Ep 152: Jacqueline Deal on China’s Strategy

Jacqueline Deal, President and CEO of the Long Term Strategy Group and recently the author of the article Competing against Ourselves: How U.S. Policy Strengthens China

Aaron MacLean:

Who is winning and who is losing in the competition on which we've embarked with Communist China? One of the smartest people in Washington, really in America on this question, Jackie Deal, joins the show today to help us understand. Let's get into it.

Aaron MacLean:

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. Feel free to follow me on Twitter @AaronBMacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Jacqueline Deal, who's Senior Fellow at Foreign Policy Research Institute, co-founder of the American Academy for Strategic Education, and President and CEO of the Long-Term Strategy Group. Jackie, thank you so much for joining the show.

Jacqueline Deal:

Thank you, Aaron, for having me.

Aaron MacLean:

Jackie, we're going to talk about this essay that you wrote for American Affairs called Competing Against Ourselves, How U.S. Policy Strengthens China. But before we do, welcome to the show. I'm a longtime fan of your work and I'm interested in how you got to the point where you are today. You sure have done a lot of work with this. I'll broadly define it as the net assessment world. How did you get into that business, if you will? What is net assessment? Maybe remind listeners who may not know exactly what the phrase means or what the Office of Net Assessment is, and just tell us a bit about yourself.

Jacqueline Deal:

Sure, thank you very much, Aaron. As I said, I'm delighted to be here and I'm also a fan of your work. We have a mutual admiration society going. Speaking of mutual or two-sided analysis, net assessment is, I guess, the common-sense version is when you are in a competition, it makes sense to analyze how you are doing in the competition. That's a relative question. You have your goals. Your opponent or competitor has his or their goals. It makes sense to try to measure over time, "Are you doing better at achieving your goals or is the opponent advancing more quickly toward achieving his goals?"

It's such a basic question that it almost doesn't need to be explained except that when you think about the different parts of the American government, it's often hard for the people who study the U.S. or blue in DoD terms to also be expert on red, the opponent. And the people who study red, the same goes for them, they're at times even prohibited from looking at blue. We have this situation of two different worlds working in different spaces and not that many people have the opportunity to try to look at the nexus, but the Office of Net Assessment in the Defense Department does.

I was fortunate as I was graduating from college and going to Oxford for graduate school. I was actually working in New York on 9/11 and reached back out to a professor with whom I had studied at Harvard who had worked for the Office of Net Assessment. I just said, "Look, I'm going to Oxford and I'm a civilian, but I learned from your course that there are opportunities for civilians to study history, military history and strategy and contribute. If there's a way, I could please let me know."

That led to an introduction to the Office of Net Assessment in the Defense Department. As you said, I've been working under or for that office for the last couple of decades now.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's get right to it then. We'll continue this theme of net assessment into the piece you just published. You write in the piece that as China looks at the world, as China does its own strategic analysis, it's looking at metrics that indicates to itself, to the CCP, that it's winning, it's winning its competition with the United States. I may have stated that a little bit more bluntly or with less nuance than you do in the piece, but can you explain that statement? Can you unpack that a bit?

Jacqueline Deal:

Well, I think we, in the West, have our lenses and our metrics. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party has a different set of lenses and metrics that we understudy or neglect at our peril. Unfortunately, from what Xi Jinping has been saying, what the people around him have been writing, it seems as though they have growing confidence that, in their words, the East is rising, the West is declining. Even as we in D.C. or in the Amtrak corridor have a habit of looking at China's demographic issues or the slowing economic growth or the nexus of the two and this idea of a middle-income trap and seeing problems, they see trends or a trajectory which is favorable to the Chinese Communist Party. They think they're on a roll.

I don't think we're actually doing much to disabuse them of that notion. In fact, what I argue in the piece is that while in theory the United States has many advantages and there's good reasons why people think our system is superior, our liberal, lowercase L, market-based rights-respecting political order is superior. There's good foundations for believing that. On the other hand, we're not competing with the Chinese Communist Party authoritarian communist regime in isolation. We're actually, in many respects, bailing them out or helping them compensate for the weaknesses of their system.

In that sense, it's not even a fair fight. And unfortunately, again, if you look at the trends, it's not crazy for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to think that they're on a roll, I'm afraid.

