“Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself”

America must abolish the entire Think Tank ecosystem. It has truly devolved into a Penumbra of Power and now operates solely to serve its own self interests.

It is often viewed as quaint to quote Sun Tzu, even if his Art of War is required reading across virtually every American IR curriculum. What is apparent, though, is that the lessons contained in this seminal work have been routinely ignored when conducting foreign policy in practice. Even more so in the case of China.

There’s a reason why I’m raising this point. It aligns with a broader and sharp critique of the entire American think tank community and arose last week when a new American client posed of me what seemed to be an overly obvious question.

“Peter, if you had to strip this Great Power competition between China and the United States down to a single first principle, what would that be?” Being honest, the question put me off balance. It had never been asked of me before, and it was a question I had never quite posed to myself in those terms.

After some thought, I replied with “know thy enemy, know thyself.”

The mere vocalization of the verse forced upon me the need to directly articulate why this particular Sun Tzu quote is so very consequential. For 30 years, China has institutionalized the practice of building maximum depth in understanding the agendas, motivations, and cultural underpinnings of every nation-state it views as a competitor. The United States has done nothing of the sort. The entirety of today’s China commentary is as a reactionary response to immediate events. There’s been scant fundamental inquiry undertaken into how America now finds itself facing a near-peer rival, or what policy prescriptions Washington needs to alter the trajectory.

I then made the following point to this new client; “China has the Central Party School. America has the Think Tank ecosystem. The former operates in complete support of the Chinese government’s national interests. The latter is a group of highly conflicted institutions whose allegiance is to money and power.” The client then nervously laughed as he nodded in agreement over Zoom.

The Central Party School

For the uninitiated, Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated the Central Party School (CPS) in 1978, gutted during the Cultural Revolution, and gave it a new foreign policy raison d’être. There was to be a whole of government approach to studying all rivals on the global stage. It was to be a process conducted in exacting detail. It was to be a platform required of the entire cadre class. And the curriculum was designed to do one thing above all else: understand the adversary on the adversary’s own terms. This is what the Chinese mean when you hear talk of “mutual respect”.

The platform operates as the intellectual spine of the Party’s governance, doubly so for foreign policy. It is competitive at the research level while enforcing coherence at the application level; internal debate is encouraged precisely so that adopted positions have been stress-tested rather than imposed from above.

To best demonstrate how the CPS operates consider that the curriculum includes the required reading of primary source material, read in the original languages — Shakespeare, Twain, Heidegger, and well beyond. I would imagine that not a single individual in America’s foreign policy establishment has read, as just two examples, Romance of the Three Kingdoms or A Madman’s Diary, let alone in Chinese.

Here is the most important point. Where American intelligence centers its activities on asking what an adversary is doing, the CPS begins with why and to what (far in the future) end. What are the structural forces that make a given behavior inevitable, and therefore predictable? The Chinese take an epistemological orientation in which adversarial behavior is treated as structurally determined rather than personality-driven or hostage to short-term political cycles. It is the difference between watching a chess game and understanding the rules that govern the individual pieces.

Think Tanks and Perverse Incentives

There is no commensurate structure within the American political establishment. Worse is how these activities are actually conducted. Rather than a government-led, or even civil service function, the near-entirety of opposition research on China has been outsourced to the Beltway think tank establishment; organizations that are agenda-driven, partisan, and operating under highly questionable incentives given both constituencies and funding. The edifice does not inform legislative and executive decision makers; it delivers confirmation bias to whichever donor is paying the bills or as an exercise to land some assistant secretary position in an administration. The product is not analysis. It is reassurance dressed up as analysis.

Then there is the audience. America runs a balkanized bureaucracy of foreign policy and intelligence agencies, and decision makers within them hibernate inside the think tank community whenever their party is out of power. They emerge four or eight years later with the same priors, the same talking points, and the same gross miscalculations — only now sharpened, monetized, and laundered through a Senior Fellow byline.

Research is funded by interests with a stake in the answer; findings are consumed by an audience that rotates between government and the funders; the output flows back into legislation, sanctions packages, and corporate strategy decks. None of it is touched by anything resembling objectivity or seeking to serve America’s national interests. There isn’t even any debate to speak of. All think tanks operate a silos where “esteemed colleagues” all agree with one another. If it weren’t for this new client of mine, I would have remained oblivious that the very advice I have given corporate clients for years applies unflinchingly to the Beltway: you cannot manage what you do not understand, and you cannot understand what you have outsourced to vendors with a stake in your confusion.

The Asymmetry that Compounds

In returning to Sun Tzu, “Know thy enemy, know thyself” is a precondition. Without both halves, victory in protracted competition is not difficult; it is impossible. Beijing has spent 30 years institutionalizing the study of America. Washington has spent the same 30 years outsourcing the study of China to a Senior Fellow ecosystem conflicted by interests and driven by explicitly conveying to outside groups what they wish to hear and not what those groups need to know.

This asymmetry compounds. Every cycle of Beltway analysis that begins with what Beijing is doing, rather than why or to what end, deepens the gap. Just think back on the “Made in China 2025” strategic plan as the clearest example. Every congressional hearing that imports its assumptions wholesale from a think tank deck deepens the gap. Every C-suite that takes its China read from the same sources deepens the gap. Once again, recall the cacophony over “China is uninvestable”? So long as the United States continues to confuse a partisan, heavily conflicted think tank ecosystem with a national knowledge function, it will keep being surprised by outcomes that were, in Beijing, treated as structurally determined years in advance.

The surprises out of China will continue to be branded “unprecedented.” They will not be. They will simply be unprecedented to American decision makers, because the actual work needed was never done. Half a century after Deng rehabilitated the Central Party School, the question Washington still has not asked itself is the very same one the new client asked me last week. Strip the competition down to a single first principle. Then look at which side has been operating on that principle, and which side has been outsourcing it. The answer is not comfortable. But discomfort, as Sun Tzu would gently remind us, is a great deal cheaper than the alternative.

With regards,

PLA