China cannot be an effective offshore balancer if it remains on the permanent defensive in its own neighborhood, hemmed in by American bases, naval forces, allies and security partners. To be in a position to balance the United States globally, it must not only break through the first island chain but achieve outright regional supremacy in the Western Pacific.
Assessing Chinese Military Capabilities: Response Actions for American Strategy
American national security depends on a comprehensive understanding of China’s recent defense reforms and weaknesses so that decision-makers remain aware of how willing Xi may be to go to war and how U.S. strategy in Asia should be adjusted to mitigate this potential. The primary concern of the new administration’s National Security Strategy in responding to China’s military modernization should be an equivalent focus on military capabilities, through a reinforced defense budget and collaboration with allies, and secondarily, greater efforts to increase high-level talks with Chinese officials on areas of potential collaboration.
A Game of Great Powers: The Realities of the Evolving Competition between the United States and China
In great power competition, alliances matter as much as anything else. And, as previous great power competitions demonstrate, alliance shifts can lead to instability and even open conflict between competitors. For the United States to maintain the upper hand in a worldwide strategic competition with China, alliances play a central role.
Warning: Scrutinize Any Underlying Assumptions for China in the New National Security Strategy
Looking back to the Cold War, most analyses, including American intelligence estimates, underappreciated the systemic weakness of the Soviet Union before the precipitous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Currently, many over-appreciate systemic weaknesses in China linked to demographic decline, debt, and large migrant populations, among other issues, as signs of distress. Today, strategic analyses miss a possible leadership transition in China or gloss over the domestic fissures in American society. Therefore, it is critically important, now more than ever, to question conventional strategic assumptions and logic. Otherwise, the U.S. will be caught by surprise and face utter disappointment with its China policy once again in the not-too-distant future.
A Comprehensive Approach to Space Deterrence
Autonomous Systems in the Combat Environment: The Key or the Curse to the U.S.
The U.S. military has already begun to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations. However, the use of autonomous machines in the U.S. could be said to be quite conservative in comparison to its adversaries. Although artificial intelligence assists in providing risk predictions and improving time available to react to events, some believe artificial intelligence and autonomous systems will drastically distance humans from a direct combat role. Observations regarding the complexity of warfare, regardless of the technology, force scientists and military leaders to question the potential consequences of implementing artificial intelligence and autonomous systems in the next military conflict.
The Façade of Chinese Foreign Policy Coherence
The common perception that China’s centralized state leadership is empowered to pursue Chinese dominance over international affairs is tempting, but illusory. Its actions abroad are better understood as a manifestation of the Chinese leadership’s responses to various, and occasionally conflicting, domestic political, economic, and social pressures.
Insights from the Past: Thucydides on Great Power Competition
Thucydides offers many enduring insights for scholars and policymakers. New tensions emerge as great powers search for new allies and try to hold on to old ones. Once begun in earnest, great power competitions are likely to endure for decades, because of the resources great powers possess. Those resources make it highly likely conflict comes with an often terrible cost for the victor and for the vanquished.
Revisiting Thucydides: Ruminations on the Future of U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy in an Age of Great Power Competition
While war between the United States and China is a possibility, a larger and more refined lesson could be gleaned from Thucydides’ ancient text. In an era of great power competition, The Peloponnesian War provides one of the first nearly complete histories of a conflict that included complex alliances, ideologically opposing views, civil discord, diplomacy, total war, and human struggle. It provides examples of how the choices made by Athenian and Spartan leaders mattered in determining whether they avoided war or led their countries into conflict. Most importantly, The Peloponnesian War offers strategists and policymakers invaluable insights into the nature and character of competition between two great powers and makes clear the importance of strategic options that avoid ill-conceived conflict.
Beijing’s Strategic Ends: Harmony through Hierarchy and the End of Choice
Countering China’s Counter-Intervention Strategy
China’s counter-intervention capability presents a tremendous impediment to continuous U.S. military operations within the Indo-Pacific. Its South China Sea claims, underpinned by weapons development and efforts across the non-military elements of national power, are intended to ensure China’s freedom of action. A free and open Indo-Pacific relies on further development and deployment of U.S. integrated air and missile defense systems and offers the means for hindering China’s counter-intervention strategy. These recommendations provide a realistic approach to compete with China in multiple domains and to ensure access in the event of a regional crisis.
