The Eurasian Century

159.Shreya Upadhyay, “BRICS, Quad, and India’s Multi-Alignment Strategy,” Stimson Center, July 12, 2022; author’s discussion with Vijay Gokhale, October 25, 2022.

160.Sourav Roy Barman, “Europe Has to Grow Out of Mindset That Its Problems Are World’s Problems: Jaishankar,” Indian Express, June 4, 2022.

161.Hanna Ziady, “OPEC Announces the Biggest Cut to Oil Production since the Start of the Pandemic,” CNN, October 5, 2022.

162.See Ash Jain and Matthew Kroenig, Toward a Democratic Technology Alliance: An Innovation Edge That Favors Freedom, Atlantic Council, 2022, esp. 9; also Stephen G. Brooks and William Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

163.Stephen G. Brooks and William Wohlforth, “The Myth of Multipolarity: American Power’s Staying Power,” Foreign Affairs, May–June 2023.

164.Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Norton, 2022).

165.Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman, “Russia’s Dangerous Decline: The Kremlin Won’t Go Down without a Fight,” Foreign Affairs, November–December 2022.

166.Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors, “Breaking China’s Hold,” Atlantic, December 23, 2022.

167.“China a ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ Because of Economic Woes, Joe Biden Warns,” Guardian, August 11, 2023.

168.Guy Faulconbridge, “Putin Escalates Ukraine War, Issues Nuclear Threat to West,” Reuters, September 21, 2022.

169.Lingling Wei, “Xi Prepares for ‘Extreme’ Scenarios, Including Conflict with the West,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2023; John Ruwitch, “China Accuses U.S. of Containment and Warns of Potential Conflict,” NPR, March 7, 2023.

170.Hal Brands, Getting Ready for a Long War with China: Dynamics of Protracted Conflict in the Western Pacific, American Enterprise Institute, July 2022.

171.Robert Jervis, “Theories of War in an Era of Leading-Power Peace,” American Political Science Review, March 2022, 1.

Chapter 6: Lessons of the Past

1.“Commentary: Milestone Congress Points to New Era for China, the World,” Xinhua, October 24, 2017.

2.John F. Kennedy, “Remarks and Question-and-Answer Period at the Press Luncheon in Paris,” June 2, 1961, APP. Kennedy invoked this analogy in reference to the Sino-Soviet pact.

3.Jeffrey Mankoff, “The War in Ukraine and Eurasia’s New Imperial Moment,” Washington Quarterly, Summer 2022.

4.Franklin Roosevelt, “Annual Message to the Congress,” January 3, 1940, APP.

5.For instance, Jonathan Kearsley, Eryk Bagshaw, and Anthony Galloway, “ ‘If You Make China the Enemy, China Will Be the Enemy’: Beijing’s Fresh Threat to Australia,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 18, 2020. Among other things, Beijing demanded that Canberra cease funding certain think tanks engaged in “anti-China” research and otherwise censor domestic debate.

6.Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 327.

7.The general phenomenon is discussed in Matthew Kroenig, The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

8.Nicholas Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power [1942] (New York: Routledge, 2017), 469.

9.Brian Klaas, “Vladimir Putin Has Fallen into the Dictator Trap,” Atlantic, March 16, 2022; Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Norton, 2022).

10.Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 259.

11.For useful critiques of these arguments, see Stephen G. Brooks and William Wohlforth, “The Myth of Multipolarity: American Power’s Staying Power,” Foreign Affairs, May–June 2023; Øystein Tunsjø, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics: China, the United States, and Geostructural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

12.Hugo Meijer and Stephen Brooks, “Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the United States Pulls Back,” International Security, Spring 2021.

13.John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 112.

14.Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great-Power Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).

15.Spykman, America’s Strategy, 165.

16.Elbridge Colby and Oriana Skylar Mastro, “Ukraine Is a Distraction from Taiwan,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2022.

17.It is also why defense spending remains nearly as low, as a percentage of GDP, as at any time since 1945. On the one-war strategy, see James Mitre, “A Eulogy for the Two-War Construct,” Washington Quarterly, Winter 2019.

18.George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993).

19.This point was made to me repeatedly in discussions with U.S., Japanese, Australian, and British policymakers during conversations in these countries in November 2022.

20.Brooks and Wohlforth, “Myth of Multipolarity”; Jain and Kroenig, Toward a Democratic Technology Alliance.

