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7 July 2024

Answering Authoritarian State Asymmetric Challenges: Tools for Deterring Hybrid Threats and Non-Military Coercion from China and Russia

Dr. Scott Fisher; Dr. Graig Klein; Dr. Juste Codjo; and Dr. Juris Pupcenoks

Deterring an adversary requires, at the most fundamental level, understanding the adversary. Threatening to isolate an adversary that craves isolation, for example, is unlikely to produce benefits for US policy makers, as borne out by decades of failure to achieve US policy aims in North Korea.

The United States faces similarly counterproductive risks when attempting to deter asymmetric challenges from China and Russia. A common view, supported by both precedent and scholarship, is that military capabilities are effective at deterrence. Our research supports these earlier findings—US and allies’ military capabilities clearly produce negative reactions in Moscow and Beijing. Unfortunately, the scope of these earlier findings is too narrow; they fail to provide the insight required to understand and then effectively deter challenges beyond the military tools of statecraft.

Instead, Washington requires a broader understanding of which instruments of national power can deter a broad spectrum of economic, diplomatic, and political challenges from adversary states. Using a unique new methodology and an approach that examines all instruments of national power, we develop several key findings that will assist US senior leaders and policy makers attempting to deter authoritarian states:
  • military instruments, especially exercises near adversary borders, can harm US deterrence goals by inadvertently supporting the leadership in Beijing and Moscow;
  • economic instruments, chiefly sanctions, produce little reaction—the international relations equivalent of a yawn—while possibly also supporting the leadership in the targeted regimes;
  • information instruments, sometimes in conjunction with diplomatic instruments, can produce the most negative reactions by the targeted states and appear to be an underutilized tool for asymmetric deterrence of authoritarian states, specifically China and Russia.[1]

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