Good afternoon, and thank you for the kind invitation to return to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) for this conference. 

I’m very pleased for the chance to talk with you today about how to conceptualize the strategic competition challenges we face today.  You’ll only be getting my own personal opinion, of course, for I’ve long since left government and can speak for no one but myself.  But I hope we’ll have an interesting discussion.

As someone who has been banging the figurative table for years to warn the U.S. and international policy community about the strategic challenges that will arise out of China’s global ambition of geopolitical “return” to something akin to the central global status and role it imagines to be its birthright as the so-called “Middle Kingdom,” I’m naturally delighted that Washington is now finally taking competitive strategy seriously.  And I’m honored to have had the chance, first at the National Security Council in 2017 and thereafter at the Department of State for three years, to have played a role in reorienting U.S. foreign and national security policy to focus upon it – and, in particular, upon the challenges of keeping sensitive technologies out of the hands of a Chinese industrial sector that officials there are working to “fuse” with its military sector.

Nevertheless, belatedly determining to focus upon a challenge is not necessarily the same thing as effectively meeting it.  It’s good that strategic competition – at least vis-à-vis China, anyway – is indeed, as I had hoped it would become, the “new normal” in Washington.  But now we face the real work, the hard work, of actually building and implementing an effective strategy.

In this regard, our policy community is working overtime to figure things out.  Sometimes this work is quite focused and systematic, and sometimes it’s more enthusiastic than disciplined – with parts of the think tank world, for instance, sometimes resembling nothing so much as a game of pee-wee soccer in which the kids just swarm to the ball. 

Nevertheless, to our credit, we are now all finally working on the problem.  As a result, we are far ahead of where we were when I first started calling attention in the mid-2000s to China’s geopolitical ambitions, and even far ahead of where we were when I began calling attention in mid-2018 to the need to revise national security export controls in light of Beijing’s “Military-Civil Fusion” strategy.

A Typology of What, Why, and How

So far, however, most of the work underway on competitive strategy topics in various quarters – in government, in the think tank world, and in academia – seems to focus on what I call the “How Stories” of strategic competition. 

Let me explain what I mean by that.

If you can forgive me some oversimplification for purposes of making a point, you could say that for any important endeavor – including developing and implementing a strategic competitive strategy – you basically have to be able to answer at least three different types of question.  This entails being able to tell at least three different types of “story.”

First, there are “What Stories.”  Specifically, what are you trying to do?  I know this seems pretty elementary, but it’s also hard to escape: you can’t do much by way of planning or evaluating a potential course of action if you don’t have some feel for what your objective is. 

You also need to be able to tell a “Why Story.”  Why are you trying to do this thing?  Why does it matter?  And how muchdoes it matter? 

These “why” issues are important because you need to know how much effort to expend toward achieving your objective.  It’s critical to know how important the goal is, because while it’s certainly not the case that any good end justifies any means, an extremely compelling objective will tend to justify expending a great deal more effort and accepting much more risk than would a goal of less importance.  (“Why Stories” are also a key part of how you convince others to shoulder such burdens with you; they are important to being persuasive wherever cooperation and collaboration is needed.)

Notably, both of these types of story – the “What” and the “Why” – are conceptually antecedent to the “How Story.”  That is, developing an effective account of how you’re going to get to your goal necessarily implies that you already have a goal.  Nor can you really calibrate the elements of a “How Story” to your objective – such as the range of measures you’re willing to attempt and the amount of resources you’re willing to invest – without having some idea of why and how much that objective matters.  Not all good objectives, will justify very large expenditures of effort, after all, but some certainly might.  You need to be able to tell which is which!

So you need all three types: “What Stories,” “Why Stories,” and “How Stories.”  Together, in effect, this narrative trilogy could be said to make up your overall “theory of victory.”  They define the game you’re in, why you care and how hard you feel you need to try, and what you need to do along that road in order to achieve success.

Stuck in the “How”

But here’s a problem, at least as I see it.  As I noted, most work today on competitive strategy seems to focus on “How” questions.   There are certainly lots of such questions, and they’re unquestionably important.  For instance:

• How do we organize the federal bureaucracy in order to become a more effective strategic competitor?   Can we do better to “integrate” the instruments of state power in order to support competitive success, enhance deterrence, and position us for as much success as possible were deterrence to fail?

