Intelligent China Policy: An Interview with Paul Heer

This former National Intelligence Officer is speaking out about Sino-US rivalry and the prospects of war over Taiwan. Is Washington listening?

Photo by Kayla Kozlowski on Unsplash

Chances are, if you’re a China watcher, you already know Paul Heer, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a veteran of 30 years as an analyst of East Asian affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, including as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2007 to 2015. You might also know him as the author of Mr. X and the Pacific:  George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).

I had brief intersections with him during the Obama years, and always admired his intellectual rigor, insisting on evidence but also taking seriously standards of evidence. I doubt we see eye to eye on everything, but as the rest of Washington has lost its mind with anti-China mania the past decade, I’ve really appreciated his critical voice—he calls it like he sees it.

I thought Un-Diplomatic readers would benefit from his insights, and was triggered by a recent piece he wrote for The National Interest about the narrowing space for Sino-US detente—a policy that’s desperately needed. So I reached out to Paul for a Q&A interview about some of the crucial factors in the US relationship with China and what ought to be done.

What follows below is that unedited dialogue. Feel free to engage him in the comments or offline. ✌️

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Van: In your latest piece at The National Interest, you start by mentioning a small conference you attended where you felt like the odd man out. What’s the prevailing view of China in the Washington policy community, and what do you find alienating or disagreeable in that? 

Paul: If there is a “prevailing view” of China in Washington, it seems to be that the United States and China are engaged in a zero-sum contest for global supremacy, and that Beijing has made it so.  This outlook has dictated an almost exclusively competitive approach to the US-China relationship, with only lip-service to the potential for cooperation, and a resistance to “engagement” with Beijing because it has been deemed a failed approach that was based on false hopes and assumptions. 

What I find disagreeable about this is that it is based on a fundamentally inaccurate assessment of China’s strategic intentions, including its willingness to embrace peaceful coexistence.  I have never seen a persuasive evidentiary basis for the assertion that China seeks to kick the United States out of East Asia and supplant it as the global hegemon.  Yet this premise appears to be a rationale (or an excuse) for sidestepping any serious consideration in Washington of mutual accommodation between the United States and China that could avert the emergence of another cold war.  If the contest is (or becomes) zero-sum, it will not be just Beijing that made it so.

This outlook is also based on an ahistorical understanding of the course of US-China engagement.  Although US policymakers hoped and even calculated that it would liberalize China, that was not its primary purpose or goal.  The goal was to foster constructive and mutually beneficial strategic and economic relations, and—to that end—alter Beijing’s external behavior, much less so its internal governance.  And it achieved much over the past 40 years, notwithstanding many setbacks.  The bottom line is that engagement has not failed:  it just hasn’t fully succeeded yet.  It obviously needs more time; and the alternative of not engaging China will not take us to a better place.

What I find alienating about this is that arguing that China is not an existential threat to the United States and promoting some form of mutual accommodation with it—and asserting that this will eventually be strategically necessary—is widely characterized as either sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party or failing to understand the nature of the CCP regime.  It is often also characterized as exclusively blaming the US side for the tensions and stalemate in the US-China relationship.  Even asserting that both sides share the blame is sometimes dismissed as too soft on Beijing.  Perhaps most troubling is the degree to which all this has politicized the discourse on China in Washington.  Few people appear ready to openly present the Chinese perspective on these issues, or to advocate any US acknowledgement—much less accommodation—of that perspective.  As a result, pursuit of the kind of US-China relationship that I think will ultimately be necessary is not really politically viable in Washington.  And I don’t see when and how that is going to change.

Van:  So is it your view that China doesn’t seek global hegemony, or that it can’t realize global hegemony—or both? 

Paul: Both.  China is not seeking global hegemony, and couldn’t realize it.  And it knows that it couldn’t realize it.

What is the evidence that China is seeking global hegemony?  In all my years of reading the intelligence record, I never saw the basis for such a judgment.  And the US Intelligence Community today does not make that judgment.  Its 2024 Annual Threat Assessment states that China seeks to become “a leading power on the world stage” and “a world S&T superpower” with “a world class military.”  Scholars have quoted Xi Jinping as saying that China will become “a world leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence.”  But a key common element here is that China aspires to be “a” global leader, not “the” global leader.  This may sound like a trivial or semantic distinction, but it’s the difference between China seeking to replace US primacy with a Sino-centric order, or with a multipolar order in which neither the United States nor China needs to be global hegemon.  Both evidence and logic support the notion that Beijing’s objective is the latter.  If the US Intelligence Community had evidence to suggest otherwise, it would have said so.

