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Dmitri Alperovitch’s new book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century is a clarion call for the U.S. and its allies to speed up measures he argues will deter China from invading Taiwan and reshaping regional and global geopolitics. Born in Russia, Alperovitch came to the U.S. in 1994 and later co-founded cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, serving as its chief technology officer until 2020. He has since founded and chairs Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington D.C.-based geopolitics think tank. 

This interview took place before the worldwide tech outages caused by a faulty CrowdStrike app update, and the following is an edited transcript of that conversation. We began by talking about the focus of Alperovitch’s new book. 

Q: Can you start by explaining what we’re on the brink of, and why it’s time to sound the alarm？

A: There’s no question that the world is in a very perilous state right now. I argue in the book that we are on the precipice of a potentially even more dangerous conflict — one with China — that would upend every country in the world, and have a disastrous impact on global commerce and the global economy. 

I’m convinced that Xi Jinping desires to invade Taiwan in his lifetime. The man has just turned 71, so he’s looking at the next 10 years or less as a possible limit on his staying in power. He’s likely to get reelected in 2027 for another five year term that runs out in 2032, when he’ll be 79. In the Chinese system, they’re not prone to electing their leaders into their 80s. So he’s potentially looking at some sort of partial or full transition of power in 2032. He wants to accomplish this task, that he sees as essential for Chinese nation’s rejuvenation, while he can take credit for it, and go down into the pantheon of Chinese history as a great leader of China — one who ‘unified’ China, in his view, and did something that Mao Zedong could never do, which is take Taiwan. And that’s why I think we’re in a very perilous time.

What has made you so convinced that he’s going to do this? Any kind of conflict over Taiwan would be not only risky in terms of the practicalities, but potentially catastrophic, not just for the Chinese economy, but for the global economy too. 

Well, authoritarian leaders tend to undertake these types of adventures. All we have to do is look at the last couple of years with President Putin. Many people argued that Putin would not invade Ukraine because of the very reasons you just cited. I was one of the analysts who predicted that he would do this very thing, three months before the start of the war. And the same arguments were made, that this would be disastrous, would damage the Russian economy, and made no sense. And of course, he proceeded to do so anyway, driven by his distorted view, both of his personal destiny and Russia’s destiny, his view of the Russian security situation and geography that required control over Ukraine; and most importantly, driven by ego and status and his own perception of legacy. 

It’s not an accident that Putin is also in his 70s, just like Xi. The same dynamics are playing out with Xi Jinping, where he has a distorted view of history, believing that Taiwan belongs to China — even though, throughout history, there’s never been a single moment when whoever fully controlled China also fully controlled Taiwan. His own view of his personal destiny, China’s destiny — he talks about that quite openly — as well as the requirement to control Taiwan for China’s security and being able to escape the containment of the first island chain, his ego: It’s all very similar to Putin. 

There’s also a multitude of evidence, both open source and revealed by the U.S. intelligence community, about those plans. The CIA has provided information that Xi Jinping has given an order to the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. That doesn’t mean that he will, but the fact that they’re getting ready for it is a very worrisome sign, and one that cannot be ignored. 

Over the last couple of years, there have been significant intrusions into U.S. critical infrastructure from Chinese military actors, called Volt Typhoon, that are doing this for no purpose that’s in line with what they’ve traditionally done, i.e. stealing intellectual property, trade secrets, or conducting traditional espionage. The networks they are attacking, such as water and electric utilities, offer no trade or IP value and don’t contain any national secrets. The U.S. government has assessed that it is being done to pre-position capabilities to potentially destroy such critical infrastructure in the event of war — yet another sign that the Chinese are preparing for conflict. 

Ultimately, all you have to do is listen to Xi Jinping, his own words, where he is saying that this ‘problem’ of Taiwan cannot be left for the next generation, and has to be solved now — and that the unification of Taiwan and China is essential for the Chinese nation’s rejuvenation. The impatience that he has introduced into the Chinese system is very different from their traditional orientation, certainly since Deng Xiaoping’s guidance to the Chinese people to ‘hide your strength, and bide your time’. Xi Jinping has turned that mantra into ‘show off your strength, and waste no time.’

