Tag: Geopolitics Page 1 of 2

Panorama of Taipei Downtown at Sunset, Taiwan

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is typically remembered as a moment when intelligence succeeded. U-2 imagery revealed Soviet missiles in Cuba before they became operational, preserving enough time for Kennedy to impose a naval quarantine and negotiate withdrawal. Yet this success followed weeks of systematic misjudgement. The British Joint Intelligence Committee assessed Soviet activity as defensive aid well into September, even as evidence accumulated of surface-to-air missile sites and unusual construction. American estimates judged a clandestine medium-range ballistic missile deployment ‘unlikely’ until photographic confirmation forced reassessment.[1] The delay was structural rather than accidental, rooted in cognitive shortcuts, institutional caution, and Cold War identity scripts that limited what analysts considered possible.

These patterns matter because they recur. As Washington and Beijing construct competing narratives about Taiwan, with each framing the other as aggressor, each mobilising resources through vocabularies of threat, intelligence communities operate within similar constraints. The question is whether the structural biases that nearly delayed Western recognition of Soviet missiles in 1962 might delay recognition of Chinese preparations today, and whether belief will accelerate quickly enough to preserve decision time.

How Analysts See What They Expect

The JIC’s reporting in autumn 1962 was shaped by anchoring. In August, as Soviet shipping to Cuba intensified, the JIC judged the activity consistent with defensive arms transfers, a framing that persisted even as evidence accumulated of surface-to-air missile sites.[2] Once an initial hypothesis is formed, analysts interpret subsequent information through that lens in what Heuer termed theory-driven thinking.[3] Analysts also treated the scale of Soviet shipments as unproblematic, dismissing missing economic justification and thereby reinforcing a false coherence in their ‘defensive’ narrative.[4]

These cognitive tendencies continue to operate today. Current assessments of Chinese military activity around Taiwan are filtered through established frameworks about deterrence and Beijing’s presumed rationality. Analysts assume that any move against Taiwan would be telegraphed by large-scale mobilisation. Yet Moscow’s deployment to Cuba was itself a deviation from expected patterns, driven by logics of revolutionary identity and prestige that Western analysts struggled to accommodate.[5]

Chinese decision-making may likewise be guided by normative framings that diverge from Washington’s expectations. Beijing’s emphasis on ‘national rejuvenation’ and ‘reunification’ functions as an identity claim structuring what counts as legitimate behaviour and permissible risk.[6] If analysts anchor on Western deterrence logic, they may discount grey-zone escalation, fait accompli strategies, or calculated acceptance of short-term costs.

How Organisations Slow Belief

The JIC’s organisational form shaped how intelligence was used. As a coordination body dependent on service departments, consensus procedures meant to ensure coherence instead diluted confidence.[7] Within Whitehall’s hierarchy, reports were filtered through multiple clearances before reaching ministers, muting urgency.[8] Intelligence was expected to support existing orientations rather than drive policy, aligning with the government’s desire to avoid escalation.[9]

Contemporary intelligence structures face similar pressures. Political sensitivities around Taiwan create incentives for analytic caution. Assessments challenging prevailing assumptions risk dismissal as alarmist. The result is a ‘belief velocity’ problem, where accurate intelligence exists but moves too slowly through institutional filters to affect decision-making.[10]

This temporal gap proved nearly fatal in 1962. Intelligence moved at three speeds: analytical (fast), institutional (slow), and evidentiary (sudden, when U-2 photography forced reassessment).[11] The Taiwan scenario presents a compressed timeline where grey-zone operations might precede kinetic action by narrow margins. If institutional filters slow recognition as in 1962, decision time could evaporate before intelligence forces reassessment.

How Identity Scripts Limit Imagination

The JIC assumed Soviet behaviour would reflect Western rational calculus, mirroring British self-understanding as a status-quo power and discounting that Moscow might be guided by different logics of revolutionary identity.[12] In the United States, the Monroe Doctrine functioned as a core identity frame, defining the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive sphere and predisposing analysts to treat Soviet deployments as inherently illegitimate.[13]

Today’s rivalry operates through similar identity scripts. The American framing of China as a ‘pacing challenge’ functions as a securitising move, casting competition as existential and mobilising resources. Between May 2023 and March 2024, the Pacific Deterrence Initiative rose from $6.19 billion to $9.86 billion.[14] Beijing’s narrative of ‘great rejuvenation’ operates symmetrically, with Xi Jinping’s October 2022 report binding national modernisation to political authority.[15] By July 2024, a Central Military Commission directive ordered the PLA to ‘dare to fight and win to realise national rejuvenation’,[16] whilst Beijing launched a ¥344 billion semiconductor fund.[17]

These competing mythscapes create a spiral where each side’s defensive posturing is framed by the other as proof of malign intent, mirroring Jervis’s security dilemma.[18] Yet this is not simple misperception but deliberate political construction, converting structural anxiety into material commitments.[19]

For intelligence communities, assessments about Taiwan operate within politically charged frames. Chinese preparations might be read through Beijing’s lens as defensive reunification but appear in Washington as offensive expansionism. Intelligence will be interpreted through pre-existing scripts rather than allowed to challenge them. In 1962, incontrovertible photographic evidence was required to overcome normative assumptions, yet assessments still underestimated Soviet deployments.[20]

Belief Velocity and Decision Time

Intelligence in the Cuban crisis mattered through synchronicity rather than prediction. The combination of U-2 imagery and Oleg Penkovsky’s provision of R-12 missile manuals provided both confirmation and temporal calibration.[21] Richard Helms said the intelligence bought Kennedy ‘three extra days’, enabling measured response.[22]

Had discovery come only after missiles were operational, Washington’s choice set would have narrowed to a strike or acceptance. Had evidence arrived earlier, the Soviet leadership might have reacted less flexibly. Both scenarios pivot on timing of belief.[23]

This temporal dimension is critical for Taiwan. Chinese preparation would unfold across multiple domains with different observational signatures and lead times. Intelligence must integrate technical collection with political assessment fast enough to preserve decision time, yet the same institutional filters that delayed recognition in 1962 remain operative.

Post-crisis reforms tightened coordination and introduced clearer confidence statements, whilst satellite imagery gained priority.[24] Yet reforms could not resolve the tension that intelligence operates as political activity within political institutions.[25] Contemporary debates might benefit from recognising this constraint: improving tradecraft matters, but if institutional cultures reward consensus, systematic conservatism will persist.

Implications for Taiwan

Three implications emerge. First, analysts must guard against anchoring on assumptions about Chinese rationality or gradualism. Beijing’s decision calculus may be structured by normative commitments to ‘reunification’ that diverge from Western deterrence logic, requiring institutional capacity to question foundational assumptions.

Second, organisational structures must accelerate belief velocity by reducing institutional filters, creating direct channels for urgent assessments, and rewarding analysts who flag outlier scenarios. The Cuban crisis showed that consensus procedures can dilute warnings until events force reassessment. Taiwan’s compressed timeline may not afford that luxury.

Third, intelligence communities must recognise they operate within politically charged normative frames. The competing mythscapes of ‘pacing challenge’ and ‘great rejuvenation’ structure what seems imaginable, influencing which indicators receive attention. Intelligence cannot escape these frames but can work to make them explicit, flagging when assessments reflect identity scripts rather than evidence alone.

The Cuban Missile Crisis succeeded because intelligence preserved enough time for diplomacy, yet that success followed weeks of near-failure when cognitive shortcuts, institutional caution, and normative assumptions nearly foreclosed recognition. The structural biases that shaped 1962 remain operative. Whether intelligence about Taiwan will move fast enough depends on whether institutions can overcome the same filters that nearly delayed belief in October 1962.

Bibliography

Aldrich, Richard J., Rory Cormac, and Michael S. Goodman. Spying on the World: The Declassified Documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 1936–2013. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Allison, Graham T., and Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1999.

Bell, Duncan S. A. “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity.” British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (March 2003): 63–81.

Blight, James G., and David A. Welch. “What Can Intelligence Tell Us about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and What Can the Cuban Missile Crisis Tell Us about Intelligence?” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 3 (1998): 1–17.

Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998.

