The Waterfall’s Shadow in the Mekong Region

To this end, CSIS constructed a series of water security TTXs that focused on WASH and WRM efforts in the face of great power competition. The first iteration explored the Sahel and how a mix of political and public health shocks interacted with climate stress in the region. Players aligned PGII investments and water security to counter these crisis events.

Based on the findings, CSIS built a second TTX that shifted the geographic focus to the Mekong River Basin and transformed the game design from crisis response to competitive strategy. The scenario explored how rival groups of players with a mix of military and development experience set strategic priorities and developed plans around water and infrastructure investments in the Mekong River Basin.

The TTX started with an orientation that helped players understand prevailing water security issues in the region. The purpose was to illustrate the convergence of infrastructure investments and environmental insecurity with great power competition in the Mekong River Basin. The orientation included the following data:

• whether the country is part of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), a large U.S. trade initiative in the region
• existing USAID water-related needs score by country
• Freedom House trends for each country (2022 Global Freedom index)
• China’s trade and debt trap diplomacy metrics, including countries’ imports from China and debt held by Beijing
• U.S. foreign aid obligated and dispersed by country
• resilience indicators including the Fragile States Index and Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) Index, which evaluates how well states can adapt to climate change

The scores helped participants understand water and infrastructure issues as they relate to foreign policy across the region. The USAID WASH Needs Index ranks countries in terms of their overall lack of access to clean water. The higher the score, the less access to reliable, safe water. In the Mekong, Thailand has the most reliable access to water, while Cambodia has the worst. By way of comparison, China ranks 61 with an index score of 0.31. Over 80 million people lack basic water access, and over 100 million lack basic sanitation. The score does not directly address issues related to climate change, such as growing salinity due to rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, and dam construction, and their combined effect on food security.

The ND-GAIN Index addresses vulnerability to climate change and how well prepared states are to respond in terms of institutional readiness. The higher the score, the more prepared states are to adapt to the reality of climate change. As Table 1 shows, multiple countries (red highlighted cells) along the Mekong River Basin are rated as highly vulnerable to future climate shocks. Combined with foreign aid and trade data, the orientation helped players understand the growing influence of China in the region alongside the deterioration of freedom and growing state fragility, such as due to climate-induced stress.

After the orientation, the U.S. team was briefed that additional funds were available to combine interagency efforts to counter BRI activities in Southeast Asia with a focus on the Mekong River Basin. The teams had to articulate a larger competitive strategy and three water security projects (WASH, WRM, WP) for the region as part of the larger PGII.

To frame this strategy, the U.S. team was briefed that the strategic end state, according to guidance developed through the National Security Council (NSC), was to sustain U.S. and partner nation access and influence in Southeast Asia, consistent with the vision of a rules-based international order. The two principal objectives to achieve this end state were (1) promote PGII initiatives focused on water security and (2) reassure U.S. partners and allies. In other words, the TTX asked U.S. players to think about how development merges with deterrence in modern great power competition. To that end, the U.S. players filled out Table 2 to prioritize water security investments. Players could nominate three water programs (WASH, WRM, WP); each had to align with at least one PGII pillar and country.[1] Based on the enhancement, players rated the extent to which the new water program would increase the access of the United States and its democratic partners to the region while denying China access and influence. For example, a player could propose a WASH initiative in Vietnam to counter increased water salinity owing to climate change and its effect on food security as one of the three expanded water programs.

The U.S. team then revealed its plans and discussed its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with a team playing the CCP. This action-reaction dynamic helped facilitate dialogue about the opportunity costs inherent in using water security programs and larger infrastructure projects to compete with China. Overall, players saw water strategy as a viable tool for countering the BRI but found that it required better integration with other instruments of power to support long-term competition.

U.S. players tended to take a mixed approach to the region with two major strategies and one minority opinion. Two teams focused on Thailand and Vietnam—the countries they thought the most accessible and open to countering the CCP. The third team focused its efforts on the countries with higher WASH needs scores: Cambodia and Laos.

The Thailand group proposed focusing on cultivating public-private partnerships to make Thailand the focal point for regional projects. These projects were concentrated in the digital and gender pillars of the PGII. The theory of competition was that creating new technical skills and increasing female employment in key sectors would benefit Thailand while creating a regional champion for water security projects.

Since Thailand had the best WASH scores in the region, the group proposed investing in water-related businesses based in Thailand that could access Cambodia and Laos, which are closer to Beijing. The idea was to promote a new cadre of local businesses, including increased opportunities for more diverse workplaces that could build water projects across the region. The U.S. players rated this approach as likely to draw both G7 interest and private sector capital.

