COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2020 by William Collins First published in the United States by Harper in 2020 Copyright © H.R. McMaster Maps © 2020 by Springer Cartographics LLC Cover design by Milan Bozic Cover photograph by Ray Kachatorian H. R. McMaster asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Information on previously published material appears here. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008410407 Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008410414 Version: 2020-05-27

For Katharine, Colleen, and Caragh—the real KCC detectives,

who inspired much more than bedtime stories, including this book

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Special Characters

Introduction

Part I: Russia

Chapter 1: Fear, Honor, and Ambition: Mr. Putin’s Campaign to Kill the West’s Cow

Chapter 2: Parrying Putin’s Playbook

Part II: China

Chapter 3: An Obsession with Control: The Chinese Communist Party’s Threat to Freedom and Security

Chapter 4: Turning Weakness into Strength

Part III: South Asia

Chapter 5: A One-Year War Twenty Times Over: America’s South Asian Fantasy

Chapter 6: Fighting for Peace

Part IV: Middle East

Chapter 7: Who Thought It Would Be Easy? From Optimism to Resignation in the Middle East

Chapter 8: Breaking the Cycle

Part V: Iran

Chapter 9: A Bad Deal: Iran’s Forty-Year Proxy Wars and the Failure of Conciliation

Chapter 10: Forcing a Choice

Part VI: North Korea

Chapter 11: The Definition of Insanity

Chapter 12: Making Him Safer Without Them

Part VII: Arenas

Chapter 13: Entering the Arena

Conclusion

Notes

Recommended Reading

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by H. R. McMaster

About the Publisher

PREFACE

THIS IS not the book that most people wanted me to write. Friends, agents, editors, and even family, asked me to write a tell-all about my experience in the White House to confirm their opinions of President Donald Trump. Those who supported the president would have liked me to depict him as an unconventional leader who, despite his brash style, made decisions and implemented policies that advanced American interests. Those who opposed the president wanted an account to confirm their judgment that he was a bigoted narcissist unfit for office. And they wanted me to write it immediately, so that the book might influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Although writing such a book might be lucrative, I did not believe that it would be useful or satisfactory for most readers. The polarization of America’s polity and that of other free and open societies is destructive, and I wanted to write a book that might help transcend the vitriol of partisan political discourse and help readers understand better the most significant challenges to security, freedom, and prosperity. I hoped that improved understanding might inspire the meaningful discussion and resolute action necessary to overcome those challenges.

SPECIAL CHARACTERS

Chapter 3: An Obsession with Control

: “Middle Kingdom”

: “After a long split, a union will occur; after a long union, a split will occur”

: “All under heaven”

Chapter 4: Turning Weakness into Strength

: “If names cannot be correct, then language is not in accordance with the truth of things; and if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success”

: “to shoot accidently while polishing a gun”

Chapter 12: Making Him Safer Without Them

: “red-colored unification”

: “masters of money”

Introduction

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

—SAUL BELLOW

ON FRIDAY, February 17, 2017, I was in my hometown of Philadelphia on the way to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the findings of a study I had commissioned on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine in 2014. As the lieutenant general director of the clunkily named Army Capabilities Integration Center, my job was to design the future army. To fulfill that responsibility, I sought to understand how Russia was combining conventional and unconventional military capabilities along with cyber attacks and information warfare—what we were calling Russia new-generation warfare (RNGW). The study recommended how to improve the future army’s ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat any forces that employed similar capabilities against the United States or our allies. We modeled the effort on General Donn Starry’s study of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Starry’s findings helped drive a renaissance in the post–Vietnam War army based on changes in fighting doctrine, training, and leader development. It was clear to me that Russia, China, and other nations had studied the U.S. Army after the lopsided U.S. victory over Saddam Hussein’s armed forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the initially successful U.S. military campaigns during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As a trained historian as well as a soldier, I believed that the old saying “The military is always prepared to fight the last war” was wrong. Militaries that encountered the greatest difficulties at the onset of war studied their recent past only superficially.¹ Learning from history, I believed, was essential if the U.S. military were to maintain its competitive advantages over potential enemies.

I intended to begin the discussion at the institute with a description of how RNGW combined disinformation, denial, and disruptive technologies for psychological as well as physical effect. Russian president Vladimir Putin and his generals wanted to accomplish their objectives below the threshold of what might elicit a military response from the United States and countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). RNGW seemed to be working, and we were likely, I thought, to see more of it. The stakes were high. Russian aggression in the last decade had taken many forms, from cyber attacks to political subversion to assassination and the use of military power such as the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Russia had changed the borders of Europe by force for the first time since the end of World War II. It seemed likely that Putin, emboldened by perceived success, would become even more aggressive in the future.

It was warm for February. I was enjoying the walk down Walnut Street when my phone rang, displaying a partially blocked Washington, DC–based number. It was Katie Walsh, the White House deputy chief of staff. She asked if I could travel to Florida that weekend to interview with President Trump for the position of assistant to the president for national security affairs. I said yes and called my wife, also named Katie, as I walked the last block. Katie was used to phone calls that suddenly changed our lives. This was one of them.

I had scheduled a premeeting with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Trudy Rubin. Trudy was always ahead of other analysts in her understanding of the complex problem set in the Middle East. I benefited from our conversations about the region. She predicted many of the difficulties that the United States encountered in the second Iraq War and characterized our unpreparedness for those challenges as “willful blindness.”² We both agreed that while many often debated whether the United States should have invaded Iraq, the better question was who thought it would be easy and why. Trudy was about to return to Syria to report on the humanitarian catastrophe associated with the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The most difficult part of that campaign, we agreed, would be how to get to a sustainable political outcome in Syria and Iraq that led to the enduring defeat of ISIS and an end to the humanitarian catastrophe across the Middle East. I told her in confidence about the unexpected phone call I had just received. She replied that she hoped I would be selected. Trudy was not a supporter of President Donald Trump, but he was the elected president, and there was work to be done. She and I both felt that, in recent years, the balance of power and persuasion had shifted against the United States and other free and open societies. Much of that shift, we believed, had been self-inflicted due to failures to understand fully the emerging challenges to American security, prosperity, and influence.

Service in our army gave me the opportunity to work alongside dedicated and courageous men and women in our armed forces, intelligence agencies, and diplomatic corps to implement the policies and strategies that came from Washington, DC. I would soon enter my thirty-fourth year of service as an officer, and I was considering retirement. I felt privileged to have served, especially in command positions. I had spent nearly half my career overseas and over five years in combat. I would look back fondly on the tremendous, intangible rewards of service, especially being a part of endeavors much larger than myself and being a member of teams that took on the quality of a family, in which the man or woman next to you was willing to give everything, even their own life, for you. I was reluctant to retire because I felt a sense of duty to my fellow servicemen and women, many of whom were still serving in battlegrounds overseas.

Service in combat was rewarding, but the experience was also difficult and sometimes frustrating. It was difficult because one bears witness to the horror of war and the sacrifices of young men and women who fight courageously and selflessly for our nation and for one another. It was frustrating because of the wide gap between the assumptions on which some policies and strategies were based and the reality of situations on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Serving as national security advisor might give me an opportunity to help a new, clearly unconventional president challenge assumptions and close gaps between reality overseas and fantasy in Washington. Trudy knew that I was apolitical; in the tradition of Gen. George C. Marshall (the architect of victory in World War II), I had never even voted. If selected, I would do my duty under President Trump as I had under five other presidents.

I BELIEVED we were at the end of the beginning of a new era. At the end of the last era, the United States and other free and open societies had reason to be confident. The Cold War ended in victory over Communist totalitarianism. The Soviet Union collapsed. Then, during the 1991 Gulf War, America put together a broad international coalition and demonstrated tremendous military prowess to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army and free Kuwait. But after the end of the Cold War, America and other free and open societies forgot that they had to compete to keep their freedom, security, and prosperity. The United States and other free nations were confident—overconfident. Overconfidence led to complacency. I bore witness to that growing confidence.

In November 1989, our cavalry regiment was on patrol near Coburg, West Germany, the town where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in the sixteenth century. As a captain in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment, I saw the need to compete as obvious. Our regiment patrolled a stretch of the Iron Curtain that divided democracies and dictatorships in Europe.³ It was really an iron complex, one designed to keep the subjugated peoples in and freedom out. Fortifications began well east of the actual border between the two German states—with a ten-foot-tall, steel-reinforced fence covered in electric trip wires. Then there was a road. East German border guards drove their jeeps along that road, monitoring the soil next to it for footprints. A steep ditch prevented would-be escape vehicles from plowing through. Beyond the ditch stood two more fencerows, separated by a one-hundred-foot-wide minefield. Those who made it past the mines then had to cross a three-hundred-foot-wide no-man’s-land. Some of our sergeants had seen East German guards shoot unarmed civilians there. It was a formidable system. But it was artificial. And then, on November 9, 1989, it collapsed. A confused East German Politburo member announced that East Germans could use all border crossings to “permanently exit” the nation. With people gathering at the gates near Coburg, guards stepped aside and threw the gates open. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of East Germans flooded across. Scouts from Eagle Troop, on patrol that day, received countless hugs, bouquets of flowers, and bottles of wine. There were tears of joy. Meanwhile, Berliners were celebrating as they chiseled away at the wall that had divided them since 1961. The wall fell. The East German government withered away. The Soviet Union broke apart. We had won the Cold War.

But then came a hot war far away from the Iron Curtain. In 1989, Saddam Hussein’s first decade as Iraq’s dictator was coming to a close. He should have been fatigued. In 1980 he had started a disastrous eight-year war with Iran that killed more than 600,000 people. Since seizing power in 1979, he had employed a Stalinist model of repression, murdering more than another million of his own people in a country of 22 million, including an estimated 180,000 Kurds in a genocidal campaign in which he used poison gas to massacre entire villages of innocent men, women, and children. But in 1990, Saddam felt more underappreciated than fatigued. Had he not defended the Sunni Muslim and Arab world against the scourge of Iran’s Shia Islamist revolution? Did not Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states owe him a debt of gratitude—and cash to cover the cost of that war?

Saddam’s tanks rumbled toward Iraq’s southern border in July 1990, and on August 2, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq was in London when the first of more than three hundred thousand Iraqi troops poured into Kuwait to make that small but wealthy nation Saddam’s nineteenth province. President George H. W. Bush and his team got a coalition of thirty-five nations to agree that the annexation “would not stand.”

Those same troopers who were patrolling the East-West German border in November 1989 arrived in Saudi Arabia almost exactly one year after they watched the Iron Curtain part. Three months later, Eagle Troop was leading the so-called left hook, a massive envelopment attack, to crush Saddam’s Republican Guard and kick the door open to Kuwait with a blow from the western desert.

As our troop moved out on February 26, heavy morning fog dissipated. It was replaced by high winds and blowing sand. Visibility was limited. Our scout helicopters were grounded. It was just after 4 p.m. We moved in formation. One scout platoon, Lt. Mike Petschek’s First Platoon, led with six Bradley armored fighting vehicles, which carry a scout squad and were armed with a 25 mm chain gun and a TOW antitank missile launcher. The other scout platoon, Lt. Tim Gauthier’s Third Platoon, moved along our southern flank. Our tanks moved behind the lead scouts in a nine-tank wedge, with my tank in the center. Lt. Mike Hamilton’s Second Platoon was to my tank’s left and Lt. Jeff DeStefano’s Fourth Platoon was to my tank’s right. Our 132 troopers were well trained and confident, in their equipment and in one another—men bound together by mutual trust, respect, affection. As a twenty-eight-year-old captain, I was proud to command that extraordinary team.

The troop was not very high-tech by twenty-first-century standards. We had three of these new devices called Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. But given that they worked only sporadically, we navigated mainly by dead reckoning in the flat, featureless desert. Because the troop had no maps, leaders did not know that they were paralleling a road that ran through a small abandoned village and then into Kuwait. We also did not know that we were entering an old Iraqi training ground recently reoccupied by a Republican Guard brigade and an armored division. Their mission was to halt our advance.

The Iraqi brigade commander, Major Mohammed, knew the ground well. Mohammed had attended the Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the 1980s, when the United States was cultivating an ill-conceived relationship with Iraq to balance against Iran. Mohammed’s defense was sound. He fortified the village with anti-aircraft guns and put his infantry in protected positions. He took advantage of an imperceptible rise in the terrain that ran perpendicular to the road running east to west through the village to organize a “reverse slope” defense. He built two engagement areas, or “kill sacks,” on the eastern side of the ridge, emplaced minefields, and dug in approximately forty tanks and sixteen BMPs, Russian-made infantry fighting vehicles, on the back side of the ridge. His plan was to destroy us piecemeal as we moved across the crest. Hundreds of Iraqi infantry occupied bunkers and trenches between the armored vehicles. He positioned his reserve of eighteen more T-72 tanks and his command post along another subtle ridgeline farther east.

At 4:07, Staff Sergeant John McReynolds’s Bradley drove on top of an Iraqi bunker positioned to provide early warning. Two enemy soldiers emerged and surrendered. McReynolds’s wingman, Sgt. Maurice Harris, was scanning into the village through the blowing sand when his Bradley came under fire. As Harris returned fire with his 25 mm cannon, Lieutenant Gauthier moved forward and fired a TOW antitank missile. Thus began twenty-three minutes of furious combat.

As our tanks fired nine high-explosive rounds simultaneously into the village, we received permission to advance to the 70 Easting, a north–south running grid line on a map. We switched to a tanks lead formation. I instructed Second and Fourth Platoons to “follow my move” and we passed through the scouts’ Bradleys. As our tank came over the crest of that imperceptible rise, our gunner, Sgt. Craig Koch, and I identified the enemy simultaneously: eight T-72 tanks in prepared positions faced us at close range. Koch announced, “Tanks direct front.” The crew acted as one. The gun recoiled, and the breech dropped. The enemy tank exploded in a huge fireball. Pfc. Jeffrey Taylor loaded a tank-defeating “sabot” round, which thrusts a fourteen-pound depleted uranium dart out of the gun tube at two kilometers a second. He armed the gun and yelled, “Up!” as he threw his body against the turret wall to get out of the gun’s recoil path. Our tank crew destroyed the first three tanks in about ten seconds. When our other eight tanks crested the rise, they joined in the assault. In about a minute, everything in the range of our guns was in flames. Our tank driver, Spec. Chris Hedenskog, informed me, “Sir, we just went through a minefield.” He knew that it would be dangerous to stop right in the middle of the enemy’s kill sack, the area in which all his tanks could concentrate their fire. We had a window of opportunity to shock the enemy and take advantage of the first blows we had delivered, to turn physical advantage into psychological advantage. So, our tanks drove around the antitank mines, with the Bradleys and other vehicles following in our tracks. We ran over antipersonnel mines, but they popped harmlessly. Our training was paying off. As McReynolds recalled, “We did not have to be told what to do; it just kinda came natural.”

Just as we cleared the western defensive positions, our executive officer, John Gifford, radioed, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re at the limit of advance; you’re at the 70 Easting.” I responded, “Tell them we can’t stop. Tell them we have to continue this attack. Tell them I’m sorry.” Stopping would have allowed the enemy to recover. I felt that we had the advantage and had to finish the battle rapidly. The army’s cavalry culture encourages initiative, and the stakes were too high not to take advantage of the hard blow we had just delivered.

We crested a second rise and entered the reserve’s circular perimeter. Iraqi tank commanders were trying to deploy against us. They were too late. We destroyed all eighteen tanks at close range. Then we stopped. There was nothing left to shoot. Our fire support officer, Lt. Dan Davis, called in a massive artillery strike on fuel and ammo stocks farther east. There was some more fighting to do, but the main attack had lasted twenty-three minutes.

Eagle Troop destroyed a much larger enemy force that had all the advantages of the defense and took no casualties. Our fight was a lopsided victory in a larger battle and war that were lopsided victories. As confidence grew based on the military victory in the Gulf War, analysts undervalued the qualitative advantage of U.S. forces and the narrow political objective of simply returning Kuwait to the Kuwaitis. They assumed that future enemies would repeat Saddam’s mistake of trying to fight the U.S. and coalition military forces on our own terms rather than asymmetrically. And, as many reflected on the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they forgot how the United States and its allies and partners had competed based on a clear understanding of their adversary, what was at stake, and the long-term strategy designed to ensure their security, promote prosperity, and extend their influence.

IN RETROSPECT, what those cavalry troopers experienced in Coburg, Germany, and what would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting in the Iraqi desert, marked the end of an era.⁴ It was then, in the 1990s, that American leaders, flush with victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, forgot that the United States had to compete in foreign affairs. Coburg was also the birthplace of Hans Morgenthau, who fled the Nazis in 1937 and became one of the fathers of the discipline of international relations. In 1978, in his last coauthored essay with Ethel Person, titled “The Roots of Narcissism,” Morgenthau lamented preoccupation with self in foreign policy because it led to alienation from other nations and aspirations that exceeded the limits of ability. It was there in Coburg, near Morgenthau’s birthplace, that American confidence grew as the Cold War ended and the world entered what the political analyst Charles Krauthammer called “the unipolar moment.” America’s stature as the only superpower encouraged narcissism, a preoccupation with self, and an associated neglect of the influence that others have over the future course of events. Americans began to define the world only in relation to their own aspirations and desires.⁵

Over-optimism and a preoccupation with self inspired three flawed assumptions about the new, post–Cold War era. First, many accepted the thesis that the West’s victory in the Cold War meant “the end of history,” what political philosopher Francis Fukuyama described as “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”⁶ Although Fukuyama warned that ideological consensus in favor of democracy was not a foregone conclusion, many assumed that an arc of history guaranteed the primacy of free and open societies over authoritarian and closed societies, and of free-market capitalism over authoritarian, closed economic systems. Ideological competition was finished.

Second, many assumed that old rules of international relations and competition were no longer relevant in what President George H. W. Bush hoped would be “a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle governs the conduct of nations.” The post–Cold War world was unipolar. Russia was in disarray after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China’s economic miracle was just beginning, and Chinese Communist Party leaders adhered to paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s directive to hide their capabilities and bide their time. An emerging condominium of nations would vitiate the need to compete; all would work together and through international organizations to solve the world’s most pressing problems.⁷ Great power competition was passé.

Third, many asserted that American military prowess demonstrated during the 1991 Persian Gulf war manifested a revolution in military affairs (dubbed RMA) that would allow the U.S. military to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” over any potential enemy. If any adversary had the temerity to challenge a technologically dominant U.S. military, the war would result in a rapid, decisive U.S. victory.⁸ Military competition was over.

Those three assumptions underpinning U.S. policies not only were over-optimistic, they also led to complacency and hubris. Hubris, an ancient Greek term defined as extreme pride leading to overconfidence, often results in misfortune. In Greek tragedies, the hero vainly attempts to transcend human limits and often ignores warnings that predict a disastrous fate. In the case of the new, post–Cold War era, warnings that might have drawn into question the three assumptions I’ve just outlined went unheeded by too many in the U.S. policy, political, and military establishments.

First, autocracy was making a comeback. By the end of the 1990s, market-oriented reforms failed in Russia, resulting in the election of Vladimir Putin, a little-known director of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB (the successor organization to the KGB). Writing in the Hoover Digest in April 2000, David Winston, a strategic advisor to congressional leadership, warned that the newly elected Russian president “will be strongly tempted to revert to the traditional paths of autocracy and statism” and “may see both the fate of Russia and his rule through the traditional prism of military prowess and conquest.” But then, autocracy had never really gone away. Despite many predictions of its imminent collapse or implosion, the despotic regime in North Korea adapted to the loss of aid from the defunct Soviet Union, endured a devastating famine, extorted money and goods from the West and South Korea in exchange for a weak nuclear agreement, and transitioned the dictatorship from Kim Il-sung, known as the “Great Leader” since 1948, to his son Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader.” Meanwhile, a nascent reform movement in Iran was stifled as the Islamist revolutionaries tightened their grip on their theocratic dictatorship.

Second, a new great power competition was emerging. China had paid close attention to the 1991 Gulf War and was deeply embarrassed by the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, during which the United States responded to Chinese missile threats meant to intimidate Taiwan with a massive show of force. The two U.S. aircraft carrier groups that converged on the strait exposed the inferiority of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy compared to the U.S. fleet. As China’s economy grew, so did the PLA. And as their military grew, China began to flex its muscles. On April 1, 2001, fighter pilot Wang Wei maneuvered his PLA Navy J-8 fighter aggressively over the South China Sea in an effort to intimidate the crew of a U.S. Navy EP-3 signals intelligence aircraft. After two passes at the U.S. aircraft, he misjudged his approach, colliding with its nose and propeller. The J-8 broke into pieces, and the U.S. aircraft made an emergency landing on Hainan Island. Wang Wei’s body was never recovered. The Chinese detained the twenty-four U.S. crew members for eleven days.⁹ The demonstration of U.S. military prowess in the Gulf War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis, as well as increasing tension in the South China Sea, spurred China to undertake the largest peacetime military buildup in history.

Third, as China began to challenge so-called American military dominance, increasingly potent jihadist and Iranian state-sponsored terrorist organizations attacked asymmetrically, avoiding military strength and exploiting weakness. The jihadist terrorist movement grew after the Afghan War of the 1980s and the Gulf War. Its leaders used a perverted interpretation of Sunni Islam to inspire recruits and rationalize violence against the “far enemies,” the United States and Europe, and the “near enemies,” Israel and Arab monarchies. Mass murder of the defenseless was the preferred tactic. On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani terrorist who attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, drove with his Jordanian co-conspirator into the parking garage underneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. After building their weapon in a Jersey City apartment, they had packed the 1,200-pound bomb into a yellow Ryder van. Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured. Yousef had hoped that his explosion would topple Tower 1, which would then fall into Tower 2 and kill the occupants of both buildings, which he estimated to be about 250,000 people. Three years later, in 1996, Hezbollah terrorists (with Iranian backing and support) attacked U.S. military forces housed in the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding 372. In April 1998, Al-Qaeda issued a fatwa (a ruling on a point of Islamic law) from its safe haven in Afghanistan calling for the indiscriminate killing of Americans and Jews everywhere. Then, in August of that year, the terrorist organization turned words into action with simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding more than 5,000. Twelve of those killed in Kenya were U.S. citizens. But Al-Qaeda was not finished. On October 12, 2000, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole was docked in Aden, Yemen, for refueling. At around 11:18 a.m., a fiberglass boat laden with C4 explosives sped toward the port side and exploded on impact, blowing a forty-by-sixty-foot hole in the ship’s port side and killing seventeen sailors.¹⁰ By the turn of the century, the director of central intelligence, Adm. James Woolsey’s observation in 1993 that “Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes,”¹¹ seemed particularly prescient. But in the new century, the free and open societies of the world would confront both.¹²

Those and other harbingers of an emerging geopolitical landscape much different from the idealized new world order might have inspired a fundamental reassessment of U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy and sparked a questioning of the assumptions underpinning the optimistic view of the post–Cold War world. They did not. Indeed, President Bill Clinton wrote the following in the preface to the December 2000 National Security Strategy report:

As we enter the new millennium, we are blessed to be citizens of a country enjoying record prosperity, with no deep divisions at home, no overriding external threats abroad, and history’s most powerful military. Americans of earlier eras may have hoped one day to live in a nation that could claim just one of these blessings. Probably few expected to experience them all; fewer still all at once.¹³

At the turn of the century, the United States was therefore set up for a rude awakening of tragic proportions. Like Icarus of the ancient Greek legend, U.S. leaders disregarded admonitions against over-optimism and complacency. Icarus’s father instructed him to fly neither too low, lest the sea’s dampness clog his wings, nor too high, lest the sun’s heat melt them. But Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he tumbled into the sea and drowned. Before the mass murder attacks of September 11, 2001, America was flying too high.