Aaron MacLean:

This is a version of a point that quite a few folks have made, or what I'm about to say is a version of a point that quite a few folks have made. You say in the piece that we don't have something equivalent yet to George Kennan's Cold War containment strategy. Of course, one of the reasons that we don't, as many have pointed out, is we're just way more intertangled with the Chinese than we ever were with the Soviet Union in the 40s, in the 80s. There's just no point in the first Cold War where you can really draw meaningful comparisons to the level of economic integration between the United States and China. We can get into the reasons why that integration exists, but it fundamentally complicates the problem.

Obviously, there are American policy decisions that have led to that entanglement. Not to skip around, but you wrote a piece maybe a couple years ago now for the Andrew Marshall Foundation, which really, it blew my mind, I'll be honest. They had taught me a lot about China, the CCP really, and CCP strategy about the way in which entanglement, if you like or infiltration would be another way to put it, is in the strategic DNA of the CCP that the CCP comes to power by attaching itself to the KMT in very early days in the 20s as a parasite.

It did so knowingly and intentionally that this was not an accident or something that they stumbled upon, but a Soviet-controlled strategy. That insight, which I did not know before I read your piece, has stuck with me.

How do you assess the extent to which our entanglement today with China economically, if not otherwise, is intentional Chinese strategy, that there is something in their strategic DNA that made them in the 70s and 80s make a turn towards this always with an eye, not of, one day, joining us at the table of responsible stakeholders in the liberal world order as it were, but with an eye towards the supremacy of their own that they were going to get to via entanglements, infiltration, what have you? How do you think about that?

Jacqueline Deal:

Well, thank you very much for reading CCP Weapons of Mass Persuasion. I think the argument there is yes, right from the beginning, from the earliest days of the Chinese Communist Party, the ambition, first of all, was there to "make China great" again or to restore China to a position of dominance. The formula that was developed was partly inspired by Soviet or Comintern representatives and advisors to the Young Communist party. It involved joining with their competitors, the other revolutionary party on the scene in China at the time, the Nationalists, the KMT, pretending to become Nationalists and using the access that the Chinese Communist Party in secret or acting covertly gained through the united front with the KMT to build up the CCP at the KMT's expense.

You have a situation where Zhou Enlai, an early Chinese Communist who would become known to us as the man on Mao Zedong's right. He had a position in the Nationalist Military Academy where he was supposed to be responsible for inspiring the troops and ensuring their psychological motivation. In addition, he was secretly recruiting personnel over to the CCP and building what would become the Red Army in an act of mutiny in 1927.

That anniversary that we're about to celebrate or that the world is going to observe and that the PRC is going to celebrate in 2027, the 100-year anniversary of the Red Army or the People's Liberation Army as it is now known, is we'll look back to a day when the CCP took off its nationalist a uniforms and came out as what they had been in secret up to that point, Red Army personnel. That's quite a founding story and it's very different from the one that the Marines or the other branches of our military celebrate and look back on.

Aaron MacLean:

When you reflect on more recent U.S.-China relations, maybe this requires speculation on some level, feel free to take it as far as you want or not. But do you see that basic strategic culture or strategic DNA reflected in the last few decades?

Jacqueline Deal:

Sure do. I think the way of competing that was ingrained or developed, grafted onto the young CCP's DNA has persisted. There was the first united front about which I was just speaking in the mid-'20s, 1920s, the second united front during World War II in the 1930s. More recently starting in the 1970s, we've had this period of rapprochement all through these where we're, instead of the KMT being the focus, it's the United States and its allies being the focus all through the ambition of the CCP and the identity of the CCP have remained clear and apparent to the party. The Chinese party again, is in the business of making China great, ensuring its own power at all costs, which involves unfortunately or seems to involve increasingly aggressive behavior toward rivals and third parties.

I think the parties has remained more or less clear about that. We on the receiving end of this infiltration entanglement strategy have been a little less clear, more confused about what's really going on, who we're dealing with. That's why as many people have said, we held out this hope that if we just worked with the People's Republic of China and traded and enriched our "friends" in the PRC, things would go well. The PRC or the CCP regime would become more and more embedded and indebted to the existing structure, international order, rules-based order.

Obviously, that has not come to pass. I think it's because on the CCP side, that was never in the cards, that was never the plan. Unfortunately, we misled ourselves to some extent and we were deceived by them about that.

