EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — At a moment when competition with China tops the list of concerns for the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), the man in charge at the National Intelligence Council (NIC) happens to have spent the better part of three decades working on East Asia, and much of that time on China in particular. Michael Collins began his intelligence career as an East Asia analyst and later served as Deputy Director of the CIA’s East Asian Pacific Mission Center, and Chief Strategy Officer of the agency.
As acting Chair of the NIC, Collins runs an institution tasked with producing the regular National Intelligence Estimates and the IC’s Global Trends Report, which is issued every four years.
As Collins has said, the NIC is “the lead producer of the U.S. intelligence community’s overall analytic view of issue in the world,” and the chief liaison between the IC and American policy makers.
Collins spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski at the recently-concluded 2024 Threat Conference in Sea Island, Georgia, about the myriad threats posed by China, how best to approach them, and the long-term challenges facing the U.S.-China relationship.
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Nagorski: You have a long background in East Asia, going back more than 30 years. Could you reflect for a moment on the changes in the U.S.-China relationship, and the China threat, between then and now?
Collins: I joined the intel community around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War. China still focuses today on what happened to the Soviet Union and what went wrong – what they believe Gorbachev did wrong. It permeates their ideology today.
They went through the Tiananmen Square [uprising in 1989] at that time, and there were voices that said maybe we should try something different as well. But ultimately the CCP, the Communist Party of China, said No, we're going to double down. During that period, looking at the East Asian theater, more people were worried about Japan becoming the economic powerhouse and taking over Asia. With China, we had to worry about it potentially collapsing or falling apart to some degree.
When I reflect back over that period, comparing then to today, the China challenge is not just regional. It's certainly not just Taiwan anymore. It's not just military, and it's not just security in the narrow sense. It's global, it's geopolitical and it's expansive across all domains.
Nagorski: And it's a giant inbox for you and everybody in the China space. How does the National Intelligence Council treat and manage all those challenges? Are there some that worry you more than the others?
Collins: I've learned long ago that we can't just keep jumping from one crisis to another. We've got to maintain a disciplined focus, in three categories of national security challenges to the United States.
There is the great power competition and the threats that we see from China and – increasingly – from its assembly of friends in the authoritarian world that are coming together in some very significant ways to challenge the United States and our partners.
Nagorski: Is that what you call it? The “Assembly of Friends?”
Collins: I just made that up.
Nagorski: It's better than ”Axis of Authoritarians.”
Collins: Their “Assembly of Authoritarian Partners” – we'll call it that.
Then there's this block of what we call transnational threats, the threats that exist across time and space to all of us in the global commons: health security, the pandemic – COVID was a clear example – terrorism, drugs, and crime.
And then the last is the rest of the world. The United States is a major power for a reason, and we have to maintain watch therefore over everything else that's going on in the world. And these things all intersect.
At its core, what we see increasingly is the systems threat from the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. It's a threat to the global system, the global order that we put in place decades ago, that has allowed the United States and arguably the rest of the world to deal with all forms of these conflicts in a relatively peaceful way.
We got through the Cold War in part because of that system. And I think that's the way to understand the significance of what this China, this CCP, under this leader, means today. And I'm emphasizing those words – it's really important to me to be careful about the terms we use when we talk about a threat. It's not China per se, and it's certainly not Chinese people themselves. It's this China, under this Communist Party of China and in particular, under this leader, Xi Jinping, that is bringing about the threats to this system that I talk about.
Nagorski: You mentioned the Cold War. Are we back in a Cold War – this time with China? If so, what's different about this one?
Collins: The Cold War involved a nation looking to contest what the United States stood for, and the power and the strength we have in the world, using the power it had at its disposal, but without a hot conflict. And I would submit that today, there are useful comparisons between those two.
They're different in some important ways. And if it's not a “Cold War,” maybe it is more inherently a “great power competition” or “systems competition.”
There's something at a higher level that I worry about in this competition. China has a huge economy. China has a techno-economic engine that the Soviet Union never had. China has a story, a powerful story, as you look at what's happening with democracy around the world with those authoritarian compatriots, who are also looking for a different way to influence their own polities domestically.
China has that assembly of partners, friends that the Soviet Union didn't have as much of during the Cold War. And this competition is inherently more troublesome, because I take Xi Jinping in his word. Just look at his writings and what he says. He has said he wants China to be the preeminent power, not just in East Asia, but central to a reordered global system under Chinese characteristics.
That is a zero-sum view of rivalry and competition in the world. And so I think we should take that seriously and understand where that's going, and what that means. At its core, he's doubling down on a state-directed Marxist-Leninist view of the world as opposed to one that opens up and moderates with the external community. Whether it's economically or politically, he's choosing a course that is inherently in competition and in conflict with the things we stand for.
So I think it's more severe, more complex, even if not as militarized, as the original Cold War. China is learning on any given day to compete with us in an increasing array of arteries, to challenge us and contest us, to undermine us without actually going to war, taking advantage of new techniques, new devices, and even proxies around the globe to do so.
Nagorski: I want to pick up on a couple of phrases I’ve heard you use. One is “narrative warfare.” Is China beating us in the “narrative warfare,” and if so, how do we respond?
Collins: One of the things that I see as one of our greatest assets, and at the same time one of the things that worries me the most, is about truth.
