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i

iii

Strategic Studies Institute

and

U.S. Army War College Press

A NEW TYPE OF GREAT POWER RELATIONSHIP 

BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA: 

THE MILITARY DIMENSION

Geoffrey Till

September 2014

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and 

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iv

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ISBN 1-58487-638-7
v

FOREWORD

For the United States and its allies and partners 

around the world, the debate about the pivot or rebalancing of American interests toward the Asia-Pacific Region is crucial. The United States has to ensure 

that allies and partners in other areas do not feel neglected or disadvantaged by the possible consequences of this initiative. To a large extent, this will depend 

not merely on how that initiative is presented, but also 

on the nature of the relationship between the United 

States and China. The more tense that relationship, 

and the more competitive rather than cooperative it is, 

the greater the likelihood of strategic distraction from 

other important areas of the world. China under President Xi Jinping is working out what it wishes that relationship to be, since it too recognizes that its nature 

will, in part, determine the peace and prosperity of the 

region. China also realizes that its nature will affect to 

a significant extent, the regime’s capacity to ensure the 

continued economic development on which the Communist party’s continued dominance depends.

For both countries, then, the stakes are high. President Xi has recently urged that China and the United 

States develop a new relationship between the two 

great powers. In this monograph, Dr Geoffrey Till explores what form that relationship may take, what its 

consequences are likely to be, and what options are 

available to the United States.

The manner in which the Armed Forces of the 

United States deployed into the Asia-Pacific are used 

to convey messages of reassurance and deterrence toward China will be a critical part of the package of necessary strategic policies toward the region. Although 

the region is overwhelmingly maritime in nature, the 
vi

U.S. Army has a number of essential roles to play in 

contributing toward this new relationship.

 

 DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

 Director

 Strategic Studies Institute and

 U.S. Army War College Press
vii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GEOFFREY TILL, Dean of Academic Studies at the 

United Kingdom Command and Staff College from 

1997-2006, is now Emeritus Professor of Maritime 

Studies at King’s College London and Chairman of 

the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies. Since 

2009, he has also been a Visiting Professor at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. 

He is also Adjunct Research Professor at the National 

Institute for the Study of the South China Sea, Haikou, 

Hainan, China. In addition to many articles and chapters on various aspects of maritime strategy and policy defense, Professor Till is the author of a number of 

books. His most recent is Seapower: A Guide for the 21st 

Century, Third Ed., January 2013, for Routledge. He 

edited, with Patrick Bratton, The Triumph of Neptune? 

Seapower and the Asia-Pacific: Adjusting to New Realities; 

and an Adelphi Book for the International Institute 

for Strategic Studies, Naval Expansion in Asia: An Arms 

Race in the Making? Both were published by Routledge 

as paperbacks in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, with Jane 

Chan, he edited Naval Modernisation in South-East Asia: 

Nature, Causes and Consequences. His Understanding 

Victory: Naval Operations from Trafalgar to the Falklands 

is to be published by ABC-Clio in 2014. Professor Till 

is currently working on a number of other projects 

on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region. His 

works have been translated into 12 languages.

ix

SUMMARY

The relative rise of China is likely to lead a major 

shift in the world’s strategic architecture, which the 

United States will need to accommodate. For the outcome to be generally beneficial, China needs to be dissuaded from hegemonic aspirations and retained as 

a cooperative partner in the world system. This will 

require a range of potentially conflicting thrusts in 

U.S. policy. 

Since the Asia-Pacific Region is primarily a maritime theater, the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force 

will need to play a leading role. The U.S. Army, 

nonetheless, will have a substantial supporting and 

facilitating role.

1

A NEW TYPE OF GREAT POWER RELATIONSHIP 

BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA: 

THE MILITARY DIMENSION

THE ISSUE

Power is the ability to influence through the 

strength of a country’s armed forces, the wealth of its 

economy, or the hold it has over public opinion or the 

popular imagination.1

 Power is best understood as 

the relative capacity to influence the environment and 

human behavior. The instrumentalities of influence 

range across a spectrum from “soft power” (the sociocultural dimension) through what some have called 

“sticky power” (the economic-industrial dimension) 

to “hard power” (the military-strategic dimension). 

Major shifts in relative power determined by dramatic 

changes in these three very closely related categories of influence have been a central characteristic of 

human history.

Nowadays the focus of attention is on a notional 

shift in relative power from “West” to “East.” Contentions that “we are living through the end of 500 years 

of Western ascendancy”2

 and that Asia “is poised to 

increase its geopolitical and economic influence rapidly in the decades to come”3

 have become commonplace. To some, this is simply part of a historic pattern of continuous change and tectonic historic swings 

backward and forward from one to the other.4 At the 

moment, the East is generally regarded as being in the 

ascendant, significantly rising relative to the West.

5

Recently, this debate has narrowed from grand 

matters of the relative power of East and West, to the 

more specific issue of the future power relationship of 

China and the United States. This has led to vibrant 
2

debate in China, the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, 

and in the United States about both the extent of the 

anticipated transformation in this bilateral strategic 

relationship and its projected consequences.

6

The United States has announced its intention to 

resume paying the level of attention to the Asia-Pacific 

region that its strategic importance warrants. In President Barack Obama’s words, “As a Pacific nation, the 

United States will play a larger and long-term role in 

shaping this region and its future, by upholding core 

principles and in close partnership with our allies and 

friends.”7

In the wake of the American “rebalance” toward 

the Asia-Pacific, the requirement for the establishment of a new and positive strategic relationship between China and the United States seems the most 

fundamental of these consequences. Building such a 

relationship is key to the enduring national security 

objective of ensuring a safe, stable, and prosperous international environment.8

 This has been characterized 

by President Xi as “a new type of great power relationship” and by Washington as the “central, sort of, 

organizing principle” of international relations.9

 The 

chief characteristics of this new relationship—and the 

extent to which they will be shaped and illustrated by 

shifts in the soft, sticky, and hard aspects of relative 

national power and the implications of this for the 

role of the U.S. military in the region—demand closer 

consideration. 

Soft Power: The Socio-cultural Dimension.

In the socio-cultural dimension, the Chinese language and Chinese concepts are clearly becoming 

more visible as the country’s increasing wealth in-
3

creases their geographic spread and depth. To some 

extent, this is a natural consequence of China’s rise. 

But it is also the effect of deliberate state policy. The 

“Confucian Institutes,” for example, which were established to win over public opinion in the outside world 

(something that historically was rarely of concern to 

the Chinese before the modern era) have proved successful. As many as 325 such institutes already exist 

around the world, and most have major development 

plans to be finalized before 2020.10 The so-called “Pannikar tradition,” in which, under the surface, most 

Asian countries resent the presence of outsiders in 

their region, provides a fruitful basis for the country’s 

competitive “charm offensives” in Southeast Asia and 

elsewhere.11 China’s vision of a harmonized world 

based on traditional Chinese values has proved an 

effective, if not decisive, counter to what Beijing refers to as “the China threat theory” peddled by its 

adversaries.12

The perceived policy paralysis in Washington’s 

ability to manage its economic difficulties and regional concerns about the reality of the U.S. pivot/

rebalance toward Asia has at least temporarily decreased the credibility of the Western liberal narrative, 

while increasing the relative effectiveness of China’s 

soft power. Some analysts in China urge the leadership to compete in the sphere of economic ideas by 

pushing the case for a Beijing consensus against the 

Western narrative of economic and social development based on liberal democracy.13

These analysts argue that opinion polls suggest 

major distinctions between the perceived trustworthiness of the U.S. Government and the attractions of 

“the American Dream,” and that many are skeptical 

that the United States will, in fact, still be the leading 

power in 20 years. Even so, the U.S. image is still glob-
4

ally better than China’s.14 Nonetheless, norms about 

the freedom of the press, religion, and speech increasingly are being accepted as universal, not just Western 

ones, even in China itself. The United States seeks to 

take careful advantage of this. 

Moreover, the fact that doubts about the rebalance 

are a matter of concern throughout Asia demonstrates 

the limits of China’s soft power, especially when Beijing is perceived as being unduly assertive in its claims 

toward the South and East China Seas.15 These limits, 

together with a memory of historic antagonisms (in 

the case, for example, of Vietnam and Japan) and local resentments about the sheer number and the personal styles of mainland Chinese flooding into Hong 

Kong, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia 

as both tourists and temporary/permanent residents, 

reinforce the point. China’s leadership must be aware 

of such limits to its soft power and of the potential 

liabilities that might accompany it.16

Further, a review of the shopping and eating places available in Shanghai and other such locations in 

China helps explain the widespread fear among those 

the West would call “hard-liners” about the extent to 

which Chinese governance styles and values are being 

subverted by Western cultural infiltration.17 This fear, 

together with rising concern about the uneven effect 

of rapid industrialization on the domestic population, accounts for an almost certainly exaggerated fear 

in governmental and party circles about the survivability of the regime and its values.18

There are, then, obvious social and cultural tensions between the United States and China. A key 

question for American policymakers in framing their 

plan for strategic communications is how competitive 

this relationship is and should be, and how best to 

handle it. The healthy development of bilateral rela-
5

tions arguably will depend in significant measure on 

“soft” cultural exchanges.19

Sticky Power: The Economic-Industrial Dimension. 

Few would deny the remarkable growth of China’s 

gross domestic product (GDP) in recent years, which 

increased tenfold between 1978 and 2004, compared 

to fourfold for the United Kingdom (UK) between 

1830 and 1900. As a result, China accumulated a current account surplus of 10 percent of GDP, while the 

United States, on the other hand, accounted for more 

than half the world’s current account deficit at 6 percent of GDP.20 A highly effective government stimulus 

program and massive credit expansion drawn from 

the world’s biggest accumulated reserves—which is 

in turn derived from high levels of both savings and 

foreign investment—meant China recovered quickly 

from the crisis of 2007-09, with export levels 17 percent higher in 2009 than for 2008.21 In 2000, the U.S. 

GDP was 8 times larger than China’s; now it is only 4 

times larger, and, according to Jim O’Neill, Goldman 

Sachs Chief economist, China’s GDP will overtake that 

of the United States in 2027.22 Many analysts, such as 

Professor Victor Sit of Hong Kong Baptist University, 

indeed argue that China’s economic achievements 

to date should be seen essentially as providing the 

foundation for a Second Global Shift into a more sophisticated kind of economic prowess—characterized 

by high-tech engineering, the development of green 

energy, and a substantial move into the financial 

services.23

This appears to contrast strikingly with the general 

angst, for example, about American competitiveness 

and Washington’s ability to handle systemic economic 
6

problems.24 This development, if true (and there are 

plenty of reasons to doubt it25), would pose a substantial potential challenge—whether intended or not—to 

the future role of the U.S. dollar and to Washington’s 

continued domination of the world economy. It is a 

new source of Chinese confidence and offers a major 

channel for China to shape its international context.26

Reinforced by the obvious implications for defense 

spending, this development suggests that a significant shift in relative economic power is indeed under 

way, even if that may not amount to a future Chinese 

economy dominating the American. 

But although the relative growth of Chinese economic power cannot be denied,27 a number of points 

counterbalance this fact. First, as China industrializes, 

it creates problems for itself. These include weak local government finances and excessive amounts of 

domestic debt, inadequate banking system loans, the 

future costs of an aging population, a probable debtto-GDP ratio of 65 percent,28 and a low governmental 

tax-take relative to the GDP. As incomes rise, China 

will lose the competitive advantage of low-cost labor 

and increase the dangers of a middle-income trap. To 

this must be added the often relegated social tensions 

remarked on earlier.29 The regime can only hope to resolve these pressures by the domestic investment of a 

goodly proportion of its newfound sources of wealth. 

Nor, according to former premier Wen Jiabao can 

there be total confidence that such problems are soluble in the near future.30 These pressures, he argued, 

mean that currently the Chinese economy is “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable” 

and that accordingly it would be “foolish to postulate 

that the 21st century will belong to China.”31 Wen Jiabao is but one of many Chinese implicitly pointing out 
7

the unwisdom of confusing the size of an economy 

with its strength. The 2012 Chinese Defense White Paper

indeed makes the point that the U.S. economic recovery will make it harder for China to catch up with the 

United States.

This raises a number of important issues. Setting 

relative indicators of raw elements of the economic 

performance of China and the United States against 

each other is misleading in two ways. First, the strength 

of an economy has to be set not just against that of 

other countries, but also against the challenge of its 

own commitments. Second, it is by no means clear 

that any relative rise in China’s economic strength, 

when set against that of the United States—and which 

may emerge even from this more sophisticated measure of comparison—is necessarily against American 

interests. Many would argue the precise reverse, in 

fact. In 1971, bilateral trade between the two countries 

came to less than $5 million; the United States now 

does more trade with China in a single hour.32

Such is the level of mutually beneficial economic 

interdependence between the two countries that a 

major failure in China could have catastrophic effects 

on the global economy, and therefore on the United 

States itself. Indeed, some worry that the internal social and economic pressures listed above will require 

Beijing to give greater priority to its domestic market 

and may make the economy rather more autarchic 

than it is now. In turn, this could lower the level of 

economic interdependence, making it significantly 

less of a bonding mechanism between the two countries. What, in fact, emerges from this review of the 

economic dimension of China’s relative rise is that, 

despite the astounding nature of China’s recent economic performance, its future trajectory and possible 
8

consequences remain uncertain and ambiguous, and 

may depend in large measure on U.S. policy and the 

fortunes of the U.S. economy. What also emerges, 

however, are the potential tensions between American and Chinese conceptions of the global economic 

system and how it should develop.33

Hard Power: The Military Dimension. 

Since the health of the economy is fundamental to 

defense spending, the narrative of the decline of the 

United States relative to China is almost as strong in 

the military power dimension as it is in the industrialeconomic one. There are major systemic differences 

in the defense spending of the two countries (such as 

cheaper labor costs in China but more social defense 

spending). This, plus the relative lack of transparency 

in Chinese budgeting, makes it difficult to compare 

the two budgets. But even according to official figures, 

Chinese defense spending is increasing, and, by 2025, 

could easily reach half the American level.34

Again, such raw comparisons based on bean 

counting (whether those beans are billions of dollars, 

or naval platforms and systems) are inadequate in 

themselves. Calculations of relative military strength

as measured by the capacity to decide outcomes have 

to include the degree of challenge posed to a country 

by the scale and nature of its perceived commitments. 

