Don’t Forget About China - Mackubin Owens, MINDSETTER™
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
While the attention of the US foreign policy establishment remains focused on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict, it is important to recognize that, in the long run, the greatest challenge to US security remains China, which has made it clear for some time that it seeks to displace the United States as not only a regional but also a global hegemonic power. Indeed, we are now in the midst of a new “cold war” not unlike its predecessor pitting the United States against the Soviet Union.
In order to become the global hegemonic power, China must first secure its geographic heartland. It is clear that Chinese strategists have read their Mackinder and Mahan. Accordingly, China has worked assiduously to undermine the US-led alliance system along the Asian rimland and invested heavily in naval, missile, and other military capabilities. Recent decades have seen the PRC pursue a massive military buildup, including an ambitious maritime modernization program. Today, the size of its navy rivals that of the U.S. Navy. Although still qualitatively inferior to its American counterpart, the PRC Navy boasts more hulls, and its shipyards are churning out modern ships at breakneck rates that far outstrip U.S. naval output.
Aided by the “tyranny of distance,” it seeks to deny the United States unfettered access to the Western Pacific by means of an Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy that features the deployment of a layered cruise and ballistic missile system that threatens U.S. and allied forces operating in the Western Pacific. The ultimate goal of the PRC is to deny the ability of the United States to operate west of the “second island chain,” the series of islands running from Japan’s Bonin and Volcano Islands, through the Marianas and the western Caroline Islands to western New Guinea and the eastern maritime boundary of the Philippine Sea.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn particular, Beijing—defying international norms—has attempted to establish sovereignty over the South China Sea and has continued to threaten the independence of Taiwan. In addition to embarking on a major buildup of its naval forces, Beijing also has carried out numerous maritime provocations against its neighbors as well as the United States, in the South China Sea, which Robert Kaplan has called “Asia’s cauldron,” a “nervous region, crowded with warships and commercial vessels…” Such a region is particularly vulnerable to miscalculation or miscommunication.
As noted, Beijing claims “indisputable sovereignty” over the South China Sea, seeking to dominate this vitally important maritime region by quashing the competing claims of smaller and weaker powers: Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo, Malaysia, and Singapore. Starting with its seizure of Scarborough Shoal in 2012, China has illegally claimed features in the South China Sea, building and militarizing numerous artificial islands. In doing so, China undermined international law and norms.
To supplement its A2/AD strategy in the Western Pacific, Beijing has employed maritime "gray zone" operations: provocative actions short of war, which seek to assert and expand Chinese control over a large area of disputed and artificial islands and reefs in the South China Sea. The main instrument for executing its gray zone operations is the PRC’s irregular “maritime militia,” comprising numerous ostensibly civilian vessels, which operate from Chinese-held islands in the South China Sea, harassing the vessels of countries with rival territorial claims. They also interfere with freedom of navigation (FON), which undermines US security commitments in the region. Although occurring below the threshold of direct military confrontation, such operations employ coercive elements that undermine existing rules and norms.
Economically, China pursues a grand strategy of predatory capitalism. The PRC refuses to adhere to the norms of liberal internationalism by employing massive government support for Chinese firms, and ignoring environmental and labor standards, thereby upending global markets. Accordingly, it has pulled one key American industry and supply chain after another into its orbit, eliminating millions of US jobs along the way.
Beijing also has employed its “belt and road initiative” (BRI) to advance its geopolitical situation by seeking a strategic foothold in Southeast Asia. For instance, China has invested in lucrative railway and pipeline projects in Malaysia and has attempted to establish a naval base in Cambodia. But for those countries that have been ensnared in Beijing’s infrastructure ambitions, the BRI—a neo-colonial approach focused on resource extraction and debt as a means of control==has proven to be a debt trap.
Technologically, China seeks to exploit the “fourth industrial revolution,” based on artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and the leveraging of 5G networks. Psychologically, China has sought to exploit divisions in American society. Beijing may very well have engaged in biological warfare by unleashing—intentionally or not—the Wuhan virus that has ravaged the economies of the liberal states.
The success of China’s grand strategy is not preordained. The United States has the means to exploit Chinese weaknesses. It is a matter of the will to do so.
Next: countering China’s Grand Strategy
Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.
Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”
Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.
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