Central Military Commission. Decision on Deeply Advancing Political Training (中央军委印发《关于全面贯彻新时代政治建军方略深入推进军队政治整训的决定》). 10 July 2024. Accessed July 20, 2025. https://www.spp.gov.cn/spp/tt/202407/t20240710_660046.shtml.

Fischer, Beth A. “Perception, Intelligence Errors, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 3 (1998): 150–72.

Garthoff, Raymond L. “US Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 3 (1998): 18–63.

Herman, Michael. Intelligence Power in Peace and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Heuer, Richards J. Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Washington, DC: CIA, 2021.

Hulnick, Arthur S. “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle.” Intelligence and National Security 21, no. 6 (2006): 959–79.

Jervis, Robert. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. New Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Reuters. “China Establishes Third Phase of National Integrated Circuit Investment Fund with $47.5 Billion.” May 27, 2024. Accessed August 11, 2025. https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/china-sets-up-third-fund-with-47-5-bn-to-boost-semiconductor-industry-124052700493_1.html.

Scott, Len. “Oleg Penkovsky, British Intelligence, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” In Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History, edited by Robert Dover and Michael S. Goodman, 226–48. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011.

Scott, L. V. Macmillan, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis: Political, Military and Intelligence Aspects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. Patriotic Education Law of the People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国爱国主义教育法). Adopted October 24, 2023; effective January 1, 2024. Accessed July 20, 2025. http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c2/c30834/202310/t20231024_432535.html.

U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). Pacific Deterrence Initiative: FY 2025 Budget Justification. Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 2024. Accessed July 22, 2025. https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2025/FY2025_Pacific_Deterrence_Initiative.pdf.

Wæver, Ole. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” In On Security, edited by Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 46–86. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Weldes, Jutta. Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Xi Jinping. “全面建设社会主义现代化国家全面推进中华民族伟大复兴——在中国共产党第二十次全国代表大会上的报告” [Report to the 20th CPC National Congress]. People’s Daily, 4 January 2023. Accessed July 20, 2025. https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2022-10/25/content_5721685.htm.

[1]: Raymond L. Garthoff, “US Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 3 (1998): 20–22.

[2]: Richard J. Aldrich, Rory Cormac, and Michael S. Goodman, Spying on the World: The Declassified Documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 1936–2013 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 249–52.

[3]: Richards J. Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: CIA, 2021), 91–92.

[4]: Ibid., 96–99.

[5]: Beth A. Fischer, “Perception, Intelligence Errors, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 3 (1998): 152–53.

[6]: Fischer, “Perception, Intelligence Errors,” 153.

[7]: Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 30–35, 224–39.

[8]: Duncan S. A. Bell, “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity,” British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (March 2003): 74.

[9]: Arthur S. Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle,” Intelligence and National Security 21, no. 6 (2006): 959–63.

[10]: Aldrich et al., Spying on the World, 252–54.

[11]: Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle,” 959–63.

[12]: Aldrich et al., Spying on the World, 252–54.

[13]: Philip H. J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 77–80.

[14]: Aldrich et al., Spying on the World, 10–23.

[15]: Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle,” 961–62.

[16]: This concept draws on Heuer’s account of how vivid evidence overcomes analytic inertia. Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, 91–97.

[17]: James G. Blight and David A. Welch, “What Can Intelligence Tell Us about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and What Can the Cuban Missile Crisis Tell Us about Intelligence?” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 3 (1998): 1–3.

[18]: Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, 91–97.

[19]: Fischer, “Perception, Intelligence Errors,” 153.

[20]: Weldes, Constructing National Interests, 30–35, 224–39.

[21]: Aldrich et al., Spying on the World, 251–54.

[22]: Ole Wæver, “Securitization and Desecuritization,” in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 54–55.

[23]: U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), Pacific Deterrence Initiative: FY 2025 Budget Justification (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 2024), 3.

[24]: Xi Jinping, “全面建设社会主义现代化国家全面推进中华民族伟大复兴——在中国共产党第二十次全国代表大会上的报告” [Report to the 20th CPC National Congress], People’s Daily, 4 January 2023, 1.

[25]: Central Military Commission, Decision on Deeply Advancing Political Training (10 July 2024), art. 2.

Are the US and China Destined for War?

By Matthew

On October 19, 2025

In Strategy

1. Destiny as Political Technology

Debates about whether the United States and China are ‘destined for war’ are usually cast in realist terms, with inevitability flowing from systemic anarchy and power transition. This essay argues instead that the language of destiny is not a structural fact but a political technology, through which each nation secures ontological survival. The American trope of a ‘pacing challenge’ and China’s invocation of ‘great rejuvenation’ function less as neutral diagnoses than as identity scripts, mobilising resources and legitimising extraordinary measures by presuming the other as antagonist. Rivalry is enacted through discursive performance, a struggle to sustain national being by scripting an enemy whose existence makes one coherent. The task is not to weigh whether realism predicts war, but to show how the vocabulary of destiny accelerates confrontation by producing the peril it claims merely to describe.

The analysis traces these dynamics: in Washington, the ‘pacing challenge’ from its 2023 Senate debut into the 2024 NDAA and FY 2025 budget; in Beijing, the ‘great rejuvenation’ from Xi’s early speeches into the 20th Party Congress and strategic industrial mobilisation. These discursive trajectories show how fatalistic language generates material outcomes, undermining the realist claim that rivalry is foreordained by structure alone.

2. The Realist Script

The ‘inevitability’ claim stems from neorealism, which holds that in an anarchic system, the security dilemma makes great power competition endemic. Despite realist debates over power-maximisation versus security-seeking, Mearsheimer’s ‘tragedy’ thesis has become the dominant framework for understanding US-China competition as structurally determined.[1]

Power-transition logic predicts that when a rising challenger closes on an established hegemon, war becomes more probable.[2] In today’s constellation China is the ascendant power, the United States the reigning one. From a realist vantage point, their collision flows from structure, not miscalculation or malice.[3]

This analytical framework is elegant and influential, yet its concepts become politically performative when adopted by policymakers. In shaping the reality they purport to describe, realists confirm the constructivist critique of its supposed neutrality. As early as 1983, Ullman warned that equating security with military power ‘conveys a profoundly false image of reality’ and militarises U.S. policymaking.[4]

3. Narrative as Political Technology

The realist script explains structural conditions for rivalry but says little about how states translate them into policy. As Buzan observed, structural theories risk treating states as interchangeable units, overlooking the domestic cohesion that shapes how external pressures are processed.[5] Rather than abandoning realism, this essay interrogates its performative dimension: how its concepts function once mobilised by political elites. To that end, it employs two constructivist tools – ‘securitisation’ and the ‘illocutionary speech act’ – to show how the language of destiny operates as political technology.

Securitisation theory describes how a ‘securitising actor’ frames an issue as an existential threat to a ‘referent object’.[6] This is achieved via an illocutionary speech act,[7] which distinguishes a statement that merely describes the world (a locutionary act) and one that performs an action by being uttered (an illocutionary act).[8] For a securitising move to be successful, it must be accepted by a relevant audience, such as the legislature or the public.[9] This focus on existential threat and emergency action lifts an issue ‘above politics’.[10]

These theoretical tools show how realism’s vocabulary of threat and competition can be instrumentalised as political technology. As Ole Wæver observes, securitising actors draw on established discourses to lend scientific legitimacy and urgency to political projects, making budgetary priorities appear matters of survival rather than discretion.[11] Such framing maps onto what Duncan Bell terms the ‘mythscape’, that of collectively rehearsed national destinies that render compromise suspect.[12] In this instance, Washington’s narrative of a ‘pacing challenge’ and Beijing’s of a ‘great rejuvenation’ function as mythscapes, each defining a national project that presumes the other as an obstacle.

4. Micro-Process Traces

This claim can be demonstrated by tracing key securitising phrases from high-level rhetoric through policy documents to material outcomes for both China and the US.[13]

4.1. The U.S. Trace

On 16 May 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the Senate Appropriations Committee that ‘the PRC is our pacing challenge’ and cast the US$842 billion request as strategy-driven rather than discretionary.[14] The cue framed the budget as structured by great-power competition and invited institutional uptake.

Seven months later, Congress authorises the frame’s operational centre of gravity in the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The Joint Explanatory Statement creates an Indo-Pacific Campaigning Initiative, notes a request of US$786.2 million for USINDOPACOM campaigning, and adds a further US$508 million across the services.[15] The same statement extends and endorses the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and provides a budgetary display keyed to that rubric.[16] While the statute does not use the precise phrase ‘pacing challenge’, the conferees state that PDI will ‘prioritize Department of Defense efforts… enhancing U.S. deterrence and defense posture… and increasing readiness and capability in the Indo-Pacific region, primarily west of the International Date Line.’[17]

Material conversion follows in appropriations in March 2024, when Division A of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act enacts the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024.[18] DoD’s FY2025 Pacific Deterrence Initiative book then repeats Austin’s formula, opening with ‘The Department is prioritizing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as its pacing challenge’, and records a PDI display of roughly US$9.06 billion in FY2024 (request) and US$9.86 billion in FY2025.[19] On DoD’s own display, PDI rose from US$6.19 bn (FY2023) to US$9.06 bn (FY2024) and US$9.86 bn (FY2025), representing a 46% jump, then a further 9% after ‘pacing challenge’ entered executive rhetoric.

The sequence of speech → legislation → outlays, shows how pacing challenge discourse directly precipitates, rather than merely predicts, a more muscular U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific.

4.2. The China Trace

The Chinese narrative begins with Xi Jinping’s report to the 20th Party Congress (16 Oct 2022; People’s Daily ed. 4 Jan 2023), which named as its ‘central task’ as ‘以中国式现代化全面推进中华民族伟大复兴’ (advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation).[20] The declaration is illocutionary: by stating the goal, Xi performs the act of binding national modernisation to the Party’s political authority, framing it as a collective leap toward an historic destiny.

Twelve months later, on 24 October 2023, the Patriotic Education Law made the slogan official, obliging schools, media and museums to ‘carry forward the spirit of rejuvenation’.[21] Its Support-and-Guarantee chapter created a legal basis for future appropriations without specifying amounts. In January 2025 the Ministry of Education announced a central special fund for patriotic-education projects.[22]

In July 2024 the narrative moved from law to mobilisation. Han Zheng’s keynote to the 12th World Peace Forum (4 July) warned of ‘外部遏制’ (external containment) and urged a ‘shared-destiny community’,[23] while a Central Military Commission directive (10 July) ordered the PLA to ‘敢打必胜，以实现中华民族伟大复兴’ (dare to fight and win to realise national rejuvenation).[24] Both were illocutionary, instructing audiences to act to realise the rejuvenation they proclaim.

By mid-2025 the Support-and-Guarantee provisions had moved to practice, extending beyond cultural projects into large-scale industrial mobilisation. Xi Jinping’s calls for ‘independent and controllable’ core technologies as a pillar of the ‘great rejuvenation’ were codified in the 14th Five-Year Plan’s directive to accelerate semiconductor self-sufficiency.[25] In May 2024 Beijing launched the third phase of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund with registered capital of ¥344 billion (US $47.5 billion).[26] Official discourse cast it as both for ‘external containment’ and for technological rejuvenation, funnelling resources into chip fabrication, research and design. Like the PDI, it converts a securitising slogan into multi-billion-dollar mobilisation.

5. Spiral Dynamics

Viewed through this lens, the traces reveal a clear escalatory spiral. In classic security studies, such dynamics are often explained through the lens of misperception. Robert Jervis’s spiral model, for example, posits that a state’s defensive actions can be incorrectly seen by a rival as offensive threats, sparking a cycle of mutual fear and hostility.[27] This cognitive trap is reinforced by the structural realities of anarchy, what Barry Buzan terms the ‘defence dilemma’, where any increase in one state’s security can decrease the security of others.[28]

Yet the evidence here suggests something more deliberate than simple misperception. Escalation is not just a cognitive error but a political process, actively manufactured by securitising actors on both sides. The narratives in the traces act as political technologies, converting structural anxiety into material commitments.[29] This is how rivalry is discursively accelerated, where each side’s defensive posturing, justified by its ‘mythscape’,[30] is framed by the other as proof of malign intent, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.[31] This discursive process is not deterministic. In principle it contains a counter-logic, what Etzioni terms ‘mutually assured restraint’, where rivals may forgo certain deployments to signal moderation. Discourse, then, can serve as a political technology of restraint as well as acceleration.[32]

6. Counterargument & Limits

A structural realist might argue that the discourses traced above are mere epiphenomena. Austin invokes ‘pacing challenge’ and Xi proclaims ‘great rejuvenation’ because material competition already exists – Beijing’s defence spending reached $314 billion in 2024, while Washington spent $997 billion and restricted China’s semiconductor access.[33] From this view, the documentary traces merely show rhetoric following structure, rather than creating it.

This materialist account has considerable force. As Mearsheimer argues, capability aggregation creates fear regardless of stated intentions and states must assume the worst about rivals’ motives given the high stakes of survival.[34] The budget increases and industrial mobilisation could simply reflect rational responses to objective threats rather than discursive construction.

Yet this misses how discourse determines which capabilities become politically salient. China’s military spending represents 1.7% of GDP versus America’s 3.4%, showing that the threat requires discursive activation to justify emergency measures.[35] More tellingly, if structure determined discourse, we would expect consistent rhetoric across time. Instead, the ‘pacing challenge’ frame represents a specific choice to militarise competition beyond what capabilities alone would predict. As Krebs and Jackson demonstrate, such rhetorical moves can trap opponents ‘without the rhetorical materials to craft a socially sustainable rebuttal,’ creating policy lock-in that transcends material constraints.[36]

The traces themselves have limitations, as public documents may simply reflect post-hoc justifications. Correlation between rhetoric and budgets doesn’t prove causation and both may respond to classified assessments unavailable to researchers. Nevertheless, the pattern suggests discourse doesn’t replace material reality but shapes how ambiguous capabilities become actionable threats. War becomes not structurally inevitable but discursively accelerated.

7. Conclusions

The concept that the United States and China are destined for war is not an objective finding but a political construction. The securitising narratives of a ‘pacing challenge’ in Washington and a ‘great rejuvenation’ in Beijing are identity scripts, political technologies that mobilise domestic populations, legitimise extraordinary measures, and channel resources. Rather than operating in isolation, they are symbiotic, feeding a spiral dynamic where each side’s defensive posturing is read as proof of aggression and sustaining a prophesy of conflict.

This reveals realism’s blind spot. Once its concepts migrate into politics, they cease to describe and begin to perform. Rivalry is discursively accelerated through a struggle for ontological survival enacted through the vocabulary of destiny. Yet discourse can also contain its own counter-logic. The idea of mutually assured restraint shows that doctrines and slogans can be deployed not only to hasten confrontation but to slow it, acting as instruments of moderation. The choice between escalation and restraint thus lies less in structure than the narrative tools employed by each nation.

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United States. Congress. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. Public Law 118-31, 22 December 2023. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office. Accessed July 22, 2025. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-118publ31/pdf/PLAW-118publ31.pdf

United States. Congress. Joint Explanatory Statement to Accompany the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. 118th Cong., 1st sess., December 2023. Washington, DC: Senate Committee on Armed Services. Accessed July 21, 2025. https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy24_ndaa_joint_explanatory_statement.pdf

United States. Congress. Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024. Public Law 118-47, 23 March 2024. Division A, Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office. Accessed July 21, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/118/plaws/publ47/PLAW-118publ47.pdf

U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). Pacific Deterrence Initiative: FY 2025 Budget Justification. Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 2024. Accessed July 22, 2025. https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2025/FY2025_Pacific_Deterrence_Initiative.pdf

Wæver, Ole. ‘Securitization and Desecuritization.’ In On Security, edited by Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 46–86. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Williams, Michael C. ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics.’ International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (December 2003): 511–531.

Xi Jinping. ‘全面建设社会主义现代化国家全面推进中华民族伟大复兴——在中国共产党第二十次全国代表大会上的报告’ [Report to the 20th CPC National Congress]. People’s Daily, 4 January 2023. Accessed July 20, 2025. https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2022-10/25/content_5721685.htm

[1] John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Updated Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 265.

[2] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Structural Realism,’ in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, ed. Timothy Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 61.

[3] Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 284.

[4] Richard H. Ullman, ‘Redefining Security,’ International Security 8, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 129–30.

[5] Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2007), 93.

[6] Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization,’ in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 54-55.

[7] J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 98-103.

[8] Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,’ International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2003): 514.

[9] Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 25.

[10] Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies,’ 515.

[11] Wæver. ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’. 54-55

[12] Duncan Bell, ‘Mythscapes: memory, mythology, and national identity’. British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (March 2003): 74.

[13] These traces rely on publicly available documents and visible policy instruments. While this approach cannot capture all causal mechanisms or behind-closed-doors negotiations, the focus on high-profile securitising language and budgetary outcomes provides illustrative evidence of discursive materialisation. Fuller analysis would require elite interviews and comprehensive corpus analysis across classified materials.

[14] Lloyd J. Austin III, ‘Opening Testimony Before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense,’ 16 May 2023, 8.

[15] U.S. Congress, Joint Explanatory Statement to Accompany the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, 317, 325.

[16] Ibid. PDI display/table.

[17] Ibid. §1302.

[18] Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, Pub. L. 118-47 (23 March 2024), Div. A.

[19] U.S. Department of Defense, Pacific Deterrence Initiative: FY 2025 Budget Justification, March 2024, 3.

[20] Xi Jinping, ‘全面建设社会主义现代化国家…,’ People’s Daily, 4 Jan 2023, 1.

[21] Standing Committee of the NPC, Patriotic Education Law of the PRC (24 Oct 2023), art. 8.

[22] Ministry of Education, ‘Reply to NPC Proposal #4957,’ 13 Jan 2025; Ministry of Education et al., ‘意见—高校思想政治工作体系,’ 15 May 2020, sec. III.4.

[23] Han Zheng, keynote, 12th World Peace Forum, 4 Jul 2024; Central Military Commission, Decision on Deeply Advancing Political Training (10 Jul 2024), art. 2.

[24] Central Military Commission, Decision on Deeply Advancing Political Training, 10 July 2024, art. 2.

[25] State Council of the People’s Republic of China, Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) and Long-Range Objectives Through 2035, Part V, Chap. 15, Sec. 2.

[26] Reuters, ‘China Establishes Third Phase of National Integrated Circuit Investment Fund with $47.5 Billion,’ 27 May 2024.

[27] Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, New Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 62–76.

[28] Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,’ World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978): 169.

[29] Wæver. ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’. 55

[30] Bell, ‘Mythscapes’. 75.

[31] Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 69.

[32] Amitai Etzioni, ‘Mutually Assured Restraint: A New Approach for United States–China Relations,’ The Brown Journal of World Affairs 20, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2014): 40–41.

[33] SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2024 (Apr 2025), 2; Sujai Shivakumar and Charles Wessner, The Limits of Chip Export Controls (CSIS, 2025).

[34] Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 271-272.

[35] SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2024, 2.

[36] Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick T. Jackson, ‘Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric,’ European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007): 36.

Photo by Suliman Sallehi: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-concrete-building-on-top-of-hill-1484776/

What Failed State Building in Afghanistan Can Teach Us: Beyond the ‘Capability Trap’

By Matthew

On July 26, 2025

In Strategy

Western policy elites still parse Afghanistan as a jigsaw of “not enough troops,” faulty intelligence or premature withdrawal. My earlier essay, “Avoiding the Capability Trap,” argued the causal chain runs the other way: abundant matériel deepens failure when it substitutes for locally grounded legitimacy.¹ Kabul’s implosion confirms that verdict while exposing the structural biases that reproduce Western misadventures. Reading Afghanistan through Barry Buzan’s taxonomy of nation-state linkages, and turning Mohammed Ayoob’s “security problematic” inside-out, suggests that non-intervention can be the hardest-nosed strategic choice.

1 – Afghanistan and the myth of the state-nation shortcut

Buzan sketches four ways coercive “states” and imagined “nations” intersect.² NATO tried to leap from a plural social terrain to a state-nation, manufacturing the nation from the top down. Such feats, Buzan warns, demand decades of standardised schooling, fiscal extraction and symbolic homogeny.³ The 2001 Bonn Agreement allowed barely eighteen months before nationwide elections; NATO’s calendar, not Afghan social realities, set the tempo.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, was no tabula rasa. Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek identities drew authority from kin networks, shrine endowments and cross-border trade; “Afghan” was a diplomatic label, not a lived community.⁴ Warlords converted donor cash into what Antonio Giustozzi calls emporia of mud: polities legitimated by personal loyalty and local revenue, not Kabul’s ministries.⁵ By 2018 those ministries relied on foreign funds for over 75 percent of their budget,⁶ turning the state into a vessel of structural extraversion rather than a nucleus of solidarity.

2 – The capability trap, revisited

Lant Pritchett’s “capability trap” captures the dynamic whereby lavish resources mask institutional hollowness.⁷ In Afghanistan, US airpower and payrolls produced countable outputs (flights logged, teachers hired) while corruption and predation eroded the outputs citizens actually valued. Sarah Chayes shows how elite rackets taxed every aid dollar several times over;⁸ Carter Malkasian records that, when American air support vanished in August 2021, Afghan troops often cut local deals rather than fight for an abstraction they never owned.⁹ External capability therefore both props up a weak state and delegitimises it by advertising dependency. The more Washington spent, the more Kabul looked foreign – boosting the Taliban’s claim to embody a rooted, Islamic nation.

3 – Ayoob’s mirror: why the European template misleads

Ayoob argues that post-colonial polities face the same nation-state forging tasks that once convulsed Europe, only faster and under tighter scrutiny.¹⁰ The Afghan debacle undercuts that analogy. Europe’s pathway was path-dependent, not path-determining: mercantilist war, colonial plunder and the absence of outside tutors bankrolled its state projects. Early-modern rulers could bleed and tax their populations because no hegemon demanded quarterly reports on “good governance.”

Transposed into today’s legally dense, media-saturated arena, the blueprint backfires. Pressure to display Weberian credentials, typified by monopoly over legitimate violence inside fixed borders, creates Potemkin ministries and finances clientelist bargains that replace, rather than integrate, vernacular authority. In trying to “finish Europe’s journey,” donors help reproduce the insecurity they hope to cure.

4 – Post-Westphalian prudence

Buzan’s matrix makes plain that Afghanistan never offered a plausible route to a unitary state-nation; NATO’s insistence on conjuring one exposed Kabul’s dependency instead. Prudence therefore begins with political triage.

Contain, don’t transform. Keep a light regional footprint, such as over-the-horizon strike tools, intelligence liaison, calibrated sanctions, to blunt trans-national threats without social engineering.¹¹
Scaffold plural bargains. In 2011 UNAMA quietly brokered a Helmand River water-sharing accord between rival tribes and Iran, reducing clashes at a fraction of ISAF’s stabilisation budget.¹² Such micro-compacts, extended to customs corridors or pasture routes, secure order by meshing with existing authority rather than overruling it.
Respect political tempo. Replace annual disbursement cycles with decade-long trust funds that release money only after mutually verified benchmarks, insulating local actors from the rent-seeking churn that sustains capability traps.¹³

This is not intended to be capital-letter ‘Isolationism’. Rather it should be seen as an exercise humility: an admission that legitimacy sediments slowly, and that neither drones nor curricula can manufacture a nation from the outside.

Footnotes

Matthew Toy, “Avoiding the Capability Trap: A Framework,” matthewtoy.com, 20 July 2025. https://matthewtoy.com/strategy/avoiding-the-capability-trap-a-framework/
Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 42–54.
Ibid., 48–50.
Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 271–75.
Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2009), 103–15.
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Why the Afghan Government Collapsed, Report 23-05-IP (Arlington, VA: SIGAR, 2022), 1–3.
Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA),” CID Working Paper 240 (Harvard Kennedy School, June 2012), 2–7.
Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 67–72.
Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 443–50.
Mohammed Ayoob, “The Security Problematic of the Third World,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1991): 257–83.
Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 69–100.
Helene von Bismarck, “Water Sharing in Helmand: UNAMA’s Quiet Diplomacy,” Journal of Peacebuilding 12, no. 1 (2016): 41–55.
Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps,” 5.

Photo by Suliman Sallehi: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-concrete-building-on-top-of-hill-1484776/

Avoiding the Capability Trap: A Framework

By Matthew

On July 20, 2025

In Strategy

Repeated Western military interventions, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, show that technological and financial superiority does not ensure political victory. Such dominance can obscure political realities and even undermine legitimacy. Precision strikes may heighten views of occupation, while excessive funding often breeds corruption (Clemis, 2025; SIGAR, 2023a). This “capability trap” is the mistaken belief that military and economic power guarantees political outcomes. The true test is whether local actors genuinely accept foreign presence, not simply endure it (U.S. Department of the Army, 2014). To address this, interventions should undergo early political-sociological assessment to confirm mission viability before detailed planning and avoid confusing military means with political ends.

The Futility Assessment Framework

The framework proceeds through a sequence of determinative questions. An affirmative flag in any phase indicates a high risk that material advantages will prove strategically irrelevant or even counterproductive.

Phase 1 – Transformation Gate

The initial and most fundamental question is one of intent: Does the mission’s authentic end-state involve remaking the basic institutions or social contract of the target society? This question demands an honest appraisal, looking beyond stated aims to the practical requirements for success. Indicators of a transformational goal include a significant ‘partner-capacity delta’, where host-nation forces are projected to remain reliant on foreign kinetic enablers after a period of five years, or a ‘governance-gap delta’, where routine state functions like revenue extraction or dispute resolution would likely collapse without sustained foreign tutelage (SIGAR, 2023b). If the answer is yes, the mission must be treated as transformational and subjected to further futility screening.

Phase 2 – Elite-Coalition Viability

The next inquiry assesses the local political foundation for change: Is there a cohesive indigenous elite bloc, minimally fragmented, that is willing and able to incur the costs of coercion required to secure the new order after foreign withdrawal? External powers cannot substitute for a legitimate local monopoly on violence. Successful political consolidation requires local actors who see the post-intervention state as their own and are prepared to defend it. The absence of such a bloc, or the presence of deep and intractable divisions, signals a critical vulnerability that foreign support can rarely overcome (Hazelton, 2017). This condition represents a high futility risk and should prompt a reassessment of primary objectives.

Phase 3 – Social-Terrain Depth Test

A critical political-sociological test follows: Must the campaign uproot kinship, religious, or customary systems that have been embedded for generations? When an intervention’s success is conditional upon altering social structures with deep historical roots, such as tribal allegiances, powerful religious hierarchies, or customary law systems, it faces a profound challenge. These systems are often the true sources of social cohesion and legitimacy. Attempting to displace them is not a matter of mere policy implementation but of cultural re-engineering, a task for which military force is singularly ill-suited and which requires decades, if not generations, to achieve (French, 2012). An affirmative answer here strongly indicates a high risk of futility.

Phase 4 – Legitimacy Inversion Screen

Consideration must be given to the paradoxical effect of overwhelming strength: Will the visible preponderance of foreign power itself delegitimise local partners? This ‘legitimacy inversion’ occurs when the very instruments of intervention undermine the goal. Key indicators include when the external force’s firepower comes to dominate the battlefield narrative, when aid flows grossly exceed the local absorptive capacity and breed parasitic rent-seeking, or when the political mythology of the new state requires public deference to its outside patrons (SIGAR, 2016). The presence of any two of these factors suggests that the intervention is likely to empower its opponents by branding its partners as puppets.

Phase 5 – Corruption Elasticity Gauge

A more quantifiable, yet crucial, metric concerns the integrity of resource transfers: What is the estimated share of new funds likely to be diverted through informal or corrupt networks before reaching their intended end-use? When this figure exceeds 30 per cent, corruption ceases to be a mere inefficiency and becomes a self-defeating ‘strategic tax’. Such a leakage rate not only wastes resources but actively finances malign networks, delegitimises the partner government, and creates a powerful constituency with a vested interest in perpetual conflict and instability (SIGAR, 2016).

Phase 6 – Political-Metabolism Mismatch

Finally, the framework assesses temporal feasibility: Are the timelines required for deep socio-political change congruent with the domestic electoral horizons and fiscal patience of the intervening state? Meaningful political transformation operates on a generational timeline, arguably requiring a commitment of fifteen years or more. This is fundamentally misaligned with the two-to-four-year cycles of Western domestic politics and budgetary processes, which create artificial pressures for immediate, demonstrable results (Posen, 2014). A definitive mismatch between the political metabolism of the target society and that of the intervening power represents a high futility risk.

Aggregate Rule and Quantitative Cross-Check

An aggregate rule is simple: if two or more of the above phases are flagged with a ‘HIGH FUTILITY RISK’, the recommendation must be Do Not Proceed with a transformational objective. To provide a more granular assessment, a weighted scorecard can be applied:

Indicator	Weight
Elite-coalition failure	3
Deep-rooted social structures must be altered	3
Legitimacy inversion	2
Corruption elasticity >30%	2
Political-metabolism mismatch	2

A total score of 5 or higher should trigger an immediate pivot away from transformational objectives towards a menu of more limited, realistic alternative strategies.

Alternative Strategy Menu

When a futility assessment counsels against transformative intervention, decision-makers are not left without options. The challenge is to select strategies that acknowledge political constraints while still addressing core security concerns.

Containment and Offshore Balancing

Instead of attempting internal transformation, the focus shifts to preventing adverse developments from affecting core national interests. This may involve a combination of offshore military presence, robust intelligence capabilities, and diplomatic containment structures (Luttwak, 1999). This approach accepts political realities in the target region while maintaining sufficient influence to shape outcomes at the margins.

Regional Coalition Building

This strategy involves empowering and supporting regional partners who possess greater cultural legitimacy and political sustainability than an external intervention can hope to achieve. It requires accepting that regional solutions may not align perfectly with external preferences, but recognises that an indigenous, or at least proximate, locus of legitimacy is often more durable and effective than an imposed one (Denison, 2020).

Selective Partnership and Conditional Support

This approach entails working with existing power structures rather than attempting to replace them. This requires a pragmatic acceptance of local legitimacy patterns, including those rooted in traditional or religious authority, while using conditional assistance to influence behaviour incrementally over time. It trades ideological satisfaction for practical influence and sustainability.

Intelligence Cooperation and Targeted Disruption

Specific threats can be addressed through deep intelligence partnerships and precise, targeted operations rather than comprehensive political-military projects. This maintains operational flexibility while avoiding the significant legitimacy deficits and resource drains associated with a sustained, visible military presence (Paul et al., 2013).

The fundamental insight remains consistent: when a society’s political and social context renders transformation futile despite an intervener’s material superiority, strategic wisdom lies not in doing nothing, but in pursuing different objectives that work with, rather than against, the grain of local political reality.

Bibliography

Clemis, M.G. (2025). The Enduring Lessons of Vietnam: Implications for US Strategy and Policy. Parameters, 55(2), pp.23–25.

Denison, B. (2020). The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Failure of Regime-Change Operations. Policy Analysis 883. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

French, D. (2012). The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hazelton, J.L. (2017). The ‘Hearts and Minds’ Fallacy: Violence, Coercion, and Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare. International Security, 42(1), pp.80–113.

Luttwak, E.N. (1999). Give War a Chance. Foreign Affairs, 78(4), pp.36–44.

Paul, C., Clarke, C.P., Grill, B. and Dunigan, M. (2013). Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

Posen, B.R. (2014). Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). (2016). Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the United States Experience in Afghanistan. Arlington, VA: SIGAR.

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). (2023a). Why the Afghan Government Collapsed. Arlington, VA: SIGAR.

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). (2023b). The Factors Leading to the Collapse of the Afghan Government and Its Security Forces. Arlington, VA: SIGAR.

U.S. Department of the Army. (2014). Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5). Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army.

Examining Europe’s proposed ‘re-armament surge’

By Matthew

On June 17, 2025

In Strategy

Andrew Michta’s Helsinki-Commission briefing, available on YouTube and social media, urges Europe to accelerate the deployment of armour and air-defence to its eastern flank. His logistics are solid, yet the argument remains trapped in a materialist mindset. The Kremlin’s strategic theatre is part gun-count, part morality play; it must perform the role of a besieged civilisation to sustain elite cohesion and domestic consent (Giles, 2021). Moscow therefore magnifies even token NATO deployments, weaving them into a narrative of encirclement. Numbers certainly matter, but myths and interpretations drive policy.

