Towards a New Cold War?
di Marzio Di Feo
The Stealth War: How China Took over While America’s Elite Slept by Robert Spalding. New York: Penguin Random House, 2019, pp. 256.
Robert Spalding, a retired Air Force Brigadier General, worked for the Defense and State Departments and, as Senior Director for Strategy to the President, he was the chief architect for the national competition framework in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS).
The Stealth War is an “executive summary” of the challenges that Western democracies face in the interconnected and globalized world. In this perspective, the enemy faced by the West, according the author, is the growing “weaponry” system developed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP). As the author states: “China is closing on achieving its goal of influencing the politicians and corporations of the United States” (xiii).
In doing this, China seeks to portray itself as law-abiding and just, manipulating how observers comprehend past, present, and future and accelerating influencing operations “by attempting to become the world’s technology leader, corner the telecommunications market, and export totalitarian social controls to the leaders in developing nations” (xv).
It is worth nothing that the book is not a typical warning essay, providing dystopian future. It is rather a realistic perspective somewhat sensationalistic on when and how this new balance of power could affect and reshape global order as totalitarian regime monitoring lives, thoughts, or racking action against the West. From a national security perspective, the bipolar order during the Cold War was not just based on the development of nuclear weapons.
The West spends its money on “butter” (recalling the “guns versus butter model” between a nation’s investment in defense and civilian goods), i.e. infrastructures, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, research and development. In other words, national security means not focusing on military as a deterrent but on the development of a strong industrial base, investing for the protection against the challenges posed by globalization.
In 1999, in Unrestricted Warfare (written by two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui), China saw a convergence of the technological layer and the business layer.
This led to the point where it is possible to use it not just to have a social score (i.e. a national reputation system being developed by the Chinese government and based on a system of trustworthiness of citizens) but to collect data and control the highest spheres through services and business model to influence (foreign) populations.
The paradox is that China is using the current information economy to promote censorship and authoritarianism, using Western technological approach and capital.
Cyberattacks as Strategic Weapons
Spalding also states that cyberattacks are used in terms of societal control, using data as strategic weapons. They also can be used for the intense interest in keeping social networks under surveillance (e.g. through Weibo and WeChat). Chinese domination will be realized through infrastructure, used “as unassuming, innocuous, but powerful weapons to gain influence over potential allies and rivals alike […] Infrastructure warfare may be the most subtle and corrosive of China’s unrestricted aggressions” (162–63).
The author depicts several future perspectives. The first is the separation scenario: democracies separating from authoritarian systems.
The second scenario, connectedness, displays the opposite: where Chinese tech companies first merge and then control US companies through investments and manpower. Networks will be designed, built, and maintained by Chinese companies, and data will be gathered and archived by the CCP. Hybrid characterizes the last perspective where the two systems will clash as democracies seek to embrace the CCP model. As consequence, this will result in constant back-and-forth trade and financial discord.
“Stopping China’s unrestricted war will take singleminded focus across the United States, and with our allies across the globe-the future of freedom is at stake. But winning this war means fighting it from within our own borders. I estimate that we have three years to act.
If …
If the United States fails to disentangle ourselves from China’s complex web of influencing campaigns; if we fail to curb our investments or solve our infrastructure problems; if we don’t protect our citizens by providing meaningful work, or ensure the security and privacy of data with the same zeal that China exhibits to acquire it; if we don’t rewrite the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to ensure legal protections for corporations in doing business in and with China; if Congress and the supreme Court fail to revisit legislation preventing cash from pouring into political campaigns to taint and influence electorate, we will fall prey to Chinese policy at home and abroad.
And we will, ultimately, lose the four freedoms [freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from want, freedom from fear]” (223).
