The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict

by Elbridge A. Colby

Importantly, a strategy is a framework, not a master plan. It is predicated on a coherent view of the world and provides a logic within which to make choices and prioritize. It is, at its heart, a simplifying logic to deal with a complex world that would otherwise be bewildering. Strategy, in this sense, is like any good theory meant to help explain the world—it should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Importantly, a strategy is a framework, not a master plan. It is predicated on a coherent view of the world and provides a logic within which to make choices and prioritize. It is, at its heart, a simplifying logic to deal with a complex world that would otherwise be bewildering. Strategy, in this sense, is like any good theory meant to help explain the world—it should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Chapters 1 through 4 lay out the broad geopolitical strategy that should guide American defense strategy. Chapters 5–11 present the military strategy needed to uphold that broader strategy. Chapter 12 is a short conclusion.

Chapters 1 through 4 lay out the broad geopolitical strategy that should guide American defense strategy. Chapters 5–11 present the military strategy needed to uphold that broader strategy. Chapter 12 is a short conclusion.

The chapter lays out why, in any war between the United States and China, both sides have the strongest incentives to keep the conflict limited, including most fundamentally by taking steps to avoid a large-scale nuclear war. Because neither side can reasonably contemplate a total war over partial (even if very important) stakes, the prevailing side will be the one that fights more effectively under whatever constraints emerge. This means that the victor will be the one that can achieve its goals while leaving such a heavy burden of escalation on the other side that the opponent either practically cannot or will not escalate its way out of a partial defeat.

The chapter lays out why, in any war between the United States and China, both sides have the strongest incentives to keep the conflict limited, including most fundamentally by taking steps to avoid a large-scale nuclear war. Because neither side can reasonably contemplate a total war over partial (even if very important) stakes, the prevailing side will be the one that fights more effectively under whatever constraints emerge. This means that the victor will be the one that can achieve its goals while leaving such a heavy burden of escalation on the other side that the opponent either practically cannot or will not escalate its way out of a partial defeat.

Its first, overriding priority must be the effective defense of allies in Asia against China. If the United States does want additional insurance, however, it can make some provision for the one other scenario in which the United States might not realistically be able to defeat an opponent’s theory of victory after defeating a Chinese assault on an ally in Asia: defeating a Russian fait accompli attempt against an eastern NATO ally, which is the only other scenario in which the United States could find itself facing a great power armed with a survivable nuclear arsenal and able to seize and hold allied territory. That said, the United States should seek to have European states assume the greater role in NATO.

Its first, overriding priority must be the effective defense of allies in Asia against China. If the United States does want additional insurance, however, it can make some provision for the one other scenario in which the United States might not realistically be able to defeat an opponent’s theory of victory after defeating a Chinese assault on an ally in Asia: defeating a Russian fait accompli attempt against an eastern NATO ally, which is the only other scenario in which the United States could find itself facing a great power armed with a survivable nuclear arsenal and able to seize and hold allied territory. That said, the United States should seek to have European states assume the greater role in NATO.

The international arena in which the United States pursues these objectives remains anarchic, in the sense that there is no global sovereign to make and enforce judgments in a dispute.

First, in an ungoverned situation, actors may rationally seek advantage and profit by using force to take from or undermine others. Second, inherently vulnerable actors may find it prudent to take preventive action against potential threats: the best defense may be a good offense.

To fulfill its core purposes, the United States should seek sustainably favorable military-economic balances of power with respect to the key regions of the world.

Power in this context is composed of military-economic strength. • The actors that matter most are states. • Balances of power particularly matter in the key regions of the world, which are those where military-economic strength is clustered. • The purpose of balancing is to deny another state hegemony over one of the key regions of the world. • The favorable balance should be sustainable over time.