The flipside of what you’re saying is that American policymakers aren’t currently taking this threat seriously enough. 

If you look at the last eight years, both the Trump and Biden administrations have had a fairly consistent policy that has overturned the consensus of the prior 40 years that we need to pursue deeper economic integration with China, and that this integration would lead to liberalization of their political system and a reduction of tensions. As recently as 2015, President Obama said that we welcome the rise of China. Well, no one in the United States now, on either side of the political spectrum, is welcoming the rise of China. We need to recognize that that fundamental shift in attitudes has happened, largely because of Xi Jinping and his wolf warrior diplomacy, his aggressive actions, and so forth. 

By and large, what the Trump administration did and the Biden administration continued and accelerated, are the right measures. I don’t quibble with the direction. What I do have an issue with is the velocity, because we are marching towards conflict that could happen as soon as four years from now, in 2028 — and that’s not a lot of time to try to deter it, which should be the ultimate focus of the U.S.’s foreign policy and national security strategy. I open the book with a quote from Tolstoy from War and Peace, that the two most powerful warriors are patience and time. And I’m worried we’re running out of time, and we have no patience. 

What do you mean by winning this conflict? What does winning look like?

First of all, I believe that we are in a Cold War. And of course, like in the first Cold War, and in any war, the goal should be to win. 

But winning does not mean going to war with China. I certainly want to avoid that at all costs. And winning does not mean even confronting the Chinese Communist Party, as some have suggested. It doesn’t necessarily mean regime change. Trying to do so would be very dangerous and counterproductive and I’m completely opposed to that. I’m quite done with the regime change adventures that the United States has undertaken in the last couple of decades, they’re foolhardy. 

If every minute counts, as I think it does, you need to do things now. This incremental approach is counterproductive. You need to incentivize industry, even at the cost of some economic pain in the short term, to try to increase our leverage over China. 

In the first Cold War, we had a strategy, as articulated by George Kennan at its onset, to contain the Soviet Union, and to ultimately wait it out until the reduction of that threat. The same strategy needs to now apply to China. On the economic and geopolitical front, we need to contain China. We have all the advantages — the U.S. is much stronger than China, which is even weaker than the Soviet Union was during the first Cold War. 

We’ve had a very stable status quo for 45 years in the Taiwan Strait that prevented China from taking Taiwan by force. We need to restore the military balance of power in the region — keep U.S. and allied superiority, and to keep China contained within the first island chain, and in the South China Sea. You’re already seeing that Chinese economic growth is coming down substantially, the era of double digit growth is gone, likely forever. And of course, their economy is still 25 percent smaller than the U.S.’s. So unless something dramatically changes they will never catch up to us economically, nor in terms of the global strength of their military. We can wait them out and ensure that the century remains a Western and American century, like the last one was, — if we can deter conflict in the Taiwan Strait. That needs to be the primary focus of U.S. national security policy.

Some of the specific economic strategies that you talk about, like securing supply chains or reshoring are underway. You say that the velocity needs to increase, but is that realistic? 

Absolutely. First of all, I’m not suggesting that everything should be reshored. In fact, alliances are a key part of the strategy, and using diplomacy. On the semiconductor front in particular, the effort to try to onshore so much production back into the U.S. is valuable from a jobs perspective, but is not really going to get us where we need to be in terms of reducing our dependence on China and Taiwan in particular. We need to be much more speedy and nimble with friends like Korea, and India and Japan, and others, to build up capacity that we just simply will not be able to do alone, because of the cost of labor, environmental regulations and the like. 

Is it doable? It absolutely is doable. And look, if in four years, God forbid, we’re in a war with China, and we ask ourselves, did we do everything possible, as quickly as possible, four years earlier, it would be a huge mistake to say, no, we didn’t. 

Is there enough appetite in the U.S. for the sort of government-led strategy you’re calling for that would see major intervention in the markets?

