After more than two decades of singleminded focus on terrorism, the CIA, spying arm of the United States, is pivoting to what has emerged as a larger geo-political threat to American primacy: China.
The world’s most storied spy agency on Thursday announced that it is establishing a China Mission Center to focus on a country that US analysts believe will be an even bigger challenge than the former Soviet Union, given its massive population and economic clout.
The new center “will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” CIA director William Burns, said in a statement accompanying background briefings to the US media by unnamed officials in which they outlined an agency-wide effort to ramp up personnel and resources for the new mission center, including China-specific analysts, linguists, technologists, and other specialists.
The CIA decision to go public with the new mission center itself is an indication of the scale of what would have been a hard to conceal project, unrivaled since the demise of the former USSR when Sovietologists ruled the roost in Langley. Although the CIA subsequently kept extensive tabs on USSR legatee Russia, Iran, North Korea among others countries, the broader issue of terrorism emerged as its major focus. Sinologists will now supplant Sovietologists and Islamologists in the CIA’s scheme of things, although officials said terrorism, North Korea, Iran, and Russia will continue to remain priorities.
They maintained that the CIA would continue its counterterrorism mission, but China, will become a singular priority, meriting a mission center that will draw expertise from across the board and around the world.
One indication of the changing emphasis comes from disclosure that the Iran and Korea would be absorbed in mission centers focused on the Near East and East Asia, respectively.
The CIA also announced the founding of another new center that will focus on emerging and transnational threats such as disruptive new technologies, climate change, and global health, all of which also involves China, but which will also be a broader area of new focus for the agency. Although, Washington pundits and analysts have described China as an emerging threat to American global dominance for more than a decade now, the US drawdown from the wars in middle-east and Afghanistan appears to have accelerated a focus on China, particularly as Beijing has become more assertive in recent years and has taken on an outsized role in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.
The CIA upgrade of the China threat comes even as Washington seeks to keep Beijing engaged despite recent tensions, the same way it engaged Moscow for decades notwithstanding the Cold War. Earlier this week US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi had a six-hour meeting in Zurich at which the two sides decided their respective leaders President Biden and President Xi Jinping would hold a virtual summit before the end of the year.
