An intensifying China-U.S. rivalry may soon test the limits of deterrence theory.
Since the first atomic detonation in July 1945, military thinkers have struggled to rationalize the use of force when there is a risk of unleashing radioactive consequences. Physicist and Los Alamos Laboratory chief J. Robert Oppenheimer captured the transition to the new era by quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Because of the advent of even more destructive thermonuclear weapons in the 1950s, the strongest-armed states have avoided war with one another. Instead, they have acceded to the brutal logic of Mutual Assured Destruction, with its eerily apt acronym, MAD. Having survived a 40-year-long Cold War without major conflagration, it has taken us just 30 more years for a nuclear and high-tech arms race to re-emerge among the big powers.
MAD still constrains the unbridled resort to force. Yet recent revelations of China’s expansive nuclear ambitions and pursuit of advanced weapons that can evade missile defenses raise new doubts about the durability of deterrence.
When chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley described China’s recent hypersonic testing as a near-Sputnik moment, he was grasping for an analogy to the 1957 Soviet satellite launch that catalysed a space race and sparked fears of a strategic missile gap.
In the context of mounting People’s Liberation Army capabilities, General Milley’s comparison seems apropos. The PLA will likely acquire more than 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. It is currently building three solid-fuel ICBM silo fields, introducing multiple-re-entry warheads, moving towards a launch-on-warning posture, and developing hypervelocity glide vehicles to help ensure nuclear weapons reach their target.
Long gone are the days when China denounced nuclear weapons as a paper tiger and happily embraced a minimal nuclear deterrent in deed and not just word.
PLA modernization
While we can only speculate about China’s intentions, there is little doubt about the capabilities they are assembling.
Officials in Beijing cast the US as a confrontational troublemaker but fail to reflect on their attempts to tilt the regional military balance and eventually supplant an American-dominated order. Historically the lagging pillar of a developing China, the PLA is at the vanguard of President Xi Jinping’s strategy for national rejuvenation.
“Xi Jinping Thought” is the overarching guide for a newly confident China to “fight and win wars” against a “strong enemy”. Mr Xi’s call for the PLA to help defend China’s sovereignty, security, and development amounts to a list of core tasks enumerated in the 2019 defence White Paper. The first aim is to “deter” and resist aggression, followed by obligations to safeguard political and social stability, oppose and contain “Taiwan independence”, crack down on separatists, and protect territorial integrity and maritime rights and interests.
In the latest Congressionally-mandated annual report on Chinese “Military and Security Developments”, the US Department of Defense empirically lays out the ongoing PLA transformation. The baseline assessment of the Defense Department’s “pacing challenge” builds on authoritative Chinese pronouncements, foundational documents, and priority initiatives.
The year 2027 is a critical milestone for Beijing as it is the deadline for achieving a networked “system of systems” for waging “intelligentized warfare”. Cutting through the jargon, the PLA seeks to create usable military options for seizing Taiwan and achieving “effective control” within the First Island Chain, which runs from the Ryukyu islands through the vast majority of the South China Sea.
The report catalogues Beijing’s progress towards fielding collective capabilities for achieving anti-access and area-denial and projecting influence beyond the Second Island Chain and deeper into the Pacific and globally. However broad China’s appetite, its most urgent goals seem closer to home.
A combination of the world’s largest navy (which will comprise 420 ships by 2025 and 460 by 2030), air and missile strike capabilities, and cyber and space operations are designed to “dissuade, deter, or, if ordered, defeat third-party intervention during a large-scale, theatre campaign such as a Taiwan contingency”.
PLA strategists use the term “effective control” to denote an ability to manage escalation. This might be accomplished by changing facts on the ground as a fait accompli (such as building artificial island-reefs in the Spratlys), a short and sharp war (swiftly seizing part or all of Taiwan or other offshore islands), or dissuading others not to risk catastrophic harm by interfering with “China’s internal affairs”.
But can the upper echelon of the Chinese Communist Party – and after the 6th Plenum that seems to boil down to Mr Xi – honestly believe that they can execute a decisive seizure of territory without triggering a robust American-led response?
Beyond M.A.D.
The nuclear genie has been kept in the bottle since the end of World War II, and we still live in a MAD world. So, what is Beijing up to, and is it shifting its thinking about the use of military force?
