Source URL (retrieved on Apr 25, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/chinese-dominance-isnt-certain-10314
April 25, 2014
FEARS OF CHINA’S RISE ARE GROWING. Only a decade ago, most experts insisted that the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas ambitions were limited to Taiwan. Now that Beijing has begun to adopt a more assertive posture abroad, the conventional wisdom has changed from dismissing the China threat to accepting it fatalistically. But must Washington and its Asian allies defer to Chinese expansionism? Can we really have jumped from one world to another so quickly?
Not a chance. Two new books provide a corrective to the lately fashionable gloom-and-doom analysis. Each is by a crack journalist. The first, Geoff Dyer’s The Contest of the Century, addresses the U.S.-Chinese relationship through the prism of China’s military, political, diplomatic and economic development. The second, Robert Kaplan’s Asia’s Cauldron, focuses on the competition between China and the states around the South China Sea—the central route for shipping between the Middle East and East Asia, and the site of disputed claims to resource-rich maritime territory.
Certainly the fresh attention to China’s aspirations is a good thing. As late as 2006 the defense correspondent Fred Kaplan (no relation to Robert) was belittling the Pentagon’s attention to Chinese military modernization in its annual congressionally mandated report on the subject. In an article called “The China Syndrome,” Kaplan wrote:
“At present,” the report states, “China’s concept for sea-denial appears limited to sea-control in water surrounding Taiwan and its immediate periphery. If China were to shift to a broader ‘sea-control’ strategy”—in other words, if it were seeking a military presence farther away from its shores—“the principal indicators would include development of an aircraft carrier, development of robust, deep-water anti-submarine-warfare capabilities, development of a true area anti-aircraft warfare capability, acquisition of large numbers of nuclear attack submarines,” etc., etc. The point is: The Chinese aren’t doing—they’re not even close to doing—any of those things [Kaplan’s italics].
Just eight years later, the Chinese have made substantial progress on all of these fronts, and Beijing has embarked on a path of military-backed assertiveness across the region that has already provoked shifts in U.S. military operations. In January 2013, the U.S. chief of naval operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, admitted that China’s new capabilities have caused the U.S. Navy to change its deployment patterns “inside the first island chain” (China’s term for the major archipelagoes from Japan and Taiwan to the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia that form the outer boundary of the East and South China Seas). Last November, China tried to unilaterally impose an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) covering airspace over Japanese and South Korean territory just before an East Asia tour by Vice President Joe Biden. Before Biden departed, the United States defied the ADIZ with an unannounced transit of two unarmed B-52s, and while the vice president was on his first stop in Tokyo he assured his hosts that the United States would go further and directly confront Beijing on the issue. During his subsequent stop in Beijing, however, Biden failed even to mention the ADIZ in public. We need to confront Chinese assertiveness with a stalwart refusal to bend, but we are in danger of conceding too much and disheartening our allies. Our lack of firmness may convince Beijing that it can get away with pressing even harder.
While there’s plenty of room for debate about the scope of China’s blue-water ambition, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has now completed sea trials of, and deployed, its first aircraft carrier, with an estimated four to six additional hulls under construction, as Robert Kaplan notes. He stresses that in addition to focusing on its surface navy, China has been expanding its fleet of nuclear ballistic-missile and attack submarines capable of deploying into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Dyer and Kaplan both point to China’s construction of a new submarine base in the South China Sea, and Kaplan also highlights China’s investment in aerial refueling to enable the projection of air power toward that sea’s southern reaches. He might also have mentioned China’s deployment of new Type 052D destroyers with state-of-the-art radars and a vertical launch system capable of firing advanced surface-to-air missiles against enemy aircraft, including anti-submarine-warfare aircraft, enabling the destroyers to defend other PLAN surface ships and submarines.
Dyer lucidly sets out the context in which these developments have been occurring. He traces the rise of the PLAN to China’s obsession with the late nineteenth-century American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan saw sea power in general, and the ability to exert control over commercial sea-lanes in particular, as essential to the well-being of trading states. “Neglected at home,” Dyer writes, “Mahan has become deeply fashionable over the last decade in Chinese intellectual circles, including translations of his books, academic articles on their importance, and conferences on his ideas.”
