onathan D. T. Ward’s new book “The Decisive Decade” fills an underrecognized gap in the literature on China—books accessible to the average American voter. Ward’s target audience is not the policymaker in Washington, but the rest of America: the farmer in Iowa, the teacher in South Carolina, or the firefighter in New Hampshire—a population that has been that has been told, and increasingly appreciates, that China represents a strategic challenge to America, but does not know what it means in practice or how the country should respond.
Ward offers a coherent framework for understanding strategic competition, details China’s ambitions, articulates America’s strengths, and defines where the battlefield (less physical and more metaphorical) lies between Washington and Beijing. His representation of the contest as a battle between two systems—liberal democracy and authoritarian capitalist—is clear and well presented.
In many ways “The Decisive Decade” reads like the written version of a Fox News panel discussion, and that is not meant as a criticism. Ward’s approach is novel, conveying the complexity of the challenge to a wider readership and audience in clear and simple language. It has defined sections with italicized phrases for added emphasis. It has extracts and references to applicable reports and summaries, and uses relevant quotes from prominent historical figures to help contextualize the nature of the contest with China. In the main, a general reader will walk away from “The Decisive Decade” better informed of the outlines of the contest between the United States and China.
For Ward, America shouldn’t be as down on itself as it seems to be today when looking at competition with China. In contrast with many policy books, the reader may find themselves somewhat buoyed by Ward’s analysis. Here, an underlying theme that is not explicitly stated, but is nonetheless woven throughout, is a general optimism about America’s position in this contest. It is much less doom and gloom than other books—this is a competition to be sure, but America is at its best when it is sufficiently mobilized and challenged, be it World War II or the Cold War, as Ward is quick to note. Ward does articulate what could well happen if the United States fails—and states that it is China’s objective to see America weakened—but writes that it isn’t a fait accompli, and the country can act to prevent this outcome.
This may well be what many in middle America needs: a clearly defined structure for understanding the China challenge and a renewed self-confidence that the United States can compete and can win. If this was the goal and ambition for Ward, he was successful. The American public is often told that China is a threat or a challenge but is offered little in the way of explanation of what that means and what the United States needs to do in response.
This is, however, wherein lies the rub. Ward’s book is less a clear blueprint for competing with China and more a collection of italicized principles that should govern America’s approach. While useful for lay consumption, it omits some of the deeper challenges and policy nuance is needed to follow Ward’s argument to its logical end. There are limited considerations of trade-offs or resource allocation, as true strategy demands.
At the macro-level, he is right to argue that the key dimension of strategic competition with China is economic. He is equally not wrong that succeeding in the economic domain requires novel approaches to constraining Chinese access to technology and markets, limiting financing, and in the diplomatic arena, offering up an alternative approach to Beijing’s global economic programs like the Belt and Road Initiative.
It is easy to suggest, as he does, that the United States needs to maintain its GDP size advantage over China and constrain China’s economic growth, but much harder to do in practice, especially given the interconnectedness of both economies. While the American economy remains generally strong, there are alarming signs about its growing debt and associated interest payments, and the rising costs of social programs. There is no small irony that for as much as Congress fights over the budget, it is only adjusting the margins of discretionary spending. The federal government’s printing of money during the COVID-19 pandemic has, arguably, only worsened America’s fiscal position from an already weakened foundation.
Progress is, however, being made through the White House’s push to “de-risk” or “de-couple” from China and reinvest in a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Significant investment at home through the Inflation Reduction Act and the creation of incentives for on-shoring through the CHIPS Act are creating market effects through government action, and seeing multi-national companies (wary of the risks of exposure to conflict between Beijing and Washington) shift manufacturing away from China. Washington also hopes to maintain an allied competitive advantage by limiting China’s access to critical next generation technologies such as advanced semiconductors.
Ward’s suggestion that a second great divergence (the first being the 15th or 16th century when the economic growth of Western Europe and the New World rapidly accelerated beyond the rest of the world) is needed is fine in principle but achieving it in practice is far more difficult. The United States certainly does need to leverage emerging technologies in novel ways—it was not electricity itself that was revolutionary, but how it was used. But merely suggesting America needs to innovate more, better, and faster, isn’t a plan. This goal also carries with it an in-built assumption that Washington has the tools or capacity to facilitate this second great divergence alone. The levers of power are no longer solely found in the halls of Congress, the Situation Room of the White House, or the secure facilities of the Pentagon. Power is far more diffused within the United States and across the globe.
