The last two (Trump and Biden) US national security strategies have claimed that the United States is in ‘strategic competition’ (a.k.a., ‘Great Power Competition’) with the autocracies of Russia and the People’s Republic of China. What does the term mean? And are we in fact in such competition? What are the elements of strategic competition? And, maybe more importantly, do Russia and China think they are in strategic competition with the United States?
Competition and conflict exist on a spectrum in state-to-state relations, from ‘cooperation’ to ‘total war.’ Strategic competition is somewhat easily understood as competitive state vs. state activity, somewhere in between cooperation and total war, but notably below armed conflict and violence. Such competition involves espionage, economic competition and intellectual property theft, intense cyberspace competition, sanctions, information operations, lawfare, military force positioning, diplomatic and military threats, intimidation, alliance peddling, and diplomatic maneuver—as long as none of this activity involves any violence, death, or destruction.
The most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of the powerful and increasingly authoritarian—if not totalitarian—states of China and Russia. Status quo powers are, sadly today, the liberal democracies; authoritarian regimes are those agitating for change. Status quo powers will likely ultimately lose in the stage of competition since maintaining any status quo is impossible over time. Since the turn of the millennium, the liberal democracies have been set back onto their heels by the two major autocracies, which have eschewed liberalizing their states.
In contrast, both China and Russia have long had strategies for handling the United States: advance US decline. So far, this strategy has been implemented rather aggressively with reasonable success by China and Russia, particularly by advancing political division within the United States to distract the populace with tertiary (domestic) issues that allow China and Russia to pursue global aims at the expense of US interests.
Globalization has created a world in which interdependence is weaponized. States with authority over the institutional nodes are positioned to impose costs on others; they can weaponize networks to gather information or choke off economic and information flows.
Liberals have argued that globalization results in reciprocal dependence, which makes coercive strategies less effective. This may not be true. Authoritarian states seem to care less about the loss incurred from entanglement; they are more willing to leave Western institutions for political gain. The strategy of entanglement most certainly has entangled liberal democratic states more than the authoritarian states.
China has had a coherent, explicit strategy to advance US decline and supplant US leadership with Chinese leadership worldwide. The United States has so far had no such (purposefully weakening) strategy regarding China. Both China and Russia welcome US collapse. In contrast, the United States has never sought Chinese or Russian collapse since the end of the Cold War—quite the opposite. Since 2000, the United States has told itself that involving the autocracies of Russia and China would eventually pull them into the West and lead to liberal democracy inside both states. This policy of ‘entanglement and enlargement,’ pursued by majority segments of both US political parties, was convenient and naïve but has utterly failed. But, to date, no American political leader has fashioned a replacement. The Biden Administration seems disinterested, intellectually incapable, or unwilling to perceive something to replace it—and so continues it, despite near consensus that it has failed.
Globalization has created a world in which every element of society—social media, journalism, law, diplomacy, trade, cyberspace—has become tools for strategic competition. States with political authority over the central nodes of a state (i.e., autocracies) are uniquely positioned to impose costs on other states. They have the advantage since they can wield the element of such ‘soft power’ more easily and directly from their central governments. Liberal democracies, on the other hand, need to build consensus, adhere to the rule of law, engage and persuade the private sector to cooperate, and convince career bureaucracies to compete in peacetime with other states.
Totalitarian regimes are increasingly turning to the Internet to control their public and as a tool to undermine democracies and threaten dissidents abroad. The Kremlin’s information operations abroad, for instance, are not so much designed to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and overt, bald falsehoods. Russia is not engaged in a competition between polities (liberal democracy vs. autocracy) but conducts information operations abroad merely to confound US interests and cloud Western policy.
People are poor judges of true versus false information, and they do not necessarily remember that information proven to be false was, in fact, false. Familiar themes or messages can be appealing even if they are false. Claims are more likely to be believed if they are backed by alleged evidence, even if that evidence is false. The autocracy of Russia knows this. Thus, Russian disinformation operations have had some (near-term) success, despite their audacity.
