Great power transitions are dangerous. If
outright war is not in the cards, a long cold war is quite plausible
While ISIS is the threat that keeps
Washington policymakers up at night, it’s the rise of China that has
international relations theorists in a panic. Graham Allison argues persuasively that China’s rise
portends a classic Thucydides Trap. His research shows that in twelve of the
last sixteen cases over the past five hundred years, when a rising power
challenged an established one, the result was war. John Mearsheimer, somewhat
more bluntly, warns that “China cannot rise peacefully.”
It’s an impending great power clash that makes the threat from ISIS look like
child’s play.
But China threatens the United States only
insofar as America insists on being the dominant power in China’s backyard, a
policy that actually contributes very little to U.S. security. If we abandon
our strategy of primacy, the risk of a clash will shrink away. If we try to
contain China’s rise, on the other hand, these predictions of doom may prove
right.
The current approach to China boils down to a kind of measured containment. It
manifests in essentially in three ways:
1) maintaining and strengthening U.S. “treaty
alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand,”
which “are the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific”;
2) increasing overall U.S. military presence
in the region to develop “a geographically dispersed, politically sustainable
force posture in the region”; and
3) further integrating U.S. economic
engagement in the region in a way that marginalizes, and in some cases excludes,
China.
But containment is problematic: it carries
the dubious presumption that China’s most likely reaction to U.S. expansion in
the region is to become a docile power, eager to give up its regional
ambitions. In reality, Washington’s determination to maintain dominance in East
Asia is much more likely to generate an intense security dilemma.
To understand why, we have to try to see
the world through China’s strategic lens. According to Andrew Nathan and Andrew
Scobell, China sees America as “the most intrusive
outside actor in China’s internal affairs, the guarantor of the status quo in
Taiwan, the largest naval presence in the East China and South China seas,
[and] the formal or informal military ally of many of China’s neighbors.” The
Chinese view the United States as “a revisionist power that seeks to curtail
China's political influence and harm China's interests.”
China’s feelings of encirclement are not
unwarranted. America’s presence along China’s maritime periphery is highly
militarized and provocative, with the U.S. Pacific Fleet conducting countless
exercises and training events with dozens of countries in the region.
Washington’s massive military presence on the Korean Peninsula, and just across
the East China Sea on the southern tip of the Japanese archipelago, are
perceived as substantive threats to Chinese security. America’s position as the
largest naval presence in the East and South China Seas also stokes fear in
China, particularly because roughly 40 percent of Chinese oil imports come by
sea and pass through sea-lanes that are subject to interdiction by the United States.
Currently, China’s “obvious orientation,” writes Lyle Goldstein “is defensive,”
although “those tendencies could change if Beijing perceives that its strategic
environment has substantially worsened.” So, what today might constitute a
defensive Chinese foreign policy could in the future transform into a more
aggressive stance if increased U.S. military presence in the region convinces
Beijing that it is under threat.
Fortunately, the United States can
relinquish its outsized hegemonic role in East Asia without damaging its core
interests. Nothing in China’s foreign policy indicates any intention to
preemptively or preventively use force against America’s or its allies’
sovereign territory. Despite its naval buildup, China has not credibly
threatened to cut off sea lines of communication or disrupt trade routes. The
United States is arguably the most secure great power in history. With weak and
pliant neighbors to its north and south, vast oceans to its east and west and a
superior nuclear deterrent, it is remarkably insulated from external threats.
Maintaining military predominance in East Asia simply doesn’t add much to our
unusually secure position.
But primacy does impose
real costs. Promising to defend a host of China’s neighboring rivals, and
maintaining tens of thousands of forward deployed troops and more than half of
U.S. naval power in Asia entail enormous budgetary expenditures that could be
kept in productive sectors of the economy. There are also the latent costs of
being entrapped into unnecessary wars. Conflict over the sovereignty of Taiwan
or uninhabited islands in the South China Sea risks entangling the United
States in a regional war that serves the interests of other countries, not its
own.