In the new century, three shocks and disappointments undermined American confidence. First, the September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda mass murder attacks in New York, Washington, and over a field in Pennsylvania hit like a sudden earthquake. The lives of nearly three thousand innocents were lost; many more suffered physical and psychological wounds. The attacks inflicted an estimated $36 billion in physical damages alone, with even higher costs accumulated when one considers the broader effect the attacks had on the American and global economies.¹⁴ Second, the unanticipated length and difficulty of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cost of those wars in blood and treasure, came like slow, rolling aftershocks from 9/11. Third, the 2008 financial crisis had the effect of a tsunami earthquake. It began with subterranean rumblings caused by subprime mortgages and unregulated use of derivatives (contracts based on overvalued homes and bad loans). When the tidal wave hit, it created the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929. Housing prices fell 31 percent, more than during the Depression. The U.S. Treasury disbursed nearly $450 billion to banks to stimulate the economy, and approximately $360 billion to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG.¹⁵ The crisis passed, but two years later, unemployment was still above 9 percent and an unknown number of discouraged workers gave up looking for work.

OVER THE seven years following the 9/11 attacks, optimism and confidence eroded and, after 2008, began to give way to pessimism and resignation. In 2009, a new president implemented a foreign policy based mainly on his opposition to the Iraq War and animated by a worldview skeptical of American interventions and activist foreign policy abroad. In a June 2013 speech during which he announced the planned withdrawal of 33,000 troops from Afghanistan, President Barack Obama cited the cost of the war and the “rising debt and hard economic times” that followed the financial crisis. He stated that “the tide of war is receding” and that it was “time to focus on nation building here at home.”¹⁶ He saw the war in Iraq as part of a broader historical pattern of U.S. interventions. After a retrospective interview with President Obama in the waning days of his second term, Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg observed that President Obama “consistently invokes what he understands to be America’s past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness.” The president and many of those who served him were sympathetic to the New Left interpretation of foreign affairs, one that considers so-called Western capitalist imperialism as the primary cause of the world’s problems. “We have history,” President Obama said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”¹⁷ An underlying premise of the New Left interpretation of history is that an overly powerful America is more often a source of, rather than part of the solution to, the world’s problems. To return to the Icarus analogy, under the Obama administration, we began to fly too low.

Across multiple administrations, U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy has suffered from what we might derive from Morgenthau’s essay “Strategic Narcissism”: the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans. The two mind-sets that result from strategic narcissism, overconfidence and resignation, share the conceit of attributing outcomes almost exclusively to U.S. decisions and undervaluing the degree to which others influence the future. The over-optimism that energized U.S. foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration contributed to an underappreciation of the risks of action, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pessimism about the efficacy of U.S. engagement abroad that influenced U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration led to an underappreciation of the risks of inaction, such as the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 or the decision to forgo military reprisals for the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in 2013. Both forms of strategic narcissism were based mainly on wishful thinking and the definition of problems as one might like them to be as a way to avoid harsher realities. I experienced the effect of strategic narcissism up close. I was often on the receiving end of ill-conceived plans disconnected from the problems they were ostensibly meant to address. That is because strategic narcissism leads to policies and strategies based on what the purveyor prefers, rather than on what the situation demands. The assumptions that underpin these policies and strategies often go unchallenged as they provide a deceptive rationale for folly.

As I got on the flight to Palm Beach, Florida, to be interviewed by a man I had never met, I thought that, if given the opportunity, I would try to help restore America’s strategic competence. And I thought that the first step might be to begin with historian Zachary Shore’s concept of strategic empathy, what Shore describes as “the skill of understanding what drives and constrains one’s adversary,”¹⁸ as a corrective to strategic narcissism. During the interview at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump seemed sympathetic to my observation that the United States had not competed effectively in recent years and that, as a result, determined adversaries had gained strength and our power and influence had diminished. As defense expert Nadia Schadlow observed in her 2013 essay “Competitive Engagement,” “being successful in a competition requires knowing and understanding both one’s competitors and oneself.”¹⁹ I began with those tasks when I assumed my duties as national security advisor just three days after the call I received in Philadelphia. I asked Schadlow to join me as senior director for national security strategy to develop options that would enhance America’s ability to compete more effectively and shift the balance back in favor of the United States and the free and open societies of the world.

There was a lot of work to do. Two days after I arrived in Washington, I held an “all hands” meeting in which I shared with the national security staff my view that our strategic competence had eroded based, in part, on our narcissistic approach to foreign policy and national security strategy. Our job was to provide the president with options and integrated strategies that combined elements of national power with efforts of like-minded partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.

First, great power competition was back with a vengeance, highlighted by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine, intervention in Syria, and the sustained campaign of political subversion against the United States and the West. And it was clear that China under Chairman Xi Jinping was no longer hiding its capabilities and biding its time as the People’s Liberation Army accelerated island building in the South China Sea, tightened control of its population internally, and extended its diplomatic, economic, and military influence internationally.

Second, the threat from transnational terrorist organizations was greater than it was on September 10, 2001. Terrorist groups were increasing their technological sophistication and lethality. They were also growing in magnitude due to slick recruiting and the perpetuation of conflict in and around the two epicenters of the war in Afghanistan and the war in Syria.

Third, hostile states in Iran and North Korea were becoming more dangerous. The new dictator in Pyongyang aggressively pursued nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. An old dictator in Tehran expanded support for terrorists and militias across the Middle East and beyond in a way that prolonged destructive wars and increased the threat to Israel, Arab states, and U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Fourth, new challenges to security were emerging in complex arenas of competition from space to cyberspace to cyber-enabled information warfare to emerging disruptive technologies. Moreover, a range of interconnected long-range problems demanded an integrated effort now including the environment, climate change, energy, and food and water security.

As we began to frame those challenges as the first step toward developing integrated strategies, we paid particular attention to improving our competence. We emphasized the importance of history. Ignorance or misuse of history often led to the neglect of hard-won lessons or the use of simplistic analogies that masked flaws in policy or strategy. Understanding the history of how challenges developed would help us ask the right questions, avoid mistakes of the past, and anticipate how “the other” might respond.

Supposition about the future should begin with an understanding of how the past produces the present. Policies and strategies must be based on the recognition that rivals and enemies will influence the future course of events. How “the other” responds will depend, in part, on their own interpretation of history. As former secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger observed, all states “consider themselves as expressions of historical forces … what really happened is often less important than what is thought to have happened.”²⁰ And more than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu wrote, “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”²¹ So, in order to overcome strategic narcissism, we must strive to understand our competitors’ view of history as well as our own.

Still, it does no good to improve our strategic competence if the United States and our partners do not possess the confidence to overcome new and pernicious threats to our free and open societies. To rebuild and sustain that confidence requires communicating clearly what is at stake and describing how the proposed strategies are designed to achieve sustainable outcomes at acceptable costs. This is what British prime minister Winston Churchill described as “an all-embracing view which presents the beginning and the end, the whole and each part, as one instantaneous impression retentively and untiringly held in the mind.”²² None of the competitions discussed in this book will be resolved quickly; strategies, while remaining flexible and adaptable to changing conditions, must be sustained over time. Consistency and will are, therefore, important dimensions of strategic competence.

But our will is diminished. As our foreign policies swung from over-optimism to resignation, identity politics interacted with new forms of populism. That interaction divided us and diminished confidence in our democratic principles, institutions, and processes. We might apply empathy to ourselves as well as to the other and, as we discuss the challenges we face, seek common understanding, and work together to secure freedom and prosperity for future generations. It is my hope that this book might contribute to those discussions.

MASKIROVKA . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country . . . RUSSIAN JOURNALIST CRITICAL OF CHECHEN WAR IS KILLED . . . WEB BECOMES A BATTLEGROUND IN RUSSIA-GEORGIA CONFLICT . . . We only responded after 150 Russian tanks moved into Georgian territory and started open aggression … . . . RUSSIAN GENERAL PITCHES “INFORMATION OPERATIONS” AS A FORM OF WAR . . . Putin is playing chess and we are playing marbles . . . CONFRONTATION IN CRIMEA . . . You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country . . . MH17 DOWNED BY RUSSIAN MILITARY MISSILE SYSTEM . . .PUTIN SAYS RUSSIA MUST PREVENT “COLOR REVOLUTIONS” . . . U.S. MOVES TO BLOCK RUSSIAN MILITARY BUILDUP IN SYRIA … A FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD . . . KREMLIN CRITIC NAVALNY ARRESTED . . . But I just asked him again, and he said he absolutely did not meddle in our election . . . TRUMP ADDS SANCTIONS TO RUSSIA OVER SKRIPALS . . . JOINT EXERCISE: VOSTOK . . . Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of dollars for energy into Russia . . . RUSSIA FOLLOWS U.S. OUT OF LANDMARK NUCLEAR WEAPONS TREATY . . . THE MUELLER REPORT IS RELEASED . . . We assess there is a standing threat from the G.R.U. and other Russian intelligence services . . . RUSSIAN POLICE ARREST HUNDREDS OF PROTESTERS IN MOSCOW . . . The post-Putin Russia is being born today . . . PUTIN PROPOSES SWEEPING CHANGES TO RUSSIAN CONSTITUTION . . . TRUST IN PUTIN DROPS AS RUSSIAN ECONOMY STAGNATES . . . TRUMP BERATED INTELLIGENCE CHIEF OVER REPORT RUSSIA WANTS HIM RE-ELECTED . . .

CHAPTER 1
Fear, Honor, and Ambition: Mr. Putin’s Campaign to Kill the West’s Cow

The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and most thoroughly, carefully, attentively, and skillfully making use without fail of every, even the smallest, “rift” among the enemies.

—V. I. LENIN

GENEVA IS the ideal city for a confidential diplomatic meeting. It is easy to blend in there. The city hosts more than three thousand official meetings annually, attended by more than two hundred thousand delegates. Government airplanes flow in and out of the airport. Convoys of black limousines and SUVs crisscross the city. Officials of friendly and not-so-friendly nations arrive at each other’s consulates, shake hands, and sit across from one another at long conference tables. At the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and other international organizations, my meeting in February 2018 with Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia, fell into the not-so-friendly category.

Patrushev asked to meet me soon after I became national security advisor in early 2017. I agreed. I thought it important to open a routine channel of communication between the White House and the Kremlin below the level of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Russia is, of course, a nuclear power, and a strained relationship is better than no relationship, if for no other purpose than to prevent misunderstandings that might increase the chance of war. There was much to discuss.

By 2017, it was clear that Russia was pursuing an aggressive strategy to subvert the United States and other Western democracies. Russian cyber attacks and information warfare campaigns directed against European elections and the 2016 U.S. presidential election were just one part of a multifaceted effort to exploit rifts in European and American society through propaganda, disinformation, and political subversion. As social media began to polarize the United States and other Western societies and pit communities against each other, Russian agents conducted cyber attacks and released sensitive information. Although Russian leaders routinely denied responsibility, the Kremlin was reportedly directing a sophisticated campaign.¹ Russia also used cyber attacks and malicious cyber intrusions to create vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, such as in the energy sector. For example, by early 2018, the United States knew that Russia had conducted the NotPetya cyber attack that first infected Ukraine’s government agencies, energy companies, metro systems, and banks.² It spread later to Europe, Asia, and the Americas, costing ten billion dollars in losses and damages around the world.³

Having studied the evolution of Russia new-generation warfare (RNGW) for years, I looked forward to talking with Patrushev to understand better the motivations behind this pernicious form of aggression that combined military, political, economic, cyber, and informational means. The day after our meeting with Patrushev, I gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference pledging that “the United States will expose and act against those who use cyberspace, social media, and other means to advance campaigns of disinformation, subversion and espionage.” During my year as national security advisor, we had worked hard to impose costs on Russia. I hoped to convince Patrushev of the dangers associated with Russia’s continued implementation of a strategy that pushed our two nations along a path toward worsening relations and potential conflict.

The potential for conflict with Russia was growing. The civil war in Syria was a particular concern. In March 2019, Russian general Valery Gerasimov cited the Syrian Civil War as a successful example of Russian intervention to “defend and advance national interests beyond the borders of Russia.”⁴ The war was a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia had supported the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of the conflict in 2011. In August 2013, the Syrian regime used poison gas to kill more than fourteen hundred innocent civilians, including hundreds of children, but it was not its first use of chemical weapons, nor would it be the last. From December 2012 to August 2014, the Syrian regime used them against civilians at least fourteen times. Despite President Barack Obama’s declaration in 2012 that the use of these heinous weapons to murder civilians was a red line, the United States did not respond. President Putin likely concluded that America would not react to aggression. By the end of spring 2014, an emboldened Putin had annexed Crimea and invaded Eastern Ukraine. And then, in September 2015, Russia intervened directly in the Syrian Civil War to save Assad’s murderous regime. After another massacre with nerve agents at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017, President Trump ordered the U.S. military to strike Syrian facilities and aircraft with fifty-nine cruise missiles.⁵ By 2018, Russian-supported forces fighting for Assad’s regime were converging with American-supported forces fighting the terrorist group ISIS. When I met Patrushev, the danger of a direct clash between Russians and Americans on the ground in Syria was not only more likely—it had already happened.⁶

On February 7, 2018, the week prior to the Geneva meeting, Russian mercenaries and other pro-Assad forces reinforced with tanks and artillery attacked U.S. forces and the Kurdish and Arab militiamen they were advising, in northeastern Syria. The mercenaries were from the company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s cook,” a man indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and sanctioned by the Trump administration for his role in sowing disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.⁷ It was an ill-conceived and poorly executed attack. U.S. forces and their Syrian Democratic Forces partners killed more than two hundred Russian mercenaries while suffering no casualties.⁸ Eager to suppress negative news prior to the forthcoming presidential election, the Kremlin lied about the number of casualties suffered. Putin wanted to win the election by the widest possible margin. News of a costly defeat brought on by Russia’s need to finance reconstruction of a country it had helped destroy would not help achieve this. The ultimate purpose of the Russian-led attack was to seize control of an old Conoco oil plant that promised to generate revenue and defray the costs of the war and reconstruction. No battle like that between Russians and Americans had ever occurred, even during the height of the Cold War.

A year had passed since Patrushev suggested we meet. I had delayed in deference to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who wanted to make a personal assessment of Russia’s intentions first. Tillerson had hoped that his preexisting relationship with President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which he developed as chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, might deliver some improvement in U.S.-Russian relations. He wanted to offer Putin an “off ramp” in Ukraine and Syria based on the assumption that those interventions, including U.S. and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia, might entice Lavrov to negotiate an eventual Russian withdrawal. In Lavrov’s case, it was not clear that he could deliver even if the possibility for improved relations existed.

Lavrov’s approach to foreign policy was old-Soviet style, reflexively anti-Western and suspicious of new initiatives. Lavrov invariably accused the United States and the West of instigating the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, as well as large-scale protests in Russia in 2011. It seemed that Lavrov had neither the independence of mind to come up with solutions nor the latitude to make basic decisions. By early 2018, it was clear that Tillerson’s valiant efforts to find areas of cooperation with Russia had foundered. It was past time to establish a direct channel of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, other than the occasional phone calls and meetings between Trump and Putin. Since Putin had centralized power in an unprecedented way, even for a country with a long history of authoritarianism, it was important to have a relationship with someone close to Putin himself. Patrushev, Putin’s right-hand man, who occupied a position that is the Russian equivalent of national security advisor, was the ideal candidate.⁹

No one on our team believed that the Geneva meeting would solve our problems with Russia. Events of the following month confirmed that belief. Soon after our meeting, Russia used a banned nerve agent in an attempted murder of a former intelligence official in Salisbury, United Kingdom, and Putin made a chest-thumping speech in which he announced new nuclear weapons. We hoped, however, that this new channel of communication between the White House and the Kremlin might lay a foundation for some bilateral diplomatic, military, and intelligence engagement with Russia across both governments. Discussions between the U.S. National Security Council staff and the Secretariat of the Security Council of Russia had existed under prior administrations. We could foster a common understanding of each nation’s interests and an awareness of where those interests diverged or converged. The two countries might then manage their differences and find some areas for cooperation. Mapping our interests might be a first step toward avoiding costly competitions or dangerous confrontations like the recent clash in Syria. At the very least, we might prepare more fully for the president’s meetings with Putin to secure favorable outcomes.

I traveled with Dr. Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia, and Mr. Joe Wang, director for Russia. During our long flight on the “big blue plane,” as we referred to the air force Boeing 757, we discussed Vladimir Putin, Russian policy, and the man whom I would soon meet, Nikolai Patrushev. Fiona is one of the foremost experts on Russia under Putin. In her book Mr. Putin, coauthored with Clifford Gaddy, she observed that “Putin thinks, plans, and acts strategically.” She also observed, however, that “for Putin, strategic planning is contingency planning. There is no step-by-step blueprint.” Our other travel companion, Joe, a bright young State Department civil service officer of ten years, judged that prospects for a near-term improvement in U.S.-Russian relations were dim mainly due to Mr. Putin’s need for an external foe to prevent internal opposition. This need to direct the Russian people’s attention away from internal problems drove an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, while the need to generate support for that foreign policy amplified rhetoric designed to conjure the external enemy as a menace. In his March 2018 speech announcing new nuclear weapons, Putin even showed “automated videos depicting” nuclear warheads descending toward the state of Florida.

On the plane, I recalled what I knew about Patrushev. He and Putin had a lot in common. Both entered the KGB in the 1970s. Patrushev succeeded Putin as director of the FSB from 1999 to 2008. Putin, Patrushev, and other prominent former KGB officers who moved into influential Kremlin positions after the 2000 Russian presidential elections believed that they were the ultimate patriots. Putin trusted and relied on Patrushev. Both men understood that, especially in Russia, knowledge is power. Their base of knowledge allowed them to form a protection racket that propelled Putin to the pinnacle of power and kept him there for more than two decades. The future Russian president’s climb began in the late 1990s, when he was head of the GKU, the government’s inspectorate charged with uncovering fraud and corruption in government and federal agencies. He used that position to build dossiers on Russian oligarchs, powerful businessmen who had accumulated great wealth during the era of Russian privatization in the 1990s. He detailed their finances and business transactions. Putin had dirt on everyone. Because the rule of law had broken down in Russia, the oligarchs regarded him as an arbiter whose persuasive power derived from holding them hostage. Putin prevented infighting that might have collapsed the corrupt system and crushed all of them. When he became the head of the FSB in July 1998, he named Patrushev as head of a new Directorate of Economic Security. He and Patrushev then used their skills as KGB case officers to collect and monopolize information. In exchange for respecting the oligarchs’ property and allowing them to amass wealth, Putin expected them to act as his agents, use their business activity to promote Russian interests abroad, and comply with direction from him, their case officer, and protector.¹⁰

Fiona, Joe, and I landed in Geneva in the early morning of February 16, 2018. Ted Allegra, an experienced diplomat and gracious host who was the chargé d’affaires ad interim of the U.S. Mission in Geneva, greeted us. We held an informative video telephone conference with the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman. Huntsman, a wise statesman, politician, and businessman who had served previously as governor of Utah, U.S. ambassador to Singapore, and, most recently, U.S. ambassador to China, worked daily in a difficult and hostile environment. The ambassador was supportive of the Patrushev meeting and the opening of a channel between Patrushev’s Secretariat and the NSC staff. He described how Russian harassment of embassy officials had intensified in recent months. But he took a long view of U.S.-Russian relations and felt that we should lay the groundwork for improved relations. I met Mr. Patrushev outside the U.S. consulate. As he exited the limousine, he evinced the self-assurance one might expect from an old KGB official. Two of his senior staff, a deputy secretary of his Security Council and a senior aide responsible for the U.S.-Russia relationship, along with a staff officer serving as a note taker, accompanied him.

After introductions, I offered coffee to the Patrushev delegation—none of them touched the light refreshments we had on hand—and we sat down across from one another. I welcomed the delegation and, after mentioning my interest in Russian history and literature, reviewed the purpose of the meeting and the sustained dialogue that was meant to follow it: to develop mutual understanding of our interests. I asked Mr. Patrushev to begin. He spoke for the better part of an hour. His version of the Kremlin’s view of the world revolved around three main points. First, he portrayed Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine as defensive efforts to protect ethnic Russian populations from what he described as Ukrainian far-right extremists and U.S. and European attempts to engineer a pro-European Union and, therefore, an anti-Russian government in Kiev. Second, he described the expansion of NATO countries and the rotation of NATO forces into areas that Russia considered traditional spheres of influence as threatening. Third, he argued that the United States, its allies, and its partners had increased the terrorist threat across the greater Middle East through ill-conceived interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.¹¹ Finally, perhaps in anticipation of my comments, he flatly denied attacking the 2016 U.S. presidential election or attempting to subvert Western democracies. None of what Patrushev said was surprising, and I did not want to waste time rebutting his assertions or denials. Instead, I endeavored to elevate the discussion to generate mutual understanding of our vital interests in four areas.

First, I noted that both our countries were interested in the prevention of a direct military conflict. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine was particularly dangerous to peace, not only because it was the first time since World War II that borders within Europe were changed by force, but also because Russia’s continued use of unconventional forces in Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe could escalate.¹² One of the historical parallels to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was Austria-Hungary’s invasion of Serbia in 1914, which triggered World War I. World War I was a powerful analogy because it was a war in which none of the participants would have engaged had they known the price they would pay in treasure and, especially, blood. Many people wanted war, but no one got the war he or she wanted. Moscow and Washington both needed to acknowledge the risk that the next Russian attempt might trigger a military confrontation, even if Russia intended to act below the threshold of what might elicit a military response from NATO. I wanted Patrushev to see the U.S. and European Union sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea as more than punitive; they were meant to deter Russia from future actions that could lead to a destructive war. I thought that Patrushev might agree that we were in a dangerous, transitional period. Communicating the United States’ vital interests and our determination to counter Russian aggression would disabuse Kremlin leaders of any belief that they could exploit perceived American complacency and wage new-generation warfare without risk.

I also wanted Patrushev to understand that the United States was awake to the danger of Putin’s playbook and, in particular, RNGW. Russia’s actions in Crimea and Ukraine were analogous to a long-standing Russian military strategy known as maskirovka, or the use of tactical deception and disguise. Like maskirovka, Putin’s playbook combined disinformation with deniability. The new playbook added disruptive technologies and the use of cyberspace to enable conventional and unconventional military forces. And, where possible, the Kremlin fostered economic dependencies to coerce weak states and deter a response to aggression. The parallels to previous dangerous periods, not only in the nineteenth but particularly in the twentieth century, were striking. In recent years, Russia had acted aggressively, counting on American complacency based on the self-delusion that great power competition was a relic of the past. Consider Secretary of State John Kerry’s comments: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”¹³ I thought it important to let Patrushev know that we were prepared to compete and would no longer be absent from the arena.

