The emerging global power of China and its challenge to U.S. military strength in East Asia pose fundamental questions about the nature and goals of Chinese policy for the long term, and how the United States should craft a strategy both in its best interests and in those of its friends and allies, not just in the region, but worldwide. The United States may easily slip into a position of action and reaction with regard to increased Chinese military capabilities and operations seemingly intent on challenging the United States. China is overtly demonstrating what Chinese official writings convey—namely, that the American East Asian presence will be challenged and that China sees itself as the preeminent Asian power, with an intent to create a hegemony that will in due course extend to the outer island chains of the Western Pacific.
Action and reaction were very much phenomena of the Cold War: The Soviet Union would develop a capability, or extend its influence in various areas, or establish a new base, and the United States would counter such activities. The great game played itself out until the demise of the Soviet Union. What the United States must seriously consider now are the potentially negative impacts of following a similar pattern of behavior with China, of being led astray into costly and complex situations at all levels of political/military strategy. There are other ways to address the issues, problems, and challenges that lie ahead for the new generation of American leaders—who cannot afford the luxury of a Cold War standoff with massive economic implications.
Non-Invasive—For the Most Part
It is wise initially to revert to first principles when creating an enduring U.S. strategy in East Asia. Does China resemble, or has it begun to replicate, the patterns of activities that have characterized the growth, and decline, of imperial powers and those nations that sought regional hegemony? Do the imperial models of ancient Greece and Rome, the Spanish, British, Hapsburg, Turkish, and Russian empires resemble and apply to what we see evolving in China? Do the militarist, expansionist territorial goals of Napoleon, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan connect with what we observe happening with a growing Chinese military capability, an economic juggernaut that is by no means yet in top gear, and with massive resource needs, particularly oil, that require overseas Chinese investment, port facilities, and political/military infrastructure?
The answer to much of this is that China has led an extremely non-invasive approach to international relations in modern times, with certain exceptions. The past 500 years—since the European powers began their outward growth, exploration, colonization, and empire building—have witnessed China on a very different track. In that time, China has never invaded and permanently occupied a sovereign state or shown imperial intent. Since the Chinese revolution and the conclusion of World War II, China has lived inwardly. But there have been exceptions.
General Douglas MacArthur’s 1950 foray into North Korea and to the Yalu River provoked a response from China that was not surprising: Its forces invaded south across the Yalu and drove the United States back to the 38th parallel. From the Chinese perspective, the United States posed a threat to Chinese sovereignty and to a communist client state. In 1962, during the short Sino-Indian War, China invaded India briefly as a means of letting Jawaharlal Nehru’s government know that China disapproved of India’s support for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement. After India suffered a defeat, China quickly withdrew, having made its point.
However, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in February 1979—to signal Chinese disapproval of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to suppress China’s client regime, the Khmer Rouge—led to an ignominious defeat. The war lasted just one month. China lost about 20,000 troops, more in a matter of weeks than the United States lost in a single year of fighting in Vietnam. Moreover, a Vietnamese force of 100,000 border troops bloodied a Chinese army of 250,000, a humiliating defeat. The impact on China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, was dramatic.
China has supplied weapons and technology to nation-states that run counter to U.S. interests. China plays its own game with regard to all major international issues, whether it is U.N. policy in the Middle East or policy toward rogue nations (of which North Korea is a leading example). China, like any other country, pursues what it believes to be its national self-interest. The United States has to accept this reality, which is not likely to change anytime soon.
What China has not done is provide indications that it sees territorial expansion as a way to extend Chinese power and influence. It has mostly followed international law and agreements. There is no question that China could have marched into Hong Kong or Macau at any time without resistance. Instead, China waited until the legal expiration of treaty agreements that, in 21st-century hindsight, amounted to the blunt use of 19th-century imperial power by Portugal and Britain. Both territories transitioned peacefully to Chinese rule. By contrast, an Argentinian dictatorship decided in 1982 to challenge Britain’s long-standing rights and ownership of the Falkland Islands, and suffered the consequences. China has never made such moves. If there is a deviation from this trend, it is economic and not militarist, and could in due course prove to be the seed of serious discord.