If the PLAN’s new aircraft carriers and destroyers are suited for engaging in Mahanian sea-control missions, this would be a step beyond the impressive suite of largely land- and air-based forces that China has acquired to keep adversaries from entering or operating within its near abroad. More than the carrier, these “anti-access/area-denial” (A2AD) capabilities (e.g., precise ballistic and cruise missiles, along with the complex of sensors and guidance technologies that allow them to find and prosecute moving targets) have implications for the U.S. position in the Asia-Pacific region because they raise doubts about our ability to protect our allies. Since the late 1940s, the United States has played a key role in tamping down potential conflicts between regional actors. In Dyer’s words, “America has defined its vital interest as preventing any one power from dominating the other main regions of the world and turning them into a private sphere of influence.”
For more than half a century the United States has guaranteed Taiwan’s independence, and our security commitment to Japan has made it possible for successive generations of Japanese leaders to maintain relatively modest defense investments. Thanks to China’s buildup of A2AD capabilities, Tokyo may now question whether Washington would send forces to protect Japan from Chinese aggression in the East China Sea, where China has been challenging Japan’s administrative control over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. The same question may apply equally to the Philippines, another U.S. treaty ally, which has recently succumbed to Chinese military-backed expansionism over disputed land features in the South China Sea.
HOW DID WE GET HERE? Here are three specific explanations. First, China’s military rise was difficult to see because it proceeded very slowly for a long time before suddenly yielding a spate of new capabilities, and these capabilities were not the ones most Americans would have expected. The high-tech electronic and sensor systems that form the backbone of China’s A2AD force took years, if not decades, to develop, and the shape of this new force may not have been observable until China actually began to test highly accurate missiles. Compounding the intelligence challenge, China did not pursue military modernization parallel to the U.S. model. As both Dyer and Kaplan note, Beijing didn’t try to build a navy like ours; rather, the PLAN has become a kind of anti–U.S. Navy, centered around submarines; small, fast attack craft armed with antiship cruise missiles; and, most recently, drones. China has adopted an asymmetric approach, using relatively cheap weapons to prevent very expensive American platforms like aircraft carriers from entering the theater. Dyer cites an estimate by U.S. Navy captain Henry Hendrix that puts the cost of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) carrier-killer missiles at $11 million each, compared with a $13.5 billion price tag on a new U.S. carrier.
To be sure, not everyone missed the flash. In 1992, Mark Stokes, a U.S. Air Force deputy attaché, traveled around the Chinese countryside and gathered evidence that, together with what he was reading in Chinese military journals, indicated a major investment in medium- and long-range missiles. But he was largely ignored. As Dyer recounts:
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.
At the end of the 1990s, as Chinese defense budgets continued to increase by double digits, the evidence was getting harder to ignore, but then the September 11 attacks occurred, diverting U.S. attention from East Asia to Central Asia and the Middle East for the next decade. 9/11 is thus the second reason we are only just now confronting the seriousness of China’s challenge to the post–World War II order in Asia.
A third reason is that until recently, Chinese rhetoric and behavior worked to mask the ambition behind the PLA’s modernization. Dyer cites the work of journalist Joshua Kurlantzick, who chronicled how Beijing used China’s wealth and a carefully crafted image to embark on a “charm offensive” across the world from the mid-1990s through 2007. China often presented itself as the anti–United States, providing capital in the form of investments and loans with no requirements for good governance. Meanwhile, in discussions with the West, Chinese Communist Party leaders offered assurances that the PLA was not seeking an aircraft carrier, nor would it militarize space, while business delegations were wooed with promises of exposure to a gigantic market of potential Chinese customers—as long as they provided investment in China’s research-and-development sector and transferred critical know-how. Then, in January 2007, China tested an antisatellite missile, and in 2008 the global financial crisis supplied an opportunity for Beijing to trumpet its brand of state capitalism as an alternative to the faulty Western market-based system. Testing of China’s antiship ballistic missile, runway images of a Chinese “fifth generation” aircraft and sea trials of the first Chinese carrier coincided with or directly followed these events. By March 2009, as Dyer recounts, a flotilla of ten Chinese ships saw fit to confront the USNS Impeccable, an American naval survey vessel, in the northern part of the South China Sea.