Second, both our nations sought to preserve our sovereignty or the ability to shape our relationships abroad and govern ourselves at home. Russia’s sustained campaign of disinformation, propaganda, and political subversion was a direct threat to our sovereignty and that of our allies. I suggested that it was in the Kremlin’s interest to stop this activity because Russian actions would unite Americans and other Western societies against Russia. Their recent efforts to influence election outcomes had failed or backfired. For example, Russian disinformation aimed against Emmanuel Macron in France during the 2017 presidential election increased support for the candidate and probably helped Macron win the presidency. Another example of Russia’s heavy-handed tactics backfiring was the failed October 2016 coup in Montenegro that intended to prevent that country’s accession to NATO. Russia’s meddling actually accelerated Montenegro’s admission to NATO and its application for membership in the European Union. Finally, Russian efforts to convince the Trump administration to lift economic sanctions in 2017 failed as the administration instead sanctioned more than one hundred individuals and companies in response to Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea and aggression in Eastern Ukraine. More sanctions would follow under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.¹⁴ During my conversation with Patrushev, I joked that Russia’s efforts to divide Americans and meddle in our election made the imposition of severe sanctions on Russia the only subject that united Congress. In fact, the first major foreign policy legislation to emerge from the U.S. Congress after President Trump took office was a sanctions bill on Russia, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which passed in the Senate in a 98–2 vote after flying through the House by a 419–3 margin.¹⁵ At this, Patrushev cracked a smile, perhaps to acknowledge that we both were very much aware of Russia’s subversive activities.

Third, both nations must protect our people from jihadist terrorist organizations. That is why it did not seem to be in Russia’s long-term interests to provide weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan or to spread disinformation that the United States supported terrorist groups. Such actions strengthened organizations that posed a common threat to both our countries. Moreover, Russia’s support for Iran, Iran’s proxy militias, and Bashar al-Assad’s forces in their brutal campaign in Syria not only perpetuated the humanitarian and refugee crisis, but also fueled a broader sectarian conflict that strengthened jihadist terrorists like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. These terrorist organizations draw strength from the fear that Iranian-backed Shia militias generate among Sunni communities, allowing them to portray themselves as patrons and protectors of those communities. I hoped that Patrushev might see that Russia’s support for Iran only reinforced jihadist terrorist recruitment and support among Sunni Muslim populations.

Finally, I raised the subject of how Russia seemed to act reflexively against the United States even when cooperation was in its interests. I used the case of Russia’s circumvention of UN sanctions against North Korea as an example. In addition to the direct threat of North Korean nuclear missiles to Russia itself, a nuclear-armed North Korea might lead other neighboring countries like Japan to conclude that they needed their own nuclear weapons. Moreover, North Korea had never developed a weapon that it did not try to sell. It had already tried to help Syria develop an Iranian-financed nuclear program in an effort that was only thwarted by a September 2007 Israeli strike on the nuclear reactor under construction near Dayr al-Zawr, Syria. Ten North Korean scientists were reportedly killed in the strike.¹⁶ What if North Korea sold nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations? What nation would be safe?

Patrushev listened but showed no discernible reaction. After a break, we agreed to charge our teams with mapping our interests and preparing materials for presentation to Presidents Trump and Putin in advance of their next meeting. I departed Geneva convinced of the importance of our work. I realized, however, that relations were unlikely to improve due to Putin’s motivations, his objectives, and the strategy he was pursuing.

When he assumed the presidency at the turn of the century, Putin worked to strengthen the system that had put him there. His overarching goal was to restore Russia’s status as a great power. He would be patient, estimating that Russia would need fifteen years to build strength before it was ready to challenge the West.¹⁷ Indeed, approximately fifteen years later, he annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine, and intervened in the Syrian Civil War.

OUR EFFORT to map Russian and U.S. interests as a way of managing our relationship addressed only one dimension of the challenge before us. That is because Putin, Patrushev, and their colleagues in the Kremlin are motivated as much by emotion as by calculations of interest. As the Athenian historian and general Thucydides concluded twenty-five hundred years ago, conflict is driven by fear and honor as well as interest.¹⁸ President Putin and those, like Patrushev, whom he brought with him into the Kremlin were shaken by the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka USSR, aka Soviet Union) and feared the possibility of a “color revolution” in Russia. They were proud men whose sense of honor had been insulted by the West’s victory in the Cold War and whose livelihoods depended on the Soviet system. Putin described the breakup of the empire and the end of Soviet rule in Russia as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” one that not only was a “genuine drama” for those who suddenly found themselves outside Russia, but also caused problems that “infected Russia itself.”¹⁹ The breakup resulted in the loss of half of the former Soviet population and almost a quarter of its territory. At the height of Soviet dominance, Russian influence extended as far west in Europe as East Berlin. Since the USSR’s collapse, Russia had lost control of nearly all of Eastern Europe. Ethnic Russians were scattered across the newly independent successor states of the USSR, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia. Russians who remember Soviet greatness, including Putin, Patrushev, and their KGB colleagues, watched as their former vassal states, unshackled from Communist authoritarian control, liberalized and eagerly joined other free and open societies under the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Soviet Union had a truly global reach, penetrating into Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Throughout Communist states, Russians were often looked up to as big brothers in an ideological war—or at least that was how many Russians imagined their Communist brethren viewed them. But then men like Putin and Patrushev saw their mighty empire, one of two global superpowers, fall to the status of a struggling regional power—and it stung. Once Putin achieved the presidency, he set about restoring Russia’s lost grandeur, a process that is still under way. Above all, Putin fears an internal threat to the kleptocratic political order he has built with the oligarchs and his cronies in the KGB. To allay fear and restore honor, he has consolidated his base of power internally and gone on the offensive against Europe and the United States.

By the time Putin became president, the cheerfulness associated with the prospect of transforming post-Soviet Russia into a successful state with a booming economy had given way to gloom. In the 1990s, Russian efforts to transition to a market economy proved unable to overcome the complete collapse of the Communist system. Greedy apparatchiks, members of the Soviet bureaucratic political apparatus, were empowered in the wake of that collapse. Because market reforms threatened their grip on power, Russian politicians led a backlash against free-market reformers. The failure to either establish an adequate legal framework or to eliminate Soviet-era bureaucracy made the transition to a market economy even more difficult. The final straw was the financial crisis of 1998, when the Russian ruble lost two thirds of its value. The failure of market reforms and the rise of the oligarchs created a system that was not only fragile, but also ideal for Putin and those who retained political control through the post-Soviet transition to consolidate their power. As journalist (and later Canadian foreign minister) Chrystia Freeland observed, Russia was “an ex-KGB officer’s paradise.” Under Boris Yeltsin’s government, the Siloviki (hard-line functionaries of the Soviet-era Ministry of the Interior, the Soviet Army, and the KGB) comprised only 4 percent of the government. Under Putin, it grew to 58.3 percent. Fear of losing control as the post-Soviet economy and social structure were collapsing propelled the Siloviki into power. And Putin, Patrushev, and their Siloviki colleagues wanted Russia to be feared again.²⁰

Putin, Patrushev, and the Siloviki did not view U.S. assistance in the post-Soviet period as it was intended. The United States wanted to assist Russia with the traumatic transition and reduce dangers and complications. Under the Freedom Support Act, the United States aimed to increase security by dismantling nuclear weapons through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, provide food aid, and support Russia’s transition with $2.7 billion in appropriated funds and technical assistance. However, Putin and the Siloviki viewed U.S. assistance as an affront to Russian sovereignty and an effort to exploit Russian weakness. In their telling, their former enemy lorded its Cold War victory over Russian heads, insisting on reforms that left their nation in economic meltdown. In a 2015 speech to leaders of the FSB, Putin stated that “Western special services continue their attempts at using public, nongovernmental and politicized organizations to pursue their own objectives, primarily to discredit the authorities and destabilize the internal situation in Russia.”²¹

Putin made a strong debut as president. Recognizing the connection between foreign policy and popularity at home, he ferociously prosecuted a war in Chechnya against separatists and terrorists who had conducted a series of attacks against Russian civilians. That war, which caused an estimated twenty-five thousand civilian deaths between 1999 and 2002, inspired only praise in Russia and weak statements of disapproval from the West. But Putin’s fears and suspicions of unrest and opposition grew as he witnessed the so-called color revolutions in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine in 2003 and 2004, and in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, which toppled undemocratic regimes and led to the election of new presidents. He vowed that protests like those would never hit Russia: “For us, this is a lesson and a warning, and we’ll do everything so it never happens in Russia.” But they did. His anxiety may have peaked in 2012–2013, during widespread protests sparked by a rigged election in which he “won” 63.6 percent of the vote, according to Russian media.²² Protests returned in 2017 and 2018, concerning corruption and an increase in the retirement age. Then, in the summer of 2019, massive protests erupted in Moscow following the removal of opposition candidates from the ballot in the Moscow city Duma elections.

Although the color revolutions and the protests in Moscow were based on the populations’ desire for freedom and improved governance, Putin saw U.S. and European hands behind them.²³ Fear and the sense of lost honor were mutually reinforcing and would continue to drive his foreign ambition. To protect himself from internal opposition and restore Russia to greatness, Putin revived Russia’s nationalist mission. He portrays Russia as unafraid and designs his foreign policy to intimidate neighbors and subvert Western democracies.

RNGW BECAME Putin’s playbook for surviving while weakening competitors. Russia does not have the power to compete directly with the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. By all measures, the combined economies of the United States and European nations dwarf Russia’s economy. The European Union and the United States had a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $36.5 trillion in 2017; Russia’s GDP was a meager $1.5 trillion. Russia’s GDP per capita in 2017 was approximately $10,750, roughly one sixth of the U.S. GDP per capita and ranking below far less powerful countries such as Chile, Hungary, and Uruguay. Russia’s economy is also woefully undiversified, with oil and gas products comprising 59 percent of all exports, leaving it vulnerable to shifting oil prices in a year that saw a 48.1 percent decline in crude oil prices. That same year, in 2014, the Russian ruble declined 45.2 percent relative to the U.S. dollar. Though the Russian economy improved under Putin, with real income doubling between 1999 and 2006 due in large measure to rising oil prices, Putin’s creation of institutions and a system to maintain his exclusive control impeded economic growth and modernization. Sanctions in response to Russian aggression did not help. But corruption is the greatest impediment to investment and economic growth; Russia ranks 135th globally on the Corruption Perceptions Index.²⁴

Nor are demographic trends in Russia’s favor. In the past three decades, due to declining fertility rates, Russia’s population dropped from 148 million in 1991 to 144 million in 2018. In addition to a fall in the birth rate, despite government incentives like payments to mothers and childcare services, declining migration also contributed to the population drop. Russia’s population is expected to fall to 132.7 million by 2050. Health is also poor due to risky behaviors such as excessive drinking and smoking. In 2019, life expectancy in Russia was seventy-two years, with a one-in-four chance of a Russian man dying before the age of fifty-five. This is equivalent to life expectancy in developing nations such as Nepal and Bhutan.²⁵

But, consistent with what they did as KGB case officers, Putin and Patrushev seemed less interested in building Russia up than in tearing other nations apart. In an old Russian joke, a farmer has only one cow and hates his neighbor because he has two. A sorcerer offers to grant the envious farmer a single wish, anything he wants. “Kill one of my neighbor’s cows!” he demands.²⁶ We might think of President Putin as the farmer with only one cow. To kill his neighbors’ cows, Putin employs sophisticated strategies designed to achieve objectives below the threshold that might elicit a concerted response from either the targeted state or others, such as the NATO alliance.

Rather than build Russia up to a position of predominance, Putin wants to drag others down, weaken rival states, and unravel alliance networks that give those states strategic advantages. In a 2013 article, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s General Staff (the Russian equivalent of the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), argued that “the very ‘rules of war’ have changed.” He added that “non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals have grown and, in many cases, exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness [sic].”²⁷ These comments became known as the “Gerasimov Doctrine.” Whether under the moniker of Russia new-generation warfare, the Gerasimov Doctrine, or hybrid warfare, Putin’s playbook combines disinformation and deniability with the use of disruptive technologies to target states’ strengths and exploit their weaknesses. It also entails cultivating economic dependencies, especially on Russian-supplied energy, while brandishing and using improved, unconventional, conventional, and nuclear military capabilities. With this playbook, Putin aims to kill his neighbor’s cow and restore Russia’s relative power.

TO UNDERSTAND the sophistication of the Kremlin’s strategy, it is worth examining more closely one of the issues I raised with Patrushev: Russian interference in other nation’s domestic politics. Efforts in 2016 to subvert democracy in Ukraine, Montenegro, and the United States demonstrated the range of actions available in Putin’s playbook.

Russian propaganda has been described as a “firehose of falsehood” that spews rapid, continuous, and repetitive disinformation.²⁸ Typically, successful disinformation and propaganda campaigns prioritize consistency in messaging. Russia under Putin, however, abandoned consistency because the aim was not to make audiences believe something new but to question just about everything they heard; the purpose was to disrupt, divide, and weaken societies that Putin saw as competitors. The Kremlin uses many tools to fulfill that purpose, such as direct financial support of fringe political parties at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Russian disinformation is designed to shake citizens’ belief in their common identity and in their democratic principles, institutions, and processes by manipulating social media, planting false stories, and creating false personas. Russia also uses media arms such as the television network RT (formerly Russia Today) and the news agency Sputnik to broadcast a steady stream of disinformation. RT has a $300 million annual budget for broadcasting propaganda that looks like legitimate news in multiple languages. The network has more subscribers on YouTube than Fox News, CBS News, or NBC News.²⁹ RT and other Kremlin-sponsored media emphasize conspiracy theories designed to raise doubts over the reliability of real reporting as well as the virtue and effectiveness of democratic governance. Furthermore, as part of a number of influence mechanisms known as “active measures,” even Russian leaders often make patently false statements to reinforce these disinformation efforts. The repetitive nature of these narratives is intended to portray a certain point of view as a popular perception. Additionally, the targets of this information are no longer limited to audiences at home and in the West, but are expanding into regions such as Africa, in an effort to establish Russia as a global superpower by fostering wide influence.³⁰

Corrupting elections is only one part of the broader effort to kill the cow of confidence in democratic processes and institutions. After multiple attempts at engineering election outcomes across a decade, the Kremlin and its intelligence arms, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), improved and modified their objectives and approach. In 2004, Russian support for Viktor Yanukovych’s presidential candidacy in Ukraine not only consisted of over three hundred million dollars in funding but also probably included the poisoning of his main opponent, Viktor Yushchenko. In a runoff election between the two candidates, efforts to assist Yanukovych included ballot stuffing and the busing of voters from one polling station to another to cast multiple ballots. The GRU and SVR succeeded in throwing the election to Yanukovych, but their brazen actions jump-started what became known as the Orange Revolution. Ukrainians protested against the rigged elections. The Ukrainian Supreme Court ruled the runoff results invalid, and Yushchenko, still in pain and permanently disfigured from the poisoning, was elected in a new runoff election held under the watchful eyes of more than thirteen thousand foreign observers.³¹

Five years later, in 2009, the Kremlin succeeded in engineering another Pyrrhic victory in Moldova for an anti-European Union party.³² That party could not form a government, however, and a European-friendly party won in fresh elections later that year. Still, the GRU kept refining its methods. Returning to Ukraine in 2010, Russia finally succeeded in helping Viktor Yanukovych secure a victory in the Ukrainian presidential election. But in 2014, it failed to get him reelected, despite a massive effort that combined election influence operations with cyber warfare (including coordinated cyber attacks to fake vote totals and infect election servers).³³ Amid protests and with the country on the brink of a civil war, Yanukovych was ousted, a move the Kremlin denounced as a “coup.” Following that, the pro-European Union candidate Petro Poroshenko won in a special election. After 2015, Russia expanded attacks on democratic elections in NATO and European Union countries and, in 2016, the U.S. presidential election. Although the Kremlin often fell short of the outcomes it wanted, efforts to subvert democratic processes in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Montenegro, Italy, Bulgaria, Austria, Spain, Malta, France, and the Czech Republic contributed to its principal goals of weakening citizens’ confidence and polarizing their societies.³⁴

The Kremlin has learned to tailor disinformation campaigns to the target country. In smaller countries less able to resist Russian efforts, such as Montenegro, a country of 640,000 people on the Adriatic Sea, the Kremlin made audacious attempts to determine an election outcome. In large, more distant countries like the United States, Russia prioritized undermining confidence in democratic institutions and processes. Disinformation and sabotage in Montenegro and in the United States, both in 2016, reveal how the Kremlin customizes its campaigns based on opportunities, risks, and the ability of the target country to resist and retaliate.

“The smaller we are, the more vulnerable we are,” Montenegrin president Milo Dukanovic observed. In 2016, the Kremlin applied a broad range of new-generation warfare capabilities to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO and the European Union. Montenegro would be the last piece completing the jigsaw puzzle representing NATO’s control of the Adriatic coast. In the run-up to the October parliamentary election, Russian state entities directed funds to the parties challenging Mr. Dukanovic’s candidacy for president. Russia spread disinformation on social media and conducted cyber attacks against government and news websites. Russian agents felt especially emboldened in Montenegro, a small country with a large Slavic ethnic minority that tends to feel a kinship with ethnic Russians. If the election results did not go the Kremlin’s way, Russian agents were ready to initiate a violent coup d’état, assassinate Dukanovic, and install a pro-Russia government. On Election Day, Dukanovic was the projected winner.³⁵

The coup failed. The night before, Montenegrin authorities arrested twenty Serbian and Montenegrin citizens. After the arrests, Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, revealed that Serbian law enforcement had uncovered the plot and passed the information on to the Montenegrin authorities.³⁶ Vucic soon received a visit from an angry Nikolai Patrushev. Serbia was supposed to support Russia’s efforts in the Balkans. In 2017, the Montenegrin High Court tried fourteen suspects, including two members of the GRU in absentia. Russia’s heavy-handed approach failed to determine the outcome of the elections or inhibit Montenegro’s application to NATO. Even though opposition parties sympathetic to Russia burned NATO flags, Montenegro’s parliament voted 46–0 to become the twenty-ninth member of the alliance, joining officially in June 2017. Montenegro applied for membership in the European Union not long afterward. On May 9, 2019, the court found all fourteen co-conspirators, including the two GRU agents, guilty of plotting the coup.³⁷

Russian interference continued to push west, as reports surfaced about Russian agents using social media to influence the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. Most analysts concluded that Russia also tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States, but recognizing limitations on its ability to do so, it focused primarily on polarizing America’s polity and undermining confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes. It succeeded.

Conditions in America were ripe for polarization. Many Americans were frustrated with politicians who did not seem to understand them and the problems they faced. Transformations in the global economy had left many without jobs. Though there were nearly nine million more jobs in the United States in 2016 than in 2007, the gains were not evenly distributed. Many white Americans, 700,000 of whom lost jobs over those nine years, were upset about their economic outlook. Furthermore, some remained impoverished in the wake of the housing and financial crises of 2008–2009. Others were burdened with student debt. Many voters were weary of protracted and indecisive wars overseas or disappointed that government remedies for problems, such as access to health care, had not delivered as advertised. People in neighborhoods depopulated after the departure of manufacturing jobs were vulnerable to crime and drug addiction, particularly a growing opioid crisis. Some neighborhoods became “food deserts” as businesses closed and people lost access to affordable and nutritious food.*³⁸ Those left behind were angry over increasing income disparity and other inequities in services such as education. There was a crisis of confidence in America, and Russia took full advantage.

Donald Trump in the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party appealed to a frustrated electorate looking for iconoclastic candidates. Sanders, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, had nontraditional views. The most progressive candidate in the race, he advocated for universal health care, tax hikes for the rich, free college education, and climate change legislation. His views appealed to young voters disillusioned by their work prospects and mounting student debt. In the 2016 presidential primaries, Sanders captured 29 percent more votes among those under the age of thirty than either Trump or Hillary Clinton.³⁹

Trump was a threat to the Republican Party establishment just as Sanders was to the Democratic Party establishment. While many were appalled by his rhetoric and personal behavior, other voters found in Trump what they thought the country needed: an antiestablishment candidate with wholly unconventional views who spoke his mind. They liked that he was “capable of saying anything to anyone at any time and anywhere.”⁴⁰ Colleen Kelley, an associate professor of rhetoric, observed that a democratic socialist from Vermont and a billionaire from New York City both took advantage of disenfranchised voters who were tired of establishment politicians whom they regarded as corrupt, out of touch, and incompetent.

Democratic and Republican political party establishments opposed the two unconventional candidates. As the general election began, many Republicans, distraught over Trump’s nomination as their presidential candidate, signed “Never Trump” letters. At the Republican convention, “Never Trump” delegates made a failed attempt to revise the convention’s rules package to block Trump’s nomination. Similarly, party leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) undermined Sanders to smooth the path for former First Lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to receive the nomination. Members of the DNC highlighted less favorable aspects of Sanders, such as his religious beliefs, affinity for socialist policies, and soft spot for Communist dictators. Divisions were apparent not only between the Republican and Democratic Parties, but also within them, and the Kremlin was quick to exploit those divisions.