The key regions of the world, ranked in order of geopolitical importance, are: • Asia. Asia comprises approximately 40 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), and given that it is the locus of about two-thirds of global growth, its share of global economic activity is rising.4 Taken together, the Asian economies are already far larger than that of the United States and are increasingly advanced economically and technologically. From a geopolitical perspective, Asia is therefore the world’s most important region. • Europe. Europe comprises nearly one-quarter of global GDP, and its economies are on the whole considerably more advanced than most of Asia’s.5 For the United States, it is therefore the critical secondary external region after Asia. • North America. North America is geopolitically important because of the United States. According to widely used estimates, the United States accounts for just under one-fifth of global GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. Largely because of this, most assessments rank the United States first in global power, though some indicate that China has surpassed it.6 The rest of North America is modest in power and share of global economic activity, making the region unique in that it is overwhelmingly dominated by a single state. • The Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf is a far smaller and less important region than the others, comprising less than 5 percent of global GDP.7 The Persian Gulf is home, however, to roughly 40 percen...

Asia in particular and then Europe and North America are thus the decisive theaters for global politics; Asia alone is a larger economy than Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and Oceania combined.13 If a state could leverage the wealth of one of those decisive theaters, it could dominate a state ascendant in one of the other regions.

The most plausible form by which a state could accumulate such power is hegemony, meaning that a state exercises authority over other states and extracts benefits from them, but without the responsibilities or risks of direct control. In this book I will use the term predominance interchangeably with hegemony.16

Because of Asia’s size and military-economic potential, ensuring that it is not subjected to such hegemony is of primary importance for the United States.

Given how powerful China is and will be, however, even if Beijing were not seeking regional hegemony, or if some future leadership decided not to do so, the United States would still need to ensure that China could not achieve regional hegemony at some later point. This approach, of course, risks exacerbating a security dilemma with China. But so long as US efforts are clearly directed at denying Beijing hegemony rather than dismembering China, occupying it, or forcibly changing its government, the security dilemma should be manageable. The United States has no interest in dictating to China, only in blocking it from attaining regional hegemony.

To summarize, then, the fundamental and primary objective of US strategy must be sustainably avoiding another state’s hegemony over one of the key regions of the world. Because Asia has the largest economy of the key regions and China by far the largest other economy in the world, ensuring that China does not establish hegemony over Asia must be the United States’ cardinal strategic aim.43

And because force is the foundational form of power and the ultimate arbiter of disputes in the anarchic international arena, the regional balance of power is at its core a question of military power. Matters of less profound interest to states may be solved with less grave forms of power, but whether states will bow to another’s hegemony will ultimately be determined by the balance of military power.

This is for several reasons. First, if a distant state is important to the coalition, geography and military particularities might limit the degree to which its absolute power can be translated into war-making ability in the region.

Second, a war to resolve the question of whether an aspirant like China would dominate a region like Asia might very well not engage the full power of one or both sides. In other words, such a war, even if very large, might remain limited in terms of the commitment of one or both sides. This is for a simple but extremely important reason—one or both sides might judge the perceived benefits of prevailing in such a total war not to be worth the costs and risks,

Thus the United States might be more powerful than China in global terms, but if China were better able to project its power in Asia, or willing to fight harder and risk more to attain its goal than Washington was willing to commit to deny it, it could establish predominance over the region. This is why the regional balance of power is so critical.

The goal of an anti-hegemonic coalition, then, is to prevent an aspiring hegemon like China from dominating a region like Asia by convincing important states that it would prevail in a systemic regional war. The aspirant’s goal is positive: establishing predominance. The coalition’s goal, by contrast, is negative: denial.

When regional states face an aspiring regional hegemon like China, their basic decision is whether to join the anti-hegemonic coalition and thereby seek to check the aspirant or to endorse or at least not resist its bid for predominance. This dilemma is commonly referred to as balancing or bandwagoning.5

By joining with the aspirant or merely not contesting it, the bandwagoning state removes itself from the aspirant’s sights. Bandwagoning may also lead to rewards and preferential treatment. China, having such a large economy, has the ability to provide material inducements to bandwagoning states.

