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executive summary: This article challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the strategic motivation and significance of China's cyber-enabled theft of U.S. intellectual property (IP) and suggests that the U.S. has a unique opportunity via its cyber strategy to influence the trajectory of China's rise. main argumentCommon refrains regarding the strategic significance of China's theft of U.S. IP include concerns of immediate economic losses, with estimates ranging from $250 billion to $600 billion annually, and the potential longer-term threat of disincentivizing innovation investments. But a focus on these consequences obscures the true strategic intent of China's cyber-enabled IP-theft campaign. Around 2010, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership perceived that China was approaching a history-informed time limit to transition from a middle- to high-income economy, and that slowing growth or economic stagnation and sociopolitical upheaval could put at risk both the CCP's legitimacy and China's great-power status. In response, the CCP adopted a multifaceted technology transfer policy to counter the expected slowing growth by stimulating indigenous innovation. Only one facet of that policy—a centrally directed, significant cyber-enabled campaign of IP theft—was able to produce results in time, with certainty, and at a scale necessary to ensure China avoided economic stagnation. In 2018 the CCP again ramped up cyber-enabled IP theft to help mitigate pressure by jump-starting additional innovation-based growth. U.S. Cyber Command is a mature combatant command, and the U.S. Department of Defense is implementing a cyber strategy of "defend forward" and "persistent engagement" that intends to inhibit such illicit, cyber-enabled strategic gains by adversaries. policy implications• The U.S. has a second opportunity to use cyber strategy to shape China's rise while the Chinese economy is vulnerable. U.S. Cyber Command is now better aligned to the challenge of countering Chinese IP theft and has an improved capability to execute U.S. strategy. • China may still avoid long-term stagnation, but Xi Jinping's predilection for cyber-enabled IP theft for mitigating economic pressure currently gives the U.S. a strategic advantage. • By denying China's cyber-enabled IP theft, the U.S. could slow China's rise or, given its current state, potentially influence the country to backslide into enduring stagnation.

Cyber capabilities, whether used alone or in combination with other military tools, offer an opportunity to influence an adversary's decision-making. (Survival / SWP)

Systemic theories of international politics are inadequate for explaining particular states' policies, and some neorealists reach for supplementary foreign-policy-level concepts. Yet these studies almost never provide the empirical evidence required by their motivational constructs. Available psychological studies rely too heavily on notions peculiar to the cold war—such as the image of the enemy. A new theory proposes four additional ideal-type images. Each image is likely to lead to a specified set of strategic behaviors. An application to dyadic relations across the Persian Gulf from 1977 through 1990 suggests that this theory can help account for otherwise puzzling behavior, and it illustrates a promising route toward a more sensitive interactionist international relations theory suited both to the former superpower relationship and to diverse others.

In "Cyber Persistence Theory", Michael P. Fischerkeller, Emily O. Goldman, and Richard J. Harknett argue that this current theory only works well in the cyber strategic space of armed conflict but it is completely misaligned for conflict outside of war - where most state-sponsored adversarial cyber activity occurs. As they show, the reigning paradigm of deterrence theory cannot fully explain what is taking place with respect to cyber conflict. Therefore, the authors develop a novel approach to national cyber security strategy and policy that realigns theory and practice.