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Paul Heer served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015, a period of immense change both within China and in the U.S.’s perception of China. The position capped a long career as a CIA analyst focused on East Asia, during which he also earned a PhD in diplomatic history, with a focus on George Kennan’s role in formulating East Asia policy during the early Cold War. He’s now a distinguished fellow at the Center for the National Interest, where he writes and speaks frequently on the U.S.’s China strategy – particularly its blind spots and misperceptions. The interview has been lightly condensed for length and clarity.

Q: You joined the CIA as an analyst straight out of graduate school. Is there anything you wish you’d known back then about the nature of intelligence work?

A: Not so much about the nature of intelligence work – I guess I had a sense of that. What I wish I had known was more about how policymakers think and how they receive and interpret intelligence. It took me a while over my career, only recognizing over time and through extended interactions with policymakers, that you have to be attentive as an intelligence analyst to their political considerations and recognizing what their assumptions and policy objectives are. Because intelligence, and intelligence analysis in particular, is only useful when it serves policymakers’ priorities and needs. As a junior analyst I certainly didn’t know that much about what those were, but I knew less about how to interact with that. I wish that at the beginning of my career I had somehow been endowed with an understanding of the difference between how intelligence analysts think and how policymakers think. Because their brains do function on different levels.

Over the course of your career, how did you see those assumptions and goals change for policymakers focused on China? 

That gets very much into the profound debate about how perceptions of China have changed over the last thirty to forty years and how U.S. policy objectives have been adjusted on the basis of those changes. It actually gets into the debate about whether engagement was a mistake. I came into the intelligence community in the mid to late 1980s, when the engagement process was getting underway. It depends how you want to date that — a lot of folks date engagement with China to the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, but as a historian I would date it back to the Nixon opening: That was the starting gun for U.S. engagement with China based on strategic reasons. 

There’s a large body of analysis and commentary that says engagement was a mistake because it was based on false assumptions that it would lead somehow to the liberalization of China. This is an unresolved and perpetual debate, but that’s a false judgment. I wasn’t a policymaker at the time, but as I mentioned, I became aware of some of the assumptions and preferences in the policy community. It was always the hope that engagement with China would lead to its internal liberalization. But my view as a historian, even if you go back to Nixon, is that the primary goal of engagement was not necessarily to change China internally — we recognized there were limits on our ability to do that — but to change its international behavior. It was a strategic calculation. Over time, it succeeded more than it has been given credit for. 

In the last decade or so some folks have been surprised and frustrated by the implications of that success. Yes, our engagement with China has facilitated its exponential economic growth where it now possesses wealth and power that rivals ours. And that is a profound challenge that we have to deal with. But the alternative of not engaging with China was not going to serve U.S. interests over the long term. The judgment that it failed because it didn’t liberalize China — my own view is that it hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded yet. It’s going to take a lot more time and attention and commitment than we thought to push China in a different direction. 

The fact that the Chinese are still afraid of engagement, the fact that the CCP still fears that goal – if you look at Document Number 9 [a 2012 Chinese Communist Party communique warning of the danger of liberal Western values like “universal values” and “civil society”], there’s been a lot of analysis about how the Chinese fear what they call “peaceful evolution” for a generation now, and the idea that the U.S. is trying to promote a color revolution in China. And in fact there have been data points emanating from the U.S. side that have at least corroborated Chinese perceptions in that regard. Frankly the Trump administration, some of their senior officials said things that basically supported the notion that we should encourage the Chinese people to overthrow their government.

Engagement seems to be a dirty word, a politically incorrect word, but I don’t see how you have a relationship with the other most consequential power in the world without some kind of diplomatic and across-the-board interaction with it.

My view is that it’s a long-term proposition, and if we think that China is incapable over the long term of liberalizing, to me that raises the question as to whether we’ve lost confidence in the power of our own model. Engagement has not eliminated China as a profound strategic challenge, but it’s left us in a better place arguably than not engaging over the last thirty plus years would have left us. Engagement seems to be a dirty word, a politically incorrect word, but I don’t see how you have a relationship with the other most consequential power in the world without some kind of diplomatic and across-the-board interaction with it. I’m unembarrassed in my advocacy for that. We have to deal with China and the way to deal with it is to engage with it. There’s a separate debate about what the balance between cooperation and competition should be in that process.

You served as National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for East Asia during a particularly consequential stretch of that change, both within China and in U.S. perceptions — from the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics to the middle of Xi’s first term. When you were in that role, what was striking you most about that period? What were you noticing?

