The prevailing consensus for the past few years has been that an ascendant China is threatening to overtake a slumping America. ‘If we don’t get moving, they [China] are going to eat our lunch,’ US President Joe Biden told a group of senators in 2021.

Research suggests that a geopolitical power transition is most likely to take place when a surging challenger overtakes an exhausted hegemon. In assessing the threat posed by China, it has become popular to refer to the Thucydides’ trap, named after the Greek historian and general who blamed the Peloponnesian War on the threat posed by a rising Athens to an established Sparta. The message is clear: a turbo-charged China has increased the likelihood of conflict with America.

In Danger zone, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley challenge this notion and offer a more nuanced view. Brands is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and Beckley is an associate professor at Tufts University. In their cogently argued book, they provide a fresh take on the likelihood of Sino-American war.

As Brands and Beckley see it, China is simultaneously both a rising and a declining power. While China continues to rise in terms of military might, measured in economic and demographic terms it is already firmly on a downward trajectory. No less significant, President Xi Jinping’s assertiveness has alerted the world to China’s ambitions, and the world is gearing up to respond. Consequently, China has a rapidly closing window of time in which to realise its plans.

The authors call this the ‘peaking power trap’. Conventional thinking suggests that China will bide its time until its military is strong enough to guarantee success, but the authors suggest that the pressure is on, and a conflict could be imminent.

Brands and Beckley remind us that China’s economic performance peaked more than a decade ago. With the effects of the government’s Covid-19 policies cramping productivity and real-estate markets tanking, the economy grew by a historical low of only 3.0% in 2022 and is expected to grow by 4.3% this year. China’s boom years are a thing of the past.

During his first decade in office, Xi demonstrated only too clearly that he prioritises ideology over markets. His reappointment in October for another five years means his state-centric economic policies look set to continue. The reforms needed to revitalise China’s economy will likely remain on the backburner. Xi’s new leadership team has little economic experience and received a chilly reception from financial markets.

China’s economic woes are compounded by the demographic legacy of its one-child policy, which has left the country with an ageing population, a rapidly diminishing workforce and a soaring pension bill. Last year, China’s population declined for the first time since 1961. Its workforce peaked already, in 2014, and has been declining ever since. By mid-century, the working-age population is expected to decrease by a staggering 200 million, further dimming the country’s economic prospects.

In stark contrast to Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘hiding one’s strength and biding one’s time’, Xi’s ‘wolf warrior’ foreign policy has alarmed the world. As a result, China is operating in an increasingly hostile international environment. The United States, Japan and Taiwan are actively stepping up their military capabilities, and Indo-Pacific cooperation has been bolstered through a reinvigorated Quad. European countries are also responding, with the United Kingdom and Germany strengthening their military presence in the region.

Brands and Beckley remind us that anxiety and opportunity make a lethal cocktail. Chinese leaders may be concerned that they need to act soon, before their country slips into full-scale decline. ‘Once-rising powers,’ the authors note, ‘often become most aggressive when their fortunes fade, their enemies multiply, and they realize that they must reach for glory now or miss their opportunity forever.’ Some of the bloodiest wars in history were started not by rising powers but by countries that had peaked and started to decline. These include Germany in 1914, Japan in the late 1930s and, of course, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2022.

With the world’s attention focused on Russia’s war in Ukraine, China may feel that the time for action is at hand. The composition of Xi’s new leadership team highlights this risk. During his first two terms in office, Xi had to share power in the Politburo Standing Committee with the moderate Youth League faction. Now that China’s highest decision-making body is stacked with Xi loyalists, there’s likely to be less room for debate and dissent, even on key strategic decisions.

In March 2021, Admiral Philip Davidson, who at the time was in charge of the US Indo-Pacific Command, controversially claimed that China could trigger a conflict over Taiwan as soon as 2027. Brands and Beckley think it could happen much sooner. That might seem alarmist, but the authors present a strong case.

Does China intend to displace the United States as the world’s leading superpower? Henry Kissinger has frequently argued that China approaches foreign relations from a long-term perspective, while Western countries are tactical, focusing on short-term gain. China is playing wei qi (better known as go), where the aim is to encircle your adversary, while the rest of the world is playing chess, where you aim to topple the other player.

In The long game, Rush Doshi takes this argument a step further, postulating that dating back to the 1980s, China has been pursuing a grand strategy to displace the American-led global order. China plans to achieve this by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic. Doshi, the newly appointed China director in the Biden administration’s National Security Council, maps out how the strategy has unfolded in three distinct phases.

