The China Conundrum: Deterrence as Dominance

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Bullit Marquez/AP Photo

A U.S. fighter jet takes off from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan on patrol over the international waters off the South China Sea, August 6, 2019.

Michèle Flournoy could well become defense secretary should Joe Biden win the presidency in November. For that reason alone, her recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “How to Prevent a War in Asia,” deserves careful reading.

A veteran of past Democratic administrations, Flournoy previews what could well become Biden’s policy toward China. Under the guise of “reducing the risk of war,” her argument turns on establishing what she refers to as “credible deterrence.” But this is deterrence with an activist edge. It entails deflecting any challenges to U.S. primacy whether in the Indo-Pacific or throughout the world. Implicit in her essay is an argument for reasserting unipolarity, the United States acting vigorously to restore its now-tattered claim to be the world’s sole superpower.

This is primacy defined in military terms. And since methods of waging war are constantly evolving, existing U.S. capabilities, no matter how impressive, can never suffice to ensure dominance. Therefore, the need for more and better is without limit.

For Flournoy, what the United States requires of China is compliance. Nowhere does she acknowledge the possibility of the People’s Republic entertaining its own legitimate national-security interests apart from (presumably) defending itself from direct attack.

In an essay otherwise largely devoid of specifics, Flournoy spells out what effectively deterring China is likely to require: enhancing U.S. military capabilities so that the United States can “credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships [sic] in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” She refrains from speculating about how China might react to the United States acquiring and advertising such capabilities. Passivity is unlikely to define Beijing’s response.

While the jargon may sound novel, this formula merely updates a decades-old paradigm favored by American military theorists: Advanced technology wins wars.

Flournoy does, however, describe what the Pentagon will need in order to restore a position of U.S. military dominance. Prominent among the “new capabilities that will ultimately determine military success” are “resilient battlefield networks, artificial intelligence to support faster decision-making, fleets of unmanned systems, and hypersonic and long-range precision missiles.” Fielding these capabilities will “require investments in stronger cyber- and missile defenses; more geographically dispersed bases and forces; more unmanned systems to augment manned platforms; and resilient networks that can continue to function under attack.”

While the jargon may sound novel, this formula merely updates a decades-old paradigm favored by American military theorists: Advanced technology wins wars. Of course, resurrecting that conviction requires ignoring this nation’s actual experience with war since the beginning of the present century.

Perhaps wisely, Flournoy offers no estimate as to how much this comprehensive makeover is likely to cost. Those costs will be immense. She does, however, acknowledge the likelihood of “substantial downward pressure on defense spending” in the years ahead. Freeing up resources for new capabilities, she writes, will require trading off unspecified “legacy programs.” Does that suggest that the Navy will be mothballing its carriers and the Army permanently parking its tanks? She does not say.

In forward-thinking military circles, “legacy” has become a term of opprobrium. It implies obsolescence—stuff to be offloaded. From a fiscal perspective, “legacy” functions as a stand-in for “fraud, waste, and abuse”—terminology employed to suggest the possibility of painlessly economizing. But this is a chimera, as Flournoy herself undoubtedly knows.

Legacy programs have a way of persisting. Given the improbability of the United States mounting a major amphibious operation anytime in the foreseeable future, the entire U.S. Marine Corps is a legacy program. But the Corps won’t be going away anytime soon. Nor will the Navy’s carriers or the Army’s Abrams tanks. So Flournoy’s expectation of using legacy systems as a cashbox for funding new programs contains a generous dose of wishful thinking.

Indeed, unless President Biden abandons his plans to “save the soul of America”—that, rather than confronting China, forms the basis of his candidacy—Flournoy’s proposed military buildup will prove unaffordable, unless, of course, federal deficits in the multitrillion-dollar range become routine. But the real problem lies not with the fact that Flournoy’s buildup will cost a lot, but that it is strategically defective.