21.Matthew P. Goodman, “Variable Geometry Takes Shape in Biden’s Foreign Policy,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 19, 2021.

22.Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographic Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal, April 1904, 436.

23.Author’s discussion with Vijay Gokhale, October 25, 2022.

24.The phrase is from “CIA Director Burns: What U.S. Intelligence Needs to Do Today—and Tomorrow,” Washington Post, July 7, 2023.

25.The exception is Iran, whose Shiite version of authoritarianism has historically seemed quite threatening to the Sunni regimes in the Gulf. On the broader dynamic, see Hal Brands, “Putin’s Saudi Bromance Is Part of a Bigger Plan,” Bloomberg Opinion, December 5, 2018.

26.John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

27.Case in point: China’s refusal to provide lethal military aid to Russia in the opening stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022 for fear of triggering U.S. and European sanctions. “China Not Giving Material Support for Russia’s War in Ukraine: U.S. Official,” Reuters, June 30, 2022.

28.“Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the Special Competitive Studies Project Global Emerging Technologies Summit,” White House, September 16, 2022.

29.Andrew Imbrie et al., Agile Alliances: How the United States and Its Allies Can Deliver a Democratic Way of AI, Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, February 2020; Melissa Flagg, “Global R & D and a New Era of Alliances,” CSET Data Brief, June 2020.

30.As President Biden repeatedly remarked. See Jeremy Diamond, “Biden Can’t Stop Thinking about China and the Future of American Democracy,” CNN, April 29, 2021.

31.See Matt Pottinger, Testimony before the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, April 15, 2021.

32.For a more extended discussion, see Brands and Beckley, Danger Zone; Jonathan Hillman, The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future (New York: Harper Business, 2021).

33.Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe,” March 17, 1948, APP.

34.Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsch, “A (Mostly Secret) Revolution Is Afoot in NATO’s Military,” Foreign Policy, July 13, 2023; Sean Monaghan, “The Sword, the Shield, and the Hedgehog: Strengthening Deterrence in NATO’s New Strategic Concept,” War on the Rocks, August 23, 2022.

35.Elbridge Colby, “America Must Prepare for a War over Taiwan,” Foreign Affairs, August 10, 2022.

36.Josh Rogin, “When Trump Caved to Xi and Threw Taiwan under the Bus,” Daily Beast, March 8, 2021.

37.Ian Easton, Hostile Harbors: Taiwan’s Ports and PLA Invasion Plans, Project 2049 Institute, July 2021.

38.See the discussion in Yukihiro Sakaguchi and Ryo Nakamura, “U.S. Nuclear Review Warns of Chinese ‘Coercion’ in Indo-Pacific,” Nikkei Asia, October 28, 2022.

39.On the Chinese buildup, see Department of Defense, 2022 Report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, November 2022. See also Michael Hirsh, “The Pentagon Is Freaking Out about a Potential War with China,” Politico, June 9, 2023; Hal Brands, “Deterrence in Taiwan Is Failing,” Foreign Policy, September 8, 2023.

40.Larry Bland, Clarence Wunderlin, and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, eds., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 274.

41.Don Clark and Ana Swanson, “U.S. Pours Money into Chips, but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits,” New York Times, January 1, 2023.

42.Spykman, America’s Strategy, 89.

43.Ryan Berg, Insulate, Curtail, Compete: Sketching a U.S. Grand Strategy in Latin America and the Caribbean, Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 2023.

44.See Shannon O’Neill, The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).

45.Jorge Guajardo and Natalia Cote-Muñoz, “The Future of North America–China Relations,” Working Paper, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, January 2022.

46.“Top China Generals Urge More Spending for U.S. Conflict ‘Trap,’ ” Bloomberg News, March 9, 2021.

47.Kyle Lascurettes, Orders of Exclusion: Great Powers and the Strategic Sources of Foundational Rules in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

48.Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal, April 1904, 427–28.

49.As some China hawks have suggested. See John Mearsheimer, “The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics,” Foreign Affairs, November–December 2021.

50.Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot,” 436.

51.“Has the Wind Changed? PLA Hawks General Dai Xu and General Qiao Liang Release Odd Articles,” GNews, July 11, 2020; Minnie Chan, “ ‘Too Costly’: Chinese Military Strategist Warns Now Is Not the Time to Take Back Taiwan by Force,” South China Morning Post, May 4, 2020.