China “has been a clever practitioner of finding the gaps and seams in American power,” write Ely Ratner and Nick Danby in a new essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. Over the years, Beijing “has exploited the U.S. market economy to accelerate its own development,” expanded its own military forces in ways meant to erode “the U.S. military’s ability to deploy and sustain forces in the Western Pacific,” and taken advantage of the open Internet in the United States to target civilian infrastructure and siphon vast quantities of data.
By contrast, American policymakers have “too often failed to press on China’s pain points or even develop options for doing so,” Ratner and Danby argue. It is now time for the United States to apply pressure in areas where China is vulnerable. In other words, Washington must “be ready to go on offense.”
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