Zack Cooper on Denial, Crisis Stability, and Being “Useful” Early

Zack Cooper came to Asia strategy from an unconventional angle: not as a country specialist, but as a defense analyst who realized the hardest problem in the Pentagon wasn’t abstract theory—it was how to maintain deterrence in Asia as China’s capabilities grew. That functional starting point pushed him toward alliances, basing, and the operational realities that sit beneath the rhetoric.
In this conversation, Cooper breaks down deterrence by denial in plain terms, explains why crisis instability is often a symptom of weak deterrence, and argues that “bases vs. places” matters more than territorial obsession. He also offers a rigorous (and refreshingly candid) take on credibility—why costly signals matter, why “audience costs” may be changing, and what that means for U.S. signaling today.
We close with student-focused advice: what actually compounded for him early on, what it means to be “useful” as an intern, how to think about graduate programs without wasting years, and the book that most shaped how he thinks about power transitions.
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-Zack Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at Princeton University.

​Getting Into the Work: From Defense to Asia
Benjamin Wolf (BW): I want to start by asking where you got into this work. What problem were you trying to solve when you first started focusing on Asia strategy—and what did you see that others were missing?
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Zack Cooper (ZC): I first got interested in Asia in a very different way than most people in the regional studies world. Usually when people start working on Asia, they start out as country specialists. Maybe they’ve been living in part of Asia, or they’ve got family heritage from a certain part of Asia. They end up studying that country and language and living there.
I came at this from the other end of the spectrum—as a functional specialist rather than a regional specialist. I started out as a defense specialist, and I really wasn’t exactly sure what part of defense I was most interested in. But over the course of a couple of years at the Pentagon, it became pretty clear that by far the hardest challenge from a defense perspective was how to maintain deterrence in Asia, especially with regard to China. So I decided that’s really what I wanted to be spending my time on—because it was such a hard problem.
It took me a little while to figure out exactly what that meant. I don’t have a China studies background, so I didn’t feel well equipped to do China-specific work. But I ended up doing a lot of work on U.S. alliances and partnerships. And I got a little bit lucky: when I started to work on alliances and partnerships, a lot of the people in that world came more from the area studies background, so they didn’t have much of a defense background to be doing analytical work on specific defense issues. That gave me an opportunity to do something useful in the field that hadn’t been done as much. There were people doing it, but it was a smaller group—and I ended up leaning into that.

Early Career: Getting Into the Pentagon and the White House
BW: You mentioned your work in the Pentagon, and I know you’ve worked with the Department of Defense and the White House. What led you to those roles? Was it things you did during your undergraduate studies? If so, what were the specific things you were involved in that made you want to pursue that career?

ZC: When I was in undergrad, I managed to get some informational interviews with people at the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, and the intelligence community. I asked them about their jobs and what they enjoyed most. It became pretty clear to me that the most important thing in Washington is understanding how government works—and that the only way I could understand that was by being in government.
So when I was an undergrad, I was determined to find a position where I could learn how government operates—or, in many cases, doesn’t operate. One of the things I ended up doing was an internship at the Pentagon before my senior year. I got lucky: very atypically, that turned into a job straight out of undergrad.
These days that’s a lot harder to get, but you have to remember this was still just a couple of years after the September 11th attacks. There were specific hiring authorities to bring on very junior people because the national security community needed warm bodies. That was a great opportunity for me to come in through a path that probably otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

Teaching at Princeton: What Students Expose
BW: We’ll focus on your work at AEI soon, but first: you’re also a lecturer at Princeton. How has that experience informed the way that you explain today’s events—China, the Indo-Pacific? Have your students taught you anything that changes how you explain these complex topics?

ZC: Yes. As time has gone on, I’ve found teaching more and more valuable—and more and more interesting.
I learn two things from teaching. First: the way I teach is very reliant on readings. So every week I go back and do all the readings that the students are doing. I find that incredibly helpful because some of these foundational pieces are so rich that even if I’ve read something twenty times, reminding myself of the fundamental logic—how we think alliances work, what the basic logic of deterrence is—is really useful.
Second: you might think you understand a topic, but when you try to teach it, you find the flaws in your logic—because the students will find the flaws very quickly. Teaching is valuable for sorting out how to conceptualize an issue: where your understanding is strong, and where it’s weak.
And a third aspect I’ve enjoyed more over time is that policy work can be very hard in a different way. It’s difficult to tell if you had a direct effect on an outcome. Even if you’re sure you suggested an idea to a policymaker, when they do what you suggested, maybe they had the idea on their own. You’re never sure.
But when you’re teaching, you’re having a direct effect on people. You get near-term feedback, and it’s exciting to watch people you’ve taught learn something and apply it professionally. Over time, I’ve found that more and more rewarding.

BW: I recently spoke with Sarah Kreps, who’s a professor at Cornell, and she emphasized similar points—so it’s interesting to hear that consensus.

Deterrence by Denial: What “Denial” Means Operationally
BW: I want to get more concrete. In your writing, you’ve emphasized deterrence by denial. What does “denial” mean operationally? What exactly must China be unable to do—or what should the United States do?

ZC: One of the basic concepts of deterrence is the difference between deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial.
Deterrence by punishment would be saying: we’re not going to physically stop you from doing something, but if you do it, we’re going to make the cost so prohibitive that you’ll wish you hadn’t. The classic example would be threatening a nuclear attack against an opponent who crosses a red line.
The alternative is deterrence by denial: if your opponent tries to do something you don’t want them to do, you’re going to physically try to stop them. You’re trying to convince them they won’t succeed if they try—not that you’ll punish them after.
The basic argument I’ve tried to make is that in Asia today, the U.S. is no longer as strong as it used to be. But one advantage we have is that we’re a status quo power. We don’t want fundamental changes in the order in Asia. Deterrence by denial can be very effective when you’re a status quo power—when you’re trying to convince the other side they can’t overturn the order.
In a conflict over Taiwan, that would mean signaling to China before conflict that they won’t be successful at taking and holding Taiwan—because that’s a very hard operational problem.
I’ll add one last thing: we have to be careful not to assume denial is a silver bullet. Some of what I’ve been working on recently is sketching out the limits of a denial approach. There are real limits. Sometimes you’re going to have to threaten punishment against an adversary like China as well. Like most things in the defense arena, it’s not binary. It’s how much focus you put on denial, how much on punishment, and in what situations.

Deterrence vs. Crisis Instability: Where’s the Line?
BW: How do you think about the trade-off between strengthening deterrence versus increasing crisis instability? What’s the line for you—what do you look for?

ZC: My view—different than some others—is that crisis instability sometimes happens because there’s an incentive to do a first strike. That can happen because the balance of forces is so even that whichever side strikes first has an advantage for the rest of the conflict.
One way to deal with that is to be stronger, in which case strengthening deterrence also strengthens crisis stability—from an American standpoint. Fundamentally, I think that’s the most important dynamic.
We thought a lot about this in the Cold War in the nuclear realm. But the U.S. is at risk to a first strike by China in part because it’s reliant on a small number of bases in Asia. If the U.S. increased the number of bases it operates from, that would make the U.S. less vulnerable to a first strike and might increase crisis stability.
So there are small, specific choices—like operating from a larger number of bases more frequently—that can increase crisis stability while increasing deterrence. In general, I think crisis instability happens when you have a weak deterrent hand to play. There are edge cases with direct trade-offs, but in general, the better deterrent we have, the more stable behavior we’ll see in crises.

Bases, Places, and the Greenland Question
BW: You mentioned increasing military bases. It’s interesting because that’s been part of the argument President Trump has pushed—capturing Greenland, and broader American territorial ideas. Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in a recent article, among others, that the U.S. doesn’t need to capture Greenland because it can establish bases without taking territory. He mentioned that at one point the U.S. had seventeen military bases in Greenland and now it’s down to one—and that was America’s choice.
What has been stopping the U.S. government from expanding those bases? What’s making them not want to expand?

ZC: My logic applies mostly in the Indo-Pacific theater. I’m not that concerned, in the near term, about Chinese activity in Greenland. There’s a lot the U.S. could do to manage that risk.
But part of the challenge for the United States is that we’ve had a transformation over the last eighty years—from a world in which the U.S. had its own sovereign facilities (bases on territory the U.S. controlled) to operating increasingly from facilities that other countries control on their own sovereign territory.
There are downsides: the U.S. has to enter into agreements with host nations, and those agreements are often more constraining than if the U.S. is operating from facilities it fully controls. But there’s also a long-term benefit: host countries are more likely to politically support U.S. operations from facilities if they aren’t U.S.-flagged bases, but rather local facilities that U.S. forces deploy from.
Over the last 30–40 years, we’ve seen a transition from what we’ve called “bases” to “places”—away from U.S. bases toward places the U.S. can operate. I think that’s a healthy trend. Some of what we hear from President Trump goes against that instinct, and we’re seeing the predictable reaction from allies and partners: they aren’t interested in the U.S. owning territory, but they are very happy to allow the U.S. to operate from their territory.
My view is we’d be better off focusing on the capabilities that flow from access to facilities rather than who owns the land—especially because in most cases, the land is owned by partners who are willing to let us do a lot from their territory as long as it’s in shared interests.

Credibility: Real Signals vs. Domestic Theater
BW: In my conversations with foreign service officers and ambassadors, and in the broader State Department sphere, there’s a lot of talk about credibility. From your perspective, where is credibility real versus performative? What actions actually move adversary beliefs, and what’s mostly domestic theater?

