In an upcoming episode of Café Berlin, Ian Oxnevad and I are joined by Brig. Gen. Robert S. Spalding III, USAF (Ret.), former U.S. Defense Attaché in Beijing and author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept and War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination.

Our conversation begins with General Spalding’s story: his military career, Mandarin study, service in Beijing, and the moment he came to believe that Washington had misunderstood the nature of the U.S.-China relationship. For years, American leaders assumed that trade, investment, and academic exchange would liberalize China. Gen. Spalding argues that Beijing learned to use that openness as a source of power.

The episode explores what makes China’s “stealth war” so difficult to recognize. It is not fought only with ships, missiles, or soldiers, but it runs through capital markets, supply chains, corporate access, elite networks, digital infrastructure, college and university partnerships, and research pipelines.

We discuss how economic integration gave the Chinese Communist Party leverage over the very societies that welcomed it. American pension funds, passive index investments, university endowments, and corporate exposure may all become entangled with companies tied to surveillance, military modernization, or party-state priorities.

For higher education, the warning is direct. Confucius Institutes were only one visible part of a much broader problem. As the National Association of Scholars documented in Outsourced to China, the institutes served as instruments of Chinese state influence on American campuses. But the deeper question extends well beyond Confucius Institutes: how ordinary academic collaboration can become systematic transfer to the Chinese party-state. Joint laboratories, visiting scholar programs, talent recruitment, co-authored papers, data sharing, procurement contracts, and informal networks can all become channels of influence or technology transfer if universities fail to ask the right questions.

General Spalding also explains why the “battlefield” itself has changed. For universities, the lesson extends well beyond China studies or STEM policy. As Minding the Campus has repeatedly reported, American universities have trained personnel connected to China’s military, partnered with entities tied to China’s defense industry, and maintained research relationships that raise serious national-security concerns. At the same time, policymakers need universities capable of producing genuine expertise on China. But universities also manage money, data, critical research, infrastructure, and international partnerships that Beijing may seek to exploit. That makes campus governance not merely an educational concern, but a national security issue.

This episode asks whether America can wake up without becoming a closed society. Can we preserve openness, constitutional freedoms, academic exchange, and innovation while closing the doors that feed surveillance, coercion, and military modernization?

And drawing on a question from our previous guest, Dr. Gregory J. Moore, we ask General Spalding what a modern Cold War-style deterrence strategy would look like for Taiwan: one strong enough to prevent war, but disciplined enough not to provoke the crisis it is meant to avoid.

The episode premieres on Wednesday, July 22, at 2:00 p.m. Watch the episode on YouTube or wherever podcasts are found.

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