By Joseph Brennan, Spring 2025 Marcelus Policy Fellow

The Indo-Pacific is becoming the strategic hotspot of global competition where cyber power converges with increased geopolitical tensions, particularly between China and the United States. With digital technology embedded into military strategy, economic infrastructure, and everyday lives, cyberspace emerged as the area of contention and collaboration. The United States also faces growing threats from players with growing cyber capabilities in the region. These threats can vary from espionage and intellectual property theft to infrastructure sabotage and disinformation operations. Moreover, they are compounded by a lack of widely accepted norms governing state actions in cyberspace.

The emerging U.S. cyber posture places emphasis on proactive, disruption-based, and offense-capacity-building measures. Such means are desired but must be weighed against restraint-based policy. Restraint does not mean abandoning deterrence but reducing miscalculation probabilities, curbing escalatory spirals, and enhancing U.S. credibility as a responsible cyber power. In the Indo-Pacific, where democratic allies, emerging digital economies, and authoritarian upstarts overlap, a wisely weighted cyber policy based on defense, diplomacy, and multilateral norm-setting is needed to address long-term stability.