Information operations conducted abroad by China and Russia are not used explicitly to advance a positive image of either state; they are used either to confuse the target (Russian disinformation) or persuade a foreign audience that China is no different (or worse) than the struggling, violent, and internally flawed liberal democracies (see ‘whataboutism’).
China
The internet is a tool to protect the Party, advance economic growth, exert control over political competitors and Western influence, and aid the Chinese military in future conflicts. The Chinese government considers private Western websites to be weapons that deliver the dangerous toxin of Western influence; it doesn’t care that the delivery vehicle is a private entity or that competing speech can easily be found or added online. It thinks our acceptance of speech we don’t like (even on private websites) is a sign of weakness and leads not to a stronger state but to a decadent populace.
Chinese Notions of ‘Sovereignty’
Internet ‘sovereignty’ to the government of China, is the control of information within its borders. The Chinese conduct three types of state-sponsored cyber activity:
- national security espionage (which all nations conduct);
- cyber-enabled intellectual property theft to aid Chinese industry (an illegal activity and adamantly opposed by the United States); and
- internal information operations designed to control and manipulate what the Chinese people can view and say online (anathema to the United States and other democracies).
Chinese espionage includes stealing US government secrets, information regarding members of the US intelligence community, the blueprints of US weapon systems, and the details of US national security strategy. Economic espionage consists of the theft of intellectual property and sensitive business information to aid Chinese industry and trade negotiations. China views US manufacturing not as a competitor to Chinese industry but as a resource to mine for proprietary and business information through cyberspace to advance China’s economy and modernize its industry and military. Chinese economic espionage is likely greater than the economic espionage conducted by all other states against the United States combined.[1]
Information operations are conducted continuously against China’s people, led by the ‘Golden Shield Project’ (a.k.a., the Great Chinese Firewall)—a massive censorship and surveillance system operated by the Ministry of Public Security. This government cyberspace tool attacks and blocks certain websites; poisons caches; conducts speech and face recognition; and sucks in closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit cards, and other surveillance technologies. It also indexes content around the world, filters incoming content, and blocks pro-democracy groups and certain related content (e.g., the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, or Taiwan), along with any news stories that embarrass the government. In addition, it blocks Voice of America and many Western news sites, such as the Chinese edition of the BBC.
The Chinese government uses the internet to conflate nationalism and Party rule and to justify the righteousness of the Party’s existence. It portrays the Great Chinese Firewall as a form of paternal protection from the prurient West. China is now engaged in Russian-style Information Confrontation.
China will likely conduct overt and covert operations to influence voters and political leaders on China-specific issues over trade, Iran, and technology. China may not necessarily select preferred candidates but will engage in negative operations. Equivalency arguments are China’s goal. “The Chinese and the Americans both spy on you. What’s the difference?” “China has lifted millions out of poverty and has a lower crime rate than America.”
And much of this equivalency goal is mere acquiescence of Chinese progress—the ‘inevitability of Chinese dominance.’ China’s strategic goal is ‘narrative dominance:’ the ability to change and control attitudes toward China in other states.
The US-China cyber relationship has rarely been more fraught than it is today. Relations have devolved to near complete distrust of each other’s motives, actions, and agendas, affecting other facets of the bilateral relationship. China’s foreign policy behavior, including its cyber activity, is driven primarily by the domestic political imperative to protect the longevity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Ensuring domestic stability, territorial integrity, modernization, and economic growth, while simultaneously preparing for the possibility of militarized cyber conflict in the future, are all objectives that directly or indirectly support the continuation of CCP rule.
China espouses laws, norms, standards, and agreements in bilateral and multilateral fora that serve domestic needs and interests. Concurrently, there has been a noticeable increase in civilian and military research and development of defensive and offensive cyber capabilities over the past several years.
China’s ‘Strategic Competition’ Strategy
China’s strategic competition strategy is best described as ‘coercive gradualism:’ employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve national or multinational objectives by incremental steps. Cooperative gradualism is non-confrontational. It is predicated on finding common ground between nations—shared values, economic benefit, improving governance, or mutual security. Coercive gradualism is incremental intimidation. It is not normally a tool for weak states.
