New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 432 pp. US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 9780197527917.
The United States is at a moment of grand strategic incubation. As American liberal hegemony has been crushed under the weight of its own strategic overextension, and China has defied imminent collapse prophets, a fervent debate about the future of America’s grand strategy has proliferated inside the Beltway.
There are many potential candidates for the title of the next George Kennan, a strategic intellectual who will both present a unifying grand theory to explain the geopolitical challenger’s behaviour and propose an overarching set of principles that should guide an American grand strategic response. What Kennan accomplished with his “Long Telegram,” Rush Doshi accomplishes with his The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. Doshi’s treatise is as rigorous as it is comprehensive, shedding light upon the evolution of China’s grand strategy and advising an optimal US response.
Doshi demonstrates clearly that grand strategic adaptation is not automatic. Although America’s hyper-power status post-1991 may have very well terrified China, Chinese response to unipolarity was shaped by a concerted Chinese political leadership—a leadership which subscribed to a prudent grand strategy, thus bypassing the friction of domestic politics (both the nationalist mass’s demand for foreign policy assertiveness and the military’s preference for offshore power projection).
While China economized resources by blunting US initiatives, the US spent frivolously on unnecessary wars and underperformed strategically. The Long Game should be read in parallel with John Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, which highlights the grave strategic errors US leadership committed, and with Yan Xuetong’s Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers, which offers a theoretical perspective for evaluating the consequential impact of leadership on hegemonic transition.
Chinese leaders, Doshi argues, made an accurate “net assessment” of American preeminence, and beginning with Deng Xiaoping, avoided confrontation with the US. They instead opted for a subtler blunting strategy, aimed at tearing down US advantages in political, economic, and military affairs. “Tao guang yang hui” (hide strength and bide time) epitomizes that strategic approach. While many have cited that aphorism to sensationalize Chinese deception, Doshi presents the first comprehensive evaluation of it. He proves the maxim’s strategic significance by meticulously investigating a plethora of primary Chinese sources on national strategy and foreign policy. He further demonstrates how leadership operationalized the strategy it designed to the letter. China blunted US political power by joining US-led institutions in the Asia Pacific (e.g., APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum) and spoiling institutionalization from within. Economically, China lobbied extensively to gain permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status in an effort to minimize US economic coercive power. Militarily, China invested in weapons useful for nearshore denial and ignored calls by its own military to build carriers useful for offshore power projection.
Yet, as the power gap between China and the US narrowed, Chinese leadership recalibrated tao guang yang hui. The inflection point was in 2008, when Wall Street crushed Main Street and the American dream. With the US economic and social models in severe crisis, Chinese leadership saw merit in a more proactive strategy, shifting from blunting to building albeit with a predominately regional focus. In citing “President Hu’s invocation of ‘actively accomplishing something’” and Xi Jinping’s spin on the concept “‘striving for achievement,’ indicated a fundamental shift to building regional order within Asia” (160). Doshi proves that, indeed, China became a more proactive actor in its region.
By 2017, tectonic shifts in the West—Brexit in Europe and the election of Donald Trump in the US—delivered to Chinese leaders evidence of “great changes unseen in a century” (2). The phrase, a Xi Jinping favourite, signifies the estimation by Chinese leadership that the very polarity of the international system has changed for good: China has revived and Western decline seems inevitable. Consequently, Xi has become the first Chinese president to have never used the term tao guang yang hui. Doshi proves that since 2017, China has even begun building a sphere of influence not only regionally but globally. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a case in point. China has also gone to great lengths to capture influential positions in UN institutions and now controls four of the UN’s fifteen special agencies. Moreover, China’s military posture has slowly shifted towards offshore power projection, seeking to protect economic interests abroad and secure natural resources. The end goal, Doshi argues, is for China to “erect a ‘zone of super-ordinate influence’ in its home region and ‘partial hegemony’ across the developing countries tied to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)” (303).
Nevertheless, Doshi believes that however real this structural shift in the balance of power may be, the United States can still compete effectively. While the existence of nuclear weapons makes direct war between China and the US suicidal, it does establish a strategic chessboard for a “long game.” Thus, having spent twelve chapters explaining Chinese grand strategy and its drivers, Doshi begins his all-important normative chapter 13, about US grand strategic adaptation, with an apothegm by Andrew Marshall, the reverent father of net assessment. The efficiency of turning American resources into strategic outcomes will matter consequentially, as China constitutes a much more economically capable challenger than any of the past hegemonic powers the US has confronted. Doshi rightfully rejects overly hawkish approaches, such as containment and rollback, as well as a dovish “grand bargain,” instead choosing to endorse the middle path of “asymmetric competition” wherein the US holds its line without matching China’s initiatives “dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan” (298).
With asymmetric competition, America could emulate China’s own historical “blunting and building” strategy, optimizing the use of resources while putting the “opponent on the wrong end of cost ratios—thereby complicating costly investments in military coercion and power projection” (318). If China uses anti-access and area denial (A2/AD), the US should use it too. If China has disrupted US efforts to build institutions in Asia by joining them and slowing them down from within, the US should do the same with Chinese-led initiatives. With respect to buttressing a sphere of influence, the US must double down on its strengths, rejuvenate its alliances, and build formidable international institutions with likeminded partners. Crucially, Doshi argues, the US must fundamentally commit to nation-building at home by finding “affirmative ways to rebuild the solidarity and civic identity that make democracy work” (334). Citing the historian Jull Lepore, Doshi calls for an “effort to stress a shared liberal nationalism…a ‘New Americanism,’ which has been part of US’s civic culture and could be again” (334). Doshi argues that the China threat, with its rare bipartisan endorsement, should catalyze that goal.
Given current cleavages in the US, however, the jury about the success of domestic reform is still out. Importantly, as Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi astutely noticed after the 2021 Alaskan summit, inflating the China threat and turning it into a tool for American domestic nation-building could lead to a new Red Scare and provoke an unnecessarily hawkish US grand strategic posture, one that would undermine bilateral cooperation with China in key areas of global governance. If this were the case, the world would unnecessarily suffer. Space for bargaining may therefore exist even under so-called asymmetric competition, and this is something Doshi should have perhaps explored further.
Yet, the very concept of liberal nationalism is also worth exploring further. The fact that a second-generation Indian immigrant produced such a stellar work on strategy, and is now regarded as one of the strategic intellectuals that will shape US relations with China, should puzzle Chinese strategists peddling the inevitable decline of open societies. And that calls for a less ideological and more prudent evaluation of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of both behemoths. A dynamic and comprehensive net assessment, which Chinese leadership has so exemplary applied in the past, may now be more pressing than ever for both Beltway and Zhongnanhai strategists. China and the US are in for the long game, but that game need not be excessively rivalrous. Leadership has a crucial role to play.
Vasilis Trigkas
Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, Beijing