The New Cold War with China

The threat to the United States from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is multifaceted, long-term, and aggressive. Whether it’s from military modernization to economic coercion, cyber warfare to space competition, the PRC’s national security challenge is global, and it targets U.S. interests, values, security, and standing in the world.

Their determined plan uses economics, media, education, politics, culture, diplomacy, and information, among many other approaches, in a highly integrated and orchestrated fashion. Its actions take place within the U.S. domestically, they seek to undermine the U.S. regionally and globally, while sowing doubt in the minds of U.S. allies.

In short, in many respects, the U.S. is involved in a Cold War with China, and it urgently needs to do more to stop their aggressive actions.

Additionally, through massive state support, it also seeks to shape American culture through supporting select movies, such as the 2019 movie Midway, to create division between the alliance of the United States and Japan, as well as prompting the temporary removal of the flag of Taiwan from the jacket of the actor Tom Cruise in the 2022 movie Top Gun: Maverick. Much like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, China uses all of its resources to challenge, coerce, silence, and divide opinions about its policies and actions. It uses cultural influence as much as any other capability at its disposal.

There is no better example of this than what China has done to expand its capabilities in space. Through robust state-funded support, economic espionage, theft, and coercion, China has aggressively grown its constellation of satellites and other capabilities giving its military and intelligence services as well as its state-run industries significant advantages. To this end, it has even tried to replicate Elon Musk’s reusable rocket concept, the Starship, as well as its Mechazilla Catching Tower.

These are just the latest examples of Chinese economic espionage which has been going on for decades and done great harm to our commercial space companies. Even as they have advocated for peaceful uses of space, China has also aggressively militarized space creating advantages that could be used in a future conflict. The U.S. needs to do a better job at confronting this sustained threat.

The Chinese Government has also sought to systematically expand its power and take over international institutions affiliated with the United Nations and other global and regional organizations. These efforts are made not only to expand its control but to also mute international criticism of the PRC’s actions and to create diplomatic and other complications for the U.S. and its allies.

Consider China’s involvement with United Nations environmental organizations and how it has been able to silence criticism and prevent investigations of the activities of its maritime militia. China pillages fish stocks around the globe and often destroys reefs and harasses other national fishing fleets. It has also done much to downplay the PRC’s significant contributions to air pollution and how its development projects worldwide, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, destroy the environment. Finally, it consistently seeks to reduce Taiwan’s role on the world’s stage and delegitimize its political system and exclude it from international forums.

While the leaders of the People’s Republic of China publicly call for peaceful relations with the United States, they are relentlessly pursuing a campaign to challenge the United States in virtually every economic, political, diplomatic, and military sphere of activities. It consistently seeks advantages using a sustained, long-term campaign of relentlessly expanding its influence using all of the resources of its government.

In many respects, our country is involved in a new Cold War with China requiring a similarly enduring approach that enlists not just the resources of the United States Government but our own civil society, allies and partners, and freedom-loving people across the world. We must do a better job of making America first and China last.

Daniel R. Green, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development from 2019-2021. He is the co-editor of "Confronting China: U.S. Defense Policy in an Era of Great Power Competition" (Bloomsbury, 2024). These views are his own and do not necessarily represent the U.S. Department of Defense.