As examples, Western Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas and Japan’s electronics industry’s dependence on China’s rare earth elements impact European and Japanese support of, and participation in, sanctions against Russia and China respectively. A targeted state is unable to contest the initial aggression due to insufficient ways, means, or other resources such as time to support a defense. ‘Justification’ is often an element of coercive gradualism.
The Chinese have a name for this approach—the cabbage strategy: “An area is slowly surrounded by individual ‘leaves’—a fishing boat here, a coastguard vessel there—until it’s wrapped in layers, like a cabbage.”[2]
China is moving away from its ‘informationized’ approach to warfare and is adopting new technologies that will support an ‘intelligentized’ approach; China sees emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, big-data analytics, quantum information, and unmanned systems as driving a shift toward intelligentized warfare.
The Peoples’ Liberation Army believes that the center of gravity in modern military operations has shifted from concentrations of forces to information systems-of-systems—everything from target detection to communication to information processing to command of action. Modern military information systems-of-systems are vast and complex, and in the future will likely be managed by AI. Therefore, it follows that they can only be analyzed in real-time and attacked using AI.
China’s Cyberspace Strategy
China treats cyberspace as a tool to harvest, exploit, manipulate, and control information to ensure regime survival first and foremost, not first as a tool to achieve decision advantage. Chinese cyberspace operations are central to military operations, intelligence collection, information control, economic espionage, intellectual property theft, and ransomware attack to study US responses and advance economic competitiveness. China places cyberspace operations as central in strategic competition in its pursuit of intelligent warfare.
Beijing’s cyberspace strategy consists of three main component drivers: economic, political, and military. Chinese cyberspace operations include:
- Maintaining economic growth and stability, which involves industrial economic cyber espionage of US and other foreign targets.
- Protecting the governing power of the Chinese Communist Party through information control, propaganda, and targeting of domestic sources of potential unrest.
- Using computer network operations to signal dissatisfaction with foreign powers over developments outside of China (e.g., maritime territorial disputes, foreign allegations of Chinese hacking activity) that negatively affect China’s reputation.
- Preparing for military scenarios and ensuring military superiority in the event of cyber conflict with an adversary through military modernization, computer network operations research, and human capital cultivation.
- Studying and understanding potential adversaries’ military infrastructures, motivations, objectives, capabilities, and limitations in the cyber domain.
- Advancing alternative narratives of government control over/handling of cybersecurity internationally (e.g., promoting sovereignty of states to control the Internet within a country’s borders) and domestically (e.g., justifying domestic surveillance and information control).[3]
China’s Influence Strategy
China’s information operations abroad are designed to distract recipients from criticisms of China and the communist party. China pursues ‘narrative dominance’ abroad; the goal is to change audience opinions fundamentally, such as whether China is worth confronting militarily. China’s primary internal information goal is to make sure no political group internally can coalesce and form a viable opposition to the communist party.
The Chinese Communist party-state leverages a broad range of party, state, and non-state actors to advance its influence-seeking objectives, and in recent years it has significantly accelerated both its investment and the intensity of these efforts.
In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities complement China’s long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances, China has used private citizens and/or companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections.
On university campuses, Confucius Institutes (CIs) provide the Chinese government access to US student bodies. With the direct support of the Chinese embassy and consulates, Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) sometimes report on and compromise the academic freedom of other Chinese students and American faculty on American campuses. American universities that host events deemed politically offensive by the Chinese Communist Party and government have been subject to increasing pressure, and sometimes even to retaliation, by diplomats in the Chinese embassy and its six consulates as well as by CSSA branches.
Although the United States is open to Chinese scholars studying American politics or history, China restricts access to American scholars and researchers seeking to study politically sensitive areas of China’s political system, society, and history in country.
At think tanks, researchers, scholars, and other staffers report regular attempts by Chinese diplomats and other intermediaries to influence their activities within the United States. At the same time that China has begun to establish its network of think tanks in the United States, it has been constraining the number and scale of American think tank operations in China. It also restricts access to China and Chinese officials of American think tank researchers and delegations.
