The conduct of war has changed, and Australia is on the frontline alongside its allies and partners. Australia’s expulsion of Iran’s ambassador, following confirmation that Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had co-opted criminal proxies on Australian soil, was not just a one-off diplomatic rupture. It is part of a much longer story: for more than three decades, hostile states have been waging an unconventional quiet war against the United States and its allies.
Weaponising Western post-Cold War enthusiasm for globalisation, hostile states embedded themselves in Western economic and social networks and set to work pioneering a new form of warfare whereby Western states have been systematically attacked from inside their own systems.
From the Baltic Sea to the South China Sea and beyond, the same playbook has been deployed against the same targets—innovation networks, military supply chains, critical infrastructures, financial systems, democratic processes and civic associations. While the US’s allies imagined themselves at peace, their adversaries were already at war.
From the Indo-Pacific to the Euro-Atlantic, US allies and partners—Australia included—are reeling as they confront the harsh realities of failing to defend themselves. Notwithstanding escalating warnings across four US administrations and repeated cautions from their own security and defence establishments, few acknowledged the threat posed by hostile states. Fewer still acted, and the inevitable result has now arrived: we are crash-landing into what Fareed Zakaria has aptly called ‘the post-America world’.
The US-led system that underpinned allies’ security and riches originated in the aftermath of World War II, when the US embraced opportunities and burdens of its new role as the ‘anchor ally’ of the democratic world. The results were stunning. The European Union emerged as a pre-eminent economic power, the NATO alliance prevented the outbreak of a third world war, and the West won the Cold War. It was all going so well, though systemic changes set in motion at the end of the Cold War would soon enough leave us once again facing the prospect of another global war.
The post-Cold War order was flawed from the outset. The foreign policy and economic elites who masterminded it dismissed the lessons of history and claimed that an order defined by US power and values would pacify rival states. Enchanted by this fantasy, allies and partners made themselves easy targets, letting their defences decline while inviting hostile states into their economic and social systems.
Seizing their opportunity, these hostile states—China chief among them, with Australia a frontline target—pioneered a new form of warfare designed to weaponise global interdependence. Notwithstanding the mounting evidence and costs of the daily attacks lobbed at them—including cyber campaigns, political interference, economic coercion and (para)military operations—allies and partners failed to defend themselves. By the 2020s, the damages caused by hostile states’ growing power and aggressions—magnified by allies’ stubborn malaise—were abundantly clear. The US-led order was in freefall.
As the most dangerous adversary, China’s attacks are especially effective. They are crafted to avoid retaliation, disguise their intent, hide their fingerprints and make progress only incrementally to stay below the threshold that would otherwise cause even a meek target to defend itself.
Sharing a page from the same general playbook, China’s partners—Russia, Iran and North Korea—are similarly waging below-threshold wars. Common attacks across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific include energy blackmail, cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, economic coercion, information operations, hostage diplomacy and political interference. Worse still, authoritarian states are actively supporting one another in their escalating attacks. Different regions, same global war.
Hostile states’ below-threshold warfare is especially insidious in the economic domain and, again, China leads the pack. Using malign investment, trade and other economic tools, it has systematically acquired foreign technologies and sensitive assets that are essential to amassing its coercive power and making itself a (near) peer rival to the US.
The military effects that flow from its economic warfare are dangerously underappreciated. Having secured critical chokepoints in military supply chains and made itself the world’s manufacturing hub, China can now stop US allies and partners alike from producing critical weapons at scale, if at all. It has, moreover, erased the technology gap that once deterred it from making credible military threats, and has positioned itself to execute sabotage and espionage attacks on the critical resources and assets that allied militaries need to mobilise, communicate and fight.
China’s greatest success in its decades-long quiet war is its systematic erosion of the ability of US allies and partners to defend themselves. Its very highest ambition is now within sight: ‘winning without fighting’.
Time is not on the side of the US’s allies and partners. In the post-US world, we face a stark choice: fight back hard now, or prepare to live in world where hostile states determine our destiny.
This article draws from papers written by Raquel Garbers and published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and is part of a series of articles on hybrid threats and economic coercion.