Today’s Opium Wars: The Unrestricted Warfare Playbook in the U.S. Illicit Drug Market

The Irregular Warfare Center’s recent article, “Today’s Opium Wars: The Unrestricted Warfare Playbook in the U.S. Illicit Drug Market,” argues that Beijing treats illicit drug markets as an irregular warfare vector—an approach intended to “win without fighting” by eroding U.S. social resilience and forcing sustained diversion of attention and resources.

Rather than framing fentanyl and similar illicit substances as a purely law-enforcement challenge, the piece pushes readers to see a broader contest that blends public health, influence, and strategic competition. On that logic, the authors contend that the U.S. response can’t remain confined to a traditional interagency framework because China’s tactics extend to real estate, banking, local regulation, and broader civil society.

“Today’s Opium War” concludes with a call for a “whole-of-society” approach to increase national resilience: training frontline local actors to recognize IW patterns, improving reporting and data capture, and pairing those efforts with public–private collaboration on counter–threat finance to trace revenue and tighten the link between diagnosis and action. What would a credible, scalable campaign plan look like? How can we target PRC-led networks and financing effectively without sliding into performative crackdowns or self-defeating damage to rule-of-law legitimacy at home?