After the Cold War, the United States enjoyed a rare moment in geopolitical history, acting as a unipolar power to impose and maintain the liberal international order alongside its allies. But China’s power and influence rapidly grew, creating a taut relationship between two powerful nations. In global politics, the fraught dynamic between a rising and incumbent power is referred to as a Thucydides Trap. As Thucydides wrote, explaining the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BCE: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in [Sparta], made war inevitable.”
U.S. policymakers must carefully consider each move in the adversarial relationship with China. The security dilemma is the spring that closes the Thucydides Trap: Any action reasonably perceived as defensive by one actor can be perceived with equal reason as aggressive by another. When one power shores up its defenses, be it by putting intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962, or by placing Patriot systems in Taiwan in 2023, the other power may feel threatened. Thus, the very moves meant to deter conflict risk provoking the other side and sparking a war in which all participants believe themselves to be the defender. Yet inaction is not an option. Without deterrence, only war is left to prevent an adversary from doing as they please.
Taiwan is where the competition between China and the United States could slide out of control. Much is at stake—the wellbeing of millions of Taiwanese, the economic advantage of controlling the global hub of microchip production, and the crucial but weakening principle of sovereignty. To mitigate the risk of escalation over Taiwan, all parties involved have turned to deterrence.
Most deterrent strategies are cost-based. They discourage aggression by increasing the price an aggressor must pay. But if at any point the cost of invasion falls below what Beijing is willing to expend, China will choose to invade Taiwan. Further, cost-based deterrence will always be haunted by the security dilemma because it has to do with one side’s ability to destroy, degrade, or inflict pain on an adversary’s military personnel, industrial base, or civilian population.
Other deterrent strategies seek to break an aggressor’s will to invade in the first place. The Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to invade Taiwan is shaped by China’s disposable resources, the benefits it perceives of owning Taiwan, and the attractiveness of alternative options. Will-based strategies, for all their nebulosity, can avoid the security dilemma. Lowering Beijing’s willingness to expend lives or capital for control over Taiwan need not be linked to the development of destructive capabilities. A will-based deterrence strategy starts with exploiting the psychological factors driving China’s ambition to expand.
China’s Disproportionate Fear of Its Neighbors
China’s defense establishment has a clear priority: Take Taiwan before 2049—the sooner the better. But Beijing cannot ignore the 14 countries China borders, whose lengthy history of invading inspired deterrent projects such as the Great Wall. Coupled with a lingering sense of victimhood from China’s so-called century of humiliation, its border situation has given shape to a fear of strategic encirclement—a paranoia that outside forces are conspiring to surround China or take its land. The West can create a headache for Beijing by enabling China’s neighbors to protest the territorial disputes China itself has created.
China currently has active or dormant territorial disputes with more than a dozen countries. Beijing has condescended to or preyed on many of their economies, ethnicities, or cultures, and these smaller neighbors have not meaningfully resisted China’s predations. Because their economies are a fraction the size of China’s, it costs the superpower very little to inflict privation or foist favor on them—any protest or pushback can be met with overwhelming economic blowback.
But the United States could displace China’s prominence in its neighbors' economies at a low cost to itself. A new free trade association, aggressive subsidization, or targeted tax advantages from the West could significantly degrade China’s leverage over countries including Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Laos. These countries could use their newfound geopolitical agility to push back against Beijing’s territorial infringements, predatory economic moves, and attempts at cultural subjugation.
The West also can encourage and facilitate collective action among countries that border China. Debt traps and 99-year leases characterize China’s prominent foreign policy vehicle, the Belt and Road Initiative, and are a common experience for Asian countries. China has grown wise to the dangers of excessive debt and would be greatly concerned if its debtors banded together to renegotiate their loans. In fact, given that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund compete for repayments from the same countries, collectively restructuring these institutions' loans could give China a measure of economic security while diluting China’s sway.
Whichever methods the West chooses to ease China’s neighbors away from Beijing’s economic dominion, China’s own fear of encirclement will lend disproportionate weight to these countries’ moves. This is important because strategically insignificant disputes often become symbolically decisive. Tajikistan, for example, clearly is not a significant competitor to China, yet if a newly unfettered Dushanbe complains that Beijing’s new maps are not representative of the 2011 treaty that supposedly resolved their border dispute, China’s own encirclement narrative is what will cause Beijing undue consternation. Overdue objections to China’s unneighborly behavior can fracture the Chinese Communist Party’s will by drawing Beijing's covetous gaze away from Taiwan, even if only for a moment.
