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Notwithstanding the recent flurry of high-level diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, the warning signs are certainly there. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades. Notwithstanding some recent efforts to lure back skittish foreign investment, China is stockpiling fuel and food and trying to reduce the vulnerability of its economy to sanctions—steps one might take as conflict nears. Xi has said China must prepare for “worst-case and extreme scenarios” and be ready to withstand “high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” All of this comes as Beijing has become increasingly coercive (and occasionally violent) in dealings with its neighbors, including the Philippines, Japan, and India—and as it periodically advertises its ability to batter, blockade, and perhaps invade Taiwan.

China’s preparatory efforts to invade Taiwan are accelerating. The exercise for attacks on Taiwan, termed Joint Sword 2024A, is significant for the following reasons. First, the naming convention suggests there will be follow-on exercises such as Joint Sword 2024 B and C, which corresponds to the three elements of the Chinese military’s doctrine for an invasion of Taiwan, the Joint Fire Strike Campaign, or JFSC, Joint Anti-Air Raid Campaign, or JAARC, and the Joint Island Landing Campaign, known as JILC. The idea of follow-on exercises was also suggested by a Global Times commentator on May 23 to include a fourth, part D. This means that the pace of exercises is quickening in order to mask Beijing’s intentions and preparations for war. Second, unlike the previous Joint Sword in April 2023, which was four days in duration, 2024A is just two days, an indicator that the Central Military Commission and People’s Liberation Army are honing their skills and sharpening their command and control to bring all their power to bear in a shorter, more concentrated time frame. In essence, fulfilling this iteration of exercises will fulfill their stated goal of being able to conduct a “short, sharp war.” That matters, because if China believes it can win quickly and decisively, then the ability of Taiwan and partners like the United States to deter such an attack is weakened. In addition, the naming of specific training objectives and elements such as “joint sea-air combat-readiness patrol, joint seizure of comprehensive battlefield control, and joint precision strikes on key targets” adds credence to the thesis of the “short, sharp war” objective for the Chinese Communist Party and Central Military Commission. Third, and most obvious, the closure areas are much closer to Taiwan than they were in Joint Sword 2023 or even the August 2022 missile firing exercise. This time the Joint Sword 2024A closure areas are within Taiwan’s contiguous zones — 24 nautical miles. In addition, the Chinese coast guard was noted on May 23 sailing within the territorial waters of Taiwan’s offshore islands of Wuqui and Dongyin — as close as 2.8 nautical miles. By doing this, China is testing to see just how close to Taiwan it will be able to operate before generating a kinetic response from Taiwan, Japan or the U.S. This is invaluable information to obtain and will provide Beijing a great advantage if and when they decide to conduct an invasion. Fourth, the joint nature of these operations is notable. With the reports of Chinese Strategic Rocket Force missile batteries being out of garrison and conducting “mock fire strike” launches, the main emphasis of this two-day Joint Force-2024A is on “joint precision strikes on key targets,’’ again, what the Chinese military doctrinally calls the Joint Fire Strike Campaign. This was occurring while the other services (army, navy and air force) were engaged in “joint sea-air combat readiness patrols” and “joint seizure of comprehensive battlefield control.”

Tensions between China and Taiwan soared to new heights this week as Beijing deployed warplanes and naval vessels in a mock invasion of the island to demonstrate its anger and towards the new president in Taipei. The Chinese military openly said its two-day war games are designed to “test the [armed forces’] ability jointly seize power... and occupy key areas” around Taiwan and the island chains it controls. Xi Jinping is flexing his military muscles in an effort to intimidate the new Taiwanese leader Lai Ching-te, who used his first speech after being inaugurated on Monday to urge China to “accept the reality” of the self-governed island’s de facto independence. China views democratically-governed Taiwan as a breakaway province, while Mr Lai says only the Taiwanese people can decide their future. The escalation of China’s military activity around Taiwan is being watched with growing alarm from around the world, with neighbouring powers in the Asia-Pacific urging the two to maintain peace and stability. According to US intelligence, Chinese president Xi Jinping has instructed his country’s military to “be ready by 2027" to invade Taiwan. The 70-year-old autocrat has previously vowed to ensure Taiwan is “reunited” with the mainland during his time in power, and has also said the matter of the island’s future “cannot be passed on from generation to generation”. The CIA director William Burns has said the US must take Mr Xi’s desire to seize control of Taiwan “very seriously”, even if military conflict is not inevitable. “We do know, as has been made public, that president Xi has instructed the PLA, the Chinese military leadership, to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan, but that doesn’t mean that he’s decided to invade in 2027 or any other year as well,” Mr Burns said last year. Many analysts have drawn parallels between Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Mr Xi’s aspirations with Taiwan. For now, Mr Burns argued, Russia’s struggle to make meaningful headway in the war in Europe despite its numerical superiority may be acting as a deterrent to Beijing.

What does the DOD mean by “order?” In the field of international relations, the terms “revisionist state” and “status-quo state” are used to describe, respectively, countries that seek to change the current international system and those that uphold it. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the international system has been defined by American hegemony and the spread of Western liberal democracy rather than its challengers—notably, fascism and socialism. This is commonly referred to as the liberal world order.

Under that world order, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. It often intervenes in international conflicts at a high cost, thus keeping dissatisfied nations from overturning the system. The NDS, however, refers to a recent shift in the current world order with an observation that, “We are facing global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order.”

