Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Volume 11 Number 19 

October 15, 2020 

Competitive Strategy in 

Divided Times 

by Christopher A. Ford 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms 

Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronicallyaccessible format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis. 
Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Competitive Strategy in Divided Times 

Volume I, Number 19 I October 15, 2020 

Competitive Strategy in Divided Times 

by Christopher A. Ford1 

Dr. Ford participated in a workshop hosted by the University of Pennsylvania 

Perry World House and Brookings Institution entitled "Roadmap for Reentry in 

2021 and Beyond: Advancing Institutional Commitments in a New Geostrategic 

Environment." He presented this latest ACIS paper to workshop panelists and 

attendees. 

As we approach the end of 2020, the United States 

finds itself at a critical juncture, confronting great-power 

geopolitical threats - from a dangerously "risen" People's 

Republic of China (PRC) and a brazenly aggressive Russia 

- of a magnitude unprecedented at least since the end of 

the Cold War, and in some key respects quite different 

from anything our nation has previously faced. These 

threats have arisen, moreover, at a time in which our 

country finds itself internally divided into bitterly 

oppositional political tribes in ways perhaps not seen 

since the 19th Century. 

Some might despair at this. In a polarized and divided 

Washington, what chance could our foreign policy and 

national security community have to implement 

consistent and effective approaches to the new 

environment of great power competition into which we 

have been thrust by decades of revisionist strategy in 

Beijing and Moscow? 

But things may not be quite as bad as they seem. Not 

because those threats are not real, for alas they are. 

Rather, because there is probably more underlying 

consensus in Washington on the existence of these threats 

- and hence the need for resolute and sustained 

competitive strategy in response to them - than often 

meets the eye in a time of polarized tribalisms. (There is 

bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress for firm measures 

against the PRC for such things as _____ _ 

____ _, and _____ _, for example, while 

both _____ and ____ coverage suggest 

that the two major U.S. presidential candidates both have 

a notably "tough on China" approach to foreign and 

national security policy. Some of the current U.S. 

administration's most effective work against great power 

competitors, furthermore - such as in ______ _ 

and _______________ _ 

_____ - owe their successes to bipartisan 

legislation that has given us more powerful tools with 

which to work.) 

This is a point of which the policy community needs to 

be reminded, so that we can still work with each other. It 

is also a message that our global competitors need to hear 

so that they will know that an increasingly robust U.S. and 

broader Western competitive posture is the "new normal" 

with which they will have to live indefinitely- unless and 

until they act in ways that are less provocative, abusive, 

and destabilizing. 

The challenge for the U.S. policy community today 

derives not simply from the fact that the dictatorial 

regimes controlling China and Russia focused, years ago, 

upon competitive strategies designed to destabilize the 

long-established "operating system" of the international 

1 Dr. Ford serves as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and is additionally performing the Duties of 

the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior 

Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the U.S. National Security Council staff. 

abuses against the 

Uighurs of Xinjiang and other ethnic minorities repression 

in Hong Kong technology theft 

U.S. domestic foreign press 

fighting technology 

theft deterring foreign transactions with the Russian 

arms industry 
Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Competitive Strategy in Divided Times 

community, undermine our role and influence in it, and 

reorient that system in various ways increasingly around 

themselves. The challenge also stems from the fact that 

while they turned to ambitious geopolitical competition in 

the post-Cold War era, we turned away. 

I have written and spoken about this elsewhere, both 

_____ and _ of it, and won't belabor the basic 

point here. The key idea is that our policy community for a 

long while lost touch with great power competitive 

strategy, or even the need for real strategy at all. 

Convincing themselves that the world would be, in great 

power terms, enduringly benign - and that our main 

challenges lay only in the realm of codifying and 

continuing humanity's collective progress toward a 

happily disarmed, neoliberal end state - our national 

security and foreign policy leaders after the end of the 

Cold War largely stopped practicing strategy, our 

politicians stopped demanding it, our universities stopped 

teaching it, and our public stopped caring. 

