Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II

FRANCIS P. SEMPA

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Sometimes small books can have big impacts — one thinks of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Halford Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, Norman Podhoretz’s The Present Danger, and, more recently, Robert Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind. Michael Sobolik’s Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance is a mere 161 pages of text, but if policymakers in Washington read it and broadly follow its suggestions, the United States may be in a better position to ultimately prevail in our current Cold War with China.

Sobolik is a senior fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council who previously served on the staff of Sen. Ted Cruz. China’s “great game” that the United States needs to counter, he writes, is its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which he rightly describes as a geopolitical offensive to extend China’s influence throughout Eurasia and beyond. Sobolik invokes Mackinder in warning that President Xi Jinping’s goal is to supplant the U.S. as “the dominant force across the entirety of Eurasia” and to extend its political influence to Africa to achieve predominance on what Mackinder called the “World-Island” (Eurasia-Africa). The BRI, he writes, is designed to “unite[] Eurasia on China’s terms.”