• Which technology sectors are most essential to our competitive success, how can we keep the PRC from stealing a march on us in their development, and how can we most effectively jump-start (or maintain) our own innovation economy as a global leader in these areas? 

• What is the appropriate role of government in supporting innovation and economic growth?  Should it adopt an industrial policy of targeted intervention and more general stimulus, or are there insurmountable problems with federal officials presuming to “pick winners”?  More broadly still, how should we respond to market-distorting competitive advantages given to Chinee companies by state subsidies and political support?

• How can we reform our military acquisition and procurement bureaucracy so as to make our armed forces more agile and responsive to novel and growing threats, even while expanding the productive throughput of our defense industrial base in the ways that would be needed in order to sustain operations for any meaningful period of time if deterrence failed?

Those questions are probably just the tip of the iceberg in the “how to implement competitive strategy department,” but you get the idea. 

That said, I’m not so sure we’ve really done the job we need to do on our “What” and “Why” questions of competitive strategy. 

To be sure, there’s what would seem to be an intuitive obviousness to some points.  Of course we don’t want to be “out competed” by China.  Who would want to “lose” what the Biden Administration – in the national security guidance documents it released last year – has called the “contest for the future of our world”? 

But it’s no small question to ask exactly what we mean by strategic competition, and what we would actually consider “winning” – or, alternatively, “losing” – to be. 

Chinese Stories

To be sure, answering all these questions isn’t always difficult for everyone.  My own suspicion – as I have outlined many times, both inside and outside government  – is that the People’s Republic of China thinks it’s got them pretty well figured out. 

In terms of “what,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, set itself the goal of achieving China’s long-term objective of “national rejuvenation” by 2049, the centenary of the CCP’s seizure of power in Beijing.  By this, it means China’s return to something akin to the kind of geopolitical status and centrality it felt itself to have had for thousands of years as the so-called “Middle Kingdom,” thus also righting the world-historical wrongs inflicted upon it at imperialist hands during a “Century of Humiliation” that began with the Opium War in 1839.  This also necessarily entails displacing or simply breaking the power of the United States in the international system, and refashioning that system into one most of the members of which, in effect, pay China some modernized, updated form of the status-deferential “tribute” that Imperial China demanded of the vassal states and barbarian lords around it for centuries. 

I’m not saying this is necessarily the only imaginable interpretation of China’s desired end-state, but I’m offering it as myleading candidate.  And, if I’m right, it checks the basic “What Story” box reasonably well.

But what about Beijing’s “Why Story”?  Well, I guess it depends on who you are.  The answer might be different depending, for instance, on whether you’re a regular Chinese citizen – though perhaps the word “subject” is more aproposhere – or the CCP leadership. 

For the leadership, achieving the objectives of that specific CCP “What Story” may well be of critical importance.  The Chinese Communist Party has no democratic legitimacy, of course, and especially since the early 1990s – when it launched its “great patriotic education campaign” in order to whip up nationalist fervor against the malevolent foreign forces said to have inflicted a “Century of Humiliation” upon China – the Party has depicted its own rule as essential to the country achieving a glorious return. 

Having staked its legitimacy on achieving “national rejuvenation,” therefore, it might well be that the CCP considers itself to have nothing less than an existential stake in its success.  Falling short might make the whole enterprise of Communist Party power seem a failure, depriving the CCP of its primary remaining justification for remaining in control and thus perhaps threatening the whole Party edifice.  So if you’re Xi Jinping and his colleagues in the leadership compound in Zhongnanhai, that’s a pretty compelling “why it matters” story.

For ordinary folks, however, things might be different.  The “What Story” of “national rejuvenation” as defined by the CCP might be very attractive to such people, but how essential is it?  Are there other visions of a future world that would be good enough as an alternative?  And how does the CCP’s vision of being a “rejuvenated” hegemon stack up against other potential future “Chinas” – such as one that remains prosperous but does not dictate to others, being not feared and detested but rather liked and genuinely respected?  How China’s “Why Story” is parsed by ordinary people could be different from the CCP version, with implications for what it would be considered necessary to do in order to achieve the geopolitical preeminence that the “What Story” seeks.

To be sure, it’s not clear that this matters too much with China, since – alas – ordinary Chinese subjects don’t have civil and political rights and don’t have the ability to hold their rulers meaningfully to account.  So in China we may be, for the moment, stuck with the CCP’s theory of victory.