In business, China often uses its companies to advance strategic objectives abroad, gaining political influence and access to critical infrastructure and technology. China has made foreign companies’ continued access to its domestic market conditional on their compliance with Beijing’s stance on Taiwan and Tibet. The formation of many local Chinese chambers of commerce in the United States appears to have ties to the Chinese government.
In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It has co-opted existing Chinese-language outlets and established its news outlets. State-owned Chinese media companies have also established a significant foothold in the English-language market—in print, radio, television, and online.
At the same time, the Chinese government has severely limited the ability of US and other Western media outlets to conduct normal news gathering activities within China, much less to provide news feeds directly to Chinese listeners, viewers, and readers by limiting and blocking their Chinese-language websites and forbidding distribution of their output within China.
Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence—even silence—voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to pressure these individuals in the United States while also pressuring their relatives in China.
Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland. Such activities not only interfere with freedom of speech within the United States but they also risk generating suspicion of Chinese Americans even though those who accept Beijing’s directives are a very small minority.
China is engaged in a multifaceted effort to misappropriate technologies it deems critical to its economic and military success. Beyond economic espionage, theft, and the forced technology transfers that are required of many joint venture partnerships, China also captures a lot of valuable new technology through its investments in US high-tech companies and exploitation of the openness of American university labs. This goes well beyond influence-seeking to a deeper and more disabling form of penetration. The economic and strategic losses for the United States are increasingly unsustainable, threatening not only to help China gain global dominance of several leading technologies of the future but also to undermine America’s commercial and military advantages.[4]
Trends are Bad for the United States
The historical trends are bad for the United States vis a vis China.
China is now ‘out-cycling’ the United States and may soon perform acquisition faster than the United States can develop and field new defense technology. This means China may soon be able to steal US technological plans via cyberspace and develop countermeasures to US defenses faster than the United States can conceive of and field ‘Third Offset’ technology—that is technology that aims to generate and sustain strategic advantage by acquiring technologically more advanced weapons to defeat adversary advancements.
China will soon outnumber US forces in every sector, including cyberspace forces. The United States, therefore, will have to discern an asymmetrical cyberspace strategy toward China and perhaps Russia and Iran too, as these states place the highest priority on advancing and funding their cyberspace forces. Worse, all these states share a common political enemy and cyberspace nemesis: the United States and NATO.
The introduction of AI may permit an automated and masked approach to offensive cyberspace activity by malicious cyber states. If AI can discern vulnerabilities autonomously and attack through them, AI will usher in a new area of constant adversary attack, not just an era of persistent competition. It is not a coincidence that the states that are heavily investing in AI are Russia and China.
The near future of cyberspace is Balkanization (a.k.a., ‘splinterization’), which is the fracturing and dividing of internet networks into separate, independent networks, usually defended by a firewall. This Balkanization is being driven by the authoritarian states of the world (Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) who wish to control information inside their borders and enable and harbor criminal cyber activity focused against the United States, as well as steal Western industrial technology, which they will want to protect, once stolen.
Russia
Russian strategic competition is best defined by its term ‘Information Confrontation’—the old Soviet ‘Active Measures’ of disinformation, misinformation, and planted information all packaged and delivered today via the internet and social media. Soviet-like themes of anti-Nazism, the threat to Russian civilization, and struggle against Western ‘informational aggression’ and ‘de-stabilization strategy’ are delivered today via TV, newsprint, video, social networks, internet trolls,so-called experts, and select, political cronies.
Information Confrontation is followed by clandestine political (physical) Destabilizing Operations focused on small sectors of a targeted country’s political apparatus by seizing certain public media and state communications, attacking specific facilities, and smearing them as oppressive agents of the illegitimate local state, and supplying weapons to separatists—the allegedly suppressed Russian minority of the targeted state (see Estonia 2007, Georgia 2008, and Ukraine 2014).
Finally, Russian Conventional Forces posture along the border to intimidate the targeted country’s military, supply the separatists, and occasionally intervene directly in the targeted country, when needed. Once the targeted country sees what it is facing, it agrees to compromise terms that sacrifice elements of its sovereignty. Russia then pockets the political victory and repeats the process.