Of course, within that framework China is indeed seeking to maximize its wealth and power and influence relative to those of the United States.  And in that regard, the US IC judged that it “will compete directly with the United States . . . to alter the rules-based global order in ways that support Beijing’s power and form of governance.”  I have no doubt that Beijing will do so relentlessly and ruthlessly, and with all the tools at its disposal—scoring points against Washington whenever and wherever it can.

But that does not add up to the goal of China achieving global hegemony.  Do the math, and the physics.  How would that come about, and how would it work?  Is it possible that China has the resources to make it happen, and that the competing resources and resistance of the rest of the world could not prevent it from happening?  What reason do Chinese leaders have to believe that they could achieve it and maintain it?  They are longtime students of history, amply familiar with all the prior examples of bids for regional or global hegemony that have not survived—including the most recent example of the United States’ post-Cold War primacy.  It seems obvious to me that Chinese leaders recognize that pursuing global hegemony would be destabilizing and potentially counterproductive to Chinese interests and goals; risk alienating other countries whose hearts and minds Beijing is trying to cultivate; and be unsustainable even if it was achievable.

That is why I think they are focused instead on bolstering China’s position in a multipolar world—and see plenty of room to do so.  They appear confident that historical shifts in the global balance of power are advancing multipolarity and giving China opportunities to extend its influence and its role in setting international norms.  My guess is that they see this as a more viable and pragmatic approach than launching an existential struggle with the United States.  They almost certainly judge that China’s “comprehensive national power” and competitiveness; the empathy of much of the Global South; and the emerging limits on US power and influence all give China advantages in the strategic competition—and a better chance of sustaining its relative global position than would be offered by a zero-sum contest.

The only scenario in which I could see China making a bid for global hegemony is if Beijing concluded that Washington was determined to resist multipolarity and try to maintain US global hegemony that perpetually subordinated China and denied its aspirations for a global leadership role.  Under those circumstances, I could imagine Chinese leaders concluding that a zero-sum contest for global supremacy is unavoidable, and that the only way for China to escape such subordination would be to make a bid for the top spot.  But I think even that would ultimately fail—at tremendous cost to China and everybody else.

Van:  You say “I could see China making a bid for global hegemony...if Beijing concluded that Washington was determined to resist multipolarity and try to maintain US global hegemony.” Isn’t that what the US has been doing since the Trump years, including now (resisting multipolarity and trying to maintain hegemony)? And if that's how China sees it, does that imply that US policy is in self-fulfilling prophecy mode—i.e., skewing the inputs of China’s calculus in a way that makes them more likely to pursue the global hegemony that many national security wonks fear?

Paul: Let me first clarify that I see this as a very low probability scenario.  Even in such circumstances, Beijing would remain cognizant of the costs and risks of pursuing global hegemony and the minimal chances of actually achieving it.  It’s more likely that China would simply feel compelled to intensify the competition with the United States for wealth and power and influence—without the specific goal of conclusively “winning” and being able to establish a Sino-centric world order as a viable “end state.”

Having said that, I think it’s correct to say that the United States is resisting multipolarity and seeking to maintain what it views as US global hegemony.  Washington appears to view “multipolarity” as a Chinese-engineered-and-led initiative to dilute and displace US power, rather than the post-Cold War historical trajectory and structural trend that it is.  And the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy states that “the United States remains the world’s leading power.”  Given that outlook on the current strategic environment, Washington’s highly competitive and even adversarial response is corroborating Beijing’s longstanding belief that the United States is trying to contain and subordinate China.  It is also reinforcing Beijing’s judgment that it needs to double down on its own competitive approach.  So yes, there is a “self-fulfilling prophesy” aspect to the equation.  As Harvard scholar and former US official Joseph Nye famously said:  “If we treated China as an enemy, we were guaranteeing a future enemy.”  My own version of that would be:  if we think China has made it a zero-sum contest, don’t be surprised if China thinks we made it a zero-sum contest, and acts accordingly.

Again, I don’t think this would automatically lead Beijing to launch a bid for global hegemony.  But it would probably ensure escalation of the zero-sum competition across the board, and make it that much harder for the two sides to identify and agree on a path toward mutual accommodation and compromise.

Van:  The balance of power between the US and China is most favorable for China around the Taiwan Strait because, you know, geographic proximity. And one of the common arguments I faced down during the Trump years was the net assessment-style view that “If China takes control of Taiwan, Japan becomes undefendable.” What do you make of this geographical warfighting argument regarding Taiwan?

