HISTORY TELLS us that for a country to govern sensibly and protect its interests at home and abroad requires experienced, competent professionals with the acuity to analyze and navigate the complex space of national security and foreign affairs, one that is replete with military, economic, technological, geopolitical, and diplomatic tensions. In the aftermath of World War II, individuals such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, among others, challenged Americans to accept that the United States must conduct its affairs and act in the world as it is, and not in the world as we wish it were. They emphasized both the necessity and strategic advantage of a U.S.-led allied system and the need to nurture what Winston Churchill originally characterized as a special relationship, and others have characterized as an essential relationship, between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Decades later, individuals such as Senators Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and scholars like Richard Pipes, Gaston Sigur, and Grace Hopper, among others, continued this legacy throughout America’s tensions with the USSR. However, since the end of the Cold War and particularly over the past twenty years, America has faced complex risks and trade-offs for which twentieth-century geopolitical strategy is insufficient and for which America may be out of practice diplomatically. In a recent piece in National Review, for example, Bing West, a veteran Marine officer and noted author with years of experience in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, records the grievous flaws of the Bush administration in 2001 that committed our country to a mission of nation-building in Afghanistan. Surely the horrific attack by Al Qaeda on 9/11 required swift retribution on the perpetrators in Afghanistan. But just as surely, we must expect that someone from among the elected and appointed officials at the White House, the State and Defense Departments, and intelligence agencies would have possessed the insight to point out the downside risks of a prolonged engagement such as have unfolded in Kabul in the past twenty years.

American officials would do well to adhere to two guidelines for judging whether our country should engage in long-term post-conflict commitments. First, predisposition. The country we seek to assist should have a political predisposition toward pluralistic governance and the economic means (with modest recovery assistance) to stimulate and achieve sustainable growth (e.g., Japan, Granada). Second, enduring ally. The country must remain allied with us in opposition to any ongoing threat to vital American interests (South Korea, Germany, Italy).

In the wake of 9/11 planning, surely someone should have had the wherewithal to point out that historically nurturing a political evolution from tribalism to institution-building and, ultimately, pluralistic governance, requires generations involving periodic conflict and enormous cost in lives and treasure. Instead, none of the five officials around the table in the Situation Room in 2001 put their foot down regarding our goals and limits in Afghanistan. True, the original goal was stated as assuring against any renewed hosting or sponsorship of a terrorist attack on our soil from Afghanistan. And to the lasting credit of the military units deployed to Afghanistan, we were able to locate Osama bin Laden within weeks in Tora Bora, a mountainous redoubt in the eastern part of the country.

West makes it clear that these forces were trained and equipped to carry out a sustained assault involving heavy bombing, intense scouting, and patrolling and over weeks not months would have ended a successful siege with the capture of bin Laden. Unfortunately, that approach was aborted for no good reason. With the Taliban scattered from Kabul at the outset, over time stability could have been established and maintained until an allied force was organized and deployed to focus on training a sufficient Afghan force to keep the Taliban off-balance with the support of allied air support and an effective advisory force as a sustainable strategy. And yet, in the ensuing months, “mission creep” led to as many as four ambassadors being deployed to Kabul to oversee the sweeping work of “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” with an open-ended mission throughout the country. Their ever-creeping mission would have taken a generation or more, if ever, to be accomplished.

By contrast, it may be useful to recap a different story—our seventy-year presence in South Korea. There we have nurtured an ethnically homogenous community to becoming a vibrant, resilient nation while defending a vital American interest—deterring Communist China from seizing critical terrain on its way someday to the capture of Japan and Taiwan. The point here is not to curse the darkness of defeat but to awaken from any political and diplomatic failures in Afghanistan and sound the alarm for Americans and our allies—especially our UK ally—that “the world as it is” goes on, and that for the past twenty years a historic threat to our vital interests has been brewing. 

AS CHINA watched much of the Cold War from the sidelines, lessons were learned by the two superpowers, perhaps best expressed by President Ronald Reagan in his declaration that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” Taking heed that the stakes of nuclear war had become inestimable, but nursing resentment from more than a century of abuse and humiliation, China’s ruling Communist Party continued to lay low and bide its time, all the while honing its revanchist empire-building strategy for achieving national rejuvenation.