Even now, there is reluctance to identify China as a competitor, perhaps born of difficulty conceiving of this possibility. Unlike our last major competitor, the Soviet Union, China is also a major trade partner, and China continues to represent a market opportunity in the eyes of many Western business interests. So we are tempted to jump from denial to defeatism. Not Dyer. In his view:
Whether they have come to praise or to warn about China’s rise, most authors on China subscribe to an almost linear transfer of wealth and influence from West to East, from a U.S. in decline to an irrepressible China. There is an air of inevitability in the way China is presented. Yet the roots of American power are deeper than they seem and hard to overturn.
IN DIFFERENT WAYS, Dyer and Kaplan provide reasons for hope. Where Dyer argues that we are likely to prevent China from succeeding in its effort to dominate Asia, Kaplan predicts that we will engage in a sustained naval competition, but at least the “stopping power of water” (a term borrowed from University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer) will keep the contest from devolving into outright war. By following commonsense rules—striving to maintain a balance of power in the region—we can prevail in what is likely to be a long-term competition. What’s more, both authors maintain that the United States should stay economically and militarily engaged, with Kaplan making the case that the two are linked: “It is only by enmeshing itself further into the region’s trade that the United States will remain self-interested enough to continue to guard the sea lines of communications in the Western Pacific.”
So Dyer and Kaplan agree on the diagnosis and even on the general prescription, with both, again, recommending that the United States aim to preserve a balance of power. Here’s Dyer: “Washington’s objectives should be to maintain a favorable balance of power and to provide clear defensive arrangements against any potential aggressors.” In Kaplan’s formulation, “It is the balance of power between the United States and China that ultimately keeps Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore free.” And again a few pages later: “For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom.”
Aiming for a balance of power sounds unobjectionable, but what does this mean in practice? Kaplan distinguishes between the past American dominance and the future balance that he envisions:
The balance of power in Asia requires American military superiority, in order to offset China’s geographic, demographic, and economic advantage. One does not necessarily mean the crushing American superiority of recent decades. In fact, the American military position in Asia can afford to weaken measurably, to take into account future budget cuts, so long as the American military retains a clear-cut advantage in key areas over the Chinese military. It is that edge which will preserve the balance of power.
Unfortunately, Kaplan does not specify how much “edge” will suffice. Nor does he proceed even to adumbrate which “key areas” he has in mind. One might think of the undersea domain as an area of traditional American strength. Kaplan points out the challenging bathymetry around China’s coast for the detection of hostile submarines, implying that the U.S. advantage in this area might be neutralized. In fact, what this means is that stealthy U.S. submarines should be able to penetrate up to China’s shores, while American sonar and other detection measures can be maintained along the choke points through which Chinese submarines would have to pass to exit China’s near seas and deploy out into the blue water of the Pacific. So the undersea domain does indeed seem to count as such a key area of U.S. advantage.
But more than U.S. submarines will be required in order to preserve a balance of power. Submarines are supposed to be imperceptible. But to maintain their nerve and stand up for themselves in the face of Chinese coercive pressure, China’s neighbors will require visible evidence of the U.S. commitment to their security. On the diplomatic side, Dyer is clear: “The endgame in Asia for Washington is . . . to forge a robust and stable set of rules and institutions laced with American values of openness and political pluralism which will be resistant to Chinese pressure,” and he cites Burma as a test case. On the military question of how to deter China from challenging the balance, he is sensible but vague:
If the basic objective is to convince Chinese hard-liners that there is no path to a quick win in the western Pacific and to defend its allies, then U.S. strategy should be built around finding ways to raise the costs so that China’s leaders would never be tempted even to consider such a proposal—and to do so in ways that are politically and economically realistic and which are not hugely provocative toward China.
The trouble is that the existence of China’s A2AD force means that to ensure access the United States must possess the ability to prevent Chinese missiles from finding their targets. This would seem to require not only shipboard air-defense systems but also the ability to penetrate China’s own air-defense network to eliminate the elements of China’s complex of sensors and guidance systems that enable the PLA to precisely target American platforms. The U.S. military has begun to think through such an approach under the rubric of “Air-Sea Battle,” but Dyer rules out this response as overly provocative toward China because it implies strikes against targets on the mainland. As an alternative, Dyer suggests a distant blockade to target China’s economy, acknowledging that its imposition would entail “plenty of strategic difficulties.” He also outlines an approach centered on arming regional powers and developing a network of positions from which to interfere with PLA power projection. The upshot is that the United States has a range of options to deter Beijing.
