The Contest of the Century (18 page)

As a result, there is an iron rule to the new era of geopolitical competition in Asia, which Washington and Beijing ignore at their peril: do not ask the other Asians to choose sides. The government that pushes Asians to pick one power over the other will lose. Modern Asia has its own internal balance of power, which will make it hard for either the U.S. or China to dominate the region. Asians believe they can trade with China and at the same time encourage an active U.S. presence, and they will push back against anyone who tries to force their hands. Everything else follows from this simple understanding.

China’s behavior over the last few years has been so counterproductive because it has run up against this iron rule. Beijing was in effect trying to suggest that America is the region’s past and China the future, so Asian governments should fall in line with its wishes. Leaders in the Asia-Pacific responded by doubling up on their ties with Washington. The harder China pushes, the more the region’s governments will band together into a loose coalition to deter a Chinese push for dominance.

Yet the new Asian reality also poses difficult questions for the U.S. American officials like to say that they have always been attentive to the regional balance of power, but the reality is that the U.S.’s unrivaled military superiority meant that it did not have to think too hard about diplomacy. The difficult process of coalition building seemed less pressing when most challenges could be addressed by sending in an aircraft-carrier group. All this is now changing. Even those who are skeptical about China’s current capabilities do not doubt that, over the next two decades, American control of the western Pacific will be substantially loosened. That means the U.S. will have to develop different ways to maintain a favorable balance of power. The U.S. needs to rethink the way it exerts influence in Asia.

An Asia strategy first, not a China strategy. By focusing too closely on China, America tends to overreact to the country, a tunnel vision that leads to the assumption that the U.S. and China are the only central players. The result is a division into two different camps that favor either accommodating China or confronting it, neither of which is wholly realistic.

The hawkish response to China’s military buildup is to call for a renewed effort to reassert American supremacy in the region. Pressure
is building, especially on the right, for a decisive military response to push back against Chinese assertiveness. Yet down that path lies the potential for a permanent cycle of escalating tensions, of provocations and counter-moves and rising defense budgets. It is a recipe for a contest that would feel a lot like a new Cold War. It would also damage America’s ties to the region. If the U.S. takes too confrontational an approach to China, it will lose support of some of its friends and allies, who will accuse Washington of pushing the region toward conflict. A strategy to contain China could not work. Asians want the support of the American military so they can feel comfortable engaging with China, not so they can isolate it.

At the same time, an excessive focus on China can lead America to lean too far in the opposite direction in an effort to accommodate Beijing, to search prematurely for a formula for sharing power between the two giants. The early years of the first Obama administration were full of talk of a G-2 between the U.S. and China to tackle global issues together. Such an effort would also fail the new Asian rule on several fronts. By transmitting a sense of weakness to China, it might actually embolden the more hawkish elements in Beijing, who would sense decline. And it would also terrify many Asian nations who dislike the idea of Asia’s becoming a Chinese sphere of influence and who would feel abandoned by the U.S. If such fears took hold, Japan could seek its own nuclear weapons, maybe South Korea, too; Vietnam’s existential crisis would deepen. Conflicts could become more likely, not less. Asians do not want the U.S. to confront China, but they also do not want the two governments to conspire to set the regional agenda. Even if Washington wanted to appoint China as a co-leader in Asia, that role is not America’s to give.

Instead, it makes more sense to start not with China, but with Asia as a whole. If the U.S. is going with the grain of what most of a rising Asia wants, it will become much easier to fend off any Chinese efforts to alter the status quo. The good news for Washington is that ideas that it says it wants to promote in Asia—free trade, open navigation, legal protections for investment, economic integration across the Pacific, and an emphasis on human rights—are all things that most Asian governments also support. As its military dominance starts to wane, Washington’s
objective is to help build an Asian regional order based on these principles, which China could not overturn even if it wanted to. All this will require a delicate balancing act. As the iron rule dictates, the U.S. will need to avoid turning China into an implacable enemy. But it also needs to demonstrate to both China and its allies that it has staying power, and that, despite Chinese predictions, it is not about to retreat back across the Pacific for evening cocktails in Hawaii. China and the U.S. will eventually have to learn to live with each other, to find a way to respect each other’s interests in the western Pacific, if they are to avoid a rivalry that feels like the Cold War. But that accommodation will be more favorable to the U.S. and more stable for the region if China believes any bid for regional dominance would come at enormous costs and regional isolation.