For years, to talk or think in terms of great power 

strategy and competition in Western countries was seen to 

be at best unnecessary, and more likely to be felt 

unfashionable, retrograde, even disreputable. Worse, 

even after our competitors' destabilizing approaches 

became clearer, prevailing Western opinion for years often 

suppressed efforts to respond to such provocations on the 

grounds that doing so would simply make things worse: 

for us to talk or act in ways suggesting a competition was 

underway would be, as was often said in the China policy 

community, a "self-fulfilling prophecy." Meanwhile, at 

least with respect to the PRC, for years ______ _ 

_________________ - and our 

companies to make short-term profits from giving it 

access to many of the advanced foreign technologies it 

has sought in service of its strategic ambitions - in a 

decades-long, slow-motion geopolitical enactment of 

Lenin's infamous (albeit possibly apocryphal) quip about 

capitalists who sell the rope that will be used to hang 

them. 

If this could be said to have been strategy of any sort, 

it was at best only that of the proverbial Ostrich, opting to 

hide its head in the sand rather than see dangers for what 

they are. It was certainly an approach that proved 

profoundly maladaptive. 

Under its sway, our strategically competitive 

"muscles" were allowed to atrophy. It was not merely that 

Volume I, Number 19 I October 15, 2020 

we lost the habit of thinking competitively. Worse still, 

certain habits of thought we had acquired during the Cold 

War and did not abandon - and which in some respects 

were reinforced during years of U.S.-centered geopolitical 

"uni polarity" in the post-Cold War era -worsened the 

obstacles we face today in devising an effective 

competitive strategy. 

We became too accustomed, for instance, to not truly 

prioritizing, which is so crucial to intelligible strategy. The 

last time America found itself unhappily thrust into a 

globally competitive relationship with a major power, we 

took on these challenges in an early Cold War global 

environment in which the U.S. economy towered over the 

rest of the world - both as a result of our own 

phenomenal dynamism and productivity, and because so 

much of the developed world had been devastated by the 

conflagration of the Second World War. In that Cold War 

rivalry, moreover, it turned out that our primary global 

competitor had hobbled itself, in economic and 

technological terms, by the adoption of a stultifying 

Marxist system of central planning. In such a context, 

President John F. Kennedy could speak in his inaugural 

address of being willing to" _______ _ 

__ ," and he could probably more or less mean it. 

Such extravagance of vision, however - which didn't 

even really work for the America of the 1960s, but which 

was to some extent revived, after the traumas of Vietnam 

and 1970s malaise, by our techno-economic triumph over 

Soviet Communism in the 1980s, and was reinvigorated 

further thereafter by our status as the post-Cold War 

"hyperpower" - was a luxury good that it is more difficult 

to afford today. We now face challenges of strategy in a 

context in which we cannot "have it all," and must 

therefore prioritize goals and objectives, shepherd 

resources, and find synergies and collaborative 

approaches with likeminded allies, friends, and partners, 

both internationally and indeed within our own political 

system. 

Doing this is made more difficult by residual mindsets 

that may have seemed less unreasonable when the whole 

world seemed to lie at our feet after the end of the Cold 

War, but which seem little short of madness today. As I 

have said before, for instance, in the nuclear weapons 

arena, sound policymaking must now struggle against 

conceptual pathologies both on the _ (where some 

2 

in government out 

pay any price, bear any 

burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose 

any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of 

liberty 

we all but stumbled 

over ourselves actually to facilitate Beijing’s rise

Left 
Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Competitive Strategy in Divided Times 

cling to a happily eschatological teleology of inexorable 

progress toward "nuclear zero") and on the __ (where 

some concluded from our Cold War triumph that effective 

arms control is unnecessary, undesirable, and in any event 

impossible). Both of these pathologies get things badly 

wrong, even as their respective moralistic obsessions with 

virtue-signaling and the performative aspects of nuclear 

policy- not to mention their demonization of any 

disagreement - impede thoughtful policy development 

and undermine the cooperation and dialogue that is 

needed in order not just to devise but also to sustain 

effective answers to the challenges we face. 

As we have emphasized repeatedly, however, this 

administration has been working to find better answers, a 

_________________ . Since 

at this point a nuclear "zero" actually seems to be 

receding rather than approaching - thanks to the PRC and 

Russia both being projected to significantly increase the 

size of their nuclear arsenals in the years ahead - we are 

moving forward briskly with our own nuclear 

modernization in order to prevent block obsolescence of 

our delivery systems, and are finally beginning properly to 

fund upkeep of the ___________ _ 

_________ . Faced with growing threats, we 

have also opted to supplement our deterrent in modest 

ways with the _________ and a 

modernized version of the _________ _ 

capability that was retired by the Obama Administration. 