During the ‘Hiding capabilities and biding time’ stage (1989–2008), China focused on blunting the role of the US and other Western countries. With scarce resources, China’s approach was asymmetric. For example, it invested heavily in submarines, missiles and mines, all relatively low-cost means of limiting access to waters controlled by China.

Emboldened by the global financial crisis, which highlighted the weakness of the US, China shifted to the building stage (2009–2016), expanding its political clout, strengthening its navy and setting up its own regional and global institutions, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Following Xi Jinping’s confirmation for a second term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, China shifted into high gear, assertively expanding its global reach.

Doshi’s greatest strength lies in his detailed analysis of recent changes in China’s political, economic and military relations. He has built an extensive database of Chinese sources ranging from official policy pronouncements and speeches to think-tank and press commentary. This allows him to document nuanced policy shifts in areas ranging from military procurement to China’s establishment of its own credit rating agencies.

The book brims with insider details. When the People’s Liberation Army in the late 1990s decided to build its own aircraft carriers, it recruited a flamboyant Chinese tycoon to negotiate the purchase of an incomplete Ukrainian aircraft carrier under the guise of turning it into a floating casino. Without arousing too much suspicion, the middleman managed to include the original blueprints and engines in the deal. The blueprints were essential to help China build its own aircraft carriers, and the engines were more advanced than anything China could produce.

The book also details the negotiations for the establishment of the AIIB, which attracted much controversy. Once Western countries started to join, membership snowballed, catching China by surprise.

Doshi makes a powerful case that China is pursuing a grand strategy to replace the US as world leader. However, he shows occasional signs of confirmation bias, with disparate policies fitting together as grand strategy just a bit too neatly. One wonders whether some military procurement decisions, for example, might simply have been dictated by resource constraints.

More significantly, Doshi pays limited attention to the twists and turns of China’s recent history, which were accompanied by shifts in strategy.

In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping set China firmly on a path of moderate reform. He also put in place succession arrangements intended to ensure the continuity of these reforms, and in 1987 he appointed Zhao Ziyang as CCP general secretary. Zhao, an established reformist, would likely have succeeded Deng had the 1989 riots at Tiananmen Square not intervened. Having sided with the demonstrators, Zhao was replaced by Jiang Zemin, a more moderate reformer.

The path that China might have taken is described in Zhao’s posthumously published memoirs, in which he notes that ‘parliamentary democracy is the best course for a modern state and should be China’s goal’. As early as 1992, Deng also anointed the anodyne Hu Jintao to succeed Jiang, indicating his intention for China to continue on a moderate path.

Deng could hardly have anticipated the assertive global stance taken by Xi, who has systematically demolished his policies and the political checks and balances he put in place.

It is harder to disagree with Doshi’s policy prescription. He writes off accommodation as unworkable and expecting China to change as unrealistic. Instead, he takes a page from China’s own strategic playbook, mapping out an asymmetric strategy in which the US and its allies seek to blunt Chinese order-building at a cost lower than that incurred by China to advance it. Rather than matching China dollar for dollar and ship for ship, the US should build capacities strategically.

Doshi reminds us that not all Chinese leaders agree with Xi’s assertiveness. In 1973, Premier Zhou Enlai asked an American diplomat if he thought China would ever become an aggressive or expansionist power. To the diplomat’s polite no, Zhou responded: ‘Don’t count on that. It is possible. But if China were to embark on such a path, you must oppose it. And you must tell those Chinese that Zhou Enlai told you to do so!’

Despite their increasingly bitter rivalry, the United States and China have recently been sending the right signals regarding potential cooperation on combatting climate change. The joint statement issued after the mid-April meeting between John Kerry, US special presidential envoy for climate, and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, indicates that the two governments may be trying to use collaboration on climate policy to prevent their relationship from devolving into outright enmity. But the path ahead is strewn with geopolitical landmines.

It’s not difficult to understand why the US and China are behaving responsibly at the moment. Both countries view climate change as an existential threat and have a strong interest in cooperation. And US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping know that open intransigence or obstructionism on this issue would cost them dearly in terms of international public opinion.