As China’s power has grown in recent years, so, too, has the risk of war with the United States. Under President Xi Jinping, China has increased its political and economic pressure on Taiwan and built military installations on coral reefs in the South China Sea, fueling Washington’s fears that Chinese expansionism will threaten U.S. allies and influence in the region. U.S. destroyers have transited the Taiwan Strait, to loud protests from Beijing. American policymakers have wondered aloud whether they should send an aircraft carrier through the strait as well. Chinese fighter jets have intercepted U.S. aircraft in the skies above the South China Sea. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has brought long-simmering economic disputes to a rolling boil. A war between the two countries remains unlikely, but the prospect of a military confrontation—resulting, for example, from a Chinese campaign against Taiwan—no longer seems as implausible as it once did. And the odds of such a confrontation going nuclear are higher than most policymakers and analysts think. Members of China’s strategic com­munity tend to dismiss such concerns. Likewise, U.S. studies of a potential war with China often exclude nuclear weapons from the analysis entirely, treating them as basically irrelevant to the course of a conflict. Asked about the issue in 2015, Dennis Blair, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, estimated the likelihood of a U.S.-Chinese nuclear crisis as “somewhere between nil and zero.” This assurance is misguided. If deployed against China, the Pentagon’s preferred style of conventional warfare would be a potential recipe for nuclear escalation. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ signature approach to war has been simple: punch deep into enemy territory in order to rapidly knock out the opponent’s key military assets at minimal cost. But the Pentagon developed this formula in wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia, none of which was a nuclear power. China, by contrast, not only has nuclear weapons; it has also intermingled them with its conventional military forces, making it difficult to attack one without attacking the other. This means that a major U.S. military campaign targeting China’s conventional forces would likely also threaten its nuclear arsenal. Faced with such a threat, Chinese leaders could decide to use their nuclear weapons while they were still able to. As U.S. and Chinese leaders navigate a relationship fraught with mutual suspicion, they must come to grips with the fact that a conventional war could skid into a nuclear confrontation. Although this risk is not high in absolute terms, its consequences for the region and the world would be devastating. As long as the United States and China continue to pursue their current grand strategies, the risk is likely to endure. This means that leaders on both sides should dispense with the illusion that they can easily fight a limited war. They should focus instead on managing or resolving the political, economic, and military tensions that might lead to a conflict in the first place. A NEW KIND OF THREAT There are some reasons for optimism. For one, China has long stood out for its nonaggressive nuclear doctrine. After its first nuclear test, in 1964, China largely avoided the Cold War arms race, building a much smaller and simpler nuclear arsenal than its resources would have allowed. Chinese leaders have consistently characterized nuclear weapons as useful only for deterring nuclear aggression and coercion. Historically, this narrow purpose required only a handful of nuclear weapons that could ensure Chinese retaliation in the event of an attack. To this day, China maintains a “no first use” pledge, promising that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. The prospect of a nuclear conflict can also seem like a relic of the Cold War. Back then, the United States and its allies lived in fear of a Warsaw Pact offensive rapidly overrunning Europe. NATO stood ready to use nuclear weapons first to stalemate such an attack. Both Washington and Moscow also consistently worried that their nuclear forces could be taken out in a bolt-from-the-blue nuclear strike by the other side. This mutual fear increased the risk that one superpower might rush to launch in the erroneous belief that it was already under attack. Initially, the danger of unauthorized strikes also loomed large. In the 1950s, lax safety procedures for U.S. nuclear weapons stationed on NATO soil, as well as minimal civilian oversight of U.S. military commanders, raised a serious risk that nuclear escalation could have occurred without explicit orders from the U.S. president. The good news is that these Cold War worries have little bearing on U.S.-Chinese relations today. Neither country could rapidly overrun the other’s territory in a conventional war. Neither seems worried about a nuclear bolt from the blue. And civilian political control of nuclear weapons is relatively strong in both countries. What remains, in theory, is the comforting logic of mutual deterrence: in a war between two nuclear powers, neither side will launch a nuclear strike for fear that its enemy will respond in kind. The bad news is that one other trigger remains: a conventional war that threatens China’s nuclear arsenal. Conventional forces can threaten nuclear forces in ways that generate pressures to escalate—especially when ever more capable U.S. conventional forces face adversaries with relatively small and fragile nuclear arsenals, such as China. If U.S. operations endangered or damaged China’s nuclear forces, Chinese leaders might come to think that Washington had aims beyond winning the conventional war—that it might be seeking to disable or destroy China’s nuclear arsenal outright, perhaps as a prelude to regime change. In the fog of war, Beijing might reluctantly conclude that limited nuclear escalation—an initial strike small enough that it could avoid full-scale U.S. retaliation—was a viable option to defend itself. STRAIT SHOOTERS The most worrisome flash point for a U.S.-Chinese war is Taiwan. Beijing’s long-term objective of reunifying the island with mainland China is clearly in conflict with Washington’s longstanding desire to maintain the status quo in the strait. It is not difficult to imagine how this might lead to war. For example, China could decide that the political or military window for regaining control over the island was closing and launch an attack, using air and naval forces to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bombard the island. Although U.S. law does not require Washington to intervene in such a scenario, the Taiwan Relations Act states that the United States will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” Were Washington to intervene on Taipei’s behalf, the world’s sole superpower and its rising competitor would find themselves in the first great-power war of the twenty-first century. In the course of such a war, U.S. conventional military operations would likely threaten, disable, or outright eliminate some Chinese nuclear capabilities—whether doing so was Washington’s stated objective or not. In fact, if the United States engaged in the style of warfare it has practiced over the last 30 years, this outcome would be all but guaranteed. Consider submarine warfare. China could use its conventionally armed attack submarines to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bomb the island, or to attack U.S. and allied forces in the region. If that happened, the U.S. Navy would almost certainly undertake an antisubmarine campaign, which would likely threaten China’s “boomers,” the four nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines that form its naval nuclear deterrent. China’s conventionally armed and nuclear-armed submarines share the same shore-based communications system; a U.S. attack on these transmitters would thus not only disrupt the activities of China’s attack submarine force but also cut off its boomers from contact with Beijing, leaving Chinese leaders unsure of the fate of their naval nuclear force. In addition, nuclear ballistic missile submarines depend on attack submarines for protection, just as lumbering bomber aircraft rely on nimble fighter jets. If the United States started sinking Chinese attack submarines, it would be sinking the very force that protects China’s ballistic missile submarines, leaving the latter dramatically more vulnerable. Even more dangerous, U.S. forces hunting Chinese attack submarines could inadvertently sink a Chinese boomer instead. After all, at least some Chinese attack submarines might be escorting ballistic missile submarines, especially in wartime, when China might flush its boomers from their ports and try to send them within range of the continental United States. Since correctly identifying targets remains one of the trickiest challenges of undersea warfare, a U.S. submarine crew might come within shooting range of a Chinese submarine without being sure of its type, especially in a crowded, noisy environment like the Taiwan Strait. Platitudes about caution are easy in peacetime. In wartime, when Chinese attack submarines might already have launched deadly strikes, the U.S. crew might decide to shoot first and ask questions later. Adding to China’s sense of vulnerability, the small size of its nuclear-armed submarine force means that just two such incidents would eliminate half of its sea-based deterrent. Meanwhile, any Chinese boomers that escaped this fate would likely be cut off from communication with onshore commanders, left without an escort force, and unable to return to destroyed ports. If that happened, China would essentially have no naval nuclear deterrent. The situation is similar onshore, where any U.S. military campaign would have to contend with China’s growing land-based conventional ballistic missile force. Much of this force is within range of Taiwan, ready to launch ballistic missiles against the island or at any allies coming to its aid. Once again, U.S. victory would hinge on the ability to degrade this conventional ballistic missile force. And once again, it would be virtually impossible to do so while leaving China’s nuclear ballistic missile force unscathed. Chinese conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles are often attached to the same base headquarters, meaning that they likely share transportation and supply networks, patrol routes, and other supporting infrastructure. It is also possible that they share some command-and-control networks, or that the United States would be unable to distinguish between the conventional and nuclear networks even if they were physically separate. To add to the challenge, some of China’s ballistic missiles can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead, and the two versions are virtually indistinguishable to U.S. aerial surveillance. In a war, targeting the conventional variants would likely mean destroying some nuclear ones in the process. Furthermore, sending manned aircraft to attack Chinese missile launch sites and bases would require at least partial control of the airspace over China, which in turn would require weakening Chinese air defenses. But degrading China’s coastal air defense network in order to fight a conventional war would also leave much of its nuclear force without protection. Once China was under attack, its leaders might come to fear that even intercontinental ballistic missiles located deep in the country’s interior were vulnerable. For years, observers have pointed to the U.S. military’s failed attempts to locate and destroy Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1990–91 Gulf War as evidence that mobile missiles are virtually impervious to attack. Therefore, the thinking goes, China could retain a nuclear deterrent no matter what harm U.S. forces inflicted on its coastal areas. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles are larger and less mobile than the Iraqi Scuds were, and they are harder to move without detection. The United States is also likely to have been tracking them much more closely in peacetime. As a result, China is unlikely to view a failed Scud hunt in Iraq nearly 30 years ago as reassurance that its residual nuclear force is safe today, especially during an ongoing, high-intensity conventional war. China’s vehement criticism of a U.S. regional missile defense system designed to guard against a potential North Korean attack already reflects these latent fears. Beijing’s worry is that this system could help Washington block the handful of missiles China might launch in the aftermath of a U.S. attack on its arsenal. That sort of campaign might seem much more plausible in Beijing’s eyes if a conventional war had already begun to seriously undermine other parts of China’s nuclear deterrent. It does not help that China’s real-time awareness of the state of its forces would probably be limited, since blinding the adversary is a standard part of the U.S. military playbook. Put simply, the favored U.S. strategy to ensure a conventional victory would likely endanger much of China’s nuclear arsenal in the process, at sea and on land. Whether the United States actually intended to target all of China’s nuclear weapons would be incidental. All that would matter is that Chinese leaders would consider them threatened. LESSONS FROM THE PAST At that point, the question becomes, How will China react? Will it practice restraint and uphold the “no first use” pledge once its nuclear forces appear to be under attack? Or will it use those weapons while it still can, gambling that limited escalation will either halt the U.S. campaign or intimidate Washington into backing down? Chinese writings and statements remain deliberately ambiguous on this point. It is unclear which exact set of capabilities China considers part of its core nuclear deterrent and which it considers less crucial. For example, if China already recognizes that its sea-based nuclear deterrent is relatively small and weak, then losing some of its ballistic missile submarines in a war might not prompt any radical discontinuity in its calculus. The danger lies in wartime developments that could shift China’s assumptions about U.S. intentions. If Beijing interprets the erosion of its sea- and land-based nuclear forces as a deliberate effort to destroy its nuclear deterrent, or perhaps even as a prelude to a nuclear attack, it might see limited nuclear escalation as a way to force an end to the conflict. For example, China could use nuclear weapons to instantaneously destroy the U.S. air bases that posed the biggest threat to its arsenal. It could also launch a nuclear strike with no direct military purpose—on an unpopulated area or at sea—as a way to signal that the United States had crossed a redline.

