The TikTok threat to democracies is partly self-inflicted. The source of the danger is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) party-state’s strategy relative to ours. We can change that disadvantage with better strategy.
TikTok is just one symptom of authoritarian fascism, a historically recrudescent disease. Democracies have defeated fascism in the past and can defeat its PRC version today. To do that we need a more proactive strategy than “when deterrence of lethal conflict fails.”
Our predicament with TikTok is that the PRC has an effective strategy for achieving influence and power. This competition is not going away. Competitors will exploit our vulnerabilities and develop innovative ways and means to achieve their ends, so we must strive for a better strategy.
To begin with, a realistic strategy must consider TikTok et al., not just TikTok. Authoritarian regimes compete and wage warfare by any means, including the information provided by private companies. We know that TikTok must give the Communist Party of China (CPC) any information the CPC demands.
In a densely interconnected global information environment, democracies must compete in the information arena. Many people gloss over what “information” is and use it interchangeably with “data,” so let’s define it.
Better Strategy Puts “Information” in the Lead
Information is data assigned meaning in context. That’s been the U.S. joint military doctrine since last September, but we still fixate on kinetic warfare as if it’s separate from the competition continuum.
In contrast to that idyllic belief, armed lethal conflict is part of the competition continuum and shaped by the terms of cooperation, confrontation, coop-frontation, and the many forms of “armed” conflict. Not least of which is autocratic regimes’ ability to weaponize information.
Information is what changes behavior, so we need to compete with influence more effectively.
The PRC is waging warfare with a more effective strategy prioritizing information effects. It employs information, directly and indirectly, through proxies like TikTok, even though some proxies try to resist the party-state’s control. The basic idea is to control what people think.
So, it’s more accurate and practical to distinguish between the PRC and China rather than referring to “China” as a nation-state. The reason is that the PRC does not represent the populace of “China.” Instead, the PRC is the authoritarian party-state that controls the people of China.
Once we recognize the breadth of PRC competition as warfare—domestically and globally—we can compete and, when appropriate, wage warfare in kind against it.
Better Strategy Accounts for Competition and Warfare
If we aren’t willing to respond to threats in kind, we’ll continue to fall short of the PRC’s broader strategy. Granted, it’s hard for a democracy to muster a broadly coherent strategy. If we continue to take Easy Street to strategy, we’ll fail to compete against the PRC’s broad approach to warfare.
Instead, when deterrence of lethal warfare fails, we’ll consider waging warfare. We regard warfare narrowly as physical and deadly, period. Just look at our armed services’ dominant identities, and it’s obvious.
Warfare is physical and lethal, but it’s not just physical and lethal. Adversaries achieve wartime effects by competing with weaponized information that attacks a continuum of targets, from democratic elections to critical infrastructure. Information-based psychological warfare has been around for a long time, but it’s not regarded as “real warfare” by the dominant warfighting identities that prevail in our armed forces.
Our dominant warfighting identities have not adjusted to the reality of information warfare. They perpetuate deficient national defense and security strategies in two hugely significant ways.
Two Deficiencies in US Strategy
- Nuclear Deterrence Requires More Than Coercion, but We Only Consider Coercion as Effective.
The National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy emphasize nuclear deterrence by coercion. Why is this a problem? Since one actor can cause nuclear-triggered planetary chilling greater than the Ice Age, nuclear deterrence and compellence by denial and punishment (“coercion theory”) are unacceptably risky nuclear strategies. Mutual assured destruction (MAD), the basis for nuclear deterrence, becomes unilateral.
The risk of one actor causing a nuclear winter threatens life and livelihood on a global scale. As more actors acquire nuclear weapons, our coercive strategy is less likely to deter or compel the behavior we want. It certainly has not prevented nuclear proliferation.
2. Competitors Wage Lethal and Non-Lethal Information Warfare, but We Only Consider Physical Lethal Warfare as Real Warfare.
