Xi Jinping’s China is displaying a superpower’s ambition. Only a few years ago, many American observers still hoped that China would reconcile itself to a supporting role in the liberal international order or would pose—at most—a challenge to U.S. influence in the Western Pacific. The conventional wisdom was that China would seek an expanded regional role—and a reduced U.S. role—but would defer to the distant future any global ambitions. Now, however, the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.
There is the naval shipbuilding program, which put more vessels to sea between 2014 and 2018 than the total number of ships in the German, Indian, Spanish, and British navies combined. There is Beijing’s bid to dominate high-tech industries that will determine the future distribution of economic and military power. There is the campaign to control the crucial waterways off China’s coast, as well as reported plans to create a chain of bases and logistical facilities farther afield. There are the systematic efforts to refine methods of converting economic influence into economic coercion throughout the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
Not least, there is the fact that a country that formerly disguised its ambitions now asserts them openly. China has entered a “new era,” Xi announced in 2017, and must “take center stage in the world.” Two years later, Xi used the idea of a “new Long March” to describe China’s worsening relationship with Washington. Even strategic shocks that originated within China have become showcases for Beijing’s geopolitical aspirations: Witness how Xi’s government has sought to turn a coronavirus crisis made worse by its own authoritarianism into an opportunity to project Chinese influence and market China’s model overseas.
The precise intentions of opaque, authoritarian regimes are difficult to discern. And there is danger in definitive declarations of hostile intent because they can lead to fatalism and self-fulfilling prophecies. The two of us have different priors about whether stable, constructive U.S.-China relations are still possible. But it requires a degree of willful ignorance not to ask whether China is in fact seeking (or will inevitably seek) to establish itself as the world’s leading power and how it might go about achieving that goal. The architects of America’s China strategy, no matter how instinctively accommodating or confrontational they might be, must face this issue squarely.
If true superpower status is China’s desired destination, there are two roads it might take to try to get there. The first is the one American strategists have until now emphasized (to the extent they acknowledged China’s global ambitions). This road runs through China’s home region, specifically the Western Pacific. It focuses on building regional primacy as a springboard to global power, and it looks quite familiar to the road the United States itself once traveled. The second road is very different because it seems to defy the historical laws of strategy and geopolitics. This approach focuses less on building a position of unassailable strength in the Western Pacific than on outflanking the U.S. alliance system and force presence in that region by developing China’s economic, diplomatic, and political influence on a global scale.
The question of which of these roads China should take is a pressing one for Beijing’s strategists, who will face tough decisions about what to invest in—and what fights to avoid—in the coming years. And the question of what road China will take has profound implications for American strategists—and, ultimately, the rest of the world.
The emerging conventional wisdom holds that China will try to establish global influence by first establishing regional hegemony. This does not mean physically occupying neighboring countries (with the potential exception of Taiwan), as the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. But it does mean that Beijing must make itself the dominant player in the Western Pacific, out to the first island chain (which runs from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines) and beyond; it must gain an effective veto over the security and economic choices of its neighbors; it must rupture America’s alliances in the region and push U.S. military forces farther and farther away from China’s shores. If China cannot do this, it will never have a secure regional base from which to project power globally. It will be confronted by persistent security challenges along its vulnerable maritime periphery; it will have to focus its energies and military assets on defense rather than offense. And so long as Washington retains a strong military position along the first island chain, regional powers—from Vietnam to Taiwan to Japan—will try to resist China’s rise rather than accommodate it. Put simply, China cannot be a true global power if it remains surrounded by U.S. allies and security partners, military bases, and other outposts of a hostile superpower.
One reason this scenario seems plausible to Americans is that it so closely resembles their own path to primacy. From the early days of the Republic, U.S. officials understood that Washington could hardly conceive of playing a major role in global affairs until it had developed a degree of strategic invulnerability within North America and the larger Western Hemisphere. This was the strategic logic that connected the many components of a decades-long campaign to evict European rivals from the hemisphere, from the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s through the breaking of Spanish power in the Caribbean during the War of 1898. The same idea underpinned a century’s worth of efforts—some of them morally ambiguous and even deeply problematic—to keep Europeans from reestablishing a foothold in the region, from the Roosevelt Corollary in 1904 through the Reagan administration’s semi-covert war against Sandinista Nicaragua, which was aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union, in the 1980s.
A bipartisan commission made clear during the Cold War that America’s global power was intimately connected to its dominant regional position. “The ability of the United States to sustain a tolerable balance of power on the global scene at a manageable cost depends on the inherent security of its land borders,” the commission stated. If America had to “defend against security threats near its borders,” it would “have to assume a permanently increased defense burden … and as a result have to reduce important commitments elsewhere in the world.”
There are certainly signs that China has imbibed this same logic because many of its policies seem calculated to establish regional primacy. Beijing has invested heavily in advanced air defenses, quiet submarines, anti-ship missiles, and other anti-access/area -denial capabilities necessary to keep U.S. ships and planes away from its shores so that it can have a freer hand in dealing with its neighbors. Beijing has focused on turning the South China Sea and East China Sea into Chinese lakes—for many of the same underlying reasons, one imagines, that the United States was so determined to kick its rivals out of the Caribbean.
Similarly, China has used a mixture of inducement, coercion, and political manipulation in an effort to weaken America’s relationships with its military partners and treaty allies. Chinese officials have promoted the idea of “Asia for Asians”—a not-so-veiled reference to the idea that the region should settle its affairs without the meddling of the United States. When Xi and his advisors unveiled the concept of a “New Model of Major-Country Relations,” the core proposition was that the United States and China could get along if each country stayed on its side of the Pacific.
Finally, the People’s Liberation Army has made no secret of the fact that it is building the military power -projection capabilities necessary to subjugate Taiwan, a development that would upend the regional balance of power overnight and call the rest of America’s commitments in the Western Pacific into question. Some analysts believe that a U.S.-China war in the Taiwan Strait would be—either now or within a few years—essentially a toss-up. All of these policies bespeak a basic insecurity with America’s strategic proximity to China. And, of course, all are consistent with the narrower goal of regional dominance. But they are also consistent with what one would expect if Beijing were trying to mimic America’s path to global power.
Yet there are reasons to wonder whether this is indeed the path that China will take, if in fact it seeks global superpower status. In international affairs, there is always great peril in mirror-imaging—in assuming that an adversary sees the world the same way that we do, or will try to replicate our own experience. This is particularly the case here because it must be apparent to Beijing by now that it will be far harder for China to subdue its regional periphery than it was for the United States.
The United States never faced a Japan—a significant regional power allied to an even greater power—in its own hemisphere, and getting beyond the first island chain means getting beyond Japan. It never had to deal with the number of rivals—India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and many others—that confront China along its territorial and maritime peripheries. It never had to face a superpower that viewed the United States as its greatest challenge, as opposed to simply viewing it as an annoyance or a lesser rival that should be appeased to ensure its support against more pressing threats. Making a bid for regional dominance risks focusing the strategic competition on a challenge at which the United States typically excels—winning high-end, high-tech military competitions—and simply driving China’s neighbors further into Washington’s arms. So far, in fact, Beijing’s efforts at seduction and coercion have been partially successful in shifting the geopolitical orientation of the Philippines and Thailand, but they have backfired in dealing with Australia and Japan. In short, it is not clear that Beijing can successfully take a regional path to global power—which raises the question of whether there may be a second road to Chinese global leadership. (HAL BRANDS).
