How Might Great Powers Compete Without Military Conflict?

2014 showed us that our traditional analysis of military power—and victory—might be outdated. Both Russia and China captured the world’s attention that year when they brazenly sought to influence their neighbors—and the broader world order. Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine, largely through the murky use of military force; and China’s island-building efforts began in earnest. These activities served as a wake-up call to many governments in the West, raising critical questions about competition among great powers in the so-called gray zone of conflict.

In fact, in the wake of these events, the U.S. National Security and National Defense Strategies, in January of this year, declared that strategic inter-state competition—not terrorism—is the primary concern of U.S. national security. And the gray-zone, is-it-military-or-isn’t-it headlines have kept coming: fake news, election meddling, and Russian trolls; a trade war with China; even a clash of navies in the Sea of Azov.

The United States is continuing to find its way in the 21st century, as other nations seek to supplant the influence it exerts over the world with their own. One major fear is that the United States’ approach may ultimately result in the self-fulfilling prophecy of a military conflict with other great powers. While it’s important to prevent war by demonstrating the significant capacity to wage it, some voices are calling for strategic planning that leads the United States away from conflict with the world’s other leading powers. I recently spoke with one of these voices: Sharon Burke, a senior advisor to New America, where she focuses on international security and resource security.

We discussed the evolving nature of great-power competition, which Burke laid out in a new report, “Strategic Distraction: America, China, and Japan in the 21st Century Competitive Space,” and what it may mean in the years ahead. A condensed transcript of our conversation is below.

Could you tell me what inspired you to write this report, which largely examines what “winning” in the contemporary competitive space looks like?

I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for a long time, for several different reasons. One is that we’ve started a new project here at New America called the Phase Zero Project, which refers to a Pentagon planning concept for the different phases of conflict: Phase One is deterrence, Phase Three is active conflict, and Phase Five is restoring civil order. So Phase Zero is the notion that, before you’re in the early stages of a conflict, you still have a chance to shape the strategic environment—either to prevent war or to your advantage or both.

What’s really interesting about this is that people had accepted the concept but then didn’t necessarily do as much with it as they could have. As a longtime defense hand, it’s always made me a little uneasy that we aren’t better—that we aren’t as good at shaping the environment either to our advantage or to stay out of war as we are at fighting war.

A lot of your focus is on Japan—why is that?

A big reason for this is that, throughout my career, I’ve touched on Japan and Japan’s interests and U.S.-Japan relationships—most directly when I was working in the U.S. State Department for Richard Armitage, who’s a true expert on Japan. One of the things I always thought about back then was that, in the American defense community, the emphasis, since really the beginning of the Cold War, has been on bringing Japan into a military alliance and making the country more into a real military power, because of course Japan has a constitutional prohibition against war. But there’s a part of me that’s always mulled over two things. One, be careful what you wish for. It’s really only a full generation ago that Japan was the aggressor, inheriting centuries of a military culture. And two, might it be a comparative advantage, in its own way, to be a trusted country that has disavowed war? Maybe not, but I’ve always wondered that.

Importantly, we’re in a time of tremendous flux in the national-security environment, in terms of both great-power competition and the relationship between the United States and China. We also have a president who’s challenging our traditional alliances; Japan is certainly one of the most important alliances the United States has in the world.

“I know that war is political. But peace is economic, and we’re all competing for trade and commerce, and we’re all competing for influence and for partners and allies and for permission.”

Your report zooms in on this competition between states. Competition, in ways, implies some sort of scorecard, and so in your research you come up with metrics that maybe aren’t traditional metrics but that still shed light on how states theoretically are winning or losing. Are there ways to define these outcomes so that they’re measurable? Because there are those theorists who say that information is the most important aspect of competition, since winning and losing are more of a perception than they are an actual metric.

One thing we’ve done is to start building this big matrix of influence. We wanted to see where China’s priorities are. So with all the information, we’ve built this massive matrix that has some of the obvious things, like trade, and some less-obvious things. For instance, China has these things called Confucius Institutes, which are basically culture and language centers. And we’ve looked at several different things: where China has these institutes, whether they have students, whom do they rely on for certain kinds of imports. So they get oil from Saudi Arabia. But what percent? How relative is that dependence? Because that again tells you the mutual importance of that relationship.

We’ve looked across I think up to about 30 indicators. Some of them are a little out there, like sister cities. But these are the ways that nations influence each other, and that’s the competitive space. I know that war is political. But peace is economic, and we’re all competing for trade and commerce, and we’re all competing for influence and for partners and allies and for permission.

Is it as obvious as many may think to know when a country is no longer in the competitive space, and has moved into conflict?