Aaron MacLean:

Let's talk about economics, which you really tackle head on in the American affairs piece. As recently as... I don't know, five or six years ago, it was common to hear concern that China was going to surpass the United States and become number one in G.D.P. globally. I don't know if that was the conventional wisdom exactly, but it was certainly a conventional concern or widely held concern. Post-pandemic sitting here in 2024, I detect a lessening of that concern and more confidence in the relative economic strength and trajectory of the United States. Xi's turning his back on what level of embrace there was of the free market and moving somewhat in the direction of autarky.

That has obviously darker implications as well, but just in terms of pure economic growth, it seems not to be great for China. You and I have mutual friends where I can think of at least one very serious China analyst in China Hawk who has said in a panel I was on with him that he would take the United States's hand every day of the week and twice on Sunday over the Chinese hand. You, in this piece, are sounding a more cautionary note.

What is your concern on the economic front, either in terms of China's actual prospects versus the United States or maybe a little bit more precisely how it perceives its prospects as compared to the United States? How that matters in terms of the competition?

Jacqueline Deal:

Well, thanks for the question. I actually recently wrote a piece a few months ago, a few months back, maybe a year ago now called Xi or the CCP is, China is Choosing Guns Not Butter. That piece was based on a sense that... I was co-authored like my Weapons of Mass Persuasion piece, I should clarify. We were arguing that while we, in the West, have this notion that defense and state exist in one corner of the government and one sphere of activity, treasury and trade and commerce exist in another sphere. We actually seem to proceed that way with some important exceptions but in terms of how our government operates.

There is another way of understanding the connection between economic and military power that's maybe more organic, more consistent with the behavior of 19th century empires. It seems as though Xi Jinping and the CCP regime has more of the imperial or mercantilist 19th century understanding of the relationship between military power and economic prosperity. Unfortunately, again, that view is that you use your military as necessary to coerce to get good deals, concessionary prices, market access, resources, and that's conducive to your wealth.

You can plow your wealth back into your military through investments in technology and procurement of more and better weapons. There's a virtuous cycle that exists. Again, unfortunately, I think that's more the view that obtains in Beijing again, whereas here, while every once in a while, we use sanctions as a response to aggression that we find heinous and illegal. Other than that important exception, we don't often integrate our economic activity or policy with our military and national security activity.

When you look back at history, even recent history, I'm thinking here of your World War I truth or rift, which I'd like to extend or embellish on.

Aaron MacLean:

This is a friendly place for that subject.

Jacqueline Deal:

Yes. I listened with interest and approval to your discussion with Matt Pottinger the other day about this. We, as you noted, tend to draw the lesson from World War I, not present company accepted, but there is a view out there that's widely accepted that World War I was almost an inadvertent or accidental war and that it's quite dangerous to prepare for war because if you do, you can find yourself in the position that the belligerents in 1914 found themselves in stumbling towards this clash that nobody wanted, but that could go on and take a devastating toll in lives and treasure.

Whereas if you look back, my thesis and dissertation advisor from Oxford is a military historian and World War I expert named Hugh Strawn. Professor Strawn's book Two Arms establishes pretty clearly that on the eve of the war, the Germans were thinking in terms of social Darwinian ideas about the world as home to endemic competition that rewards or that in which only the fit are likely to survive. That states have a requirement for increased living room or an access to material and that expansion is good and necessary.

There was a belief that you could use force and aggression for political purposes, for prevention of mistakes on the part of your counterparts. There was a belief that you could again go to war to prevent other undesired outcomes or another conflagration that would be almost inevitably started by your rivals. Unfortunately, while that's not, again, clearly not the view that predominates in Washington D.C. or other Western capitals, that does seem to be a lot more consistent with the worldview of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

How do I know this? Well, starting in 2017, Xi has been celebrating the idea that the world is undergoing great changes, not seen in a century, meaning not seen since the end of World War I. While we look back to that war and think, "Yikes, it's very dangerous for us to prepare to fight, and therefore it's wrong to think the safest way to keep the peace is to prepare for war."

You have this other regime in Beijing celebrating this opportunity in their eyes to have the rise and change the global balance in the way that transpired after the First World War when the United States became the predominant power as the war cemented the decline of the British Empire.

Aaron MacLean:

It's my fault for not knowing that you're a Strawn student. It was not surprising. Impressiveness tends to beget impressiveness. We had him on the show actually to talk about Clausewitz maybe a year ago now. It's my ambition to get him back. Maybe I should invite him back to talk about this. In the course of that, you said that, and this makes sense that China has a more 19th century mercantilist view of things. Marxism is also a 19th century phenomenon originally. I want to ask you where you rate or how you assess the role of actual Marxism, Marxist, Leninism, communist thinking, especially as regards economics, but maybe otherwise in the Chinese scheme of viewing the world.