Nevertheless, you can perhaps see where I’m going here: how one defines one’s “What” and “Why” stories is exceedingly important. 

And then, of course, there’s always still the “How Story” question.  By what means does China envision that it will achieve its objective in strategic competition?  For present purposes that’s a topic for another day.  For my part, I believe the CCP leadership, at least, has fixated upon a conception of “comprehensive national power” (CNP) under which it assumes that if China manages to acquire for itself a world-leading position across all or most of an array of facets of overall power – military strength, economic weight and dynamism, technological sophistication, political prestige, cultural attractiveness, and the like – it will all but inevitably, naturally, be able to lead and set the norms of the world-system in the late 21^st Century, just as the British did in the 19^th Century and the Americans in the 20^th.  The CCP’s “How Story” thus points toward a coordinated campaign of government-led and state-promoted effort to plan China’s way to a kind of geopolitical primacy that neither Britain nor the United States actually ever deliberately organized themselves to achieve. 

What are America’s Stories?

Nevertheless, I’m not really here today to talk about China – though I do think it is vital to understand something about its “What,” “Why”, and “How” questions encoded within it.  We need to understand the narrative trilogy of China’s theory of victory because they’ve decided to be our primary competition.  Success in competition is about relative rates of progress more than it is about meeting any kind of absolute standard, so keeping the other guy from running dangerously fast is also important.  If slowing him down is part of our own “How” story, however, we need to understand how he runs.

Buy my main point is about us, and about how we think about our “theory of victory” in the strategic competition now underway.

And I don’t think we’ve yet done a good enough job of telling the “What” and “Why” stories that we need.

To some extent, I think this may be because of our geopolitical position.  We are the power challenged most directly by China’s rising power, because it is we that China wishes to replace at the center of the international system.  This makes us in many ways a status quo power, and I suspect this also tempts us to take our “What” and “Why” stories for granted.  But I think we need to do more to interrogate our “What” and “Why” narratives more resolutely; if we are to take strategic competition seriously, we need to be clearer with ourselves on both counts. 

So what do we really mean by “winning” in this strategic competition?   Is our “What Story” simply that we wish Chinato fail in its bid for revisionist geopolitical hegemony?  Such an objective, after all, does not sound too unreasonable.  After all, who among us would really want China to succeed in coercing the rest of the world into a network of neo-tributary relationships radiating in concentric circles from a Middle Kingdom ruled by repressive authoritarian brutes?  The world has seen all too much imperialist self-aggrandizement by powerful states at the expense of the autonomy and independent of sovereign peoples over the last few centuries, and CCP-led imperialism would no better than any other – and indeed likely worse in many ways.

But we sometimes also sound like we have other, grander, goals in mind.  Should it be our broader objective, for instance, that we also preserve what is sometimes called the “rules-based international order”?  That would be asking more than simply seeing China fail in its bid for neo-imperialist hegemony.  After all, Beijing might indeed fail, but perhaps the struggles of that failure would come at the cost of the rules-based order, with China basically breaking system by its attempt at domination. 

(Such a breaking, by the way, would presumably suit Russia fine.  The Kremlin doesn’t seem to want to run the late-21^st Century world, just to damage others in it enough that it will be able to carve out within it some grim and kleptocratic simulacrum of tsarist imperial glory behind a buffer zone of cowed victim states.  In this sense, despite their so-called “no limits” partnership, the Russian and Chinese “What Stories” diverge considerably.  Russia surely doesn’t want to see China really win much more than we do.)

And what specifically, moreover, do we mean by that “rules-based order”?  It is merely a system of sovereign states interacting in a kind of classical, stereotypically “Westphalian” way as juridical coequals and under a system of clear international legality, perhaps through multilateral institutions such as the U.N. Charter?   Or do we have in mind something more like the post-1991 version of that order, in which the United States had not just a special but a downright dominant, even “unipolar” role? 

For that matter, opening the aperture even further, do we mean, as President Biden suggested in his 2022 National Security Strategy – which emphasized how “[d]emocracies and autocracies are engaged in a contest,” a “contest for the future of our world” – that we seek a “rules based international order” the rules of which include instruments such as the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?  In that case, it would be presumably part of our strategic objective to ensure, eventually, that every government in the world is held to account if it falls short in affording its citizens the full suite of rights and protections described in such instruments.