In this more nuanced mode of assessment, the U.S. 

Navy, for example, is challenged by the sheer diversity of the scenarios for which it feels it has to prepare. This is true whether it’s a question of having to 

prepare a wide variety of mission capabilities, both to 

cope with asymmetric techno-tactical anti-access strategies ranging from terrorists on jet skis to the anti-ship 
9

ballistic missile strategies of the Chinese and the very 

different conditions pertaining to the Western Pacific, 

the Indian Ocean, the Gulf and Red Sea, the Gulf of 

Aden, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and, to some 

extent, the Atlantic theaters of operation.35 These considerations dissipate the U.S. Navy and make it more 

difficult for it to assemble that concentration of force 

that Mahan advocated so strongly. Further, “[f]or the 

first time since 1890 . . . the U.S. Navy is faced with 

the prospect of competing against a potentially hostile naval power possessing a ship-building capacity 

that is equal to if not superior, to its own”36—in some 

respects at least. 

That is the reason for the concerns in Washington 

about trends in the correlation of naval, and, indeed, 

air forces, in the Western Pacific and the possibility 

that the U.S. military may be on the verge of significant decline relative to China. These concerns were 

exacerbated by the administration’s sequestration difficulties. Thus, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, stated: “We’ll have inadequate 

surge capacity at the appropriate readiness to be there 

when it matters. . . . We will not be able to respond in 

the way the nation has expected and depended (on us 

to act).” In an open letter to Congress, 45 prominent 

analysts concluded that such short- and long-term difficulties “. . . will degrade our ability to defend our 

allies, deter aggression, and promote American economic interests. . . . It will erode the credibility of our 

treaty commitments abroad.”37

By contrast, China is seen as engaging in a major 

modernization of its land and air forces and, most 

significantly, given the maritime nature of the AsiaPacific region, in a potentially transformational rise in 

the level of its naval aspirations. The development of 

China’s naval nuclear power, for example, seems like-
10

ly to boost China’s foreign policy confidence. Thus, a 

Global Times editorial in October 2013 stated:

China is powerful in possessing a credible secondstrike nuclear capability. . . . Some countries haven’t 

taken this into serious consideration when constituting their China policy, leading to a frivolous attitude 

towards China in public opinion account. . . . China 

needs to make it clear that the only choice is not to 

challenge China’s core interest. . . . Developing marine-based nuclear power is part of such work.38

Building up the navy is a critical part of China’s 

long-stated intention to develop as a maritime power. 

On July 11, 2005, China inaugurated its first Navigation Day to commemorate Admiral Zheng He’s first 

voyage in the 15th century. Seven years later, in his 

last speech at the “Big 18” National Party Congress in 

2012, President Hu Jintao argued for, “. . . enhancing 

the Chinese capacity for exploiting marine resources, 

resolutely safeguarding China’s maritime rights and 

interests, and building China into a maritime power.”39

This message was strongly reinforced by the first 

major speech of his successor, President Xi, on the 

subject, which, significantly, took place on the guided 

missile destroyer Haikou.

40 China’s urge to the sea, 

moreover, is robustly maritime, not just naval. The 

stress of energy and also food security means it incorporates far more than just shipping, ship-building, 

and associated industries. China’s growing interest in 

the Arctic demonstrates that it is global in scope. Practical progress and the extent of China’s institutional 

reform (for example, its coast guard agencies) shows 

how seriously these maritime aspirations are taken.41

Given the traditional land-centric and continental 

focus of Chinese strategic culture,42 this latter develop-
11

ment has struck many observers as particularly worrying. China is developing more ambitious naval forces, 

and even more significantly, the maritime industries 

that historically tend to go with them.43 Almost equally inevitably, these will challenge the U.S. strategic 

primacy in the Western Pacific, a geographic area of 

strategic maneuver hitherto dominated by American 

naval/air power. Given its many other global commitments and the likely impact of reduced levels of 

defense spending in the years ahead, the U.S. Navy is 

particularly sensitive to these developments. This sensitivity is reflected in the “rebalance” toward the AsiaPacific, the “Air-Sea Battle construct,” and the current 

U.S. naval preoccupation with political, technological, 

and operational ways of maintaining required levels 

of access to the waters of the Western Pacific in these 

new and more challenging circumstances.44

Such perceptions may need, however, to be caveated. First, it is easy to exaggerate the extent of China’s 

naval rise, its first carrier and growing amphibious 

capability notwithstanding. Most estimates suggest 

that for all its current difficulties, the U.S. military in 

general, and its naval and air forces in particular, will 

remain far more capable than the Chinese at least for 

the next couple of decades.45 Second, it is possible to 

interpret China’s greatly increased level of investment 

in the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as an 

unremarkable illustration of a historically natural and 

now economically sustainable response of a country 

with developing maritime interests both in its near 

seas and more distantly, to enhance its capacity to defend those interests. Offshore, China has substantial 

economic and strategic interests most obviously in the 

South and East China Seas, an area from which, in the 

recent past, its national security has been threatened. 
12

China’s growing presence on the world ocean, such 

as its participation in the international counterpiracy 

mission off Somalia and the presence of an air-defense 

frigate standing off the coast of Libya, while thousands of its citizens were evacuated from the perils of 

a local civil war, reflect the country’s integration with 

the global trading system—a process that inevitably 

expands China’s international interests and security 

obligations. The first of these, at least, called for cooperation with the U.S. Navy rather than competition, 

still less confrontation.

Once again, the extent of China’s relative military 

rise and the motivation and consequences of that rise 

remain a legitimate area for debate. These are likely to 

be quite significantly affected, among other things, by 

American policy.

Alternative Futures.

A shift, then, is taking place across all three dimensions of power—soft, sticky, and hard. It is evidenced not just by greater economic and military 

strength, but by China’s greater diplomatic weight at 

the United Nations (UN), as illustrated by its role in 

the management of the North Korean problem and its 

influence in the ongoing debate over Libya, Syria, and 

Iran. Some anticipate radical change in the global economic system, expecting a set of governing and operating principles more collective, less individual, more 

state-centric, less liberal. In other words, the Yuan will 

replace the dollar, and Mandarin will take over from 

English—Globalization with Chinese characteristics.46

The immediate consequences were made clear by 

Ruan Zongze in the Peoples’ Daily: 
13

Today, China, because of its rapidly rising strength, 

sits at the main table on the global stage, and needs to 

get used to newly being in the limelight. The international community also needs to adjust to China’s new 

role.47

Hence the key question, if the status quo is not defensible and some degree of strategic change seems 

inevitable, which of the possible alternative futures 

in system change, both in terms of outcomes and the 

means by which those outcomes are delivered, would 

seem the most beneficial—or the least harmful—

to U.S. interests? There are clearly a variety of such 

outcomes, with varying degrees of acceptability to 

Washington.

A Zero-Sum Shift. 

History suggests, unfortunately, that war and conflict often accompany systemic change, as the incumbent great power either defeats a challenger or succumbs to it.48 As Niall Ferguson succinctly comments, 

“Major shifts in the balance of power are seldom amicable.” In China, as elsewhere, there are hawks who 

most definitely think along such potentially confrontational lines.49 There cannot be, they say, “two tigers 

on one mountain.” It would also be as well to remember that with its combination of economic power and 

hard military power, China is potentially the most 

formidable challenge the United States has ever come 

across, especially when it might turn itself into a major nuclear weapons state. Previous outcomes to such 

confrontations (which would include World Wars I 

and II, and the Cold War) underline the wisdom of 

Henry Kissinger’s observation that:
14

Neither [the US and China] has much practice in cooperative relations with equals. Yet their leaders have 

no more important task than to implement the truths 

that neither country will ever be able to dominate 

the other, and that conflict between them would exhaust their societies and undermine the prospects of 

world peace.50

Heightened Rivalry and Increased Multipolarity.

A second somewhat less immediately apocalyptic 

possibility would be of continued U.S.-China rivalry 

against a background of increased multipolarity with 

high levels of state versus state competition, reminiscent perhaps of Europe before World War I, and as 

characterized perhaps by the tensions between Japan 

and China over the islands of the East China Sea, or, in 

a somewhat lesser key, between Japan and South Korea.51 Most analysts would reject this as a desired outcome, first because of what the European example led 

to, and, second, because of a systemically greater need 

for a collective global response to common threats 

like international crime, environmental degradation, 

international terrorism, economic recessions and 

depressions, and so forth.

Lowered Rivalry and Increased Multipolarity. 

Recognition of this need may, instead, lead to a 

third kind of outcome—greater multipolarity but 

with less state-on-state competition, in which the key 

interests of all major stakeholders are sufficiently accommodated. Since China appears to be “catching 

up” with the United States faster than other countries 

such as India or Russia are catching up with China, 

the resultant multipolarity would seem likely to have 
15

a distinctly bipolar edge to it, though it would be in 

the interest of neither great power to seek to develop 

this relationship in “G2” terms. 

Nonetheless, such an outcome anticipates the United States and China acting to a significant extent as security partners in a wider, more multipolar, world. In 

such a world, the individual and distinctive agendas 

of a host of other countries in a notably diverse region 

act as both a restraint and—possibly playing one off 

against the other—an encouragement to both of the 

main actors in the drama, as has been done before 

elsewhere. This will ensure that neither emerges as 

the sole superpower.52 This is plainly what Singapore 

among other U.S. partners would wish to see:

The rise of China does not imply the decline of the 

United States. And we in Singapore do not subscribe 

to the declinist theory . . . the world and Asia are big 

enough to accommodate both a rising China and a 

reinvigorated US.53

All the same, a distinctly competitive edge to the 

relationship between the United States and China in 

this construct seems likely to remain. Hence, in this 

relationship, an element of mutual deterrence would 

need to co-exist along with the reassurance in U.S. 

policy. Nonetheless, this kind of calibrated and defensive balancing would, in effect, be much less provocative than outright competition.54

Peaceful Replacement.

The final alternative outcome is of one major 

power stepping down and being replaced by another 

peacefully, as illustrated by the supplanting of Britain as the world’s leading power in the 19th century 

by the United States in the 20th. As a process, this is 
16

in some ways the most benign of all outcomes. But 

it was not without its own tensions and difficulties55

and is in any case unlikely to be accepted by a United 

States, which doubts its necessity or may be reluctant 

to entrust its core national interests to the protection 

of another state, or group of states, especially one with 

significantly different values.

Accordingly, of these four alternative outcomes, 

some variant of the third option, namely, greater 

multipolarity but with less state-on-state competition, would seem to have the greatest appeal. This 

requires the retention within a broadly cooperative 

rules-based international system of China as a major 

military and trading power, with national interests to 

defend and incentives to work substantially with others against common threats. There is, however, likely 

to be some robust debate about what those rules are.56

The Chinese never cease to point out that institutions 

like the World Bank, the Organization for Economic 

Cooperation and Development, and the International 

Money Fund are dominated by the West and need to 

change rather more than they are changing. The key 

issue here would seem to be the extent to which China 

seeks to make new rules—or whether the old ones will 

make China. 

Nonetheless, engaging positively with China was 

one of the major publicly stated motivations for the 

rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific:

A key objective of our rebalance is to build a healthy, 

transparent and sustainable U.S.-China defense relationship, one that supports a broader relationship . . .

a strong and cooperative U.S.-China partnership 

is essential for global security and prosperity in the 

21st Century.57
17

The United States, in effect, will need to accommodate China’s views more than it used to and prompt 

a reconsideration of the rebalance toward the AsiaPacific. For China’s part, President Xi has made his 

view of the four required principles, in what he calls 

a “new type of great power relationship,” fairly clear. 

Both sides should:

1. Use existing intergovernmental mechanisms for 

communication and dialogue;

2. Utilize trade and exchanges on technology to 

open new channels of cooperation;

3. Coordinate their policies on major international 

issues; and,

4. Develop a new pattern of military relations.58

Nonetheless, the extent and consequence of this 

strategic shift and the new relationship between Beijing and Washington remains ambiguous. One of the 

reasons is that this shift, at least to a large extent, is 

contingent on the direction and success of U.S. policy. 

OUTLINES OF A RESPONSE 

Denying Denial.

Sufficient changes are afoot to suggest that a substantial reappraisal of U.S. policy toward China as an 

emerging great power is called for, even if the extent 

and consequence of that rise as yet remain ambiguous, and may mean no more than a shrinking ratio 

of American superiority. Hence, the value of Hugh 

White’s warning against what he calls the four common denials about China’s future is to be found among 

those who do not accept the need for the reappraisal 
18

of the necessity for some form of accommodation 

between Beijing and Washington, namely, 

1. China is not really growing economically that 

much;

2. China will not attain sufficient strategic weight;

3. China will not choose to use its strategic weight, 

as to do so is not in its interest; and,

4. Even if China does so choose, it will necessarily 

lose.59

On this basis, there would not be much need for the 

United States to re-evaluate substantially its current 

course of policy. 

The declinist debate about the extent to which the 

United States will have to cede at least elements of its 

supremacy to China remains unresolved, but, for all 

that, there is little doubt that something of a strategic 

shift is indeed taking place.60 As Ambassador Charles 

W. Freeman, Jr. has observed: 

In some disturbing ways, Sino-American competition 

is beginning to parallel the contest between us and the 

Soviet Union in the Cold War. This time, however, the 

United States is in the fiscally precarious position of 

the USSR, while China plays the economically robust 

role we once did.61

That may be an exaggeration of the robustness 

of the Chinese economy and an underestimation of 

U.S. resilience, but, even so, none of these four denials serve as a reliable basis for sensible policymaking. 

“Americans will need to move beyond the myth,” 

Christopher Layne concludes, “that the United States 

is somehow immune from the forces of change that 

history has unleashed.”62 Exaggerated notions of what 

the “No. One Power” represents and can, in any case, 

achieve may also need restraint. 
19

Outlines of a Policy.