The red team replicating the CCP noted that while Beijing would not challenge Thai businesses directly, China maintains indirect economic mechanisms it could use to counter a U.S.-led initiative. For example, one red player noted China could apply economic pressure by curtailing the number of tourists that travel to Thailand, a practice it used against South Korea in 2017. The red team also saw opportunities to use low-level cyber operations and propaganda, consistent with political warfare, to undermine trust and confidence in U.S.-backed businesses. In other words, U.S. efforts to work through a local partner to promote water security could be effective but would not remove all the ways and means Beijing has to apply pressure to states in the Mekong River Basin.

A separate strategy that emerged focused on combining water projects with food security efforts to build resilience to climate shocks. The focus was on the climate pillar. This group assessed the magnitude of the climate challenge confronting Vietnam. Countries critical to regional food supplies, like Thailand, justified the focus, as Thailand and Vietnam two of the three top rice exporting countries in the world. The group also recommended a water-related project linked to agriculture and climate stress in Thailand. The focus of these efforts was more on mitigating future food security issues than on addressing current challenges. The team also assessed that these water programs could complement recent U.S. military outreach to Vietnam. Furthermore, given the size of the population and economic growth trends, the players rated projects in Vietnam as very attractive to both G7 and private sector partnerships.

The red team noted that while these issues would produce regional benefits in the long run, they were unlikely to shift the U.S.-Vietnam relationship to a strategic partnership in the short term. Beijing would still retain the ability to drive a wedge between Washington and Hanoi. China retains significant military, economic, and ideological instruments to influence Vietnam, despite long-standing differences between the two countries.

This discussion led to a debate about the balance of U.S. foreign assistance and how much should be linked to larger interagency strategies to counter China. Some saw addressing climate change and increasing water security as goals in themselves. The majority assessed that the United States, especially if its foreign assistance budgets increased, could integrate a focus on engaging local government and civil society, foreign assistance linked to poverty reduction and environmental growth, infrastructure-linked economic development, and governance programs with long-term competition without falling victim to the traps of the Cold War.

These practitioners highlighted a need to refine interagency coordination along these lines and run periodic TTXs as a form of further calibrating regional strategies. These events would have to integrate multiple Biden administration strategies like the Indo-Pacific Strategy with PGII and the 2022 Global Water Strategy. In fact, the myriad of strategies published by the Biden administration led one player to express a need for more dynamic interagency coordination than traditional NSC meetings. Participants viewed the TTXs as a way of investigating opportunities to achieve the objectives in multiple strategy documents and avoid policy fratricide. One participant noted that this effort would also need to include integrated country strategies to balance regional, functional, and country-specific aspects of foreign policy. Another participant noted that while there is an agency strategic planning process in the U.S. Department of State and USAID, as well as different interagency coordination processes, efforts tended to have too many objectives to easily prioritize. This participant saw the focus on water security, infrastructure, and integrating development with deterrence as a way to synchronize and prioritize objectives.

The third strategy to emerge from the TTX—and the minority perspective—was to focus on Cambodia and Laos, the countries with the worst WASH scores and projects linked to the health and digital pillars. Specifically, the players wanted to invest in low-cost internet of things (IoT) networks linked to local cellular service for remote monitoring—an opportunity to use ICT for WASH. The team assessed that they could address local needs in these countries in a way that offset some of the negative effects of Chinese dam construction on water and food security. One participant discussed how changing water flows were disrupting local economies and leading to migration. Another participant noted that despite Laos’s high dependence on China, the relationship between water governance and agriculture in Laos created a way to both address water security and show the population the negative effects of the Chinese authoritarian development model. Other players noted that this messaging could be enhanced by coordinating with elements like the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The player wanted to use the GEC’s data-driven approach to studying the information environment to tailor messages about the water security programs while monitoring for China’s efforts to undermine confidence in U.S. and allied water and infrastructure investments.

The red team responded that while the effort might increase WASH scores in both countries, it would not significantly alter the influence of the CCP. Cambodia and Laos depend heavily on the Chinese economy. Furthermore, China could use its own propaganda and concepts like “Three Warfares”—influence operations that combine psychological and legal warfare with traditional propaganda—to promote rival narratives about the importance of each country’s relationship to Beijing. One red team member even said China could use this construct to take credit for Western money invested in water security while pinning the negative effects of its dam construction on foreign (G7) business interests.

The discussion around the third strategy again highlighted the need to coordinate different agency planning processes with a focus on the information environment. One player suggested a need for an interagency competition manual similar to the recent U.S. Department of Defense Joint Concept for Competing. The group agreed the interagency collaboration needed a framework for conceptualizing long-term competition beyond deterrence and departmental interests. The challenge was how to develop this framework and balance military strategy with diplomacy and development. One player asked bluntly, “Who owns competition?” While the U.S. Department of State has processes to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives at the country and regional levels, it was not clear these formed critical components of major U.S. Department of Defense campaign plans that focus on competition. This insight brought some of the players back to recommending additional interagency TTXs to visualize and describe how to synchronize and prioritize objectives across multiple government agencies oriented toward long-term competition.

The discussion led one player to note the missing role of the U.S. Congress in the debate. Congressional action led to prioritization of water security, and Congress must be brought into any discussion about increasing the foreign assistance budget. The participant noted increasing signs that Congress was interested in TTXs and creative forums for analyzing policy, though the initial forays focused on military matters. The player proposed designing the TTXs on long-term competition in a manner that allowed congressional staffers—and, if possible, entire committees—to play, building on recent efforts by the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. The player advocated starting a new series of congressional games that touch multiple committees, including the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and House Armed Services Committee.

Connect the World to Compete with China

Modern competition is about more than military balances. It extends to development projects and building a network that connects people and creates conditions for solving collective action problems plaguing the twenty-first century: climate change, water access, food insecurity, and poverty. In the process, it also creates a new positional advantage that prevents authoritarian states from co-opting economic corridors. It is a new great game that must be played with a different set of rules than the cold wars of old.

The more the Biden administration can synchronize its development and diplomacy with theater strategy, the more likely it will be to gain an enduring advantage in long-term competition with China. This advantage starts with visualizing and describing regions in terms of people’s needs, likely environmental shocks, and transportation corridors to identify clusters of projects that offset authoritarian overreach while helping local communities address core human security challenges.

• Calibrate regional strategies. The United States should look for opportunities to better align foreign assistance and defense budgets. Unfortunately, aid budgets are unlikely to grow in the near term based on the budget deal and election cycle. As a result, USAID—along with the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the DFC—will need to work with Congress and interagency partners to identify how best to align existing programs and resources. Based on standing legislation, USAID will continue to spend on water projects. These efforts could be coordinated with less confrontational defense dollars linked to efforts like the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and ongoing theater campaigns. The net results would be a two-level prioritization framework that better aligns ends, ways, and means. USAID should prioritize projects likely to draw the most traction across agencies as a means of making each development dollar go further and extend U.S. strategic interests.

• Conduct stress tests and refine regional strategies through TTXs. USAID and other interagency partners will need to augment traditional approaches to long-term planning to embrace more dynamic methods aligned with understanding the new era of competition. Turning traditional war games into peace games and TTXs is the first step and will help leaders analyze complex interactions almost certain to accompany water and broader infrastructure projects. These games should occur at three levels. First, they should be part of program design and help identify opportunities for interagency as well as private sector partnerships. Second, they should be conducted through existing interagency processes and evaluate how guidance ranging from the Indo-Pacific Strategy to integrated country strategies align with PGII and the 2022 Global Water Strategy. Third, the games must involve Congress and bring a mix of staffers and elected representatives into the dialogue. Too often, U.S. strategy—whether defense or development—has been stovepiped and segmented by branch and agencies, producing unhealthy tension and friction. Games offer a means to overcome these self-imposed barriers that help different stakeholders develop a common understanding of modern competition. These congressional games should also focus not just on optimal resourcing but also on authorities and how best to tailor the interagency framework to support long-term competition. If twenty-first-century competition is as much as about development as deterrence, the United States needs to ensure it has both the ways and means to gain an enduring advantage.

• Amplify regional strategies. In a connected world, the message matters as much as the facts. Efforts to better integrate water projects with public-private sector infrastructure initiatives and theater strategy require global messaging that counters authoritarian influence campaigns. This messaging campaign should be integrated with existing initiatives like the GEC and embassy-level outreach and should be built into programmatic requirements for the network of vendors that support modern development. The messages should be tailored to audiences across diverse regions and retain the ability to counter malign foreign influence campaigns. The result is not propaganda but ensuring affected populations can cut through the noise to understand why the U.S. government, alongside its partners and the private sector, is investing in water infrastructure.

Benjamin Jensen is a senior fellow for future war, gaming, and strategy in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Daniel F. Runde is a senior vice president, director of the Project on Prosperity and Development, and holds the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at CSIS. Thomas Bryja is a program coordinator in the Project on Prosperity and Development at CSIS.

This brief is made possible by the generous support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Please consult the PDF for references.