Competitors freely wage non-lethal and indirectly lethal information warfare. How? Their concepts of influence subsume denial and punishment with eight forms of influence on will and capability: deny, punish, intimidate, neutralize, assure, enhance, demonstrate, and exercise. Their effects subsume coercion with eight effects: coerce, compel, induce, persuade, defend, deter, secure, and dissuade. This broad strategy circumvents our narrow conception of warfare as brute force.
When we fixate on denial and punishment to coercively deter and compel adversaries, innovative competitors can achieve their wartime aims in other ways. We don’t regard indirect lethal warfare, the kind being waged by China, Russia, and Iran with relative impunity, as warfare.
Compared to combined effect influence, coercion theory is riskier and less effective.
Better Strategy is Broad, not Narrow
Coercion Theory’s “when deterrence of armed conflict fails” strategy is too narrow and too late to defeat broad threats. Compare it to our “pacing competitor’s” (“China”) strategy.
The PRC’s strategy includes proxy-enabled theft of critical information and outright seizure of disputed territories by maritime construction. Both examples shape favorable PRC conditions for kinetic warfare, too. Systematic disinformation leads the way.
Democracies deal with disinformation by competing with domestic accountability. The rule of law exposes disinformation. The catch for this strategy is that the same U.S. Constitutional checks and balances that establish the basis for representative government also permit change, but slowly.
In contrast, the PRC competes and governs by authoritarian rules it makes without domestic accountability. It’s a one-party authoritarian state. That authoritarian-democracy strategy gap puts democracies at a disadvantage as long as we fail to influence the PRC through China. That’s the PRC’s domestic audience. Where does that, and our “when deterrence fails” approach to warfare, leave us?
Better Strategy Recognizes the Need to Compete Broadly
Short of hoping that the Communist Party of China (CPC) will embrace democratic change, our strategic imperative is to out-compete TikTok and other organizations subject to authoritarian influence. Maybe an American company will buy TikTok. If that happens, the CPC will replace that proxy with another one.
A ban on TikTok also misses the practicality of having to compete with the PRC as it is. We ensure we’re mired in eternal debates over what constitutes acceptable information by censoring TikTok propaganda. Censorship may be desirable or unavoidable, but it distracts us from competing with authoritarian systems while protecting our democratic values. We must compete in kind, accountably.
In contrast, the PRC party-state exploits TikTok and other privately owned enterprises as instruments to achieve advantageous combined effects with negligible domestic accountability. Byte-dance owns TikTok. Both are nonstate-owned companies whose executives have suffered imprisonment, disappearance, and murder by CPC operatives. Compliant courts back this up.
The evidence that TikTok is a national security threat to the United States is overwhelming. This is particularly true from the perspective of the PRC’s standards of national security threats. The authoritarian regime does not permit foreign-owned companies or its citizens free speech. U.S. standards are different and strike a balance between freedom of expression and collective responsibility. So, what’s the PRC’s strategy?
The CPC’s Strategy is to Retain Domestic Influence by Displacing U.S. Power
The CPC’s goal is to displace U.S. power in Asia and globally, as manifested in many “national rejuvenation” talks, programs, and Party initiatives. The exceptionalist effort justifies a systematic propaganda campaign that blames foreign imperialism for the PRC’s problems—everything from foreign clothing to democratic ideals.
Combined Effect
In terms of combined effects, the PRC is deterring U.S. intervention in its internal affairs, including Taiwan, by compelling the U.S. to comply with authoritarian practices, coercing U.S. military forces out of striking distance from China, persuading American citizens of China’s benign intent, and inducing American citizens to buy Chinese products.
What Democracies Can Do to Create Better Strategy
Here are three recommendations for democracies to defeat authoritarians.
1. Train AI to Recognize Better Strategy
Train your AI to recognize that strategy as compellent deterrence, coercive persuasion, and inducement (Cp Dt Cr Pr In). Better yet, train it to identify all eight combinable, discrete effects: compellence, deterrence, coercion, defense, persuasion, dissuasion, inducement, and security. Then, query the A.I. to produce alternative strategies. Doing this expands your options.
