A look back at U.S. history may provide clues to China’s future actions.
Will the leaders of the People’s Republic of China carry out their threats to attack Taiwan? How do the Chinese plan to exert influence in Asia and the world? Guidance in answering these pressing questions may come from an unlikely source. There are numerous parallels between the United States’ international position in 1898 and China’s in 2005, and an examination of U.S. actions during and soon after the Spanish-American War could help to predict the course that China’s government will choose.
In 1898 the United States had both regional and imperial ambitions: to clear the Caribbean of any last vestiges of European colonialism, and to extend U.S. influence across the Pacific, beyond Hawaii to the Philippines and even to China. The U.S. government had previously lacked the force to pursue these aims, but by 1898 it had both the force (a small but modem navy) and the strong economy needed to pay for, sustain, and even enlarge that force. The question was how best to use both the force and growing U.S. political influence.
Eliminating European colonies and undue European influence in the Western Hemisphere had been a longtime U.S. foreign policy goal. In April 1898, the United States went to war with Spain to further that aim. The real power in the Caribbean was Great Britain, but Spain—and not Britain, France, or Germany—was the power that U.S. forces could beat. They defeated the Spanish army and navy relatively quickly (an armistice ending the fighting was signed in August 1898) and without great loss of American lives. A bonus was the capture of the Philippines, though the Filipino irregulars under President Emilio Aguinaldo began an insurrection in February 1899 that did not formally end until after Aguinaldo’s capture in March 1901.
United States foreign policy before, during, and after the war with Spain had several essential goals. The first was to avoid war with Great Britain. In August 1898, President William McKinley appointed John Hay, who had previously served as ambassador to Britain, as his secretary of state. Hay then settled the Canada-Alaska boundary dispute and committed the United States to respecting an unfortified border with Canada. He also convinced the British that American aims in the Caribbean were limited to enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, while U.S. policy with regard to China was to maintain what Hay called the “open door.” In other words, the United States was not building a navy designed to compete with Great Britain’s because the country did not intend to become Britain’s global competitor.
The second goal of U.S. foreign policy was to build a canal across Central America. To lay the foundation for this aim, Secretary of State Hay negotiated a treaty with Great Britain in November 1901 that gave the United States sole authority to complete such a project. In January 1903, he negotiated a treaty with Colombia granting the United States a 100-year lease to construct a canal in the Colombian province of Panama. When the Colombian legislature rejected the treaty in August 1903, the U.S. government cooperated with a conspiracy to create an independent Panama. In November, the same month that the country declared its independence, Secretary Hay negotiated a treaty with the new Panamanian regime granting the United States rights for a canal zone.
The third aim of U.S. policy was to gain influence in China while not imitating the policies of imperialist nations such as Japan and Great Britain. The occupation of the Philippines was complemented by the seizure of Guam in 1898 and the annexation of Hawaii that same year. During the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1900, however. Secretary Hay announced that the United States did not have territorial ambitions in China—that U.S. forces would not support European policies of annexing Chinese territory to create exclusive enclaves. The U.S. goal was to keep China open to all nations wishing to trade with the country or to send missionaries to work peacefully there.
But if China was worthy of self-determination and territorial integrity, why not the Philippines? That contradiction in U.S. policy was clear in 1900 but was not resolved until 1933, when Congress approved legislation granting the Philippines independence in 1945 and commonwealth status until that date. The point is that for more than three decades after the United States annexed the Philippines two inconsistent policy themes coexisted side by side. One emphasized the unique quality of American policy in Asia (the United States would act differently than other imperial powers); the other stressed the need for military bases so that the United States could exert power in the region.
The fourth goal of U.S. foreign policy was to gain influence at the lowest possible strategic cost. For example, a naval race with Great Britain would have imposed a strain on the U.S. economy just when American industry was growing dramatically and competing in the relatively new international market. Consequently, U.S. claims to primacy in the Caribbean were tempered by a judicious approach to the British, who dominated that new market.
Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt carefully avoided any confrontation with British leaders over Canada, Britain’s possessions in the Caribbean, and its Far East policies. In December 1903, for instance, Roosevelt was very judicious in how he used the “stick” of the U.S. fleet in his efforts to persuade Germany, Great Britain, and Italy to back away from their naval blockade of Venezuela. A year later, when Roosevelt announced his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, he focused his criticism on the chronic instability of Central American governments. Instead of declaring “all Europeans stay out,” he said that the United States would act as the world’s primary policeman in the Caribbean.
The construction of the Panama Canal can also be seen as a means of reducing long-term strategic costs. It meant that the U.S. fleet could be shifted from one ocean to the other in short order and that the United States could have naval influence in both the Atlantic and Pacific without having to maintain two separate fleets. The canal gave the country a strategic advantage in the Caribbean, the eastern Pacific (from the West Coast to Hawaii), and the western Atlantic. That satisfied the advocates of a stronger U.S. role—those supporting the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—as well as those who saw the U.S. fleet as a defensive force that kept potential enemies at arms length.