Elements of this approach are already being developed in what is now called the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia. The president has left no doubt that he sees the Asia-Pacific as a central long-term priority for U.S. national security. But many of the details are not clear. As things stand, the U.S. economic agenda in the region is shaky, and the hints Washington has given of its new military strategy are downright alarming. This chapter will look at the four pillars of the U.S.’s approach to Asia—military, diplomatic, economic, and political.

HOW NOT TO FIGHT CHINA

In 1992, a young deputy air-force attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing called Mark Stokes started to tour quietly around various parts of the country, looking for clues about what the Chinese military were up to. In those days, there were not nearly as many foreigners living in China as there are today, and in most cities a Western face soon attracted a lot of attention. But by hanging around cities with large military bases, such as Leping in the southern province of Jiangxi, and comparing impressions with what was being written in Chinese military literature, Stokes was able to gain some insights into what the PLA was actually planning. He started to accumulate evidence about what appeared to be the start of a major strategic bet by the Chinese military on medium-range and long-range missiles. It was the first sign that China was building
a military that one day might seek to exert greater control over the western Pacific. “In many ways, we are still in the same position we were in then of underestimating China’s ability for important breakthroughs in areas that directly challenge the U.S.,” says Stokes, who now helps run a consultancy that monitors the Chinese military.

For much of the last two decades, the Pentagon has held an anguished internal debate about the nature of China’s military modernization. Back in 1992, plenty of people in the Pentagon dismissed the analysis of people such as Stokes, rejecting the idea that a country as poor as China would have such clear-cut military ambitions. Others argued that China’s ability to contest Asia’s seas with the U.S. was heavily constrained by its dependency on the global economy. China could not afford to upset the apple cart, they said. In the 1990s, the debate was largely academic, because the U.S. still had a dramatic superiority, which it had coolly demonstrated in the 1995–96 standoff over Taiwan’s election. After China launched several missiles into Taiwanese waters in order to intimidate voters, the U.S. sent two aircraft-carrier groups into the region as a demonstration of force. Beijing was furious, but it could not do anything, and Taiwan held its election without further threats. Yet, over the years, the Pentagon has consistently been surprised at the pace of China’s military buildup, from its ability to take out satellites to the stealth fighter jet it tested while Bob Gates was in the country. Today, if you ask the question about how the U.S. would respond to a similar crisis, the answer from U.S. military officials often involves a lot of nervous fidgeting.

One of the jobs of a military is to plan for worst-case scenarios. The U.S. military conducts regular war games to test how conflicts with potential adversaries such as China might play out, and in recent years these have delivered some disturbing conclusions. In several of the simulations, the U.S. participants found that Chinese missiles quickly overwhelmed many American bases in the region, as well as sinking some of the aircraft carriers that the U.S. sent into the western Pacific. It is a measure of the rapid advance in China’s air force and navy in the last two decades that, if a conflict did break out over Taiwan, it is now not at all clear that the U.S. would be able to intervene decisively in the Taiwan Strait.

The U.S. has not lost an aircraft carrier since the Japanese sank the
Hornet
in 1942. In both practical and symbolic ways, the aircraft carrier has been the symbol of American power projection over the six decades during which it has dominated the Pacific. The credibility of U.S. defense guarantees for the region has been carried on the backs of America’s eleven carriers, with their decks each the size of three football fields filled with dozens of fighter aircraft. But it is those same vessels that are now potentially under threat by China’s vast new array of missiles. The loss of a carrier would be a massive psychological blow to American prestige and credibility, a naval 9/11. The mere prospect that carriers might be vulnerable could be enough to restrict their use. Even if the U.S. Navy commanders thought their carriers would probably survive in a conflict, they might be reluctant to take the risk. As a result, the U.S. needs a Plan B.

Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, that new plan is taking shape. It is not actually described as a plan—instead, Pentagon officials call it a new “concept” for fighting wars. But it does have a name, AirSea Battle, which echoes the war-fighting doctrine from the later stages of the Cold War called AirLand Battle, when the massive buildup in Soviet troops appeared to give the U.S.S.R. the capacity to overrun Western Europe. Many of the details about AirSea Battle remain vague. But the few indications that have been made public suggest an approach that, if pushed too far, could be a manifesto for a new Cold War.

——

In 2005, the American writer Robert Kaplan did a
cover story for
The Atlantic
entitled “How We Would Fight China.” I can remember receiving a copy in my office in Shanghai and tossing it angrily onto a pile of papers, the plastic wrapper still on the magazine. This was the high point of the debacle in Iraq, and the idea of talking up a war with China at that very moment seemed the height of neoconservative conceit. It made me uncomfortable for all sorts of other reasons. When you have recently moved to a country, are learning its language, making friends, and exploring its mysteries, it is unsettling to be asked to start thinking about how it might be defeated militarily. When I did eventually read Kaplan’s article a few years later, it was not as hawkish as the title
suggested and contained sensible recommendations about getting on better with the rest of Asia and dispersing U.S. military assets across the region. But I also began to realize that the question he raised was a crucial one. China does not have a grand imperial plan to invade its neighbors, in the way the Soviets did. But in any country with a rapidly growing military—one that is feeling its national oats and is involved in a score of unresolved territorial disputes—there is always the risk that its leaders might be tempted by some sort of military solution, the lure of a quick win that would reorder the regional balance. If China and its neighbors all believe that the U.S. has a credible plan for a conflict, this both acts as deterrence against any eventual Chinese adventurism and reduces the risk that anxious Asians will start their own arms races with Beijing. Or, as T. X. Hammes, the American military historian, puts it: “We need to make sure no one in the Chinese military is whispering in their leaders’ ears: If you listen to me, we can be in Paris in just two weeks.”

Alarming as it may sound, the question of how to fight China also forces Washington to reflect on its deeper objectives in Asia. Bob Gates, the former defense secretary, used to remark that the Pacific had “for all practical purposes been an American lake for our navy since the end of World War II.” But relative decline means finding different ways to achieve U.S. goals. With its superiority now under challenge, Washington faces a choice: it can try to retain its primacy, or it can shift to a more defensive approach that is geared toward preventing another power from ever turning the region into a sphere of influence. Deterrence is not always the same as domination. Washington’s answer to this question remains muddled. When asked to define their military objectives, American officials will say that deterrence is their principal goal, but they also give plenty of indications that they still aspire to a more maximalist role, to try and hang on to their unquestioned superiority. Shortly after he became head of the U.S. Navy in 2011, Admiral Jonathan Greenert issued a set of “Sailing Directions,” which set out the navy’s mission and made the claim that
“we own the sea.” When I asked another senior U.S. official about the objectives of AirSea Battle, he said, a little awkwardly, “It is part of a conversation we are having about the different forms we expect our pre-eminence to take.”

AirSea Battle is a direct response to the war-game simulations that showed Chinese missiles taking out American carriers. Its target is the buildup by other nations of what in Pentagon-speak is known as “anti-access/area-denial,” or A2AD for short, the weapons and ships that are designed to prevent an opponent from getting into the seas around its coasts
in the event of a conflict. “We need to make sure that we can actually get to the fight,” an air-force official explained. In public, Pentagon officials claim AirSea Battle is not aimed at China. One senior Pentagon official insisted to me, “This is not an anti-China battle plan.” But when the Pentagon starts to describe the new threats it is facing—long-range, precision-strike missiles that can restrict the movements of its ships, advanced submarines, and skills in cyberwar—it becomes clear that AirSea Battle is primarily about China. The hypothetical threat that the Pentagon planners outline describes accurately the precise strategy that China has been developing to restrict U.S. access to the western Pacific. No wonder U.S. military officers sometimes refer to China as “Voldemort”—in the Pentagon’s new battle plan, China is the enemy whose name they dare not speak.