“Great power competition” has just become a phrase that the Pentagon is forbidden to use when speaking of the People’s Republic of China and the United States. The order was conveyed in the last few weeks by the White House in a classified document the contents of which were disclosed to the Navy Times but not, apparently, to the New York Times.
The administration thought the word competition “inaccurately frames the U.S. and China as on a collision course,” according to the Navy Times‘s sources. We may conjecture that the Obama administration also believed this would be understood as a gesture of good will, which might reciprocally elicit better behavior from the Chinese, as they saw how sincere we were about peace.
If these were their hopes, they were almost instantly dashed when China, on September 25, flew an air armada of unprecedented size and lethality through the small Miyako gap in the Japanese island chain that extends south of Okinawa. For the first time fighter jets crossed, along with tankers, bombers, and other military aircraft. Obviously not talking about an emerging threat does not somehow make it diminish.
The American gesture and Chinese response have far greater significance than this obvious fact: They make crystal clear the fundamental cultural differences that plague all American attempts of this sort.
We are all, as it were, Emersonians. We believe other cultures will understand our gestures as we mean them: Our hand proffered for a handshake, our attempt to walk a mile in their moccasins, our gestures of restraint will signal desire for peace and understanding, even friendship. That is the message we are trying to send.
How do the Chinese receive it? Not at all as intended but as the opposite. We have successfully intimidated Washington to the point she won’t mention us. They are weak, irresolute, and, when it comes to it, craven. We can deal with them and drive them out of Asia.
“Compromise” is a scarce concept in Chinese theories of conflict. Rather the phrase they use is ni si wo huo—”you die, I live.” That is not “win-win.” It is—and we must face this—a template that turns our good will, deeply embedded in a culture of trust, into a show of weakness.
China is now pushing massive territorial claims as we and our allies, in effect, try to change their culture so that it will be receptive to our coping methods. China possesses the largest military in the world, with technology increasingly close to our own and far greater numbers of weapons. They are asserting a claim to some million-and-a-half square miles of sea to the east—claims already found illegal by the Permanent Court of Arbitration under a treaty that China has signed.
The White House reaction? Tell the military specialists, including the four-star admiral commanding the Pacific, to shut up. This is like someone with a persistent painful cough who decides the answer is to avoid doctors. “Maybe it will just go away.” Instead of keeping mum, we should be deterring, in a very big way—and indeed should have started doing so in 1995, when China grabbed her first small piece of territory from the Philippines, “Mischief Reef.” Not surprisingly, the wisdom at the time was “Wait and see. Do nothing.” Now the conflict, which potentially ranges from Japan and Korea to Indonesia and India, is perhaps beyond deterrence. China’s full national faith and credit are invested in it.
This is no time to tell, for example, Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the Pacific fleet, to keep his profound concerns and strategic counsel to himself. As the fellow with the cough should go to the doctor, so the president should listen to our top military and civilian experts, not mute them.
A deep split exists between the military officers, who every day see provocative Chinese operations against us and our allies, and our civilian officials, who are divided. Henry Kissinger told Zhou Enlai early in the 1970s negotiations, “We believe a strong China is not expansionist because this is your tradition.” Maybe this was the diplomat’s version of “the wish is father to the thought.” But it is absolutely clear today that Kissinger was wrong about China’s tradition and intent.
In our government today, two streams of thought exist. One, which follows Kissinger, clings to the misconception of a militarily restrained China. For them, the present illegal one-and-a-half-million-square-mile territorial grab—accompanied by new bases, new runways, rocket emplacements, and so forth—is not the problem. For these analysts, the real danger is that the United States and its allies will overreact and ruin any chance of friendship with China—that mirage that is always dancing on the horizon. The fantasy of an amiable relationship between the United States and the world’s largest, most enduring, and cruel dictatorship is difficult to banish.
Others understand. Aggression and illegal annexations of territory must be stopped, as early as possible. The two factions cannot agree. This president has chosen—like those before him—to kick the can a little further down the road. Of course at some point the expanding Chinese are likely to kill people—Japanese, Filipinos, Americans: The list is long, which would transform the situation overnight. Will the Pentagon speech code then be lifted? Kick that can far enough, and you will have to abandon our allies and a Pacific role that goes back more than a century.
Suppose for the sake of argument we do just that: We tell Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan (which has 1,000 missiles aimed at it, or one for every 20,000 Taiwanese), “We’re out of this, you are on your own.”
Will the problem disappear as those countries accept China’s demands? Not if they act as they always have in the past: fiercely defending themselves against external threats. Centuries ago, the Mongols, of all conquerors, thought the Koreans excessively passionate in their bloody resistance. The Japanese have never been pushovers. Without the United States to back them, China’s neighbors will still resist, creating the potential for a ghastly war. For now, they want peace, and they are talking to China. They are not, however, caving to China’s demands.
Could they fight without the United States? Of course. Anything we can make, Japan can make too. Furthermore, Japan does not need to steal technology. They already have their own. They can easily supply the weapons needed, weapons we intentionally deny. Japan got no F-22s, our best fighter jet. So they are building their own. How good will it be? Very good. Japan’s submarines are the stealthiest in the world. We cannot even build equivalents, as theirs are nonnuclear. They could, however, sink a Chinese fleet—as they have American fleets in exercises where a laser hit is counted as deadly.
Even without the United States, then, the neighbors China threatens have their own not-yet-fully-realized capacity to block Beijing. China should have gotten out of this whole mess by accepting the court finding and relinquishing its territorial overreach. For internal reasons we do not understand, it did not.
It is clear, however, that sometime before 2009, Beijing made the highly consequential assessment that it no longer needed the United States to offset the former Soviet Union, that too much American influence led to ideas like democracy, and so China made a fateful reversal. Beijing is now the flagship of the diminishing dictator fleet—an international outlier. Their leaders repudiate the United States, even aiming racist insults at our president and our admiral, born to a Japanese mother.
This is playing with fire. Japan has long slumbered, enjoying unthreatening and beneficial relations with China. Now China has poked her enough to wake her up. That was a mistake. One that may rebound humiliatingly against proud Beijing.
So what are we Americans doing about this grave danger? Forbidding the mention of it. But does Beijing understand what we are trying to do? Absolutely not and for deep cultural reasons. Wars are serious business, however. This is no way to avert what may become a catastrophe.
Arthur Waldron is Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
