Unrestricted warfare economic strategy — the use of financial markets, trade policy, and commercial mechanisms as weapons of geopolitical conflict — is not a theory. It is a documented doctrine, and China has been executing it for twenty-five years while the West debated whether it was real.
In 1999, two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army published a strategic manual titled “Unrestricted Warfare.” Its central argument was that 21st century conflict would not be limited to kinetic military engagements. Any domain — financial markets, trade networks, information systems, material supply chains, legal systems — could be weaponized against an adversary. The key insight was that Western liberal democracies, conditioned to think of warfare as tanks and aircraft, would not recognize economic and commercial operations as acts of war until the damage was irreversible.
Craig Tindale’s analysis in his Financial Sense interview maps the execution of this doctrine across the critical mineral supply chain with forensic precision. Chinese state smelters offering below-cost processing contracts to Chilean copper miners — unrestricted warfare. State-backed short sellers targeting DoD-funded industrial startups — unrestricted warfare. Gallium export restrictions timed to coincide with Western directed energy weapons programs — unrestricted warfare. The pattern is consistent, the doctrine is explicit, and the West has been largely too conditioned by Cold War kinetic thinking to recognize it.
The investment implication is that standard geopolitical risk frameworks are insufficient. Companies with Chinese-controlled input dependencies carry risks that don’t appear in standard financial models. The risk is not that China will invade. The risk is that China will simply stop issuing export licenses. That is a commercial decision that happens to produce military-grade strategic outcomes. Unrestricted warfare economic strategy doesn’t require a declaration of war. It just requires patience and control of the midstream.
The Hedge 