Strip away the references to deterrence and Flournoy is proposing that the United States goad the People’s Republic into a protracted high-tech arms race. That some version of an arms race is already under way is no doubt the case, Flournoy citing “growing Chinese assertiveness and military strength.” She contrasts this Chinese muscle-flexing with the perception that the United States is a “declining power.” Strangely, she chooses not to assess whether or not that perception has merit, merely styling it as a “narrative.”

Yet whether that narrative has any basis in fact qualifies as a matter of profound strategic significance. The operative question is not whether the United States is literally in decline, however one might interpret that term. Rather the question is whether given the broader panoply of existing U.S. security challenges, confronting China militarily makes sense.

Flournoy’s expectation of using legacy systems as a cashbox for funding new programs contains a generous dose of wishful thinking.

The United States today faces a constellation of security challenges. China is one. “Endless wars” that never seem to end comprise a second. Climate change is a third. Pandemics are a fourth. Domestic dysfunction related to race, culture, and economy forms yet another and may be the most pressing. That embarking upon an expensive military competition offers the best way to address these several problems is not self-evident.

Flournoy’s essay is devoid of historical reflections. Yet history may offer relevant lessons.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Great Britain as a palpably declining imperial power nonetheless chose to engage in a naval arms race with Germany, a challenger to British pre-eminence then very much on the rise. The ensuing competition did little to shore up British deterrence. It did nothing whatsoever to prevent the outbreak of the war that began in 1914. Rather than forestalling British decline, the Anglo-German naval race accelerated it.

Midway through the 20th century, the United States, at the very summit of its economic and political clout, chose to center its competition with the Soviet Union on amassing a huge arsenal of nuclear arms. Roughly four decades later, the United States prevailed in that competition. Yet the exorbitant costs absorbed along the way, not to mention close brushes with Armageddon, should give pause to anyone eager to replicate that Cold War, with China now standing in for the USSR.

Is the United States today facing a situation that compares to the imperial overstretch besetting the British Empire of the late 19th century? I don’t know. What I do know is that the United States is no longer the nation that seven decades ago embarked upon the Cold War, and neither is China. Back then, the People’s Republic was struggling to feed itself and made literally nothing that American consumers cared to buy. Today, China is America’s foremost trading partner and holds more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt, as well as a principal economic rival. Flournoy seems strangely oblivious to the implications of those changes.

Reduced to its essence, Flournoy’s essay advances a striking claim: The United States can be safe only if it remains unambiguously and in perpetuity the strongest military power on the planet. From her perspective, security necessarily derives from hard power. Adequate security, therefore, must entail dominance.

In the upper reaches of the national-security establishment and across the military-industrial complex, her argument will be well received. Weapons manufacturers will salivate. Her ideas may even resonate with a President Biden, who is neither a bold nor an original thinker. Whether Flournoy’s case for deterrence via dominance responds to the nation’s actually existing needs is another matter.

In the 21st century, security begins with protecting Americans where they live.

A people whose entire way of life has been overturned by the coronavirus and who find themselves besieged by unprecedented natural disasters should consider the possibility that genuine security is no longer a function of accruing and wielding military power. In the 21st century, security begins with protecting Americans where they live. The immediate threats to our collective safety and well-being—perhaps even to our Republic—are here within our own continent, not on the other side of the planet. As a remedy to those threats, armed might is largely irrelevant.

A realistic appraisal of perils that are close to home does not imply that the United States should turn a blind eye toward antagonistic behavior by China. For the foreseeable future, U.S. and Chinese geopolitical interests will not align. Bilateral relations will be fundamentally competitive, even if in the realm of trade and investment, they will also include elements of cooperation. On issues such as climate change, forging an effective global response will make collaboration obligatory. A sound policy toward China will foster opportunities to do so.

Flournoy’s rush to define Sino-American relations in terms of a military competition will diminish such opportunities. In that sense, her perspective exemplifies a “legacy program” that ought to have been junked long ago.