National Security

This pillar focuses on the urgent need to recognize and counter CCP unrestricted warfare—including cyber aggression, biothreats, transnational repression, and malign influence operations against the U.S. and its allies. Research here illuminates how the CCP blurs conventional boundaries between peace and conflict, leveraging espionage, technology theft, diaspora coercion, elite capture, and alliances with regimes such as Iran to compromise American security from within.
Gaps in current research involve fragmented assessments of cross-domain threats (such as integrated cyber-biological attacks), limited public policy frameworks for whole-of-society resilience, and insufficient exploration of the CCP’s coordination with other authoritarian regimes in transnational operations and intelligence sharing.