Evidently, there is a need for a clear-sighted and 

pragmatic policy of retaining China as a major stakeholder in a more multipolar world system and a prospective security and economic partner of the United 

States. This stands midway between the panda-hugging and dragon-slaying extremes of recommended 

American policy. It differs radically from the containment options of “Mr. X” when confronting the Soviet 

Union of the late-1940s, in that there is no thought of 

the holding back of a major and essentially malignant 

new power until its internal contradictions change it 

into a more benign one. Any attempt to contain China 

sequentially in this way is likely to be counterproductive, not the least because a policy would be most 

unwelcome in much of Asia. Instead, the emphasis 

is on the simultaneous transmission of messages of 

reassurance and deterrence, both intended to convey 

that China’s rise is to be welcomed as a responsible security partner. Putting it simply, the aim would be to 

provide incentives for “good” behavior and disincentives for “bad”—and in both cases to range across the 

whole of the soft-sticky-hard dimensions of power. 

Critically, the aim needs also to involve wider engagement with other players in a more multipolar world. 

There are three dimensions to such a policy:

• Deterrence—providing disincentives to unwelcome behavior; 

• Reassurance—providing incentives to welcome

behavior; and,

• Wider Engagement with other players in an increasingly multilateral setting in order to support U.S. policies of deterrence and reassurance 

as necessary.
20

There are good reasons for caution about this policy, and two initial points need to be made immediately. First, the U.S. capacity to engage in a nuanced 

and effective program of deterrence and reassurance 

is itself much more conditional than often appears to 

be the case. The extent to which China’s trajectory can

be shaped easily by American policy initiatives may 

be exaggerated. To a large extent, China has always 

marched to the sound of its own drums. This is true 

in terms both of domestic political and institutional 

constraints and of traditional cultural values—refined 

and consolidated by 5,000 years of history. As Kissinger has warned, these distinctive values and their 

possible effects need to be understood. For example:

A principal difference between Chinese and western 

diplomatic strategy is the reaction to perceived vulnerability. American and western diplomats conclude 

that they should move carefully to avoid provocation; the Chinese response is more likely to magnify 

defiance.63

That said, “a calibrated combination of rewards 

and punishments, and majestic cultural performance” 

were arguably what preserved China through thousands of years of turbulence. Logically, the country’s 

leaders may well understand, and even prove surprisingly receptive to, such a policy, even one emanating from Washington.64 Nonetheless, there is a need 

for some becoming modesty in Washington’s appraisal of what it can and should do to mold Chinese 

perceptions.

Moreover, its relationship with the United States is 

far from being the sole, or even necessarily the main, 

preoccupation of a Chinese leadership concerned 

above all with providing the kind of internal social 
21

and economic development that ultimately will be 

the main way of ensuring the survival of the current 

regime. For this reason, China is independently engaging in its own pivot toward Central Asia, Africa, 

South America, and the Middle East—not necessarily 

in some grand game of global rivalry with the United 

States, but mainly because its requirement for resources and markets demands it.65

This feeds into the second assumption that needs 

to be made about China’s being a responsible security 

partner, namely, that there is a sufficient constituency 

of support for the notion of sharing power within 

China itself. Some Developmentalists would argue 

the unwisdom of China’s assuming the burdens of 

even an informal empire. Instead, they argue, Beijing 

should focus on more limited aims, simply to win the 

status needed to help create conditions in East Asia 

conducive to the country’s economic development 

and the continued stability of the regime as it proceeds 

through its program of calibrated reform.66 China is 

represented as a still-developing country, and its involvement in the system should be designed to meet 

those internal needs. 

There are a number of difficulties here, however. 

China frequently has exhibited a marked reluctance 

to assume the burdens of being a responsible stakeholder, preferring instead to devote those resources 

to its immediate internal needs. This might explain, 

perhaps, China’s limited and tardy response to the 

Haiyun typhoon disaster in the Philippines.67

Other Chinese skeptics concerning the notion of 

the country’s acting as a responsible stakeholder, on 

the other hand, argue that China’s intention should be 

to seek an East Asia that resembles the ancient past—

Sino-centric, hierarchical, deferential, but reasonably 
22

stable—and that a substantial U.S. role in the area 

would be unnecessary and unwelcome.68 These are 

complex issues much debated by scholars. 

Among other points they make is that in its 5,000 

years of history, China has actually played different 

roles in East Asia, from victim to suzerain, from promoting the policies of openness and mutual respect 

characteristic of the Tang dynasty to the greater levels of control manifested by the Yuan and Ming dynasties.69 The “All Under Heaven” Tianxia system, in 

which China is at the center of a deferential universe 

of smaller-state vassals benignly looked after while 

the barbarians are kept at arm’s length, goes deep in 

the Chinese psyche. It presupposes China setting the 

rules of such a harmonious world.70 Skepticism about 

the adoption of the role defined by the United States 

as a responsible stakeholder is further reinforced by 

the sense that the rules of the current game historically have been set by Washington and its allies, with 

little Chinese involvement. 

A third group, the Internationalist Globalists, argue, on the contrary, that in its own economic and 

strategic interests, a rising China needs to integrate 

itself into the world economic system and help shape 

its future as a responsible stakeholder. Thus Liaowang, 

a leading party foreign affairs journal, says, in a muchcited article: 

Compared with past practices, China’s diplomacy has 

indeed displayed a new face. If China’s diplomacy 

before the 1980s stressed safeguarding of national security, and its emphasis from the 1980s to early this 

century is on the creation of an excellent environment 

for economic development, then the focus at present 

is to take a more active part in international affairs 

and play the role that a responsible power should on 
23

the basis of satisfying the security and development 

interests.71

It is difficult to gauge the relative strength of these 

three grouped responses or their future trajectories, 

but they do represent a variety of shades of opinion. 

The entrepreneurial middle class will tend to favor 

the third option; the military and representatives of 

the still massive state-owned enterprises, the second. 

The United States therefore has to work on the various potentially conflicting schools of thought within 

the country.72 Assuming and acting as though the hegemonists within China are the dominant group73 is 

likely to prove a self-fulfilling prophecy for the United 

States. The problem is compounded by the fact that as 

yet, there is no longer a leading Mao-like figure predominant in setting China’s security agenda; instead, 

there is a shoal of conflicting agencies and views ranging from the hard to the soft liners. Nonetheless, President Xi seems already to have won for himself a level 

of state authority not enjoyed by his two predecessors. 

His immediate assumption of the chair of the Central 

Military Commission and creation of a nascent National Security Council emphasize the point. President 

Xi’s own take on the issue is therefore likely to be key 

to future developments, even if he is operating within 

a more pluralistic and constraining context than is often assumed. That being so, his earlier U.S. residence 

(and, indeed, the fact that his daughter is studying 

at Harvard) may suggest an encouraging degree of 

open-mindedness on the issue of China’s developing 

relationship with the United States.74
24

Messages of Deterrence.

That said, the Chinese military remains an important constituency, which on the whole tends to be more 

hawkish than many party officials in the Ministry of 

Foreign Affairs, or Commerce. This hawkishness is 

tempered, however, by the military’s strategic-cultural emphasis on the notions of active defense and its 

professional prudence and awareness of the military 

realities. Accordingly, there is scope for the exertion 

of a degree of deterrent pressure on Chinese assertiveness, should this be seen to recur. All the same, Beijing exhibits a marked propensity to push back when 

under pressure or challenged, a characteristic much 

illustrated by its policy in the disputed South and East 

China Seas.

In addition to this the extent of the public reaction 

to such events as the bombing of the Chinese Embassy 

in Belgrade, the air collision between Chinese and 

American aircraft near Hainan in 2001, and rising tensions in the South and East China Seas demonstrates 

the existence of a growing nationalist sentiment within China (and, indeed, elsewhere in the Western Pacific). This sentiment, when empowered by the tools 

of the social media, can hardly be ignored by any 

government, whatever its political hue or means of 

containing it.

Moreover, as remarked earlier, the policy effect 

of such groups may be reinforced by the existence of 

a strategic culture that features, for example, what 

Kissinger calls “offensive deterrence.” This involves 

“. . . the use of a pre-emptive strategy not so much to 

defeat the adversary as to deal him a psychological 

blow to cause him to desist.” To an extent, such reactions to external events are the default setting.75
25

Some Chinese policy initiatives do, indeed, seem to 

emanate from hard-line circles, not the least the extent 

to which the regime is implicated in the widespread 

cyberattacks on the United States and other sites. Such 

initiatives clearly demand a robust response.76 A pragmatic acceptance of the existence of hard-line opinionformers in China and the unwelcome policy initiatives that they may produce consequently means that 

a realistic policy has to include the provision, when 

necessary, of disincentives for unhelpful behavior and 

policies. Such a policy therefore demands a degree of 

deterrence.

The United States, as the world’s biggest economy, 

leading military power, and a major source of global 

values, is in a good position to engage in policies of calibrated deterrence when there is a need. The extent of 

its military decline vis-à-vis China, and indeed everyone else, should not be exaggerated. The United States 

spends more than eight times on defense than does 

China. Moreover, of the top nine defense spenders, 

four are allies—the UK, France, Japan, and Germany 

and one a partner, Saudi Arabia. U.S. spending comfortably exceeds the rest of the nine put together—$739 

billion to $486 billion.77 If partners such as South Korea 

and Singapore are factored in as well, the total goes 

higher still. U.S. defense spending is still only some 

4.4 percent of its GDP, more than most countries, but 

less than some and is, in strictly economic terms,78 easily affordable. Certainly, even now the United States is 

nowhere near the level of defense spending that contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. China’s level of 

defense spending by comparison is notoriously hard 

to measure, but almost any calculation suggests that, 

although China is catching up, there remains a huge 

gap in military spending between the two countries.79
26

As a result, in the Pacific, it will be many years 

before Washington’s commanding lead in deployable 

air and naval power is seriously compromised:

The consensus of sources is that the size and level of 

operational experience of the U.S. Navy and Air Force 

makes it nearly impossible for potential opponents to 

mount a serious challenge in the waters and air space 

over the world’s oceans. This is likely to continue until 

2035.80 

The obvious exception to this, though, may be the 

much narrower waters of the Western Pacific, where 

the gap between the two countries could prove 

considerably less. 

More widely, Washington’s deterrent capability is 

sustained by the continuing appeal of the U.S. dream; 

and for all the country’s current budgetary problems, 

that dream remains strong, and its economy is still regarded as the essential motor of the world economy. 

The U.S. image—its capacity to win and influence 

friends in the Asia-Pacific and to avoid playing into the 

hands of the Chinese hegemonic constituency, however—depends on avoiding the appearance that the 

United States is “looking for a fight.” For this reason, 

deterrence needs to be recessed, pragmatic, nonconfrontational, and, hence, frequently silent, so far as the 

media and much of the outside world is concerned—

over such matters as the Chinese declaration of a new 

Air Defense Zone in the East China Sea. But private 

persuasion behind closed doors is likely to be more 

effective than repeated and ostentatious displays of 

American resolve.81

Accordingly, using these power advantages in order to make disincentives for bad behavior clear has 

to be carefully calibrated—first, that such use is seen 

by Beijing as credible; second, that it does not feed 
27

the paranoia of the hard-liners and encourage their 

rise relative to that of the soft-liners inside China’s 

policymaking circles; third, that it does not trigger 

the instinctive rather than thinking cultural reactions 

described by Kissinger; and, fourth, that it does not 

unduly upset the other Asian powers. As a general 

rule, the further up the soft power/hard power scale 

they are, the more likely responses are to have these 

negative effects. Even so, they may be necessary in 

some cases.

China is well aware of the dangers of encirclement, 

but may need to be shown that in its assertive behavior in the East, and especially the South China Seas, 

it is in danger of encircling itself. Hence, likely local 

reactions to assertive acts may also act as a deterrent 

to such acts.82

Messages of Reassurance.

But alongside acting as a deterrent, the successful 

retention of China as a security partner will require 

the United States to provide ample reassurance that 

its intentions toward China are not malign, and that it 

welcomes, in fact as well as in rhetoric, the country’s 

resumption of its proper place in the world order. This 

policy rests, of course, on the assumption that China 

is willing to share responsible power with the United 

States, as Beijing says, and is not secretly aiming at 

predominance either within the region or globally. 

There is room for doubt about this, as Kurt Campbell 

in one of his last interviews as Assistant Secretary of 

State pointed out: 

. . . We have done everything possible to encourage 

China to play a leading role in the G20, in the East Asia 
28

Summit, just every imaginable institution and venue. 

But in many respects, China is ambivalent about playing that role.83

Because of the various constituencies of opinion 

about such reassurances, Beijing may need to be persuaded into being a responsible Great Power and accepting the political and economic costs that go with 

it. One paradoxical characteristic of this role is the occasional need to accept being bullied by the weak and 

to moderate, or even withdraw, policies that prove 

deeply unwelcome to the irritatingly presumptuous 

smaller fry clustered around one’s heels. Persuasion 

accordingly requires the provision of positive incentives for good behavior. 

What is encouraging, as discussed earlier, is the 

wealth of evidence suggesting that the advantages 

of a cooperative relationship with the United States 

is widely recognized within Chinese policymaking 

circles. If the economic development of China, the solution of its many domestic problems, and, indeed, the 

survival of the regime are China’s top priorities, then a 

fruitful economic relationship with the world’s largest 

and generally most successful economy is recognized 

as essential. Unsurprisingly, then, trade between the 

two countries is steadily rising. Worth approximately 

$100 billion in 2003, it doubled to $200 billion in 2005, 

rose to $300 billion in 2007, to $406 billion in 2011, and 

in 2012, topped $500 billion. 