The fifth U.S. policy goal was to avoid being perceived as merely a regional power. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt sent the “Great White Fleet” on an around-the-world tour, which lasted 14 months, to demonstrate to Japan that the United States could project power across the Pacific and to show the major European powers that it could also extend its forces across the Atlantic. In just ten years, the United States had manifested first its regional strength and then its international military potential. Along the way it used an interesting combination of diplomacy and military might to maneuver through a wide variety of conflicts, from open war (with Spain) to regional intervention (in Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic) to international police actions (helping to suppress the Boxer Rebellion). United States leaders, moreover, had done so while avoiding strategic costs that the country did not want to pay.
Britain’s Response to Growing U.S. Power
In today’s inflated idiom, Britain was the great imperial “hegemon” of the 1890s, possessing the world’s strongest and largest navy and most significant merchant marine. As it happened, the United States began enlarging its navy while both the Germans and the Japanese were enlarging theirs. Faced with the rapid rise of multiple competitors, the British could suppress them, concede regional superiority to them, or ignore them. In the case of both Japan and the United States, Great Britain conceded regional superiority so long as it needed to concentrate its naval forces to deter any threat from Germany.
At the same time, the Royal Navy took a gamble. It could not outbuild all of its potential opponents. Indeed, it was having trouble staying solvent while retaining its lead over Germany in the race to build dreadnoughts. The Royal Navy could, however, change the nature of naval combat by gaining and then holding a significant technical and tactical advantage through the development of highly mobile battle cruisers, which could strike accurately at ranges beyond those of their opponents.
The Royal Navy’s all-big-gun battle cruisers were replacements for the numerous ships at far-flung stations that had either been scrapped as unaffordable or brought home to confront the growing German menace. As military historian Jon Sumida has clearly pointed out (see In Defense of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914), Royal Navy leaders planned to counter the growing worldwide challenge to their influence by creating a force that was strategically mobile and technologically superior. That their decision was at least partially correct was demonstrated in the first months of World War I when a British force led by two of the battle cruisers caught and then destroyed the powerful German East Asiatic Squadron near the Falkland Islands. Just as significant was the battle cruisers’ swift return to England immediately after their overwhelming victory in order to reinforce the battleship squadrons blockading the German High Seas Fleet.
The partially successful British gamble on new technology made obsolete the battleships of the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet. But while it did not eliminate the United States as a regional power or even as an international force with which to be reckoned, the British gamble did impose a significant strategic cost on America. The magnitude of that cost was made clear in the aftermath of the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, when the United States and the other signatories of the naval arms limitation agreements negotiated at the conference scrapped the older portions of their battle fleets. In 1919, for example, the U.S. Navy spent more than $43 million (in 1919 dollars) to operate and maintain its battleship force. By 1926 that figure had declined to $28.8 million.
Put another way, the strategic cost of the legacy force was very high. Indeed, it was so high that no nation could support a really large and modern navy without endangering its own domestic economic stability. Governments therefore turned to international agreements to hold that strategic cost in check. The Washington Naval Treaty actually limited navies in both quantitative and qualitative terms. It held down construction and the ability of navies to introduce new competitive technologies in fields such as aviation and submarines.
But the treaty and other arms limitation agreements did not solve the major problem facing the hegemon: competition from newly industrialized nations. The new navies these states assembled eventually developed their own advanced technologies. By 1922 they had turned the tables on the British. Prior to World War I, the Royal Navy had imposed high strategic costs on Japan, Germany, and the United States by pushing advanced technology. But all three competitors paid those costs, and only one of them suffered for doing so. Indeed, after World War I, competition from the United States and Japan convinced Great Britain to negotiate a naval arms limitation agreement-something totally unanticipated just a decade earlier.
The British also responded to the situation by abandoning their alliance with Japan and forging a new alliance with the United States. Becoming America’s ally was not easy for Great Britain, and the process took more than a decade, but it proved beneficial for both nations. The British gained the support of the world’s strongest industrial nation. The United States got significant military support and basing rights in the theater of potential conflict that mattered the most—Europe.
Clues to the Future?
The leaders of the People’s Republic of China have so far focused on avoiding the sort of economic authoritarianism and confusion that we have seen in Russia, and on increasing China’s international economic and political influence. The two go together; the second depends on the first. But like the United States in 1898, China is avoiding a direct political or military confrontation with the world’s strongest military power. It could, for example, attack Taiwan, but I assume that it has chosen not to do so because the likely strategic cost would be greater than the strategic gain.
Indeed, by deploying forces opposite Taiwan and by building up its navy, the mainland government imposes strategic costs on both Taiwan and the United States. Put another way, the government in China can arm itself with modem weapons—something all major governments are doing—and force both Taiwan and the United States to stay ahead.
