Asia & the Pacific

The Cold War started earlier than we think — and maybe never ended at all. Historian Calder Walton says understanding the US-Soviet conflict prepares us for this era of tensions with Russia and China.

Calder Walton recounts how Russia and China are using their intelligence agencies to reverse the outcome of the Cold War

The following is an event write-up about the recent Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship (PETR) seminar on “France’s Global Role in a Changing World Order” co-moderated by Natalie Colbert, Executive Director of the Belfer Center, and Svenja Kirsch, Fellow with PETR, on April 19, 2023.

This paper addresses the question of how the Chinese party-state chooses to exercise its economic, financial, diplomatic, military and soft power in the next 25 years will make a great difference to US national security and foreign policy, and to developments in the rest of the world. The paper makes three key points:

The core argument of this paper is that Beijing will likely aspire to pursue an empire-like position globally, not just seek an Asia-Pacific sphere of influence, and that this aspiration will founder. Achieving an empire-like position is both an imperative and is infeasible. The tensions between goal and reality will likely characterize China’s role in the world in coming decades and will be central to the difficulties of US-China relations. Second, there is heuristic value for US policymakers and analysts to consider a 20-year outlook on the rise of China that encompasses China’s pursuit of a global empire-like position. Third, paying close attention to how Beijing organizes its own government, corporate, and non-governmental organizations to seek an empire-like position will provide important signposts emerging tension and trends.

The incursion in January of a Chinese spy balloon into U.S. airspace seemed to many observers like a bad miscalculation by Beijing. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to travel to China the following month, but the balloon incident led to the scrapping of the much-anticipated visit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping almost certainly would have preferred to see diplomacy proceed as planned. It is likely that he would not have sanctioned this operation had he known its consequences. If he believed that the United States would simply overlook the incursion, he was clearly mistaken.

Calder Walton explains why, as the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq passes, it is useful to understand how China's intelligence and national security establishment reacted at the time.

Stephen M. Walt describes a "gnawing fear that we are living through a series of disruptions that are overwhelming our collective ability to respond." What does this mean for public confidence in the entire political system, and is there any cause for optimism?

Ivan Arreguin-Toft argues that non-material considerations like cyber power matter just as much as material ones in debates about U.S. retrenchment from the Middle East.

A new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives explain why the U.S. war in Afghanistan endured and ended. A robust anti-terrorism narrative generated audience costs for presidential inaction. As the narrative weakened, these costs declined, and the war ended.

In the past, strategic surprise has often stemmed from a failure of imagination. Most intelligence failures are rooted in a lack of foresight or early warning of impending events. Blue sky thinking seeks to prevent these surprises by devoting more attention not just to known risks and likely scenarios, but also to low probability, high impact events. In an unprecedented step in forging ongoing global collaboration, 129 global experts gathered in Amman, Jordan, in December 2021. The conference was held under the auspices of Jordan’s Aqaba Process and facilitated by representatives from the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project. Attendees included intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers, private sector practitioners, and academics representing 29 countries, 5 continents, and 68 government and private sector organizations. Through presentations and discussion under Chatham House Rules, the conference facilitated an open exchange of ideas on the possible next big threats from terrorism and on strategies for moving forward.