Two years earlier, the Kremlin had intensified its use of the internet to widen political and social discord in the United States. It had learned from previous efforts, and by 2016, conditions were ideal for its refined cyber-enabled influence campaigns. The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a front organization for the GRU, turned the social network ecosystem invented in the United States against the American people, their democratic system, and their common identity. The IRA used Facebook (including its Instagram), Twitter, Google (including its YouTube, G+, Gmail, and Google Voice), Reddit, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, and Meetup to post content or support false personas. Russian agents even used music apps and games like Pokémon Go to reinforce themes and messages. The IRA maximized the potential of Facebook’s features, including Ads, Pages, Events, Messenger, and even Stickers. Cumulatively, it reached 126 million people on Facebook, posted 10.4 million tweets on Twitter, uploaded more than 1,000 videos to YouTube, and connected with more than 20 million users on Instagram.⁴¹

The IRA was persistent and sophisticated. It used vulnerabilities in the U.S. information ecosystem to exploit fissures in society. Facebook and Instagram were perfect platforms for persistent messaging to amplify divisive issues. Agents cultivated strong ties within social media groups with content designed to gain approval. They also inserted content intended to drive groups to extreme positions, sometimes pitting members against one another or against members of other groups. Some IRA content cultivated support for U.S. policy favorable to Russia, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria or Afghanistan. Russian agents recruited witting and unwitting American accomplices. The IRA and its abettors used Twitter to bend reactions to current events in divisive ways, using “click farms” to manufacture popularity and draw attention to extreme messages. On critical topics, the IRA created “media mirages,” interlinked ecosystems that surround audiences with a cacophony of manipulated content. The GRU used digital marketing best practices, evolving the page logos and typography over time.⁴²

Russian manipulation was effective because of social media companies’ business models, their blind avarice, and their narrow focus on functionality without due consideration for how their platform could be used for nefarious purposes. Because tech companies prioritize holding users’ attention to expose them to more ads, the companies’ algorithms do not prioritize truth or accuracy, but instead help disseminate fake news and disinformation. The algorithms that determine the presentation of content in social media encourage further polarization and extreme views. For example, YouTube algorithms, in suggesting which videos to watch next, guide users toward more extreme and polarizing content. Those who interact on network platforms self-segregate into homogenous groups that share beliefs on contentious issues such as gun control, climate change, and immigration. Liberals interact with liberals and conservatives interact with conservatives. The most divisive and emotional topics amplify different rather than common views. The internet and social media thus provided the GRU with a low-cost, easy way to divide and weaken America from within.⁴³

Russian efforts to discredit Clinton in favor of her Democratic rival Sanders and in favor of the candidacy of Donald Trump were connected to the overall objective of weakening American society through racial, religious, and political polarization. While Russian disinformation showed a clear preference for Trump and a concerted effort to discredit Hillary Clinton, the majority of the content focused on socially divisive issues such as immigration, gun control, and race. The IRA’s main effort was to foment racial division, which it accomplished by amplifying white militia content while creating content for black audiences that highlighted the mistreatment of black Americans by police. The IRA began producing videos toward that end in September 2015. Of 1,107 videos across 17 channels, most content, an astounding 1,063 videos across 10 channels, was related to Black Lives Matter and police brutality.⁴⁴

The IRA even tried to use race and anti-immigration sentiment to support fringe groups advocating for Texas and California to secede from the United States, using the same playbook Russian agents had used in support of the Brexit movement (which culminated in the 2020 departure of Britain from the European Union). It is likely that the GRU pulled that playbook out of KGB archives. In 1928, the Soviet-led Comintern (Communist International), an organization founded to spread Communist revolution globally, planned to recruit southern blacks to advocate for “self-determination in the Black Belt.” By 1930, the Comintern had initiated an operation to encourage a separate black state in the South that would expand the Communist revolution to North America.⁴⁵

To conceal itself, the IRA used false identities co-opted from existing organization names and set them up as offshoots of real groups. These included United Muslims of America and Black Guns Matter. The Kremlin went to great lengths to achieve its goals, even recruiting Americans to propagate Russian-backed social media messages and participate in political rallies in the physical world. When the DNC announced that it had been hacked, the IRA created the online persona Guccifer 2.0, a “lone Romanian hacker,” to publish the stolen documents on a WordPress blog. To conceal its identity, the IRA used a network of computers located outside Russia, including in the United States, and paid the bills using cryptocurrency. To make it difficult to identify hostile pages, it often used portions of existing memes or local stories and modified the content to suit its purposes.⁴⁶

Diminishing trust in authoritative sources of information, such as American mainstream media, made cyber-enabled manipulation easier for the GRU. The IRA attacked the professionalism and integrity of journalists across all community groups while portraying WikiLeaks (an organization that through anonymous sources publishes news leaks) positively. While candidate Trump further diminished confidence in the mainstream media with cries of “fake news,” the Russians set up actual fake news sites. For example, at least 109 IRA Twitter accounts masqueraded as news organizations. The IRA used conspiracy theories to diminish further confidence in information. Conspiracies on Facebook and Instagram covered topics such as Hillary Clinton’s health and the DNC hacks. One extreme example, dubbed Pizzagate, was a fictitious story of a pedophile ring supposedly run out of a Washington, DC, pizzeria by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta. Initiated and fueled by conspiracy theorists posting it on social media sites, the ridiculous story gained traction, forcing the New York Times and the Washington Post to debunk it. The GRU promoted other fantastical stories across both left- and right-leaning sites. Yet, the mainstream media often aided Russian disinformation even as reporters tried to debunk conspiracy theories: falsehoods reported tended to be falsehoods believed.⁴⁷

Fomenting division and diminishing confidence in sources of information complemented the GRU attack on the integrity of the U.S. electoral process. The systems that the IRA attacked proved as vulnerable to physical manipulation as the American polity was to emotional polarization. In March and April 2016, twelve GRU officers hacked the Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). It was easy. The GRU monitored the computers of DCCC and DNC employees, implanted malicious computer code (“malware”), and extracted emails and other documents. The malware allowed Russian agents to track employees’ computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the network. When the DCCC and DNC identified the attack in May 2016, the GRU employed countermeasures to avoid detection and remain on the network.⁴⁸

A week prior to the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, the GRU used two cutouts, DCLeaks and WikiLeaks, to release 19,254 emails and 8,034 attachments. Much of the content was embarrassing and exposed the DNC’s effort to bolster Clinton’s candidacy and suppress Sanders’s popularity, forcing the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other top officials. IRA-generated Facebook and Instagram posts amplified fears of voter fraud, claiming that certain states were helping Secretary Clinton win. One site stated that civil war was preferable to an unfair election. Others falsely reported that militias were deploying to polling stations to prevent fraud and called on others to join them. False reports claimed that “illegals” were overrepresented in voter polls in Texas and elsewhere, or were voting multiple times with Democratic Party assistance. The page Being Patriotic posted a hotline for tips about possible cases of voter fraud. It seems that the GRU, like most Americans, did not expect Donald Trump to win; it was prepared to foment acrimony and division through claims that the election had been rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor. After the surprising result on Election Day, the right-targeted voter fraud narrative shifted to suggestions that President Trump would have won the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud. Trump boosted those claims, asserting that millions of people had voted illegally.⁴⁹

After the election, Russian disinformation efforts intensified, with the IRA continuing to target right- and left-leaning groups. Posts and tweets advocated for the elimination of the Electoral College. Many called for in-the-streets action and marches to protest the election outcome. The marches allowed Russian agents to cross over from cyberspace to the physical world, as they had before the election in Houston, with dueling protests fielded by IRA’s weaponization of social media. In the post-election period, agents attempted to discredit individuals and institutions that advocated for strong responses to Russian aggression in Europe and the Middle East and its waging of cyber-enabled information warfare in the United States. Their attacks against conservative think tanks and their personal attacks against me and the National Security Council staff heightened in the late summer of 2017. The post-election attacks employed many of the same tactics used against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign. GRU efforts to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller spanned almost the entire time of his investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.

Both campaigns exercised poor judgment that made it easier for the Kremlin to undermine confidence in the electoral process. For example, when Russian intelligence endeavored to compromise candidate Trump and those around him through potentially lucrative real estate deals, Trump’s company attempted to negotiate for a Trump Tower Moscow, offering to give Putin a $50 million penthouse in the proposed tower. The Kremlin undoubtedly knew that the proposal put Trump at risk of breaking the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. When Russian agents approached the Trump campaign claiming to have incriminating evidence on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. responded, “I love it.”⁵⁰ The agents never delivered the promised “dirt.” And the Trump campaign’s hiring of the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to influence potential voters with microtargeted messages based on the data of more than 87 million Facebook users created the perception that social media–based tools had skewed the election results.⁵¹

The Clinton campaign also reinforced the GRU’s efforts, working through cutouts to obtain incriminating information on Trump from Russian intelligence agents. Clinton lawyer Marc Elias hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce the “Steele dossier,” named for the retired British MI6 officer Christopher Steele, whom Fusion GPS had hired to solicit allegations of Trump improprieties. Steele used undisclosed Russian intelligence sources to compile a fantastic report that was published ten days prior to President Trump’s inauguration.

Thus, regardless of the outcome of the election, the Kremlin was well positioned to undermine not only Americans’ faith in their country’s democratic processes and institutions, but also public confidence in the man or woman who would win the election. Partisan politics magnified the effects of the Kremlin’s campaign and perpetuated America’s vulnerability to Putin’s playbook. Yet the GRU gave equal opportunity to both parties to step into the trap of kompromat, the use of compromising material for negative publicity or extortion—or in this case, to diminish further Americans’ confidence in their leaders and in democratic processes and institutions.

The U.S. government and both presidential campaigns were not prepared for Russian efforts to compromise the candidates and the democratic process. But they should have been. David Cohen, former deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, observed, “We’ve seen Russian interference in Europe for the past ten years. We saw identical techniques: stolen information, misinformation, all of that, in a variety of countries … and one of the things we did not do as well as we should have was sound the alarm… . We didn’t do a good enough job of better preparing ourselves, of saying, ‘The Russians did that there, so there is no reason to think they’re not going to do the same thing here.’ ”⁵²

DENIABILITY IS critical to Russia’s disinformation and subversion. As evidence mounted of its attack on the U.S. election and its sustained effort to polarize American society, Putin stated that “the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including election process.”⁵³ Russian denials often provide opportunities for willful ignorance among those disinclined to confront Russian actions. The Clinton and Trump campaigns found it convenient to turn a blind eye to Russian subversion. The DNC was embarrassed by the documents that revealed their effort to tip the balance in favor of Hillary Clinton during the primary and did not want to draw more attention to their actions. And candidate Trump exploited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal, unclassified email account to access and pass highly classified material as a focal point of criticism. The Trump campaign even encouraged more Russian hacking. At a rally in Doral, Florida, in July 2016, candidate Trump called on the Russians to find the thirty thousand missing personal emails that Clinton had deleted during her tenure as secretary of state. As for the Obama administration, after it became aware of the hacking, it did not respond in a concerted manner. Later, President Trump, because he conflated Russia’s attacks on the election with the legitimacy of its outcome, seemed to take Vladimir Putin at his word when the former KGB case officer denied it. As late as July 2018, President Trump continued to cast doubt on the universal finding of all U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies that Russia had in fact interfered in American elections in 2016. On July 16, 2018, President Trump stated at a news conference with President Putin in Helsinki, Finland, “They said they think it’s Russia; I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”⁵⁴

Disinformation enables Russian deniability. The Kremlin manipulates the news to confuse and sow doubt. Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian television producer, identified the goal as the creation of an environment in which “people begin giving up on the facts.”⁵⁵ A particularly egregious example came after British intelligence identified the two Russian agents who had attempted to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with a nerve agent in Salisbury, placing more than 140 people at risk, including children. Later, a British woman died after she handled the container the nerve agent was in. Russia claimed that the two agents were in Salisbury to visit cathedrals, and insinuated that they were a gay couple touring the United Kingdom. Russian officials propagated dozens of lies and conspiracy theories about the Skripal attempted murder through media and Twitter accounts. Indeed, the Washington Post likened the Kremlin’s effort to “an elaborate fog machine to make the initial crime disappear.” Stories blamed a toxic spill, Ukrainian activists, CIA agents, British prime minister Theresa May, and Skripal himself.⁵⁶

President Trump authorized strong action in response to the Skripal poisoning, including the expulsion of sixty undeclared Russian intelligence officers and the closing of the Russian consulate in San Francisco, California.⁵⁷ He did so after a concerted effort across the U.S. government to understand the facts and coordinate a global response with the United Kingdom and other allies. I spent many hours on the phone trying to get some reluctant allies and partners to take resolute action. Although roughly twenty countries joined the United States and the United Kingdom in condemning the attack and expelling at least some Russian agents (153 were expelled worldwide), some allies’ actions were disappointing. The Kremlin’s disinformation efforts had been at least partially successful. The response to the attempted murder of Skripal revealed that the European consensus that emerged after the shock of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine was wearing off. Even in the face of an egregious attack using a banned nerve agent that could have caused hundreds of casualties in a NATO member country, some U.S. allies in Europe were reluctant to take strong action against Putin. They rationalized the attack as score settling with a defector. Putin’s playbook had worn down their resolve. When I told President Trump about the small numbers of agents expelled from Germany and France, he was incensed; he felt that European nations should take more responsibility for their own security. He was right.

Denial enabled by disinformation allows Putin to get away with murder, literally. Russia has issued implausible denials to its role in crimes ranging from the attempted murder and murder of individuals to mass murder. In 2006, Russian agents murdered defector Alexander Litvinenko in London with polonium, a radioactive material that causes a slow and painful death. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax accountant who knew too much about President Putin and the oligarchs who surround him, was murdered in a Moscow prison. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician, was murdered on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. And in 2017, Denis Voronenkov, an exiled critic of Mr. Putin’s and a former member of the Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, was gunned down in Kiev, Ukraine. The Kremlin murdered journalists as well as politicians. Notably, in 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, who was famous for her coverage of the Chechen wars.⁵⁸

The Kremlin denied the Assad regime’s undeniable use of chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing to murder innocents in Syria. Yet, not only did it deny these events, but the Kremlin also produced and spread disinformation about them. When Assad’s forces murdered more than seventy innocents with nerve agents on April 7, 2018, even before the attack occurred, Russia began to claim that there was intelligence of a potential chemical attack planned by Islamist militant groups. Later, the Kremlin claimed the attack was a false-flag event designed to blame Russia.⁵⁹

Russia never took responsibility for murdering 298 people in the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Photos and video of the missile’s route captured on social media, evidence of the missile launches on social media, and evidence at the wreckage site all proved incontrovertible, but when asked about Russia’s role, Putin responded, “Which plane are you talking about?”⁶⁰

Disinformation creates confusion about what to believe. Deniability, in the Kremlin case, fosters a sense of helplessness and incites fear concerning what Russia might do to target the United States and other free and open societies. As the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell observed, those “who live in fear are already three parts dead.” Putin’s playbook generates a destructive cycle. Fear consumes compassion and contributes to the polarization and weakening of the targeted society.

RNGW IS designed to accomplish the Kremlin’s objectives short of major armed conflict. But conventional military strength is important to intimidate weak neighbors and deter U.S. and NATO forces from responding to Russian aggression. Here Putin faces a challenge: Russia does not have the defense budget to compete with the United States and its NATO allies, either in advanced conventional weaponry or in the ability to conduct integrated land, aerospace, maritime, and cyberspace operations—what the U.S. military calls joint warfighting. But just as the internet and social media provided opportunities to revise maskirovka (tactical deception and disguise), Russia has integrated disruptive technologies into its military to exploit perceived U.S. and NATO vulnerabilities.

Since he took office, Putin led an ambitious program of military reform that integrated new technologies, improved discipline, and reorganized the force. There was much work to do. What was supposed to be a short, easy war to reestablish Russian control over Chechen territory lasted from December 1994 to August 1996, ending with the Russian Army’s humiliating withdrawal. The Chechen War was a nightmare for poorly trained, underfed, ill-equipped, and undisciplined Russian soldiers, who sometimes surrendered to the enemy without a fight or sold arms to the Chechens for food or drugs and alcohol.⁶¹

As it undertook massive reforms in the 2000s, the Russian military did not try to match U.S. and NATO capabilities. Instead of exquisite systems, Russia invested in cheaper combinations of air defense, offensive cyber and electronic warfare, drones, long-range missiles, and massive artillery. This approach seemed to work. During the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the Russian military established air supremacy from the ground with sophisticated air defenses rather than expensive stealth fighter jets.

A reforming Russian military was emboldened under Putin. In the years following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia routinely held large military exercises in the Baltic Sea and on its most western border, staring down NATO, and joint exercises with the Chinese in far eastern Russia. Russian naval vessels and aircraft conducted dangerous intercepts of U.S., allied, and partner aircraft and vessels, including in the Nordic-Baltic region. An annual large-scale exercise named Zapad (“West”) drew its name from strategic military exercises designed to demonstrate the military strength of the Warsaw Pact along the Soviet Union’s “Western Front” during the Cold War. As with RNGW, Russia’s conventional force prowess, shown through these maneuvers and the positioning of nuclear-capable missiles, was meant to have a psychological effect on NATO.

Still, given U.S. conventional military tactics and Russia’s limited defense budget, traditional military reform was insufficient to incite fear and restore Russian national prestige. Putin was determined to expand Russia’s nuclear arsenal and announce a nuclear doctrine designed to intimidate NATO countries and weaken the alliance. Its doctrine of “escalation control” called for the threat of early use of a nuclear strike on Europe to pose a dilemma for the United States: risk a nuclear holocaust or sue for peace on terms favorable to Russia. In developing the capability to enact its doctrine, the Kremlin violated the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

While threatening nuclear war, Russia demonstrated how its offensive cyber capabilities threatened the United States and its allies. Prior to its attack on the 2016 U.S. election, Russia conducted malicious cyber intrusions targeting U.S. critical infrastructure.⁶² The Kremlin had already revealed its capabilities overseas. On Christmas Eve 2015, the lights went out in Eastern Ukraine, affecting more than two hundred thousand people. It was the first time that a cyber attack switched off a nation’s power grid. As the Russians were turning off the lights in Ukraine and hacking the Democratic National Committee, they inserted malicious code into American water and electric systems, as they had attempted to do earlier at U.S. nuclear power plants.⁶³ Like the nuclear strategy of escalation control, Russian cyber threats to infrastructure are meant to intimidate and deter the United States and other NATO allies from responding to Russian aggression against a member of the alliance.

ECONOMIC COERCION through dependence on Russian energy is another powerful tool of Putin’s, as it augments the threats from Russia’s conventional, nuclear, and cyber capabilities. The countries that gained independence from Soviet control after the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are particularly vulnerable because they inherited a transportation and energy infrastructure that depends on Moscow. Moscow demonstrated in Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan that it will restrict access to energy supplies or use energy pricing tactics to coerce target countries. In 2010, Russia forced Ukraine to grant a twenty-five-year extension of the lease to its Black Sea Fleet’s base in Crimea, one of the bases Russia used to annex Crimea by force years later. Moscow used economic coercion to convince Kyrgyzstan and Armenia to join the Eurasian Economic Union, an organization designed to compete with the European Union and extend Russia’s influence over former Soviet territory.⁶⁴

Even Germany made itself vulnerable through policy choices that eliminated alternative sources to Russian natural gas. Shameless corruption played a role. In 2005, during his final months as chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder gained approval for a multibillion-dollar Nord Stream pipeline project with the Russian state gas company, Gazprom, to transport gas from Russia to Germany. Soon after he left office, Schroeder became chairman of the pipeline shareholders’ committee. In April 2017, Nord Stream II AG, the developer of the pipeline, signed a deal for a second pipeline under the Baltic Sea called Nord Stream 2 that will double the amount of gas being transported from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. The pipeline not only deepens Germany’s dependence, but also punishes Ukraine, which will lose up to $2 billion a year in transit fees, or 1.5 percent of its GDP. The pipeline also denies transit fees to other NATO and European Union members, including Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. The Polish government deemed the pipeline a “hybrid weapon” born of Moscow and intended to divide the European Union and NATO.⁶⁵ In early 2020, the U.S. Congress placed sanctions on companies completing Nord Stream 2 in an effort to “stop construction.” It was too little too late, however, as the pipeline was nearing completion. The sanctions succeeded mainly in souring relations between the United States and Germany.

GERMANY IS the most prosperous and powerful nation in Europe, which makes it a particularly attractive target for Putin—for weakening Europe is the priority in Putin’s effort to break apart the post–Cold War order and reestablish Russia as a great power. Indeed, the continent remains the principal battleground for RNGW’s combination of disinformation, denial, disruptive technology, and dependence to sow division and exhaust the will of European nations, the EU, and NATO.

Writing about the period between the world wars, the diplomat and historian George Kennan observed that Soviet diplomacy depended not on the “strength of their ideas,” but on “the weakness of the Western community itself: from the spiritual exhaustion of the Western people.”⁶⁶ Although the challenges Europe faced in the 2000s paled in comparison to the trauma of the First World War, they were sufficient to generate spiritual weariness if not spiritual exhaustion. At the end of the Cold War, Europe celebrated freedom from Soviet domination and Communist totalitarianism, but as newly freed peoples confronted practical problems such as inefficient agriculture and tired industries, solidarity based in newfound freedom slowly gave way to economic concerns and a tendency to take their rights for granted.⁶⁷

To diminish confidence in the European Union, the Kremlin exploited events, magnifying crises such as the global financial crisis of 2008; the European financial crisis in 2015 that strained the euro; the refugee crisis from 2011 onward associated with the civil war in Syria and violence from Afghanistan to North Africa to the Maghreb; Britain’s referendum to exit the European Union in 2016; the gilets jaunes (“yellow vest”) movement in France in 2019, and the rise over several years of nativist, secessionist, and Euroskeptic political parties in Spain, Hungary, Italy, and Poland.⁶⁸ The weakening of Europe began well before the turn of this century, however. Economic internationalism of the 1990s affected Europe as well as the United States. Factories moved to cheap labor markets, and many citizens were left behind by the transforming global economy and growing income inequality.⁶⁹ As the promise of free-market capitalism at the end of the Cold War confronted the realities of lost jobs and income disparity, skepticism of the European Union grew. The Union expanded rapidly, growing from twelve countries to twenty-eight between 1995 and 2013. As the introduction of the euro moved monetary policy away from the states and EU bureaucracy and regulations grew, so did sentiment across the Continent that “faceless” men and women in Brussels, including the 732 elected members of the European Parliament, were usurping national sovereignty. Skepticism of the European Parliament and unbounded globalization gave rise to populist parties that polarized European politics and created opportunities for Russia to weaken NATO and the European Union.

Strained transatlantic relations between the United States and Europe created still more opportunities for Russia. The Atlantic alliance was adrift for much of the post–Cold War era. Although Europe supported the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Europeans opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and opposition to that war grew in ensuing years. After President Barack Obama continued to withdraw the bulk of U.S. forces from Europe and violence spread across the greater Middle East, centered on the rise of ISIS and the civil war in Syria, some Europeans blamed U.S. precipitous disengagement for emboldening Russia and exacerbating crises. When President Obama declared his desire to pivot toward Asia, many Europeans concluded that he was turning his back on seven decades of transatlantic partnership. Then, in 2016, Republican candidate for president Donald Trump professed profound skepticism about NATO, suggesting that the alliance was “obsolete.” He described the European Union as a competitor rather than a union of allies and like-minded nations that shared democratic principles. After President Trump took office in January 2017, his revival of the “America First” slogan seemed to herald disengagement from Europe and the abandonment of American leadership of the postwar international order. President Trump’s sudden decision in October 2019 to withdraw U.S. special operations forces from northeastern Syria surprised NATO allies and put their forces in a precarious position. Those allies saw the lack of consultation as an example of diminished U.S. commitment to NATO and Europe. Soon thereafter, French president Emmanuel Macron described the European Union as on “the edge of a precipice,” noting that the combination of Great Britain’s impending departure from the Union and the EU’s internal divisions could make it “disappear geopolitically.” He also partly blamed Trump for the Union’s struggles, saying that the U.S. president “doesn’t share our idea of the European project.” At the end of 2019, after starting a new diplomatic initiative with Russia, Macron stated that NATO was experiencing “brain death” and asked rhetorically how Turkey could remain a member of the alliance and still purchase sophisticated defense systems from Russia.⁷⁰

Putin, of course, took advantage of tensions among European nations and between the United States and Europe. Indeed, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, he has been undeterred due to a lack of unity among these allies, to diminished confidence among them, and to their failure to impose costs on the Kremlin sufficient to force Putin to abandon his playbook. Putin’s perception of Europe as weak, combined with the unenforced red line in Syria in 2013, almost certainly contributed to his 2014 decision to annex Crimea and invade Eastern Ukraine. Perceived European impotence and American reluctance probably contributed to other Kremlin decisions, such as attacking elections in Europe and the United States, the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom, and support for Assad’s use of chemical weapons to commit mass murder in Syria. Despite sanctions on Putin’s regime and the Russian defense industry, Nord Stream 2 was a reminder of how Russia could extend its influence in Europe despite egregious violations of international law and infringements on European sovereignty. While subverting Europe politically, Russia was rewarded financially and gained coercive economic influence.