In the days that followed, China also sent nuclear-capable H-6 heavy bombers across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a previously respected informal boundary between China and that island. Worse yet, state-owned media displayed images of Dongfeng-17 (DF-17) hypersonic ballistic missiles, also believed capable of carrying nuclear weapons, being moved into positions off Taiwan.

Washington has not overtly deployed nuclear-capable weaponry in such a brazen fashion near Chinese territory, but it certainly has sent aircraft carriers and guided-missile warships into the area, signaling its ability to launch attacks on the mainland should a war break out. While Pelosi was in Taiwan, for example, the Navy deployed the carrier USS Ronald Reagan with its flotilla of escort vessels in nearby waters. Military officials in both countries are all too aware that should such ships ever attack Chinese territory, those DF-15s and DF-17s would be let loose against them—and, if armed with nuclear warheads, would likely provoke a US nuclear response.

As William Wohlforth has noted, American primacy and activism acted as a powerful deterrent to great-power conflict by creating enormous disincentives for Russia, China, or other actors to incur the “focused enmity” of the United States.11 The persistence and even extension of the U.S. security blanket smothered potential instability in unsettled regions such as Eastern Europe, while removing any possibility of German or Japanese revanchism—a prospect much feared in the early 1990s—by keeping those countries tightly lashed to Washington. American intervention helped extinguish bloody conflicts in the Balkans before they could spread to neighboring countries; U.S. diplomatic and military pressure kept aggressive tyrannies such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea bottled up and helped slow the spread of nuclear weapons. U.S. support helped democratic forces triumph in countries from Haiti to Poland, as the number of democracies rose from 76 in 1990 to 120 in 2000;

Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions, and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,” supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails, and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold War era.¶ The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history.¶ Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers.¶ Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military power into the Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military relationships in regions as remote as Latin America?¶ Likewise, China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38¶ These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come.¶ The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of power has shifted so markedly that the postwar international system cannot be sustained. Yet that moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy should be not to hasten it by giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as possible. Rather than simply acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building, America should aggressively bolster its defenses, with an eye to preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable achievements.

The United States and its allies have failed to prevent Russia from brutalizing Ukraine, but they can still win the larger struggle to save the international order. Russia’s savage invasion has exposed the gap between Western countries’ soaring liberal aspirations and the paltry resources they have devoted to defend them. The United States has declared great-power competition on Moscow and Beijing but has so far failed to summon the money, the creativity, or the urgency necessary to prevail in those rivalries. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has now inadvertently done the United States and its allies a tremendous favor. In shocking them out of their complacency, he has given them a historic opportunity to regroup and reload for an era of intense competition—not just with Russia but also with China—and, ultimately, to rebuild an international order that just recently looked to be headed for collapse.

This isn’t fantasy: it has happened before. In the late 1940s, the West was entering a previous period of great-power competition but had not made the investments or initiatives needed to win it. U.S. defense spending was pathetically inadequate, NATO existed only on paper, and neither Japan nor West Germany had been reintegrated into the free world. The Communist bloc seemed to have the momentum. Then, in June 1950, an instance of unprovoked authoritarian aggression—the Korean War—revolutionized Western politics and laid the foundation for a successful containment strategy. The policies that won the Cold War and thereby made the modern liberal international order were products of an unexpected hot war. The catastrophe in Ukraine could play a similar role today.

Such costs might be acceptable in exchange for peace and security. But spheres of influence during the Cold War did not prevent the Soviets from repeatedly testing American redlines in Berlin, causing high-stakes crises in which nuclear war was a real possibility. Nor did those spheres prevent the two sides from competing sharply, and sometimes violently, throughout the “Third World.” Throughout history, spheres-of-influence settlements, from the Thirty Years’ Peace between Athens and Sparta to the Peace of Amiens between the United Kingdom and Napoleonic France have often ended, sooner or later, in war. The idea that spheres of influence are a formula for peace rests on assumptions that often go unexamined: that revisionist powers are driven primarily by insecurity, that their grievances are limited and can be easily satisfied, that the truly vital interests of competing powers do not conflict, and that creative statecraft can therefore fashion an enduring, mutually acceptable equilibrium. The trouble is that these premises don’t always hold. Ideology and the quest for greatness—not simply insecurity—often drive great powers. Rising states are continually tempted to renegotiate previous bargains once they have the power to do so. Offering concessions to a revisionist state may simply convince it that the existing order is fragile and can be tested further. Conceding a sphere of influence to a great-power challenger might not produce stability but simply give that challenger a better position from which to realize its ambitions. Consider the situation in the western Pacific. The most minimal Chinese sphere of influence would surely include Taiwan. Yet if Taiwan became a platform for Chinese military capabilities, the defense of other U.S. allies in the region, such as Japan and the Philippines, would become vastly more difficult. Nor would such a concession likely satisfy Chinese ambitions. A growing body of literature by scholars such as Toshi Yoshihara, James Holmes, Liza Tobin, and Elizabeth Economy suggests that China desires at the very least to push the United States beyond the chain of islands running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines. Even a limited Chinese sphere in the western Pacific would serve as a springboard to this larger objective. Meanwhile, the United States will have sacrificed a number of critical advantages by pulling out. A free Taiwan offers proof that Chinese culture and democracy are not incompatible; subjugating Taiwan would also allow Beijing to remove this ideological threat. Worse still, the United States would lose the edge that comes from being the only great power without significant security hazards near its borders. It was only after the United States achieved dominance in the Western Hemisphere that it could project power globally. Russia and China, by contrast, still have to deal with U.S. allies, partners, and military presences in their own backyards—a circumstance that diverts resources they might otherwise use to pursue more distant ambitions and compete with the United States at a truly global scale.