Tax Absolute Narratives
Encirclement theory is but one of many CCP narratives that can be turned against China. Beijing has a habit of making absolute statements. It then must spend significant resources matching reality to its claims. China’s zero-Covid myth, for instance, required self-imposed economic and social torture to bend reality into a shape that might resemble Beijing’s boasts.
The West can, without militaristic escalation, increase the price China must pay to keep perceptions in line with its version of reality, both at home and abroad. This will help sap China’s expansionist will. An especially exploitable claim is the CCP stance that Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority is humane and in keeping with international standards. Merely by living up to established principles regarding the protection of political refugees and dissidents, the West can expose the gap between the Uighurs’ lived experience and the party line in Beijing. Right now, China is allowed to tread roughshod over the human rights of Uighur dissidents. Covert repatriation schemes such as Operation Fox Hunt pursue Uighurs living abroad. Exiles and refugees also are plagued by the collateralization of their family members, as well as by China’s online suppression and disinformation campaigns. These efforts affect Uighur exiles even in the United States. By preventing CCP agents from kidnapping political refugees living in the West and shipping them back to China, policymakers can make it harder for Beijing to maintain its illusion of humanity.
Undermining these narratives also could compromise the story Beijing tells about reunification with Taiwan. Just as assertions of party omniscience are shaken by the implausibility of zero Covid, so too are claims of ancestral brotherhood between China and Taiwan undermined by policies of eugenic purification in other formerly wayward provinces. In the same way, promises of political or individual freedom are flattened by reference to the fate of Hong Kong’s nonconformists. It is difficult to justify the decision to invade another country, much less muster the will to do so. Without any militaristic action, the West can confound China’s attempts to do either by publicizing the chasm between reality and Beijing’s flawed narratives.
Perforate the Great Firewall
After an initial period of skepticism and fear, China embraced the internet as a means of monitoring and influencing its own citizens and the world. Taken together, the various means the CCP uses to control the internet within China’s borders comprise what some call the Great Firewall. By manicuring China’s information environment, the party ensures its narratives remain unscrutinized and its missteps remain unknown. Of course, people will always pursue the truth, and many Chinese, at significant personal risk, dodge the Great Firewall to connect with each other and the outside world away from their government’s prying eyes. Western governments, by tweaking a few regulations and subsidizing the development of anti-firewall software, can both frustrate Beijing’s attempts to control media and increase the cost of maintaining the Great Firewall.
One way Beijing controls media is by reserving the right to edit films before they are released in China. Because China’s market is so lucrative, Hollywood rarely questions CCP edits before releasing films to Chinese audiences. In regions in which religious sensitivities would make certain scenes offensive, selective editing is a common practice. But China’s edits go well beyond the bounds of managing cultural preferences. In the 2022 release of Fight Club, the film’s ending is cut and replaced by text informing the audience that the authorities arrested and sent to mental asylums all members of Edward Norton’s conspiracy.
Washington should mandate that if a film produced in the United States will be presented differently around the world at the behest of a foreign government, the studio must include an advisement at the beginning or end of the film notifying viewers about the edits and the nature of the foreign government’s request. Doing so would not infringe on artistic freedoms and would deny Beijing the latitude to pillory Americana before it is viewed by Chinese audiences. Chinese moviegoers and American studios alike would be forced to ask why this apparent censorship occurred. This would create some hairline fractures both in the Great Firewall and Beijing’s party line.
Additionally, to encourage firewall-avoidant internet activity, Western governments should subsidize the development of firewall-evading software, perhaps with the exception of the dark web. The more ubiquitous VPNs become, the weaker the firewall, leaving the natural entropy of information to act on Beijing’s narratives. No Western military action is taken, yet censorship is made apparent to Chinese moviegoers and netizens.
Cost-based deterrence that keeps the price of aggression high without triggering an escalatory spiral is essential to preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. But a separate line of effort should be directed toward will-based deterrence, which seeks to lower the price that an aggressor is willing to pay in the first place. The methods involve little or no military activity and as such carry low risk of triggering the security dilemma. They are relatively cheap and degrade the CCP’s ability to marshal its people for invasion.