Countering China’s Great Game
- Subject: Spring 2024 Catalog | Political Science | China and the Asia Pacific | Strategy | Society of Military History Conference
- Format:
Hardcover
- Pages:
192pages
- Illustrations:
3 maps
- Published:
April 15, 2024
- ISBN-10:
1682479501
- ISBN-13:
9781682479506
- Product Dimensions:
8 × 5 × 1 in
- Product Weight:
27 oz
Overview
The United States is in the midst of a new cold war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and America is losing. That claim, at the core of Michael Sobolik’s new book Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance, challenges the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom about U.S.-China relations. Officials in Washington are reacting to the CCP and playing defense. Like America’s efforts to contain the Soviet Union in the twentieth-century Cold War, the United States needs a strategic vision to overcome the CCP. Sobolik offers a plan for American victory over the CCP and presents a roadmap to sabotage the crux of the CCP’s foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
At its core, the BRI is not an economic venture. It is a geopolitical gambit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “project of the century” has entered its second phase: leveraging yesterday’s investments for today’s political and military ends. Xi will never do away with the BRI because it is strengthening Beijing’s strategic position from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands to Africa and Latin America. The BRI is the apotheosis of the CCP’s grand strategy. America needs a blueprint to take it down.
Sobolik provides this blueprint by identifying the BRI’s core weakness: imperial overstretch. After identifying China’s penchant for empire-building, he identifies the BRI’s key weaknesses globally and traces them back to the CCP’s vulnerabilities at home. Sobolik’s work offers policymakers a plan to go on the offense and win America’s new cold war.
About the Author
Editorial Reviews
"Michael Sobolik’s new book, Countering China’s Great Game, provides a clear-eyed, comprehensive plan for winning the new Cold War with China and puts forward a convincing argument why that’s the best—if not the only way—to avoid the hot war nobody wants. By laying out the history, character and strategy of the Chinese Communist Party, he explains how Western policies of engagement have failed and why a new strategy is urgently needed. This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand China’s rising threat to the global world order."—Josh Rogin, Washington Post
"Since his time on the Hill, Sobolik has established himself as the conscience of the conservative coalition taking on the Chinese Communist Party. With Countering China’s Great Game, he emerges as a strategist. Beijing, beware!"—Jacqueline Newmyer Deal, President and CEO, Long Term Strategy Group
"Instead of treating Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative as little more than an overblown infrastructure program, Michael Sobolik’s insightful new book highlights the imperial ambitions that lie behind Beijing’s far-flung activities. Unlike many others who have written on the subject, Sobolik goes on the identify the BRI’s key points of vulnerability and to suggest how these can be exploited to impose costs on the Communist Party regime. Recommended reading for anyone involved in the burgeoning debate over America’s strategy for competing with China."—Aaron Friedberg, author of Getting China Wrong and A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia
“In Countering China’s Great Game, Michael Sobolik skillfully and persuasively describes the Chinese Communist Party’s grand strategy to displace the United States. Drawing on close personal experience and a deep understanding of the Party’s system and goals, he gives readers an inside look at the stakes—and how we can fight back.”—Rep. Mike Gallagher, Chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party
"The threat from China represents America's worst national security crisis in decades. Michael Sobolik presents a sober strategy to put the tyrants in Beijing on their heels and ensure the 21st century is an American century. This a serious read from a serious scholar. And I hope all Americans with a stake in U.S. national security read and heed his findings."—Morgan Ortagus, former State Department spokesperson
"How should America handle the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party? In this fascinating new book, scholar Michael Sobolik carefully lays out strategies to understand and ethically push back against Beijing. It's a book well worth reading." —Isaac Stone Fish, author of America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger