Unrestricted warfare without war: China’s below-threshold strategy in Latin America

China’s growing role in Latin America is framed as more than routine geopolitical competition, instead resembling a form of “unrestricted warfare” that uses economic, technological, legal, and informational tools to reshape the regional strategic environment below the level of armed conflict. The article argues that while Latin American states retain agency, the United States’ main challenge is to provide credible alternatives to China’s deepening, structurally influential presence.

There has been an increased focus by the United States on the Western Hemisphere in the latest National Security Strategy, but strategic competition in the region did not begin with Washington’s rediscovery of it. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has increased its influence in Latin America with one analysis by the European Parliament stating that China could overtake the U.S. as the continent’s most important trading partner by 2035. According to the PRC’s 2025 Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean, the areas that the PRC is attempting to integrate itself into Latin America are as diverse as trade, infrastructure, and BeiDou navigation integrations. While some Western commentary might indicate that this is simply a theatre of ‘geopolitical competition’ between the U.S. and China, are we mislabeling these activities as “competition” when they fit more closely within the logic of unrestricted warfare?

Unrestricted warfare is a concept taken from the book of the same name written ostensibly by two Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force colonels in 1999. According to an article by Professor Gerschaneck, the colonels wrote about the PRC engaging in asymmetric warfare against the United States by using non-military tools ranging from leveraging international law and economic warfare to cyber operations and terrorism. Unrestricted Warfare (UW) and the tactics it espouses are not official Chinese doctrine, even if elements of the tactics it proposes do appear in official sources. The definition of Unrestricted Warfare (UW) that is used in this piece, namely a whole-of-state approach by the PRC to reshaping the strategic environment in Latin American through asymmetric non-military tools, is contested. A 2016 RAND report argues that “use of measures short of war is neither unrestricted nor warfare”. However, unlike similar terms, such as hybrid warfare or grey-zone competition, UW not only has been used to address Chinese activities, it is also better at addressing the whole-of-state coordinated approach employed by the PRC. While acknowledging this contestation, this phrase can provide a framework to judge China’s strategic below threshold activities in the region – cognisant that China is not formally ‘at war’ with the United States. This is because these activities enable the PRC to shape the strategic environment within which both states would operate doing wartime. More importantly, the strategic logic of UW remains useful because, as per an US Army War College study, “a nation can exercise deterrence by choice—proactively shaping the environment to constrain the adversary to choices that do not threaten”; it also called the current strategic competition between the United States and China in between war and peace, which lends credence to use of UW in this context.

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