Russia’s appearance of strength, however, belied significant weaknesses that cut across its economy, demographics, public health, and social services. As former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright has observed, Putin’s Russia played a poor hand well.⁷¹ The United States and its allies, particularly in Europe, played a much better hand poorly. Or, as the Stanford professor of international relations Kathryn Stoner pointed out to me, understanding the game that is being played is more important than the face value of the cards a player holds. Understanding the Kremlin’s strategy and the fear, sense of lost honor, and ambitions that drove its actions is the first step in parrying Putin’s playbook and protecting our free and open societies.

* In the 2010 Census, the Agriculture Department estimated that 11.5 million poor Americans (4.1 percent of the U.S. population) lived in food deserts.

CHAPTER 2
Parrying Putin’s Playbook

A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.

—ANDREI SAKHAROV

THE UNITED States and Europe were ill-prepared for Russia’s toxic combination of disinformation, denial, dependence, and disruptive technologies. Responses to the Kremlin’s sustained campaigns of subversion not only were slow and inadequate, but also tended to aid and abet those who sowed dissention and division. In her November 21 testimony before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Dr. Fiona Hill observed that “when we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each other, to degrade our institutions and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.”¹ When we are considering how best to counter Russian aggression, Hill’s admonishment is the best starting point. Putin seeks to divide; Americans and Europeans should not divide themselves. Putin employs disinformation; Americans and Europeans should restore trusted sources of information. Putin cultivates dependencies; Americans and Europeans should depend more on each other and like-minded nations. Putin employs disruptive technologies to compensate for Russia’s weaknesses; Americans and Europeans should counter those efforts and maintain their considerable competitive advantage. The United States and European nations should be confident.

When I met Patrushev in Geneva, the combination of fear and injured pride was palpable. He appeared tough, but his was the kind of toughness that comes from bitter disappointment, in his case, in a system he had spent his whole life defending. The Soviet Union was corrupt to its core, but Patrushev had been taught to look—from the inequality in a system that professed egalitarianism; from the brutality that belied the Soviet concept of social justice for workers as a fraud; and from the cynical patriarchy in the Stalinist order that during and after World War II killed six million of its people and put approximately one million others in barbaric prisons in which many more perished.² Patrushev’s long face carried his disappointment and anger over the collapse of the corrupt system he had worked so hard to perpetuate. And since 2000, he had joined Putin in an effort to recreate that system—but not exactly. He, Putin, and the Siloviki dropped all pretense of egalitarianism, doubling down on nationalism and pride in Mother Russia. And they added a strong dose of greed, as both Putin and Patrushev became personally wealthy at the top of their corrupt system. Blaming the United States for their failings became a habit, and competition with the United States and Europe was necessary to distract the Russian people from those failings. It was also natural. Putin, Patrushev, and the Siloviki define themselves and their system, as they did during the Cold War, based on a perceived threat from the West.³

Because the Kremlin’s base motivation is unlikely to change while Putin is in power, the United States, its allies, and like-minded partners must parry Putin’s playbook and, in particular, its critical components of disinformation, denial, dependence, and the use of disruptive technology. Because the Kremlin’s objective is to divide and weaken the United States and Europe from within, defeating Putin’s sophisticated strategy will require strategic competence and a concerted effort to restore confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes.

Putin’s aggressive behavior and Patrushev’s tough demeanor mask Russia’s underlying vulnerability and diminishing power relative to the United States and Europe. In 2019, Russia’s GDP was roughly equivalent to that of the state of Texas and smaller than Italy’s.⁴ After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, NATO countries finally increased defense spending. Excluding the United States, their combined $299 billion budget in 2019 compared favorably to Russia’s 2018 defense budget of $61.4 billion. The U.S. defense budget alone was eleven times larger, at $685 billion in 2019.⁵ But although Europe and the United States enjoy tremendous comparative advantages over Russia, parrying Putin’s playbook requires mobilizing those advantages and remediating vulnerabilities that the Kremlin exploits.

AFTER TWO decades of Putin’s rule, Russian aggression itself may be most effective at restoring trust in democratic principles and institutions. As the historian and author Timothy Garton Ash observed in 2019, Europe recognizes that it faces an existential threat of disintegration, “like the prospect of death, that concentrates minds.”⁶ Concentrating minds might lead to the abandonment of flawed assumptions that have, in the past, masked the growing threat. Because of flawed assumptions, the United States and its European allies, in spite of all good intentions, have allowed and, at times, encouraged Russian aggression.

I return here to the idea of strategic narcissism, for America’s failure to develop an effective response to Russian aggression was based in it and, in particular, in a kind of wishful thinking: that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian leaders would accept the status quo. Multiple U.S. administrations neglected the emotional drivers behind Putin’s actions. Even after the pattern of Russian attacks and subversion of European nations was undeniable, over-optimism about prospects for change in Russian policy delayed effective responses.

Nearly eight years before I met Nikolai Patrushev in Geneva, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met her counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in that same city. Only seven months had passed since Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the first war in history in which cyber attacks were used in combination with a military offensive and a sustained disinformation campaign. Clinton presented Mr. Lavrov with a “reset button” meant to symbolize a fresh start in the relationship. She described her reset attempt as “a very effective meeting of the minds” that she hoped might lead to “more trust, predictability, and progress.”⁷ Optimism about the reset policy grew as work progressed on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which reduced the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers by half and limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Also positive was Russian support for the expansion of a Northern Distribution Network to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan and new sanctions on Iran. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on an open microphone whispering to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev—Putin would return to the presidency from the position of prime minister two months later—that he would have “more flexibility” after the U.S. presidential election in November of that year. Obama was referring to the potential for a new arms agreement, but his comment also communicated to Medvedev a willingness to overlook Russia’s transgressions in the interest of making progress on that and other priorities.⁸ Seven months later, during his reelection campaign for president, Obama mocked his opponent, Senator Mitt Romney, for describing Russia as a geopolitical foe: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”⁹

Over-optimism led to complacency as the Obama administration pursued a Russia policy based on its hopes to work with the Kremlin rather than the needs to deter and defend against Russian aggression. Those hopes soon vanished when Russia annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine, intervened in Syria, hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and attacked the 2016 presidential election. In the 2000s, as the Russian threat grew more complex and sophisticated, the United States wrongly assumed that Russia’s goals aligned with those of the United States. It believed that diplomatic efforts could bring the Kremlin in from the cold to join the community of responsible nations and abandon its disruptive behavior. Psychologists define optimism bias as the tendency of those beginning a treatment to believe in the success of the treatment even if the result is uncertain. President Obama and Secretary Clinton were not the first to succumb to optimism bias and wishful thinking while pursuing improved relations with Russia, nor would they be the last.

In the summer of 2001, President George W. Bush met with President Vladimir Putin and reported that “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciate so very much the frank dialogue.”¹⁰ Putin’s talent for deception and manipulation was on full display as he told President Bush a fabricated story about how he had saved from a fire in a dacha a cherished Russian Orthodox cross given to him by his mother and worn around his neck. As he would later do with the Clinton Foundation and the Trump organizations, he tried to do a favor for President Bush by arranging a lucrative job in a Russian oil company for one of Bush’s friends.¹¹ By the end of his second term, Bush was forced to revise his assessment of Putin. In August 2008, as both presidents were in the receiving line to greet Chairman Xi Jinping at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, Russian forces were invading Georgia.

President Donald Trump continued this trend of U.S. presidents believing that they could appeal to mutual interests, build personal rapport with Putin, improve the relationship between Washington and Moscow, and change Russian strategic behavior. Trump often stated that improved relations with Russia “would be a good thing, not a bad thing.” The candidate was appreciative of Vladimir Putin’s flattery, stating in December 2015, “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.”¹² Trump treated some of Putin’s most brazen criminal actions with dismissiveness and moral equivalency. For example, in 2017, when asked by Bill O’Reilly in a Fox News interview if he respected Vladimir Putin even though, as O’Reilly stated, “he’s a killer,” the president responded, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”¹³ President Trump, in public statements made before and after his election, appeared to waver in his determination to hold Russia accountable despite policy decisions that strengthened Europe’s defenses and imposed significant costs on Putin and those around him, mainly in the form of sanctions. Indeed, the president seemed at times to abet Russian disinformation and denial. For example, after U.S. intelligence agencies determined unequivocally that there had been a Russian attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, President Trump described his conversation with Putin: “He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. But I just asked him again, and he said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they’re saying he did.” Commenting further in Helsinki, Finland, in July 2018, after a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Putin, the president stated that “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”¹⁴

While some speculated that President Trump sometimes appeared to be an apologist for Russia and Mr. Putin because the Kremlin was extorting him with damaging evidence of business improprieties or embarrassing personal conduct, Trump’s over-optimism about improving Russian relations fit a pattern of optimism bias and wishful thinking across two previous administrations.¹⁵ And the unreciprocated efforts to improve relations with Putin left U.S. presidents vulnerable to the KGB case officer’s subterfuge. At the 2018 press conference in Helsinki, when asked directly by a reporter if he had “compromising material” on President Trump, Putin did not give a direct answer. He responded, “Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this, when President Trump was in Moscow back then, I didn’t even know that he was in Moscow. I treat President Trump with utmost respect, but back then when he was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow… . Do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it’s difficult to imagine utter nonsense on a bigger scale than this. Please disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.”¹⁶ Putin was never going to be Donald Trump’s friend. He used the Helsinki summit to undermine the U.S. president and keep alive speculation about the slanderous contents of the Steele dossier.

The basis for Trump’s persistent optimism bias, even as Putin undermined him publicly, had an added dimension. For some of the self-proclaimed strategists around President Trump, the pursuit of improved U.S.- Russian relations despite continued Russian aggression was based mainly on two rationalizations: first, a misunderstanding of history and an associated nostalgia for the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II; and second, a peculiar sense of kinship with and affinity for Russian nationalists. This latter rationalization is based on a perceived commonality of interest in confronting Islamist terrorism and protecting what these Trump strategists regarded as wholesome and predominantly Western, Caucasian, and Christian cultures from dilution through multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious immigration.¹⁷ In a July 2018 interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News, President Trump said that the characterization of Russia as an adversary was “incredible” because of the country’s tremendous sacrifices during World War II. “Russia lost 50 million people and helped us win the war,” President Trump said. Some Americans and Europeans view Russia as the repository of a purer version of Christianity and, under Putin, a bastion of conservatism that is protecting Western civilization from postmodern ideas that are anathema to some conservatives.¹⁸

But both rationalizations are fundamentally flawed. The alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II was an “alliance of necessity.” In the midst of that war, Russia had initially tried to stay out of the conflict by signing the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in the brutal dismemberment of Poland and the inevitable annexation by the Soviet Union of the three Baltic states. It was only when Nazi Germany turned on its accomplices that the Soviets found themselves unexpectedly fighting on the side of the Western Allies and (after the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 1941) the United States. It was an alliance that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had tried his best to avoid; he had been hostile to the governments and people of the West.¹⁹ The only factor that held the unlikely allies together was Adolf Hitler. And while it is true that the Soviet Union bore the largest sacrifice of fighting in terms of lives lost, once the war ended, the alliance of necessity dissolved and gave way to a cold war between the two powers.

Despite the U.S. desire to regard Russia as an erstwhile ally grateful for American bloodshed for a common cause and the $11.3 billion in U.S. assistance under the Lend-Lease policy, Russia’s memory of the alliance in World War II does not evoke warm feelings among Kremlin leaders.²⁰ Some Russians view U.S. and U.K. delays in opening a second front in France as an intentional effort to allow the Soviets and the Germans to bleed each other to death on the Eastern Front. And they believe their exclusion from the joint American-British effort to build an atomic bomb was part of a plan to dominate the Soviet Union and the postwar world. If the prospect of improved relations with Putin relied on a natural confluence of interests with respect to Europe or to Russian nostalgia for the World War II alliance against Nazi Germany, that prospect was dim.

Ignorance of history combined with bigotry to generate another source of delusional thinking about Putin’s Russia. Some Americans were easy targets for Russian disinformation because they felt a kinship with and a cultural affinity for Russia as a defender of social conservatism and Christianity. That basis for optimism about improved relations with the Kremlin was not confined to the United States; it was even more prevalent in parts of Europe. For example, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban expressed alignment with Russia, declaring that Hungary would be “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West” in order to build a “new Hungarian state.” Some saw Putin as a modern-day crusader who was protecting Christianity from Islamist terrorists after U.S. interventions in the Middle East made the world less secure. The Russian Orthodox Church, which acts as an arm of the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services, praised Putin’s intervention in Syria as part of the “fight with terrorism” and a “holy battle.” Russia actively cultivates these feelings of racial and religious kinship to further polarize and weaken Western resolve to confront the Kremlin’s aggression.²¹

ONCE SPECIOUS rationalizations for seeking improved relations as an end in themselves are rejected, we can develop a consistent strategy designed not only to defend against Russia’s ongoing campaign and deter further aggression, but also to set conditions for a post-Putin era in which Russian leaders recognize that they can best advance their interests through cooperation rather than confrontation with the West. The public and private sectors both have an important role to play. Because Putin’s playbook depends so heavily on disinformation and denial, defense begins with exposing the Kremlin’s efforts to sow dissension within and between nations.

Governments have powerful tools available to identify malicious cyber actors and act against them. Law enforcement and sanctions against individuals and organizations engaged in political subversion have proven effective. Because most of the evidence that underpins indictments and sanctions is public, the results of law enforcement investigations, such as the Mueller Report in the United States, are particularly valuable in pulling back the curtain on Russian cyber-enabled information warfare. Named after Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the report on the two-year investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election exposed the level of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and the overall effort to divide Americans through cyber-enabled information warfare.²² Armed with the Mueller investigation and other sources of information, on March 15, 2018, the Trump administration placed sanctions on Russian individuals and companies, including those associated with the IRA and GRU.²³ The U.S. Department of Justice also announced criminal counts against twenty-six Russian nationals and three Russian companies.²⁴

In the fight against Putin’s playbook, citizens and their representatives in government have an important role to play. As Fiona Hill suggested, they might resolve, at the very least, not to be their own worst enemies. The reaction to the Mueller Report among President Trump, his supporters, and his opponents demonstrated how political divisiveness can mask what all sides should have agreed upon: that Russia attacked the U.S. election and that the attacks continued beyond the election to divide Americans and reduce confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes. Some glossed over that point of agreement to either echo President Trump’s description of the investigation as a “witch hunt” or to claim that the report did not go far enough to reveal either “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians or obstruction of justice on the part of the president. As Hill observed in her testimony before the impeachment inquiry committee in November 2019, Russia’s goal was to put the U.S. president, no matter who won the election, “under a cloud.” She warned that those who support fictional narratives reinforce the Kremlin’s campaign.

Sadly, Hill’s observation seemed to fall on deaf ears. February 2020 revelations that Russia was using disinformation to bolster the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump spurred President Trump to fire Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire as the president dismissed Russia’s continued subversion of America’s democratic process as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, some Democrats resurrected the already investigated allegations that Trump was somehow in collusion with the Kremlin. Putin could not have written a better script. Social media remained the Kremlin’s weapon of choice.²⁵

Deterring Russian aggression in cyberspace requires more than a purely government response. While the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has exquisite capabilities to attribute actions in cyberspace, it is often reluctant to do so because attribution might reveal its tools and methods. The scale of the problem alone demands efforts across the public and private sectors. Social media and internet companies must continue the work they began after the 2016 election to expose and counter disinformation and propaganda. Facebook, which took the most blame for the vulnerabilities its system created, identified and deleted Russian bots on both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook also had Cambridge Analytica (the UK-based firm that harvested data from millions of people’s Facebook accounts without consent) delete Facebook data and improve users’ awareness of how to strengthen their privacy features. Twitter identified and deleted bots as well. But Russian bots and trolls adapted, trying to stay ahead of those protecting infrastructure, exposing disinformation, or countering denial. Moreover, these defensive actions did not adequately address the safeguarding of personal data that Russian or other malign actors might use in cyber-enabled information warfare or the economic incentives that drive users toward extreme content.

Because social media companies have economic incentives to gather and use personal data to generate revenue (mainly through advertising), regulation may be necessary. A combination of removing the cloak of anonymity for some users (such as advertisers), protecting individuals’ personal data, and requiring internet and social media companies to be held liable for damaging compromises of data or blatant abuse of their platforms are all actions that could shift industry incentives in favor of protecting against disinformation and denial. Regulation may also help ensure that those companies do not become the arbiters of freedom of speech in democratic societies.

Private-sector efforts can be particularly valuable in countering Russia because they are unclassified and can be released to the media, the public, and law enforcement. For example, a private company helped attribute responsibility for the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, United Kingdom. Bellingcat, an international research and investigation collective, conducted an open-source investigation to identify the attackers and connect them to their GRU offices. Combinations of government and private efforts counter Russian denial in the physical as well as the cyber world. Private-sector efforts can create a firehose of truth to counter the Kremlin’s firehose of falsehoods. Still, no combination of private- and public-sector efforts to expose and defend against RNGW activities will solve the problem once and for all. As attacks on the 2020 presidential election made clear, Russian agents will adapt continuously to avoid detection, circumvent defenses, and launch new offensives.

Countering cyber attacks such as data theft or damage to systems must go beyond the “perimeter” defense or even so-called defense in depth, in which multiple layers of security controls are placed throughout an information technology system. Because capable state actors such as Russia can penetrate elaborate defenses given adequate time and resources, defense requires a good offense. Organizations like the NSA in the United States conduct continuous reconnaissance in cyberspace to identify and preempt attacks before they can penetrate the system perimeter. Furthermore, the creation of U.S. Cyber Command in 2010 marked crucial efforts to “direct, synchronize, and coordinate cyberspace planning and operations to defend and advance national interests in collaboration with domestic and international partners.”²⁶ The command is tackling the problems of integrating and scaling capabilities to the magnitude of the threat under the concept of “increasing resiliency, defending forward, and constantly engaging.”²⁷ This form of active defense appeared successful during the U.S. midterm elections in 2018. In keeping with U.S. Cyber Command’s doctrine of persistent engagement and causing problems for adversaries before they penetrate our systems, cyber operators reportedly blocked internet access to the IRA on the day of the elections.²⁸ In the future, private-sector firms are likely to participate in active defense. Attribution and punishment after attacks will remain important, but these have proven inadequate to deter or prevent attacks designed to cripple critical systems or infrastructure, extort victims, or wage cyber-enabled information warfare. Amplified sharing of information and expertise within government and between government and industry should help provide protection to the dot-com, dot-gov, and dot-mil internet domains.

Just as the GRU and SVR learned from early attempts to undermine Western democracies, the United States and other nations might learn from countries on the Russian frontier that were on the receiving end of Putin’s playbook. In 2007, Estonia came under a sustained cyber offensive that included disinformation, denial, and cyber attacks on infrastructure. Its disagreement with Russia over the relocation of a World War II statue sparked an offensive that began with distributed denial-of-service attacks, a flood of internet traffic that overwhelms servers and shuts down websites. Estonians lost access to news outlets, government websites, and bank accounts. Russian media stoked the crisis with disinformation, such as false reports that Soviet war graves were being destroyed. Russia has continued this sustained campaign of disinformation and propaganda for over a decade.²⁹ Recognizing that it needed improved and sustained defenses, Estonia, under the direction of President Toomas Henrik Ilves, formed a civilian cyber defense reserve unit, attained a high level of security through end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication, and constantly monitored systems for potential threats. Estonia demonstrated that a clear understanding of the problem, determined leadership, a comprehensive strategy, and close cooperation across public and private sectors can defend successfully against malicious actors. Estonia’s cybersecurity now includes high-functioning e-government infrastructure, digital identity, mandatory security baselines, and a central system for identifying and responding to attacks. Private-sector service providers are reviewed to assess and reduce risk. President Ilves recalled that citizen and private-sector involvement is essential to effective defense and that the keys to success were incentivizing online security measures, implementing cybersecurity public education programs, and constantly monitoring cyberspace and power grids.³⁰

In Finland, the government sought the participation of its citizens in an effort to track, fight, and prevent cyber attacks. Mandatory cyber education is meant to “bolster Finland as an information society” and contribute to cyber research. The National Cyber Security Centre is accessible to all. It provides information, posts vulnerabilities, and runs “exercises” that include simulated cyber attacks to increase awareness of vulnerabilities and motivate organizations to protect themselves. The goal is to achieve comprehensive security.³¹

Although it is challenging to scale up efforts of small countries like Estonia and Finland to a country the size of the United States, their examples demonstrate the potential for collaboration not only between government and industry, but also with academia and civil society.

Karen Edwards, a Silicon Valley executive who helped build the Yahoo brand, one of the prime internet companies, knew that defensive measures were inadequate to counter Russian disinformation. She was angry about what was happening to her country as Russians and extremist groups polarized society and created a crisis of confidence in democratic processes and institutions. Present at the creation of the first Silicon Valley boom in the 1990s, Edwards was, even then, both enthusiastic about the promise of the internet and wary about how it might be abused by nefarious actors. Two decades later, the Stanford University and Harvard Business School graduate had an idea of how a good offense in the presentation of information might extend beyond defense and preempt elements of cyber-enabled information warfare. Edwards and her business partner, Raj Narayan, started a company called Soap AI in Palo Alto, California. The company is based on an innovative solution that combines the positive potential of the internet with emerging artificial intelligence technologies to defeat those using disinformation and propaganda to polarize American society. After diagnosing the problem as information overload, mistrust of media, and a lack of diverse perspectives, Edwards, Narayan, and their team designed a machine-learning platform that allows users to understand better what is happening in the world by accessing verified sources of information, reducing the clutter associated with clickbait, and ensuring access to a range of perspectives.³² Soap AI uses a “scrub cycle” in which artificial intelligence sorts stories from verified sources across a range of perspectives. Soap presents multiple opinions on an event or story so readers can make their own judgments based on correct information.³³ A dynamic combination of offensive, defensive, and preemptive solutions to the disinformation dimension of Putin’s playbook could turn what the Kremlin and other authoritarian governments consider a vulnerability—that is, America’s inherent decentralization and resistance to authoritative direction from the center—into a strength.³⁴

Education is vitally important, not only to alert citizens to the dangers of Russia’s disinformation campaigns but also to restore confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes. A Russian proverb describes education as light and ignorance as darkness. A public informed about challenges to national security and to issues that adversaries use to sow dissension, such as race, gun control, and immigration, will prove less vulnerable to manipulation. Education inoculates society against efforts to foment hatred and incite violence on the basis of race, religion, politics, sexual orientation or any other sub-identity.