I am not calling for that. In the semiconductor industry, you had a very unique dynamic that did require significant government investment, which has now been matched by private sector investment around the world. The Chips Act altogether provides about $75 billion of funds, either through tax breaks, or direct subsidies to industry. In our estimates at Silverado, it will in turn produce about $1.2 trillion worth of overall investments outside of China over the next 10 years from the private sector, from Europe, from other nations. That is exactly the type of leverage that you want to have. 

But it’s not necessary in other sectors. In critical minerals, you mostly don’t need government subsidies. What you need to do is level the playing field, introduce tariffs on Chinese dumping and punish Chinese firms engaged in that dumping, in order to allow domestic producers to catch up. There’s plenty of funding available in the private sector, and all sorts of areas where we need to catch up to China, whether it’s in the processing of minerals, whether it’s batteries, electric vehicles, and the like. You mostly don’t need government subsidies, what you need to do is to make sure that the Chinese can’t drive domestic industry out of business. You need to also punish them for the intellectual property theft that they’ve engaged in on an unprecedented scale, that I’ve personally witnessed over the course of my career. That has been the greatest transfer of wealth in history, there needs to be appropriate punishment for that.

So you would go further than both the Trump and Biden administrations on export controls and tariffs? 

Absolutely. We had an announcement from the administration in May about increased tariffs on EVs, batteries, critical minerals and on semiconductors. Some of those are not going into effect till next year. Why wait? If every minute counts, as I think it does, you need to do things now. This incremental approach is counterproductive. You need to incentivize industry, even at the cost of some economic pain in the short term, to try to increase our leverage over China. 

This is not about decoupling. It is impossible to decouple from China, their economy is too big. And frankly, it’s counterproductive because what you want is maximum leverage over China. It is about what I call ‘unidirectional entanglement’, making them more dependent on us and us less dependent on them in critical areas like semiconductors, critical minerals, green energy, and other advanced technologies. This is totally doable with tariff policy, and with sanctions where appropriate on Chinese firms that have engaged in evasion of export controls — as SMIC, their largest semiconductor manufacturer has done by producing a chip for Huawei, in violation of the U.S. entities list. 

What more should the U.S. be doing in terms of military preparedness? 

One of the key lessons from Ukraine we’re learning today, very painfully, is that great power wars can last a long time, and can expend a lot of munitions. As the Ukraine conflict has shown, the depth of our magazines is very shallow. Part of the problem has been that over the last 40 years, we have become enamored with highly exquisite, highly capable weapons systems. These are simply too expensive to procure in large quantities. I cite the examples of the Ford-class aircraft carriers, which cost about $14 billion apiece to procure. The previous generation Nimitz aircraft carrier is still the world’s best and largest — nearly 40 percent larger than the Chinese carriers and far exceeds them in capabilities — and it costs only $4 billion. If you already have the best aircraft carrier in the world, why would you spend three and a half times more to procure the next generation one? And realistically, when the annual defense budget is almost $900 billion, and the national debt is around $35 trillion, you can’t substantially increase defense spending without jeopardizing the fiscal health of this country. 

So you need to spend money smarter, and you need to spend it on systems that are cheaper, and that you can acquire in large quantities. That can be done by focusing on simpler technologies, not always wanting to be at the cutting edge. The weapons platform that has been most key to the Ukraine conflict has not been drones or highly advanced missiles, or even tanks and armored vehicles. It has been artillery: Howitzers that have not substantially changed in many decades, and 155 millimeter artillery shells of which we have found that we don’t have enough.

We’ve done a series of interviews with U.S. policymakers on China from the last three decades. One of the questions that we’ve asked them consistently is whether they still believe that a prosperous China is in the U.S.’s interests. If we make it clear to the Chinese that we don’t see their country being prosperous as being in the West’s interests, isn’t that going to exacerbate the potential for future conflict?

I don’t know that it’s about them being prosperous. It’s about them owning the production of four critical technologies and two critical components for those technologies — the components being semiconductors and critical minerals, and the technologies being AI and autonomy, biotech and synthetic biology, space, and green energy. In three of those — AI, biotech and space — we’re leading, they’re leading in green energy; they’re leading in critical minerals processing and semiconductors are a mixed bag.

