War: What is it good for? (61 page)

In mid-2011, as governments all around the Pacific Rim weighed their options, I had the good fortune to be invited to Canberra for a meeting of the Australian Strategic Policy Instituted.
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Seen from Canberra, the dilemmas were particularly acute. When the rest of the West had fallen into recession in 2009, Australia had not, largely because China's continued hunger for its coal and iron fueled a mining and commodities boom. By 2011, the country was unique among rich nations in being in its twentieth straight year of economic growth. To many Australians, this suggested—as the institute's director, Major General Peter Abigail, put it—“that Australia will at some stage need to make a choice between its primary economic partner [China] and its primary security partner [the United States].”

During the darkest days of the global financial crisis, Australia had already hinted at what its choice would be. “The Government's judgement,” a Defence White Paper had announced in 2009, “is that strategic stability in the region is best underpinned by the continued presence of the United States.” But the problem, as Australian journalists mercilessly pointed out, was that the official thinking was a mess: after insisting on the primacy of Australia's security partner, the bulk of the white paper was about how to stay in its economic partner's good graces.

The meeting I went to had been called to try to straighten out this muddle before the government published its next Defence White Paper. The discussion was open and engaged, ranging from the nature of strategy to urbanization and energy, but through it all there was a palpable discomfort in the room. Every option seemed to bring more costs than benefits. A split with its economic partner would ruin Australia. A split with its security partner would leave Australia unable to stand up to China. And if, miracle of miracles, Australia managed to keep all these balls in the air, a continuing mining boom would ruin it anyway by distorting its economy.

Personally, I left Canberra even less certain about what would happen next than I had been when I arrived, but behind the scenes more important
conversations were going on. At first, these conversations also seemed to be more decisive: forsaking ambiguity, the Australian government announced that “Australia and the United States are seeking to align their respective force postures in ways that serve shared security interests.” In November 2011, Barack Obama flew to Canberra. “Let there be no doubt,” he told the Parliament. “In the Asia-Pacific of the twenty-first century, the United States of America is all in … We will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in the region … We will keep our commitments.” Over the months that followed, discussions much like those in Canberra went on all along the island chains. One government after another followed Australia's lead and stiffened its spine. A flurry of collective security agreements followed, and some nations made major policy shifts. Myanmar turned its back on China and embraced Washington (and democracy); Japan talked of rearming and even of fighting China over the Senkaku Islands.

But no sooner had these new certainties taken shape than they began dissolving. In May 2013, Australia's new Defence White Paper abandoned the recent tough talk and cut back military spending sharply. “Whereas the Chinese saw the [previous] plan as a red rag,” Rory Medcalf of Sydney's Lowy Institute for International Policy observed, “it is tempting to caricature Australia's new strategy as raising a white flag.” This, apparently, was just the conclusion that the People's Liberation Army did reach. “U.S. power,” its newly appointed deputy chief of staff told a Communist Party newspaper, “is on the decline, and leading the Asia-Pacific is beyond its grasp.”

Perhaps I was right to be confused in Canberra. Nothing is clear in the western Pacific because the fog of unknown unknowns is denser here than anywhere else on earth. And yet it is here that the most important decisions have to be made. “If we get China wrong,” one Washington insider admitted, “in thirty years that's the only thing anyone will remember.”

Breaking the Chains

The worst way the United States could get China wrong is the same as the worst way that Britain could have gotten Germany wrong a century ago: by getting into a war with it.

To experts in Washington, the most easily imaginable military scenario is that China might grab the Senkakus, Spratlys, Paracels, or some similarly isolated piece of real estate, perhaps in the hope that a weak American
response would lead its allies to desert it, breaking the island chains. However, hardly anyone thinks this scenario will actually happen. In 2011,
Foreign Policy
magazine asked a group of experts to rate the likelihood of a Sino-American war in the next decade, on a scale from 1 (impossible) to 10 (certain). No one gave a score above 5, and the average was just 2.4. Nonexperts agree; that same year, the Pew Research Center found that only 20 percent of Americans saw China as the greatest international threat—although that did represent a doubling since 2009, and China scored higher than any other country (in second place, with 18 percent, was North Korea).

The reason this island-grabbing scenario seems so unlikely is that despite China's military buildup, American dominance remains overwhelming. Aggression would call down on China a counteroffensive that American planners call “AirSea Battle.” The United States has well-developed plans for cyberwar and would open with a massive electronic strike, paralyzing China's power grids and finances, blinding its satellites and surveillance, and jamming its command-and-control systems. Cruise and ballistic missiles, guaranteed to land within five or ten yards of their targets even after flying thousands of miles, would crater China's military runways and annihilate its surface-to-air defenses. Virtually undetectable stealth planes—B-2 bombers, F-22 fighters, and eventually F-35s too—would streak deep into the interior, flattening missile launchpads. China would lose the initiative within hours, and while American admirals might still hesitate to sail close to the Chinese coast, their naval aircraft and missiles would sink any Chinese ship foolish enough to put to sea and would pulverize any breach in the island chain.