There’s a broader question underlying that: how did this process evolve? The prevailing narrative that addresses that period is that we’re dealing with a China that has become more assertive and more aggressive under the leadership of Xi Jinping. I was the NIO during this period when the global financial crisis occurred, and the historical narrative that’s prevalent now is that China perceived the crisis as the great opening for them, the opportunity to start scoring points against the U.S. There’s some truth to that because it did reinforce China’s perception of the relative balance of power trending in their favor. The relative speed and success with which China, as opposed to the U.S., recovered from the financial crisis fueled this notion that’s prevalent in Chinese diplomacy now, that their model was shown to be effective, and the Western model of capitalist democracy has flaws, some self-inflicted. When you ask what policymakers were asking us about at the time, one of the questions was and remains, why are the Chinese becoming so assertive? It’s partly because of that perceived opportunity to start scoring points against a U.S. that was in relative decline. But that’s a one-dimensional characterization, especially when it’s attributed to the shift of Xi Jinping’s leadership. In the wake of the Party Congress, Xi Jinping’s personality and personal history seem to be the source of all Chinese foreign policy and domestic policy. But that overlooks a more complex equation, and more emphatically it overlooks an interactive dynamic between China and the U.S. 

Yes, it’s true the Chinese saw opportunities to be more assertive and take advantage of their rise in wealth and power, but there were a whole series of other developments that were happening, from the Chinese perspective in particular, in the external security environment that reinforced in Beijing not just an opportunity to be more assertive but a perceived need to be more assertive. This was also the time period of the Obama administration’s pivot to East Asia. The Chinese genuinely saw challenges to their interests, their security, and their sovereignty. This was the period of escalating tensions in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and even on the Korean Peninsula in the wake of the death of Kim Jong-Il. So the defensive and reactive component of Chinese behavior is often overlooked in the characterization of that period.

And on the other side of the equation — and this is where I would really emphasize the interactive part of the dynamic — you had shifts in and involving the U.S. that reinforced both perceived needs and opportunities here. The pivot was initiated in response to a perceived opportunity in Washington to push back against Chinese behavior, and there were very rational reasons for doing that. And it was based on a perception at the time that the U.S. still had relative leverage and balance of power in its favor. We were in a position to, and needed to, push back against China. 

This was the same period starting ten or twelve years ago, the evolution of what we see now – what it’s fair to say is the dysfunction of American politics, and global perceptions of the U.S. as being less capable of focusing on the international equation. There’s been some rescue from that given the boldness of the U.S.-led response to the war in Ukraine. But the underlying issue, it seems to me, is there is a growing sense of vulnerability and weakness in the U.S. foreign policy psyche. Some of this is obviously fueled by the same thing the Chinese perceive: the implications and consequences of the global financial crisis. As an historian you can make the argument that the U.S. is in relative strategic decline, and I emphasize relative because it’s not absolute, we’re still a greater power by every measure than China, but the relative trajectories of the two countries are a fundamental driver of this interactive dynamic. This sense of vulnerability of America, even if it’s unspoken, has led to an exaggeration of threat perceptions about China. As an analyst of China, it really reinforces what is a generally inaccurate characterization of what China’s strategic intentions and ambitions toward the U.S. really are. 

My bottom line here is that there is very much an interactive dynamic, really a classic security dilemma, that’s driving the direction of this relationship. It started to become apparent during the period you asked about because of a whole series of global and regional developments.

Our strategy is “invest, align, compete.” We will invest in our nation’s competitiveness, innovation, and democracy, we will align our efforts with allies and partners, and we will compete with China to defend our interests and build our vision for the future. pic.twitter.com/z4ttf1wrYW

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) May 27, 2022

So with this narrowing space for engagement, what should the U.S. be doing now? Is it just getting our own house in order, or are there moves internationally that you think would help halt the death spiral of the relationship?

The Biden administration has addressed this pretty effectively in some regards. Of course we have to get our house in order. If we’re going to be competitive against China internationally we have to be prepared to compete, and there’s a lot of getting our house in order that needs to be done. It’s in the National Security Strategy and also in Tony Blinken’s China speech back in May – [which] said invest, align, and compete. Those all make good sense. We need to invest in our capability to compete, make our model more competitive. We need to align with partners internationally who share our concerns about China. And again, in any of this I don’t want to minimize the extent to which we need to be concerned about China: we face a profound and unprecedented challenge from China, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, because it brings a lot more to strategic competition than the Soviet Union was ever able to muster during the Cold War. There are plenty of U.S. allies and partners who agree with us on that. So “align” needs to be a core element of it.