Enter the Resource-Hungry Dragon
China has repeatedly indicated that its inherent needs and destiny are bound to economic hegemony in East Asia. To that end, the People’s Republic has begun a systematic set of claims, based on perceived historic rights, to key islands in the South China Sea. China is now a self-evident economic goliath. At some point its gross national product will equal and likely surpass those of the United States, Japan, and Germany. The danger is not economic competition—which is healthy and beneficial in the context of a well managed, globally interconnected marketplace—but resource needs. China’s massive population must be fed and sustained in keeping with its world economic position. The country has a serious hold on key precious metals, particularly in the semiconductor and space industries, but in other domains it is woefully dependent. Oil is the largest problem. The exponential growth of Chinese oil-demand could reach a crisis situation by 2020. Planners are constantly looking for alternative suppliers and areas for investment and exploration.
The legal concept of a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) has been generally accepted into the body of international law, but that zone and the law of the sea are the least developed and codified legalisms within the international community. Drawing 200-mile EEZs around the disputed island chains of the South China Sea creates major challenges for dispute resolution. Vietnam has been at odds with China over island-sovereignty issues for some time, and the geopolitics of the region place Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia in potential conflict with China over such claims as well. The wider issue of Chinese resource-needs will not fade away. There are no signs of major green energy programs that will solve China’s problems anytime soon. Coupled with China’s increasing thirst for oil is its parallel policy of hard-currency accumulation and owning foreign indebtness.
What then may China really want to achieve, given its military buildup, its naval exercises, and its posturing regarding Taiwan? What does China hope to gain by its ability to field new weapon systems such as anti-carrier, anti-access ballistic missiles and a growing fleet of submarines, both nuclear and non-nuclear, along with increasing moves into space and other intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance domains? China may, very simply, be planning on winning a war that it never fights.
Such a war is about countervailing power, raising the order of battle of key assets to high levels, and creating constant challenges that require persistent U.S. presence, deployments, and basing at very high cost. It is a war of attrition by other means, underpinned by sustainable economic growth and a Chinese military-industrial complex based on the new Chinese state capitalist model, which even some distinguished American economists have cited as being more efficient than the free-market capitalist system. This is a new form of hegemony, the Chinese version. The threat is not just the military buildup per se, but the underlying single weakness in the otherwise rosy Chinese future—resource limitations and the increasing demand for oil. By beefing up its military strength, China wins the war it never fights by checkmating the United States, specifically the U.S. Seventh Fleet, the forward-deployed representative of American presence, intent, technology, and firepower in Asia.
So what is the best strategy for the United States? No one in his right mind can contemplate a war with China. No responsible U.S. leader, however, can abide China creating an East Asian economic/political/military hegemony that may witness the demise of U.S. influence, and with it critical American economic interests.
Keeping the Arteries Healthy
The solution lies within the problem itself. While the United States reacts to Chinese moves—planning, for example, ways to implement new air-sea anti-access tactics and capabilities—essential points are most likely being missed. China’s quest for economic hegemony by political-military means can be addressed at the strategic level, because the United States has several critical factors in its favor. In the strategy that evolves from these factors, the U.S. Navy is a major player.
East and Southeast Asia are joined economically, and therefore politically, by one medium—the sea. It is the means by which most of the trade of Asia, and thus the world, takes place. Seaborne commerce is the enduring thread that runs through the history of the world since the age of discovery and expansion. Without oceanic trade, our global economy would collapse. The sea routes connecting all Asian countries with the rest of the world are vital arteries. If, for whatever reason, they cease to function, the world will hemorrhage economically.
The disparate Asian nations are interconnected and interdependent in this regard. Through the vital passages of the Malacca Strait and the Indonesian Archipelago run the routes that take trade onward through the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the trans-Pacific routes; those pathways are the lifelines of the world’s trading nations. The protection of that trade, the maintenance of the freedom of the seas, and the enforcement of the laws of the sea present a huge strategic opportunity to bring together the United States and its allies in the region. Such common effort can foster long-term peace and prosperity for all and ensure that East Asia is not destabilized by misplaced Chinese hegemonic intentions. China does not win a war that it never fights, and Asia can grow in wealth and prosperity with its American trading partners.
That is the genesis of a new U.S. strategy in Asia, one based on trade-route protection, maritime power, and shared efforts based on shared interests.
