{"id":48565,"date":"2019-06-25T11:13:50","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T01:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=48565"},"modified":"2019-06-25T11:13:50","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T01:13:50","slug":"beyond-balancing-alternative-us-grand-strategies-for-dealing-with-china-and-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/beyond-balancing-alternative-us-grand-strategies-for-dealing-with-china-and-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond \u2018balancing\u2019: alternative US grand strategies for dealing with China and Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s time to start paying attention. The US\u2013China spat is doubling down. The hardline speeches given by Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe<\/a> and then acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan<\/a> at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue<\/a> revealed that both sides are preparing to fight their corners. In this, the most exposed countries are the Indo-Pacific\u2019s middle powers, which are trapped between the feuding great powers.<\/p>\n

Wei helpfully\u2014and forcefully\u2014told ASEAN countries that China\u2019s newly acquired South China Sea islands are now its territory for ever more and it will fight tooth and nail to keep them. Displaying considerable chutzpah, Wei then declared that China has always been peaceful and never used force to capture any territory. The history of China\u2019s armed seizure of Johnson South Reef (now an 11-hectare military facility), in which 64 Vietnamese soldiers died and two ships were sunk, has seemingly been rewritten\u2014just as the history of Tiananmen Square<\/a> has been.<\/p>\n

For Australia and other regional nations that have China as their major trading partner, Shanahan\u2019s speech also raises concerns. He launched the US\u2019s new Indo-Pacific strategy<\/a>, which advocates defence preparedness, military partnerships and networking to counter a revisionist China, a malign Russia, a rogue North Korea and diverse transnational challenges. In that document, China gets four pages; the others, one each.<\/p>\n

The critical issue for the region and its stability and future affluence is that the strategy is one of balancing. The US wants to maintain a favourable balance of power vis-a-vis others: \u2018A negative shift in the regional balance of power could encourage competitors to challenge and subvert the free and open order that supports prosperity and security for the United States and its allies and partners\u2019.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t necessarily a good development. Balancing works through threatening or using violence. Under this grand-strategy approach, war can play a major role and is both acceptable behaviour and a legitimate means of statecraft. Creating a favourable balance of power may require a major war between the great powers. Embracing balancing may be purposefully constructing an uninviting future in which success is either uncertain or ugly.<\/p>\n

A future China may overtake the US in economic power and be able to spend more on defence than America, potentially creating a larger military force. On the numbers, China might win a \u2018balancing\u2019 relative power game. The other great power of concern, Russia, is in economic and demographic decline but has considerable nuclear forces. That makes using war as a means of statecraft unappealing: a nuclear victory might be a pyrrhic one.<\/p>\n

There are other options. While great-power competition is considered in America\u2019s national security strategy<\/a>, national defense strategy<\/a> and now the Indo-Pacific strategy as today\u2019s defining strategic issue, this does not in itself mean war. Such competition is understood as remaining below the level of great-power armed conflict, instead ranging across diverse areas including economics, diplomacy, the cybersphere, information campaigns and proxy wars. Such diversity gives much more choice in the grand strategies that could potentially be used, in contrast to last century\u2019s bipolar Cold War confrontation, when balancing ruled.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth thinking about potential alternatives to balancing. There might be some that are more efficacious and avoid constructing an international environment in which the possibility of great-power war is deliberately built in. War in itself is a gross failure of policy, not a success. While warfare is sometimes necessary to get ourselves to a better future, as it was during World War\u00a0II, preference should be given to trying to achieve a better tomorrow without shedding any blood.<\/p>\n

Some may argue that US grand strategy is an American matter, but it\u2019s an issue that affects all, particularly close US allies that will get swept up into any major war. Others may suggest that we just ignore the problem and leave it to American strategists to decide, but that approach didn\u2019t work so well in Iraq or Afghanistan. The US has devised highly successful strategies in the past, but not always. As we\u2019ll have to live with the results of America\u2019s current grand strategy, it behoves regional strategic thinkers and policymakers to assess it and if necessary argue for change. That is, after all, one of the great virtues<\/a> of the American \u2018empire<\/a>\u2019: the colonies and dominions get to have a say.<\/p>\n

To suggest what\u2019s possible, I\u2019ve written a paper<\/a> under the US Defense Department\u2019s Strategic Multilayer Assessment program that develops 12 grand-strategy alternatives related to China and 10 for Russia. The paper doesn\u2019t advocate any particular grand strategy but instead quickly sketches alternatives, hoping to provoke creative thinking and innovation.<\/p>\n

The alternatives outlined could each create a different future, but they are more than simply possibilities as they\u2019re derived from international relations theoretical perspectives developed, assessed and critiqued over an extended period. The alternatives thus have a common structure useful for cross-comparisons.<\/p>\n

Uncritically accepting balancing builds a major war into our possible future. This is an unappealing tomorrow, but the Chinese\u2014and Russian\u2014challenges are real. They require genuine debate, perhaps even strategic innovation. This may all sound intellectually confronting, but it\u2019s vital. Our future may well rest on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s time to start paying attention. The US\u2013China spat is doubling down. The hardline speeches given by Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe and then acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":48572,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,924,163,2380],"class_list":["post-48565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-indo-pacific","tag-major-war","tag-russia","tag-us-china-relations"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBeyond \u2018balancing\u2019: alternative US grand strategies for dealing with China and Russia | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/beyond-balancing-alternative-us-grand-strategies-for-dealing-with-china-and-russia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Beyond \u2018balancing\u2019: alternative US grand strategies for dealing with China and Russia | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s time to start paying attention. 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