His military analysis, while not wrong in general, smacks of a do-everything, everywhere, all-at-once approach. He recommends that, in effect, the Department of Defense should buy more of everything, immediately, and assumes that simply suggesting it be done is enough to mobilize the Pentagon and Congress into action. If anything, the delta between successive administrations’ rhetoric and investment in naval capacity has only grown. America has consistently failed to prioritize investment in its Navy and the construction of new ships, the very assets needed for a fight in the Indo-Pacific takes nearly a decade. Short of shifting the United States economy to a wartime footing (which could well undermine its economic strength and competitiveness), Americans should have little expectation that the country would be able to achieve that which Ward outlines.
His repeated references to America’s role in World War II will certainly make the average American feel good, but is not as useful a comparison to the challenge at hand. In World War II, retooling a factory line that was stamping out aluminum sheets for a Packard automobiles to one that was making aluminum for Mustang fighter aircraft is not at all analogous to producing today’s advanced weapons systems. The inability to increase production of the Javelin anti-tank missile for use in Ukraine is illustrative—there simply is not the available capacity, skilled workers, or precursor parts to achieve a replacement rate for Kyiv’s current usage.
Ward is due credit for looking at the broader framework of diplomatic and military support within the Indo-Pacific. Here, too, political rhetoric must be followed by concrete action—shrinking some embassies and reallocating personnel to smaller and increasingly important locations in the Indo-Pacific would be a good first step. Leveraging allies and partners in a substantive manner such as through Aukus (a military cooperation and technology sharing agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States) and the Quad (a forum that brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.) is vitally important. It is also important to recognize that Washington will still need to prioritize other regions, even as it pivots toward the Indo-Pacific—a process that will be all the easier if the United States leverages its allies.
China represents a systemic challenge, one that requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach. Washington has been woefully inactive in communicating this to the American people, let alone mobilizing the country to the demands of strategic competition. “The Decisive Decade” seeks to fill that niche and does so quite well. The criticisms outlined above in no way take away from the fact that for the average American it offers a straight-forward framework for understanding China’s ambitions. Ward outlines what this competition means for America, but more importantly how the country can compete and, arguably, win in this new era of strategic competition. While the decisions of greatest consequence are made in Washington, creating a body of better-informed Americans, ones who demand more of their elected officials and think more broadly about the world today, is necessary if America is to be decisive in the decade ahead.
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Bringing Strategic Competition Home for the Heartland
Image by PayPal.me/FelixMittermeier from Pixabay
June 24, 2023
Jonathan D. T. Ward's latest book seeks to explain for the average American voter the strategic challenge that China poses to the U.S. This is a welcome addition to the literature on China, filling an underrecognized gap, writes Joshua Huminski.
J
onathan D. T. Ward’s new book “The Decisive Decade” fills an underrecognized gap in the literature on China—books accessible to the average American voter. Ward’s target audience is not the policymaker in Washington, but the rest of America: the farmer in Iowa, the teacher in South Carolina, or the firefighter in New Hampshire—a population that has been that has been told, and increasingly appreciates, that China represents a strategic challenge to America, but does not know what it means in practice or how the country should respond.
Ward offers a coherent framework for understanding strategic competition, details China’s ambitions, articulates America’s strengths, and defines where the battlefield (less physical and more metaphorical) lies between Washington and Beijing. His representation of the contest as a battle between two systems—liberal democracy and authoritarian capitalist—is clear and well presented.
In many ways “The Decisive Decade” reads like the written version of a Fox News panel discussion, and that is not meant as a criticism. Ward’s approach is novel, conveying the complexity of the challenge to a wider readership and audience in clear and simple language. It has defined sections with italicized phrases for added emphasis. It has extracts and references to applicable reports and summaries, and uses relevant quotes from prominent historical figures to help contextualize the nature of the contest with China. In the main, a general reader will walk away from “The Decisive Decade” better informed of the outlines of the contest between the United States and China.
For Ward, America shouldn’t be as down on itself as it seems to be today when looking at competition with China. In contrast with many policy books, the reader may find themselves somewhat buoyed by Ward’s analysis. Here, an underlying theme that is not explicitly stated, but is nonetheless woven throughout, is a general optimism about America’s position in this contest. It is much less doom and gloom than other books—this is a competition to be sure, but America is at its best when it is sufficiently mobilized and challenged, be it World War II or the Cold War, as Ward is quick to note. Ward does articulate what could well happen if the United States fails—and states that it is China’s objective to see America weakened—but writes that it isn’t a fait accompli, and the country can act to prevent this outcome.
This may well be what many in middle America needs: a clearly defined structure for understanding the China challenge and a renewed self-confidence that the United States can compete and can win. If this was the goal and ambition for Ward, he was successful. The American public is often told that China is a threat or a challenge but is offered little in the way of explanation of what that means and what the United States needs to do in response.