Historically, Western analysis rarely pauses on this critical identity driver. Civilisational framings, or what Marlene Laruelle calls Russia’s “anti-liberal European” self-image (Laruelle, 2016), explain why deterrence sometimes falters when, on balance, an alliance should be the rational option. Michta’s focus on equipment and troop-tallies risks underestimating this discursive asymmetry.

NATO’s dilemma: choreographing presence

The security dilemma cannot just be wished away, but its social meaning can be reframed. NATO now plans to defend forward with rotating brigades rather than permanent garrisons. Visibility is deliberate: forces spend most of their time at home and surge only for exercises, reassuring Baltic publics while limiting imagery that feeds Moscow’s siege myth. Twenty-two Allies already meet the 2 per cent GDP benchmark, up from three a decade ago (NATO, 2024), yet credible posture still requires narrative discipline. Radical transparency, such as publishing force-flow schedules and live-streaming major drills, signals defensive intent and denies the Kremlin the fog in which worst-case fantasies multiply. A minimalist inspection regime, of the kind sketched in recent European Leadership Network workshops, could complement this by addressing Russian ontological insecurity without conceding capability (ELN, 2024).

Lessons from outside Europe

Wargames on a Taiwan contingency reinforce the logic. RAND analysts find that smart sea-mines, road-mobile fires and cheap drones raise the PLA’s operational risk more sharply than prestige carriers (RAND, 2023). Denial assets lower the escalatory temperature while still signalling resolve. Yet capability is not enough: Beijing will test whether the coalition’s political will is socially durable. Expanding informal constructs like AUKUS into routine crisis-response exercises needs to narrate a shared story of status-quo preservation rather than anti-China containment.

South Asia offers a counter-example. The 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, analysed at the Belfer Center, showed deterrence only holding once both sides satisfied domestic identity needs with symbolic strikes before back-channeling de-escalation (Belfer, 2025). Conversely, the Israel–Hezbollah dyad illustrates erosion: CSIS charts a steep rise in rocket exchanges as mutually reinforcing victim narratives demand ever larger demonstrations of “honour” (CSIS, 2024). Deterrence frays when stories that cultures tell themselves are left unmanaged.

Policy implication

Europe’s re-armament is necessary, but insufficient by itself. Credible high-readiness forces must be paired with an information architecture that denies Moscow the dramaturgy it craves. That means choreographed deployments, radical transparency, selective arms-control gestures and a public narrative that casts NATO as guardian of a plural security order, not the shadow of tomorrow’s invasion. Any deterrence strategy that ignores identity politics may well become an expensive repeat of history.

Bibliography

Belfer Center (2025) Escalation Gone Meta: Strategic Lessons from the 2025 India–Pakistan Crisis. Harvard Kennedy School.

CSIS (2024) The Coming Conflict with Hezbollah. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

European Leadership Network (2024) OSCE Workshop Report: Strengthening European Security Architecture.

Giles, K. (2021) What Deters Russia. Chatham House.

Laruelle, M. (2016) ‘Russia as an Anti-liberal European Civilisation’, in The New Russian Nationalism, Edinburgh University Press.

Michta, A. (2024) ‘Why NATO Must Step Up’, testimony to the U.S. Helsinki Commission.

NATO (2024) ‘Defence Expenditures and the 2 Per Cent Guideline’.

RAND Corporation (2023) These Technologies Could Defeat China’s Missile Barrage and Defend Taiwan.

Is the Strategic Defence Review an Engineered Response? Rethinking UK Defence in an Age of Bricolage

By Matthew

On June 9, 2025

In Strategy

Abstract

Looking at the situation, the United Kingdom’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) projects a confident rationality: an “Integrated Force” designed to deter, fight, and win through “constant innovation at wartime pace” (Ministry of Defence, 2025, p. 14). Yet Moscow’s conduct in Ukraine has revealed a profoundly different strategic grammar. Russia behaves, in Ondřej Ditrych’s terms, as a bricoleur – an opportunistic tinkerer that stitches together ad hoc “assemblages” while actively cultivating contradictions to wrong-foot a rule-bound opponent (Ditrych, 2024, p. 2). This article argues that a defence posture optimised for elegant integration may prove brittle when confronted by such an adversary. It posits that Russia’s dialectical approach is designed to exploit the very linear logic that underpins Western military planning. By contrasting the systemic fragility of Russian bricolage, vividly exposed by the Wagner Group’s implosion, with the SDR’s search for institutional longevity, this analysis suggests that effective deterrence now requires the UK to supplement integration with a capacity for institutionalised improvisation. This ‘controlled bricolage’ is presented as a form of adaptive power, essential for reassuring allies and succeeding in an era of disorderly, attritional conflict.

1. A Strategy of Contradiction

To understand the contemporary threat is to look beyond conventional military net assessment and into an opponent’s strategic culture. Ondřej Ditrych (2024, p. 3) characterises the Russian state not as a grand strategist but as a bricoleur, a tinkerer that improvises solutions from a limited repertoire of available parts. This is more than mere opportunism; it is a dialectical method. It is comfortable with, and indeed actively cultivates, the very contradictions that would paralyse a Western staff college. Russia’s strategy often appears to be a pastiche of mutually exclusive signals: complaining of encirclement while expanding its territory, invoking international law while flouting it, and deploying high-tech weaponry alongside crudely adapted civilian technologies. This is not strategic incoherence but a feature designed to create a chaotic information environment, wrong-footing an adversary who seeks clarity and predictability.

The Wagner Group was, perhaps, the ultimate expression of this method. It was a composite entity that simultaneously functioned as a proxy military force, a resource-extraction enterprise, a political influence operation, and a vehicle for plausible deniability (Ditrych, 2024, p. 3). It allowed Moscow to project power into Africa and the Middle East in ways that circumvented the rules of state-on-state competition. Yet this bricolage has a breaking-point. Such ad hoc structures lack institutional resilience. Wagner’s spectacular implosion following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny was not the result of external pressure but of the unbearable internal frictions of the system that created it (Ditrych, 2024, p. 4). This reveals the core vulnerability of the bricoleur: a reliance on improvised, personality-driven structures that can shatter under systemic stress, a stark contrast to the West’s enduring, if cumbersome, search for institutional longevity.

2. The Limits of an Engineered Deterrence

The SDR’s answer to this disorderly world is a renewed drive for rational integration. It proposes a force “integrated by design” (Ministry of Defence, 2025, p. 15-16), directed by a new Military Strategic Headquarters and equipped via a streamlined Defence Investment Plan. The document is, in itself, a signal of intent, a blueprint for a logical, legible, and thereby deterring military machine. However, in applying this lens, it arguably misreads the nature of the challenge. As the RAND Corporation’s work on national power suggests, military effectiveness is not simply a function of material capabilities– the ships, tanks, and aircraft a nation possesses. It depends equally on the efficiency of the conversion process that turns those national resources into usable military power (Treverton and Jones, 2005, p. 18). Russian bricolage is, in essence, a high-speed, high-risk conversion strategy. The UK’s SDR, with its focus on creating new bureaucratic structures and processes, risks optimising its inventory of capabilities while neglecting the need for a truly agile conversion mechanism.

This creates a deterrence paradox, which plays out for multiple audiences. The first, and most obvious, is the adversary. As Keir Giles argues, Russia often discounts material symbols of Western strength, focusing instead on a perceived lack of political will and a hesitation to accept risk (Torun, 2024, p. 667, summarising Giles). A bricoleur state, seeking seams to exploit, is unlikely to be deterred by a show of conventional force that it believes will never be used in the ambiguous ‘sub-threshold’ where it prefers to operate. The second, and equally critical, audience is domestic and allied. Effective deterrence requires not only a credible threat but also the reassurance of one’s own public and partners that the nation can withstand and respond to shocks. This requires a resilient defence industrial base capable of surging production. The SDR acknowledges this, noting that a nation’s Armed Forces are only as strong as the industry behind them (Ministry of Defence, 2025, p. 7), but the deep-seated challenge of moving from peacetime efficiency to wartime industrial mass remains a critical constraint on the UK’s own risk appetite and, therefore, its credibility.