I've been very much taken by Dan Tobin's read of this question, that great congressional testimony he gave a few years ago, which I'm actually not sure. I know it's on the C.S.I.S. website. I recommend people take a look at it. I want to get him on the show. Dan, if you're listening, this is your invitation, but I'll dumb it down. In Tobin's assessment, it's the nationalism, it's China's national destiny that is dominant and it is the socialism that is the tool that is going to be used, the embrace of science, the embrace of a particular originally 19th century worldview that in the view of the party is the correct analysis.

It is the superior analysis to western liberal capitalism, whatever you want to call it. They're going to use that to lever China ahead in a race for national dominance. How do you assess that? How does communism fit into all of this?

Jacqueline Deal:

Well, again, taking their word for it, they seem to write increasingly about socialism with Chinese characteristics, the cynicism of Marxism, and this alternative model that they're giving to the world or bequeathing to the world. I think Dan is right. His testimony was very important and it, too, seized on this, I think if I'm remembering correctly, 19th party Congress circa 2017, set of disclosures from Beijing. I was just part of the steering committee of an important effort led by Nadege Rolland at the National Bureau of Asia Research on China's view of its strategic space.

As part of that Nadege discusses how increasingly it's the proposition or what the Chinese Communist Party is offering in the world is it's couched in civilizational terms. It's nationalism, but it's got socialism as a vehicle or some syncretic mix of Marxism and Chinese on the ground characteristics and circumstances. Again, part of the package seems to be something civilizational where it begins with a statement to the effect that all civilizations in the world are equal.

But then I think as with other sub-statements, I fear you get to... Well, China's one-fifth of the world, our civilization is the longest, which Xi has also been saying notwithstanding the evidence that Egypt's civilization has deeper roots or is historically traceable earlier. Anyway, there's some claim in there about civilizational hegemony or natural dominance. I think we even have to be careful using the word "nationalism" at this point.

Aaron MacLean:

That's interesting. Okay. Talked a bit about economics. You also talk about metrics that show relative progress on defense issues, on diplomatic issues in the American affairs piece. On the defense front, I mean I think my own view is that's probably where the CCP has the strongest case that its metrics may actually be showing a good reading. That is to say that China has played a smarter game in terms of military preparation over the last 20 years than the United States has. That, I think, you can mount a strong argument for that that would be hard to defend against.

On the diplomatic front, it seems to me to be not quite as straightforward a call. What are the metrics they look at in terms of their diplomatic progress in the world? They're standing there asserting, as you point out, their civilizational superiority. I don't think too many people are that impressed by that. The closer you get to China, the more you see its neighbors rightly alarmed at Chinese behavior. The further away you go places like Europe in the Middle East, there has been more complacency and there's still plenty of complicated problems there.

But I've detected in the last few years more seriousness than there was five or 10 years ago in a bunch of places in part because of American efforts to raise the alarm, in part because the Chinese can't help themselves. They have an inappropriate phrase, ever look that it's phrase, which is why it's an inappropriate phrase. It's a strategic autism where they really, they struggle to do what net assessment demands you do, which is turn the map around and see the world from someone else's perspective.

When they go into small European countries and try to bully them, well, that leaves a mark. When they have an embargo against Australian wine or something like that, that leaves a mark. It's hard when you're dealing with democracies to come back from something like that politically. On the diplomacy front, it seems to me that they are frequently their own worst enemy. How do you think about that?

Jacqueline Deal:

Well, again, going back to the period of the Civil War and the founding of the party that we wrote about in the Weapons of Mass Persuasion piece, part of the strategy that as it developed turned out to work for the young communists in their eventual triumph over the nationalists and seizure of power across the mainland was "surrounding" the cities from the countryside. When I look around the world today, I think it's possible that Beijing or the CCP, it's possible not guaranteed, that they have been overconfident or overestimated the purchase of their message in the "developed world" or the global north.

I should also just clarify. I don't mean that they're going around right now saying "Chinese civilization is superior right now." They're just trying to prepare the ground for that or soften up their audience by saying "All civilizations are equal." The West, the Western proposition about universal right and the entitlement of all people to certain basic respect under the law, what they call so-called human rights. They're trying to erode that in the first instance and pitch the idea of development rights as an alternative.