Paul: I’m not an expert on military strategy and doctrine, so I can’t address whether, how, and why Chinese control of Taiwan could make Japan “undefendable.”  But looking at a map of the Western Pacific, it doesn’t make sense to me.  Deploying PLA forces to Taiwan would give China an additional power projection platform, but China already has air, naval, and missiles bases that are closer to Japan than Taiwan is.  So it’s not clear to me that Chinese possession of Taiwan would make Japan significantly more vulnerable to Chinese attacks than it already is.

I would focus instead on the fact that Beijing’s determination to possess and control Taiwan is not driven by pursuit of more military power projection.  That may be among the potential benefits, but I don’t think it is high on the list.  Indeed, Beijing would not necessarily or automatically deploy PLA forces to Taiwan.  For decades it has included a commitment not to do so in its unification proposals to Taipei.  There is certainly room for some skepticism about the currency and reliability of any such commitment, but it underscores the fact that Beijing has considered a PLA presence on the island as something that was negotiable.

History shows that Beijing, even under the CCP regime, generally did not view the island of Taiwan as an important strategic military asset.  In the 1930s Mao Zedong famously expressed a willingness to allow it to become independent.  That all changed in June 1950, when Harry Truman sent US military forces into the Taiwan Strait after the outbreak of the Korean War—effectively reintervening in the Chinese Civil War on behalf of the Chinese Nationalist (KMT) government on the island.  This made Taiwan the location of a rival Chinese regime under foreign military protection, which transformed the geostrategic importance of Taiwan to Beijing.

Even with that dramatic shift, CCP leaders did not view Taiwan as an island that needed to be recaptured for the purpose of allowing the PRC to project military power beyond it.  Instead, it was an island that needed to be recaptured for the purpose of neutralizing the threat that it posed to China—and the legitimacy of the CCP—as a potential platform for power projection against the PRC.

So yes, Chinese possession of Taiwan would obviously pose a potential challenge to the defense of Japan.  But that assumes that Beijing wants the island as a military base largely for power projection reasons, which is debatable; and my guess is that it exaggerates the difference that possession of Taiwan would make to the latent threat China already poses to Japan.  Military experts can explain otherwise.

Van:  So China doesn’t seek global hegemony, but couldn’t achieve it anyway. It would like to be the leading power in Asia, but it conceives of that happening within multipolarity, which means it's not inherently exclusive of the US. The balance of power is most favorable to China in the Taiwan Strait, but control of Taiwan—in the unlikely event that happens—does not suggest Japan is next...there is no domino theory at play in East Asia.  Given all this, what would you like the US to be doing differently?

Paul: The first thing Washington should do is get the diagnosis right, so that the prescription can be corrected.  The current prescription of an adversarial zero-sum approach to Beijing is based a diagnosis that China poses an existential threat because it seeks to kick the US out of East Asia, undermine American democracy, and replace the US as the global hegemon—and that this negates the utility of seeking some version of mutual accommodation.  But these premises are all incorrect.  The United States needs to start with a more accurate assessment of the actual nature and scope of China’s strategic ambitions—and of the United States’ own relative global leverage and influence in contending with China.

Based on this more accurate diagnosis, the United States should gird itself for the competition but not at the expense of pursuing peaceful coexistence.  Because China does pose a profound and unprecedented competitive challenge to the United States, Secretary Blinken’s strategy of “invest, align, and compete” makes good sense.  But because a competitive challenge is not an existential threat, and the US and China are interdependent and together face many urgent global challenges, this should be supplemented with “engage, cooperate, and accommodate.”  This will be difficult and will take time, especially the building of mutual understanding and trust, and it will require both sides to recognize the limits on their leverage and the constraints on their wish lists.  But it is the only viable alternative to what would probably become another cold war.

While it competes with Beijing for wealth and power and influence, Washington should nonetheless begin the process of working with Beijing to flesh out the terms of peaceful coexistence.  This would include seeking a stable balance of power within the Indo-Pacific based on mutual agreements on force posture, and would involve US multilateralism within the region that includes China rather than excluding and targeting it.  Globally, this would involve sustained efforts by Washington to counter Beijing’s efforts to expand its influence over “the rules” of international law and practice, while recognizing that the UN framework ultimately relies on consensus.

On the key issue of Taiwan, Washington should supplement its focus on military deterrence with diplomatic efforts to reassure Beijing that the “one China policy” remains both substantive and credible, and especially that permanent separation of Taiwan from the mainland is not the US goal.  This will require addressing the fault-lines between Washington’s “one China policy” and that of Taipei, which appears to be embracing the notion of permanent separation.

All of this will require Washington to muster bold and decisive leadership—especially the political will to make and to advocate tough choices—along with strategic vision and strategic planning.  Currently these seem to be in short supply.  But I haven’t given up hope.