On any given day, we know that a lie proliferates across the internet 75% faster than something that's true. Something that's true is boring, but something that's fantastical resonates around the world. And so the conversation about misinformation and disinformation – without question, of all the different phenomena that exist in international affairs, that's the one that bothers me the most. Because at its core, what we're talking about is the ability of an adversary to tell a different story without the same degree of accountability or standards controlling what their approach is to the truth – or the lack thereof.
And we're in a tough spot, because our adversaries live in that world. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Xi Jinping, [Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei, [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un, they all depend on their populations believing something that is simply untrue.
Nagorski: Is there not also a subtler version of this? For example, in Africa and other places, China puts out issues of newspapers or they take over local media and publish China-friendly content. That's not as duplicitous or nefarious, but they're good at that too, right?
Collins: Yes. So we have to have our A game and be proactive in formulating and ensuring that the standards we hold dear permeate around the globe. It’s not a coincidence that China has more influence in many areas around the world, in the Global South, this collection of states that are struggling to find a third way between not choosing between the West and East.
Where there's an absence of a free press, where there's an absence of an independent judiciary, where there's an absence of legitimate law, where there's a prevalence of corruption, China and Russia tend to have an advantage over us. And so I worry about that, in areas where these things don’t exist.
Nagorski: Another term you’ve used is “objective empathy.” You’ve said you want to have a hard line towards China, but you don't want to poke China in the eye. Talk about what you mean by “objective empathy” in this regard.
Collins: What I mean by the term objectively empathetic is, I don't necessarily agree with the designs they may have, but I have to be empathetic, to sit in their shoes and understand what they're trying to accomplish.
So if a leader is trying to affirm the strength of a monopolistic party that doesn't give its people the freedom to express their views, or to achieve the national rejuvenation that they think they should rightfully achieve, that leader potentially is going to be more sensitive and insecure when that is being challenged in some ways. To understand what's driving or motivating the heads of our adversarial states, therefore, we have to understand them as politicians, what's most important to them, what keeps them up most at night internally, and put ourselves in a position to understand how the United States and our partners respond to that in a more dispassionate way.
In many cases, this means being careful about how we respond, so that we don't force them to be in a bind with their domestic polities, in some way that puts them in a box. I think that's one of the potentially most challenging issues that the United States is going to have to wrestle with in the years ahead, in particular in China. China is showing some weaknesses. Its economy is not doing well, money is leaving China, it's never left China before. People are leaving China like they've never left China before. The straight-line forecasts on any given quarter or year show some questioning about where they're going.
They've made some hard choices. And I use that word because they did have choices – about locking in with Russia, and in so doing awakening Europe to what the China challenge might be. And frankly, their approach to COVID. With all due respect, at the end of the day, it was more important to the CCP to maintain a narrative about that issue and who's in control in a zero-sum way, than to cooperate with the rest of the world and figure out what the heck was going on so we could save the lives of human beings.
Nagorski: Are those economic challenges and those missteps potentially a good thing for the United States?
Collins: Strategically, let them double down in some way on the approach they're kind of taking or double down on their “assembly of friends,” if you will, for whatever that buys them. When you put that pie chart together and look at the strength and the power of the industrialized democracies in the world, it's an interesting balance to think through.
But we have to be mindful – per my point about objective empathy – about what the story is that that leader now has to respond to. If it looks like that he's not going to be able to achieve something or that somebody's rubbing it in his eyes in such a way that they're losing the control of the narrative – and nationalism is still very strong in the PRC – that could become another potential driver of instability and potentially even conflict.
Nagorski: Let’s look down the road. The NIC does some very down-the-road thinking, as of course the Chinese are famous for doing so. I believe you have an outlook for the year 2045. What are some potential 2045 China outcomes?
Collins: When you put all these pieces together and you look at the state of the global order, the global system, there are certain things that will matter all the more. The private sector is in this game all the more. That will be a critical feature. It's no longer just about nation states determining where the future geopolitical order will go.
Narrative warfare, and who gets ahead of this race for A.I., in determining not just one's ability to leverage it and proliferate it, but getting ahead of and correcting when the falsehoods are made – those are big questions. And where that balance of innovation strength will lie, between [China’s] ecosystem and our ecosystem. I'm an optimist in believing that in any country around the world, there is disagreement, there is dissonance, and we can't just pretend to think that just because there isn't a Tiananmen happening on the streets of Beijing, that the population of China is saluting, with faith, at the Communist Party.
If I were the leadership of China, I’d want to know, "Where's my population? Where are they really bought in?" We're looking at these system alignments, as the authoritarian states are looking to come more together among themselves. We could be drifting into a more bifurcated global systems construct for a period of time.
And then at the end of the day, there will be hopefully an objective analysis about which system is stronger than the other. The threat to the United States is not China, and it's not Chinese people. I think about that scientist, that engineer, that entrepreneur in China who just wants to be good at solving cancer or solving a hard problem. Where do they want to go to school? Where do they want to study?
We talk about things like A.I., the importance of us being truly objective and investigative in the analysis we do. It's easy to say that China's eating our lunch in various things. But when you really unpack where private money is going, whose patents, whose references are being cited by others and where the patent owners or holders went to school, including engineers in China, it's not that close. Now, that's not to say it can't change.
But I'll close with being optimistic here. I think there is room for debate and study to surface disagreement between our systems, and in so doing perhaps bring about a moderation in our adversary's predisposition, while at the same time we still hold true to the principles that keep us strong as opposed to us sacrificing those ideals to accommodate.
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