THOUGH BOTH KAPLAN AND DYER CHOOSE to foreground military issues, their books are at their best when reporting local details or relying on deep historical research—material that should inform the development of U.S. strategy. If the authors are correct that the fate of the Asia-Pacific region will depend on whether the United States can maintain a balance of power in the face of China’s rise, then knowledge of conditions on the ground across the region will prove critical. This local knowledge will help Washington work with the countries of the region, and potentially even embed them in an alliance-like architecture (if not a formal alliance such as NATO) to keep Beijing at bay.
Kaplan’s virtuoso reportage and historical sensitivity seem at odds with his insistence on the primacy of geography and structural factors. The first chapter of Asia’s Cauldron begins: “Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” It is as though geography determines everything. But prior to this opening, Kaplan offers a prologue called “The Ruins of Champa” that vividly conveys India’s enduring cultural influence in Vietnam:
I am in My Son, in central Vietnam, forty miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea. Flowers and grass grow out of every nonvertical surface of each monument where altars, lamps, and lingas used to be placed, swimming in incense and camphor. . . . A lichen-coated linga, the phallic symbol of Shiva’s manhood, stands alone and sentinel against the ages.
So history and culture matter, too. The message of the prologue is that one must “never lose sight of the vividness of India’s presence in this part of the world” even “at a time when China’s gaze seems so overpowering.” In chapters covering not only Vietnam but also Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan, Kaplan offers a richly textured account of how each country approaches its relations with the great powers in its midst. We learn how Mahathir bin Mohamad modernized Malaysia using Islam as the glue to unite its variegated peoples, and that the country is, after Singapore, the most reliable military partner of the United States in the South China Sea, having not forgiven China for its support of ethnically Chinese Communist insurgents through the 1970s. Kaplan similarly details the perspective of Lee Kuan Yew, father of modern Singapore, on the Vietnam War, which in his eyes bought time for the other states of Southeast Asia to strengthen their economies and thereby ward off the Communist challenge. And regarding the Philippines, we learn that internal threats are so dominant that the army there is three times bigger than the navy, even though the Philippines is an “archipelagic nation,” and thus the country is desperate for U.S. help in the face of China’s “creeping expansionism” in the South China Sea.
Finally, Kaplan covers Taiwan, offering a new perspective on Chiang Kai-shek and conveying the importance of Taiwan’s position between the Japanese archipelago and the northern reaches of the South China Sea: “Taiwan is the cork in the bottle of the South China Sea, controlling access between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.” Furthermore, if China were to annex Taiwan, then all of the assets currently focused on “reintegrating” (in Beijing’s parlance) that island would be freed for other missions.
Kaplan points out that Chiang created a Chinese alternative to Mao’s Communist “People’s Republic” on an island where even today, 70 percent of the population has “aboriginal blood, which is ethnic Malay in origin,” cementing the connection to the South China Sea realm. To counter Chiang’s reputation as a corrupt failure, Kaplan cites the work of the contemporary historians Jonathan Fenby and Jay Taylor, who show that Chiang’s forces fought much harder than has been appreciated against the Japanese invaders in the World War II period, as Mao’s Communists “were pursuing the very strategy Chiang was accused of: avoiding major military entanglements with the Japanese in order to hoard their strength to later fight the Nationalists.” Drawing again on Fenby and Taylor, Kaplan’s review of Chiang’s early policies on Taiwan assigns him credit for putting the country on the path to its current prosperous democracy.
Kaplan also visits Taiwan’s Pratas Islands in the northern South China Sea, which provokes him to reflect on the origins of Beijing’s current “nine-dash line” claim to most of that maritime realm. The original line had eleven dashes and was developed by the Nationalists on Taiwan. When the mainland Chinese inked an agreement with Vietnam over the Gulf of Tonkin in the 1950s, two of the dashes were dropped. Kaplan lands on the main island and finds only enough to occupy him for an hour. This inspires him to reflect:
Because there was nothing here, these so-called features were really just that—microscopic bits of earth with little history behind them and basically no civilians living on them. Thus, they were free to become the ultimate patriotic symbols, more potent because of their very emptiness and henceforth their inherent abstraction: in effect, they had become logos of nationhood in a global media age. The primordial quest for status still determined the international system.
