By courting risk—and by imposing risk on that antagonist.
The United States must embrace risk for its strategy vis-à-vis an increasingly domineering Communist China to succeed. Fortunately for makers of American strategy, the Cold War past furnishes ample precedent for how to manage risk in the Indo-Pacific in the here and now.
I speak of Berlin.
In the aftermath of World War II, ravaged by strategic bombing and Soviet Army rapine, the German capital found itself an enclave stranded within Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. Postwar Allied cooperation—such as it was—broke down by mid-1948. As the Iron Curtain clanged down across Eastern Europe, Great Britain, and the United States merged their occupation zones in western Germany, the Harry S. Truman administration articulated a doctrine for combating communist insurgencies in Greece and Turkey, and Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave an address at Harvard announcing an economic recovery plan to help Europe recuperate from war. Washington and London introduced a new currency—the