A War by Any Other Name

On the undeclared war between the US and China

The tragic human costs of the war with Iran are still emerging, but thousands of Iranians have been killed or wounded, alongside hundreds of civilians in Israel and neighboring countries. At least 13 US service members have died, and at least 200 have been injured.

The financial cost is already staggering. Iran faces tens of billions in destroyed infrastructure and lost oil revenue. The US government has, over two weeks in, likely spent $16-20 billion, and expended hundreds of Patriot & Tomahawk missiles, MQ-9 Reaper drones, Precision-strike missiles, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles.

These costs exclude the immense but unquantifiable drain on senior-level attention—the endless tracking, press briefings, looming Congressional hearings, and countless reports to be written, read and debated. There is something deeply melancholic about this familiar cycle; in the shadowed corridors of Washington, yet another distant war flares and will soon recede. 

Except for those in Iran and Israel and their immediate environs, the war, like the several that came before it, is also a costly geopolitical sideshow. It constitutes an enormous distraction from the primary war the US is fighting, and has been fighting, for years. The war with China.

There is no kinetic dimension to this war — no missiles launched, nor bombs dropped. Yet. But it is still a war, and the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu helps in understanding why. For a thousand years Sun Tzu’s Art of War, one of the storied seven texts of the 11^th century Song dynasty, has inspired and instructed Chinese leaders on the practice of war. In Chapter three he notes that the highest form of victory is to subdue an enemy without fighting.

Whether or not this is Beijing’s formal strategy may be debated, but the evidence that it could be is all but unmistakable:

1. Fueling a synthetic plague — China is the primary if not overwhelming supplier of the core elements, or precursors, of fentanyl and related opioids, which have killed more Americans in the last 10 years than the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Despite steps reportedly taken by the government in 2019 and 2025, Chinese companies continue to supply, by most estimates, ~90% of the precursors for fentanyl reaching the US. This synthetic plague claims tens of thousands of lives every year. It does its work quietly, street by street, suburb by suburb.
2. Launching cyberattacks — China’s state-backed hacking groups, which include Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, have deliberately targeted US critical infrastructure on multiple occasions, including power grids, telecommunications networks, and water systems. These groups have probed vital internal systems and in some cases embedded malicious code that could be activated in the future. This malware is the modern equivalent of quietly placing explosives on strategic bridges and railroad tracks. Meanwhile President Xi has publicly committed to “an independent foreign policy of peace”.
3. Funding & arming adversaries — China buys the vast majority of Iran’s oil, single-handedly propping up a government that the US has already gone to war against twice. China is also a major buyer of Russian oil, providing a vital outlet for Russia to evade sanctions from NATO countries. But China does more than provide money to the Kremlin & Tehran: it supplies arms and essential dual-use technologies that underpin military capabilities in both countries. And while most of these equipment transfers are cloaked, occasionally details emerge, including Beijing’s reported recent transfer of hundreds of armed drones to Iran.
4. Large scale intellectual-property theft — for more than two decades US corporations and federal officials have documented a pattern of industrial espionage tied to Chinese state institutions and state-aligned firms. Through cyber intrusions, coerced technology transfers tied to market access, joint-venture requirements, and the recruitment of insiders, proprietary designs, manufacturing processes, and software have been systematically acquired. Estimates place the cost of intellectual-property theft at up to ~$600 billion annually, with Chinese actors responsible for a large share of these losses. The scale is large enough that US officials have described it as one of the greatest transfers of wealth in modern history. Yet even when cases are identified, cooperation from Chinese authorities in prosecuting the firms or individuals involved has been rare.
5. Restricting access to rare earths — the US technology industry depends on a group of obscure elements whose names few citizens could recognize but without which it cannot function. Rare earth minerals and related materials—vital to semiconductors, electric vehicles, advanced electronics, and precision weapons—are overwhelmingly processed and refined in China. In 2023 China imposed export licensing controls on gallium and germanium, key semiconductor metals, and by December 2024 it effectively halted their export to the US. In 2025 China expanded export controls on additional rare-earth elements and processing technologies, requiring government approval for shipments tied to defense or advanced semiconductor industries (though a partial suspension of the outright US ban occurred in late 2025, licensing requirements and leverage remain). The result is a quiet but consequential capacity to slow or interrupt the flow of inputs on which many vital US commercial sectors depend.

Any one of these would be belligerent. Collectively they suggest a pattern that is unmistakably aggressive.

Then there is Wuhan. The epicenter of the 2020 covid outbreak, Wuhan is also the site of a key research center, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that was active in covid-related research. The FBI has assessed the probability that covid originated in a lab with “moderate confidence”. Over a million Americans died from covid. Many more suffered acute illness. Inner cities across the country hollowed out. Schools closed in many states. Thousands of businesses went bankrupt. Math and literacy scores for children plummeted. Beijing rejected calls for an independent international investigation into the outbreak in Wuhan, and refused to consider reparations or restitution. Covid may have been inadvertent, but it was devastating all the same.

