To Prevail, America Must Get Scrappy

Last Sunday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted that whenever the Pentagon games war with China, our military loses every time. His admission is yet another indication that America’s unrivaled primacy in Asia is over.

As a result, America can no longer be an overeager or a reactive power. We need instead to reprise our role as a scrappy insurgent republic. Through security guarantees to our treaty allies and partners, America must keep Russia from doing more harm to its neighbors and keep Beijing’s multi-faceted bid for Asian paramountcy—including enlisting Russia as a proxy—in check.

Our budget will be tight. Certainly, dreams of devoting five percent of America’s gross domestic product to defense and doing it within five to ten years are over: Even with the $150 billion in additional Pentagon spending from reconciliation, America’s defense budget will still be less than three and a half percent of its GDP. 

In some ways, both Biden’s and Trump’s foreign and military strategies recognize this. But we are still backing into this brief. No entity has gained more from Russia’s open-ended war on the “political West” than the Chinese Communist Party. To limit China’s gain, America must augment our global alliances and positions of strength to offset Beijing and counter Russian aggression so that Moscow is of far less military, diplomatic, and economic benefit to China.

Meanwhile, the United States should recognize that China is a far more formidable rival than the erstwhile Soviet Union was. The Chinese Communist Party is determined not to repeat the USSR’s mistakes or to confine its future to the Eurasian landmass. Our posture now must be that of vigilant coexistence with Beijing. General Secretary Xi says being a good neighbor is a Chinese virtue. The US government should hold him to this. 

To keep the peace in Asia, there must be predictable consequences for Chinese aggression, for China’s support of Russia and other proxies, as well as its human rights atrocities. In the Western Pacific, the United States should be scrappy, creative, and focused on deterring China. China is surrounded by powerful countries and has plenty to protect. The U.S. can and should field asymmetric military capabilities and plans to impose enough friction, risk, and uncertainty to persuade Beijing that aggression will be self-defeating.

Meanwhile, China’s involvements around the globe are not a zero-sum proposition. Certainly, China’s Belt and Road investment activities in the developing world aren't always exclusive nor are they—yet—inherently or entirely weaponized against the U.S. The issue for U.S. strategy is keeping it so—and shaping the global competition with China in constructive, not maladaptive, ways. After primacy, we need discipline based on a clear-eyed assessment of where the U.S. must block and counter China and where we can commingle with it.

Besides the Western Hemisphere, the United States needs to retain dominance in Europe, Oceania, and Free Asia, and in outer space. In the Global South, the U.S. and other free nations must compete for position and influence in areas that we’ve taken for granted or neglected. Despite China’s influence in the Global South, suspicion and resentment are growing over Beijing’s heavy-handedness. American self-rule and self-reliance is a winning hand, and Washington must play it by offering attractive alternatives.

Toward this end, Washington must modernize its diplomacy and information warfare tools and orchestrate and amplify these messages. Putin’s effort to recreate the Soviet empire has fared poorly. We need to convince the Russians of how futile it is. Xi insists there are no limits to China’s alliance with Russia. Yet, news of Russia’s depravities in Europe is conspicuously absent among Chinese. What is Beijing hiding from? The U.S. must tell the truth, and make clear the cultural, economic, and China’s and Russia’s political backwardness compared to the West.

This strategy is manageable and limited. Its aim is to perpetuate self-government at home and to defend and advance it overseas. It will bring America closer to its allies and protect peace and prosperity without inadvertently pushing our main geopolitical foe— China —into fighting hot wars against us.

Eric Brown is a Senior Research Scientist at the College of William & Mary’s Global Research Institute and previously served as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute from 2004-2022.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at Hudson Institute.

Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Arlington, Virginia, served as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy at the Pentagon (1989–93), and is the author of China, Russia, and the Coming Cool War (2024).