Experts in Beijing seem to agree that island-grabbing would be unwise. In fact, they suggest, the real security risk is not a speculative Chinese attack but a preemptive American one. In the 1950s, American presidents sent tanks to the Yalu River and twice threatened nuclear war. Even the levelheaded premier Hu Jintao sometimes felt besieged; observing in 2002 that the United States had “strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, strengthened a pro-American government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on,” he suggested that “they have extended outposts and placed pressure points on us from the east, south, and west.” To some Chinese generals, the harsh logic of the game of death seems to be encouraging the United States to exploit its military lead while
it still can, launching an unprovoked attack on its rising rival to win itself another generation as globocop.

That, though, is surely the least likely future of all. Globocops, like real cops, pay huge reputational costs for brutalizing the innocent. Democratic globocops pay higher costs still, and when the intended victim is also the globocop's banker—as China is for the United States—beating him up becomes a truly terrible idea. The Pax Americana, like the Pax Britannica before it, is as much a diplomatic and financial balance as a military one, and winning a preemptive war would hurt the Americans almost as much as the Chinese.

If anyone gained from such a war, it would probably be Russia, the fourth region that the drafters of the Defense Planning Guidance worried about back in 1992. For a decade, their fears of Russian revanchism seemed misplaced, because the country fell off an economic cliff. Output declined by 40 percent in the 1990s and real wages by 45 percent. The government defaulted on its debts in 1998, and living standards tumbled so far that in 2000 the average Russian died younger than his or her grandparents. Russia hung on to the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, but it was not even clear whether its missiles still worked, and its soldiers put up a wretched showing against Islamists in Chechnya.

But since the 1990s much has changed. Fueled by oil and gas exports, GDP per person doubled between 2000 and 2012. The Kremlin has announced a $600 billion modernization of its submarines and missiles, and it is carving a smaller, nimbler expeditionary force out of the ruins of the old Red Army. Russia remains much less threatening than the Soviet Union and may become less threatening still if, as the World Bank expects, its oil revenues fall after 2015. But even so, if American aggression pushed China into Russia's arms, that would be among the worst of all possible outcomes for the globocop. A Russo-Chinese axis controlling the Eurasian heartland and a great stretch of its inner rim would be Mackinder's worst nightmare.

For some years, Russia and China have been cooperating loosely to block American plans in Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, but the two countries' differences—over Russian arms sales to Vietnam and India, Chinese access to Russian oil and gas, and competition in mineral-rich Kazakhstan and Mongolia—have so far obstructed anything deeper. Far from buying itself more time to act as globocop, if the United States was to beat China on the battlefield, it would overshoot the culminating point of its strategy, leaving Beijing with nowhere to turn but Moscow and bringing on just the strategic disaster it was trying to avert.

The obvious conclusion to draw is that despite all the saber-rattling and policy-pivoting since 2009, the costs of using force are prohibitively high for everyone involved, and the payoffs equally low. It is hard to imagine anyone starting a great-power war in East Asia in the 2010s—just as it was hard to imagine anyone doing so in Europe back in the 1870s, when the British globocop began showing the first signs of losing its grip. It took another forty years of relative decline, in which Britain's economy grew more slowly than those of its rivals, before anyone was willing to push matters all the way to the brink. And that, I would suggest, is the historical analogy that we need to worry about. If the forty years between the 2010s and the 2050s do unfold like the forty between the 1870s and the 1910s, they will be the most dangerous in history.

There is, of course, no guarantee that history will repeat itself. Much could change in the next four decades. Chinese growth might stall, as Japan's did in the 1990s. Or the American economy might get new legs, invigorated perhaps by its ongoing revolution in extracting gas and oil from shale and tar sands. This promises (or threatens—environmentalists decry the dirtiness of the new fracking technology) to release vast supplies of energy from what once seemed unprofitable sources. Some economists also suggest that a “third industrial revolution” in nanotechnology and three-dimensional printing will boost American productivity even more dramatically. The United States might then confound its critics, as it has often done before. Plenty of people wrote America off back in the 1930s, only to see it come back and defeat the Nazis in the 1940s. Others wrote it off again in the 1970s, only for it to defeat the Soviets in the 1980s. Who is to say that the United States will not continue the forty-year cycle, recovering from its 2010s woes to get the better of China in the 2020s?

Current trends, however, make such sunny prognostications look rather unlikely. Chinese growth will probably slow over the next few decades, but most economists think it will nonetheless remain faster than American economic expansion. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for instance, foresees Chinese growth coming down from 9.5 percent in 2013 to 4.0 percent in 2030, but in no year, it predicts, will the American economy expand by more than 2.4 percent. The Congressional Budget Office is gloomier still, setting a ceiling for American annual growth of 2.25 percent in the 2020s, and some financial analysts foresee long-term American growth averaging just 1.0–1.4 percent per year.

Most predictions expect China's economy to outgrow America's sometime between 2017 and 2027 (probably in 2019, and almost certainly by
2022, says
The Economist
). According to the accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, China's GDP will be 50 percent bigger than the United States' in the 2050s, while the OECD's economists think the gap will be more like 70 percent. And by that point, both sets of experts agree, India's economy will also be catching up with—or overtaking—America's (
Table 7.1
).