RING OF FIRE Eurasia has often been a deathtrap for aspiring hegemons: there are too many nearby enemies that can make common cause with offshore superpowers. For almost 40 years, a rising China avoided strategic encirclement by downplaying its global ambitions and maintaining friendly relations with the United States. But that period is over. As Beijing has become more aggressive in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and elsewhere, it has engendered hostility nearly all around. Over the past five years, the United States has abandoned engagement and embraced neo-containment. Washington has carried out its largest naval and missile expansion in a generation, imposed its most aggressive tariffs since World War II, and implemented its tightest restrictions on foreign investment since the Cold War—all directed at China. Arms sales and military support to frontline states have increased; U.S. technological sanctions are threatening to destroy Huawei and other Chinese firms. In 2021, China’s deputy foreign minister complained that “a whole-of-government and whole-of-society campaign is being waged to bring China down.” The United States’ turn against China has contributed to a broader backlash against Beijing’s power. In Northeast Asia, Taiwan has become more determined than ever to maintain its de facto independence, and the government has approved a bold new defense strategy that could make the island extremely hard to conquer. Japan has agreed to cooperate closely with the United States to fend off Chinese aggression in the region. Through its own belligerence, Beijing has given the U.S.-Japanese alliance an explicitly anti-China cast. The countries around the South China Sea are also starting to hedge against China. Vietnam is acquiring mobile shore-based missiles, Russian attack submarines, new fighter aircraft, and surface ships armed with advanced cruise missiles. Singapore has quietly become a significant U.S. military partner. Indonesia increased its defense spending 20 percent in 2020 and another 21 percent in 2021. Even the Philippines, which courted China for most of President Rodrigo Duterte’s term, is now reiterating its claims in the South China Sea and ramping up air and naval patrols. China’s ambitions are provoking a response beyond East Asia, too, from Australia to India to Europe. Everywhere Beijing is pushing, a growing cast of rivals is pushing back. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—a strategic partnership that includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—has emerged as a focal point of anti-China cooperation among the most powerful democracies in the Indo-Pacific. The new AUKUS (Australia–United Kingdom–United States) alliance unites the core of the Anglosphere against Beijing. The United States is forging overlapping mini-coalitions to ensure that advanced democracies stay ahead in key technologies, while the G-7 and NATO are staking out tougher positions on Taiwan and other issues. To be sure, counter-China cooperation remains a work in progress, because many countries still rely on trade with Beijing. But these interlocking partnerships could eventually form a noose around Beijing’s neck. FLAMING OUT China is a risen power, not a rising one: it has acquired formidable geopolitical capabilities, but its best days are behind it. That distinction matters, because China has staked out vaulting ambitions and now may not be able to achieve them without drastic action. The CCP aims to reclaim Taiwan, dominate the western Pacific, and spread its influence around the globe. Xi has declared that China seeks a “future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.” Yet that dream is starting to slip away, as growth slows and China faces an increasingly hostile world.

norm to its former allies and enemies aftermath the second world war that led to the formation of the current liberal economic world order provides an explanation as to why in spite of US’ relative decline there is continuity for America’s liberal economic order. The rising challenger China can be considered to have been socialized – it has accepted US led international norms, and participates in various International Organizations. Thus, it makes less sense for China to wage war against the hegemon whose ideals it has internalized. According to this theory, a hegemon creates a stable international economic order characterized by market openness but its decline results in global instability. This hegemonic effect of open trade benefits all participants, especially, weaker states that do not have any burden of public goods. In this sense, global economic stability is born out of hegemony and provides provision of collective public goods and in doing so facilitates a stable international system. The motivation to create an economic openness lie in the interest of the hegemon – it has the largest economy and so benefits most from open markets. In addition, only hegemons have the material capability (political and military) to provide public goods and induce other states to embrace open trade. By virtue of the Hegemonic Stability Theory, the hegemon is an important element in creation and maintenance of the international system. As stated earlier, open trade benefits all participants, even the rising challengers that are accommodated in the system. In contemporary world politics, China is the fastest rising power and it is also reaping the benefits of the open economic order created by the US. By participating in the globalized economy, China has earned a comparative advantage in labor-market and its economy has been growing. On top of that China is an export-based economy and thus, it has very little incentive to jeopardize this benefit by engaging with the hegemon and thereby disrupting the order. In his article, Artur Stein has argued that decline in hegemony does not bring about a complete collapse of the trade regime as long as hegemonic power is committed to economic openness. Taking these two points in consideration, it can be argued that it is not in the interest of China to challenge US hegemony. On account, likelihood of war is averted.