And compete. We have to be more competitive across the board. One of my core caveats is that we need to compete based on a more accurate understanding of what we’re competing for and about and with. The idea that our goal is to win the future doesn’t address those questions. It presumes that this is a zero sum, winner-take-all contest between two existential ideological rivals and that’s part of the overstatement and oversimplification of the whole thing. 

I don’t think the Chinese are trying to replace the current international order with a Sino-centric one. They’re trying to pursue multipolarity and international legitimacy for their system, not impose it on other countries.

The other thing I would say is that we can’t just compete. Yes, there is a competition here, but because there are limits on American power, because we’re in a different historical era than we were in the Cold War — it’s not 1945 anymore, it’s not even 1991 anymore. I’m a strong proponent that there needs to be an equal element of cooperation in this relationship. We need to find a way to be able to cooperate with China not just because of the multiple transnational challenges that require the U.S. and China to find some modus vivendi, but because of the whole basket of long-standing bilateral issues that we need to cooperate on. 

One of my concerns about the Biden administration’s narrative is that if we establish some guardrails and keep the lines of communication open, that’s the way to start. We need to do more than just keep the lines of commutation open. We cannot subordinate cooperation to this overemphasis on strategic competition. In fact, the National Security Strategy says explicitly that we will avoid the temptation to view this exclusively through the prism of strategic competition — but there’s very little in that document that escapes that prism. And there’s a very interesting little passage that says, we need to find the differences and challenges that coexist between cooperation and competition. The National Security Strategy vaguely acknowledges that dilemma but does not really confront or address it, and doesn’t really provide a solution as to how to establish a modus vivendi with the Chinese that will facilitate peaceful coexistence when there’s still so much focus on our primary mission being strategic competition, because we’re engaged in a struggle between autocracy and democracy for the future of the international order. 

I would say again, that formulation overstates China’s ambition. I don’t think the Chinese are trying to replace the current international order with a Sino-centric one. They’re trying to pursue multipolarity and international legitimacy for their system, not impose it on other countries. That’s enough of a challenge, it does constitute an ideological contest, but it’s not an existential contest — the Chinese aren’t trying to supplant American hegemony with Chinese hegemony and communize the world. They’re a big enough challenge without attributing that goal to them.

One of your roles as an analyst was to see the world through China’s eyes and convey that understanding to policymakers. What surprised you in digesting that view, and in what policymakers didn’t understand about the Chinese worldview?

I don’t know that it surprised me, but that it’s a hard thing to do. Strategic empathy is a hard thing to do, particularly to get into the mindset of such a – to use the stereotype – inscrutable foreign power as the Chinese leadership is. There’s little understanding of the history that drives that, and there’s always been and is still ideological and Cold War baggage that prevents what I would call a more objective perception of what China represents. It’s understandable to a certain extent because it’s the only historical model we have for that kind of a rivalry, and it wasn’t that long ago. There are a lot of people still in government and academia who grew up during the Cold War – and I’m one of them – so it’s hard to think of other models for that.

You have a PhD in diplomatic history, with a dissertation and subsequent book looking at George Kennan’s work on East Asia. What surprised you about Kennan’s work on East Asia, and what are the lessons for us today – or, to put it a different way, what would Kennan make of American policy on China?

Well, there’s a whole smorgasbord there. The most surprising thing was how inconsequential Kennan thought East Asia would be. For most of his life he largely dismissed it as something we could afford to ignore to a certain extent.

The lessons that are relevant today, which is certainly related to his work on the Soviet Union, is that he was very much a realist. He would look askance at the kind of ideological overlay that has come to characterize the U.S. approach to China. He thought that morality was not a useful thing to incorporate into your foreign policy. He can be faulted for that, and in fact I do fault him in the book, but he would recognize that it’s a strategic material rivalry that’s more fundamental than the ideological component of it. 