Deterrence is precarious by design. While it is a severe barrier to major-power war, it quickly loses potency amid lower levels of brinkmanship and coercion.
The spectre of catastrophic war is a faint check on malign behavior in cyber and grey-zone operations that fall below the threshold of conventional conflict. Now an emboldened China – harboring historical grievances, requiring tight internal security, and flashing newfound military might – seems destined to keep probing the integrity of a creaking post-war world order.
Taiwan is the most obvious flash point, even more than other islands in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Numerous experts say so, and Beijing seems eager to reinforce them. The result is that many American national security professionals think they must do more to deter Chinese aggression.
But who is deterring whom?
Have the Chinese discovered a MAD work-around, or are their military moves aiming to achieve other more pedestrian goals, such as weakening alliances, enhancing leverage, and bolstering national status?
One Chinese stratagem may call for heightening the prospect of a major-power war to compel others to acquiesce to Beijing’s preferences. Those preferences include discouraging those who support Taiwan and dissuading US military forces from conducting surveillance and freedom of navigation operations close to China.
Since only Mr Xi knows whether he would seriously pull the trigger on the use of force, he has the luxury of pushing the US to the frontiers of its tolerance.
The problem with such a risky notion is that China and the US could lurch into conflict. After all, neither side shows any sign of backing down. Instead, both Beijing and Washington increasingly seem convinced that the other will only listen to reason when confronted with hard power.
The Biden administration’s top advisers understand that the accelerating pace of Chinese military modernisation means there can be no slackening in the defence arena without diminishing American leverage.
For instance, the Nuclear Posture Review document likely to be released sometime this month will seek to straddle the need for strengthening deterrence with the need for reassuring allies and partners of American resolve to defend their interests. Because adopting a rhetorical policy of “no first use” has no tangible benefit for US national security interests, the administration would be prudent to preserve ambiguity.
Washington should maintain a high bar on the use of nuclear weapons while simultaneously reinforcing its longstanding policy of reserving the right to use all its military capabilities to defend and protect the US and its allies.
Still, a stout military posture is not enough to convince a sceptical region that America’s vision is better than the PRC’s. When one adjusts to the inherent limits of MAD, one realises that the Indo-Pacific region thrives on more vital dimensions than nuclear weapons and military force.
Levels of competition
In an otherwise divided US, there is a surprising bipartisan consensus behind the Biden administration’s policy of out-competing China and denying it exclusive control over East Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. Having anchored its strategy to stand with allies and partners, the Biden administration is unwavering in its policy direction.
Such postulates of American strategic thought will be at the heart of an Indo-Pacific strategy set for release in the coming days. The Biden administration is determined to fashion a positive, inclusive vision that begins with hard-power facts but doesn’t end with them.
In doing so, it recalls that a decade ago this month, then President Barack Obama told the Australian Parliament that “in the Asia Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in”.
Mr. Obama spelt out a comprehensive rebalance to the region, modifying America’s global military force posture while forging ahead with Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations. Whereas Mr Obama strove to focus on “the future that we must build”, President Joe Biden inherited an America focused on its narrow self-interests and in retreat from international leadership.
Alas, the region’s two multilateral trade accords, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that commences on Jan 1 and the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership for which China has applied for membership, lumber ahead without the US.
Mr Biden knows an underdeveloped trade policy hampers him, but for the time being, his hands are tied.
As Harvard professor Joseph Nye contends, the US and China are locked in a cooperative rivalry that must be played across military, economic and social dimensions. Maintaining the balance of power in Asia requires improving defense relations with key allies and partners while negotiating trade agreements and advancing solutions to transnational issues like climate change and pandemics.
The greatest challenge is managing all the levels of competition and cooperation at the same time.
Professor Nye wisely sees in the combined military might and economic power of like-minded countries a level of power that far exceeds even the China dream.
But as Dr. Henry Kissinger pointed out in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, published the same year Moscow launched its Sputnik satellite into orbit in 1957: “The mere assembling of overwhelming power is meaningless if it cannot be brought to bear on the issues actually in dispute.”
Therein lies a crucial problem. Can the US mobilize others not to buckle when Beijing turns up the pilot light on military contingencies, and will the sum of US allies and partners amount to more than the parts? Unless the answer to those questions is yes, the firewall protecting against more extreme coercion and aggression risks being breached.
Read in