
Asymmetric Competition in the Arctic
JOURNAL OF INDOPACIFIC AFFAIRS WINTER 2021 3
social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this
Declaration can be fully realized.”3 Similarly the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion (NATO) embraces these standards in its opening articles, and the Interna-
tional Criminal Court was explicitly founded to try cases where a country fails to
act on its own, or is “in reality . . . unwilling or unable” to do so.4 While the actual
exercise of such ideals is never perfect, these basic principles form the foundation
of existing global norms and standards for state behaviors.
Challenging these norms can—and often does—create internal and international
backlash and consequences, even if they are applied unevenly. ese range from in-
ternal protests (e.g., Hong Kong 2019–2020), to coercion through sanctions or
military force up to and including full- scale invasions. In many ways this runs coun-
ter to a strict Westphalian construction, which emphasizes the absolute right of
each state to be the “sole author of laws within its jurisdiction . . . hold a monopoly
on the organized use of force,” and regards inuence or interference in the domestic
aairs of a state as a violation of sovereignty so severe it may prompt open war.5
e PRC and Russia are primarily authoritarian in their rule, and thus poten-
tially subject to various negative consequences should their actions violate these
standards. Both countries would naturally prefer a more permissive environment,
where, for example, the PRC’s Uighur genocide, or its handling of Hong Kong,
were not grounds for repercussions.6 As neither Russia nor the PRC can yet rea-
sonably challenge the hard power of the United States, Moscow and Beijing seek
to revise the existing rules in ways that favor their national and global objectives
while simultaneously undermining current norms, institutions, and those that
support them using “all the means at a nation’s command.”7 Some authors have
attempted to reframe the PRC’s actions as more complex than revisionism, but
none of the presented arguments adequately explain things like the prohibition
on researching “Western constitutional democracy, universal values of human
rights, Western- inspired notions of media and civil society independence . . . neo-
liberalism, and ‘nihilistic’ critiques of the state,”8 the PRC’s pursuit of dissidents
abroad, or its use of “sharp” power to erode trust in government and societies
through censorship, dis- and misinformation, and interference in sociopolitical
relationships and institutions that involve academia, culture, media, and econo-
mies (ACME). e latter has grown so strong so that even non- Chinese academ-
ics report self- censorship to avoid PRC entanglements.
Asymmetric Competition as National Strategy
e examples above demonstrate the PRC’s strategy for reshaping the political
and security environment. In 1999 two senior PRC military ocers wrote Unre-
stricted Warfare, explaining how the PRC could defeat the militarily superior