The consequent need for mutual understanding 

is evidenced by the existence of more than 60 mechanisms for official U.S.-China discussions. Presidents 

Hu and Obama met 13 times, and at Sunnylands in 

Rancho Mirage, CA, Obama and Xi appear to have 

gotten off to a good start.84 Such contacts are rein-
29

forced by a plethora of more informal ones, such as 

the two-way tourist trade, huge numbers of student 

exchanges, and so forth. Although the notion of Chimerica can be pushed too far, there is certainly evidence of mutual dependence in the economic relations 

between the two countries, even perhaps a degree of 

convergence.85

This reflects, and indeed strengthens, the existence 

of soft-liners in China, who wish China to adopt a 

responsible stakeholder position alongside the United States, and who are well aware of the dangers of 

drifting into strategic rivalry. The notion of China’s 

soft power has been widely discussed in China86—

(hence the push for Confucian Institutes), and Beijing 

is perfectly aware that perceived assertiveness in the 

East and South China Seas has made its neighbors 

more wary. 

Moreover, there is a great deal of diversity even 

among the soft-liners about what China should do in 

practical terms to secure this new relationship with the 

United States, differences that reflect a greater variety 

of opinion about how China should develop in general. Nor is there any doubt about the fact that there are 

limitations to the concessions China can make in order 

to be seen as a responsible stakeholder. Thus, in his 

first Presidential address, Xi was noticeably tougher 

than his predecessors in making this point clear:

[N]o country should presume that we will engage 

in trade involving our core interests or that we will 

swallow the bitter fruit of harming our sovereignty, 

security, or development interests. . . . [China would]

. . . stick to the road of peaceful development but never 

give up our legitimate rights and never sacrifice our 

national core interests.87
30

In his foreign policy initiatives, Xi has to balance 

between contending domestic forces, as does everyone else. China has real concerns about U.S. policy, 

which need to be, and indeed are being, addressed.88

Therefore, the United States has to present and explain its policies carefully. Many would see Obama’s 

pivot/rebalance toward Asia as a prime example 

of how not to present policy. Arguably, its first appearance fed paranoia in Beijing that the policy was 

essentially a military demarche toward China (and so 

sustained the hard-liners). Then, when its real limits 

became clear, the policy troubled them further by 

revealing the limits of American power at a time of 

sequestration. The policy alienated other countries in 

Asia, who concluded that it looked like the policy of 

containing China in which they did not wish to participate. The policy also mystified local U.S. partners, 

who felt insufficiently consulted and were not sure 

of their role in it. The assumed association of the rebalance with the much misunderstood Air-Sea Battle 

construct reinforced misperceptions of both. Furthermore, U.S. allies and partners in other areas became 

concerned that their interests would be neglected. The 

fact that much of the rebalance was a perfectly natural response to the running-down of the Iraq and Afghanistan commitments and hence a return to normal, 

and that the military dimension was a relatively small 

aspect of the rebalance, got lost in the noise. Arguably, 

it would have been better not to have announced the 

initiative with such fanfare, but simply, quietly, to 

have gotten on with it. In crafting a new security relationship with China, such “bumper-sticker” strategies 

are more hindrance than help in a policy designed to 

assuage, not exploit, China’s anxieties, while protecting U.S. interests in the region.89
31

Given the reluctance of most Asian states to take 

sides in a great power rivalry between China and the 

United States, and the need to secure a sustainable balance of interests between them, the United States has 

to engage in a policy of careful conciliation alongside 

its deterrence of Chinese assertiveness.90

Wider Engagement. 

The third and final constituent of a policy of helping to turn China into a security partner is, at the same 

time, seeking the support of other partners in a more 

multipolar world. In such a world, there will be other 

significant rising players, both in the region (Japan, 

Korea, Australia, the Association of Southeast Asian 

Nations [ASEAN], and Indonesia) and, outside the 

region; these countries include India, Brazil, Mexico, 

South Africa, the European Union [EU], Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Responsibility for the direction of the 

world’s affairs will be rather more shared than it used 

to be. Russia and China tend to call this the “democratization of international relations,”91 and are clearly 

anxious to facilitate such a process. 

This can be a helpful process for the United States 

in two ways. First, all these countries, to a greater 

or lesser extent, face the same range of problems—

the dangers of recession and depression, organized 

transnational crime, mass migration, global warming, pandemics, and international terrorism, which 

can only be addressed by serious collective action and 

effective global or at least regional governance. They 

have a significant share in the global economy and, 

in consequence, an interest in advancing solutions to 

global challenges. 
32

Second, most countries in the region do not want to 

answer, or even to be asked, “Whose side are you on?” 

in any strategic competition between the United States 

and China. Their differing levels of economic dependence on China is one of the main reasons, but their 

attitude may also suggest implicit assumptions about 

the strategic unwisdom of facilitating the emergence 

of “China versus the Rest” structures in the AsiaPacific region, which would take it back to unwanted 

and potentially dangerous forms of bilateralism. For 

this reason, the United States needs to tread a careful 

line between encouraging closer relations among the 

countries of the region and seeming to seek to marshal 

these countries into an anti-Beijing coalition. Nonetheless, a number of them, especially in the Indo-Pacific 

region, have their own reservations about aspects of 

China’s possible future trajectory and may seek comfort in each other’s company.92 Beijing is perfectly well 

aware of this fact and of the damage that overassertive 

behavior in the South and East China Seas can do to 

its charm offensives by reinforcing, rather than undermining, the China threat theory. This acts as a systemic constraint on aggressively nationalistic policies. 

These two points strengthen the notion that constructively engaging with other countries, perhaps especially in the Western Pacific, will play a key role in a 

general policy of encouraging China to become a U.S. 

partner and perhaps an even more significant security 

provider in the global system. No other country seems 

as well placed as the United States to engage in this 

kind of focused consensus-building leadership.93

The importance of a considered and energetic engagement with the rest of the countries of the Western 

Pacific is reinforced by the fact that one consequence 

of China’s rise is that it puts some of Washington’s local alliances under great strain. In such maritime dis-
33

putes as those over the islands of the South and East 

China Seas, the United States has to steer a complex 

course between providing sufficient support to allies 

and partners like Japan and the Philippines, while 

not enough to encourage entangling adventurism. As 

such recent events over the Scarborough and Second 

Thomas shoals in 2012-13, and over China’s declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in 

December 2013, have shown, this can be a tricky line 

to follow.

In spite of that, the other countries of East Asia, 

sensitively engaged, have a substantial contribution 

to make to the mixed deterrence/reassurance policies 

that could help China become a true security partner 

for the United States, rather than a hegemonic threat. 

Heightened awareness in Beijing of the reactions and 

importance of local states should act as a significant 

incentive for truly harmonious policies. 

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE U.S. MILITARY

Introduction.

In order to facilitate China’s rise as a responsible 

stakeholder, the United States will need to develop 

initiatives designed to deter, reassure, and garner the 

support of other states. Although the U.S. military in 

the Asia-Pacific has a key contribution to make to such 

a policy, there is a good deal more to such an exercise 

than that. Political, economic, and social initiatives, in 

many cases, will be far more important. But as Hillary 

Clinton nonetheless has remarked, the military role is 

indispensible if the full spectrum of possible events is 

to be adequately covered:
34

The U.S. will be better positioned to support humanitarian missions; equally important, working with 

more allies and partners will provide a more robust 

bulwark against threats or efforts to undermine regional peace and security.94

The Asia-Pacific is generally recognized as a primarily maritime region. Great sections of the world’s 

largest ocean lie between most of its leading actors. 

The region’s economy depends absolutely on sea traffic and, to an increasing extent, on fish and energy resources to be found at sea. In consequence, many countries in the region are rapidly developing the maritime 

elements of their economies, including China. There 

are numerous challenges to that sea dependence. 

Among them is the great skein of island and jurisdictional disputes stretching from the north of Japan 

to the Bay of Bengal. Not surprisingly, a substantial 

buildup of naval/air forces is taking place around the 

region. Not unnaturally, then, the U.S. Navy, Marines, 

and Air Force are widely seen as having the leading role in the military aspects of U.S. policy toward 

the region.

In consequence, there may be a danger of overlooking the role of the U.S. Army in a properly coordinated joint approach to the challenges of the Western 

Pacific. The U.S. Army role, however, is an essential 

component in the mix. For all its push to the sea, China at the moment remains essentially a continental 

power; China’s strategic culture reflects long periods 

in which its main security preoccupations were with 

the defense, and sometimes the extension of, its territorial borders. This goes for most other countries 

in the region as well. Seven of the world’s 10 biggest 

armies are to be found in Asia, and 21 of the 27 Asia-
35

Pacific nations traditionally have the Chief of Army as 

their Chief of Defense.95 Many countries in the region, 

moreover, still suffer from major problems of domestic insurgency and are therefore required to engage in 

long, costly, and difficult land-force-centric campaigns 

to secure national integrity. In such a situation, an engagement approach that neglects the land dimension 

is unlikely to succeed. Accordingly, the U.S. Army Pacific Command (USARPAC) seeks to maintain “persistent engagement, forward presence, trained, and 

ready forces and an agile mission command” in order 

to cope with a wide range of theater contingencies.96

Accordingly, all three services will need to contribute 

to the deterrence of China’s assertiveness to its reassurance and to a strategy of wider engagement in 

the region. 

Deterrence and the Military.

Despite the fact that “preventing and deterring future conflict relies on finding the right theater force 

posture” and that “winning the nation’s wars has and 

will always be the U.S. Army’s most essential mission,”97 it is hard to conceive of a situation in which 

it would be necessary or even credible for the United 

States to engage in a direct land war with China. This 

does not, however, apply to the Korean Peninsula, 

where the explicit deterrence of North Korean aggression remains in many ways USARPAC’s core mission 

in the Asia-Pacific theater. But this deterrence is not 

aimed at China and indeed is partly designed to avoid 

provoking it. With this significant exception, the U.S. 

Navy, Marines, and Air Force, rather than the Army, 

would be at the daily cutting edge of U.S. military deterrence of Chinese aggression, should that ever seem 

likely to occur. 
36

Nonetheless, it is the Army’s contention that the 

Air-Sea Battle construct, to the extent that it is a consciously deterrent strategy, “requires a joint force . . . 

You can’t achieve in my opinion, A2AD with just air 

and sea . . . You have to look at it from a joint force 

perspective and not from a parochial perspective.” 

This was certainly the language of the Joint Operational Concept (JOAC) in November 2011. The Army 

should be able to provide the vital infrastructure, missile defenses, supply, and command-and-control facilities, even if not apparently in the forefront of any 

such Pacific-based campaign.98 Some, indeed, advocate a shift in Army thinking away from mechanized 

maneuver and toward missile forces designed to deter 

through the capacity to defend allies and “hinder adversaries from projecting power themselves.” Working with the U.S. Navy and Air Force, the Army’s 

deployment of anti-ship missiles on land sites, it is 

argued, would “limit China’s ability to inflict damage 

off the Asian mainland” and offer enhanced prospects 

for a blockade of Chinese shipping (or Offshore Control).99 Others, though, defend the continued need for 

mechanized armor.100

However this maneuver/firepower debate works 

out, as an editorial in DefenseNews remarked: “There 

are few crowded battle-fields, and fewer theatres in 

which some land component will not be necessary to 

shape events or attain decisive results.”101 This is consistent with the official language, which talks of “integrated operations across all five domains,” the need to 

maintain the capacity to “defend and respond in each 

warfighting domain” in order to ensure “the U.S. and 

allied expeditionary warfare model of power projection and maneuver.”102
37

Contextual realities reinforce the point about the 

indispensability of a significant role for the Army in a 

recessed strategy of deterrence in the Western Pacific, 

not the least because of the very poor record since 

World War II of predictions about when and where 

the large-scale commitment of ground forces might 

prove to be necessary. To cope with unexpected contingencies, “we should be organized and prepared for 

a rapid response of widely dispersed expeditionary 

forces that converge to any crisis.”103

The presence of U.S. forces in the region, moreover, 

is a matter of choice, not geography, since the area is 

far removed from the continental United States. There 

is then a significant discretionary element to the U.S. 

guarantee of less fortunately placed allies and partners such as Japan and South Korea. Accordingly, a 

policy of sea-based offshore-balancing (which implicitly retains the option of sailing/flying away if/

when the going gets tough) needs to be sustained by 

a substantial presence ashore for maximum credibility and strategic effectiveness. Finally, the maintenance of a heavy land capability ashore in Korea with 

“(h)igh states of readiness and training for the North 

Korean threat that is the best deterrence to prevent it 

from actually occurring” requires the maintenance of 

demanding warfighting standards and helps provide 

“. . . the Army that everybody wants to be associated 

with.”104

Moreover, the substantial buildup of Chinese naval/air capability, its relative lack of transparency, 

and the apparent furthering of its counterintervention 

strategy could certainly all be seen as a challenge to 

the U.S. maritime supremacy in the area. Up to now, 

the U.S. Navy had become accustomed to thinking 

of itself as the dominant naval player in the Western 
38

Pacific, in fact if not theory, conceding China’s preeminence in the continental theater. Now China appears to be seeking to transform this military balance 

to its own advantage. One probable consequence may 

be the unraveling of the standard maritime off-shore 

balancing narrative, which argues: 

. . . that America can best contain our adversaries not 

by confronting them on land, but by maintaining our 

naval and air power and strengthening those smaller 

nations that see us as a natural counterweight to their 

larger neighbors.105

The more maritime China becomes, the less likely in 

some respects will all this seem possible.

Nonetheless, there is a substantial maritime component to the strategic tension between China and the 

United States. One of the most obvious signs is the 

defense of what the United States sees as freedom of 

navigation in waters the Chinese regard as their own. 

This has become one of the main irritants in the current relationship between the two countries, and, with 

the Chinese announcement of a new ADIZ in the East 

China Sea in November 2013, could easily get both 

more complicated and more dangerous operationally.106 China maintains that unauthorized foreign air/

naval activity in its economic exclusion zone (EEZ), 

including what the British call “military data gathering,” is a kind of tactical/battlefield preparation, and 

so prejudicial to the security of China.107 This activity, 

China claims, is a contravention of the UN Conference on Laws of the Sea (UNCLOS) Article 301, which 

requires parties to refrain from threatening the sovereignty of any state when exercising their rights in 

someone else’s EEZ. The opening of the PLAN’s new 

submarine base at Sanya, with its all important ac-
39

cess to deep water, will no doubt have strengthened 

such perceptions. Should China be slowly developing 

a bastion approach for the deployment of its future 

submarine submersible ballistic missile (SSBNs), as 

the Soviet Union did in the Barents Sea and the Sea of 

Okhotsk, sensitivity to such data gathering would no 

doubt increase still further.108 The Impeccable incident, 

after all, took place a mere 75 nautical miles southeast 

of the Sanya Naval Base.109 The intensity and frequency of such U.S. activities is held to be evidence of Cold 

War thinking and a stumbling block to better militaryto-military relations. The United States would regard 

all this as an instance of China seeking to change the 

rules rather than observe them. The same observation may be made about the USS Cowpens incident of 

November 26, 2013. 

Further, China’s conception of its EEZ and its near 

seas is that it is an abundant source of fish, oil, and gas 

resources essential to the national economy, an area 

of indisputable sovereignty that must be protected, 

a large defensive moat against unwelcome intruders, and a point of access to the wider ocean. For all 

these reasons, in Beijing’s view, these are waters in 

which China’s interests and expectations should be 

paramount. The unexpectedly harsh tone of China’s 

response to the projected but canceled presence of the 

U.S. carrier George Washington in an exercise with the 

Republic of Korea’s navy in the Yellow Sea after the 

sinking of the Cheonan (and by subsequent editorials in the Global Times, the English-language version 

of the official People’s Daily), illustrates the point. The 

latter said:

China undoubtedly needs to build a highly credible 

anti-carrier capacity. . . . Not only does China need an 
40

anti-ship ballistic missile, but also other carrier-killing 

measures . . . Since US aircraft carrier battle groups 

in the Pacific constitute deterrence against China’s 

strategic interests, China has to possess the capacity to 

counterbalance.110

China seems often to see itself as potentially encircled by foreign forces in local seas. Accordingly, 

Chinese commentators regularly and publicly condemn the forward presence of U.S. naval warships, 

and no longer accept—if they ever did—arguments 

that it has a stabilizing function that also works to 

the benefit of China. Thus, People’s Liberation Army 

(PLA) Major General Luo Yuan declared: “The socalled forward presence means that the United States 

can send its gunboats to every corner of the world . . .

This way, the United States can even claim the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea is covered within 

its security boundary.”111 Chinese commentators also 

point out that were the USS George Washington to have 

sailed into the Yellow Sea, its aircraft would have been 

capable of reaching Beijing. If we add to this a strategic culture deeply affected by the country’s historic 

exposure to threats from the sea, not the least of which 

is in this particular area, and to the disastrous consequences for China of the failure to deter these activities, Chinese sensitivity to the unauthorized presence 

and activity in Chinese waters is understandable.

It is this context that China has seemingly embarked on a campaign of developing counterintervention capabilities that would put American forces 

at risk, should they enter the near seas in a manner 

to which China takes exception. The resultant anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy,112 as this has been 

dubbed by its prospective victims, appears to be a 
41

complex system-based sea denial strategy that makes 

use of sophisticated and resilient command, control, 

communications, computers, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) facilities to detect 

and target hostile surface ships and to threaten them 

with a range of ballistic and cruise anti-ship missiles, 

delivered from land bases, land-based aircraft, submarines, and medium and small surface combatants. 

All of this strategy, it would seem, is accompanied 

by a cyber offensive intended to undermine the U.S. 

Navy and Air Force’s electronic capacities to defend 

themselves and to sustain offensive operations. The 

United States seems to have been surprised by how 

rapidly key components of this strategy, such as the 

anti-satellite capacity revealed in 2009, the initial operating capacity of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile 

in late-2010, and the J-20 fifth generation fighter that 

appeared in March 2011, have emerged. How effective 

all this would be militarily remains an issue of considerable debate, but even its critics accept that A2/AD 

puts U.S. forward presence in the near seas at significantly greater hazard, and thus may serve the Chinese 

political/deterrent purpose of such a strategy. 

The effect is reinforced by what seems to be a reasonably concerted political and legal campaign to 

demonstrate to the other countries of the region that 

U.S. naval intentions, especially, but not exclusively, 

in the EEZ, are provocative, destabilizing, and illegal 

in terms of the UNCLOS (which, as they rarely fail to 

point out, the United States has so far not ratified). This 

combination of threatened hard power and deployed 

soft power has had its effect on Asia opinion, and 

certainly is not conducive to improved relationships 

between the two main actors in this drama.113 It is not 

inconceivable that this combined power could lead to 
42

a serious while unintended incident at sea, or, indeed, 

in the air above it, at least equivalent to the collision 

of American and Chinese aircraft near Hainan in 2001. 

Since the foundation of the Republic, the United 

States, for its part, has always felt that it has no choice 

but to defend the principle of freedom of navigation 

in what it regards as the Global Commons, if necessary, against the strongest of powers.114 For Washington, this was and remains a point of high principle. In 

January 1918, accordingly, President Woodrow Wilson made “Absolute freedom of navigation upon seas 

outside territorial waters” the second of his Fourteen 

Points.115

More recently, the U.S. Navy tends to think of the 

world ocean in global rather than regional terms, as 

the world’s greatest maneuver space, and is acutely 

sensitive to the way in which a precedent established 

in one area could well be applied elsewhere. Hence, 

the conduct of freedom of navigation exercises “with 

attitude” in the past, such as the Gulf of Sirte cruises 

of the mid-1980s and the bumping incident involving 

the USS Caron and a Soviet warship in the Black Sea 

in 1988.116 In the Asia-Pacific theater, the sheer size of 

the Pacific Ocean (and the time it takes to cross even 

portions of it) requires open access to, and forward 

presence in, the Western Pacific for the United States 

to service its alliances and protect its interests. Without this forward presence, the current security system 

could unravel, and local powers could be forced to 

seek unwelcome accommodations with their great 

neighbor in a manner that would also be against U.S. 

national interests. An avoidance of such a situation 

has contributed to the interest of the U.S. Navy and 

Air Force in developing the concept of Air-Sea Battle 

mentioned earlier.
43

The atmospherics have undoubtedly been worsened by the way that the Air-Sea Battle was seen to be 

not an operational concept—an exercise in coordination between naval and air forces against the development of sea denial capabilities around the world117 —

but instead as a strategy specifically aimed at China. 

Nonetheless, there is a reasonable chance that in 

time with the low-key maintenance of their positions 

on warships and the EEZ (which seems usually to be 

current practice118), the tensions over this point between China and the United States can be managed 

without irreparable damage to the prospect of their 

entering into a closer relationship, while still retaining this cardinal point of strategic interest and legal 

principle for the United States. Chinese officials have 

now publicly admitted119 that they too have conducted military surveillance operations in other people’s 

EEZs, specifically around Hawaii and Guam, and so 

may be following the example set by the Soviet Union 

in earlier days in which they first resisted, then adopted, Western conceptions of the freedom of the seas 

during UNCLOS negotiations.120 In this instance, a 

fairly low-key military action in defense of the principle of free navigation (the USNS Impeccable, after all, 

is civilian manned and not a standard warship, and 

neither were the vessels harassing it ) appears to have 

achieved both aims. 

Some authorities have suggested an alternative 

deterrent posture for the United States, which retains 

the notion of coercive pressure on China but accepts 

the argument that military-technological and legal 

problems make it increasingly difficult to do so via a 

forward presence and Air-Sea Battle. Conceding the 

Western Pacific as a mutually denied battlespace, the 

notion of Offshore Control instead aims to discipline 
44

Chinese behavior by threatening pressure on its sea 

lines of communication at some distance away from 

the Chinese mainland. Capitalizing on China’s manifest nervousness about what President Hu once called 

its Malacca Dilemma difficulties, this strategy may 

seem somewhat less provocative to Beijing, as it would 

not call for a substantial American naval/air presence 

in China’s near seas. This alternative strategy, however, has its practical, legal, and technological difficulties, too, and its greater effectiveness as a deterrent to 

China and as a reassurance to Japan and South Korea 

is by no means accepted by all. The outcome of this arcane debate only seems likely to be settled by greater 

clarity about the future technological feasibility of the 

U.S. Navy and Air Force’s capacity to maintain a decisive presence in the Western Pacific.121 But this, of 

course, is a debate about the means of U.S. deterrence 

of China, not its necessity or aim. 

The long-term strategic effectiveness of such a deterrent would partly also depend on how it is communicated to China and indeed to the rest of Asia. In 

keeping with the notions of recessed deterrence discussed earlier, a low-key approach would seem likely 

to work the best. 

Reassurance and the Military.

China’s admission that it, too, gathers intelligence 

in the EEZs of other countries suggests that a degree of 

maritime convergence between the United States and 

China may be expected despite their current rivalries. 

The two countries certainly have increasing interests 

in common. China has as much at stake in the safe 

transition of the 74,000 or so merchant vessels that ply 

the Straits of Malacca and the pass through the South 
45

China Sea every year as any other major player in the 

global system. Recent events have shown that China, 

moreover, is as vulnerable as any other country—and 

maybe more than most—to the illicit activities of the 

Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Gulf, the depredations of Somali pirates, and, indeed, to disorder and 

instability ashore. As an increasingly maritime power 

with extensive state interests and a growing diaspora, 

China seems likely to have an increasing interest in 

the Freedom of Navigation, the world ocean as a flow 

resource, and the general defense of the sea-based 

trading system. This explains Chinese participation in 

the international counterpiracy effort off Somalia and 

its slow integration with Western efforts.122 Equally, 

there is a clear attempt to normalize relations between 

the two navies.123

This is entirely consistent with the aims of the U.S. 

Navy’s recent doctrinal statement, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. The establishment of a 

global maritime partnership designed to protect the 

good order at sea and the safe and timely sailing of 

the world’s merchant shipping on which the world’s 

peace and prosperity rest means that navies and coast 

guards need to cooperate against anything that threatens maritime security, whether that takes the form of 

piracy and other forms of maritime crime, direct attack by forces hostile to the system, or the incidental 

effects of inter- and intrastate conflict. With aims that 

seem identical, the Chinese would seem to be a natural 

and increasingly important component in a Mahanian 

community of commercial interests and righteous ideals in what might be envisaged as more of a shared 

kind of maritime dominance aimed not at state but at, 

in the main, nonstate threats—exercised by a rather 

different set of navies than Mahan had in mind.
46

Nonetheless, frictions remain, as does the possibility of unwanted incidents at sea—hence, the ongoing 

bilateral talks about the prevention of unintended incidents at sea routinely held between the United States 

and Chinese navies. So far, progress in these has been 

slow, even glacial. The Chinese are apt to represent 

their attendance at the talks as a withdrawable concession to the American side, rather than as an acceptance that the resolution of these difficulties would be 

in their own interest. Where the United States wishes 

to talk tactics—identifing dangerous behaviors at sea 

that should be avoided by agreement—the Chinese 

focus on matters of high principle. Because these incidents commonly take place in what China regards 

as its near-seas, these discussions usually then get 

bogged down in the absence of agreement about who 

owns what and what jurisdiction the owner is entitled to have. But the essential point is that mutual 

understanding is advanced by these talks, even if no 

substantial formal agreement seems possible in the 

forseeable future. In the meantime, the low-key way 

in which both sides have preserved their principles 

without major incident since March 2009, suggests 

that the normal maritime rules of the road and such 

systems as the Code for Unexpected Encounters at Sea 

(CUES) can be used instead as a workaround, if not a 

solution.124

In November 2012, China’s Defense Minister, General Liang Guangli, argued: “We should develop the 

ties between us, between our two militaries, touch on 

some of our differences, resolve conflicting views . . .

our two countries’ ties are very important.”125 The 

future relationship of the two countries, the need to 

cooperate over Korean security, and the threat of violent extremist organizations were among the issues of 
47

common interest to be explored. This idea was pushed 

further in a meeting between Secretary of Defense 

Chuck Hagel and Liang’s successor, General Chang 

Wanquan, in August 2013.126 There is a substantial 

land component to this, since these broader purposes 

need to be served at least as much by armies talking 

together as navies and arguably much more, given 

the particular influence of the dominating PLA. The 

two armies do interact bilaterally, thereby increasing 

mutual understanding, even a degree of trust. Such 

bilateral interactions are intended to influence the 

thought processes and strategic assumptions of the 

PLA’s future leaders and indeed to develop the capacity for low-level interoperability slowly in such areas 

as humanitarian assistance—areas in which the land 

component has a particularly important role to play. 

For such interoperability, exercises are key.127

Accordingly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 

regularly participates in the annual Yangxi Forums 

and through such means advances the capacity for 

functional cooperation in disaster management such 

as logistics and the provision of medical services.128

The Chinese appear to be impressed by the extent to 

which USARPAC can operate multilaterally in this 

kind of activity and are probably increasingly aware 

of the gaps in their own responses and the greater 

need to think through the second- and third-order 

consequences of their actions—or sometimes lack of 

them. These low-key and functional initiatives are reinforced by a variety of two-way exchanges such as 

band visits, military student interchanges,129 and midlevel officer exchanges. These trust building exercises 

may be slow in their effect and consequence, but it 

is important to recall the significance of the fact that 

there was little activity of this sort between the United 
48

States and previous potential power challengers such 

as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union. 

This degree of slow professional military convergence is unlikely to produce fast and decisive results 

and is certainly not without its difficulties. This approach faces innumerable problems, such as finding 

the necessary funding and the fact that the United 

States tends to give its officers higher levels of operational responsibility than people of other ranks in 

foreign services (which makes matching sensitive and 

difficult). Much worse, though, is the fact that some 

elements in the Chinese military and party hierarchy 

remain deeply suspicious of this kind of bilateral exchange and regard it as a covert means of U.S. infiltration into the Chinese military system, threatening 

the party’s control of the Army.130 Explicit and highly 

charged suggestions that Chinese personnel are being groomed for this purpose by the U.S. military are 

hardly likely to encourage Chinese participants in 

such exchanges to “open up.” At the same time, the 

Chinese may well be very unwilling to let their own 

deficiencies be known by others. 

Nor is U.S. participation in such exchanges untrammeled. All USARPAC proposals of this kind 

have to be specifically approved to ensure that they 

do not break the legal constraints of the National Defense Authorizations Act 2000, in such areas as the 

export of military technology and the sensitivity of 

military equipment to be used. Media exposure can 

cause difficulties as well, if it identifies the involvement of controversial Chinese personnel, for example. 

Finally, each proposal has to gain institutional approval through the United States Pacific Command 

(USPACOM) and be put in the budget. None of this is 

as byzantine as the equivalent Chinese process. But it 
49

also illustrates the effect of the absence of trust and the 

need to build it up if the United States and China are 

to develop as security partners.

One important aspect of military-to-military trust 

building would be the encouragement of still further 

transparency in the Chinese defense decisionmaking process. This remains a contentious issue—with 

the amount, trajectory, and consequences of Chinese 

defense spending being fiercely contested by both 

sides.131 Nonetheless, tentative moves toward enhanced transparency are under way,132 and can be facilitated through regular personal contacts, exercises, 

and institutional initiatives such as the establishment 

of a regular strategic and economic security dialogue. 

All of this helps stabilize and normalize the relationship between the two countries.133

That said, the task of crafting a general policy that 

constructively combines the twin strategic requirements of reassurance and deterrence may prove especially hard when it is confronted with specific and 

practical issues. One of these is Taiwan, given the 

inexorably widening gap between Taipei’s capacities to defend itself and China’s growing might. As 

Ambassador Freeman has observed:

We are coming to a point at which we can no longer 

finesse our differences over Taiwan. We must either 

resolve them or live with the increasingly adverse consequences of our failure to do so.134

An American policy of calculated ambiguity—of 

limited military help to Taiwan and restraint on Taipei, alongside constant reminders to Beijing of the adverse consequences of assertive action, even if militarily successful—is still the distinguishing characteristic 

of American policy. These constant reminders might 
50

well be thought to include the provision of “air defense and other key capabilities to allies and friends in 

the event of a Taiwan contingency.”135

Fortunately, the Taiwan issue appears to have 

much less salience than once it did, given the level of 

practical rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing. 

Sadly, precisely the same tensions and contradictions 

for the United States can be seen in the ongoing maritime jurisdictional disputes over the South and East 

China Seas, most especially between Japan and China. 

Here, as remarked earlier, the United States seeks to 

balance its strategic aim of securing a constructive relationship with China against the urgent tactical requirement to support its allies while not facilitating 

their adventurism. 

Wider Engagement and the Military.

The current U.S. drive to engage-and-partner in 

the Asia-Pacific appears to have two objectives. The 

first of these is to engage with partners able to assist in 

the deterrence/reassurance of China, usually through 

their own independent channels and subjects of communication with Beijing, but sometimes through 

the provision of facilities of one sort or another that 

support a forward U.S. presence (such as Australia, 

Japan, South Korea, and Singapore). The second objective is to facilitate the management or resolution of 

local problems that could disturb local stability and 

threaten interests commonly held around the region 

and which, in some cases, might otherwise exacerbate 

relations between Beijing and Washington. The U.S. 

Army’s presence in South Korea is a good example. 

Partly, it acts as a deterrent on North Korean aggression, and partly, it may serve as a means of mediat-
51

ing the troubled relations between South Korea and 

Japan, thereby contributing to a stability that is in the 

interests of both Beijing and Washington.136

The key requirement for both objectives is to avoid 

creating the impression in Beijing that the United 

States is weaving a web of countries around China’s 

strategic periphery that is intended to contain its rise. 

This impression would not be acceptable to the great 

majority of regional countries. Their sheer diversity 

of character and interest would in any case make this 

impossible, and provides a practical restraint on the 

United States and a source of relief and even acceptance to China.137

The Global Maritime Partnership (GMP) construct 

in CS21, for example, was generally welcomed in the 

region as it was around the world. It demonstrates 

tacit acceptance of a leading security role for the U.S. 

Navy and the fact that, for the moment at least, in 

Kishore Mahbubani’s words:

The real reason why most international waterways remain safe and open – and thereby facilitate the huge 

explosion of global trade we have seen—is that the 

American Navy acts as the guarantor of last resort to 

keep them open. Without the global presence of the 

U.S. Navy, our world order would be less orderly.138

GMP serves both purposes, since it addresses 

common problems, such as the threat of piracy, drug 

smuggling, international terrorism, human trafficking, and catastrophic natural disasters, such as extreme weather. Any of these could directly threaten 

sea-based trade and other legitimate forms of sea-use 

and indirectly threaten the local stability afloat and 

ashore upon which that trade depends. That is the 

reason for the multitude of cooperative naval operations designed to curb these activities, and to build 
52

up local capacities to handle them in the future and, 

where necessary, to engage in security sector reform. 

These activities include bilateral exercises such as the 

Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) 

exercises held between the U.S. Navy and nine Southeast and South Asia navies, and multilateral naval exercises like the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), which 

help develop the necessary capabilities. Exercise engagement will also tend to be supported by port visits; 

military-to-military contacts; and the provision of security assistance in the shape of platforms, equipment, 

and skills training. The transfer of two ex-U.S. Coast 

Guard cutters to the Philippines is a recent example. 

This action, however, does raise the issue of China’s 

perception of such activities. The conduct of naval engagement with allies and partners can be seen as potentially hostile by third parties. If this is not, as in this 

case, the intention, the handling of such engagements 

needs to be conducted with finesse. Fortunately, local 

partners will usually be only too pleased to help the 

United States do so.

The land equivalent of such engagement is at least 

as important in the Asia-Pacific Region where, as already remarked, the human terrain is dominated by 

the army.139 The USARPAC co-hosted Pacific Army 

Chiefs Conferences, to which most of the region’s 

Army chiefs come, has the highest visibility. Below 

that come a host of regional Army get-togethers to address cooperation in such issues as: the contribution 

of military medicine to common health threats (not 

the least of which is pandemic disease); de-mining 

(a major issue in much of Southeast Asia, Myanmar, 

and Sri Lanka); counterterrorism training (Special 

Forces); action against police brutality, and corruption; and, disaster management so necessary in the 

Asia-Pacific Region. 
53

The U.S. Army’s hard-won experience in counterinsurgency and security force assistance from General 

Douglas MacArthur’s experience in the Philippines 

in the 1930s and in Japan from 1945 to 1950, through 

the former Yugoslavia, Colombia, Liberia, Iraq, and 

Afghanistan, retains clear relevance in an area where 

many countries continue to face real internal security 

problems, including, of course, China.140 The success 

of the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines 

is a case in point.141

Armies, like navies, are what some call an epistemic community. Because of their shared experience 

and outlooks, they often talk better to each other than 

they do to their own civilians and diplomats, first 

about the narrow functional issues of the day and 

then, as confidence and a degree of trust build, about 

wider security concerns. 

As another means of facilitating its strategy of 

wider engagement, the Army is progressing its system through which units align with certain areas to 

become more familiar with their culture, language, 

and requirements, together with an expansion of 

its International Military and Educational Training 

(IMET) programs (such as happened with Indonesia, 

Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand). 

Toward this purpose, the Army’s Foreign Area Officers program has particular utility in that it produces 

means by which local expertise can be fed into the 

American decisionmaking system, and assistance can 

be provided to local countries on a whole variety of 

civilian-military issues of particular value to those 

countries transitioning into democracies. Although 

the extent of this program’s utility should not be exaggerated, it represents something of a shift away from 

straight warfighting toward the more consciously 
54

calibrated and restrained employment of military 

power.142

To a large extent, these “engage-and-partner” exercises are focused on managing what some call nontraditional (but no less important) security threats, 

which, by their nature and effect, are commonly regarded as security threats throughout the region. 

Constructively, defending good order against nontraditional threats in this way is not only usually in the 

direct national interest of the United States, but it also 

helps head off local instabilities that potentially could 

exacerbate relations between it and China. 

A still-more-ambitious variant of the policy is the 

encouragement of the development within the region 

of net security exporters rather than consumers. This 

is accomplished by engaging with countries that have 

“expressed their intentions to expand their regional 

influence to use their influence to assume a greater 

share of future regional security responsibilities,”143

perhaps so they can develop the capacity to lead, 

deploy, and participate in peacekeeping or humanitarian operations. This may develop into attempts to 

build up relations with allies and partners like Korea, 

Japan, India, and Australia, as part of U.S. policy of 

trying to identify and prioritize regional leaders.144

Each of these states is an independent actor with its 

own agendas, constraints, and priorities, both in the 

region and globally. None of them (with the possible 

exception of Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe) 

would wish to be seen as part of an international coalition designed to contain China. All of them seem interested in maintaining and expanding their capacity 

to ensure security and stability in the Asia-Pacific, to 

“deter aggression, coercion, or provocative actions by 

potential spoilers,”145 and to help prevent and respond 

to crises. For these reasons, this kind of engagement 
55

tends to focus on the development of higher-end skills 

such as preparing for expeditionary operations. 

The long, slow, cautious buildup of a defense relationship with India is probably the best recent example. In January 2012, the U.S. Department of Defense, 

(DoD) Defense Strategic Guidance, stated that:

The United States is also investing in a long-term partnership with India to support its ability to serve as a 

regional economic anchor and provider of security in 

the broader Indian Ocean region.146

The process for this partnership is through the sale 

of high-profile military equipment like the C-17 and 

C-130J transport aircraft and the P-8 maritime patrol 

aircraft. India became the second largest defense buyer 

from the United States in 2011. More than 50 bilateral 

exercises took place with India in 2011, which included a variety of maritime security, counterterrorism, 

salvage, and diving exercises, plus those dealing with 

unexploded ordnance. The Indians have observed 

RIMPAC and hold MALABAR exercises involving the 

United States and India. Participation in MALABAR 

has been expanded in some years to include Japan, 

Australia, and/or Singapore. The annual MALABAR 

is considered the premier annual bilateral maritime 

exercise.147 At the same time, India is the subject of 

USARPAC’s largest bilateral exercise series, part of 

which is intended to help India develop more expeditionary skills, a more ambitious leadership role, and 

the capacity to handle contingencies. There is enough 

confluence of national interest for the U.S. military to 

help in this way.

Nonetheless, there are considerable constraints on 

the process. Partly, these reflect bureaucratic, political, 

and institutional constraints within India, and partly 
56

because India is another Asia-Pacific country that values its independence of decision; it has a long cultural-strategic tradition of marching to the beat of its own 

drum, and it intends to continue to do so. This is true, 

more or less, of all of Washington’s other security partners in the region, so any prospect of an engage-andpartner initiative ending up as an Asia-Pacific version 

of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is 

exceedingly remote. Still less likely for the same reason is the prospect of this initiative becoming an antiChinese coalition, compounded in most cases by the 

very high and increasing levels of mutually beneficial 

trade that individual countries do with China. Hence, 

Chinese complaints about this prospect are episodic 

and seem to have a distinctly formulaic quality. From 

this point of view, the more Beijing is involved and 

feels able to participate in these engagement exercises, 

the better—hence its likely involvement in RIMPAC 

2014 is to be welcomed. 

The prevailing and sometimes inconvenient independence of view characteristic of the region would 

seem to reinforce the notion that the U.S. policy of 

engage-and-partner is most likely to lead to an increasingly multipolar Asia-Pacific. This should serve 

as the basis of an enduring security partnership between China and the United States better than either a 

largely bilateral relationship of two Asia-Pacific giants 

surrounded by small fry on the one hand, or of China 

versus the rest of Asia on the other.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Several broad conclusions about the tricky course 

to be followed would seem to emerge from this review. The first is that it would be unwise of the United 

States to seek to establish a quasi-coalition of any sort, 
57

since this would be regionally unpopular and would 

feed Beijing’s paranoia. The second is that the United 

States may need to exercise caution in its involvement 

in disputes between China and other players in the region. Both in the Scarborough Shoal/Second Thomas 

Reef dispute between China and the Philippines, and 

the Senkaku/Daioyu Islands dispute between China 

and Japan, there is the danger that incautious support 

for local partners could encourage local adventurism 

and risk the broader objective of securing an enduring 

and beneficial security relationship with China.148

The risk of such adventurism reinforces the need 

for U.S. restraint, lest its broader strategic objectives in 

the Asia-Pacific become much harder to achieve. But 

at the same time, most analysts would agree that Chinese assertiveness over such issues and any ambitions 

that some in Beijing may have about re-establishing 

the habits of deference from others throughout the region need to be prevented. The Finlandization of Asia 

would be a profoundly destabilizing development 

that needs to be deterred. The United States therefore 

must steer a complex course between deterrence and 

reassurance in its relationship with a rising China. 

In such a tricky and holistic policy involving the full 

spectrum of hard, sticky, and soft power, the U.S. military in the region is likely to have crucial roles to play 

in both dimensions of this policy and in a supporting 

campaign of wider engagement.

Summary and Recommendations.

• Despite its long strategic history, world power 

is a relatively new concept for China. Mistakes, 

insensitivities, and ambiguities must be expected and, when not deterred, responded to 

sensitively.
58

• This will require the United States to maintain and display substantial joint forces in the 

Asia-Pacific region, alongside its active soft and 

sticky power engagement.

• To serve the overall purpose of securing a new, 

sustainable, and mutually beneficial relationship with China, U.S. deterrent policies will 

need to be recessed, implicit rather than overtly 

confrontational—unless particular Chinese demarches require a robust response.

• For the same reason, Washington will need to 

reassure Beijing and to demonstrate that its 

peaceful rise is regarded as a needed first step 

in developing a new relationship between the 

two countries.

• A descent into bilateralism in the Asia-Pacific 

(whether the result of a policy of Chinese Finlandization of the region or the U.S. orchestration of a quasi-coalition against China) would 

be profoundly destabilizing and unwelcome to 

most countries in the region. The varied agenda 

of a multiplicity of second-tier actors is an effective constraint on Chinese adventurism.

• Accordingly, the engage-and-partner strategy

of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region should 

aim to improve military-to-military relations 

with China while contributing to the capacity 

of other countries in the region to work with 

China as independent, confident, and effective 

actors in their own right.