Surely, the same principle applies in the realm of nations. Our world teems with violent regimes and vicious men. And something precious—our notion of peace, sovereignty, liberty, civilization itself—sits exposed to all that danger. In a world where might makes right, the only thing that keeps the peace, defends our sovereignty and liberty, and upholds civilization is the willingness to use our resources to keep the dangers at bay. Yet too many policymakers disregard the wisdom of military deterrence, and too many people of faith forget that the aim of deterrence is, by definition, to prevent wars, not start them. Some people of faith oppose the threat of military force, let alone the use of military force, because of Christ’s message of peace. This is understandable in the abstract, but we must keep in mind two truths. First, governments are held to a different standard than individuals, and hence are expected to do certain things individuals aren’t expected to do—and arguably shouldn’t do certain things individuals should do. For example, a government that turned the other cheek when attacked would be conquered by its foes, leaving countless innocents defenseless. A government that put away the sword—that neglected its defenses—would invite aggression, thus jeopardizing its people. Second, all uses of force are not the same. The sheriff who uses force to apprehend a murderer is decidedly different from the criminal who uses force to commit a murder. The policemen posted outside a sporting event to deter violence are decidedly different from those who plot violence. Moral relativism is anything but a virtue. Some lament the fact that we live in such a violent world, but that’s precisely the point. Because we live in a violent world, governments must take steps to deter those who can be deterred—and neutralize those who cannot. In this regard, it pays to recall that Jesus had sterner words for scholars and scribes than He did for soldiers. In fact, when a centurion asked Jesus for help, He didn’t admonish the military commander to put down his sword. Instead, He commended him for his faith.[i] “Even in the Gospels,” soldier-scholar Ralph Peters reminds us, “it is assumed that soldiers are, however regrettably, necessary.”[ii] They are necessary not only for waging war but, preferably, for maintaining peace. It’s a paradoxical truth that military readiness can keep the peace. The Romans had a phrase for it: Si vis pacem, para bellum. “If you wish for peace, prepare for war.” President George Washington put it more genteelly: “There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy.” Or, in the same way, “We infinitely desire peace,” President Theodore Roosevelt declared. “And the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.” After the West gambled civilization’s very existence in the 1920s and 1930s on hopes that war could somehow be outlawed, the men who crafted the blueprint for waging the Cold War returned to peace through strength. Winston Churchill proposed “defense through deterrents.” President Harry Truman called NATO “an integrated international force whose object is to maintain peace through strength…we devoutly pray that our present course of action will succeed and maintain peace without war.”[iii] President Dwight Eisenhower explained, “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk its own destruction.” President John Kennedy vowed to “strengthen our military power to the point where no aggressor will dare attack.” And President Ronald Reagan steered the Cold War to a peaceful end by noting, “None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong.” Reagan also argued, “Our military strength is a prerequisite for peace.”[iv] Even so, arms alone aren’t enough to deter war. After all, the great powers were armed to the teeth in 1914. But since they weren’t clear about their intentions and treaty commitments, a small crisis on the fringes of Europe mushroomed into a global war. Neither is clarity alone enough to deter war. After all, President Woodrow Wilson’s admonitions to the Kaiser were clear, but America lacked the military strength at the onset of war to make those words matter and thus deter German aggression. In other words, America was unable to deter. “The purpose of a deterrence force is to create a set of conditions that would cause an adversary to conclude that the cost of any particular act against the United States of America or her allies is far higher than the potential benefit of that act,” explains Gen. Kevin Chilton, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command. It is a “cost-benefit calculus.”[v] So, given the anemic state of America’s military before 1917, the Kaiser calculated that the benefits of attacking U.S. ships and trying to lure Mexico into an alliance outweighed the costs. That proved to be a grave miscalculation. In order for the adversary not to miscalculate, a few factors must hold. First, consequences must be clear, which was not the case on the eve of World War I. Critics of deterrence often cite World War I to argue that arms races trigger wars. But if it were that simple, then a) there wouldn’t have been a World War II, since the Allies allowed their arsenals to atrophy after 1918, and b) there would have been a World War III, since Washington and Moscow engaged in an unprecedented arms race. The reality is that miscalculation lit the fuse of World War I. The antidote, as alluded to above, is strength plus clarity. A second important factor to avoid miscalculation: The adversary must be rational, which means it can grasp and fear consequences. Fear is an essential ingredient of deterrence. It pays to recall that deterrence comes from the Latin dēterreō: “to frighten off.”[vi] Of course, as Churchill conceded, “The deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics.”[vii] Mass-murderers masquerading as holy men and death-wish dictators may be immune from deterrence. (The secondary benefit of the peace-through-strength model is that it equips those who embrace it with the capacity to defeat these sorts of enemies rapidly and return to the status quo ante.) Third, the consequences of military confrontation must be credible and tangible, which was the case during most of the Cold War. Not only did Washington and Moscow construct vast military arsenals to deter one another; they were clear about their treaty commitments and about the consequences of any threat to those commitments. Recall how Eisenhower answered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s boast about the Red Army’s overwhelming conventional advantage in Germany: “If you attack us in Germany,” the steely American commander-in-chief fired back, “there will be nothing conventional about our response.”