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  1. HOW TO COPE WITH CHINA’S NAVAL STRATEGY

HOW TO COPE WITH CHINA’S NAVAL STRATEGY

Considering the structural similarity between Soviet naval strategy during the Cold War and China’s trident strategy today, the United States could deter or mitigate China’s strategic expansion effectively in much the same manner that it worked to contain Soviet naval power, using its own three-pronged strategy.

First, the United States should take strong, public political positions against China’s excessive maritime claims and efforts to undermine partners and international norms, just as it did during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Under the auspices of the Truman Doctrine, the United States frustrated the Soviet Union’s attempts to expand its influence into Turkey and Greece, which was critical geographically to its “support area” concept. In Eastern Europe, the United States, in coordination with NATO allies, conducted an aggressive and proactive campaign to compete with the Soviet Union and undermine its defense line there.76 In the Sea of Okhotsk, one of the Soviet Union’s SSBN sanctuaries, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), with its ASW capabilities, played a critical role in helping to defend U.S. SLOCs in the western Pacific Ocean and blocking Soviet naval access to key choke-point straits.77 In aggregate, these containment efforts contributed to deterring the Soviet Union and mitigating its influence.

Today, strong and consistent U.S. political commitments already have proved to be an effective counter against some strategically threatening Chinese claims and actions. For example, the PLAN expanded its activities in the ECS, the SCS, and the Indian Ocean when COVID-19 began to spread globally in February 2020, alongside broader Chinese efforts that included strengthening CCP governance of Hong Kong, clashing with India on the two nations’ border in the Himalayas, and beginning island and infrastructure construction in the Maldives.78 The White House officially declared its strong political opposition to China, emphasizing that the United States does not accept China’s attempts to change the rules-based world order.79 In response to China’s military exercises in the SCS, the U.S. Navy conducted a joint exercise in those waters with the JMSDF and the Australian navy to emphasize that the United States did not recognize China’s excessive claims in the region.80 While it is impossible to establish clear linkages between U.S. activity and Chinese decision-making, it is notable that China de-escalated its border clash with India at around the same time as the U.S.-Japan-Australia naval exercise; pressure on China’s leadership in one area may have had effects elsewhere.81 Given past experience that suggests that China moderates its activity in the SCS when the United States hardens its stance and responses, maintaining and expanding overt U.S. opposition to China’s excessive claims and coercion are key to preventing its consolidation of advantages in the SCS.82

The economic and supply-chain chaos created by COVID-19 illustrates the vulnerability of the United States to China-dependent supply chains, and hints at the type of pain China might impose deliberately on the United States in a conflict.

Second, burden sharing with allies and other like-minded countries is crucial for Washington’s regional position vis-à-vis Beijing. China has expanded and likely will continue to expand its influence whenever and wherever power vacuums develop. China’s naval expansion not only diminishes the prospects for the United States to establish sea control in a crisis; it undermines U.S. credibility across the international community, especially among crucial regional partners in Asia. To arrest this potential loss of military and political influence, the United States must endeavor to maintain its military advantages and expand the role of naval forces in its security strategy. The current trend of China’s military growth, however, is disadvantageous, and counterbalancing it may demand too much for the United States to accomplish alone. Power projection is key to U.S. strategic influence, and, because of the great distances involved, exercising it requires enabling allies and partners. Thus, the United States should share this burden with its allies and other countries with shared regional interests.

Burden sharing must mean more than seeking financial support from partners. Geography demands that an effective response to China’s trident strategy should assign primary responsibilities to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to counter China’s defense line in the ECS, just as NATO once contained the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. To enhance its position in the SCS, China’s sanctuary area, the United States should deploy ASW capabilities to other regional coastal states and support building up their own capacities. Once these countries possess sufficient ASW capabilities, their contribution could mirror Japan’s role in U.S. efforts to counter the Soviet Union in the Sea of Okhotsk.

India also must play a significant role in the Indian Ocean to address China’s support area. This would be similar to Italian, French, Greek, and Turkish efforts to guarantee NATO access to the Mediterranean Sea during the Cold War.

Shifting the U.S. strategic approach to emphasize the defensive is crucial. Christian Brose, staff director on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee until 2018, argues that U.S. countermeasures against China should change from being offensive to being defensive, aiming to block or erode China’s offensive intentions rather than to roll back Chinese gains after the fact.83 In particular, the United States and Japan have a great opportunity to impose costs on Chinese operations in the ECS.84 Just as China seeks to impose costs on potential U.S. operations within the first island chain now, if Japan obtains sufficient A2/AD capabilities against the PLAN, it would raise substantially the PLAN’s costs to break out beyond the Japanese archipelago and the Taiwanese islands into the western Pacific Ocean.

In the SCS, the United States must work to limit PLAN submarines’ freedom of action and reduce that sea’s utility as a sanctuary area or bastion. While the artificial islands China has constructed in the SCS provide it substantial geographic advantages for projecting power, the United States can leverage the geographic advantages of partner countries. Just as the U.S. Navy relied on support from the JMSDF during the Cold War, if the U.S. Navy enhances other coastal countries’ ASW capabilities and thereby threatens PLAN submarine operations, China would need to develop new capabilities to regain its lost advantages.

In the Indian Ocean, China continues to expand its regional influence via its economic power. If India coordinates its naval presence and posture in the region with those of the United States, China would need to expand its military deployments correspondingly to counter the increased threat to its freedom of action in a conflict. Beyond the operational necessity this would impose, it also might make association with China less politically and economically attractive to the coastal countries it targets in peacetime. By imposing new costs on China, the United States can force China to change its strategic orientation and seek some new source of advantage, all while reducing its current advantages at sea.

Finally, the United States should contain China’s trident strategy by involving like-minded countries, regardless of their geographic location. China’s claims and many of its activities in the South China Sea have no valid basis in international law.85 To counter China’s excessive claims and deter its illegitimate acts in the region, the United States needs to organize like-minded states in opposition. To put force behind their political opposition requires expanding regional naval capabilities and their interoperability with the U.S. Navy, as well as the Royal Navy, French navy, Royal Australian Navy, and JMSDF. This coalition should become more integrated and focus its operations in the ECS, SCS, and Indian Ocean. The numerous close partners the United States has in the region constitute a decisive advantage over China. Using them defensively to help contain China’s trident strategy could be a game changer in the ongoing international competition. It would force China either to reduce its ambitions or to adopt an increasingly offensive naval strategy that would both strengthen the coalition against it and incur the same disadvantages that the United States would face at present in conducting offensive operations against China.

To deal with China’s trident strategy, the United States needs its own three-pronged strategy, which should include leveraging its allies and partners and the defensive advantages offered by East Asia’s geography. Burden sharing and international cooperation are particularly crucial. On 23 July 2020, Michael Pompeo, Secretary of State in the Trump administration, acknowledged the existence of a cold war against China.86 While the Biden administration in its first year did not view the relationship with China that starkly, it nonetheless has acknowledged that the United States is engaged in an intense strategic competition with China.87 In many respects, China is a tougher rival for the United States than the Soviet Union was, and the United States must counter the threats that China poses in conjunction with its allies and partners, just as it did against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. China’s trident strategy in the ECS, SCS, and Indian Ocean has worked well so far. ASCEL in the ECS has created a defense line that can frustrate USN forces approaching from the east; an emerging submarine sanctuary area in the SCS would strengthen China’s credible nuclear-retaliation capability; and an Indian Ocean support area would enable China to conduct sea-denial operations with its naval presence.

Alan Dupont, an Australian strategist, warns that the escalation of global competition between the United States and China already constitutes a new cold war and that the United States is disadvantaged in this new competition because of the two countries’ deep economic interdependence.88 But even if China possesses advantages that the Soviet Union lacked, and therefore poses some tougher challenges to the United States, comparison of China’s and the Soviet Union’s naval strategies offers both useful insight and warning. China’s similar ambition to surge into regional power vacuums is both a challenge and an opportunity for the United States and its partners. But if in this new strategic competition the United States pursues blind engagement with China and ignores those vacuums, it may end up in a position from which it will be unable to recover.

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