We are not, however- and in sharp contrast to both China 

and Russia - adding new kinds of weapons to or seeking 

significantly to expand our nuclear arsenal, nor are we 

engaged in reckless experimentation with madcap 

strategic nuclear delivery systems such as Russia's 

_____ Burevestnik " ______ " nuclearpowered cruise missile or its nearly equally insane 

Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone bomb. 

Similarly, while we are demonstrably willing to walk 

away from bad arms control agreements, and those being 

chronically violated by the other side, we remain 

committed to achieving good ones, including through 

negotiations with Russia (and hopefully soon China as 

well) _________________ _ 

_______ _, led by a senior diplomat the 

President appointed specifically for this purpose. In 

response to their many provocations, we have also moved 

to impose unprecedented penalties and restrictions upon 

Russia and upon the PRC - including a ______ _ 

___ designed to impede Beijing's ____ _ 

Volume I, Number 19 I October 15, 2020 

___ - but recognizing that our relationships with 

these dangerous authoritarian competitors must be in 

various respects ___________ _, we 

have also avoided full-scale economic warfare, and have 

continued our efforts to engage with both of these regimes 

where we have shared interests. 

In all of these respects, our efforts will surely anger 

both extremes of today's polarized policy community, but 

finding such a middle way is still, unquestionably, the right 

answer. The challenge now for the U.S. policy community 

is to institutionalize the contemporary world's hard-won 

insight into the imperative of having a robust and effective 

competitive strategy, and to ensure that thoughtful 

firmness continues to be brought to bear in building and 

implementing it. 

And it is in this regard, I think, that even today's 

poisonously polarized U.S. political environment may yet 

helpfully surprise, for once one makes allowances for 

rhetorical tone and flavor, I believe that - as noted above 

- a considerable degree of policy consensus has actually 

developed around some core points of American strategy. 

There will likely now be no going back to the era of 

dismissive "self-fulfilling prophecy" sneers about 

competitive posture, no more thoughtless facilitation of a 

competitor's geopolitical rise, and no more grand illusions 

about how we should embrace and facilitate the 

muscularity and empowerment of those who wish us ill 

because - if we just give them the chance - everyone 

really just wants to democratize and be our friend. 

Hereafter, I think, there will also be fewer na'ive and 

arrogant assumptions that we can domesticate tyrants 

merely by offering our "outstretched hand" or charm 

dictatorial thugs by looking in their eyes to "see their 

soul," and fewer delusions that challenging competitive 

dynamics can be "reset" by concessions and photo-ops. 

Our political system, of course, will inevitably produce 

some degree of policy adjustment every time control shifts 

periodically back and forth between parties, and factions 

within them. Nevertheless, it is all but impossible to 

imagine a return, in U.S. approaches to the PRC and to 

Russia, to the strategic complacency and lazy hubris of the 

post-Cold War years. Competitive strategy, in some form 

or another, is here to stay- and I think there is a very 

good chance that our otherwise so painfully divided policy 

community will find common ground across those fault 

3 

program of acquiring foreign technology and diverting it 

Right to the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese security 

services 

both competitive and cooperative 

middle way between such dysfunctional extremes 

weapons infrastructure that is also 

crucial to U.S. deterrence 

lower-yield W76-2 warhead 

sea-launched cruise missile 

accident-prone flying Chernobyl 

to forestall a spiraling arms race by capping holdings 

of all nuclear weapons 

broad range of new 

measures longstanding 
Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Competitive Strategy in Divided Times 

lines to ensure that our geopolitical competitors don't run 

the global board. 

I cannot guarantee this, of course, and it is always 

possible that such constructive possibilities will be 

overtaken by some short-lived triumph by one or the other 

Volume I, Number 19 I October 15, 2020 

of the pathologies I mentioned earlier. But I do think it 

likely that the enduring "new normal" in the U.S. policy 

community will be one notably more serious and focused 

upon competitive strategy than before, and this should 

give heart to serious people everywhere. 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms 

Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronicallyaccessible format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis.