National security threat

Why China is a bigger threat than the Soviet Union

For reasons of politics, economics, and military power, the Chinese Communist Party now poses a greater threat to U.S. security than the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.

The similarities between those two behemoths are obvious.

Both nations rooted their power in authoritarian control over the people and in devotion to party supremacy, and both viewed America's submission as a prerequisite for their ultimate success, but most of the threat similarities end there. In large part, that's because communist China has a far better strategy than the Soviet Union. Where Moscow sought to dominate its adversaries, Beijing seeks first to co-opt and then dominate them. Where the Soviet Union relied on ramshackle KGB efforts to steal Western technology, China matches domestic hackers to academic infiltrators. Where the Soviet military tried to overmatch NATO with mass, Xi Jinping fragments our alliances and targets our defensive weak points.

Let's consider the political, economic, and military elements in turn.

Beijing's ideology takes the center in what might be described as warped communism. The Standing Committee believes that the party is supreme and China is destined for global hegemony, but it's flexible about how to get there. Xi's inner circle is happy to make foreign nations rich if that will earn their loyalty. We see the patronage-cronyism side of things in Africa and Asia, where China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure projects. This has facilitated webs of pro-Beijing political corruption, but the most striking example of this Chinese gambit is found in the West.