One of the key findings of my work on Kennan in East Asia is that he had this very ‘defensive perimeter’ approach. He thought we should minimize our presence and our commitments in East Asia because our interests there over the long run, except in Japan and the island chain, were ultimately limited. His concern was that we were going to overextend. He obviously thought it was important to contain the spread of Communist influence in East Asia, but interestingly he was focused almost entirely on Soviet communist influence. He didn’t think that China was going to be wholly subordinate to Moscow, and he was right in that regard. But he also thought, and this is where he made a mistake, that China itself, regardless of its alignment, was never going to be in a position to challenge vital U.S. interests. That was why he thought we needed to minimize and even exclude security commitments on the mainland of East Asia. During his time at the policy planning staff, he said we have no real vital interests in Korea, we should not inherit the French problem in Indo-China, and we should certainly not stay engaged in the Chinese Civil War to the extent of supporting the Nationalist regime in Taiwan.

The tragedy for Kennan is that the Korean War upended all of that. It led to our security commitments in the Philippines, to the alliance with Japan, South Korea, and our security commitment to Taiwan.

There’s no shortage of China-focused analysis from businesses, from think tanks, and the media. What does the agency do that others can’t? What does it try to see that others miss?

It’s not so much we try to see that others miss, it’s the sources that the intelligence community has access to which really supplement our analysis. The first thing I would say is that most intelligence analysis is still based on open and publicly available sources. The explosion of information sources on China over the course of my career has been overwhelming. There’s been a challenge in the intelligence community to glean all of that. There’s clearly been a recognition in the intelligence community that there are non-government, private sector channels of information and understanding of China that we should be trying to capitalize on. That’s why the intelligence community is much more engaged with private business and academics and scholars who know things about China and we’ve learned a hell of a lot from them. 

But what we have that they don’t are all the other government intelligence sources: diplomatic, military, intelligence reporting that supplements what’s available and hopefully provides us with more information than what’s publicly knowable. That doesn’t make us omniscient. We still will never have all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and there’s extrapolation and speculation that goes into filling in those gaps.

You were NIO for all of East Asia. In the U.S., we often see Asia-Pacific through the prism of China – other countries’ actions or motivations are always reacting to something China did. Everything revolves around China. What do we miss with that approach to the region?

That’s a very important point. You’re right, because I was the NIO for East Asia and worked with a lot of analysts and other colleagues in and out of government who were not just China specialists. It’s crucially important. It’s not just that we often see the region through the prism of China. We often see the region through the prism of the U.S.-China axis, the U.S.-China competition. that’s highly problematic and sometimes even dangerous, because it risks taking the rest of the region for granted, or expecting other counties to align with U.S. interests and preferences on how to deal with China. 

There are a lot of fault lines there. These are all sovereign countries with their own interests and preferences and agency. That applies even to countries within the U.S. alliance network. There’s a range of views, and we saw this in response to the Obama administration’s pivot and the Trump administration’s free and open Indo-Pacific initiative. There’s a range of views on China about what the collective agenda should be for multilateral organizations, a range of views on how China is viewed as a threat or an opportunity, in economic or security terms, and a range of views on how confrontational the U.S. and its partners should be on dealing with China. We’ve heard many Asian leaders and strategic thinkers say over the last few years that they don’t want to be asked to choose sides between the U.S. and China, some have even said that you may not want us to because you wouldn’t be comfortable with the choice we would make. 

There’s varying levels of interest in not making U.S. diplomacy in the region, not having it exclude and target China. Again, there’s all kinds of problems in cooperating with China on regional issues because of the challenges it does pose and the concerns the other countries in the region have. But China is the largest trading partner of all of its neighbors, many of them don’t want to antagonize it, don’t believe they can risk it, especially when they have concerns about our attention span and our reliability and our staying power in the region despite our assurances to the contrary. 

We at least need to consider the possibility of an approach to multilateralism in East Asia that does not wholly exclude and target China because it’s widely perceived as that – including by many of our partners in the region.

I just believe there’s more room than we’re prepared to acknowledge to actually include China in multilateralism in the region, and I say this partly as a historian. There’s a separate debate about what led to the war in Ukraine. But if there’s any element of truth that it was partly a product of Moscow’s view that U.S. diplomacy in Europe excluded and targeted Russia, we need to be attentive to the perception in Beijing that our diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific excludes and targets China. This is one of the reasons the Chinese have talked about the U.S. trying to create an Asian NATO. I’m not arguing that we should be overly accommodative to Chinese interests and their own ambitions, which are profound – China does want to maximize its sphere of influence in East Asia relative to ours. But I don’t think that it’s necessary to land on a hostile or exclusive approach. We at least need to consider the possibility of an approach to multilateralism in East Asia that does not wholly exclude and target China because it’s widely perceived as that – including by many of our partners in the region.

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