3. Towards an Elastic Architecture: Institutionalising Bricolage

If Russia’s strategic advantage lies in its tolerance for disorder, then an effective counter-strategy cannot lie solely in the imposition of a more perfect order. The UK must learn to fight fire with fire, supplementing its integrated blueprint with a capacity for institutionalised improvisation. This means cultivating a form of ‘controlled bricolage’ as a source of adaptive power. Treverton and Jones (2005, p. 11) noted two decades ago how the information technology revolution would inevitably move action away from slow-moving governments and “toward nimbler organisations.” The SDR’s proposal for an “expert Digital Warfighters group” (Ministry of Defence, 2025, p. 47-49) is a promising, if nascent, step in this direction. For this to become a genuine source of advantage, however, it must be treated not as a specialist enclave but as a guiding ethos for the entire force, empowering small teams at the tactical edge to experiment, adapt, and exploit opportunities at a speed the adversary cannot match.

This, in turn, requires a fundamental shift in the Ministry of Defence’s culture of procurement and risk. It necessitates an embrace of “good-enough” solutions that can be fielded rapidly, with iterative upgrades baked into the process, rather than pursuing perfect capabilities that risk arriving too late. Such an approach accepts that in a state of constant technological flux, some failure is inevitable and should be treated as an opportunity for accelerated learning. This is the logic behind the Royal Navy’s planned regulatory “sandbox” for autonomous systems (Ministry of Defence, 2025, p. 105-106), a concept that must be expanded across all domains. An elastic and adaptive force, capable of improvising under pressure, offers a more credible deterrent to a bricoleur than a rigid one, however powerful. It signals a capacity to endure, to adapt, and to respond effectively amid the very chaos the adversary seeks to create.

4. Conclusion

Arguably, a rationally designed and integrated force remains indispensable for the enduring demands of high-intensity warfare. Integration alone, however, is no longer sufficient. The central insight for UK defence is that an over-optimisation for elegant, systemic coherence can itself become a vulnerability when facing an opponent whose strategy is to weaponise disorder. Power in the 21st century is increasingly a function of adaptability. The challenge, therefore, is to create an architecture that is not only strong but also elastic; one that can, when necessary, fracture gracefully into many semi-autonomous nodes, each authorised to improvise within the commander’s intent. Deterrence means more than pure strength, it is the ability to adapt one’s defence to the changing strategic landscape.

Bibliography

Ditrych, O. (2024). DECONSTRUCTING RUSSIA’S BRICOLAGE TACTICS: Strategic insights for defeating the Kremlin. EUISS Brief 18. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies.

Ministry of Defence. (2025). Strategic Defence Review 2025: Making Britain Safer, Secure at Home, Strong Abroad. London: HM Government.

Torun, Z. (2024). Review of ‘Russia’s War on Everybody. And What it Means for You’, by Keir Giles. Europe-Asia Studies, 76(4), pp. 667-668.

Treverton, G. F. and Jones, S. G. (2005). Measuring National Power. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

Header image for an article on PGM usage by Russia

Precision Reconsidered: Russia’s Shift from Guided Missiles to Mass Bombardment

By Matthew

On May 29, 2025

In Strategy

Previously Russia positioned itself as a modern power able to cripple an adversary’s decision-cycle with carefully targeted precision-guided munitions. Three years of war in Ukraine have punctured that story. The Kremlin now relies on volume rather than accuracy, trading the prestige of “surgical” strikes for the blunt attrition of drone swarms and repurposed air-defence missiles. What follows traces that transition and asks what it does to Western analytical assumptions about technology, ethics and power.

From Surgical Imagery to Saturation Practice

Pentagon tallies show that Russian forces loosed more than one thousand one hundred guided missiles in the first month of the invasion, yet many exploded in apartment blocks rather than command nodes (Department of Defense, 2022). Domestic production never kept pace. By mid-2023 Russian factories were turning out roughly sixty new cruise missiles a month, a fraction of operational demand (Williams, 2023).

Facing depletion, Moscow shifted firepower architecture. S-300 surface-to-air missiles were redirected at ground targets, increasing miss distances, while Iranian-designed Shahed drones began to pad nightly salvos (Army Recognition, 2024). Guided-missile launches fell steadily while drone use soared, reaching an estimated total of four thousand deployed by the first quarter of 2025 (Atalan and Jensen, 2025). The identity of the high-tech precision striker gave way to the practicalities of magazine depth and industrial capacity.

Implications for Western Analysis

Western security discourse long treated accuracy as a twin proof of technical mastery and ethical restraint (Schmitt and Widmar, 2014; Wilson, 2020). Russia’s practice weakens both pillars. Norms endure through consistent observance and recognition; when a major power claims the vocabulary of precision while accepting wide error margins, the social meaning of accuracy erodes (Tannenwald, 2017).

The episode therefore offers a methodological caution. Counting missiles without attending to their symbolic weight risks analytical short-sightedness. The shift towards low-cost saturation munitions signals a recalibration of Russian strategic identity and alters the deterrence calculus of adversaries who must now defend against continuous drone attrition rather than episodic cruise-missile raids. Civilian resilience, alliance solidarity and arms-control expectations all pivot on how quickly that new reality is understood.

In Summary

Russia’s move from precision-guided missiles to mass bombardment is more than a supply-chain story. It marks the point where an identity built on technological finesse buckled under material constraint, transforming both the battlefield and the normative landscape around it. Analysts tracking future conflicts would do well to remember that weapons categories are not only hardware inventories but carriers of meaning, and that meaning can shift faster than production lines.

Bibliography

Army Recognition 2024. ‘Russia Repurposes S-300 Surface-to-Air Missiles for Ground Attacks Against Kharkiv’, 5 January.

Atalan, Y. and Jensen, B. 2025. Drone Saturation: Russia’s Shahed Campaign. CSIS Brief, 13 May.

Department of Defense 2022. ‘Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby Holds a Press Briefing’, 21 March.

Schmitt, M. and Widmar, E. 2014. ‘On Target: Precision and Balance in the Contemporary Law of Targeting’. Journal of National Security Law and Policy, 7(3).

Tannenwald, N. 2017. ‘How Strong Are the Nuclear Taboo and the Chemical Weapons Ban?’ The Washington Quarterly, 40(1), 79–98.

Williams, I. 2023. ‘Russia Isn’t Going to Run Out of Missiles’. CSIS Analysis, 28 June.

Wilson, N. 2020. ‘The Ambiguities of Precision Warfare’, Intimacies of Remote Warfare commentary, 12 June.

Reflection – The UN’s Legitimacy Gap: A Haiti Case Study

By Matthew

On May 18, 2025

In Strategy

Thomas Weiss identifies five “gaps” that chronically hamper global governance: knowledge, normative, policy, institutional and compliance (Weiss 2013). In Haiti, those gaps seem to have coalesced into what many Haitians read as an enduring legitimacy deficit. A more charitable interpretation does note instances of UN adaptation – better crime mapping after 2011, a dramatic scaling-up of the Haitian National Police (HNP), and a science-led cholera response – but, examined closely, such achievements tend to appear partial and fragile, leaving the larger breach largely intact.

Knowledge and compliance. MINUSTAH’s 2004 start-up underestimated the dense, shifting alliances between gangs and political patrons. When a contingent from Nepal inadvertently introduced cholera in 2010, infecting more than 800,000 people and claiming over 10,000 lives (Frerichs et al. 2012; Katz 2013), the Organisation spent six years contesting its own liability before an apology was issued (United Nations 2016). Subsequent epidemiological work certainly curbed transmission, yet the delay itself suggested an accountability reflex still subordinate to reputational caution – an impression hard to reverse.

Normative conduct. Sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, including minors among the victims, seriously undercut the UN’s human-rights narrative. The Associated Press counted more than 2,000 allegations between 2004 and 2016, with very few domestic prosecutions (Associated Press 2017). Reforms adopted in 2017 – victim-centred assistance, mandatory pre-deployment training, a voluntary trust fund – mark welcome movement, and Haiti arguably catalysed those global norms. Even so, the survivors’ experience of limited redress reinforces a perception that institutional learning operates at UN headquarters, not in the quartiers populaires where the harm occurred.