[viii] Eisenhower’s words were unambiguously clear, and unlike Wilson, he wielded the military strength to give them credibility. Discussing military deterrence in the context of Christianity may seem incongruent to some readers. But for a pair of reasons it is not. First, deterrence is not just a matter of GDPs and geopolitics. In fact, scripture often uses the language of deterrence and preparedness. For example, in the first chapter of Numbers the Lord directs Moses and Aaron to count “all the men in Israel who are twenty years old or more and able to serve in the army.” This ancient selective-service system is a form of military readiness. Similarly, I Chronicles 27 provides detail about the Israelites’ massive standing army: twelve divisions of 24,000 men each. II Chronicles 17 explains the military preparations made by King Jehoshaphat of Judah, a king highly revered for his piety, who built forts, maintained armories in strategically located cities “with large supplies” and fielded an army of more than a million men “armed for battle.” Not surprisingly, “the fear of the Lord fell on all the kingdoms of the lands surrounding Judah, so that they did not go to war against Jehoshaphat.” In the New Testament, Paul writes in Romans 13 that “Rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong…Rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.” Again, this is the language of deterrence. Those who follow the law within a country and who respect codes of conduct between countries have nothing to fear. Those who don’t have much to fear. Likewise, to explain the importance of calculating the costs of following Him, Jesus asks in Luke 14, “What king would go to war against another king without first sitting down to consider whether his 10,000 soldiers could go up against the 20,000 coming against him? And if he didn’t think he could win, he would send a representative to discuss terms of peace while his enemy was still a long way off.” In a sense, both kings are wise—one because he recognizes that he’s outnumbered; the other because he makes sure that he’s not. Put another way, both kings subscribe to peace through strength. Again, as with the Centurion earlier, Jesus could have rebuked the martial character of these kings, but he did not. This is not just description but commendation. We ignore their example at our peril. Secondly, it is not incongruent if we understand military deterrence as a means to prevent great-power war—the kind that kills by the millions, the kind humanity has not endured for seven decades. We know we will not experience the biblical notion of peace—of shalom, peace with harmony and justice—until Christ returns to make all things new. In the interim, in a broken world, the alternatives to peace through strength leave much to be desired: peace through hope, peace through violence, or peace through submission. But these options are inadequate. The sheer destructiveness and totality of great-power war testify that crossing our fingers and hoping for peace is not a Christian option. Wishful thinking, romanticizing reality, is the surest way to invite what Churchill called “temptations to a trial of strength.” Moreover, the likelihood that the next great-power war would involve multiple nuclear-weapons states means that it could end civilization. Therefore, a posture that leaves peer adversaries doubting the West’s capabilities and resolve—thus inviting miscalculation—is not only unsound, but immoral and inhumane—unchristian. “Deterrence of war is more humanitarian than anything,” Gen. Park Yong Ok, a longtime South Korean military official, argues. “If we fail to deter war, a tremendous number of civilians will be killed.”[ix] Peace through violence has been tried throughout history. Pharaoh, Caesar and Genghis Khan, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all attained a kind of peace by employing brutal forms of violence. However, this is not the kind of “peace” under which God’s crowning creation can flourish; neither would the world long tolerate such a scorched-earth “peace.” This option, too, the Christian rejects. Finally, the civilized world could bring about peace simply by not resisting the enemies of civilization—by not blunting the Islamic State’s blitzkrieg of Iraq; by not defending the 38th Parallel; by not standing up to Beijing’s land-grab in the South China Sea or Moscow’s bullying of the Baltics or al-Qaeda’s death creed; by not having armies or, for that matter, police. As Reagan said, “There’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.”[x] The world has tried these alternatives to peace through strength, and the outcomes have been disastrous. After World War I, Western powers disarmed and convinced themselves they had waged the war to end all wars. By 1938, as Churchill concluded after Munich, the Allies had been “reduced…from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we never cared to think about it.”[xi] Like predators in the wilderness, the Axis powers sensed weakness and attacked. In October 1945—not three months after the Missouri steamed into Tokyo Bay—Gen. George Marshall decried the “disintegration not only of the Armed Forces, but apparently…all conception of world responsibility,” warily asking, “Are we already, at this early date, inviting that same international disrespect that prevailed before this war?”[xii] Stalin answered Marshall’s question by gobbling up half of Europe, blockading Berlin, and arming Kim Il-Sung in patient preparation for the invasion of South Korea.[xiii] The U.S. military had taken up positions in Korea in 1945, but withdrew all combat forces in 1949.[xiv] Then, in 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that Japan, Alaska and the Philippines fell within America’s “defensive perimeter.”[xv] Korea didn’t. Stalin noticed. Without a U.S. deterrent in place, Stalin gave Kim a green light to invade. Washington then reversed course and rushed American forces back into Korea, and the Korean peninsula plunged into one of the most ferocious wars in history. The cost of miscalculation in Washington and Moscow: 38,000 Americans, 103,250 South Korean troops, 316,000 North Korean troops, 422,000 Chinese troops and 2 million civilian casualties.[xvi] The North Korean tyranny— now under command of Kim’s grandson—still dreams of conquering South Korea. The difference between 2015 and 1950 is that tens of thousands of battle-ready U.S. and ROK troops are stationed on the border. They’ve been there every day since 1953. The lesson of history is that waging war is far more costly than maintaining a military capable of deterring war. As Washington observed, “Timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it.” Just compare military allocations, as a percentage of GDP, during times of war and times of peace: In the eight years before entering World War I, the United States devoted an average of 0.7 percent of GDP to defense; during the war, U.S. defense spending spiked to 16.1 percent of GDP. In the decade before entering World War II, the United States spent an average of 1.1 percent of GDP on defense; during the war, the U.S. diverted an average of 27 percent of GDP to the military annually. During the Cold War, Washington spent an average of 7 percent of GDP on defense to deter Moscow; it worked. Yet it seems we have forgotten those hard-learned lessons. In his book The World America Made, Robert Kagan explains how “America’s most important role has been to dampen and deter the normal tendencies of other great powers to compete and jostle with one another in ways that historically have led to war.” This role has depended on America’s military might. “There is no better recipe for great-power peace,” Kagan concludes, “than certainty about who holds the upper hand.”[xvii]