I think it's possible that that message does find a receptive audience in maybe not the parts of the world to which we pay the most attention, but the parts of the world that when you add up all the people and all the land and the access to courts and littorals could be very important if, again, you have this 19th century or social Darwinist worldview of a zero-sum competition and the global map as home to race for control over key resources and positions. This idea of using the countryside or surrounding the cities from the countryside dominating in the periphery to eventually confront the center with a hopeless position. That's, I think more like what the CCP has in mind.

Again, when I look at messages around the war in Ukraine, I think in a lot of places, again, to which we don't, maybe our browsers don't automatically go to media sources from certain capitals in Africa, but in those capitals, increasingly it's Xinhua or RT and Xinhua, the Russian and the Chinese state media that are shaping the news or the narratives. This idea of development rights could be very appealing or could be a useful cover for efforts to work with elites and subvert democratic norms in a lot of places where democracy and liberalism aren't fully entrenched and backed by a constitution, that's time tested.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. It just strikes me as a tougher road to hoe. If your diplomatic success, your political strategy's success is going to depend upon the crystallization of a particular regime where there are elites that you can manipulate as opposed to... I'm saying this entirely from the hip, Jackie. Feel free to point out all the holes in this. But I feel like the Soviet Union was very adept at manipulating democratic countries and manipulating the lefts of countries into being greatly sympathetic to it, the nice liberals to being greatly sympathetic to deplore the excesses of a Stalin.

But otherwise, see the Soviet Union's point and resist the anti-communist predilections of the anti-communist liberals and of conservatives. If I were sitting there making strategic decisions, I think that's a hand that actually worked out pretty well for the Soviet Union even if other things didn't. The Chinese seem not to play that particular hand. They're taking a different route, a very crude, blunt comparison I agree on.

Jacqueline Deal:

I wish I agreed. I think that they're actually very adept at courting, co-opting, seducing in particular elites in Western countries such that you have many people who would accuse us of racism, of "anti-Asian hate" for even having this conversation even though of course, the greatest source of threat or hate towards Asian people and the party responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the recent decades of Asian people, and the party undertaking a genocide of Asian people is the Chinese Communist Party. Yet you have all these young people in the United States on college campuses who are defending the right of the Chinese Communist Party or an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party to manipulate what they consume in social media via TikTok.

You have many people saying that any impulse to protect ourselves from this infiltration or entanglement threat is racist. I think that has purchased unfortunately. You have many cases of parliamentarians and former leaders of important countries on the gravy train of trips to China and consulting relationships with bodies connected to the CCP. I don't think that there is as much stigma as there would be if people maybe did their homework, read what Xi Jinping is saying when he speaks to his own people for internal consumption about his goals and the trajectory.

I think we're behind on getting up to speed about what we're getting up against. Unfortunately, again, unlike in the competition in the Cold War in part because of all of this infiltration work where Moscow did have to mostly fend for itself. Well, it had access to say our foodstuffs and there were some commerce that went on. I don't want to dismiss that or rule it out. Historically still, as you say, the level of interaction engagement economically is so much dramatically larger between the United States or the West and the Chinese Communist Party regime, so that is a key difference.

Again, unfortunately as I've been arguing, it's not great for us because it means that all of the limitations of their system growing out of their information control and censorship and the regime's obsession with control and the limits that that would otherwise place on their productivity and innovation and growth potential. Again, they have all these workarounds with access to our best minds, our best schools, our best labs, our best investment brains. We consistently bail them out.

Again, the reason that I'm concerned is when you look at the trends, again, when I started out in the early 2000s studying, researching the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party, people were contemptuous of the idea that the P.L.A. could ever pose a threat to Taiwan. Most people doubted that even if they ever could pose a threat to Taiwan, it would ever go beyond that.

Now I think we have made some progress insofar as people understand that Taiwan faces a very serious threat. The CCP has ambitions well beyond that island.

Aaron MacLean:

One thing that's in the news that we should think about for just a second, and I want to be respectful of your time, so just a couple more questions. But the Israelis, it seems, had this remarkable operation in Lebanon last week, we're recording this here at the end of September, where they mapped out the Hezbollah supply chains, sold them a bunch of pagers, and then blew the pagers up, and then they all went to their walkie-talkies, which it turns out apparently the Israelis had also sold them. They blew the walkie-talkies up. It's incredible.

Of course, I'm sitting here cheering them on and hoping that it's part of some larger strategic concept for them that's going to earn them some success. But man, when you look at what they just pulled off and then you think about U.S.-Chinese economic integration and what that means for our supply chains, what that means for wartime scenarios, that's a harrowing path to walk down.