Finally, education combined with the restoration of civility in public discourse can reduce the vitriol that widens the fissures in society that Russia and others exploit. A renewed focus on civics education in the United States and other Western societies is important to deter and defeat Russia’s campaigns of disinformation and denial. While keeping in mind the importance of self-criticism, civics curricula in Western nations might emphasize the virtues of those nations’ free, open, and democratic societies. For example, while acknowledging that the American experiment is flawed and incomplete, curricula in the United States might ensure that citizens appreciate the nobility of an unprecedented multi-century effort to ensure democracy, individual rights, equal opportunity, and liberty for all. Political leaders and the media have a vital role in that connection; as do citizens, who might resolve, whenever they discuss points of disagreement, to give at least equal time to points of agreement. Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, initiated a program to promote civility in public discourse. As in cyber defense, improving education and restoring civil discourse will take broad public involvement.

All these efforts are especially critical on the European continent, which remains on the front lines of Putin’s aggressive ambitions. The United States and European and other democratic nations must recognize that parrying Putin’s playbook requires strong collective action. The first step is to regain self-respect not only within individual nations, but also among them as free and open societies.

Europe needs to regain psychological as well as physical strength. The European Union will be only as strong as its members. Europe’s larger states could and should lead; in the next decades, Germany and France are particularly critical to the strength of Europe and the strength of the transatlantic alliance. So are the states that won freedom after the Iron Curtain fell. Will European culture sustain the common identity essential to generating the will to defend itself? The Kremlin is betting that the answer is no. In 2019, Putin declared that liberalism had “become obsolete.”³⁵ It will depend on European leaders and their citizens to prove him wrong.

AS THE United States, NATO, and others counter Russian efforts that fall below the threshold of a military response, they should not underestimate the danger of Russian conventional military and nuclear capabilities. NATO conventional and nuclear strength remains an important deterrent of further aggression, as an emboldened Kremlin could miscalculate and take actions that spark a disastrous military confrontation. It is for this reason that NATO member states should fulfill the pledge made at the Wales Summit in 2014 to invest the equivalent of 2 percent of their GDP in defense. After the end of the Cold War, Europe’s military power atrophied because of the belief that great power competition was a relic of the past. Because Putin is trying to collapse the alliance, it is possible that he could, based on an assessment of weak resolve within NATO nations, precipitate a crisis in the Baltics or elsewhere. He might actually want a target nation to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which states that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and then attempt to dissuade other NATO nations from recognizing the attack. That failure would deliver a hard psychological blow to the alliance.

The United States and its NATO allies must also develop and field capabilities that counter Russia’s disruptive military technologies, including its new nuclear weapons. The United States and NATO are behind in countering Russian capabilities in electronic warfare, layered air defense, and a range of other disruptive capabilities designed to close the gap in advanced military technologies.³⁶ Important conventional capabilities include missile defense, long-range precision fires, and air defense against drones. The U.S. withdrawal from the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in response to Russia’s violation was necessary to maintain deterrence in Europe and make clear that Russia’s irresponsible doctrine of escalation control could only lead to catastrophe for all parties. And should Russia and other nations, such as China, agree to negotiate a treaty limiting or eliminating types of intermediate-range weapons, as the INF Treaty did in 1988, or to preserve New START, the treaty signed in April 2010 (and the follow-up to START I, which reduced the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers by half and established an inspection and verification regime), the United States should remain ready to enter into verifiable agreements that limit the scale and scope of the most destructive weapons on earth. As the United States and NATO invest in future military systems, they should keep Russian countermeasures in mind and design simple, less expensive systems that degrade gracefully, rather than complex, expensive systems susceptible to catastrophic failure.

The combination of actions, initiatives, and capabilities to parry Putin’s playbook should aim to deter Russia by denial—that is, by convincing the Kremlin that it cannot accomplish its objectives through its pernicious form of aggression, the use of military force, or nuclear extortion under its doctrine of escalation control. Should Russian aggression continue or expand, however, the United States and like-minded nations should be prepared to exploit the Kremlin’s many vulnerabilities. Those include Putin’s and the Siloviki’s personal vulnerability to public scrutiny, the Russian people’s growing desire for a say in how they are governed, and the frailty of an economy overburdened by corruption, self-imposed isolation, and a demographic time bomb.

TRUTH AND transparency are important offensive as well as defensive weapons to defeat the Kremlin’s use of lies and obfuscation. Putin’s brash actions internationally belie both his weakness and his fear of losing power. His rule, extended by sham elections, has grown old. When he returned to the presidency after a break as prime minister that was meant to give the illusion that he respected the Constitution, he encountered massive protests. People were angry in part because Putin raised the retirement age even as more Russians became aware that he had become a billionaire many times over only by looting the country.³⁷ By 2019, protests were a regular occurrence in Russian cities as Putin’s popularity dropped. In regional elections in September of that year, Alexei Navalny, an anticorruption activist and lawyer, developed what is known as a “smart-voting” strategy. Creating a list of candidates across the country who he believed could defeat those backed by Putin’s United Russia party, he urged opposition-minded citizens to vote for those on that list. The strategy resulted in victories for a record 160 candidates across the country³⁸ and showed that, even as Putin controls the media and restricts the opposition, elections still matter in Russia.³⁹ Exposing Putin’s personal finances and the finances of the Siloviki who surround him may further embolden a Russian opposition movement that has survived despite brutal Kremlin repression and absolute control of the media, parliament, courts, and security services. Support for opposition groups, anticorruption organizations, and surviving investigative journalists in Russia is an appropriate counter to Putin’s playbook and a way to communicate support for the Russian people while countering Kremlin aggression.

It is likely that opposition to Putin will grow with time as he enters his third decade in power. In January 2020, Putin proposed changes in the Constitution designed to extend his rule beyond 2024. The changes stripped power away from the presidency and empowered the Parliament and the State Council. Prime minister Dmitry Medvedev resigned. Medvedev was given a new position that had not existed previously, deputy chairman of the Security Council. Putin’s choice for Medvedev’s successor as prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, is a technocrat previously tasked with modernizing the Russian Federal Tax Service. Without his own political base, Mishustin seems unlikely to impede Putin’s authority. Indeed, the choice is broadly seen as a way to allow Putin to retain de facto power, perhaps by making policy though the newly empowered State Council.

Putin is very sensitive to the truth, especially about his personal life and his finances. When a small Moscow paper reported that he had divorced and was engaged to a famous gymnast, he had the paper shut down. When the vast data leak known as the Panama Papers revealed in 2016 how he had secured lucrative deals for his friends in exchange for a cut of the profits, he deflected attention from this by accusing Hillary Clinton of inciting protests in his country.⁴⁰

RUSSIAN ECONOMIC dependence on its energy sector is another key vulnerability, and the European nations should take advantage of it. Reducing dependence on Russian oil and gas presents an opportunity to impose costs greater than Putin and the stagnant Russian economy can bear. And because it is possible that, faced with continued economic stagnation, Putin will precipitate another crisis to stoke Russian nationalism and distract the Russian people from their discontent, dependence on Russian energy could prove to be a security as well as an economic liability for Germany and other European states.

Finally, despite Putin’s 2020 proposal to change the Constitution and create a position from which he can continue to wield power, the United States, Europe, and other like-minded nations should think comprehensively about a post-Putin Russia. It is important to recognize that Russian society is still emerging from a traumatic period of transition that witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the birth of a new Russian state, changed borders, and transformation of its economic and political systems. It was, as former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice observed, simply “too much to overcome.”⁴¹ Although the West will have limited influence over how the transition from Putin to a new order occurs and how that new order addresses the challenges and opportunities facing Russia, the United States and other nations might prepare now to play a supportive role.

Lessons from Russia’s failed transition should inform that support. A post-Putin government would have three options: repression, serious reform, or an incompetent execution of the first two options. The West should approach a post-Putin Russia with the goal of welcoming it into a Euro-Atlantic security system that aims to preserve peace and promote prosperity. If the “power vertical” (i.e., the recentralization of the power of the presidency and federal center) that Putin helped to create collapses, America and other nations, informed by failed efforts in the 1990s, should support democratic and institutional development in Russia.⁴² Preparation might begin with an expansion of grassroots programs, exchanges, and education programs (such as the Fulbright scholarship) that circumvent Putin’s repression of civil society to reach the Russian people directly. And the failed effort to promote reform in Russia in the 1990s should also lead to the recognition that reform in Russia will depend on the Russian people. Still, as Secretary Rice observed, “Russia is not Mars and the Russians are not endowed with some unique, anti-democratic DNA.”⁴³

The West must remain open to the possibility, however, that a new government may not abandon the Kremlin’s aggressive policies and may instead perpetuate Putin’s playbook. Under Putin, the Kremlin’s fears are about losing power internally; a rush to allay imagined Russian fears of the West would be foolhardy. Deterrence should remain a top priority for the United States and NATO, so that it is clear to whoever follows Putin that further expansion and continued subversion would be too costly.

IN THE near term, Putin and Russia have forged a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Chairman Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. President Putin described China as “our strategic partner.” Chairman Xi reciprocated with “We’ve managed to take our relationship to the highest level in our history.” Additionally, he referred to President Putin as his “best friend and colleague.”⁴⁴ The two authoritarian regimes aid and abet each other in their mutual effort to collapse the postwar political, economic, and security order.⁴⁵ In 2017, joint military exercises in the Baltic Sea signaled to the world the start of this new partnership. In 2018, China joined Russia’s annual military exercise in Siberia for the first time. The following year, India and Pakistan were also invited to join the exercise otherwise known as Vostok, meaning “East.” Also, in 2019, hundreds of Russian and Chinese military flights violated U.S. allied airspace from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan. On July 23, 2019, a joint Russian-Chinese flight of bomber aircraft entered the air defense identification zone of South Korea and Japan, triggering intercepts by fighter jets from both countries.⁴⁶ In December 2019, Russian and Chinese ships joined the Iranian navy for an exercise in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman. Also, trade between Russia and China increased significantly, growing from $69.6 billion in 2016 to $107.1 billion in 2018, with the increased trade even conducted in the nations’ own currencies as a step toward reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar.⁴⁷

The two countries’ warming relationship has resurrected discussions of the Nixon administration’s triangular diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China. Under triangular diplomacy, the United States endeavored to have a closer relationship with each nation than each nation had with the other. Under Putin and Xi, however, the prospects for improved relations are dim. A Russian grand alliance with China is unnatural because Russia would be a minor and weaker party. Putin’s playbook has made clear that great power competition is not a relic of the past. He and Xi are drawn together, in part, because they are both authoritarian leaders who are determined to undermine free and open societies. Despite Putin’s dangerous aggression against the United States, Europe, and the rest of the free world, the danger from Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party is greater based on the scale of the challenge and the pernicious nature of China’s strategy. For all Putin’s brazen attacks against our country, it is China that in many ways presents the larger, and more complicated, threat to the United States.

NEW CHINA CHARTER STRESSES ECONOMY OVER IDEOLOGY . . . Hide your strength, bide your time . . . TROOPS ROLL THROUGH BEIJING TO CRUSH PROTESTORS . . . CHINA WARNS U.S. TO KEEP AWAY FROM TAIWAN STRAIT . . . A world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations . . . TURMOIL IN CHINA: TIANANMEN CRACKDOWN . . . VIETNAM DRILLS FOR OIL IN BLOCK CLAIMED BY CHINA . . . We need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder in the system . . . The United States is a Pacific power . . . CHINA’S PRESIDENT PLEDGES NO MILITARIZATION IN DISPUTED ISLANDS . . . The Tribunal concluded that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources . . . TWO CHINESE HACKERS ASSOCIATED WITH THE MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY CHARGED . . . After these people are released, their education and transformation must continue . . . BATTLE LINES DRAWN: A FULL-BLOWN TRADE WAR BETWEEN AMERICA AND CHINA . . . I’m getting a lot of money in tariffs its coming in by the billions . . . HUAWEI C.F.O. IS ARRESTED IN CANADA FOR EXTRADITION TO THE U.S. . . . Freedom is only possible when this “virus” in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health . . . HONG KONG LEADERS REBUFF PROTEST DEMAND . . . If one of these sides is going to lose, it’s going to be the NBA . . . TRUMP AND CHINA SIGN PHASE ONE TRADE DEAL . . . The agreement will work if China wants it to work . . . CHINA SILENCES CRITICS OVER DEADLY VIRUS OUTBREAK . . . Taiwan is showing the world how much we cherish our democratic way of life . . . CHINA’S RULERS SEE THE CORONAVIRUS AS A CHANCE TO TIGHTEN THEIR GRIP . . .

CHAPTER 3
An Obsession with Control: The Chinese Communist Party’s Threat to Freedom and Security

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

—GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

I HAD never been to China when I arrived with the president and his traveling party on November 8, 2017. From my first day on the job in the White House almost nine months earlier, China was a top priority. U.S.-China policy was a prominent feature of the Trump presidential campaign. The Chinese were eager to arrange a summit between the two presidents at Mar-a-Lago after the warm and successful visit of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo of Japan just three weeks after the president’s inauguration. China figured prominently in what President Obama had identified to President Trump as the biggest immediate problem his administration would face: what to do about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.¹ I thought it was vital to frame a long-term strategy for China prior to the Mar-a-Lago Summit, scheduled for April 2017, so that the initial discussions between the two leaders and the two main working groups that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was eager to initiate (one on security, the other on trade and economic relations) would be informed by policy goals and more specific objectives.

In March, the Principals Committee of the National Security Council convened to recommend the agenda and objectives for the Mar-a-Lago Summit. At the outset of the meeting, I highlighted the fundamental assumption underpinning U.S. relations with China since paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and the opening of China in 1978: after being welcomed into the international political and economic order, China would play by the rules, open its markets, and privatize its economy.² And as the country became more prosperous, the Chinese government would respect the rights of its people and liberalize. I observed that the intentions, policies, and actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had rendered those assumptions demonstrably false. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China is a threat to free and open societies because its policies actively promote a closed, authoritarian model as an alternative to the rules-based order. This matters because the CCP aims to accomplish its objectives at other nations’ expense. In particular, its strategy intends to shift global economic leadership and geopolitical alignment toward China and away from the United States. It was past time, I believed, to effect one of the most significant shifts in foreign policy and national security strategy in recent American history.

I spent most of my career in Europe and the Middle East. I knew a little Chinese history but had a lot to learn. My “professor” was the NSC senior director for Asia, Matt Pottinger. Matt learned Chinese in high school in Boston and then studied for two years overseas in Beijing and Taiwan. He was fluent not only in Mandarin, but also in Chinese history and literature. He covered China as a journalist for eight years, including as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. When covering the devastating 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, Matt was impressed by the effectiveness, discipline, and compassion of the U.S. Marines who provided humanitarian relief. He decided to seek an age waiver and join the Marine Corps as an officer. After nine months of intense physical preparation, he reported, at the age of thirty-two, to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. Subsequent assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence officer convinced him that the United States had tremendous capabilities but did not always employ those capabilities well. American leaders often failed to understand the nature of complex competitions with enemies and adversaries. Matt came to the attention of then–Major General Michael Flynn. In 2010, the two coauthored, with Paul D. Batchelor, a monograph entitled Fixing Intel. In 2015, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president, Flynn had retired from the army as a lieutenant general, and Pottinger had left the Marine Corps and was working at an investment firm in New York City. After Trump was elected, Flynn, who was named national security advisor, asked Pottinger to join the NSC. I was grateful for the opportunity to serve with Matt. He worked tirelessly to get sound policies and strategies in place not only for China and North Korea, but also for the entire Indo-Pacific region. And his sense of humor brought much-needed levity to the hard work and long hours on the NSC staff.

The discussions at Mar-a-Lago were meant, in part, to convey a significant change in U.S. policy. We communicated to our counterparts that we were particularly concerned about China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, where their People’s Liberation Army was building islands in order to lay claim to 1.4 million square miles of water through which approximately three trillion dollars of trade flows each year. But the main theme of the summit was China’s unfair trade and economic practices, which we described as a form of economic aggression that the United States could no longer tolerate. The discussions were cordial. I got the impression from our guests that they had heard these points before, believed that time was on their side, and doubted our will to back any of our concerns with action.

But when Air Force One touched down in Beijing nearly seven months later, a new China policy was largely in place. Government bureaucracies were shifting away from an approach that regarded China’s growing power at the West’s expense as an inevitable phenomenon that was best accommodated rather than challenged. The new policy acknowledged that we were in a competition with China—a competition that the United States was losing because of a failure to understand the emotions, ideology, and aspirations that motivated Chinese Communist Party policy. Since the 1990s, U.S. policy toward China betrayed all the elements of strategic narcissism: wishful thinking, mirror imaging, confirmation bias, and the belief that others will conform to a U.S.-developed “script.” China aided in that self-delusion as the CCP used co-option and coercion to tighten its control internally and extend its influence internationally while concealing its true intentions. Our two days in Beijing heightened my sense of urgency to infuse our approach to China with a strong dose of strategic empathy.

The first step was to appreciate the influence of historical memory on Chinese Communist leaders. John Fairbank, the godfather of American sinology, noted in 1948, in the first edition of his seminal book The United States and China, that to understand the policies and actions of Chinese leaders, “historical perspective is not a luxury, but a necessity.”³ During the visit, Chairman Xi Jinping and his advisors used history to convey messages to President Trump, to the Chinese people, and to the world. The selective use of history—both the history they invoked and the history they averted—revealed the emotions and worldview that drive Chinese Communist Party goals. State Councilor Yang Jiechi, my Chinese counterpart, had decided on a “state visit plus” of tremendous grandeur that would take us to three sites adjacent to one another at the center of Beijing: the Forbidden City (the seat of Chinese emperors across five centuries), the Great Hall of the People (a vast building completed in 1959 as part of the tenth anniversary of the founding of Communist China), and Tiananmen Square (the site of Mao’s mausoleum and the focal point of the massive protests against Chinese Communist Party rule in 1989 that the People’s Liberation Army brutally suppressed).

OUR HOSTS were State Councilor Yang, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Chinese ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai, and Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang. Our party included U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson, White House senior aide Jared Kushner, U.S. ambassador to China Terry Branstad, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, and director of social media and assistant to the president Dan Scavino. Chairman Xi and his wife, the famous singer Peng Liyuan, greeted President and Mrs. Trump at the gates of the Forbidden City. The leaders and their wives moved ahead of the rest of our party. As we walked through the West Glorious Gate, I looked for Matt Pottinger, who had been walking behind us. I discovered later that the guards had denied him access. Matt knew too much. Our hosts were gracious, but clearly intended to use the visit to the Forbidden City to convey messages without the encumbrance of someone who might subject those messages to skepticism and keen appraisal.

The main message was consistent with a speech Xi Jinping had delivered just two weeks earlier, at the Nineteenth National Congress in the Great Hall of the People: the Chinese Communist Party was relentlessly pursuing the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The Forbidden City was the perfect backdrop for Chairman Xi to place in historical perspective his determination to “take center stage in the world and to make a greater contribution to humankind.”⁴ The visit portrayed this great rejuvenation as an inevitable return to an earlier era during which Imperial China was a powerful “Middle Kingdom .” The Forbidden City was built during the Ming dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years (from 1368 to 1644), a period considered one of China’s golden ages, in which its economy, territorial control, and culture reached unprecedented efflorescence. It was during this dynasty that Zheng He, an admiral in the Ming fleet, embarked on seven voyages around the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans, more than half a century before Columbus. Zheng He’s “treasure ships,” among the largest wooden ships ever built, brought back tribute from all parts of their known world. But despite the success of the seven voyages, the emperor concluded that the world had nothing to offer China. Citing the expense of the fleet, he ordered the treasure ships scuttled and Chinese ports closed. Xi viewed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an aberrational period during which European nations and their colonies, and then, later, the United States, achieved economic and military dominance.⁵ The 2017 visit to the Forbidden City was meant to depict China’s increasingly active foreign policy as a return to a natural order. The Forbidden City was the destination for foreigners to bow before the emperor’s authority, pay tribute, and to supplicate for privileges that the emperor might bestow upon them.

Xi wanted his visitors to recognize as inevitable that Chinese power would once again underpin an international system in which Chinese leaders granted privileges in exchange for recognition of China’s superiority. The visit by the U.S. president and First Lady was, in part, a continuation of the “coming-out party” to announce China’s return to power that began with the spectacular opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Like that show and the closing ceremony that placed modern technological innovation in the context of five thousand years of Chinese history, the tour of the city and the remarkable performances based on three Chinese operas before dinner were reminders that Chinese dynasties stood at the center of the earth and that Chinese emperors were the guarantors of harmony on earth and the arbiters between earth and heaven.

The chairman’s message was meant for the Chinese people as well as for President Trump and our party. We walked in the footsteps of countless foreign delegations, such as the British mission, led by Lord George Macartney, that visited the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty in the 1790s. Traveling from the port to the Forbidden City, the British found the route lined with banners emblazoned with large characters announcing that the Europeans had come to “pay tribute to the Great Emperor.” During President Trump’s visit, state television’s live coverage served the same purpose: to show the Chinese people a foreign power acknowledging China’s and Chairman Xi’s power. Qianlong and Chairman Xi both saw the narrative of national greatness as necessary for maintaining domestic order.⁶

While the images broadcast to China and the world from the Forbidden City were meant to project confidence in the Chinese Communist Party, they belied profound insecurity. Like Chairman Xi, the emperors who occupied the Forbidden City practiced a remote and autocratic style of rule vulnerable to corruption and internal threats. Since the end of the Han dynasty, in AD 220, China’s core provinces were ruled only half the time by a strong central authority. Even when China was ruled by powerful governments such as that of the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing dynasties, China was subject to domestic turmoil and foreign invasion. As with those who went before him, Xi’s outer confidence masked a sense of foreboding that he might suffer a fate similar to that of previous rulers.⁷ A few months later, in 2018, Chairman Xi did away with term limits and extended his rule indefinitely.

In its very design, the Forbidden City seemed to reflect the contrast between leaders’ outward confidence and inner apprehension. Our guide walked us through the three great halls at the city’s center: the Taihedian, the Hall of Supreme Harmony (where the emperor presided over ceremonies), the Zhonghedian, the Hall of Central Harmony (where officials kowtowed to the emperor before ceremonies in the Taihedian), and the Baohedian, the Hall of Preserving Harmony (where emperors held banquets to entertain heads of state, kinsmen, and government ministers). Those grand structures were meant not only to impress, but also to defend from threats that might come from inside or outside the city’s walls. The emperor was housed at the center of the walled complex for protection and was constantly surrounded by his guards. The emperors who sat on the elaborate throne in the Hall of Central Harmony made decisions based largely on fear and anxiety.