Primacy could conceivably be justified if
the United States derived commensurate benefits. That does not appear to be the
case. As Robert Jervis has written, “the pursuit of primacy was what
great power politics was all about in the past,” but in a world of nuclear
weapons, with “low security threats and great common interests among the
developed countries,” the game is not “worth the candle.” Charles Glaser
similarly argues, “Unipolarity is much overrated.”
It is not necessary to protect core national interests and in fact causes the
U.S. to “lose track of how secure it is and consequently pursue policies that
are designed to increase its security but turn out to be too costly and/or to
have a high probability of backfiring.” Nor does U.S. dominance reap much in
the way of tangible economic rewards. Daniel Drezner contends, “The economic benefits from
military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated. . . .
There is little evidence that military primacy yields appreciable geoeconomic
gains” and therefore “an overreliance on military preponderance is badly
misguided.”
The struggle for primacy in East Asia is not fundamentally one for security or
tangible economic benefits. What is at stake is largely status and prestige. As
the scholar William Wohlforth explains, hegemonic power transitions
throughout history actually see the rising power seeking “recognition and
standing rather than specific alterations in the existing rules and practices
that constituted the order of the day.” In Thucydides’ account of the
Peloponnesian War, for example, “the rise of Athens posed unacceptable threats
not to the security or welfare of Sparta but rather to its identity as leader
of the Greek world.” Similarly, the power transition between a rising Germany
and a dominant Great Britain in the lead up to World War I was characterized by an “absence of tangible
conflicts of interests.” U.S. paranoia over the rise of China is less about
protecting significant strategic and economic returns, which are marginal if
not actually negative, and more about a threat to its status, prestige and reputation
as the world’s sole superpower. In no way is that a just cause for war.
In contrast to today’s foreign policy, in
which the United States maintains a global military presence and routinely acts
on behalf of peripheral interests, a more prudent approach would define U.S.
interests more narrowly and reserve U.S. intervention for truly vital national
interests. Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. MacDonald advocate retrenchment, which includes deep
cuts to the defense budget and a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe
and Asia. “Faith in forward defenses is a holdover from the Cold War,” they
argue, “rooted in visions of implacable adversaries and falling dominoes [that]
is ill suited to contemporary world politics.” Barry Posen similarly argues the United States “should
reduce, not increase, its military presence” in response to China’s rise. By
narrowing U.S. commitments in the region, wealthy and capable allies can take
responsibility for their own defense and balance against China. Meanwhile, the
United States can extricate itself from potentially perilous entangling
alliances.
The United States pursued dominance in
East Asia long before any concerns about a Chinese superpower, so continuing to
justify primacy on those grounds is somewhat fishy. But even assuming China’s
continued economic growth, the prospect of China achieving regional hegemony is no sure thing, an insight that should
temper the inflated level of threat supposed by primacists.
Regional hegemony requires
China to develop uncontested dominance in its sphere, but China is surrounded
by major powers that would resist such a gambit. India, which harbors great
power ambitions of its own, is protected by the Himalayas and possesses nuclear
weapons. Japan is protected by the stopping power of water and is wealthy
enough to quickly build up its military and develop nuclear weapons if it feels
threatened by China. Russia can check Chinese power in Central Asia and draw
Beijing’s focus away from maritime dominance in the Pacific inward toward the
Eurasian heartland. China’s serious demographic problems as well as its restive
provinces like Xinjiang and Tibet remain top level concerns for Beijing and add
to the difficulty of obtaining true regional hegemony. The United States can withdraw from East Asia and still
“have ample warning and time to form alliances or regenerate forces before
China realizes such vast ambitions.”
There are several cogent reasons—economic
interdependence, nuclear deterrence and the general
obsolescence of great power war, among others—to be skeptical of
warnings that conflict between the United States and China is inevitable, or
even likely. Nevertheless, history shows that great power transitions are
dangerous. If outright war is not in the cards, a long, drawn-out, burdensome
cold war is quite plausible. If Washington is tempted to maintain or expand its
reach in East Asia to contain China’s rise, the chances of conflict increase,
as do the associated costs short of war, such as bigger defense budgets,
strengthened security guarantees to allies and increased deployments.
John Glaser is studying International Security at George Mason University. He
has been published in CNN, Newsweek, the Guardian and
the Washington Times.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Air Force
Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen.
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