This move into the realm of theory does not serve Kaplan well. He is closer to the mark earlier in the book when defining the importance of the South China Sea in terms of its centrality to trade, its resources and the fact that disputed land features within it are being used as the basis for claims to control traffic through its waters: “Domination of the South China Sea would certainly clear the way for pivotal Chinese air and naval influence throughout the navigable rimland of Eurasia—the Indian and Pacific oceans both. And thus China would become the virtual hegemon of the Indo-Pacific.” Regional hegemony, not symbols or logos, is what is at stake.
But Kaplan returns to more solid ground in an epilogue that, like the prologue on Vietnam, offers visceral impressions of his visit to the jungle-enclosed eastern Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. He concludes on a fittingly humble note: “What if the future of the South China Sea is not just about newly strong states asserting their territorial claims, but also about a new medievalism born of weak central government and global Islam?”
Dyer’s historical research and reportage are impressive and illustrate how Beijing squandered the gains of its aforementioned “charm offensive” in the last decade by reverting to form. Dyer cites the Singapore-based scholar Geoffrey Wade to establish that despite the image of peaceful exploration that China trumpets, the Ming-era voyager Zheng He was actually a colonial gunboat diplomat at the helm of a well-armed armada. In the fifteenth century Zheng intervened with military force in civil conflicts in Sumatra, Java and even modern-day Sri Lanka, and he established a semipermanent Chinese garrison at Malacca to control traffic through the strait. Dyer also offers a revealing quote from the Chinese international-relations expert Yan Xuetong: “Ancient Chinese policy will become the basis for much Chinese foreign policy, rather than Western liberalism or Communist ideology. . . . It is easier to teach common people why they are doing certain things if it is explained in these terms.”
Putting aside his implication that “common people” are primitive, Yan’s statement sheds light on some otherwise puzzling developments of the past few years. In a range of incidents China has alienated regional powers by according them treatment more befitting traditional Chinese vassals than independent states. For instance, in 2009 Japan voted out the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been in power for fifty years, and installed a new government that favored closer ties with China at the expense of relations with the United States. Yet in September 2010, the captain of a Chinese fishing boat rammed a Japanese coast-guard vessel in the vicinity of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. While the captain was detained in Japan, huge anti-Japanese protests erupted in China, and Chinese shipments of rare-earth metals critical for Japanese high-tech manufactures started to decline. “At one stage,” Dyer reports, “the Japanese ambassador was hauled in to receive a formal complaint in what the [official Chinese] Xinhua News Agency gleefully described as ‘the wee hours’—the fourth such dressing down he had received.” From a strategic perspective, China’s conduct seems counterproductive. Why antagonize a potentially well-disposed Japanese government over fish? “Beijing had a game-changing opening to weaken American standing in the region,” Dyer notes. “But, rather than driving a wedge between the U.S. and its most important allies, China has managed to push them much closer together.” The explanation must involve China’s sense of its status and impatience to establish a new order in which the region defers to Beijing. At the same time, the onus is now on Washington to work more closely with Tokyo.
