Let’s Stop Pretending Spying Is a Big Deal

When U.S. officials complained at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore early this month that a Chinese naval vessel had dangerously cut off a U.S. destroyer in international waters as it passed through the Taiwan Strait, China’s defense minister had a ready-made answer for how such hazards could best be avoided in the future.

“For China, we always say mind your own business, take good care of your own vessels, your fighter jets, take good care of your own territorial airspace and waters,” said Gen. Li Shangfu. “If that is the case, then I don’t think there will be future problems.”

The United States has long used the standard, internationally ratified definition of what constitutes “innocent passage” to justify sending warships through the territorial waters of many other nations, and, in the case of China, patrolling the seas close to the Chinese coast. The same has been true of U.S. military aircraft flying near China in international airspace.

For China, which in recent years has acquired ever more impressive means to push back with a powerful naval fleet and sophisticated air force of its own, the U.S. position amounts to what Beijing calls “hegemony of navigation,” by which it seems to mean taking maximal advantage of international rules that were largely conceived in the spirit of Western legal traditions and enacted during a long era of scarcely challenged Western power.

From the instant one looks more closely, though, things become more complicated. For one, China has ratified laws of the sea that it now complains about, and the United States, remarkably—and I am tempted to say to its shame—has not.

Furthermore, China frequently commits the very same acts that it objects to close to its shores. Most of these receive little international attention, such as sending warships into disputed waters around the Senkaku Islands, also claimed by Japan, or firing ballistic missiles into waters that form part of that country’s exclusive economic zone. The Chinese Navy has also trailed U.S. Navy vessels into seas close to Okinawa, Japan, where a Chinese submarine surfaced undetected near U.S. warships during drills there just to prove that it could. Chinese warships have also exercised the right of innocent passage close to U.S. shores.

For Americans, this shadow game has been powerfully brought home by two recent events. The first, which I would characterize as clumsy or ill-advised, involved the west-to-east transit of U.S. continental airspace by a Chinese balloon that reportedly carried sophisticated electronic signals-capturing equipment. One comedian joked aptly afterward that the Chinese could have at least painted the thing blue to blend in with the sky. The incident may have set U.S.-China relations back by at least half a year, prompting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his first official visit to Beijing at a time of badly needed high-level communication between the two countries. In fairness, there was also an incommensurate response by U.S. politicians and media, for which China serves as all-too-convenient bogeyman and foil. Lest one think this is a one-sided problem, this reality is strongly mirrored in China as well.

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Readers may be surprised for me to say that the second recent event along these lines is salutary. I’m speaking here of the reports that emerged last week that China has plans for or is already operating a major intelligence base in Cuba, an island that—as news stories have ritualistically reminded readers since the 1962 missile crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union—sits a mere 90 miles or so from Florida. In its most recent response to this revelation, the Biden administration has calmed the worst of the politicians’ predictable dudgeon by stating that China’s intelligence collection efforts this close to U.S. shores have been underway and known in Washington at least since 2019.

Here is why this is all a good thing: We would all do better—both Americans and Chinese—by dropping the pretense that only one side or the other, depending on one’s loyalties, gets up close and personal in collecting the other side’s electronic signals and other information. In fact, Li had it entirely wrong. In great-power competition, there has never been such a thing as minding one’s own business. It has never existed, and it is dangerous to pretend that we expect it to.

So long as China is not installing offensive weapons in Cuba, Beijing having a listening post on the island should be treated as a mundane development, just as the United States would like China to stop getting hot about U.S. ships sailing wherever they like in international waters or taking advantage of the permissive rules surrounding innocent passage. There is, of course, a law-of-the-jungle way of thinking about this: that what goes around comes around. But there is also a more thoughtful way of framing things that can perhaps do more to enhance the safety of all concerned.

The United States and China have a lot of work to do to codify their relationship in ways that produce fewer surprises and less chance of violent conflict. U.S. Senate ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea would be a good place to start, signaling at a minimum that Washington does not expect Beijing to be bound by rules that it has not formally adopted for itself.

Amid the present climate in Washington, where hostility and suspicion toward China come cheaply, one should not hold one’s breath. In the scheme of things, though, this would be a mere baby step. And the present climate in Beijing, which is equally inclement, makes getting what follows all the more difficult to imagine. But that doesn’t mean efforts toward these ends should be postponed or abandoned.

For one thing, the two countries need to come to an understanding about the development and future deployment of new nuclear weapons. China has been reluctant to engage on this for one obvious structural reason: The United States still possesses a far larger arsenal of deliverable and accurate hydrogen bombs. Yet it is in the interest of both parties to recognize, given the reality of the scale of annihilation that these systems can produce, that they have no practical use in warfare. Where this should incline the two countries is toward a mutually agreed, managed reduction in their stockpiles as well as shared rules and limits governing their delivery systems.

If the Soviet Union and the United States, which were fierce adversaries and often closer to war than Washington and Beijing have ever been over the last seven decades, were able to engage in fruitful nuclear arms control, this should provide confidence to the two sides about what they can accomplish together.

Other urgent domains await—areas where there is no gainsaying the technical and economic capacity of the world’s two most powerful countries and largest economies to innovate in military affairs to an exorbitant and possibly catastrophic extent. These, quickly stated, include the militarization of space and artificial intelligence. Both are manifestly areas where, once a race gets out of control, the idea of minding one’s own business will sound hopelessly quaint and naive.

China and the United States will inevitably compete more and more with each other across all domains and in almost every imaginable geography as the power differential between the two countries narrows. Of each side, this will require making less noise about the supposedly exceptional behavior of the other as the convergence of their efforts grows with each passing year. And the way to make that possible is to keep expanding the list of commonly agreed-upon rules.