The New Maritime Paradigm
The U.S. Navy will play a pivotal and unifying role in this strategy. Its key ingredients include freedom of navigation, freedom of the seas, protection of seaborne trade, and rights of passage. What is required is a new “Asian Law of the Sea.” Such a law would:
• Guarantee various rights and codify conduct
• Provide unified policing and enforcement
• Provide agreement-based (and, in due course, treaty-based) means for regular international gatherings of the member states
•Take the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other multi- and bilateral agreements to a new organization and forum for organizing and implementing a maritime code of conduct.
This new organization would be the vehicle for resolving issues associated with 200-mile EEZs and disputes over island chains; for enforcing international law and human rights; and for combating piracy, smuggling, and terrorism. That is a formidable array of international activities that the United States can carry out with its regional partners. Such a cooperative undertaking can be the means to bring China into the family of Asian nations in ways that are neither belligerent nor challenging to the status quo. The strategy clearly places markers in the sand. To be a nonparticipant is to take one’s country out of the community of nations. If China chooses a less cooperative, continual hegemonic course, then its Asian neighbors will have built themselves a strongly fortified maritime community, linked by various agreements and obligations.
The alliance aspects are crucial. The good news is that the region’s nations are on board. The Australians, the Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Thais, the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Filipinos, and now the Vietnamese, signaled by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ groundbreaking visit in late 2010, are increasingly joined in a common bond. At the center is the United States, especially its principal Asian representative, the Seventh Fleet.
Navies are unique for multiple reasons, one of them being the unifying force of the brotherhood of the sea that navies show toward one another. Sailors are gregarious people who are diplomats in myriad ways, and nothing is more unifying than port visits after joint exercises, rescue missions, disaster relief, and successful operations against drug runners and terrorists. Navies by themselves can implement policies that no amount of conventional diplomacy can hope to achieve. The United States has existing resources that require little additional investment to make security-force assistance with all the participating nations a permanent and persistent feature of U.S. naval diplomacy. Those should be the watchwords of this strategy: “U.S. naval diplomacy.”
Joint international protection of maritime trade, economic rights, and the enforcement of a new emerging law of the sea for Asia can be the means to maintaining peace. If China balks and insists on an open standoff characterized by “benign aggression,” then there is little the United States and its friends and allies can do, other than to make it very clear that they will never tolerate any form of overt aggression. The olive branch can be continuously offered, and at some stage, it is hoped, will be accepted with magnanimity.
No one can successfully predict regime change in China. What one can safely predict is the likelihood that the confluence of generational change, the very international trade that is making China great, cultural and travel exchanges, the Internet, and technological sharing will overcome the inward-looking penchant of the current Chinese leadership. The specter of Tiananmen Square still looms large. China demonstrates a ruthless streak from time to time, and human rights are not part of its political make-up. Only time will tell if this will evolve. The virtues of youth and the global economy combined eventually may make certain transformations inevitable in China.
The Seaborne Solution
One scenario can illustrate implementation of the new regional collective effort. Regular joint exercises can be executed to protect shipping following the routes from the Southeast Asian straits to the Japanese islands and South Korea. Such exercises can develop and train the region’s nations in all domains of maritime warfare and seaborne trade protection.
For instance, in the antisubmarine-warfare and antisurface modes, those nations can show both capability and will, and if China elects to be a thorn in the side of its neighbors by offering up a belligerent passive-aggressiveness, then it will merely be providing training targets for the combined nations honing their skills. We can only hope this will not occur, and China will show respect for and observance of the rights of free passage and the various economic zones. Indeed, China has as much at stake as any nation, increasingly dependent as it is on the freedom of the seas for imported resources.
Change for the better in East Asia has been illustrated by the transformation of Vietnam, a nation that at the conclusion of the Vietnam War could barely sustain its population at the poverty level. Today, it has rejected the Marxist-Leninist model and pursues a state capitalist economy. Nothing is more symbolic of change than the $1.3 billion investment made by Intel outside Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam’s 90 million people are now at a new level of prosperity and growth, perhaps unthinkable at the time of another symbolic memory, the last U.S. helicopter departing the empty Saigon embassy in 1975. Vietnam can become a close ally and major trading partner with the United States, and be integrated with the other Asian nations in a new Asian maritime strategy.
The United States should be strident in implementing the new strategy. It combines the maintaining of vital U.S. national interests—even to the extent of keeping the peace by preparing for war—with an internationalist maritime strategy that focuses on the enduring significance of the sea. The sea is both the means and the end in a modern U.S. Asian strategy.