This unique form of warfare is designed never to reach a full-scale conventional war with the targeted country and certainly not with NATO. Russia’s hybrid warfare is designed to begin and end in the early phases of warfare that never reach conflict with US or NATO forces.
By creating a new status quo, Russia successfully breaks international norms, creates indistinct (and new) borders, and lowers international expectations to curb its behavior. By making the conflict politically ambiguous, claiming no direct involvement, and keeping hostilities small and protracted, Russia keeps direct outside involvement weak, off balance, and confused.
Russia projects strength in ways designed to limit provocations with the West. It fuses psychological with kinetic operations to shape or confuse its adversary and Western perceptions of the conflict to dissuade involvement. This strategy complicates the ability of the international community to mobilize for an appropriate and timely response.
Cyberspace operations are integrated into all aspects of Russian military operations and involve three categories: psychological effects (the targeting of people by utilizing diplomats, so-called experts, and academic elites to influence opinions and perceptions); effects via information operations (controlling the message); and technical effects (offensive cyber operations against computer and communications systems). Information is not used to persuade but to confuse, paralyze, and subvert. Russia’s power is maintained not by persuasion (the American, liberal-democratic definition of the power of speech) but by manipulating what it considers truth.
In 2000, the “Russian Foreign Ministry defined ‘information security’ as the ‘protection of [Russia’s] national interests in the information sphere.’”[5]
Russia conducts strategic coercion via cyberspace to undermine political rivals, taking advantage of or enhancing political divisions within democracies to weaken them overall.
Russia applies the ‘3Ds’ strategy:
- cyberspace-delivered Disinformation,
- political Destabilization (often delivered via cyberspace), and
- (threat of) physical Destruction
Russia exploits a general reluctance by the West to risk war.[6] Russian hybrid warfare is a collection of tactics designed to circumvent deterrence and avoid military retaliation by skirting the threshold of what could be considered state use of armed force. In this new style of conflict, non-kinetic actions can be as important as kinetic attacks. Cyber operations have created a capability that is well suited to this new political-military environment. Cyber capabilities create an operational space in which nations can conduct offensive action with less political risk. Advanced cyber action can create physical effects equivalent to a kinetic attack.[7]
Unlike Soviet propaganda, Russia’s information warfare does not crudely promote the Kremlin’s agenda. Instead, it is calibrated to confuse, befuddle, and distract. In the words of Peter Pomeranzev and Michael Weiss, modern Russia has weaponized information, turning the media into an arm of state power projection. Their nihilistic approach is best summed up by the motto of the Kremlin’s premier TV arm, RT (formerly Russia Today): “Question more.” Russian disinformation does not aim to provide answers, but to provoke doubt, disagreement, and, ultimately, paralysis.[8]
Are We Still in Strategic Competition with China and Russia?
The Internet has proven to be a tool for promoting democracy, but authoritarian governments harness the Internet’s power to serve their purposes as well: surveillance; propaganda; monitoring; and herding. The same technologies that might make billions of people economically irrelevant might also make them easier to monitor and control. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin adopted three distinct periods of foreign policy directed at the United States: “Pragmatic Accommodation” from 2000-2003, “Soft Balancing” from 2003-2007, and “Asymmetric Balancing” from 2007-present.[9] In short, he bid his time in the early 2000s to rebuild Russia through state control of its energy resources, modernization of its military forces (especially nuclear forces), and cooperative diplomacy. He began to oppose US policy at the end of the first decade of the new millennium and today overtly competes with the United States in a zero-sum relationship.
Similarly, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the recognition that communism would keep China weak, China’s foreign policy has evolved through three stages. First, was to adopt Deng Xiaoping’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ which Deng Xiaoping meant, of course, ‘capitalism but with continued communism totalitarian rule.’ From 1978 to the mid-2000s, China was consumed with adopting capitalist practices, stealing Western technology, and building its economy by taking advantage of its cheap labor and state support. China’s strategy was known informally as ‘Hide and Abide.’ China joined international institutions and integrated itself into the Western economy.