The US has, through its own policies, furthered the strategy articulated by Sun Tzu. Start with the broadest interpretation of US economic policy over the last generation. Administration after administration, whether Democrat or Republican, supported China’s economic rise by opening US domestic markets to cheap Chinese imported goods while supporting China’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). This had the effect of hollowing out US manufacturing capability, as production inevitably shifted to lower cost factories in China, while accelerating China’s growth by normalizing its full access to global trade flows.

The paradox of Donald Trump’s administration is that he was the first US leader to seemingly understand the importance of reshoring manufacturing to the US, but his erratic tariff-on-again-off-again approach has undercut the very reshoring he sought to foster.

The US National Security Strategy is another tell. Across the last three administrations there has been a consistent failure to confront China. Under President Obama, the US National Security Strategy defined China as a responsible stakeholder and partner. In Trump’s first administration, that evolved to a strategic competitor and revisionist power. Under Biden it became a systemic rival. The most recent iteration of the US National Security Strategy is less equivocal but still frames China as an economic rival to be “rebalanced” rather than a hostile belligerent. These linguistic evasions do not alter the underlying reality. They obscure it—while others act upon it. In politics, as Machiavelli understood, it is not the language used but the effectual truth that determines the outcome.

These failures are tempered by an unsung US success: hosting Chinese students at US universities. In 2025 some 266,000 Chinese students attended US undergraduate and graduate schools. Critics bewail the subsidizing of Chinese students, but the benefit that accrues to the US is meaningful. These students are often the very best young minds China has, and many of them stay in the US after graduating. In STEM subjects, which are among the most competitive fields, many choose to remain in the US (in one study, ~90% of Chinese STEM PhD students opted to stay in the US long-term). The number is lower in other fields, but it is still often above 50%. The logic is clear: by enabling these students to come to US universities China loses many of its brightest and most capable minds, who then go on to work for US companies, further bolstering US advantages in innovation and productivity.

Some view war with China as an inevitability. As if the strands of human history are, once woven, as immutable as stars in the heavens. Much is made of the “Thucydides trap” — the idea, inspired by the war between Sparta and Athens, that war is particularly likely between a rising state and a diminishing one. This conclusion is too general to be useful. The nuance is everything: war is more likely when an aggressive rising power senses the formerly dominant rival is distracted by internal divisions and costly wars of low strategic value, and inhibited from making forceful responses to repeated adversarial thrusts.

On the other hand, as Edward Luttwak, in The Rise of China vs the Logic of Strategy, has noted, the CCP’s leadership is all but infected with “delusions of supreme strategic wisdom vouchsafed by ancient texts”. The Han ruling class that has led the CCP for its entirety seem to overlook that “for two-thirds of the last thousand years and more, the Han were ruled by a smaller number of non-Han who defeated and conquered them”. And China’s last war, the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war, was far from a glorious victory. 

While AI may reconfigure the balance of this conflict, a quieter factor remains. The average age of the US President, the Senate Majority Leader, and the House Majority Leader is 68 — identical to the average age of the seven members of the CCP’s Standing Committee. These are systems led, on both sides, by aging men shaped by earlier eras and steeped in their own rhetoric of civilizational superiority — and operating under mounting pressure and narrowing time horizons.

Some future US responses are obvious: boosting naval forces in the Pacific, reframing the US National Security Strategy to unequivocally state that China is acting as a direct adversary. Imposing harsher sanctions on Chinese companies violating arms embargoes or producing fentanyl precursors. Increasing investment in domestic rare earth production. Further restricting China’s access to the most advanced AI technologies while deploying AI to neutralize cyber threats.

Less obviously, the US can exploit China’s greatest vulnerability – which is the fear at the heart of CCP rule. The fear that translates into repression and violence against China’s own citizens. The millions killed in death camps and executions in the early purges. The ~45 million killed as a result of the Great Leap Forward and related violence. The millions who perished during the Cultural Revolution. The millions who died in the Laogai prison camps. The million or more Tibetans killed under Chinese occupation. The tens of thousands of Muslim Uyghurs murdered in Xinjiang. The hundreds of political prisoners currently being held without fair recourse, many from Hong Kong. And potentially most grippingly today, the 78-year-old pro-democracy activist and media tycoon Jimmy Lai — now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Whatever the Standing Committee's calculus, the question is no longer whether conflict will emerge. It has already begun. The war between China and the US does not resemble the wars of the past. There are no declarations. No entrenched fronts. No clear beginning. Only a steady accumulation of pressure across markets, networks, and institutions.

The language and discourse of contemporary politics has not caught up to reality. It rarely does—until the consequences make it unavoidable.


The Thebans — foreseeing that war was at hand — wished to surprise their old enemy Plataea in time of peace, before hostilities had actually broken out, and believing that in peacetime the city was unguarded and the inhabitants off their guard, they entered easily at night with about three hundred men. But the Plataeans, recovering from their initial alarm, perceived the small number of the invaders during negotiations, attacked them vigorously, and after a fierce fight captured or killed nearly all, showing that the Thebans had gravely miscalculated the readiness and resolve of their opponents.

 — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War