Policy and institutional adaptation. Supporters of the UN strategy point to iterative mandates: from peace enforcement (MINUSTAH) to rule-of-law mentoring (MINUJUSTH) and, since 2019, a slim political office (BINUH), with a Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support force now in train (UN Security Council 2023). Elections held in 2006, 2010 and 2016 proceeded on schedule with heavy UN logistical underwriting, and the HNP expanded from roughly 4,000 officers in 2004 to more than 15,000 by 2020 (Malone and Day 2020). Yet the police have struggled to retain personnel and equipment since the draw-down, and gang territory has again expanded. The pattern suggests that short, mandate-driven cycles may be ill-suited to a state so hollow that capacity must be nurtured for decades, not rotations.

Legitimacy in the balance. Survey data gathered in Port-au-Prince in 2015 found only a minority favouring immediate UN withdrawal, indicating a degree of conditional acceptance; most respondents nonetheless judged the mission “only somewhat” effective (International Crisis Group 2016). Such grudging tolerance implies utility rather than genuine confidence. In other words, the Organisation remains necessary but is seldom trusted.

Taken together, Haiti illustrates how partial advances in knowledge production, normative reform, and institutional design, whilst real, have not yet outweighed the reputational cost of early missteps and uneven compliance. Unless the UN sustains a far longer horizon of engagement – accepting that legitimacy is rebuilt in increments and measured locally – its blue helmet risks settling into an increasingly tarnished emblem: credible enough to be tolerated, rarely persuasive enough to inspire.

Bibliography

Associated Press. 2017. “UN Child Sex Ring Left Victims but No Arrests.” Associated Press investigative report, 12 April.

Frerichs, R. R., et al. 2012. “Nepalese Origin of Cholera Outbreak in Haiti.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (47): 19944–19949.

International Crisis Group. 2016. Haiti: Security and the Reinforcement of the Rule of Law. Latin America/Caribbean Report No. 62. Brussels: ICG.

Katz, Jonathan M. 2013. The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Malone, David M., and Adam Day. 2020. “Taking Measure of the UN’s Legacy at Seventy-Five.” Ethics & International Affairs 34 (3): 285–295.

United Nations. 2016. “Secretary-General’s Remarks to the General Assembly on a New Approach to Cholera in Haiti.” UN Doc. A/71/620, 1 December. New York: United Nations.

United Nations Security Council. 2023. Resolution 2699 (2023) on Haiti. UN Doc. S/RES/2699, 2 October.

Weiss, Thomas G. 2013. Global Governance: Why? What? Whither? Cambridge: Polity Press.

The Strategic Cost of Selective Memory: America’s Curated History and Its Global Fallout

By Matthew

On April 4, 2025

In Strategy

In international affairs, collective memory isn’t just about remembrance, it is strategy. Building on Maurice Halbwachs’ foundational insight that memory operates within ‘social frameworks’ rather than being purely individual, states don’t merely remember; they perform memory. They weaponise it, sanitise it – engaging in what scholars analysing the commemoration of conflict call the ‘politics of memory’ – or altogether reinvent it in service of national mythologies. Nowhere is this more visible than in the United States, where curated memory masquerades as identity and policy follows suit like a loyal retriever chasing a dream of exceptionalism.

American memory is less a reflection of truth and more a product of selective mythmaking, a process operating, as recent work suggests, between individual cognition and broader social systems. Slavery becomes a tragic prelude to civil rights triumphalism; Vietnam is rebranded as a “lesson” rather than a quagmire; Iraq fades into a haze of “intelligence failures” rather than strategic hubris – precisely the kind of state-managed remembrance of war that historians like Jay Winter have examined. The result is not forgetfulness, but an active process of narrative laundering – a continual reframing that turns moral ambiguity into digestible fables of resilience and heroism.

This curated memory has profound consequences on the global stage. For one, it erodes credibility. When the U.S. invokes democracy, freedom, or human rights in its foreign policy, other nations, particularly those in the Global South, hear the echoes of hypocrisy. How can a country that selectively remembers its own imperial past credibly critique the actions of others? The inability to reconcile with its own historical misdeeds, from colonial genocide to CIA-sponsored coups, prevents the kind of sustained engagement with inherited trauma that theorists like Marianne Hirsch describe through the concept of ‘postmemory’ – rendering its moral posture performative at best, disingenuous at worst.

Secondly, America’s self-mythologising fuels dangerous policy cycles. By continually framing itself as a liberator rather than an empire in denial, the U.S. is caught in a loop of interventionist déjà vu. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – each was framed through a narrative lens of moral imperative, conveniently edited for domestic consumption. The strategic amnesia of past failures enables new ones, while domestic audiences, pacified by a curated history, fail to ask the right questions until it’s too late.

Finally, selective remembrance alienates allies and emboldens adversaries. Nations with long historical memories (Russia, China, Iran) perceive American forgetfulness as both weakness and opportunity. They understand that the U.S. forgets what it cannot afford to confront. In contrast, these states actively curate their own histories to justify assertive policies, turning memory into statecraft. The battlefield, then, is not just diplomatic or military – it’s mnemonic. A clash of memory regimes.

Collective memory, when manipulated, becomes a liability. It blinds policymakers to patterns. It masks structural failings. It builds castles of credibility on foundations of denial. And eventually, it collapses under the weight of its own revisionism.

If America seeks to reclaim its influence on the global stage, it must confront its past not as mythology, but as memory: flawed, complex, and deserving of honest reckoning. Until then, its strategic future will remain tethered to the convenient lies it tells itself and the inconvenient truths the rest of the world refuses to forget.

Bibliography

Ashplant, T. G., Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds. Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge, 2000.

Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1925.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Orianne, Jean-François, and Francis Eustache. “Collective Memory: Between Individual Systems of Consciousness and Social Systems.” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023).

Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Insurgency vs. Terrorism: What’s the Difference?

By Matthew

On April 4, 2025

In Strategy

I’ve created a video on the difference between the definitions of insurgency and terrorism. While both involve violence and political motivations, I explore why understanding their key differences is essential. The video includes historical examples and the blurred lines between these two concepts, which should help in shedding light on the political implications behind the labels we use.

Please do feel free to reach out and discuss anything in the video, or leave a comment if you would prefer.

Matthew Toy

Strategist

Strategic leader with a passion for applying digital innovation to solve complex challenges in the public sector and regulated industries. With over 20 years' experience, I specialise in leadership, digital transformation, and building high-performing teams to deliver impactful outcomes. My expertise encompasses programme delivery, regulatory governance, and future-oriented strategic analysis, informed by ongoing study in International Affairs (Cybersecurity) and practical experience as a Special Sergeant in policing. I am driven by a commitment to public service and leveraging technology to enhance strategic decision-making and deliver positive societal impact.

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Thoughts, reflections and experiences

Tag: Geopolitics Page 1 of 2

What Intelligence Failures in the Cuban Missile Crisis Can Tell Us About the US, China, and Taiwan

How Analysts See What They Expect

How Organisations Slow Belief

How Identity Scripts Limit Imagination

Belief Velocity and Decision Time

Implications for Taiwan

Bibliography

Are the US and China Destined for War?

1. Destiny as Political Technology

2. The Realist Script

3. Narrative as Political Technology

4. Micro-Process Traces

4.1. The U.S. Trace

4.2. The China Trace

5. Spiral Dynamics

6. Counterargument & Limits

7. Conclusions

Bibliography

What Failed State Building in Afghanistan Can Teach Us: Beyond the ‘Capability Trap’

Avoiding the Capability Trap: A Framework

The Futility Assessment Framework

Aggregate Rule and Quantitative Cross-Check

Alternative Strategy Menu

Bibliography

Examining Europe’s proposed ‘re-armament surge’

NATO’s dilemma: choreographing presence

Lessons from outside Europe

Policy implication

Bibliography

Is the Strategic Defence Review an Engineered Response? Rethinking UK Defence in an Age of Bricolage

Precision Reconsidered: Russia’s Shift from Guided Missiles to Mass Bombardment

From Surgical Imagery to Saturation Practice

Implications for Western Analysis

In Summary

Bibliography

Reflection – The UN’s Legitimacy Gap: A Haiti Case Study

The Strategic Cost of Selective Memory: America’s Curated History and Its Global Fallout

Insurgency vs. Terrorism: What’s the Difference?