TURNING TO SOUTH KOREA, the other major U.S. ally in Northeast Asia, Dyer recounts that several months before the fishing-boat incident a North Korean minisubmarine had fired a torpedo at a South Korean naval vessel, sinking the ship and killing forty-six sailors. At this point economic ties between China and South Korea were “booming,” thanks in part to a fact that Dyer uncharacteristically omits: China backstopped the South Korean economy during the 2008 global financial crisis. But following the sinking, China blocked the UN Security Council from punishing Pyongyang and generally failed to convey a sympathetic response to Seoul. South Korea’s disappointment was reinforced in October 2010, when then vice president Xi Jinping gave a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of China’s intervention in the Korean War eulogizing the conflict as “great and just.” A month later, North Korea struck again, shelling a South Korean island and killing four inhabitants. “Under pressure to rein in its ally,” Dyer explains, “Beijing decided to call for a meeting of the so-called six-party talks.” Seoul would of course have been loath to participate without an apology from Pyongyang, but China was counting on the gesture to “deflect some of the blame for the standoff onto South Korea.” China’s heavy-handed approach at such a difficult moment with South Korea can only be explained by a historically informed sense of primacy. “With no formal warning, Dai Bingguo, the senior Chinese foreign-policy official, turned up in Seoul to discuss the proposal.” This account is not footnoted; perhaps an outraged South Korean diplomat provided Dyer with the full scoop:
He did not have a visa, so South Korean Foreign Ministry officials had to rush out to the airport to get him into the country. Dai insisted on meeting with President Lee Myung-bak that evening, even though he did not have an appointment. And even though he asked that the meeting be off the record, he brought a group of Chinese journalists along with him. Lee told him that Seoul would not agree to a meeting involving the North Koreans, but Dai went out and announced the proposed summit anyway.
In the course of a few months, China thus went a long way toward undoing the goodwill that it had built up with South Korea in the past decade. Dyer attributes this to Chinese fear of a North Korean collapse, but we can also speculate that, having supported South Korea’s economy through the 2008 crisis, Beijing may have felt entitled to more deference than Seoul was willing to offer. Back in the era of Zheng He, after all, South Korea would have been sending tribute missions to the Chinese capital.
In the same vein, Dyer reports that the South China Sea states consider China to be pursuing a strategy of “talk and take” in an attempt to bully them into accepting a new status quo that favors Beijing. China’s ambition and presumptuousness color even its relations with long-standing U.S. ally Australia. According to Dyer, a Chinese defector revealed that “senior officials in Beijing were openly suggesting that Australia could come to play a role somewhat similar to France’s—still part of the Western alliance, but detached from America and willing to take its own path on important issues.” Dyer also provides colorful background to the outburst by Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi at the 2010 Asia-Pacific Summit in Hanoi. “China is a big country,” Yang ranted to an audience including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “and you are all small countries. And that is a fact.” Before delivering this diatribe, Dyer tells us, Yang was apparently spotted pacing “in the corridor beforehand rehearsing lines.” So we now know that his remarks were not spontaneous. Why would China behave in such a heavy-handed way?
Both Dyer and Kaplan explain that China feels entitled by history to project its authority onto smaller states in its region. The authors liken Beijing’s position to that of Washington in the era of the Monroe Doctrine and compare the South China Sea to the Caribbean. But as Dyer points out, unlike China’s current power-projection efforts, “The Monroe Doctrine was not imposed on an unwilling hemisphere: in much of the region, it was welcomed.” And as Kaplan reports:
One high-ranking official of a South China Sea littoral state was particularly blunt during an off-the-record conversation I had in 2011, saying, “The Chinese never give justifications for their claims. They have a real Middle Kingdom mentality, and are dead set against taking these disputes to court. China,” this official went on, “denies us our right on our own continental shelf. But we will not be treated like Tibet or Xinjiang.”
Dyer and Kaplan are thus at their strongest when they are explaining conditions on the ground in the region and drawing on history to offer context for today’s competition. But Dyer stumbles when he jumps on the anti-arms-race bandwagon, warning:
Toward the end of the Cold War, the arms race ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union before the pressures of high defense spending began to seriously undermine the U.S. But if a deeper arms race were to develop between China and the U.S., it is not at all clear that Washington would be starting from a stronger financial footing.
In fact, the Pentagon’s strategy in the Cold War was not to provoke ever-greater Soviet defense expenditures across the board but rather to try to stimulate the Soviets to spend in particular areas that were relatively less threatening to us and likely to be less productive for them. Of course Washington can’t hope to drive the Chinese bankrupt through defense expenditures and wouldn’t want to because increased Chinese defense spending—in the abstract, at least—is a frightening prospect. What we can try to achieve through our own behavior is to influence the investments that China makes in response. But to formulate a cogent strategy toward Beijing will require avoiding defeatism or alarmism, something that these two contributions should help to accomplish.
Jacqueline Newmyer Deal is president and CEO of the Long Term Strategy Group, a Washington-based defense consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Source URL (retrieved on Apr 25, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/chinese-dominance-isnt-certain-10314
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