Rather than risk armed conflict or trigger more escalation, Beijing’s strategy, known in China’s highest circles as Unrestricted Warfare, is designed to enable China to achieve at least three goals: 1) the capture and control of the world’s strategic resources (e.g., cobalt from Congo, lithium from Chile); 2) take critical terrain (e.g., Suez, Malacca, Gibraltar); and 3) provide itself assured access to, and control over, commerce within the world’s greatest markets (Western Europe and the United States). China currently owns ninety-six ports spread throughout the world. China’s goal is to penetrate, discredit, and undermine our democratic system of governance and the rules-based, pro-market liberal world order we have nurtured for decades and of which we are the free world’s leading promoter.

In 2013, with the arrival in office of President Xi Jinping, China began the serious rollout of its grand plan. Originally, Xi cast the strategy publicly in a benign wrapper known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Its purposes and content, however, were unmistakable. In close collaboration with Russia, China sought to penetrate, and ultimately dominate, country after country using predatory lending and traditional mercantilism. Engaging with enticing offers to build infrastructure, the BRI strategy seeks political and economic influence, if not dominance, through local dependency on Chinese goods and services. Ultimately, its goal is to dislodge the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. 

In 2018, after securing changes in Party rules that virtually assure his chairmanship for life, Xi accelerated the pace of his effort to expand China’s influence and control throughout the world. He’s no longer laying low or biding his time. For example, today China owns 60 percent of Congo’s cobalt; much of Chile’s lithium (for batteries); and ports in Sri Lanka, Greece, Italy, and others spread throughout Europe. China also wields control of more than 70 percent of solar panel manufacturing worldwide. 

Russia has followed suit, contracting to build four large nuclear power reactors in Egypt and two more units in Turkey, which will give it a dominant role on the Suez Canal and in the Eastern Mediterranean where Russia already maintains a naval base at Tartus on the coast of Syria. China and Russia use nuclear power plant projects as arms of their foreign policy and gain military basing rights to ship nuclear fuel to those new sites. For this China-Russia tandem, nuclear energy is not merely a market commodity, it’s a weapon in an arena where state-owned enterprises are the competing gladiators.

Both China and Russia are also expanding into Africa and South America, buying up substantial stakes in mineral resources with focused entrees in energy. China has also acquired a site in the Bahamas where it intends to build a deep-water port. In sum, Russia and China are establishing dominance over country after country using offers to build much-needed critical infrastructure without having to deploy a soldier or a ship and without having to fire a shot. We underestimate the implications of this encroachment because we focus on military movements.

CONCURRENT TO the foregoing geopolitical turmoil, two other evident trends, population growth in emerging economies and urbanization, pose both serious challenges and potential opportunities for all of humankind. Over the next thirty years, the global population will grow to ten billion people. Ninety percent of that growth will occur in non-Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and involve migration to cities that will require an unprecedented scale of industrial and social services. The need for reliable and clean electricity, clean water, and nutritious food will be staggering and will pose the largest and most intense developmental challenge in human history. Clearly, the dominant provider of that infrastructure will have gained political influence along with staggering profits and will dominate the world. Today, China and Russia are strategically positioning their respective countries to be those providers.

Despite the long lead in agricultural technologies provided by America to feed billions of people in emerging economies, reliable electricity is now the most urgent need in these regions. And with the additional constraint of meeting global climate objectives, nuclear power currently provides the only realistic solution for meeting the predictable demand for baseload electricity facing our planet, while concurrently addressing emissions at the global scale. Today state-owned enterprises (SOEs), heavily subsidized entities from Russia and China, are capitalizing on this demand for nuclear power, creating alliances in parts of the world that will shape geopolitics for the next sixty to one hundred years—the life of these plants, including decommissioning. Tragically, over the past forty years, the United States has allowed its civilian nuclear construction capacity to atrophy, rendering its private enterprises unable to compete one-on-one with the nuclear SOEs of China and Russia. Of fifty-four nuclear projects currently underway, America is leading only one.

These realities—emerging Chinese-Russian collaborations and mounting centrifugal issues in the United States and allied countries—are daunting. The need for U.S. and UK leadership, and multinational coordination toward forging public-private partnerships is urgent. As such, the question should be posed: Does the U.S.-led allied system, particularly the U.S.-uk alliance, have the diplomatic capacity and organizational structure to not only respond to these challenges, but dominate and win the competition?

CIA director William J. Burns contends that the United States will have to update its diplomatic capacity to meet these complex challenges. More systemically, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates contends that in order for the United States to effectively counter China and Russia in the years ahead will require “a dramatic restructuring of the government’s national security apparatus.” While both of these are long-term prospects, existing threats will only multiply if not stanched soon.

