel your nightmares, haunting you with visions of fire raining down on your precious aircraft carriers and reinforcing your risk-aversion as you prematurely grieve the death of thousands of sailors in bloody forays against our homeland defenses. You, like our mutual enemy of yore, Imperial Japan, dream of classical maritime battles, testing your mettle against ours—but you close your eyes to the complexity of peer competition after decades of a hegemon’s hubris. You are not prepared for death. You are prepared even less for setbacks. Unlike us.
“If China lost 300 million people in a nuclear war: the other half of the population would survive to ensure victory.” – Chairman Mao
To reiterate, our plan is simple: strategic terrorism. We want to scare you. We want to terrify you that you are being overtaken. We learned much from your Japanophobia in the 1980s. You were so afraid! And then the Japanese bubble burst, the Soviet Union collapsed, and suddenly without firing a shot your greatest rivals were in decline. But that fear of being overtaken lingers, much as it did for your predecessor, the British Empire. Now, you see us and wonder if you can stay on top.
We will stoke that wonder. We will fuel your fears. We will further fortify the South China Sea. We will use our economic heft to displace you, year by year, as the power broker of Asia. We have already co-opted Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia—Laos isn’t far behind—and soon Vietnam will accept that our economy, land border, and control of the South China Sea make its pesky resistance to our designs untenable. All of Asia sees that Taiwan is no longer within your ability to defend—we would decimate any carrier strike groups that dared cross our first Island Chain while rushing to Taiwan’s aid. The Philippines is divided and weak, and we will court President Duterte by massaging his ego and demonstrating to him how fickle and far you are as a partner. Singapore, the only ethnic-Chinese majority country outside of China, will fall in line as your position looks increasingly weak. India will focus on its own growth and domestic politics as Prime Minister Modi deepens the Bharatiya Janata Party’s nationalist agenda in his second term; and, as with Russia, we are fine reaching an agreement with India for reasonable coexistence.
There have been hiccups, such as our overstep in Malaysia, but the inexhaustible Middle Kingdom will prove its economic power and enduring presence in the region. Simultaneously, you, a distant, self-absorbed, and frustrated country, look increasingly unreliable as a partner for Asian nations. We know your naval planners see these same trends, and yet, they are unable to reverse them.
We will amplify your fears. We will barrage your senses until everything is a warning sign. We want you to see every one of our international development projects as a Trojan horse. You expend political capital trying to burn each horse, like you tried with our Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), but when you play with fire . . . you get burned too. As the AIIB situation showed, your economic interests often trump preservation of your relationships, and no one likes a boy perpetually crying wolf.
What’s worse is that you’re a village chief, not a boy. When the villagers see their chief foaming at the mouth with terror in his eyes, they will scatter to the winds, each family fending for itself while their former chief grows ever more paranoid and isolated, as your tantrum against Huawei has shown.
And then we will come. We will poke you, harass you a bit, and spin you up. We will show your villagers how powerless you are—that you can barely manage yourself let alone their security. And then we will go around, with sword and with gold, and convince each of them to join us or cleave themselves off from the international system into national seclusion. Your alliances, the greatest advantage you have accrued in the lee calm of Midway, will melt away as you stew blindly over petty provocations and fret about your decline.
But even more than scaring you into self-destructive behaviors that destroy your partnerships and hollow out the global order, our goal is to make you spend. This is our “Helen of Troy” strategy: the fear that launched a thousand ships. Humans’ fear of loss is, after all, greater than their hopes of gain.[1] You are drawn to the negative, and we will feed it to you. We will push your imperial overstretch, conjuring phantoms and monsters in every shadow and dream.
You see, when panicked, you spend. And you spend lavishly. Woe betide the enemy of the American treasury, right? The arsenal of democracy, the greatest industrial weapon in world history, appears fatigued. But you can prime the pump! You can create jobs! Oh, how you love saying that. Who cares what it’s for or how much it costs, thank goodness the 17th Missouri Congressional District just got 112 defense jobs for $139 million. All those billions and all those jobs will build grand ships, push the boundaries of modern technology, and prepare for the greatest war in world history. Splendid.
Sadly for you, as your domestic politics remain acrimonious and embarrassing, your government will be unable to balance your finances. Budgets—and deficits—will only increase as spending balloons and taxation remains weak. In 20 years, you will have the greatest military in the world and you will be bankrupt.
We will have Ronald Reagan’d you: stoked your fears to induce unsustainable spending levels under the banner of national security. Now you’re on the other side of “Star Wars.” In the 2040s, like Russia in the 1990s, you will have a “beautiful” military rusting away.
Then, we will make our move. We have no desire to fight you as neither of us would gain, but you cannot see that. Your fear is a darkness that confounds and consumes. What our tactical moves will be are unimportant; the key is that we will have forced you, through strategic terrorism, into unsustainable spending, overextension, and ultimate retrenchment. In steep, self-created decline, you will be easily pushed aside as we reclaim the mantle of world’s greatest power.
“But!” you exclaim, “we will contain you, China, before it reaches that point!”
Friends, you are terrible at gray war—as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq can attest. Your binary war-peace thinking is a severe limitation in the coming decades. Your plans are escalators: they bring you to the level of war. Ours are elevators: we go to the level we desire.
We have been surprised, and heartened, by your inability to evolve beyond your antiquated paradigms. America’s Secretary of the Army’s recent recommendation to close the Army War College’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute was refreshingly expected. As soon as Americans can skip out on complex, boring, irregular conflicts, you do. You see them as aberrations, annoyances, before you can fight another “good” war. Your confusion over the littoral combat ship’s purpose, requirements, and capabilities is similarly comforting and reflects a Navy adrift, driven by sunk costs and legacy thinking. You are ill at ease when pushing beyond the methods of fighting established during the Cold War. You do not, will not, and seemingly cannot, understand how to thrive in the gray zone of conflict.
It is our specialty. Our system allows us to throttle risk, to control decision-making tightly and what information our citizens see even more tightly. We will defeat you not through grand battles but through gray zone dominance—the overwhelming accumulation of micro-advantages as you remain fixated on full-scale war and we make inroads in every other domain of power. The Art of War and other classical Chinese teachings are ingrained in us, and they stress maneuver over combat. We will shape and define the environment that leads to your demise. Our vision stretches decades, yours stretches quarters.
“But . . . but . . . Innovation!” you cry.
We love when you say innovation. It makes us giddy. It is theater—the illusion of improvement acted out in scenes of a thousand meetings. One of your officers wrote about the ways in which the U.S. Marine Corps practices self-sabotage. We love this. Your speeches, your memos, your reports, your procedures, your acquisitions—are wondrous for us: slow, conservative, expensive, and imprecise. In an age when we field tens of cutting-edge anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), you have yet to develop a purpose-built ASCM since the Harpoon in the 1970s. Such an inefficient and broken system deserves a bit of reverence. Let’s say it was all a part of the Founding Fathers’ omniscient plan and resist change under that assumption.
En bref, we are bullying you and exploiting the weaknesses in your system. We are preying on your insecurities, fears, and the teenage temper-tantrums your country has executed so well in the last two years. Fear leads to poor decisions and paranoia. Fear leads to isolation. Fear leads to overspending and the bankrupting of American might. Fear culminates in the very loss you first feared.
We would prefer not to fight you in that hollow state two decades from now, but we are okay fighting a splendid little war if it puts the nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism.
In the land of the blind, the One-Eyed Man is King, and we are ready for our crown.
Sun Tzu sends.
Endnotes
[1]. Graham T. Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Scribe Publications, 2017) 50.