Starting with Xi Jinping, China began a (largely polite) period of challenging the United States, adopting a competitive military strategy, competing against US institutions worldwide, intimidating and entangling neighbors militarily and economically, and staunchly refusing to evolve into a liberal democracy.
By 2016, however, Xi Jinping had shifted Chinese foreign policy to actively displace the United States in a zero-sum attitude. China today seeks to undermine US leadership and ultimately displace or corrupt Western institutions with Chinese bureaucrats or Chinese leadership.[10] Like Putin, Xi seeks overtly today to advance US decline.
This is why it seems wrong to claim the United States is still in a period of (mere) ‘strategic competition’ with Russia and China. Of course, at one level, since the relationship is not in the stage of armed conflict, one could say the United States can only be in the stage of competition (since there are only three phases: cooperation, competition, and conflict). But given that Putin and Xi both advance US decline, whereas the United States has never advanced either state’s decline, it seems trivial and inadequate to describe the relationship today as mere ‘competition.’ Perhaps a better descriptor is ‘zero-sum competition.’ In short, the US strategy of entanglement and engagement is over, though no new strategy, description, or guiding vision has replaced it.
We seem to have moved past the stage of competition with both Russia and the People’s Republic of China. We are more likely in a state of strategic confusion. We have currently no idea what our policy toward these intractable autocracies should be, despite whatever authoritative claims the Biden administration issues. Authoritarian states are incompatible with modernity and cannot coexist with liberal democratic states, period, without rivalry. They will clash with liberal democratic states—inevitably and inexorably. We are, in fact, in a zero-sum relationship with these states, whether we like it or not, and whether we want to be in such a relationship or not.
Notes
[1] Survey of Chinese Espionage in the United States Since 2000. Center for Strategic and international Studies. Survey of Chinese Espionage in the United States Since 2000 | Archives | CSIS. Jon Bateman, US-China Technological “Decoupling.” Carnegie Endowment for international Peace. April 25, 2022. Limiting Chinese National Security Espionage – U.S.-China Technological “Decoupling”: A Strategy and Policy Framework – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Scott Pelley, Aliza Chasan, Aaron Weisz, Ian Flickinger, “Global intelligence leaders warn against China’s technology theft.” 60 Minutes Overtime. October 22, 2023. FBI, Executive Summary: China: The Risk to Corporate America 2019.
[2] William G. Pierce, Douglas G. Douds, and Michael A. Marra,” Understanding Coercive Gradualism,” Parameters 45(3) Autumn 2015. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2742&context=parameters
[3] Amy Chang, Warring State: China’s Cybersecurity Strategy. Washington, D.C.: Center for a New American Security, 2014. https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/warring-state-chinas-cybersecurity-strategy
[4] Larry Diamond and Orville Schell, Chinese Influence & American Interests Promoting Constructive Vigilance, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, CA. 2018. https://www.hoover.org/research/chinas-influence-american-interests-promoting-constructive-vigilance
[5] Jessikka Aro, The Cyberspace War: Propaganda and Trolling as Warfare Tools, Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, May 10, 2016. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12290-016-0395-5
[6] James Andrew Lewis, ‘Compelling Opponents to Our Will’: The Role of Cyber Warfare in Ukraine, NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2018/10/Ch04_CyberWarinPerspective_Lewis.pdf
[7] James Andrew Lewis, ‘Compelling Opponents to Our Will’: The Role of Cyber Warfare in Ukraine, NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2018/10/Ch04_CyberWarinPerspective_Lewis.pdf
[8] Edward Lucas and Ben Nimmo, CEPA INFOWAR PAPER No. 1, Information Warfare: What Is It and How to Win It?, November 2015, Center for European Policy Analysis. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/55861600/cepa-infowar-paper-no-1
[9] Robert Person, “Russian Grand Strategy in the 21st Century,” Russian Strategic Intentions: A Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) White Paper. US Joint Staff, May 2019, p. 25. http://nsiteam.com/sma-publications/
[10] Rush Doshi. 2021. The Long Game. China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. Brookings. August 2, 2021 The long game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order | Brookings