2. Consider All Possible Combined Effects, not just Coercion
Compare compellent deterrence and coercive persuasion and inducement (Cp Dt Cr Pr In) to coercion theory’s only alternatives to brute force: coercive deterrence and coercive compellence (Cr Dt Cp). If this is too hard, sign up for Kineviz’s Graph X.R. or Insight X.R., and let that A.I. do it.
In addition to those two Cold War legacy types of coercion, we must recognize more combined effects. Compellent deterrence (Cp Dt) shows that deterrence can be psychologically compellent, not just physically coercive, as coercion theory posits. Moreover, coercive persuasion and inducement (Cr Pr In) show that coercion can be more than deterrent and compellent.
Coercion can be persuasive and inducing, too, not just deterrent and compellent. Why does that matter?
Both coercive persuasion and inducement are perceived as cooperative instead of confrontational). This means the PRC’s combined effects can freely (by democracies’ standards, not the PRC’s) exploit our naive “when deterrence of armed conflict fails” approach to warfare.
Indeed, the ways and means of the CPC’s national rejuvenation campaign include Party-controlled modernization with dis, mis- and mal-information in the lead. How can we compete with that and not lose our democracy?
The I.E. is stuffed with more-than-military force. We have to recognize that. We must see “force” as including, but more than, lethal or kinetic energy. Ultimately, it’s information that influences behavior.
Influencing behavior is effective. Recall that information is data assigned meaning in context. People act on perceived meaning. Given democracies’ “when deterrence of armed conflict fails’ approach to warfare, we can develop a better strategy by defining “force” broadly enough to account for all its forms.
3. Specify “Force” in Terms of Effects
Force causes effects, and it’s generally considered to be confrontational, not cooperative. It changes a status quo. Crucially for strategy, there are more types of force than kinetic and deadly, like psychological.
To appreciate this, let’s consider just the causative effects of a combined effect influence strategy.
In order of confrontational and cooperative effects, those four effects are coerce, compel, induce, and persuade. Let’s include what the definition of each effect does not include, too, because that is crucial to assessment. Assessing effects must include disproving claims, not just “proving” them with selective evidence.
The Four Causative Effects
Coerce
1. “Coerce” is causative, physical, and confrontational. Therefore, it includes tangible trade sanctions, like cutting off energy supplies. It does not include non-physical force, like polarizing disinformation that incites social unrest.
Compel
2. “Compel” is causative-psychological-confrontational, including threatening to impose sanctions or withdraw incentives and using disinformation to generate unrest. However, it does not involve applying tangible sanctions or incentives (coercion and inducement, respectively).
Induce
3. “Induce” is causative, physical, and cooperative, including tangible financial incentives such as favorable loan conditions. So, it doesn’t include malformation to mislead an audience.
Persuade
4. “Persuade” is causative-psychological-cooperative, including offering to withdraw sanctions and grant incentives. However, it does not include applying tangible sanctions or incentives (coercion and inducement, respectively).
By defining these effects in falsifiable terms, we can better assess them. We’ll know when they happen and when they don’t, and then we can combine them and assess those effects.
One critical issue in defining these effects is nth-order effects (first, second, third, etc.). For instance, we don’t consider an activity that produces polarizing information (example 1 above) as physical “coercion” even though it can cause physical social unrest as a second-order effect. We need discrete definitions of effects to combine them in an assessable way, but we also must also consider their nth-order effects.
With those considerations in mind, defining “Force” in terms of effects can expand our options to compete and wage warfare against threats that do both by any expedient ends, ways, and means.
Try this drill for the preventive effects: defend, deter, secure, and dissuade. Then, combine the preventive and causative effects. Compare their concepts of influence with coercion theory’s coercion via denial or punishment.
The better strategy unveils more options. Authoritarian adversaries already do this as a matter of course, but generative AI does it in ways we don’t always understand.