What Comes After COVID-19? Political Psychology, Strategic Outcomes, and Options for the Asia-Pacific “Quad-Plus"
The novel coronavirus pandemic has built the foundation for an unexpected pax epidemica between the U.S. and China. The pandemic has inflicted significant damages on all the great and middle powers to the extent that none would be in a position to win a war anytime in the near future. Most importantly, policymakers’ pessimistic considerations about their own country’s military capabilities and readiness for war would make them risk-averse and unwilling to undertake any major military campaign, therefore calling off the risk of interstate war altogether.
Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight with China
Given China’s existing strategy, military thought, and fears of rebellion, renewed state support for insurgents is far from certain. Instead, China is more likely to employ economic and informational tools to achieve its aims, while focusing on partnerships with state actors and striving to remain below the threshold of armed conflict. While this does not mean we can afford to disregard counterinsurgency entirely, as China is not our only competitor and could always adopt new stratagems, it does suggest a different set of defense priorities for countering China.
Strategic Failure: America is (Literally) Missing the Boat Competing with China
As the name suggests, great power competition—the newest focus of the U.S. Department of Defense—is about power. However, despite the recent fetishization of great power competition within the defense community, few people give serious thought to what power is and how great powers wield it to compete. In today’s great power competition with the People’s Republic of China, American strategists appear stuck focusing on archaic instruments of power and power projection to the detriment of national security. The Department of Defense spends billions on military hardware while rhetoric and neglect undermine the political partnerships and economic integration on which American power is based. Strategists pay lip service to strengthening alliances, then trumpet a foreign policy of “America first.” They highlight creating new partnerships, but fail to consider the economic and financial tools that establish genuine interdependence and influence. China is using a variety of initiatives to make advances across the globe while the United States is missing the boat.
The Rhymes of History: Beijing’s Nightmare Strategic Scenarios
Perhaps the most challenging consequence of a non-repetitive history is that the future is mostly undetermined, a mystery revealed only by the unfolding of particular events. This uncertainty puts the onus of decision and responsibility squarely on the shoulders of political, diplomatic, and military leadership, who must navigate this challenging terrain with incomplete knowledge of its features. A Sino-U.S. war is not preordained, nor is it an impossibility. If it ever does happen, it will be the result of the particular choices, words, and deeds of particular leaders, not a pattern embedded in the structure of history.
The Slow-Motion Crisis: Climate Change and its Effect on U.S.-China Competition
We live in an era of great geopolitical change. From the way groups compete to the diffusion of power among state and non-state actors, the upcoming geopolitical shifts will bear little resemblance to those of the past. Many people have studied how artificial intelligence, global markets, social media, and hypersonic weapons will affect the way states compete in the future. Another major factor in future geopolitical competition, especially between the reigning hegemonic power of the U.S. and rising regional ambition of China, will be climate change.
Who was Sun Tzu’s Napoleon?
We know that Thucydides was not only the chronicler, but a general in the Peloponnesian War, Julius Caesar the architect of the Gallic War, and Machiavelli an active participant in Florentine diplomatic and martial affairs. Maurice de Saxe waded through the bloody fields of Malplaquet and Fontenoy, while both Jomini and Clausewitz kept their own formative experiences fighting in the Napoleonic Wars firmly in mind as they composed their respective theoretical works. But what motivated Sun Tzu (or its anonymous authors) to compose The Art of War? What were its historical precedents?
Not Another Peloponnesian War: Great Power Collaboration?
As Thucydides showed so clearly, the real trap is power itself. Insufficient power leaves one open to being exploited, or worse; more power actually makes power harder to control, and it leaves one vulnerable to being undermined. That is the nature of power. Thucydides was right about fear, honour, and interest being the motivators for power.
Choosing Interests While You Sleep? #Reviewing The Senkaku Paradox
If the U.S. should concede ground on partner territories or interests, the nation must articulate a new policy. The other option would be to compete against near-peer competitors in such a manner that maintains the present security environment with enough flexibility to deter conflict and, if needed, limit escalation. Either way, we must move forward into the reality of great power competition with our eyes wide open and with a determined gait, not dozing and stumbling forward.
The Rise of the Present Unconventional Character of Warfare
Major power competition has evolved in style. An inability to counter U.S. military superiority has led China, Russia, and major regional powers to employ unconventional warfare to achieve their national security objectives. Technological developments re-invented this type of warfare and improved its reach and potential effectiveness. Within the parameters of a democratic system, countering unconventional warfare is problematic. Attempts at global security cooperation operations may improve the efficiency of global physical presence but is no replacement for a whole-of-government effort to address root problems enabling the success of these unconventional warfare models.