By Angelo Giuliano
The gloves are off. A major Western think-tank document lays out, in cold bureaucratic language, the real strategy driving today's conflicts. Published in 2023 by the RAND Corporation as Great-Power Competition and Conflict in the 21st Century Outside the Indo-Pacific and Europe, this report summarizes a four-volume series examining how the United States, China, and Russia compete for influence in secondary theaters—Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Research was completed in September 2021, before the full-scale war in Ukraine, and left unrevised. What it reveals is not abstract analysis. It is the operational logic of an empire determined to prevent a multipolar order in which it can no longer dictate terms.
This is the playbook for perpetual hybrid warfare aimed at China and every nation that chooses independent development. Energy strangulation, color revolutions, intelligence integration into foreign kill chains, and proxy bloodletting are presented as tools for managing competition. The stakes are the future of global power itself.
Energy as a weapon of mass coercion
The report explicitly references Chinese strategic assessments of external threats. One passage notes that the Iran nuclear issue "could touch off conflict between Iran and the United States and potentially threaten China's economic and energy relationship with Iran." This is not a side observation. It treats disruption of China's energy security as a foreseeable outcome of escalation in the Middle East.
China's industrial rise depends on stable resource flows. The document maps competition potential across countries and highlights how secondary theaters can become flashpoints precisely because of these interconnections. By examining influence-seeking in diplomatic, informational, military, and economic domains through a unique dataset of 16 variables, the authors identify where competition is most intense. Historical power centers receive the greatest attention. The implication is clear: pressure applied in the Middle East can raise costs for Beijing without requiring direct confrontation in the Indo-Pacific.
The same logic extends to other regions. Proxy pressures, sanctions, and instability around key producers keep supply vulnerable. Record profits for certain energy interests are secondary. The primary objective remains containment of the world's largest manufacturing economy and its expanding partnerships.
Ukraine and the expansion of involvement
Although the core research predates the 2022 invasion, the report situates ongoing great-power entanglement in third-country conflicts as already underway. It notes U.S. military aid flowing to Ukraine even before the full-scale war and discusses how involvement in secondary theaters can expand. Later institutional analyses have confirmed the pattern: intelligence sharing shifted from defensive support toward broader aims, integrating U.S. systems into operational targeting processes.
This evolution is consistent with the report's broader framing. Limited assistance becomes deeper integration. Red lines move as tactical opportunities appear. The stated defense of sovereignty sits alongside the practical imposition of costs on a competitor. Such campaigns generate data, create dependencies, and perfect methods that can be applied elsewhere—all while daily narratives keep public attention fixed on surface events.
Color Revolutions, information operations, and the assault on the Belt and Road
Chinese analysts' concerns are quoted and analyzed at length. The report states that these analysts "note concerns about proxy wars induced by color revolutions that are bolstered by support from Western powers against China." These revolutions are described as using "military containment, ideological subversion, and cultural infiltration" with the potential "to disrupt China's strategic layout along Belt and Road Initiative routes."
Information warfare receives equal attention. Western efforts to "subvert Chinese objectives through information warfare, such as pushing Western propaganda to sway pro-China decisionmakers, countries, and populations away from China" are presented as part of the assessed threat environment.
The Belt and Road is the strategic prize. By offering infrastructure, trade connectivity, and financing without traditional political conditionalities, it reduces dependence on older hierarchical systems. Destabilizing partner countries raises investment risks and creates openings for alternative influence. The report further notes the presence of hundreds of Uyghur fighters who joined the conflict in Syria, a minority linked to organizations operating in the Idlib region. China's approach is described as combining free-riding on Russian and Syrian efforts with prioritized intelligence collection and counterterrorism—while limiting direct military involvement.
These are not peripheral details. They form a coherent toolkit:
- Political and financial backing for opposition movements framed as organic uprisings
- Media and informational campaigns that reframe mutual development as predation
- Selective support that prolongs instability in BRI partner states
- Exploitation of extremist elements that can later threaten China's internal security
The authors measure competition potential across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, concluding that China's influence is rising while the United States remains the dominant military actor for now. Recommendations include maintaining expertise in secondary theaters, recognizing links between counterterrorism and great-power competition, strengthening ties in Latin America, and investing in mobility, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and special operations forces should conflict preparation become necessary.
The stakes could not be higher
This is a war against the future. A multipolar system in which nations trade, build, and decide their own paths threatens the hierarchical arrangements that have concentrated power for generations. China did not seek to police the globe. It refused to remain poor. That determination has accelerated the end of the unipolar moment more effectively than any military campaign.
The report's own findings acknowledge that competition is necessary but not sufficient for conflict, and that future involvement may differ from Cold War zero-sum patterns. Yet the practical orientation remains the defense of existing primacy through secondary-theater pressure. Energy disruption, color revolutions, and hybrid operations are the instruments.
Why this strategy faces structural defeat
Damage can still be inflicted. Costs can be raised. Temporary disruption remains possible. The fundamentals, however, have already shifted.
China leads in manufacturing scale, renewable deployment, and infrastructure delivery. Alternative trade and financial channels expand. Populations measure partnerships by electricity, transport, and employment—not by distant lectures. Energy coercion loses effectiveness as domestic capacity and renewables grow. Naval chokepoints retain power, yet overland corridors steadily erode monopoly control. Prolonged attrition drains the initiator as well as the target.
Most decisive is the reality that the majority of humanity lives outside the old centers of unilateral power. Their preference for multipolar arrangements is practical, not ideological. Treating that preference as a problem to be managed only accelerates the transformation underway.
The choice that remains
Confrontation produces instability and lost opportunity. Cooperation based on mutual respect and shared progress offers another path. A multipolar order does not demand the disappearance of any major power. It demands the end of the presumption that one capital holds permanent rights to police and punish independent development.
The RAND document makes the containment logic visible. The more clearly it is seen, the sharper the contrast becomes between a system of perpetual pressure and one of tangible development. Productive power has already moved. Political will across much of the world is following. The multipolar future is not a threat to be contained. It is the direction history has already taken.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Angelo Giuliano:
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