That’s the kind of question I think people like you and to some extent people like me should be asking, because we’ve put it under a label of “gray-zone warfare.” But gray has lots of differences in it. And the question of, say, Sri Lanka in the competitive space—or has it crossed over into civil unrest and conflict—is a very different question from Russia’s interference in U.S. elections as an act of war. There are variations of gray here. That’s one reason I don’t like the term “gray zone.” That alone is a crucial aspect of war and peace right now. And I don’t think that we’re there. We don’t know how to govern that space.

Among other things, your paper investigates how a country makes investment choices. It’s well known that China has been significantly increasing its military budget over the last couple decades, and that the United States spends more on defense and security than, I think, the next seven countries combined. I’m wondering: Are we out of balance? Not just the United States—is the world out of balance? How can the United States, China, and Japan shift resource allocations and also avoid military conflict?

What is it from Princess Bride, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”? Nobody wants that, and particularly not soldiers who have to go fight it. You just have to be prepared to do that if that’s what you have to do. And I’m 100-percent sure that that’s how Secretary Jim Mattis thinks. He doesn’t want this nation to be in a war—especially not with China—and he thinks that having a strong defense is the only way you don’t get there.

However, if all you’ve got is a defense strategy looking at weapons, how are you not going to get there? We should be able to imagine what it looks like to live with China without also being at war with China. And if we really can’t picture what that looks like, that’s a failure of imagination. But if we can imagine what that looks like, we should also be able to imagine how we get there.

But I also think that conflicts between countries never really end—that the end of an armed conflict is, arguably, just setting the stage for future conflicts.

Well, it’s good to remember that progress is possible. That’s one of the things that was really fascinating about having had a chance to study Japan: What’s happened in the space of a generation there is remarkable. The country was the aggressor in a war. It got utterly destroyed. And now, Hiroshima, which was one of the two cities the United States dropped an atomic bomb on, is a normal city. There are trees and buildings, and Japan is the third-largest economy in the world. That’s remarkable. Things can change. Countries can change. After all, the purpose of fighting a war is to defeat something that’s keeping you from having stability and prosperity and peace.

The competition that took place during the Cold War—between communism and capitalism—focused the efforts of the world’s great powers for over a generation. How would you characterize 21st-century competition? Is it economic? Do China and the United States have certain ideologies defining present-day competition?

It’s funny to look back at the Cold War. At the time, we characterized it as a clash of ideology and of different ways to live. But in retrospect, and in reality, we know that the Soviet Union wasn’t truly a communist country; it was an oligarchy ruled by a small clique that accrued lots of benefits. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t elements of communism, particularly in the way the Soviet Union’s economy was organized, but it was really a mixed economy. So, even though there was a veneer of that contest of ideals, it was still two nations fighting for preeminence and predominance and territory—literally. I don’t think that the United States was ever going to be particularly acquisitive in terms of wanting to take territory, but we certainly wanted to have influence, and the right to do as we want with territories.

In that way, I think that it was always that—nations fighting for predominance, fighting for territory, fighting for resources—and that’s what it is again. The problem is that we’ve got so many different flavors of it right now. And also we’ve got threats like al-Qaeda and ISIS that have the ability to project violence beyond their very limited means and beyond their very limited places to cause real damage. So we have to take them seriously.

Do you have any other thoughts on how, looking ahead, we can have a better conversation on great-power competition?

One of the things I’m trying to do is to understand the roots of this a little bit better: What pieces are in play? If we’re talking about an era of great-power competition, what’s that competition about? And how do you win it? Characterizing all those elements, so that we don’t end up in a shooting war, is important. Something I think about is whether we’ll be able to take that suite of weapons and look at Phase Zero: Is there a way to use the same tools and weapons to shape the strategic environment and also prevent conflict? I think that we have to do a lot more work in that area.

It’s important, too, to figure out how to provide utility for the Department of Defense. But I’d argue that one of the outcomes of having such a clear strategy is that it focuses the mind a little too much. You get kind of canalized, thinking, We know what we’re doing, we know how we’re gonna do it, we’ve got it all. It’s meaningful, though, to come in sideways and say, But have you thought about critical minerals and the way they’re shaping the competitive space? Regrettably, there’s less appetite for those conversations. The beauty of having a strategy is that you know where you’re going. The downside is that you know where you’re going.

If it weren’t such a scary time, it’d be a fascinating time, because we’re having to re-adjudicate the entire question of defense and what it means for the American experiment. There’s a lot of room for creativity. I just hope that the Department of Defense is able to accommodate it.

All opinions expressed in this interview are those of the speakers and not those of the United States Army or the Department of Defense.