During the Cold War, the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism divided the world and cemented alliances. But in the coming decade, ideology alone is unlikely to win the US and China many friends. The Chinese Communist Party no longer has any real ideology to speak of, while political polarisation and Trumpism have tarnished America’s lustre. Instead, as climate change puts human survival at risk, leadership in tackling the problem will shape international alliances.

Turning rhetorical climate commitments into action will sorely test both countries in the coming years. Shortly after Biden’s recent climate summit of world leaders, for example, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hinted that China’s cooperation with America would hinge on whether the US ‘interferes in China’s internal affairs’.

While China regards Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and, most importantly, Taiwan as ‘internal affairs’, Kerry has made it clear that the US will not trade away concessions on these matters for Chinese cooperation on climate change. Unless China or the US softens its position, further escalation of Sino-American tensions over these hot-button issues can be expected to endanger bilateral climate efforts.

Besides the difficulty of insulating their bilateral conflicts from areas of potential collaboration, it’s unclear what and how much climate cooperation the US and China can deliver. The brief US–China joint statement offers few specifics, and for good reason. Given the absence of trust, neither country is willing to make binding commitments.

As a result, bilateral cooperation on climate change will be volatile, modest and incremental at best. The volatility stems from the overall instability of US–China relations, with a spike in tensions inevitably inflicting collateral damage on climate efforts. Mutual suspicion and hostility will also prevent both sides from taking big steps and motivate them to drive hard bargains. Only minor measures can test trust and produce sufficient goodwill to sustain cooperation. We should thus expect a gradual, drawn-out process.

Given the absence of mutual confidence, the US and China perhaps can best cooperate by refraining from certain actions, rather than actively trying to achieve things together. Here, the first imperative is to avoid linking climate cooperation with the most adversarial aspects of the bilateral relationship, such as human rights, trade and security.

Exercising such restraint will demand more of China than it will of the US, because Chinese leaders apparently believe that the climate issue gives them crucial leverage over Biden’s policies in other areas. Xi needs to recognise that such linkages will be counterproductive. Strong bipartisan anti-CCP sentiment in the US leaves Biden little room for manoeuvre, and Chinese intransigence could severely damage Xi’s credibility as a global leader on climate change.

Suppressing the temptation to score points by attacking each other’s positions during upcoming multilateral climate negotiations will also help the US and China to stay productively engaged. On specific issues such as emissions-reduction goals and contributions to financing energy transitions in developing economies, each country should base its criticism on sound scientific, economic and moral grounds. More important, they should accompany their criticism with alternatives that third parties deem reasonable, realistic and beneficial.

It may be unrealistic to talk about active US–China cooperation on clean energy when the two countries are waging a technology war. Yet, although the US and China agreed in their recent joint statement only to discuss, not commit to, collaboration on green technologies, they may still explore ways to sequester such innovations from their broader strategic competition. Specifically, the US and China should seek to minimise harm whenever they weigh policies that might appear necessary to maintain a competitive advantage but could adversely affect the development and adoption of green technologies.

The world needs the US and China to cooperate on climate change, but we should not harbour any illusions. The best we can hope for is that the two superpowers are disciplined enough to avoid endangering humanity’s survival as they jostle for geopolitical advantage.

The hack of Microsoft’s Exchange server software, which centrally manages email and calendars for businesses, threatens to be a bonanza for cybercriminals and may alter the course of US–China relations under the Biden administration.

State-based cyber espionage typically—barring money-focused North Korean hacking—follows a standard playbook with its own internal logic: governments have intelligence requirements, their agents break in and steal information, sooner or later (and sometimes much later) the agents get caught and systems are cleaned of malware, and the cycle repeats. The score changes with intelligence wins, but the game stays the same.

The ongoing Chinese exploitation of Microsoft Exchange servers is different. Has the game changed?

In late 2020, Orange Tsai, a Taiwanese security researcher, discovered a series of four separate bugs that could be strung together to seize control of a Microsoft Exchange server.

This kind of vulnerability is about as bad as it gets. Not only is email an intelligence agency’s highest priority, but Exchange servers are particularly valuable real estate from which to move further into a network. The Microsoft-hosted cloud version of Exchange is not vulnerable, so, ironically, the customers that chose to run their own Exchange servers because of concerns over the security of cloud services find themselves uniquely exposed.

Orange reported these findings to Microsoft so they could be fixed, but before he’d even submitted his report to the company’s security response centre, this series of bugs was being exploited ‘in the wild’—that is, they were already being used for cyber espionage.