You're probably far enough ahead that the pager stuff was just, you shrugged your shoulders, I imagine that "Well, yes, that's the stuff that's going to start happening." Did that clarify anything for you in terms of U.S.-China competition when you saw the use of supply chains to pull off an operation like that?

Jacqueline Deal:

I agree with your analysis. I'm hoping it was a major wake-up call for us. I would say in addition to the successful deception campaign that the CCP has accomplished about its goals and its identities, we have been less vigilant, less serious than we should have been about basic concrete requirements for being a state that can defend itself. We've let our views about the market and its efficiency and the benefits of international trade cloud or distract us from hard, cold realities or practical truths about what every self-respecting country has to do to be worthy of that name which is have secure, reliable access to basic inputs that it needs for its security and the protection of its population.

Frankly, we've had a number of wake-up calls. The brilliant Israeli attack last week is only the most recent. But in COVID in March of 2020 when the Trump administration was starting to ask tough questions about how Beijing handled the outbreak when it was initially detected in Wuhan, and the message came back, "You can keep asking these questions, but it'd be a shame if your hospital fell into the hell of the novel Coronavirus pandemic because you couldn't get access to pharmaceuticals."

That was a wake-up call about our dependence on our number one geopolitical rival for basic health inputs and goods medicine that we need and PPE. Now we see that our dependence on other countries, including the PRC for basic electronics or assembly of electronic goods could clearly be weaponized. When you look at the PRC and you look at us and you think about which country has more cameras, which country has more vigilance and smart systems around what goes in and what goes out and who goes in and who goes out in many cases for the better. But in this respect for the worse, the PRC wins on that count.

They are more vigilant. I wouldn't want to live in a police state or a counterintelligence state, but it's possible that we've gone too far in the other direction.

Aaron MacLean:

Last question, and it's a big one. You can just give us how to start thinking about this. But if the classic Andrew Marshall approach to Cold War strategy would run, and again, this would be crude. Something like while maintaining deterrence, while working to deter a war that would be destructive to both countries you engage in a series of competitions, you try to pick competitions where we are more likely to come out ahead than the bad guys, originally, the Soviet Union now China, where we are going to play to our economic advantages, say, but they'll be playing to economic disadvantages.

To start to put them on the back foot and to put their regime on the back foot over time make them less confident, make them less stable, et cetera, while keeping to the point that you've emphasized in the paper and today as we talk a careful eye on how they understand themselves. Because that's the key to understanding how to play this game is to look at their metrics, look at the way they understand themselves. You play it out. You play it out while deterring World War III. You generate a series of circumstances where they see themselves as and hopefully actually are weaker and we are stronger.

If that's the contentless structure, how do you start filling in the content for U.S.-China competition? What should we be focused on? What should our strategy look at? What metrics for them should we be paying the most attention to?

Jacqueline Deal:

Well, again, going back to this united front centric approach that is in ingrained in their DNA as a party, one thing that would get their attention is, on the one hand, dramatically less access here and less success with those efforts or evidence that those efforts were backfiring. Maybe also some sense that their own agents or instruments were turning on them or changing their mind. I think we have to think creatively about the competition in that domain which is maybe not an area that comes naturally to us or as naturally as some of the harder conventional and strategic areas of power and competition.

I think evidence that things aren't going as well with the buildup of the P.L.A. and the eyewatering amount of new kit and systems that they've procured, or at least their ability to use those operationally. If there's some way that we can operate our own forces or work with our allies and partners to operate in a way that reduces their confidence in the intimidation factor and reliability of those systems, which again is something that we can do in peacetime. That operational behavior I think was relatively common in the Cold War with the Soviets. I think that would help as well.

I think there are some purely domestic steps we have to take to get back into the business, lines of business that again, every self-respecting country has to take responsibility for making certain things essential. Essential inputs have to be either made here or made close by. We have to have much more secure access. That would again, go some distance towards deterring Beijing from trying to threaten us or coerce us with the threat of denying us those inputs. And I think would make them think twice about the bad behavior that they've been undertaking.

Aaron MacLean:

Jackie Deal, Senior Fellow at FPRI, President and CEO of the Long-term Strategy Group, thank you so much. This was a really interesting conversation.

Jacqueline Deal:

Thank you very much, Aaron. My pleasure.

Aaron MacLean:

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