The rising threat of global conflict was recently brought into focus by China’s launch of a vast amphibious assault ship. This adds to Beijing’s unprecedented military buildup, as detailed in the Pentagon’s latest China Military Power Report. As the Trump administration prepares to assume office, attention is rightly turning to the inadequacies of the U.S. defense industrial base. However, we must not overlook the full scope of the threat that China poses to U.S. national security.

China is undoubtedly an existential hard-power threat that must be countered. However, it is also an ideological adversary, advancing rapidly in the realms of information and cognitive warfare — domains the People’s Liberation Army regards as its “fundamental function” and the “basis” of its operational success. Since President Xi Jinping assumed leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, he has pushed the PLA to expand an “ideological concept of information warfare,” a strategy it has pursued with notable results.

Central to this approach is discourse power — the ability to shape global narratives. Yet Washington, still tethered to anachronistic, kinetic-centric notions of warfare, seems to have largely dismissed this tactic. The Pentagon report itself concedes the PLA “probably intends to use” information operations as an “asymmetric capability” against America and its allies.

Probably? Such hedging reflects a dangerous complacency in the face of an increasingly clear and escalating threat.

The desire of global powers, both established and aspiring, to control........

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