Microsoft reported that a Chinese state-sponsored group the company calls Hafnium was using these techniques to take control of Exchange servers, to steal email, files and credentials, and to set up persistent access (commonly known as backdoors) to the compromised network for future exploitation.

Independent discovery of bugs is surprisingly common. The high-profile Spectre and Meltdown processor bugs were more or less simultaneously discovered by three independent groups, and research has found that, in a particular set of vulnerabilities, about 6% were independently discovered within a year.

It’s still possible that cyber espionage activity in early January was the result of independent discovery, but by late February Orange’s bug discoveries were being used by other cyber actors; at least one of these groups was using exploits with significant similarity to Orange’s prototype code, including his use of ‘orange’ as a password.

How did Orange’s discovery make it into the hands of a Chinese espionage group? Taiwan is a perennial target of Chinese espionage (of all kinds, not just cyber espionage), and security researchers make tempting targets because of the possibility of their using any techniques they discover. But Microsoft itself is also a potential source of the leak and is reportedly investigating avenues of vulnerability, particularly its Microsoft Active Protections Program, which gives a trusted cohort of companies advance access to security information so that they can prepare defences.

In any case, within days of Orange’s discovery Exchange servers were being exploited by Chinese espionage groups. In what would normally have been a cybersecurity success story, this quiet exploitation was almost immediately detected independently by two separate security companies, both of which also informed Microsoft.

In the normal course of state-sponsored espionage, this kind of measured and covert exploitation of vulnerabilities for intelligence-gathering would have continued until Microsoft issued a fix, and the opportunity for intelligence gains would have disappeared as organisations updated their systems.

But in a deviation from the ‘normal’ playbook, as Microsoft was preparing to issue its patch, exploitation of the vulnerability accelerated, with multiple groups automatically and indiscriminately using it on any susceptible server.

There are claims that up to 10 different cyber espionage groups are involved, many of them with links to China, but cybercriminals are also taking part.

Not only was this hacking indiscriminate, affecting 30,000 servers in the United States and potentially hundreds of thousands globally, but the hackers also left these servers open to further abuse by other malicious groups by installing open webshells, backdoors that allow a compromised server to be controlled simply by using a web browser.

Cybercriminals are already taking advantage of these pre-compromised servers to launch ransomware attacks. Ransomware groups have refined their tactics over the last year and payments in the millions of dollars are not uncommon. Given the sheer number of companies affected, it’s possible that the total lost to ransoms may well be in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, in addition to the network remediation cost.

At this stage, there has been no official US statement on who is ultimately responsible for the mass hacking of Exchange servers. Determining a chain of events and assigning responsibility will be key to any official response. There’s a spectrum of possibilities ranging from the deliberate to the coincidental: perhaps China deliberately exploited this bug at scale; perhaps loosely controlled contractor groups went rogue; perhaps the technique was deliberately shared with criminal groups; perhaps it was available for sale within criminal markets; or perhaps it was leaked during Microsoft’s remediation process.

At the most incendiary end of the spectrum of possibilities, a deliberate decision by China to mass-exploit servers would drastically affect Washington’s approach to dealing with Beijing. In the short term, the US would assemble a broad coalition of affected countries (likely all countries are affected) to launch a robust diplomatic and economic response, but perhaps more importantly attitudes would harden within the administration and it would embed hard-edged combativeness into all US–China decision-making. There is also the worrying possibility that if a deliberate Chinese operation is proven, this episode will change the game so that states become willing to carry out cyber operations without conducting the due diligence to avoid collateral damage and destructive side-effects.

If responsibility is sheeted home to rogue contractors, the administration would take a ‘get your house in order’ response and diplomatic pressure would be applied to bring China-based cyber proxies under control. Building a broad coalition of countries is also key here, but such a move should include more public indictments to reveal the linkages between the Chinese state and cyber espionage groups. Although deterrence by embarrassment doesn’t seem to have worked in the past, the global and (likely) destructive consequences of the hack raise the stakes considerably.

If it’s found that ultimate responsibility lies with criminal groups (that is, the Chinese state exploited the bug, but criminal groups independently discovered or bought it and engaged in mass exploitation), the response would be two-pronged. One arm of action would focus on operations that deter and hamper cybercriminal groups, including law enforcement action and offensive cyber operations. A second arm would focus on the ongoing efforts to improve the level of cybersecurity resilience across the whole economy through strong regulation.