Or, perhaps, do we have a layered vision of success – in which, for example, we would like “X” to be the case eventually, and will generally try to promote that outcome, but very much want “Y” to come about and will work hard to achieve it, while feeling that “Z” is absolutely essential and must be ensured at almost any cost?  That’s hardly a crazy way to think about things, and an approach that in many respects we follow in daily life, but it still requires we integrate our goals and prioritize them with a degree of honesty and clarity. 

A layered approach to “What Stories,” moreover, also already implies we’ve had some kind of conversation with ourselves about “Why” questions, since otherwise we couldn’t really do the prioritization inherent in having that kind of a “nested” goal matrix.  Any way you slice it, it seems to me, we need to work harder at articulating our “Whats” and our “Whys.”

Such distinctions would presumably have significant impact on “How” we seek to achieve our objectives, not to mention the international partners with whom we would be able to expect to work in achieving them.  You might convince a Communist Vietnamese autocrat, a Gulf monarch, and a thuggish national populist strongman to join you in a quest to preserve all states’ sovereignty and autonomy against Chinese neo-imperialist tribute-seeking, for instance, but you’d probably get rather a different answer from all three of them you asked for their help in winning what President Biden describes as “great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression.” 

For that matter, you also might not always get the answer you want, even from at least some of the world’s democracies, if you signaled that what you really wanted was to restore the kind of unipolar, U.S.-managed system that some American leaders felt we had created after the Soviet Union collapsed.  Have you forgotten the words of Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright, when on the Today Show in 1998 she defended U.S. military interventions around the world by declaring that “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future ….?”  Well, I can assure you there are lots of foreign diplomats who have not forgotten it.  To them, such thinking was little more than arrogant and condescending triumphalism, and if reconstituting such a U.S. approach to the world is your objective, you’ll find those foreign interlocutors a lot less enthusiastic about joining you to push back against Beijing that would otherwise have been the case.

Getting Our Story Straight

Anyway, I hope I’ve made the point that the details of our “What” and our “Why” stories matter a lot.  But we haven’t been very good enough at having these conversations, even with ourselves.  If we want to effectively integrate and make sense of all of the “How” speculations and proposed solutions currently careening around our policy community, we’ll need to do better.

In particular, I’d say we need to really engage with ourselves over how extensive our ambitions are – and how extensive, perhaps, they are not.  It’s not for me to prescribe an answer – or at least I won’t offer one right now, at any rate.  But without that kind of discussion, it’s going to be increasingly hard to know how to proceed, and indeed to be able to judge whether our strategy, whatever it is, is working.

History is not short of examples of powers that either couldn’t make up their mind about such questions or ended up biting off more than they could chew.  We know this most obviously from the history of warfare.

If you believe your Thucydides, for example, after the first 15 years of the Peloponnesian War between the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta and their respective allies, the conflict had reached a standoff.  This stalemate would itself have been, in strategic terms, and Athenian victory.  After all, Athens at the time was, in effect, a status quo power, and Sparta’s war objective in forming the Peloponnesian League against Athens had been to destroy the latter city and its empire of allied city-states. 

As the former Oxford political theorist Alan Ryan has observed, 

“[i]f only the Athenians had been content with avoiding defeat, the Peloponnesian League would have had to settle for the frustration of its aims.  It would have been a remarkable achievement and would have shown how formidable Athenian democratic institutions, economic resources, and military imagination really were.”(1) 

As it was, however, Athens undermined its “negative success,” if you will, in fending off an adversary’s effort to destroy its power, and “defeated itself” through a disastrous combination of internal dysfunction and military overreach, refusing Spartan offers of parlay and ultimately catastrophically losing the war.

Most of you will probably have heard the term “mission creep” applied in the arena of armed conflict.  Think, for example, of the decision to drive by U.S.-led United Nations forces north to the Yalu River early in the Korean War, which turned a fantastically successful rout of invading North Korean forces into a long and bloody fight against intervening Chinese ones and ultimately forced us to settle for the “negative success” of simply having saved South Korea from Communist invasion.  Or, by contrast, how in 1991 President George H.W. Bush carefully avoided going beyond his initial objective of expelling Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi armies from Kuwait. 

But challenges related to your vision of success – whether it is modest or expansive, clear or ambiguous, carefully-delimited or expanding – are not limited to the arena of warfare.  To my eye, our strategy in strategic competition today needs to grapple with such questions too. 