Ultimately, however, we concluded that the United States has a strong interest in precluding the emergence of another bipolar world—as in the Cold War—or a world of many great powers, as existed before the two world wars. Multipolarity led to two world wars and bipolarity resulted in a protracted worldwide struggle with the risk of nuclear annihilation. To avoid a return such circumstances, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ultimately agreed that our objective must be to prevent a hostile power to dominate a “critical region,” which would give it the resources, industrial capabilities and population to pose a global challenge. This insight has guided U.S. defense policy throughout the post–Cold War era.

Giving major powers the green light to establish spheres of influence would produce a multipolar world and risk the return of war between the major powers. Without a stabilizing U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf and U.S. relationships with Jordan and the Gulf States, Iran could shut down oil shipments in its supposed sphere of influence. A similar scenario in fact played out during the 1987 “tanker war” of the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually escalated into a direct military conflict between the United States and Iran. Iran’s nuclear program makes these scenarios even more dangerous.

The post-1945 world order – written into international law, ratified by the United Nations, and kept in place by the balance of nuclear terror among major powers – is hanging by a thread. The United States is divided against itself and stretched to the limits of its capabilities. Europe is waking up to the possibility that, come November, America may no longer fulfill its collective-defense obligations under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Faced with this new uncertainty, Europe is cranking up its defense production, and European politicians are screwing up the courage to persuade their electorates that they will need to ante up 2% of their GDP to guarantee their own safety.