Within a month of the discovery of the recent SolarWinds hack, the US issued an official statement that the perpetrators were ‘likely Russian’. The fallout from the Exchange hack will continue over many months, but official statements that hint at or assign responsibility will be key indicators as to how the US government, and the world, will respond.

‘Decoupling’ is central to the geopolitical duel between the United States and China. Conceived and promoted by hawks in US President Donald Trump’s administration, this strategy has now become America’s principal tool to weaken Chinese power.

The first act of decoupling—the Sino-American trade war that began in 2018—has substantially reduced bilateral trade. A similar process is now in full swing in the technology sector, with the US pursuing an unrelenting campaign against Chinese tech giants such as Huawei and ByteDance (the owner of the popular video app TikTok). With the Trump administration threatening to have Chinese firms delisted from US stock exchanges if they fail to give US auditors access to their records in China, financial decoupling has begun as well.

Although it remains to be seen whether economic decoupling will succeed in containing China, the strategic logic at least sounds compelling. Because China benefits from its economic ties with the US, severing them will inevitably weaken Chinese growth.

Unfortunately, US China hawks are not content to stop there, but also want to cut America’s cultural and educational ties with China. Earlier this year, pressure from Republican lawmakers forced the Peace Corps, which has sent more than 1,300 Americans to China since 1993, to terminate its program in the country. And in July, Trump suspended America’s Fulbright program in mainland China and Hong Kong as part of a package of US sanctions in response to the Chinese government’s security crackdown on the city.

Likewise, in late May, two Republican lawmakers proposed a bill to bar Chinese nationals from coming to the US to pursue graduate studies in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And on 13 August, the US State Department designated the Confucius Institute US Center, a Chinese government-sponsored entity that provides language programs, as a ‘foreign mission’, which will almost certainly result in the termination of its activities in the US.

Journalism has suffered the fastest decoupling. After the Wall Street Journal published a commentary in early February with a headline that referred to China as ‘the real sick man of Asia’, the Chinese government expelled three journalists working for the newspaper. The US retaliated in early March by forcing 60 Chinese citizens working for state-owned media outlets in America to leave the country. China then expelled all US citizens working for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, effectively crippling these publications’ newsgathering capabilities in the country.

Cutting cultural, educational and journalistic ties between the US and China is unwise and counterproductive for America. Instead of advancing long-term US strategic objectives by promoting American values and maintaining the moral high ground, the Trump administration is playing into the hands of the Chinese government, which regards these ties as conduits for American ideological and cultural infiltration.

Without government-sponsored exchange programs such as the Peace Corps and Fulbright schemes, the US will have no direct channels for engaging ordinary Chinese people, especially the young. Through these programs, Americans teach English, American history and literature, and Western social sciences, often in remote areas of China that have limited contact with the outside world.

Such activities help Chinese people to gain a more accurate understanding of the US and help to neutralise official anti-American propaganda. Scrapping these programs thus amounts to unilateral ideological disarmament by the US.

Some US retaliation against Chinese bullying of American journalists seems reasonable. But the Trump administration’s disproportionate expulsion of 60 journalists gave the Chinese government an excuse to do something it had wanted to do for a long time: throw out the best American reporters.

The mass tit-for-tat expulsions of US and Chinese journalists will hurt America far more than China. Whereas reporters at Chinese state-owned news outlets in the US do little serious independent reporting that could educate the Chinese public, American journalists who cover China—despite constant harassment and surveillance by the Chinese government—provide invaluable information about the country. The loss of these channels will undercut US policymakers’ ability to track critical developments in China.

Finally, blocking Chinese graduate students from studying STEM subjects in the US would deprive America of top talent in these fields and help China to advance. Gifted Chinese students will instead go to other developed countries to study—and many of them will then return home, because STEM-related career opportunities outside the US are less plentiful.

While China will benefit from this reverse brain drain, the US will miss out on contributions from tens of thousands of engineers and scientists. Of the 31,052 PhDs awarded in all STEM fields in the US between 2015 and 2017, Chinese students received 16% of the total, including 22% of engineering PhDs and 25% of those in mathematics. Moreover, some 90% of Chinese science and engineering students stay in the US for at least 10 years after completing their doctorates—the highest rate of any nationality.

US–China relations are on the brink of collapse. Economic decoupling is already a reality, and US-led cultural separation—an unthinkable prospect not so long ago—may soon be. That would be a tragedy, and America will be the main loser.