For example, the Yongle emperor Zhu Dai, who built the Forbidden City, having overthrown his nephew to take power, was even more concerned about internal dangers than he was about the possibility of another Mongol invasion. To identify and eliminate opponents, the emperor set up an elaborate spy network. To preempt opposition from scholars and bureaucrats, he directed the executions not only of those suspected of disloyalty, but also their entire families, including women and children. Among the victims were four scholars who became known as the Four Martyrs. One of these scholars, Fang Xiaoru, when threatened with the elimination of nine kinship lines, replied defiantly that he was “fine with ten.” All his blood relations were murdered along with all his students and peers—a total of 873 people. The Chinese Communist Party used similar tactics several centuries later. ⁸

I could not help but think of the contrast between the city’s grandeur and its occupants’ insecurity. The art and architectural style, however, reflected the basis for Confucius’s social creed that hierarchy and harmony fit together and are interdependent. Our guide explained that architectural styles conformed to the Treatise on Architectural Methods, an eleventh-century manual that specified particular designs for ranks in Chinese social structure. As we entered the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest building in the Forbidden City, he pointed out that its double-layered-roof design was reserved for the emperor only. The grand throne is surrounded by six immense golden pillars engraved with dragons to evoke the supreme power of the emperor. Behind the throne, a carved gilt screen and incense burners in the shape of unicorns signify the submission of all other kingdoms. After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the new rulers of the Qing dynasty preserved the Ming architecture, but changed the names of some of the buildings. The Hall of Imperial Supremacy became the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Consistent with the Confucian teaching that the fundamental duty is to “know thy place,” the emperors promoted deference to hierarchy (both by the Chinese people and vassal states) as the path to harmony. But their effort to preserve hierarchical order and control was anything but harmonious for those subjected to their brutality. As the Manchu forces advanced into China proper, Chongzhen, the last Ming emperor, left his throne carved with images of dragons and unicorns, and hanged himself from a tree on Meishan, a hill overlooking the palace.

As our guide described the construction of the Forbidden City, it was clear that the rulers’ determination to preserve the hierarchical order and guard against internal threats meant hardship rather than harmony for the Chinese people. Zhu Di mobilized one hundred thousand artisans and one million laborers to build the city; they did so in just fourteen years. Peasants dragged large carved stones seventy kilometers from the quarry to the construction site. Working in below-freezing temperatures, fifty laborers per stone sloshed water in front of the sled that bore the stone to create an icy surface before dragging the sled over rough ground. The most powerful symbol of hierarchy and the deference that Chinese rulers expected lay not in the architectural style of the city, but in the sacrifice the Chinese people made to construct it. Laborers in the Forbidden City, like those who worked eighty kilometers away to strengthen the Great Wall and protect against another Mongol invasion, were on the unfortunate end of superior-inferior relations that underpinned the hierarchical order.

As we walked through the city, it was easy to view Chairman Xi as supremely confident. He wanted to be seen as the unchallenged ruler of an increasingly powerful and apparently harmonious country. Yet for Xi and his predecessors, the pomp of the office masked deep insecurity, and harmony concealed brutal repression. After the tour of the Forbidden City, I thought of the relationship between the emperor and the Chinese people during previous eras as analogous to the dominance that the Chinese Communist Party seeks over all aspects of Chinese political and social life today. Xi and Communist Party leaders expect the same degree of deference to hierarchy and collective effort to achieve the China Dream, what Xi has described as Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism, and national glory. As China’s power increased, so did leaders’ uncertainty and fear. Danger came in many forms. The sweep of Chinese dynastic history reveals cycles of prosperity followed by increased population; the growth of corruption; some combination of natural disaster, famine, rebellion, and civil war; political and economic decline; and, finally, collapse. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China’s classic texts, warns, “After a long split, a union will occur; after a long union, a split will occur .” Communist Party leaders and their dynastic progenitors viewed control through autocratic hierarchy as the best guarantor of harmony and protection against chaos. Control then and today required protecting China not only from internal influences that might challenge the hierarchical order, but also from threats along China’s vast frontier. (China today shares its 13,743 miles of border with fourteen countries, including Russia, India, Vietnam, and North Korea).

Our guide showed us where the last royal occupant of the Forbidden City, Emperor Puyi, was stripped of power in 1911, at the age of five, during China’s Republican Revolution. He remained in the old Imperial apartments at the back of the palace until 1924. Puyi abdicated in the midst of the “century of humiliation,” a period of Chinese history that Chairman Xi had described to President Trump and those who joined the two leaders for dinner at Mar-a-Lago six months earlier. The century of humiliation was the unhappy era during which China suffered major internal fragmentation, lost wars, made major concessions to foreign powers, and endured brutal occupation. Humiliation began with Great Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842. It ended with Allied and Chinese defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 and Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.⁹

As the tour ended, I was even more convinced that our dramatic shift in policy was needed and long overdue. The Forbidden City was supposed to convey confidence in China’s national rejuvenation and return as the Middle Kingdom. But for me, it exposed the fears as well as the grand ambitions that drive the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to extend China’s influence along its frontiers and beyond and regain the honor lost during the “century of humiliation.” The party was obsessed with control because control was necessary to allay its fears and fulfill its ambitions.

THE HISTORY that our Chinese hosts omitted was as revealing as the history they promoted. The two leaders and their wives preceded us into the Hospital for Cultural Relics at the National Palace Museum. As we observed craftspeople restoring artifacts, it was clear that Xi was resurrecting what Mao had tried to destroy: historical memory of China’s Imperial past. Mao was an iconoclast; Xi was a nostalgic. Mao destroyed order and invited the chaos of continuous revolution; Xi evoked Confucian moral order to maintain control and encourage conformity.

The 1.5-ton portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong that hung over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, facing Tiananmen Square, was impossible to miss. But our guide did not mention it; nor did he make any mention of Mao, even though the square occupies the space between that great portrait and the mausoleum that holds Mao’s crystal coffin and his embalmed body. It was at the Gate of Heavenly Peace that, on October 1, 1949, Mao announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He and his fellow revolutionaries believed that the state had to be torn down to save it. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia seemed a workable model. By the time Mao gave his speech in 1949, the Chinese people had endured fourteen years of brutal Japanese occupation after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and a costly civil war that followed from 1945 to 1949.

Xi repeatedly spoke of Japan’s brutal occupation of China and portrayed the Chinese Communist Party as a savior that had liberated the Chinese people from Japanese oppressors. Even as we looked out at Tiananmen Square, our hosts cast their efforts to achieve “national rejuvenation” as the party’s triumph over the century of humiliation. But as I looked upon the square’s gray vastness, my mind could not help but replay images of fanatical Red Guards from Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 or the tanks that brutally repressed the student demonstrations of 1989.

Chairman Xi dwells on the century of humiliation for another reason: to gloss over the first decades of party rule that followed, which were even worse. The application of Maoist theory between the end of the Civil War in 1949 and Mao’s demise nearly three decades later killed tens of millions of Chinese through misrule, policy-induced famine, and political purges, to say nothing of the disastrous Maoist-inspired revolutions in other parts of the world.

Six years after National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger orchestrated President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution and forced to work in a tractor factory, succeeded Mao as paramount leader. Deng gradually dismantled Maoist policies. From 1978 to 1989, he focused on economic growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign policy. In 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”¹⁰ Under Deng and his successors, such as Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–2012), the rejection of Maoist economic policies and political excesses was explicit. But that changed when Xi Jinping assumed the premiership in 2012.

To master the past as a means of securing his future, Xi cultivated a more benign interpretation of Chinese Communist Party history, one based on three phases of progress. First, Mao Zedong ended the century of humiliation. Second, Deng Xiaoping and his successors generated wealth. Third, Xi Jinping returned China to greatness. Xi’s portrayal of Mao as savior rather than tyrant represented more than a manipulation of history; it required the suppression of personal trauma. Xi and his family suffered physical and psychological abuse during the Cultural Revolution. His father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior party official and veteran of the revolution, was imprisoned and tortured. The Red Guards ransacked his childhood home and forced his family to flee. One of Xi’s sisters died from the hardship. Xi was brought before a jeering crowd during a “struggle session,” a humiliation ritual used during the Cultural Revolution, where his own mother denounced him. Like many of his contemporaries who are now at the top of the party, Xi was forced to work in the countryside. He rarely speaks of the horrors inflicted on his family at the outset of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1968. Instead, his propaganda apparatus portrays his seven years of hard labor as an uplifting coming-of-age story that explains his resilience as well as his empathy for the hardships suffered by the less fortunate people of rural China. Xi’s reluctance to criticize Mao and the Cultural Revolution is more than a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which victims develop positive feelings toward their captors and sympathy for their causes. Xi is unwilling to renounce the Mao era mainly because he understands that any historical questioning of the Communist Party past could morph into skepticism of and opposition to the Communist Party present. Contemplation of the Maoist period’s failures might raise doubts about the party’s ability to deliver on the China Dream through absolute control. Losing control of the past is, for autocrats, the first step toward losing control of the future.¹¹

MANIPULATING THE collective memory of the Chinese people requires ever greater feats of censorship and nationalistic education under Xi. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms generated prosperity, but they also caused ideological incoherence. The contradictions between Communist orthodoxy and a highly globalized economy were starker than ever thirty years after Deng said, “Let some people get rich first” and “Getting rich is glorious.”¹² Authoritarian capitalism created ample opportunities for corruption and produced a bourgeois class larger than any other self-proclaimed Communist country has ever seen. When he assumed leadership of the party in 2012, Xi was determined to reemphasize the ideological underpinning of CCP rule but to couch it in a rhetoric of Chinese chauvinism and national destiny. In speeches, he revived Mao’s claim in his Little Red Book (a collection of 267 of the dictator’s aphorisms) that it was “an objective law independent of man’s will [that] the socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system.” In tandem, he has promoted a “community of common destiny for mankind,” a bid for global leadership that strongly echoes his dynastic forebears, based on the idea that China reigns supreme over tianxia—“everything beneath heaven.”

Xi was the consensus pick to lead the party in 2012, a bona fide member of what Australian journalist John Garnaut has labeled the “princeling cohort.” The princelings, direct descendants of the party elders who fought and won the revolution in 1949, share existential angst that they may succumb to the historical cycle that destroyed every dynasty that came before them. For Xi and his contemporaries at the top of the CCP, maintaining control and achieving national rejuvenation can be matters of life or death.¹³

This attitude was further reinforced by the Tiananmen Square protest. In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square to demand democratic governance, free speech, and a free press. Within a week, many of the protesters began hunger strikes. The Chinese government declared martial law and dispatched mechanized PLA units to the capital. On the night of June 3, the PLA closed in on the center of Beijing, firing live ammunition into crowds of people on the streets. The army stormed the square at 1 a.m. on June 4. Estimates of civilian deaths ranged from several hundred to ten thousand. The massacre generated global outrage. As I glimpsed Tiananmen Square, I remembered that history and thought once more about the paradox of China’s growing power and fragility.

For the CCP’s leaders, the lesson of Tiananmen was never to loosen its grip on power. Xi and the party see 1989 as a period during which the Chinese Communist Party might have joined the Soviet Union in collapse. As with Putin and the Russian Siloviki, party leadership viewed Mikhail Gorbachev as weak. Gorbachev, who visited Beijing amid the Tiananmen Square protests to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Soviet-Communist China relations, lost faith in the primacy of the Soviet party elites and compromised. Xi and his cohort believe that Gorbachev’s effort to make the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a “party of the whole people” was misguided and led to the Soviet Union’s demise.

While obsessed with party purity and order at home, the CCP is determined to advance its system of authoritarian capitalism abroad to expand Chinese power and influence at the expense of countries that adhere to democratic principles and free-market economic practices. On the morning of the second day of our visit, we stood on the steps of the Great Hall of the People as the American and Chinese leaders, clad in overcoats against the brisk autumn air, reviewed a People’s Liberation Army honor guard. Off to one side was a throng of Chinese and American elementary school children leaping up and down and enthusiastically waving the flags of the two nations. The kids, who had been cued to begin their cheering too soon, were visibly exhausted by the time the two leaders passed in front of them to enter the Great Hall and begin the day’s talks. Pottinger (who wouldn’t be stopped from attending the second day’s meetings) leaned over and deadpanned into my ear, “The children are getting an early start on their social credit scores.” Such bits of humor were what made our intense schedule feel tolerable—and would have landed a Chinese blogger in jail.

The ceremony and the tour of the Forbidden City left me with the impression that the party’s leaders believe that they have a fleeting window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor. To seize upon this opportunity, the CCP integrates internal and external efforts to expand its comprehensive national power. Internally, realizing the so-called China Dream requires unprecedented economic growth, popular support for national rejuvenation, and tight control of the population. Externally, satisfying the narrative of national rejuvenation renders a dramatic expansion of Chinese economic, political, and military influence indispensable. The CCP’s strategy relies on co-option and coercion to influence China’s population, other nations, and international organizations to act in the party’s interests. The party also attempts to conceal its intentions and its actions to preclude competition. This strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment integrates a range of cultural, economic, technological, and military efforts. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous, not only to the United States and the free world but also to China’s citizens deemed a threat to the party’s ambitions, is the integrated nature of the party’s effort across government, industry, academia, and the military.

TO MAINTAIN its exclusive grip on power in the post-Mao period, the party strove to meet the population’s rising expectations mainly through increased economic opportunity. Since Deng’s reforms, the Chinese people achieved an astonishing rate of growth, which pulled more than 800 million people out of poverty. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, China’s middle class grew by 203 million people. China became the world’s second-largest economy and the largest exporter. Infrastructure and construction projects transformed China’s harbors, airports, railways, and roads, connecting the Chinese people to one another and the world to an unprecedented degree. By the early 2000s, half the world’s cranes were building gleaming skyscrapers in China’s rapidly expanding cities. The party’s goal was to double income levels between 2010 and 2020. This proved unsustainable. Since 2015, China has marked less than 7 percent growth every year, and by 2020, China’s leaders saw this key pillar of their legitimacy, economic growth, fracturing. Policies designed to maintain high rates of growth generated long-term frailties in the economy.¹⁴ Vast debt fueled inefficient growth but did not produce profitable returns. Overinvestment in particular sectors led to overcapacity and losses. By early 2020, economic growth had decelerated to the lowest rate in twenty-nine years as capital investment by Chinese firms dropped. To boost the decelerating economy, China cut banks’ reserve rates to free up $126 billion for loans. But then the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in early 2020 and the associated quarantine and travel restrictions affected nearly half of China’s population, slowing China’s economy further. It seemed possible that China’s economic policies designed to keep the party’s exclusive grip on power and allow China to sprint to catch up to the United States might risk what party leaders feared most: internal dissent based on a failure to meet the peoples’ rising expectations.

The logical way to continue the economic growth that began with Deng’s reforms in the 1980s would have been to reform markets even further, unleashing free enterprise and deemphasizing large, inefficient state-owned companies that lacked incentives to increase productivity and pursue innovative technologies. Instead, under Xi, the party strengthened the primacy of state-owned enterprises (SOE). Although SOEs are inefficient and major sources of waste and corruption, they are critical to maintaining the party’s control over the economy and co-opting the population. SOEs are also foundational to the party’s plans to shift the economy toward high-end manufacturing and dominate critical sectors of the emerging global economy. Xi moved to “strengthen, optimize, and enlarge” state companies, directing more than $1 billion in mergers to create national champion industries such as railway, metals, mining, shipping, and nuclear energy.¹⁵

UNDER THE party’s strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment, China’s authoritarian system has become ubiquitous. To ensure their grip on power even if they fail to meet their goals for improved standards of living, party leaders emphasized propaganda and accelerated the construction of an unprecedented surveillance state that is more intrusive than that imagined by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Indeed, the party invented the term brainwashing, and today’s efforts have their roots in the thought reform movement that Zhou Enlai initiated in 1951 and the CCP perfected during the Cultural Revolution. Twenty-first-century brainwashing has been upgraded with new technology. For 1.4 billion Chinese people, government propaganda is a seamless part of everyday life. Chinese television news follows a regular agenda: ten to fifteen minutes on Chairman Xi and other CCP leaders, five to ten minutes on Chinese economic achievements, and five to seven minutes on the failures of the rest of the world. There is also routine coverage of the theme that the United States wants to keep China down. Students in universities and high schools must take lessons in “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the chairman’s fourteen-point philosophy that emphasizes the party’s “people-centric” approach to governance and the many benefits of the CCP’s supreme leadership over everything. Xi Jinping Thought is the subject of the most popular app in China. The app, whose name translates to “Study Strong Country,” requires users to sign in with their mobile numbers and real names before earning study points through reading articles, commenting daily, and taking multiple-choice tests about the party’s virtues and wise policies.¹⁶

The social credit score is one of the party’s many tools for co-opting the population into conformity and coercing recalcitrant individuals. The party uses its control of the internet and all forms of communication in combination with artificial intelligence technologies to monitor activities and conversations. The resulting social credit score is meant to determine eligibility for almost all social services, such as loans, internet access, government employment, education, insurance, and transportation.

Like its dynastic predecessors, the party leadership is particularly concerned about dissent in China’s border regions. The party has acted most aggressively toward the ethnic minority populations and in territories annexed in recent history. In western Xinjiang, for example, where the ethnic-majority Uighurs mainly practice Islam, the party has engaged in systematic repression designed to coerce the population into forswearing their religious and cultural identity in favor of the party’s nationalist ideology. By 2019, the party had detained at least a million Uighurs in concentration camps where they are subjected to systematic brainwashing. Uighur families are forced to house loyal party members so their progress in reeducation can be monitored. The CCP has demolished historic mosques. Ethnic Han have been forcefully resettled into Xinjiang to dilute Uighur culture. Xinjiang has become a testing ground for maintaining ideological purity and psychological as well as cultural control. In Xinjiang’s concentration camps, prisoners begin the day with a flag-raising ceremony; they pass time singing Communist Party songs, praising the party and Xi Jinping, and studying Chinese language, history, and law. The CCP responded to international criticism of these repressive tactics with denial, but evidence mounted. In November 2019, the New York Times uncovered a startling cache of documents allegedly leaked by a member of the CCP. The more than four hundred pages of records revealed party orders to crush all minorities’ opposition, imprison more than one million people in concentration camps, and carry out systematic brainwashing and cultural control. Included in the documents were internal speeches by Chairman Xi directing officials to show “absolutely no mercy” as they crack down on minority populations. He also directed follow-up efforts to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China. Local officials who resisted the party’s orders were purged; a county head in southern Xinjiang was jailed for quietly releasing more than seven thousand inmates.¹⁷ The CCP is also repressive, albeit more subtly, in Tibet, and it has continuously chipped away at local autonomy and individual rights in the former colonial territories of Hong Kong and Macao.

In Tibet, where the Buddhist majority regards the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader, the party blended co-option with coercion under a campaign of “stability maintenance.” To appear as a benefactor, the party refurbished rather than razed temples and historical sites. As in Xinjiang, however, Communist Party cadres monitor every village, oversee political education, and manage every monastery and religious institution. Enabled by new technology, the party intends to scrutinize daily behavior so it can identify and swiftly punish dissent. The party also claimed the right to approve “high reincarnations” that select future Dalai Lamas, the foremost leader of the “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism.

In June 2019, the party’s effort to tighten its control over Hong Kong’s population sparked sustained protests that continued into 2020. The protests were initially in response to a law that would allow local authorities to extradite criminal fugitives wanted on the mainland. The demonstrators demanded suspension not only of the bill, but of other means of eroding Hong Kong’s democratic autonomy. The party responded by waging a sustained campaign of propaganda to discredit the protestors and by carrying out coercive measures against companies and individuals that supported them. A landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates in the November 2019 election indicated widespread support for the protest movement and Hong Kong’s semiautonomous status. Demonizing dissent and blaming foreign forces were the same tactics employed after the Tiananmen Square massacre thirty years earlier. After President Trump signed a bill expressing support for the protestors and authorizing sanctions against individuals and entities that used force against them, thousands of people assembled in front of the Hong Kong City Hall for a pro-American and pro-democracy rally.¹⁸ The party conducted a global propaganda campaign to portray the protests as a foreign-backed color revolution designed to destabilize China.

Efforts to prevent dissent and maintain control through co-option and coercion span the entire country. Religion is one of the party’s perceived threats because it encroaches on the void left after the collapse of Maoism. Mao attacked religion as “vulgar superstition,” but his effort to replace spirituality with Communist ideology and his own cult of personality failed. The Catholic Church and fast-growing Protestant religions concerned Xi and the party, although their campaign against Christianity was less brazen than the campaign against Islam. In 2018, for example, the party attempted to co-opt the Catholic Church by ceding veto power to the Vatican over bishop nominees in return for Rome’s recognition of party-appointed bishops. Despite its effort, about half the country’s ten million Catholics continued to worship underground and reject churches run by the state. When Protestant congregations proved difficult to control because of their diversity, the party forcefully removed crosses from the tops of churches and even demolished some churches to make an example of those that had failed to register with the government. To provide an alternative to Christianity and Islam, Xi and the party resurrected the Confucian moral code, with its emphasis on deference to hierarchy and preservation of harmony, as a form of folk religion intended to strengthen the CCP’s grip on power. The party has also significantly boosted patronage of Buddhism and Daoism as “Chinese” alternatives to what it regards as foreign belief systems.¹⁹

Suppression of religion extended to suppression of ideas associated with Western liberalism. Any principles or values that might challenge the absolute control of the party had to be eliminated. Particularly dangerous were materials that extolled individual rights, including freedom of expression, representative government, and rule of law. In 2019, for example, the Ministry of Education ordered a nationwide check on all university constitutional law textbooks. Within weeks, a popular textbook written by Beijing University law professor Zhang Qianfan was pulled from bookstores throughout the country. Zhang noted in an interview that “constitutional law, as an academic discipline, should not be politicized.” Not long after it was posted on a social media platform, the interview also disappeared.²⁰

THE PARTY’S effort to stifle human freedom and extend authoritarian control does not stop at China’s borders. China uses a combination of co-option and propaganda to promote its policies and its worldview. China’s expanding influence in the world, what scholars and policy makers call tianxia (, meaning “everything under heaven”), goes beyond the peaceful development of a new international order sympathetic to Chinese interests. Chinese leaders aim to put in place a modern-day version of the tributary system that Chinese emperors used to establish authority over vassal states. Under that Imperial system, kingdoms could trade and enjoy peace with the Chinese Empire in return for submission.²¹ If the Chinese Communist Party succeeds in creating a twenty-first-century version of the tributary system, the world will be less free, less prosperous, and less safe. China intends to establish the new tributary system through a massive effort organized under three overlapping policies: Made in China 2025, One Belt One Road (OBOR), and Military-Civil Fusion.

Made in China 2025 is designed to make China a largely independent science and technology innovation power. To achieve that goal, the party is creating high-tech monopolies inside China and stripping foreign companies of their intellectual property through theft and forced technology transfer. SOEs and private companies work in concert to achieve the party’s objectives. In some cases, foreign companies are required or coerced to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies to sell their products in China. These Chinese companies mostly have close ties to the party, making routine the transfer of intellectual property and manufacturing techniques to their partners and, by extension, to the Chinese government. Thus, foreign companies entering into the Chinese market often make huge profits in the short term, but after transferring their intellectual property and manufacturing know-how, they see their market share diminish as Chinese companies, advantaged by state support and cheap labor, produce goods at a low price and dump those goods into the global market. As a result, many international companies lose market share and even go out of business. Made in China 2025 aims to fuel China’s economic growth with a vast amount of transferred technology and eventually dominate sectors of the emerging global economy that will give it military as well as economic advantages.