This is, however, wherein lies the rub. Ward’s book is less a clear blueprint for competing with China and more a collection of italicized principles that should govern America’s approach. While useful for lay consumption, it omits some of the deeper challenges and policy nuance is needed to follow Ward’s argument to its logical end. There are limited considerations of trade-offs or resource allocation, as true strategy demands.
At the macro-level, he is right to argue that the key dimension of strategic competition with China is economic. He is equally not wrong that succeeding in the economic domain requires novel approaches to constraining Chinese access to technology and markets, limiting financing, and in the diplomatic arena, offering up an alternative approach to Beijing’s global economic programs like the Belt and Road Initiative.
It is easy to suggest, as he does, that the United States needs to maintain its GDP size advantage over China and constrain China’s economic growth, but much harder to do in practice, especially given the interconnectedness of both economies. While the American economy remains generally strong, there are alarming signs about its growing debt and associated interest payments, and the rising costs of social programs. There is no small irony that for as much as Congress fights over the budget, it is only adjusting the margins of discretionary spending. The federal government’s printing of money during the COVID-19 pandemic has, arguably, only worsened America’s fiscal position from an already weakened foundation.
Progress is, however, being made through the White House’s push to “de-risk” or “de-couple” from China and reinvest in a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Significant investment at home through the Inflation Reduction Act and the creation of incentives for on-shoring through the CHIPS Act are creating market effects through government action, and seeing multi-national companies (wary of the risks of exposure to conflict between Beijing and Washington) shift manufacturing away from China. Washington also hopes to maintain an allied competitive advantage by limiting China’s access to critical next generation technologies such as advanced semiconductors.
Ward’s suggestion that a second great divergence (the first being the 15th or 16th century when the economic growth of Western Europe and the New World rapidly accelerated beyond the rest of the world) is needed is fine in principle but achieving it in practice is far more difficult. The United States certainly does need to leverage emerging technologies in novel ways—it was not electricity itself that was revolutionary, but how it was used. But merely suggesting America needs to innovate more, better, and faster, isn’t a plan. This goal also carries with it an in-built assumption that Washington has the tools or capacity to facilitate this second great divergence alone. The levers of power are no longer solely found in the halls of Congress, the Situation Room of the White House, or the secure facilities of the Pentagon. Power is far more diffused within the United States and across the globe.
His military analysis, while not wrong in general, smacks of a do-everything, everywhere, all-at-once approach. He recommends that, in effect, the Department of Defense should buy more of everything, immediately, and assumes that simply suggesting it be done is enough to mobilize the Pentagon and Congress into action. If anything, the delta between successive administrations’ rhetoric and investment in naval capacity has only grown. America has consistently failed to prioritize investment in its Navy and the construction of new ships, the very assets needed for a fight in the Indo-Pacific takes nearly a decade. Short of shifting the United States economy to a wartime footing (which could well undermine its economic strength and competitiveness), Americans should have little expectation that the country would be able to achieve that which Ward outlines.
His repeated references to America’s role in World War II will certainly make the average American feel good, but is not as useful a comparison to the challenge at hand. In World War II, retooling a factory line that was stamping out aluminum sheets for a Packard automobiles to one that was making aluminum for Mustang fighter aircraft is not at all analogous to producing today’s advanced weapons systems. The inability to increase production of the Javelin anti-tank missile for use in Ukraine is illustrative—there simply is not the available capacity, skilled workers, or precursor parts to achieve a replacement rate for Kyiv’s current usage.
Ward is due credit for looking at the broader framework of diplomatic and military support within the Indo-Pacific. Here, too, political rhetoric must be followed by concrete action—shrinking some embassies and reallocating personnel to smaller and increasingly important locations in the Indo-Pacific would be a good first step. Leveraging allies and partners in a substantive manner such as through Aukus (a military cooperation and technology sharing agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States) and the Quad (a forum that brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.) is vitally important. It is also important to recognize that Washington will still need to prioritize other regions, even as it pivots toward the Indo-Pacific—a process that will be all the easier if the United States leverages its allies.
China represents a systemic challenge, one that requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach. Washington has been woefully inactive in communicating this to the American people, let alone mobilizing the country to the demands of strategic competition. “The Decisive Decade” seeks to fill that niche and does so quite well. The criticisms outlined above in no way take away from the fact that for the average American it offers a straight-forward framework for understanding China’s ambitions. Ward outlines what this competition means for America, but more importantly how the country can compete and, arguably, win in this new era of strategic competition. While the decisions of greatest consequence are made in Washington, creating a body of better-informed Americans, ones who demand more of their elected officials and think more broadly about the world today, is necessary if America is to be decisive in the decade ahead.
