The Long War: How America Needs to Think to Survive China's Rise

I deeply care about the war against China, one that will last decades, if not longer. It is my personal responsibility to help win it. Kennedy said it best: "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." Some people repeat that because they are supposed to, or because they wish to virtue signal and count that as accomplishment or contribution. It is no such thing. America needs to move away from virtue signaling as accomplishment. We need to be critical of people to their faces when they do that. The culture needs to evolve.

If we are to survive, it is my suggestion that we need to become serious people. A serious person is someone who looks into the dark void and sees it for all its horror and does not look away. They then focus on it obsessively until they bring the light inside. Unpleasant things do not disturb them. They become calls to action to create solutions to problems in the unknown, in the Fog of War, as Robert MacNamara once called it. Serious people do not look for institutional cover. They do not outsource the risk to people of greater wealth or higher hierarchical status. They do not count on another person or institution to solve the problem. They own it themselves. They live a life being misunderstood without flinching before the emotional discomfort that comes from that. Anything less than this intensity and we cannot call ourselves a serious person.

The above is the standard I hold myself to. I am an actual believer in the mission. Ever since I was a graduate school student seventeen years ago, this has been my focus. My first academic publications on the threat of China came out in 2011. Addressing the threat of China at scale is why I have wanted to be successful, so that I could get to a place of impact, at scale, at bat—not for virtue signaling, not from the bleachers. I think in decade intervals about the war with China and act them out in my personal career. And the first thing a serious person must confront is this: the war with China is not between any single component of American society: not our military, not our intelligence community, and not our branches of government and their will to act.

The war with China is for civilizational survival, and win-win is not on the table. Civilizational wars are decided by who controls power, and power is defined by technological and economic prowess. People rationalize good things in those they can get things from; wealth buys just that. The moment the US is no longer number one in GDP, the world still starts rationalizing good things in China, and the US may rapidly decline; it is not enough to live on. It is only enough to live on in control of the fate of humanity through our influence. The future of humanity is America’s mission. We are not going to become a commerce-trading country like Singapore. We are an ideological country with a mission for humanity: a civilization carrying the banner of the West. Whoever owns wealth and power through technology and institutional adoption sets the rules and direction for humanity. This is our calling. 

This means the battle must also be fought directly in the economy, with American companies pursuing not just quarterly returns, but zero-sum market shares measures against Chinese companies that rank them in unflattering ways. We need serious people who unafraid of the discomfort of direct confrontation and competition. Furthermore, when we talk about multi-domain war, we must extend that domain to economic strategy and GDP. There is no military and there is no intelligence community without the money to fund them. China has spent decades using Western capital markets, Western technology transfers, and Western institutional access to finance its own rise. That is not trade. That is strategy. We have been slow to name it as such.

The Department of War cannot be the primary engine of victory in this Long War. We should call it the Long War, not the New Cold War. Taiwan is not even a footnote in it. This is a civilizational battle. The rise of China comes at the direct cost of the fall of the United States and the West. There is no win-win. The CCP understands this. The question is whether we do. Part of understanding it is reckoning with time. We must look past 4 and 8 year presidential cycles. Democratic systems are structurally biased toward short horizons: the next election, the next approval rating, the next news cycle. The CCP plans in generations. They are patient. So are many of us. 

It is unfortunate that Americans are so often portrayed as short-term thinkers, because many of us are not. We do not beat our chests like baboons on TV. Outrunning them requires that we match their time horizon and outpace them in output. We must focus on outrunning China in wealth through technology, measured in 10-year interval targets. Not slogans. Targets. That is where the real battle is. We must own the systems they operate within and share none of them in international institutions. We must own power and energy, the cryptographic infrastructure of global commerce, the standards bodies that define interoperability for technology, access to space, the semiconductor supply chains that determine what can be built and by whom, and the financial rails that move capital across borders. These are not technical abstractions. They are the terrain of the Long War.

The war with China is won through wealth accumulation and GDP. Winning means crushing their international influence and power and flattening their GDP growth so they stop expanding. That is the definition of victory. Not a treaty. Not a summit. Not a managed coexistence. A clear and durable asymmetry of power in which the United States and its allies set the terms of the international order and China does not. That is why this work is so important to me. I am in this for the biggest of big pictures. Nothing else motivates me: not recognition, not money, not social status, not credentials. Only the final result is good enough: a China not growing anymore, a world without ambiguity, and without threat to the world order from China. I have spent seventeen years building toward the moment when I could contribute something real to that outcome. That moment is now.

Being a series person means wanting to see GDP percentages move because of what we do together. Let that be our shared goal. Let us become serious people. And if we read this essay wondering more about how we feel about it than about what has to be done, we are evidence of the problem ourselves. Stop looking away from the dark void. Stop hoping it goes away. Own it yourself with me. Let us focus on China instead of all the things in between. Let us condition ourselves to win the Long War