• This engage-and-partner strategy should focus

on responses to such apparently lower-order 

threats as international terrorism, transnational 

crime ashore and afloat, and humanitarian disasters, because these could easily prove desta-
59

bilizing regionally while offering good prospects of cooperation with a new and relatively 

more powerful China.

ENDNOTES 

1. Dana H. Allin and Erik Jones, Weary Policeman: American 

Power in an Age of Austerity, London, UK: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), 2012, p. 170.

2. Niall Ferguson, “The Decade the World Tilted East,” The 

Straits Times, January 7, 2010. 

3. Minxin Pei, “Think Again: Asia’s Rise,” Foreign Policy, June 

22, 2009, p. 5.

4. See Arthur Cotterell, Western Power in Asia: Its Slow Rise and 

Swift Fall, 1415-1999, Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, Asia, Pte. Ltd, 

2010; and Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now, London, UK: 

Profile Books, 2011.

5. Thus, the conclusion of the influential Kishore Mahbubani, 

The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the 

East, New York, Public Affairs, 2008.

6. The internal Chinese debate about what Beijing’s official 

“Harmonious World” foreign policy after the era of U.S. primacy 

actually means can be seen through a comparison between Professor Zhao Tingyang’s The Tianxia System, 2005, and Senior Colonel 

Liu Mingfu’s The China Dream, 2010. The Tianxia System uses traditional Chinese ideas to craft a new world order, while The China 

Dream argues that the PRC needs to have a military rise to guard 

its economic rise. These two books are important because they became social phenomena and media events that put their authors 

into the spotlight. They provoked debates that spread their influence far beyond their core audiences of scholars and military officers into China’s broader civil society. The possibilities discussed 

range from a more modest pursuit of world harmony, to the more 

active project of harmonizing the world—by force, if necessary. 

See William A. Callahan, China: The Pessoptimist Nation, Oxford, 

UK: Oxford University Press, 2010.
60

7. “Remarks to the Australian Parliament,” Washington, 

DC: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, November 

17, 2011. 

8. Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for the 21st Century, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), January 2012, pp. 1-3; The National Military Strategy of the United States 

of America: Redefining America’s Military Leadership, Washington, 

DC: DoD, 2011, pp. 10-11.

9. Vice-President Joseph Biden, quoted in Mark Landler, 

“Biden Tries to Soothe Asia Tension,” The International New York 

Times, December 7-8, 2013. 

10. China Daily, December 2012.

11. Kor Kian Beng, “China’s Leaders Fly the Extra Mile to 

Push Foreign Policy,” The Straits Times, November 11, 2013.

12. Zhou Wa, “Western Views of China Increasingly Positive,” China Daily, May 14, 2012. 

13. Chin-Hao Huang, China’s Soft Power in East Asia: A Quest 

for Status and Influence? Special Report #42, Washington, DC: National Bureau of Asian Research, January 2013.

14. “US Lacks World’s Trust, Poll Finds,” The Guardian, September 12, 2012; see “America’s Global Image Remains More Positive than China’s,” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, July

18, 2013; and Jeremy Au Yong, “More think US losing standing 

abroad,” The Straits Times, December 5, 2013. 

15. Rowan Callick, “Asian ‘Pivot’ Losing its Edge,” The Australian, October 8, 2013; Cameron Stewart, “US Failing to Back Its 

Asia Pivot,” The Australian, October 9, 2013; Alan Dupont, “Pivot to Asia Has Not Fallen Off Its Axis,” The Australian, October

15, 2013.

16. Nirmal Ghosh, “Anti-China Sentiment a Challenge for 

Myanmar,” The Straits Times, January 14, 2013; Drew Hinshaw 

and Chuin-Wei Yap, “China Tensions Stoked by Ghana Arrests,” 
61

The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2013. The United Nations World 

Tourism Organization figures showed that at a collective $102 billion in 2012, Chinese tourists are now the biggest tourist spenders. 

But this may be a problem: Ho Ai Li, “China’s Loud and Loutish 

Travellers,” The Straits Times, June 3, 2013. 

17. “Chinese Military Makes Anti-US Movie,” The Straits 

Times, November 3, 2013, from The New York Times; Wang Gungwu, “Xi’an Challenge Counters the Shanghai Syndrome,” The 

Straits Times, November 11, 2013.

18. Despite all the statistics concerning rising anger about corruption, unfair land acquisition practices, and pollution, successive and reputable public opinion surveys in China continue to 

show a population that is broadly content with the way things are 

going, especially when measured by the key evidence of expectations that the lives of their children will be better than theirs. The 

Chinese system has shown itself to be a good deal more enduring 

than some expected 15 years ago. 

19. Yuan Guiren, “Promote Mutual Understanding,” China 

Daily, November 21, 2013.

20. World Bank Development Indicators, 2008, available from 

siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/WDI08

supplement1216.pdf. See also Rajiv Biswa, Future Asia, London, 

UK: Palgrave, 2013.

21. “China’s Trade Figures Bounce Back from Crisis,” The 

Straits Times, January 11, 2010.

22. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of 

the World, London, UK: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 285.

23. Unpublished presentation paper at East Asia Institute, 

Singapore, February 26, 2010. For evidence of Chinese perceptions of this, see Meng Jing, “Cleared For Take-Off,” China Daily, 

December 5, 2012; Wang Chuo, “Going the Extra Yard,” and Professor Yu Hongyuan, “A Revolution Is Here and Clean Energy Is 

the Spark,” both from China Daily, December 28, 2012.
62

24. See statement of Norman R. Augustine, Retired Chairman 

and CEO of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, before the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, Washington, DC, U.S. 

House of Representatives, January 7, 2009.

25. Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline, New York: 

Liveright, 2013.

26. Hence its pursuit of free trade deals with Southeast Asia 

and advocacy of a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Editorial, The Straits Times, October 30, 2013. 

27. Some have sought to do so, however. Ruchir Sharma, 

“China’s Illusory Growth Numbers,” The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2013; a balanced view is taken by Timothy Beardson, 

Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future, New Haven, CT: 

Yale University Press, 2013.

28. “For China, Spending Is Less Easy Than it Looks,” The 

Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2013.

29. These may be assessed through successive articles in The 

Wall Street Journal, including Timothy Beardson, “Don’t Count 

on China to Bail Out the US,” February 14, 2013; Ruchir Sharma, 

“China Has its Own Debt Bomb,” February 27, 2013; “Tensions 

Mount as China Grabs Farms for Homes,” February 15, 2013. Also 

see Jonathan Walton, Intensifying Contradictions: Chinese Policing 

Enters the 21st Century,” Washington, DC: National Bureau of 

Asian Research, February 2013, available from nbr.org/publications/

element.aspx?id=647. 

30. J. Stapleton Roy (Ex-US Diplomat), “Drift Toward Strategic Rivalry,” Paper for East-West Center, February 20, 2013. 

31. Wen Jiabao, quoted in Chris Buckley and Zhou, “China 

GDP Target Cut Helps Fight External Pressures: Wen,” Reuters, 

March 14, 2012.

32. Ambassador Charles W. Freeman, Jr., “Beijing, Washington, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige,” Remarks to China Maritime Studies Institute, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI, May 

10, 2011; Presentation of Paul Haenle of the Carnegie-Tsinghua 

Center for Global Policy, Beijing, China, November 2013. 
63

33. Christopher A. McNally, “How Emerging Forms of Capitalism are Changing the Global Economic Order,” Asia-Pacific 

Issues, No 107, Honolulu, HI: East-West Center, February 2013. 

Though the fact that the RMB has appreciated by some 40 percent 

since 2005 largely removes one cause of frequent U.S. complaints. 

34. James Dobbins, quoting a RAND study, “War With 

China,” Survival, August-September 2012, p 8.

35. Sam Tangredi, Futures of War: Towards a Consensus View of 

the Future Security Environment, Newport, RI: Alidade Press, 2008, 

pp 105-107; Andrew S. Erickson and David D. Yang, “Using the 

Land to Control the Sea: Chinese Analysts Consider the Antiship 

Ballistic Missile,” and Eric Hagt and Mathew Durnin, “China’s 

Antiship Ballistic Missile: Developments and Missing Links,” 

both in Naval War College Review, Autumn 2009, pp. 53-86 and 87-

116, respectively. 

36. Robert O. Work, The US Navy: Charting a Course for Tomorrow’s Fleet, Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary 

Assessments (CSBA), 2008, p. 71. See also remarks by Dr. Donald 

C. Winter, Secretary of the Navy, at the Sea Air Space Exposition, 

Washington, DC, April 3, 2007.

37. Cited in Michael Richardson, “Looming Defence Cuts 

Threaten Global Security,” The Straits Times, February 18, 2013.

38. Global Times, October 29, 2013. 

39. Peh Shing Huei, “Hu Defends Track, Calls for War on 

Graft,” The Straits Times, November 9, 2012.

40. Ibid.; Mr. Xi cited in George Galdorisi, “The United States 

Pivot to the Pacific,” Asia Pacific Defence Reporter, October 2013.

41. James Holmes, “China’s Maritime Strategy Is More than 

Naval Strategy,” China Brief 8, Washington, DC: Jamestown 

Foundation, April 2011. 
64

42. With, however, the substantial exceptions of the Tang, 

middle-Song and late-Ming dynasty periods. But the first of these 

was more commercial and maritime than naval; the second also 

was more riverine and coastal than open-sea. The third, while totally remarkable in its level of technological and operational ambition, was something of an unsustainable “flash in the pan.” See 

Louis Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, Oxford, UK: Oxford 

University Press, 1994. 

43. Wendell Minnick, “Report Shows Rapid Rise of China’s Defense Industry, Russia’s Role,” Defense News, December 

10, 2012.

44. Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), Version 1.0, 

November 22, 2011.

45. For a vigorous statement of this, see Work, The US Navy: 

Charting a Course for Tomorrow’s Fleet. This broadly is also the 

conclusion of the U.S. Government’s intelligence review, Global 

Trends 2030, and Andrew Erickson and Adam Liff, “A Player, but 

no Superpower,” available from ForeignPolicy.com. But for a countervailing view of the need and possibility of just such a development, see Colonel Liu Mingfu, lately of the National Defence University in Beijing, The China Dream, Beijing, China: Zhonguo, 2010.

46. Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World, New York: 

Penguin, 2009, pp. 409-413; Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

47. “Get Used to Beijing’s Rising Power: Chinese Paper,” The 

Straits Times, December 8, 2012.

48. For such dangers in power transition, see Steve Chan, 

“Exploring Puzzles in Power-Transition Theory: Implications 

for Sino-American Relations,” Security Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 

pp. 103-141. 

49. Niall Ferguson, “The Trillion Dollar Question,” The Guardian, June 2, 2009; “China Should Aim to be World No 1,” The 

Straits Times, March 2, 2010. This article discusses the recent book, 

The China Dream, by Colonel Liu Mingfu of China’s National 

Defence University. See also Zhang Min, Chinese Are Not Afraid: 
65

New Threats to Chinese Defense Security and China’s Response Strategies, Shanghai: People’s Publishing House, 2013. It is only fair to 

remark that the United States has its hawks too. See Kai Liao, 

“The Pentagon and the Pivot,” Survival, Vol. 55, No. 3, June-July 

2013, pp. 95-114. 

50. Henry Kissinger, Address at the 8th IISS Global Strategic Review Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, September 10-12, 

2010, quoted in “A World Full of Fault lines,” The Straits Times,

December 7, 2010.

51. Yuka Hayashi and Jeremy Page, “US, Japan Warn China 

in Island Row,” The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2013. 

52. Dilip Haro, “A New Fluidity to Power Plays,” The Straits 

Times, February 26, 2010.

53. “Anti-China Rhetoric in US ‘a Mistake’,” The Straits Times,

February 9, 2012.

54. This policy might be characterized as being somewhere 

between the conditional offense/defense and defensive balancing 

options outlined in Michael D. Swaine et al., China’s Military and 

the US-Japan Alliance in 2030, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013—more deterrent than the latter, less than the former. 

55. These were especially evident in the naval field. See Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy between the Wars: the Period of AngloAmerican Antagonism, 1919-1929, London, UK: Collins, 1968, especially pp. 204-233, 300-330, 433-466. For the ruthless U.S. attack 

on British economic interests, see Lawrence James, Churchill and 

Empire: Portrait of an Imperialist, London, UK: Weidenfeld and 

Nicolson, 2013, pp. 323-328. 

56. Qiao Xonsheng, “A World to Win and Little to Lose,”

China Daily, February 21, 2011. 

57. U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, Remarks 

at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, October 3, 2013. 
66

58. These principles are discussed in Carlyle A. Thayer, “China-US Defence Ministers Meet: Not Quite a New Type of Great 

Power Relationship,” Thayer Consultancy Background Brief, August

14, 2013.

59. This is essentially the argument of Hugh White, The China 

Choice: Why America Should Share Power, Collingwood, Ontario, 

Canada: Black, Inc., 2012. See Denny Roy’s review of this work in 

Survival, Vol. 55, No. 3, June-July 2013, pp. 183-202.

60. See Robert Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American 

Future: Why the United States is not Destined to Decline, Cambridge, 

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012; and responses to it by 

Christopher Layne, Paul Macdonald, Joshua Shrifson, and others, 

available from H-DIPLO@H-Net.MSU.edu, July 2013. 

61. Freeman, p. 4.

62. Layne, Footnote 51.

63. Henry Kissinger, On China, London, UK: Allen Lane, 2011, 

p. 348. For other illustrations of the requirement to take China’s 

distinctive strategic culture into account when providing it with 

behavioral incentives and disincentives, see also pp. 218, 237, 376, 

270, 394, 407, 450, 462, 506, 515.

64. Kissinger, On China, p. 237.

65. Hua Liming, “China Has a Role to Play in Mideast,” China 

Daily, January 8, 2013; International Crisis Group, China’s Central 

Asia Problem, Asia Report No. 244, February 27, 2013. 

66. Yong Deng, China’s Struggle for Status, Cambridge, UK: 

Cambridge University Press, 2008. See Ching Cheong, China 

dealing with security threats within and outside,” The Straits 

Times, November 21, 2013.