The Centrality of Vision for Effective U.S. Strategy

And so, in closing, let me make a final point as I return to the “How” problems of strategic competition.  It should be clear by now that I tend to agree with Lawrence Freedman that strategy is a “special sort of narrative” that provides a “compelling account[] of how to turn a developing situation into a desirable outcome.”(2)  That strategy is, in other words, a story we tell to ourselves, and to others, about the future.

This is likely true as more general matter, but I think it is especially critical for us in the United States to have searching and wide-ranging discussions about our “What” and “Why” narratives.  Having clear and compelling answers to such questions is far more important for us – if we wish to have an effective strategy in the face of Chinese imperialist revisionism – than it is for China.

Much is made, in our competition with China, about how we face a “whole-of-nation” challenge from the PRC, and I agree with that.  When it comes to what it means for there to be a “whole-of-nation” strategy in the first place, however, depends a lot on the nation you’re talking about. 

It’s pretty clear what it means for CCP-ruled China.  The PRC’s political system draws both upon Leninist “vanguard party” theory and upon ancient Chinese Legalist traditions of “rule by law” rather than the rule of law, and the CCP has been building for itself a shockingly pervasive system of technologically-facilitated surveillance and social control. 

For such an authoritarian regime, it’s presumably all but second-nature to try to organize itself and the entire citizenry to achieve national objectives on a “whole of system” basis.  Woe be unto him who does not follow Party guidance! 

The CCP, moreover, sees this coercive centralization as one of its greatest strengths.  It is trying to plan its way to a new Industrial Revolution, and to acquire global primacy based not merely on its rapidly expanding military power projection capabilities, but also – and in the long run more importantly – on a systematically constructed and pervasively weaponized international economic, technological, social, political, and cultural relationships. 

Beijing’s theory of “comprehensive national power” is about nothing if it is not about that weaponization, and the geopolitical “shaping” power of the “leverage webs” China is trying to weave for itself, and the CCP regards its own authoritarianism as absolutely essential to competitive success because it permits every part of society and of the economy to be mobilized and directed in support of national strategy.  As the CCP’s Central Committee and China’s State Council made clear in 2016, China’s view of strategy seeks to “combine the advantages of concentrating power for major undertakings with the market allocation of resources” – which basically means free-market-style riches slaved to a totalitarian vision of geopolitical self-aggrandizement.

That’s a reason to be very focused on ensuring that the CCP does not achieve its vision of victory, but in itself this doesn’t tell us too much about what we need to do in strategic competition. 

It’s clear enough what “whole of nation” competitive strategy means à la Chinoise, as it were, but we’re still far from clear about what it means à l’Américaine.  Given that we certainly do not want our leaders to have the extraordinarily coercive tools of centralized management and socio-political control that the CCP enjoys in China, what does it mean for a liberal democracy to have a “whole of nation” strategy? 

Well, the short answer is we don’t really know yet, and we’re still trying to work it out. 

But here’s where we circle back to the importance of what I’ve been calling “What Stories” and “Why Stories.”

My strong suspicion is that whatever “whole of nation” strategy means in our context as a free-market-oriented, rights-based, constitutionally-structured, representative democracy, it will inevitably be an approach grounded primarily in persuasive voluntarism.  Our political leaders simply can’t order the citizenry and the private sector around as Xi Jinping can order around his subjects.  And we don’t want them to be able to do so.

This means that while government will inevitably play a critical leadership role in developing, implementing, and sustaining U.S. competitive strategy, the lion’s share of the work will surely be done in a disaggregated way, coordinated not by official fiat but rather by persuasion.  This will entail eliciting cooperation from an enormously broad range of stakeholders through various variations on the theme of public-private partnership, through the development of a clear and compelling vision to which enough of the relevant stakeholders remain committed, enough of the time, to make a difference.

That’s how – for us, in particular, and indeed for any liberal democracy – our work on “How Stories” has to link back to our “What Stories” and “Why Stories.”  If we cannot tell our “What” and “Why” stories with striking clarity and compelling persuasiveness, they will fail to persuade – either our own people or our would-be international partners – and we will thus fail to compete.

So it’s time to have those conversations, and I hope that groups of smart and engaged foreign policy professionals such as you good folks at FSI will be able to contribute to building this vision.

Thanks for listening.

-- Christopher Ford

NOTES:

(1) Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present (London: Penguin, 2012), at 25.



(2)  Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), at xiii-xv.