So it’s about regaining our position in the areas where we’ve lost it, and keeping our lead in the three other areas, curtailing China’s access to our own technologies, and not allowing them to get far ahead. Because if you look at their advances in many of these industries, that has been underpinned by massive amounts of intellectual property theft, and trade secret theft; it has been underwritten by subsidies from the Chinese government and dumping and other unfair trade practices. We absolutely need to put a stop to that, or punish them for doing so, in the name of pure fairness, if for no other reason. 

For the last 45 years, we’ve enabled the rise of China and directly helped their military buildup, which is now shifting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. We need to learn from the mistakes of many decades and from the mistakes of the first Cold War in order to apply the lessons for the second one.

Why are you so adamant that we are in a new Cold War? 

The case is quite straightforward, I can’t believe anyone would even argue against it. 

First of all, the Oxford dictionary definition of a cold war is “a state of political hostility between countries characterized by threats, propaganda, and other measures short of warfare”. I would challenge anyone in the world to tell me that the current relationship between the U.S. and China does not fit that definition to the “t”. 

Let’s look at the similarities between the first Cold War and the second, as I call it. You again unquestionably have global competition for supremacy, that’s playing out in every single corner of the world. It is playing out in the military, diplomatic, economic and technology spheres. 

Both countries are, as we speak, preparing for conflict. The Chinese military is doing it, and if you go to the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Combatant Command in Hawaii and the Pentagon, they’re thinking about conflict with China, that’s at the top of mind for everyone there. 

We have a conventional arms race and a nuclear one. China’s engaged, for the first time in the decades that they’ve had nuclear weapons, in a massive buildup of their arsenal, going from about 300 warheads to over 1,000 by the end of the decade, and trying to match our numbers by the mid 2030s. 

You have a space race. The defining moment of the first Cold War was the race to the moon in the 1960s, trying to get there before the Soviets did. What are we doing now? We’re racing once again to the moon, and then potentially off to Mars, trying to get there before the Chinese do. 

You have economic warfare, as we’ve talked about.

Ideological struggle is a little bit different, even though that part of the struggle of the first Cold War is quite misunderstood and overblown (see Cold War I historian Sergey Radchenko’s recent book To Run the World that compellingly argues that ideology played a relatively small part in the first Cold War). There’s no question that we now have a confrontation, if not between capitalism and communism, but certainly between authoritarianism versus democracies, as President Biden speaks about regularly. Look who Xi Jinping is close friends with — Russia, Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader in Hungary, and so forth. And he’s not just friends with them, he’s trying to support them, and also trying to export that authoritarian ideology and censorship and population control technology to other countries, particularly in Africa. 

You have a major regional flashpoint. Taiwan is the new West Berlin, the key flashpoint for the first 15 years of the first Cold War, where America and the Soviet Union were at high risk of a conventional and nuclear confrontation. That is now Taiwan. 

The strategy with China is all about deterrence and containment. That needs to be the primary focus of U.S. foreign policy, national security policy and economic policy, because a conflict with China would be an absolute disaster for America, and for the world.

You have a scramble for military bases, the United States is building up bases in the region, reinforcing bases in Japan and Guam, getting access for the first time in 32 years to the bases in the Philippines. China’s doing the same, in Pakistan and Cambodia, and even as far away as Djibouti and elsewhere. 

You have a spy war that exceeds anything we saw in the first Cold War. The level of espionage against this country, as articulated by the director of the FBI, is higher than at any point during the conflict with the Soviet Union — in part because it’s been enabled by cyber. 

I’ve listed ten reasons for how the two conflicts are similar. And the only reason that people on the other side of the ledger provide, that this is not a new Cold War, is that we have this great economic independence with China. 

To dismiss nearly a dozen similarities on one side of the ledger, and to produce just one on the other side does not strike me as a very compelling argument. For sure, the degree of economic interdependence between the West and China is much larger than it was with the Soviet Union. But it is now reversing, and there’s clearly a decoupling, or de-risking as the president of the European Commission calls it, taking place.