The Western alliance doesn’t just face the challenge of doubling down on defense while maintaining unity across the Atlantic. It also now faces an “axis of resistance” that might be tempted to threaten Western hegemony with a simultaneous, coordinated challenge. The lynchpin of this axis is the Russia-China “no-limits” partnership. While the Chinese supply the Russians with advanced circuitry for their weapons systems, Russian President Vladimir Putin ships them cheap oil. Together they have imposed autocratic rule over most of Eurasia.

Bryson already accepts part of framing of the narrative of roboethics, where a discussion to consider the ontological status of robots in relation to rights is legitimate in principle. Our position is that the entire discussion is completely misguided. At best, robot ethics debates are First World philosophical musings, too disengaged from actual affairs of humans in the real world. In the worst case, it may contain bad faith — the white, male academic’s diminutive characterization of actually oppressed people and their fight for rights, by appealing to ‘reason’.

2 A SUMMARY OF OUR ARGUMENT

The long history of struggles for legal recognition by marginalised human groups reveals the degree to which rights and personhood were always reluctantly and incompletely conceded. A wide range of critical scholarship exposes the fact that the gradual historical expansion of the legal categories of rights-bearers carries with it an entirely predictable set of marginalisations. And while contemporary marginalised human subjects (women, children, indigenous people, refugees, climate migrants etc.) stand in more complex relation to law’s inclusion, neither the universal human of human rights, nor the legal person, have ever cast off a centripetal tendency towards an intrinsically Eurocentric construct prioritising the putatively rational, property owning, white male. Such a centripetal tendency is evident in the fact that all ‘others’ to this trope—including indigenous peoples—and ‘nature’ itself—are complexly objectified, and feminised, and cannot form central case instances of the human legal person.

These archetypal conceptual patterns and their material expressions of power are also firmly embedded in constructs of international legal personhood. Koskenniemi argues that ‘the international doctrine of State sovereignty bears an obvious resemblance to the domestic-liberal doctrine of individual liberty’, while Nijman argues that the ‘individual and the collective (e.g. the state) Self are (philosophically) intertwined [and that t]his is self-evident as the individualist, subjectivist perspective has marked the deep structure of international law’—including, of course, the structure of international legal personhood. The state is, in many senses, the individual writ large—a continuity that comes as no surprise, notwithstanding the importance of rejecting a reductive equivalence between the sovereign state and the individual. Despite complexities and distinctions, a range of scholarship makes clear the fact that the ultimate subject of all forms of law is the privileged, ‘rational’, white male template central to Eurocentric law, politics, economics and philosophy.

Redefining standards of patentability and patentable subject matter, to leave essential medicines enabled by AI outside the scope of the patent system will increase access by ensuring a competitive market, which will drive prices down. In this model, non-essential medicines will still be entitled to patent protection, provided that the invention satisfies existing requirements for patent eligibility. Innovating companies will similarly be entitled to patent protection if they can demonstrate that their R&D processes do not rely on AI systems. The reform will be accompanied by a ten-year transition period where an otherwise ineligible essential medicine will be entitled to patent protection if (i) documentation from the FDA shows it to be more effective than alternative products in the market, or (ii) if the innovating company demonstrates the associated R&D costs to be considerably higher than industry average. The first exception will aid in directing R&D efforts to inventions with potential for more social value. Under the second exception, innovating companies investing heavily in their R&D processes, such as those developing in-house AI systems, will be entitled to patent protection for both essential and non-essential medicines. Through these exceptions, the new system will retain some of the incentives available under the current regime for a period of ten years. This transition period will allow for observation of the new system and for adjustment of its application if necessary.

Whatever their theoretical basis, trade secret laws confer an exclusive right on the possessor of valuable information not generally known to or readily ascertainable by competitors. 69 This is the hallmark of an IP right. Both patents and copyrights confer similar rights to prevent use by others on the developers of new and valuable information. In so doing, it is generally acknowledged that patents and copyrights serve a utilitarian purpose – the grant of that legal control encourages the development of new and valuable information by offering the prospect of supracompetitive returns, returns possible only if the developer does not face competition by others who use the same idea. In so doing, patents and copyrights avoid the risk of underinvestment inherent with public goods, which are more costly to invent than to imitate once invented.70

Trade secrecy has the same effect. It gives the developer of new and valuable information the right to restrict others from using it, and therefore the prospect of deriving supracompetitive profits from the information.71 This may be true of business as well as technical secrets, since some protection for business ideas helps insure a first mover advantage for those who take risks on untested business models. 72 True, the right of exclusion in trade secret law is not absolute. The trade secret owner cannot sue someone who develops the idea independently, or who reverse engineers a product on the open market to learn the secret. 73 But the same is true of copyright law. 74 A right to exclude does not have to be absolute to be effective in rewarding and therefore encouraging innovation. It need merely provide sufficient advantage in terms of lead time or relative costs to minimize or eliminate the public goods problem.

Lemley, Mark A., The Surprising Virtues of Treating Trade Secrets as IP Rights (June 1, 2008). Stanford Law Review, Vol. 61, p. 311, 2008, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 358, Available at SSRN:

In this article, I suggest that trade secrets can be justified as a form, not of traditional property, but of intellectual property (IP). The incentive justification for encouraging new inventions is straightforward. Granting legal protection for those new inventions not only encourages their creation, but enables an inventor to sell her idea. And while we have other laws that encourage inventions, notably patent law, trade secrecy offers some significant advantages for inventors over patent protection. It is cheaper and quicker to obtain, since it doesn’t require government approval, and it extends to protection of types of business and process information that likely wouldn’t be patentable.