ZC: It’s a great question—and I don’t think we have great answers at the moment.
Academics have spent a lot of time thinking about credibility and signaling. One way they think about it is through the logic of costly signaling: for something to be credible, it should have to be costly. If it’s not costly, it doesn’t really send a signal your adversary takes seriously.
It can be costly in different ways. Two that we talk about most: sunk costs and audience costs.
Sunk costs are when you do something so expensive it wouldn’t make sense unless you were serious. For example, in the Persian Gulf War 35 years ago, the U.S. spent six months building up hundreds of thousands of troops at great expense opposite Iraq. It wouldn’t have made sense to do that unless the U.S. was serious about military action. That’s a sunk cost—an expensive signal you wouldn’t send if you weren’t serious.
Audience costs are tying your own hands as a leader. The classic example is a president making a major public statement—like President H.W. Bush saying of Iraq, “This will not stand.” He tied his hands. The logic is: there’s an election coming up, and if he backs down he pays a domestic political cost.
What’s hard right now is it’s not clear whether President Trump faces audience costs. Technically, he’s not up for another election, so maybe what he says doesn’t matter. But also, Trump supporters are pretty quick to shift their views when President Trump does it himself. That makes this unusual for academics. If he can’t generate audience costs, then his words don’t matter—and all that matters are actions you can observe and whether they’re costly. That makes it hard to signal convincingly.
This is a challenging moment for academics trying to think rigorously about credibility and signaling.

Student Advice: What Actually Compounds
BW: As we begin to wrap up, I want to turn to your early successes and advice for students. When you look back at your early twenties, what one skill—writing, methods, modeling, networking—ended up compounding the most, and why?

ZC: This is an easy one for me. The only thing in my early twenties that actually mattered was working really, really hard.
There may be other people who are incredibly skilled at that period of their lives—who can demonstrate how smart they are, and how well traveled. I think the only comparative advantage I had at 22 was that I was willing to work extremely long hours for very terrible pay.
A lot of my coworkers couldn’t do that. They had families. They couldn’t stay at work until midnight. They couldn’t work every weekend because their spouses wouldn’t allow it. I hate to say it, but for me, that was my only comparative advantage at the time.
It’s much harder, as somebody in mid-career, to work that hard now. So when you get an opportunity where you can demonstrate how hard you can work—and not every job cares, but in places like the White House and Pentagon it matters a lot—being able to show you’ll put in the time and effort was the most important signal I could send to coworkers and bosses about my willingness to get the job done to the best of my ability.

What “Being Useful” Means as an Intern
BW: You’ve worked across think tanks, academia, and government, and you’ve been around many young students through internships and fellowships. What does being useful actually mean for a student intern in this space? What deliverables do great interns produce that mediocre ones don’t?

ZC: I wish I could tell you that interns—and frankly, even young researchers—are given wonderful opportunities in think tanks or government or the private sector. Often that’s not the case, and that was certainly my experience when I was young.
For the most part, I was being asked to sit in meetings, get coffee, set up meetings, schedule, sometimes take notes. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. And yet doing those basic things well was a requirement to convince leadership they could give me a slightly harder task than making coffee for a senior official.
I often see anxiousness among young people—I absolutely felt this—to jump from basic requests to something more challenging. But if you can’t do the basic stuff well, or you can’t show you’re willing to put in the time to do the basic stuff well, you’ll never get the more challenging tasks.
So when you get an internship, the most important thing is to show not only that you’ll work hard, but that you’re a good teammate, you’ll do whatever needs to be done to make the organization successful. If you do that for a couple of months—or a couple of years—then you can get to step two: doing more substantive work. But step one is doing the basics, doing them well, and showing you can be trusted as part of a team.

The Graduate School Lesson He Wishes He’d Understood Earlier
BW: Is there anything you wish someone had told you as a student that would have saved you a lot of time in trial and error?

ZC: The one thing I wish I had fully understood is the difference between different types of graduate programs.
When I finished undergrad, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to go back and do a graduate degree. My undergraduate degree felt too disconnected from the policy world I wanted to be in. But once I was in the policy world, the policy world felt too disconnected from academia—and we weren’t paying enough attention to the theoretical, foundational aspects of our work.
I thought blending those could best be done in a master’s program. I don’t want to suggest master’s programs are never useful—I teach in a master’s program, and there are situations where they’re valuable. But I didn’t realize early on that what a master’s program tends to teach you is how to consume research, not so much how to do new research.
I ended up doing a master’s and then a PhD because what I really wanted was to conduct new research. For people thinking about career transitions or professional development, master’s programs can be wonderful and can be stepping stones to other degrees. My wife and I met in a master’s program—she was doing a joint law degree and a master’s, and I switched to the PhD.
But I think people should think twice before treating a master’s as a terminal degree—and I wish I had understood that earlier.

One Book That Shaped How He Thinks
BW: Finally, if you had to recommend a book for someone interested in following your career path—or just name a book that has influenced you most—what would it be, and why?

ZC: The book that’s been most important to how I think about the world is a political science book that doesn’t get a lot of readership because it doesn’t fall neatly into the theoretical paradigms commonly taught. It’s by Robert Gilpin, and it’s called War and Change in World Politics. It’s about how and why countries rise and fall.
At a moment like we’re in in the United States—asking fundamental questions about America’s role, watching China rise rapidly over the last 30 or 40 years—this isn’t the moment to read books about a static, unchanging world. This is the moment to think about how change happens and what it looks like. Gilpin’s work has been foundational for me in trying to think in a logical, theoretically informed way about how that happens.

Closing
BW: Dr. Cooper, thank you so much for joining me. I’ve learned so much in just a short period of time. It’s been a real honor.
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ZC: Of course. It’s been wonderful talking to you—thanks so much for having me on.