U.S. strategists are confronting “an unprecedented crisis” because of China’s growing military strength in the Indo-Pacific, according to a new report from Australian defense analysts.
“America’s military primacy in the Indo-Pacific is over and its capacity to maintain a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain,” researchers at the University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Center warn in a new report. “After nearly two decades of costly distraction in the Middle East, the United States is struggling to meet the demands of great power competition with China and faces the uncomfortable truth that its armed forces are ill-prepared to succeed.”
That stark assessment is driven by several factors, including China’s development of ballistic missiles designed to launch devastating attacks on U.S. military forces in the region. It raises the prospect that the United States might abandon allies in a crisis if China’s People’s Liberation Army can win the initial round of a conflict, although U.S. analysts think the gloomy outlook underestimates American advantages.
“This report is part of a predictable wave of anxiety reaching the same conclusion — that U.S. strategic preeminence faces a serious challenge from China (and to a lesser degree Russia) and can no longer expect to prevail without correcting the bad habits built up during decades of comfortable dominance,” Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii, told the Washington Examiner.
China has designed a modern military to take advantage of perceived U.S. weaknesses, the report explains, with a focus on precision-strike missiles that Beijing could use against U.S. military forces throughout the region.
“This growing arsenal of accurate long-range missiles poses a major threat to almost all American, allied and partner bases, airstrips, ports and military installations in the Western Pacific,” the report warns. “In all these scenarios, Beijing’s aim would be to strike first to secure longstanding political goals or strategically valuable objectives before the United States can do anything to stop it.”
That’s not an inaccurate description of the threat, analysts and former U.S. government officials acknowledge, but the Australian report might be unnecessarily alarmist.
“It’s a well-researched report, and a timely report, but I do disagree with the level to which they argue the United States has lost military primacy,” Patrick Buchan, a former Australian government defense adviser who now leads the U.S. Alliances Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner.
Buchan agrees that China’s missile systems are a serious threat, but he notes the United States has withdrawn from a landmark Cold War-era treaty that banned land-based intermediate range cruise missiles, in part to begin countering that threat. And those new missiles will be just one component of the military power that can be arrayed against China.
“Look at the assets the United States deploys to the region and the assets the United States has the ability to rapidly deploy to the region, including things like advanced fighters and maritime assets, plus the amount of U.S. carriers,” Buchan said. “[And that’s] in addition to the U.S. strengthening its alliances with existing allies — plus new partners, which further adds to U.S. capabilities in the region.”
Kelly Magsamen, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs from 2014 to 2017, agreed that the University of Sydney report is “too pessimistic” about the U.S. defense posture. But that pessimism shouldn’t be ignored by Washington, she added.
“Obviously, this is a symptom of a much bigger issue of the region’s confidence in American leadership in general,” said Magsamen, who is now a vice president of national security policy at the Center for American Progress. “It should be a flashing red light to people in the Trump administration about where the region is right now with respect to the United States.”
That effort might already be underway. The rising threat of China’s military has is driving an extraordinary amount of outreach to countries traditionally regarded as minor geopolitical players, including Mongolia and the Pacific Islands states, which both could provide key advantages to U.S. efforts to blunt the threat of Chinese missiles.
“It is important that, as this report correctly notes, U.S. defense planners are working with a sense of urgency to reshape U.S. military capabilities and posture to account for what China is doing,” Roy said. “The bottom line is we would rather have the United States’ strategic problems and capabilities than China’s strategic problems and capabilities.”