The party’s international efforts to achieve national rejuvenation and realize the China Dream come together under the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, later labeled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for foreign audiences, to mask its China-centric nature. OBOR calls for more than one trillion dollars in new infrastructure investments across the Indo-Pacific and Eurasian continents and beyond. While the initiative initially received an enthusiastic reception from nations that saw an opportunity both for economic growth and to satisfy their need for improved infrastructure, by 2018 it had become clear to many of those nations that CCP investment came with many strings attached, most prominently unsustainable debt and widespread corruption. Under the CCP’s integrated strategy, economic motives are inseparable from strategic designs. OBOR projects are meant to gain influence over targeted governments and place the “Middle Kingdom” at the hub of routes and communications networks. New or expanded transportation and shipping routes will ease the flow of energy and raw materials into China and Chinese products out. More routes would significantly reduce the risk that the United States or other nations could interdict those flows at critical maritime chokepoints, such as the Strait of Malacca (the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific).²² To ensure control at key geographic points, the CCP uses investment and indebtedness as the basis for servile relationships between the Middle Kingdom and modern-day vassal states. OBOR is, in large measure, a colonial-style campaign of co-option and coercion.

Belying the party’s description of OBOR as development of a “community for shared future for mankind,” the initiative has instead created a common pattern of economic clientelism that the Chinese Communist Party eagerly exploits.²³ The CCP first co-opts countries with large, high-interest loans from Chinese banks. Once they are indebted, the party coerces that country’s leaders to align with the party’s foreign policy agenda and goal of displacing the influence of the United States and its key partners (e.g., Japan, Australia, India, and European nations). Although Chinese leaders often depict these deals as “win-win,” many OBOR projects have proven to be a one-way toll road that ensures China’s access to a client country’s energy and raw materials, creates artificial demand for Chinese products and a Chinese labor force, and allows China to control critical physical and communications infrastructure. These deals, rather, fit the description of “triple wins” solely for China: Chinese companies and workers abroad cycle money back into the Chinese economy, Chinese banks enjoy high-interest payments, and the Chinese government gains powerful influence over the target country’s economic and diplomatic relations.

For developing countries with fragile economies, the OBOR sets a ruthless debt trap. When countries are unable to service loans, China sometimes trades debt for equity to gain control of the debtor country’s ports, airports, dams, power plants, or communications networks. The list of countries for whom China set the debt trap reveals a shrewd strategy to control routes vital to commerce and freedom of navigation. By 2020, the risk of debt distress was growing in thirty-three countries with OBOR financing, and eight poor countries (Pakistan, Djibouti, the Maldives, Laos, Mongolia, Montenegro, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan) already had unsustainable levels of debt.²⁴

China’s tactics vary based on the relative strength or weakness of the target states’ leaders and institutions. When faced with large-scale investment projects, countries with weak political institutions often succumb to corruption, which makes them even more vulnerable to China’s strategy. In Sri Lanka, for example, then-president Mahinda Rajapaksa incurred debts far beyond what his nation could bear. He agreed to a high-interest loan to finance Chinese construction of a port, despite no immediate or apparent need for a new harbor on the small island nation. The prime minister was later defeated electorally, but the Sri Lankan government remained severely indebted. Following the commercial failure of the port, Sri Lanka was forced to sign a ninety-nine-year lease to a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Although Chinese officials announced that the port would not be used for military purposes, two Chinese submarines docked there in advance of Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to the country in 2014.

The Maldives, a small island nation of four hundred thousand people off the coast of India, was another attractive target because it controls a maritime territory of high strategic importance, one more than three times larger than the United Kingdom. When China approached the country and struck a deal with President Abdulla Yameen (who, along with other officials, greatly profited from the inflated value of contracts), the Maldives incurred a combination of debt and guaranteed loans of more than $1.5 billion, more than 30 percent of their GDP. (Unreported guarantees could make the total loans as high as $3 billion.) In 2018, Chinese efforts to influence the presidential election in the Maldives failed due to a backlash against corruption, indebtedness, and the associated loss of sovereignty.²⁵

Malaysia, the second-largest recipient of OBOR funding after Pakistan, was another important target for the CCP due to the country’s strategic location at the heart of Asia, with 4,500 kilometers of coastline and a shamelessly corrupt government. After Prime Minister Najib Razak and his co-conspirators embezzled $4.5 billion from the country’s sovereign wealth fund—$681 million went into Najib’s personal bank account—China arrived to bail him out. China also financed a Malaysian rail project for $16 billion, over twice the actual cost, a scheme that Chairman Xi personally approved. Five months later, Najib flew to Beijing to sign the deal. Beginning in mid-2017, the much-needed cash flow from Chinese state-owned banks was initiated, helping the president of the third-wealthiest nation in Southeast Asia cover for his embezzled funds.²⁶

In Kenya, the railway project to connect the port city of Mombasa with Nairobi significantly underdelivered in revenue and increased public debt to unsustainable levels. Kenyan economist David Ndii described the railway in harsh terms as heralding “a new age of Oriental colonialism.” Seeing Kenyan government officials “groveling” to the Chinese and making excuses for excesses, such as the maltreatment of Kenyan workers, Ndii was reminded of “the chiefs who sold their people into slavery … and signed away their lands to European imperialists for blankets and booze.”²⁷

The new vanguard of the CCP is a delegation of bankers and party officials armed with duffel bags full of cash. Corruption enables a new form of colonial-like control that extends far beyond the strategic shipping routes in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In Ecuador, China financed a great dam in the jungle at the base of an active volcano. The $19 billion agreement allowed China to receive 80 percent of Ecuador’s oil exports at a discount; China sells the oil at a markup for profit. Two years after the dam opened in 2016, thousands of cracks appeared in its machinery, and the reservoir was clogged with silt and trees. The first time the turbines were activated, the power surge shorted out the national electrical grid.²⁸

In Venezuela, China profited from the corrupt authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro even as the dictator destroyed the country’s economy. China kept the dictator’s regime on life support with a $5 billion credit line in 2018, and in return secured oil at a discount and resold it at a markup, profiting as the Venezuelan people became destitute.²⁹ The CCP also supports other dictatorships with new technical means of co-option and coercion, such as surveillance technologies, facial recognition, and restricted internet.

The Military-Civil Fusion policy is the most totalitarian of the three prongs; it reveals starkly how Xi has moved away from the market-reform trajectory of Deng Xiaoping. Under Xi’s rule, SOEs and private companies alike must act at the direction of the party. First in 2015 and then again in June 2017, the party declared that all Chinese companies must collaborate in gathering intelligence. “All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.” Chinese companies work alongside universities and research arms of the People’s Liberation Army not only to achieve its economic goals but also to extend China’s influence internationally. Chinese companies have become arms of the party as it dominates key sectors of the global economy, leads in the development of dual-use technologies, and modernizes the PLA. Capturing private companies under its systemic efforts through Made in China 2025 allows the party to conceal its intention to move ahead of the forerunning nations (e.g., the United States) that lead in technologies with both economic and defense applications. Chinese companies steal or force the transfer of intellectual property; abet the party’s bribery and compromising of foreign political and business leaders; and create financial and infrastructural vulnerabilities to allow espionage or intelligence operations.³⁰

But Military-Civil Fusion extends beyond the use of Chinese companies to include efforts that are varied, comprehensive, and unconventional. In addition to espionage through traditional channels such as cyber-theft by the Ministry of State Security or undeclared intelligence personnel at Chinese diplomatic missions, the party tasks some Chinese students and scholars in U.S. and other foreign universities and research labs to extract technology. Many of the returning scholars and scientists are then received in one of more than 150 “Overseas Chinese Scholar Pioneering Parks,” located in high-technology development zones, for what is essentially an intelligence debriefing.³¹ Chinese entities marking themselves as nongovernmental science and technology organizations and advocacy groups are particularly effective. Founded in 2015, the Shenzhen-based China Radical Innovation 100 (CRI 100) is a self-described nonprofit development platform that targets innovation hubs overseas such as Silicon Valley and Boston in the United States and Tel Aviv in Israel. CRI 100 boasts a “new international cooperative innovation model” that, in fact, consists of extracting and sending back the results of cutting-edge research in U.S. universities and labs via the centers it has established overseas, such as the Radical Boston Innovation Center. In 2019, the CRI listed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, and Oxford University as partners. At the Boston-based North America Chinese Association of Science and Technology, over 85 percent of the members have doctoral degrees from top U.S. universities and work in the top research labs in corporate America. Also affiliated with CRI is the six-thousand-member Silicon Valley Chinese Engineers Association, which provides “channels to allow members to engage in China’s rapid economic development.”³²

Military-Civil Fusion fast-tracks transferred and stolen technologies to the People’s Liberation Army in such areas as maritime, space, cyberspace, biology, artificial intelligence, and energy. Military-Civil Fusion also encourages state-owned enterprises and private companies to acquire companies or a strong minority stake in companies with advanced technologies so they can be applied not only for economic, but also military and intelligence, advantage. China is known to have more than a dozen organizations that direct a nationwide effort to access foreign technologies and recruit the scientists and engineers to work in China. An example is the Thousand Talents program that targets for recruitment professors and researchers who have access to cutting-edge technology. In January 2020, Professor Charlie Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry, who had received a $50,000 monthly salary, $150,000 in annual living expenses, and more than $1.5 million under the program for a special laboratory in Wuhan University of Technology, was arrested for lying to FBI investigators. Sometimes, U.S. national defense funding supports the CCP’s highly organized technology transfer activities.³³ Scientists affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army have worked on projects funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. One of many examples is the Shenzhen-based Kuang-Chi Group, described in the PRC media as “a military-civilian enterprise.” The Kuang-Chi Group was founded largely on U.S. Air Force–funded research on metamaterials at Duke University. The group is applying research as it works with the People’s Liberation Army’s space-based reconnaissance platforms.³⁴

Under Military-Civil Fusion, so-called “private” companies in telecommunications are the CCP’s most valuable tool for industrial espionage. China’s use of communications infrastructure for espionage is not a theoretical possibility; it is ongoing and gaining in scale. In 2018, for instance, African Union officials accused China of having spied on its headquarters’ network system in Addis Ababa over a period of five years. The headquarters building had been built by a Chinese SOE as China’s gift to the African Union.

Chinese cyber espionage is responsible for what former NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” In fact, a U.S. Council of Economic Advisers study estimated that the loss from malicious cyber activities to the U.S. economy in 2016 alone could have been as high as $109 billion.³⁵ A grim revelation of China’s cyber capabilities came in December 2018, when American and U.K. law enforcement exposed a sustained Chinese hacking operation of tremendous scale. The Chinese Ministry of State Security used a hacking squad known as APT10 to target U.S. companies in the finance, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and medical industries as well as NASA and Department of Defense research laboratories. APT10 hacked into internet service providers in the United States, Britain, Japan, Canada, Australia, Brazil, France, Switzerland, South Korea, and other countries, extracting clients’ intellectual property and sensitive data. For example, the hackers obtained personal information including Social Security numbers for more than one hundred thousand U.S. naval personnel.³⁶

China’s theft and development of cutting-edge technologies is fundamental to its military modernization program. The party’s narrative of national rejuvenation prioritizes the development of a powerful military capable of defending expanding global interests. The PLA has used stolen technologies to pursue advanced military capabilities such as hypersonic missiles, anti-satellite weapons, laser weapons, modern ships, stealth fighter aircraft, electromagnetic railguns, and unmanned systems.³⁷ Their vision is of a force capable of overmatching the United States in future war. Much of the technology needed is dual use. U.S. venture capital and private equity companies help the PLA achieve its vision by providing much of the capital to Chinese companies engaged in research and development of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies.

Some transfers from U.S. companies have permitted the Chinese defense industry not only to develop its own capabilities, but also to drive the U.S. defense industry out of the international arms market with inexpensive knockoffs. For example, the Chinese drone company DJI controlled over 70 percent of the global market share in 2018 thanks to its unmatched prices. The company’s unmanned systems even became the most frequently flown commercial drones in the U.S. Army until they were banned for security concerns.³⁸

Chinese espionage is successful in part because the CCP co-opts individuals, companies, and political leaders to collect intelligence and turns a blind eye to their activities. The party cultivates sympathetic agents in the United States and other nations with the lure of short-term profits. Companies from the United States and other free-market economies often do not report theft of their technology because they are afraid of losing access to the Chinese market, hurting their stock prices, harming relationships with customers, experiencing professional embarrassment, or prompting federal investigations.

Co-option crosses over to coercion when the CCP demands that companies adhere to the party’s worldview and forgo criticism of its repressive and aggressive policies. For example, when a Marriott social media account manager “liked” a pro-Tibet tweet in 2018, the hotel company’s website and app were blocked in China for a week, and the manager was fired after pressure from the Chinese government. In the same year, Mercedes-Benz, the German car manufacturer, was forced to apologize to the Chinese people for quoting the Dalai Lama in an Instagram post. In late July 2019, a young pilot of Cathay Pacific Airways was arrested by Hong Kong police during a protest. After being chastised by the CCP for not acting fast enough against employees involved in the protests, Cathay’s CEO and chief commercial officer resigned. Other leading Hong Kong companies rushed to condemn the protests.³⁹

A glaring example of China’s coercion of American companies came in October 2019, when Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, tweeted his support for the Hong Kong protesters. Intensely sensitive to any hint of intrusion into its internal affairs, Chinese state-run television canceled its broadcast of Rockets games. The NBA lost contracts totaling approximately $100 million, and Chinese officials demanded that the league issue an apology. The party also threatened to cut off the extremely lucrative revenue stream from China if Americans did not silence their opinions about Hong Kong. Immediately, leading NBA figures, including star players James Harden and LeBron James and coach of the Golden State Warriors Steve Kerr, obliged, chastising the Rockets general manager for expressing his opinion. This external application of the methods used for internal control, such as the social credit score system, succeeded with Orwellian efficiency.

The brilliance of the social credit score is that it coerces by co-opting people’s social networks. If, for example, a Chinese citizen protests against the government in a way deemed threatening, not only will the protester’s score fall (preventing him from purchasing train tickets, renting apartments, obtaining loans, etc.), but so will the scores of all his friends and family because of their association with him. This then prompts his friends and family to “unfriend” or ostracize the protester, and possibly speak out against his antigovernment “unsocial” behavior. The Chinese Communist Party thus has co-opted its citizens to enforce and reinforce the state’s coercive measures. The party also co-opted the NBA in an eerily similar fashion, using the mere threat of losing access to the profitable China market.

The muted international response to China’s oppression of its people and coercion of its neighbors attests to the effectiveness of the party’s campaign of political and economic co-option. China uses both foreign investment and access to its market to incentivize countries and foreign companies to conform to its interests and position on sensitive issues. The party develops a broad range of incentives and influence efforts to manipulate political processes in target nations and engineer policies favorable to Chinese interests. In 2018 and 2019, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States uncovered sophisticated CCP influence campaigns that augmented China’s considerable economic leverage with the purchase of influence within universities, the bribery of politicians, and the harassment of the Chinese diaspora community to become advocates for CCP policy.⁴⁰

China’s influence efforts are also designed to promote a “China model” as an alternative to liberal democratic governance and free-market economics. China exploits the openness of free societies to promote views and policies sympathetic to the CCP. China’s influence campaign is well organized and sophisticated. Consistent with its long-standing Maoist motto “We have friends all over the world,” the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries cultivates relationships with local officials through sister city and state-to-province relationships. Those relationships are based on “principles” consistent with China’s foreign policy. While some relationships are positive financially and culturally, many aim to co-opt officials and influence them to take positions that strengthen the CCP initiatives and undermine U.S. policy.

As Xi intensified efforts to control his own population and co-opt or coerce foreign entities to support his policies, the CCP curtailed or stopped many long-standing dialogues and projects between Chinese organizations and U.S. think tanks and universities. Chinese archives and libraries closed. Yet, the CCP maintained access to programs with U.S. institutions that advanced its interests and gave it access to key technology while constraining or shutting out U.S. researchers. Chinese think tanks and universities mandated centralized approval of topics and foreign participants for conferences. Think tanks work as arms of the CCP and follow Xi Jinping’s directive to “go global” and advance the Chinese narrative. A scholar with long experience in China observed that Chinese interlocutors no longer had “much to say beyond the Xi Catechism.” Instead of demanding reciprocity, some U.S. think tanks and universities chose self-censorship because they feared losing access to China completely if they criticized CCP practices, such as the establishment of a surveillance state, the incarceration of political prisoners, the internment of Xinjiang’s Muslim population in reeducation camps, or the party’s intensifying campaign of intimidation of Taiwan to achieve unification.⁴¹

THE CHINESE Communist Party’s obsession with control and its drive to achieve national rejuvenation converge on Taiwan, the island territory that gained autonomy as the last bastion of the Republic of China after the ROC’s defeat at the hands of the Communists during the 1945–1949 Civil War. Taiwan constitutes a particular danger to the mainland’s autocracy and authoritarian capitalist economic system because it presents a democratic, free-market alternative. Taiwan liberalized its economy in the 1960s and undertook political reforms in the 1980s that transitioned governance from one-party rule to a multiparty democracy. Taiwan’s tremendous success confronts the Chinese with a thriving system that implicitly debunks the CCP’s oft-cited contention that Chinese people are poorly suited for representative government and individual rights.

Understanding that Taiwan’s success heightens the party’s most fundamental insecurities and undercuts the promise of the China Dream, the party under Xi intensified rhetoric concerning the final annexation of Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China dwarfs Taiwan, geographically as well as economically, but some numbers paint a vastly different picture. For example, compare Taiwan’s per capita income, in purchasing power terms, of $57,000 (higher than that of Germany, the United Kingdom, or Japan) with China’s $21,000 (below that of Kazakhstan, Mexico, or Thailand). Taiwan is a threat because it provides a small-scale, yet powerful example of a successful political and economic system that is free and open rather than autocratic and closed.⁴²

Taiwan has been the object of a relentless CCP campaign of co-option and coercion. Although the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with China in 1979 was accompanied by the Taiwan Relations Act, which stipulated the peaceful resolution of Taiwan’s future status, the CCP immediately began a campaign to bolster political sympathies in Taiwan for reunification. Co-option efforts included expanding investment and trade to make the island more dependent on the mainland. By 2000, China became Taiwan’s biggest export market, accounting for more than a quarter of its exports.⁴³ Expanded trade with China made Taipei more vulnerable to Beijing’s economic leverage.⁴⁴ To punish unfriendly Taiwanese political leaders, for example, the CCP temporarily stopped issuing individual travel permits just prior to Taiwan’s 2019 parliamentary elections.⁴⁵ Other coercive measures against Taiwan included diplomatic isolation as China made renouncing Taiwan a condition for foreign investment and access to its market. Between Xi Jinping’s ascension to power in 2012 and the year 2018, The Gambia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Burkina Faso ended diplomatic relations with Taiwan in exchange for Chinese investment and access to the Chinese market for their exports.

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in Taiwan, the party did its best to ensure defeat of the incumbent, Tsai Ing-wen, and the Democratic Progressive Party due to her party’s position that Taiwan is an independent country. Those efforts, based in part on the CCP’s erosion of citizens’ rights in Hong Kong and its heavy-handed tactics, backfired. Tsai secured over 57 percent of the ballot and a record 8.2 million votes, well ahead of her rival, Han Kuo-yu, and his Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with China. The setback is likely to heighten Xi’s desire to push for unification. Xi’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, commented after the election that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory” and that “those who split the country will be doomed to leave a stink for 10,000 years.”⁴⁶

A cause for greater concern is the possibility that the PLA will intensify preparations for a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. After Xi removed term limits on the presidency, a move that allowed him to rule indefinitely, some speculated that he did so to force unification on Taiwan during his tenure. Statements of CCP officials under Xi were aggressive; many implied military action. In 2019, Chairman Xi said in a speech that Taiwan “must and will be” reunited with the mainland. China’s preparations for a cross-strait assault include rapid modernization and expansion of its navy and air force and increased patrols around Taiwan of bomber, fighter, and surveillance aircraft.⁴⁷

The sustained campaign of co-option and coercion aimed at Taiwan may represent the most dangerous flashpoint for war, but it is only the first priority in a much larger CCP campaign designed to achieve hegemony in the Asia Pacific region. Since 1995, when China occupied Mischief Reef, a low-tide elevation within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), China has become increasingly assertive in the South China Sea. Occupying an area twice the size of the state of Alaska, the South China Sea lies east of Vietnam, west of the Philippines, and north of Brunei. It is a vital waterway through which one third of the world’s cargo transport flows. While the PRC made expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea since its establishment, it has since 2012 acted to seize control of the area through quasi-military and military deployments and the construction of military bases on reefs and artificial islands. When its neighbors protested China’s attempted “land grab,” the PLA conducted belligerent shows of force. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal in The Hague ruled the Chinese claim as having no legal basis. Yet, in encounters that followed, heavily armed China Coast Guard patrol vessels threatened to shoot foreign fisherman in the disputed waterway. Economic coercion was even more effective than military intimidation. After The Hague ruling, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte said he would ignore the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision and instead advance partnership with China in oil exploration plans. In return, he received $24 billion in pledges of investment and credit lines. Later, that number grew to $45 billion, including railways, bridges, and industrial hubs.⁴⁸

China continues to expand its military systems around the South China Sea, Taiwan, and in the East China Sea, near Japan’s Senkaku Islands. China’s military strategy in the region is often dubbed “anti-access and area denial,” or A2/AD. Aimed at establishing exclusionary control, the strategy integrates cruise and ballistic missiles and air defenses. The PLA has modernized its land, maritime, and air systems to extend military power out to the “second island chain,” comprising the Ogasawara and Volcano Islands of Japan and the Mariana Islands of the United States. It is also demonstrating the ability to impose costs on American air and naval forces should they attempt to intervene during a conflict. China hopes to gain coercive power over nations and territories in the region through not only demonstrated military prowess, but also economic coercion and the use of information warfare and maritime militias. Its efforts to create exclusive areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific region are particularly challenging because they are integrated as components of a “total competition” that is “the peaceful equivalent of total warfare.”⁴⁹

WHAT CHINA’S campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment has in common with Putin’s playbook is the objective of collapsing the free, open, and rules-based order that the United States and its allies established after World War II, the order that some believed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, was no longer contested. What Russia’s annexation of Crimea and China’s imposition in the South China Sea have in common is the strategic behavior of probing. Historians A. Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel describe probing as the use of aggressive diplomacy, economic measures, and military actions to test the willingness of the United States and its allies to contest efforts to displace U.S. influence and to replace the free and open order with a closed, authoritarian system sympathetic to Russian and Chinese interests. The revisionist powers of Russia and China increasingly coordinate their actions under what they deemed in June 2019 a “comprehensive strategic partnership of a new era.”

During my second full day in the White House in 2017, I hosted an “all hands” meeting with the NSC staff during which I shared my assessment that China and Russia were emboldened by what they perceived as American retrenchment and disengagement from arenas of competition. The trip to Beijing convinced me even further that it was past time to reenter those arenas and compete to counter China’s campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment.

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