67. Rory Medcalf, “China Throws Away a Chance to Lead,” 

The Wall Street Journal, November 15-17, 2013. 

68. David C. Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power and Order in East 

Asia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; Denny Roy, 
67

“More Security for Rising China, Less for Others?” Asia Pacific 

Issues, No. 106, Honolulu, HI: East-West Center, 2013.

69. Lai-han Chan, “China’s Vision of Global Governance: A 

New World Order in the Making or Old Wine in a New Bottle?” 

Draft paper for RSIS Conference on China’s Role in Global and 

Regional Governance, Singapore, March 2011. 

70. Anthony Reid and Zheng Yangwen, eds., Negotiating 

Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia, Singapore: NUS Press, 2009.

71. Article “PRC’s ‘New Diplomacy’ Stress on ‘More Active’ 

International Role,” July 11, 2005, quoted Chin-Hao Huang, China’s Soft Power in East Asia: A Quest for Status and Influence? Special 

Report #42, Washington, DC: National Bureau of Asian Research, 

January 2013.

72. This may also underlie China’s creation for the first time of 

a National Security Commission, ibid.; and Kor Kian Beng, “New 

CCP Policies Raise Questions for Region,” The Straits Times, November 23, 2013. 

73. John Bolton, “How to Answer China’s Muscle-Flexing,” 

The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2013.

74. I am grateful to my colleague, Dr. Hoo Tiang Boon, for his 

insights in this area. 

75. Kissinger, On China, pp. 173, 217. Kissinger maintains that 

this is a development of the Sun Tzu notion of “combative coexistence,” a characteristic much evidenced by Chinese behavior 

in crises over the offshore islands.

76. Carlos Tejada, “China Lashes Back at Hacking Claims,” The 

Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2013; “China Hackers Breached 

US, Aussie Security: Report,” The Straits Times, May 19, 2013. 

77. Dana H. Allin and Erik Jones, Weary Policeman: American 

Power in an Age of Austerity, London, UK: Routledge for IISS, 2012, 

pp. 167-168, 200-201.
68

78. The domestic and political costs of these levels of defense 

spending, on the other hand, are more difficult to calculate and 

may prove significantly less easy to bear. 

79. Eberhard Sandschneider, “Is China’s Military Modernization a Concern for the EU?” in Zaborowski, pp. 40-41; Mahbubnai, 2008, p. 105.

80. Tangredi, p. 103.

81. Jeremy Au Yong, “US Seeks to Balance Asia Goals, China 

Ties,” The Straits Times, December 7, 2013; Mark Landler, “Biden 

Tries to Soothe Asia Tension,” The International New York Times,

December 7-8, 2013.

82. Richard Fontaine, “Asians Hedge against China,” The Wall 

Street Journal, December 6, 2013. Thus the ADIZ initiated in November had the unwelcome effect for Beijing of drawing together 

South Korea and Japan, two countries with a testy relationship in 

recent times. 

83. Quoted in Denny Roy. 

84. Discussions with Chinese scholars at the Council for 

Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific preparatory meeting, 

Singapore, December 2012. 

85. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, “The US and China 

Both Need Economic Rehab,” The Wall Street Journal, November

7, 2013. 

86. Chin-Hao Huang, China’s Soft Power in East Asia: A Quest 

for Status and Influence? Special Report #42, Washington, DC: 

National Bureau of Asian Research, January 2013. 

87. Quoted Michael Richardson, “Securing Allies Amid 

China’s Rise,” The Straits Times, February 2, 2013.

88. Zhang Jie and Li Zhifei, “Security Challenge in 2013,” 

China Daily, January 10, 2013; Cheong Suk-Wai, “US Moves 

‘to Cooperate with, Not Contain, China’,” The Straits Times,

December 6, 2012.
69

89. Robert Ross, quoted in William Cheong, “US Should 

Focus on Easing China’s Anxieties,” The Straits Times, January

14, 2013.

90. Cheong Suk-wai; David Kang, “Balancing US, China 

Interests in East Asia,” The Straits Times, October 24, 2012.

91. Xi Jinping, quoted in “Putin, China’s Xi Vow ‘Strategic’ 

Support in First Meeting,” AFP Staff Writers, Moscow, Russia, 

March 23, 2010.

92. Brahma Chellaney, “Averting Power Disequilibrium in 

Asia,” The Straits Times, November 15, 2012; see also “Pacific Is 

Big Enough for All of Us: Clinton,” The Straits Times, November

16, 2012.

93. Fareed Zakaria, The Post American World and the Rise of the 

Rest, London, UK: Penguin, 2009, pp. 254-279; Timothy Garton 

Ash, “Only a Strategic Partnership with China Will Keep This 

New Dawn Bright,” The Guardian, November 27, 2008.

94. Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign 

Policy, November 2011.

95. “Partnering in the Pacific Theater: Assuring Security 

and Stability through Strong Army Partnerships,” United States 

Army, Pacific, October 1, 2012, p. 2.

96. Ibid., p. 1.

97. Ibid., p. 11.

98. Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., “Army Creates ‘Strategic Landpower’ Office with SOCOM, Marines: Odierno Defends Budget,” 

Aol Defense, November 1, 2012: JOAC Version 1.0, November 

22, 2011.

99. Jim Thomas, “Why the U.S. Army Needs Missiles,” Foreign Affairs, May-June, 2013, pp. 137-144; Terence K. Kelly et al., 

Employing Land-Based Anti-Ship Missiles in the Western Pacific, 

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013.
70

100. Chris McKinney, Mark Elfendahl, H. R. McMaster, “Why 

the U.S. Army Needs Armour,” Foreign Affairs, May-June, 2013, 

pp. 129-136.

101. “Rest, Renew & Rethink,” Defense News, October 22, 2012. 

102. “Air-Sea Battle: Service Collaboration to Address AntiAccess and Area Denial Challenges,” Washington, DC: Air-Sea 

Battle Office: Department of Defense, May 2013, pp. I, 2, 4. See 

also Richard A. Bitzinger and Michael Raska, “The AirSea battle 

Debate and the Future of Conflict in East Asia,” RSIS Policy Brief, 

February 2013; and Elbridge Colby, “Don’t Sweat AirSea Battle,” 

The National Interest, July 31, 2013, available from nationalinterest.

org/print/commentary/dont-sweat-airsea-battle-8804. 

103. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Duane Thiessen, USMC, in Joel 

Wuthrow et al., The US Army in Asia: Opportunities and Challenges, 

Washington, DC: Center for Naval Analyses, August 2013, p. 10.

104. Wuthrow, p. 10.

105. Peter Beinart, quoted in Dana H. Allin and Erik Jones, 

Weary Policeman: American Power in An Age of Austerity, London, 

UK: Routledge for IISS, 2012, p. 88. 

106. Michael Auslin, “China’s Regional Aggression Takes 

Flight,” The Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2013.

107. Ren Xiaofeng and Cheng Xizhong, “A Chinese Perspective,” Marine Policy, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2005, pp. 139-146. 

108. Tetsuo Kotani, “What China Wants South China Sea,”

The Diplomat, July 18, 2011.

109. Oriana Skylar Mastro, “Signalling and Military Provocation in Chinese National Security Strategy,” Journal of Strategic 

Studies, April 2011, pp. 219-244, especially p. 220; Mark Valencia, 

“The Impeccable Incident: Truth and Consequences,” China Security, Spring 2009.

110. Staff Writers AFP Beijing, September 7, 2010; “China 

Needs ‘Carrier-Killer Missile: Press’,” citing Global Times, Sep-
71

tember 6, 2010. This was unexpected, since China did not protest 

against the presence of the George Washington in the Yellow Sea 

in 2009. 

111. Luyo Yuan, “PLA General: US Engaging in Gunboat 

Diplomacy,” People’s Daily, August 12, 2010, cited in Manicom.

112. This, of course, is an American term, not a Chinese one.

113. The problem for the United States is compounded by the 

fact that, for their own reasons, other countries in the region, including India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, adopt not-dissimilar policies toward the EEZ, although in their case, China is 

probably the main target. 

114. Hence, the so-called Quasi War with France, 1798-1800, 

and the War with Britain in 1812.

115. R. Cranston, The Story of Woodrow Wilson, New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1945.

116. This latter was resolved by a U.S.-Soviet agreement 

signed September 23, 1989, at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in which 

the Soviets agreed on the right of foreign warships to transit territorial waters on “innocent passage.” In return, the United States 

undertook not to engage in more of such freedom-of-navigation 

exercises. At issue in this case were foreign rights in the territorial 

sea, not the EEZ. 

117. As it was in the UK.

118. Discussions with USPACOM and PACFLT, May 2013. 

The USS Cowpens incident of November 26, 2013, however, shows 

the fragility of this assumption. See Carl Thayer, “US Cowpens 

Incident Reveals Strategic Mistrust Between U.S. and China,” The 

Diplomat, December 17, 2013. 

119. At the Shangri-La Dialogue, Singapore, May 2013. See 

IISS Report, August 2013; Rory Medcalf, “Is China ‘Reciprocating‘ 

US Maritime Surveillance?” Sydney, Australia: Lowy Institute for 

International Policy, The Interpreter, June 1, 2013. Additionally, 

some Chinese analysts are now making the point that there may 

be significant distinctions in the frequency and intensity of such 
72

military data gathering, with some types of (macro and strategic) 

intelligence being somewhat less objectionable than more immediately provocative (battlefield) activity. 

120. James Kraska, Maritime Power and the Law of the Sea, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 31, 106-107. 

121. See TX Hammes, “Offshore Control: A Proposed Strategy for an Unlikely Conflict,” Washington, DC: National Defense University, Strategic Forum, July 2012. Also see Sea Mirski, 

“Stranglehold: The Context, Conduct and Consequences of an 

American Naval Blockade of China,” and E. B. Montgomery, “Reconsidering a Naval Blockade of China: A Response to Mirski,” 

Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, May 4, 2013, pp. 385-421, 

616-623. The feasibility and desirability of a forward U.S. presence is the distinguishing difference between the two Carnegie 

alternative options.

122. The Chinese now participate in intelligence-sharing arrangements in Bahrain, and rescue internationally flagged merchant vessels, not just their own. 

123. Grace Jean, “USN Conducts Gulf of Aden Counter-Piracy Training with PLAN,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, September 4, 2013; 

and “Chinese Warships Pull into Pearl Harbor for US Port Visit,” 

Jane’s Defence Weekly, September 18, 2013.

124. Discussions with USPACFLT staff. See also David Griffiths, U.S.-China Maritime Confidence Building: Paradigms, Precedents, and Prospects, Newport, RI: U.S. Naval War College, China 

Maritime Studies Institute, 2010. 

125. Quoted in “China Tries to Allay Fears Over Its Military 

Build-Up,” The Straits Times, November 28, 2012, a point echoed 

in “US Calls for Closer Military Ties with China,” The Straits 

Times, May 29, 2013. 

126. Daniel Wasserbly, “US, Chinese Officials Seek to Bolster 

Defence Relationship,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, August 28, 2013. 

127. “US China Militaries Hold Disaster Relief Exercise,” The 

Straits Times, December 1, 2012.
73

128. USARPAC Discussions, March 2013. 

129. West Point cadets regularly do one of their semesters in 

China, for example. 

130. “Chinese Military Makes Anti-US Movie,” The New York 

Times, reproduced in The Sunday Times, Singapore, November 

3, 2013. 

131. Compare, for example, Zhu Zhe and Zhang Haizhou, 

“Defense Spending Lower Despite Risks,” China Daily, March

9-15, 2012; and Jeremy Page, “China to Lift Spending on Defense,” 

The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2012.

132. Wu Jiao and Mo Jingxi, “Spokesmen System to Boost 

Military Transparency,” China Daily, November 21, 2013; Wen Ya, 

“First Military Spokespeople,” Global Times, November 22, 2013.

133. Tao Wenzhao, “Unprecedented Endeavour,” China 

Daily, May 9, 2012.

134. Freeman, Remarks, p. 6; see also Elbridge Colby, “Can 

We Save Taiwan?” The National Interest, October 18, 2013, available from nationalinterest.org/commentary/can-we-save-taiwan-9257; 

and “Alarm Over the Taiwan Strait,” The Wall Street Journal,

November 7, 2013. 

135. Comments by Major General (Ret.) John Landry in 

Wuthrow, p. 7.

136. Jonathan Eyal, “The US: Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” 

The Straits Times, November 4, 2013.

137. “US Rebalance: Potential and Limits in Southeast Asia,” 

IISS Strategic Comments, December 19, 2012. 

138. Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The 

Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, New York, NY: Public 

Affairs, 2008, p. 105.

139. Daniel Wasserbly, “Army Chief Outlines Ground Force 

Role in New Strategy,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, January 27, 2013. 
74

140. Paul McLeary, “As US Army Looks to Asia, Partners 

Are Critical,” Defense News, October 22, 2012; Vago Muradian, 

“Odierno Pushes BCT Revamp, Must-have Programs,” Defense 

News, November 5, 2012; Michelle Tan, “YS Army Boosting 

Budget, Doing More in Pacific,” Defense News, December 10, 2012; 

Cheng Cheong.

141. Wuthrow, p. 7.

142. Jeremy Au Yong, “US to Boost Defence Drills with 

Asian,” The Straits Times, November 17, 2012; Wuthrow, 

pp. 1, 6, 11.

143. “Partnering in the Pacific Theater,” p. 7.

144. Derek S. Everson, “When Foreign Policy Goals Exceed 

Military Capacity, Call the Pentagon,” Washington, DC: Foreign 

Policy Research Institute, February 2013. 

145. “Partnering in the Pacific Theater,” p. 7.

146. Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century 

Defense, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, January 5, 

2012, p. 2.

147. Report to Congress on U.S.-India Security Cooperation, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, November 

2011, p. 3.

148. Li Ying, “US Not Ready to be Philippines’ Savior over 

Huangyan Island,” China Daily, May 21, 2012; Simon Tisdall, 

“Militarism or Reform? As the Sabres Rattle, Japanese PM Must 

Decide,” The Guardian, December 17, 2013.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

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