The one big difference, though, is how this Cold War ends. The great insight of George Kennan, was that the Soviet Union was this unsustainable, unnatural entity that would one day collapse, because of ethnic tensions and how it came together. China has been around for 5,000 years, and is a highly homogeneous society, that’ll probably be around for another 5,000 years, or however long humanity sustains itself. The Chinese Communist Party may be around for decades, or even centuries. And as I’ve said, I don’t think we should be pursuing regime change. We should not put all our hopes in for a 1991 type of moment where the thing disintegrates. 

The strategy with China is all about deterrence and containment. I end the book with a Latin phrase, in a nod to Cato the Elder, who would end every speech in the Roman Senate with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est’ — Carthage must be destroyed. My phrase is ‘Sinae deterrendae sunt’ — China must be deterred. That needs to be the primary focus of U.S. foreign policy, national security policy and economic policy, because a conflict with China would be an absolute disaster for America, and for the world. We must do everything in our power to deter it.

The terminology of a Cold War suggests that there’s going to be an ultimate winner or loser. Isn’t the more likely reality that the West is going to be in a state of competition for many years to come. And that the way to keep on top is to continue to strengthen in areas where it believes it has advantages, like freedom and democracy, or economically — not with some day in mind where the U.S. and its allies can announce that they’ve won a Cold War against China, but more in the hope that China eventually changes its system. 

This is about supremacy. This is not just about, let’s keep our freedom and democracy and let sleeping dogs lie, whatever China does is not impactful on us. All the problems that we now face, vis a vis China, stem from one thing, and that is the rise of China. If China was as poor and weak as it was in 1979, we would have no issues with China. But because it is now so economically and militarily dominant, that’s where the conflicts in the South China Sea, the challenges we face with them supporting Russia, all stem from. 

Letting China become the world’s greatest power is absolutely contradictory to U.S. interests, and incredibly dangerous. In fact, that has been the U.S. policy, since the founding of this country, to prevent the hegemony of other states in areas where we operate. 

And that’s why it’s not just about competition, it is about making sure that the U.S. remains the number one economic power and winning that race. To win that race it’s not sufficient to just run faster. You also want to slow the other guy down, and certainly not give them water and better equipment and help them to run faster against you, as we have been doing, quite myopically, for the last 45 years or so. 

It’s also about calling a spade a spade. For our own domestic population, it’s important to characterize this conflict with China appropriately, in order to prioritize our efforts, and to explain to our people why they’re going to be buying more expensive materials, more expensive cars — because we are in a Cold War with China, and the goal is to win, and this is the pain that we may suffer as a result. If you don’t explain that, then people will object and will say, why wouldn’t we buy cheap Chinese goods, it seems like it’s better for everyone? 

Articulating this is essential to bring in public support. You have to do this in a democracy. You can’t just do this covertly, away from the American public, that’s a recipe for disaster. There are no downsides to labeling a spade a spade. The Chinese plainly know that they’re in a Cold War with us. They’ve known that since Deng Xiaoping proclaimed it in the late 1980s “that one Cold War has come to an end but that two others have already begun.” Privately they will tell you, they’re in a Cold War and the United States is trying to contain them, which we plainly are. So just simply declaring that will change nothing. They’ll just say, thank God, they’re finally telling the truth. 

The downside is potential from misallocation of resources: by overstating the threat, you spend too much on building up your military and accept too much damage to your economy, all of which ultimately proves unnecessary. 

I fundamentally don’t believe that we are misunderstanding the threat. If anything, we are underestimating it. If you look at the intelligence about Chinese intentions, Chinese capabilities, the trajectory is very clear. In fact, you don’t even have to look at the intelligence, you just have to look at what they’re saying publicly. People are ignoring the threat, literally ignoring what Xi Jinping is laying out there in black and white. They are intent on unification with Taiwan. They intend on doing it by force if they can’t do it peacefully, and they know that the prospects of peaceful unification are increasingly becoming impossible.

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