Fortunately, opportunities are at hand this year and next to renew or strengthen the kind of strong competitive alliances we will need to compete successfully with China and Russia and meet the challenges of ever-increasing demands for reliable electricity under low-carbon constraints. To wit: the twenty-sixth gathering in November of the Conference of Parties (COP26) to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Scotland offers an opportunity. The countries of the Free World should come together and announce the looming arrival of a new generation of small modular reactors (SMRs) capable of not only providing abundant baseload power but also meeting industrial applications ranging from desalination to process heat and power for the production of hydrogen for use in hybrid systems. Look for similar meetings among the Three Seas Initiative countries from the Baltic states in the north to the Balkan countries neighboring the Mediterranean.

Each of these meetings presents opportunities for the United States and UK to deepen alliances in energy broadly, and on emissions reductions and nuclear energy specifically. But for us to take advantage of these upcoming meetings between our Department of State and the British Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy must take the initiative with the relevant countries to enable the formation of public-private partnerships starting with NATO, the Five Eyes countries, and the Three Seas Initiative countries. Similarly, we must lead in defining a mandate for the Quad countries (Japan, the United States, India, and Australia). Fortunately, much of this work is already being done in the private sector.

With American and British leadership, a historic opportunity is at hand to restructure the alliance system around twenty-first-century challenges—challenges that are far more complex than their twentieth-century predecessors. By teaming with our G7 allies, our industries can be positioned to lead the execution of the largest infrastructure project in human history, with advanced nuclear power and SMRs in the lead. The coronavirus pandemic has illuminated the inherent threat that an authoritarian power such as China will pose for global stability. Its growing dominance in nuclear energy constitutes concerns equivalent to those posed by Huawei and 5G dependence.

HOWEVER, GREAT power threats aren’t unprecedented. When the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik-1, it shook Americans and America’s national security community. The communist USSR had beaten the United States in a high-stakes technology race, and it seemed to call into question whether the United States had the capacity and resolve to not only respond and compete with the USSR, but to outcompete and dominate it on all technology fronts. America didn’t respond merely by complaining about the USSR competing unfairly on the world stage. Rather, America stepped up its commitment to critical technology sectors and created the greatest civilian space exploration program in the world.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. China and Russia are out front of the United States in civilian nuclear power—a science, technology, and engineering sector that has been critical to national security since its beginning. However, the U.S. nuclear power heritage, its “UN P5” status, and its excellence in operations still constitute the best on the planet. U.S. national interests and allied relationships can be advanced by the delivery throughout the world of a critical commodity—safe, clean, and reliable nuclear energy. If we aren’t building the plants and supplying the fuel, another country will—and our influence on safety standards will erode.

Announcing a U.S.-led, allied supported global energy strategy among G7 members, with nuclear power in the lead, will instill confidence in the global community and send signals throughout the $10 trillion global nuclear energy arena that the United States is returning to its important role as the country of choice for the peaceful delivery of clean energy. Further, it will empower the private sector to compete successfully in the international nuclear arena. America’s response to the twenty-first-century threats of China and Russia must be proactive and not dominated by complaints that China and Russia are playing unfairly. Pointing out the threat is necessary, as is calling out China and Russia for illicit and corrupt practices and challenging Americans to respond to the threat. But it must be done in the context of the reality that China and Russia are doing what great powers do—challenging and attempting to displace or disrupt the influence of what they perceive as the hegemon. In terms of geopolitical realism, this is normal behavior.

Such was the case in 1947, when Stimson issued his challenge to Americans regarding the threat of Communist Russia. Stimson was blunt: “The problem of Russia is thus reduced to a question of our own fitness to survive. Our future does not depend on the tattered forecasts of Karl Marx. It depends on us.” Similarly, the threat of China and Russia today is also reduced to a question of our own fitness to survive. And our future does not depend on the SOEs, industrial policies, and five-year plans of authoritarian states seeking to disrupt the liberal world order established by America and its allies.

It depends on us—the United States, the UK, and our allies—leveraging our economic, technological, and diplomatic capacity to restructure our alliances for twenty-first-century challenges. To this end, an allied partnership around nuclear power would constitute a strategically important move on the geopolitical chessboard to counter China and Russia—a move that would generate myriad security benefits for the West and all those hoping to join it.

Robert McFarlane, a career Marine officer, served for nine years at the State Department and White House rising ultimately to become President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor.

David Gattie is an Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) College of Engineering and a Senior Fellow at UGA’s Center for International Trade and Security. Gattie is an unpaid member of the advocacy council for Nuclear Matters. He has provided testimony on energy, climate, and nuclear power policy before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own.

Image: Reuters.