The United States is presently in a position vis-à-vis China analogous to that of Great Britain in relation to America in 1900. If the U.S. military is to have any peer competitor over the next generation, it will be China, and Chinese leaders can impose costs on the United States by simply doing what they were inclined to do anyway— which is what America did to European nations in the late 1890s and early 1900s when it built up its navy.
China, like the United States after 1898, has tried to exert influence on its neighbors, though not recently through military action or overt military intimidation. Unlike America back then, however, China faces significant regional rivals. For example, the Chinese have to deal with an independent, wealthy Japan and the strong economies of the other states in the region, from South Korea to Thailand. The Chinese also confront a North Korea that may be armed with nuclear weapons, and a Vietnam that refuses to be militarily intimidated.
The present-day South China Sea is not the same as the Caribbean in 1898. It is not a Chinese lake. If there is any strategic weakness in the region, it is to the north, in Russia, and that vulnerability is basically social and economic, not military. Like the United States after 1898, the Chinese face very different political cultures in an area where they expect their economic strength to give them influence. And like the United States after 1898, they may find that gaining and preserving influence within these cultures is easier said than done. For example, I cannot imagine a Chinese interventionist force in Indonesia—not while a Muslim population in western China is pressing for recognition of its religious and cultural integrity.
Another point to consider is the aftermath of gaining regional and then international power. Chinese statesmen must realize that the United States was not capable of using its great turn-of-the-century power, which was demonstrated by the cruise of the Great White Fleet, to arbitrate the crisis that led to World War I in the same way that President Theodore Roosevelt had arranged a settlement of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. And because it could not do so, the country was compelled a generation later to enter World War II. Yet the United States had the only economy that grew in real terms during the latter conflict, and the country was clearly the dominant Western power at the end of 1945. A present-day senior official in the Chinese government could therefore state with some authority that war paid off for the United States. Could it do the same for China? Or would a better Chinese strategy be to continue to gain economic strength and forego war but still to threaten it in order first to isolate Taiwan and then to use Taiwan as a South China Sea analogy to Hawaii? What is clear, however, is that the government of the People’s Republic of China has rejected or at least modified its former policy of using military threats (including the use of nuclear weapons) and ideological confrontation to intimidate other governments within and outside its region. Its current approach emphasizes—whether deliberately or by accident—holding down strategic costs and increasing those costs for its neighbors and rivals.
By 1908 the United States had claimed a major place on the world stage, but the Europeans knew that they still held center stage. They did not lose their dominant place until after World War II, and throughout the Cold War they remained at the center of strategic conflicts and therefore the primary focus of American energy and policy. China’s economic growth has moved that country (along with Japan, South Korea, and even Taiwan) to the center of the world’s economic and political stage. War, or even military confrontation, might seem to run counter to both China’s long-term interests and its existing level of influence in the world.
But China, like the United States in 1898, can gain influence by simply building up a force level that compels its potential competitors to pay what are for them inordinate strategic costs. A century ago, time was on the side of the United States vis-à-vis Great Britain. The U.S. economy was growing, American manufacturers could compete effectively in the new and growing world markets, and the country had the capability and wealth to take advantage of the transformations—such as electricity, the airplane, radio, and the submarine—that were about to alter warfare. The Chinese are in a similar position in relation to the United States.
Will they be able to exploit it? One can argue that the United States did not exploit its advantages after 1908. Successive U.S. administrations could not stabilize Central America, though they kept European regimes from exploiting the instability there. Woodrow Wilson could not prevent World War I, or even settle it on terms favorable to the United States, despite growing U.S. military and economic power. Franklin Roosevelt could not deter either Germany or Japan from war. The best he could do was to end the United States’ international isolationism and to make sure that the country emerged from the war with a strong economy.
What the United States lacked before both World War I and World War II was a way to impose high enough strategic costs on its likely opponents that they would avoid war and tacitly recognize U.S. international influence. Because deterrence failed, the United States was forced into both world wars and then into the Cold War, which can be thought of as a long-term strategic competition that involved avoiding paying the high human and economic costs of full-scale war while maneuvering for strategic victory. Unfortunately for the leaders of the USSR, the United States and its allies imposed greater strategic costs on the Soviet economy and society than either could bear and the effort to reform both (along with other factors) led to the rapid evaporation of the ruling Communist Party’s legitimacy.
I therefore suggest that the Chinese government will try to find a way to impose high enough strategic costs on its potential opponents—especially the United States—that it gains international strategic influence without going to war. The United States can be viewed as having tried to do the same thing between 1898 and 1908—to expand influence from the United States proper to both Europe and Asia so that it became the arbiter of international diplomacy and interaction. Unfortunately for U.S. leaders, the effort was only partly successful. If the leaders of present-day China grasp that point, it should shape their military policy in general and their naval policy in particular.
Dr. Hone is the assistant director for risk management at the Department of Defense’s Office of Force Transformation and is coauthor of American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919-1941 (Naval Institute Press, 1999).