This choice between balancing and bandwagoning is not binary but rather falls along a spectrum. States can aggressively balance or fully kowtow, but they can also soft balance, attempt to be neutral, and pursue a range of other policies between the poles of full resistance and submission. A state’s ideal policy is often to free ride—to stay out of the conflict and hope that the balancing coalition succeeds in checking the aspirant’s bid for hegemony.

These differing assessments of both the value and the costs of resistance mean that there is no strictly rational compulsion for states to perceive the situation in exactly the same way and thus no reason to expect them to form common judgments as to how to respond to given moves or provocations by an aspirant such as China. This generates coordination problems, and the more states that must be involved in the coalition and the more those states’ strategic situations differ, the more difficult those problems will be.

a cornerstone balancer: a very powerful state to anchor the coalition.

The involvement of a very strong state comparable in power to China is thus highly valuable for several reasons. First, the involvement of such a state by definition makes the coalition more powerful and improves the likelihood of its success. Second, a powerful state’s involvement makes forming and sustaining the coalition less complicated. If simply getting the coalition off the ground requires assembling myriad smaller entities, each with its own calculus, the task is much more complex and uncertain. The involvement of a very powerful state makes each smaller state’s involvement less necessary, widening the coalition’s margin of error and increasing the reasonableness of affiliating with it. Third, such a powerful state is likely to be less susceptible to the aspirant’s coercive influence.

Such a cornerstone state can be located within the key region, but it need not be. It may instead be an external cornerstone balancer. It merely needs to have the ability to project power into the region sufficient for the coalition’s purposes. This concept is particularly relevant to the United States.

although the United States has a great interest in preventing another state’s hegemony over any key region, it also has a potent interest in avoiding unnecessary entanglement. Accordingly, the United States should become heavily engaged only if such a coalition is unlikely to form and sustain itself without such US involvement.

As a general principle, then, the United States should look upon heavy, risky intervention in key regions with distinct skepticism. If a favorable balance of power denying an aspirant regional hegemony can be maintained without US involvement, so much the better. The United States should become directly and substantially engaged only if a favorable balance of power is unlikely to be maintained in a key region without it.

This criterion for US strategy also helps explain a puzzle left by the conventional narrative of American strategic history, which identifies the nation’s entry into the Second World War and its international leadership afterward as embodying a national shift from isolationism to internationalism. This account overlooks the United States’ long history of active engagement in Asia, which dates back at least to the occupation of the Philippines and the Open Door Policy, and even to the opening of Japan in the 1850s. A more parsimonious account explains US behavior as resulting from the increasing importance of its role in ensuring that no other state could dominate a region key to American interests, not from a wholesale transformation in the United States’ conception of its role in the world.

Given China’s enormous power, comprising roughly half of Asia’s total, any coalition in Asia to check Chinese pretensions for hegemony that did not include the United States would need to include the great bulk of the other important states: not only Japan and India but also South Korea, the major Southeast Asian states, Australia, and probably even Russia. No such purely Asian grouping exists today; links among the Asian states are relatively attenuated compared to those within Europe, and thinly tied multilateral institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are ill suited for this role.

There are two states in the region that could plausibly try to serve as cornerstones to address these issues: Japan and India.

But it is doubtful that other regional states would view Japan as a workable cornerstone.

Even if Tokyo were to develop its military power, the power imbalance between China and Japan would remain vast.

For the coming decades, however, India’s economy will be much smaller and less developed than China’s.

Forming and sustaining a coalition in Asia is thus quite likely impossible without the United States playing a significant role.

The most plausible alternative to Russia as an aspiring hegemon in Europe is likely the European Union or a more cohesive entity emerging from it. Although a loose coalition of states is unlikely to be able to seize and hold hegemony because of its inherent fractiousness, a unifying superstate could. The United States itself, initially a loose confederation, evolved into a highly unified strategic actor. In the 1860s, Great Britain and France considered intervening in the American Civil War in part to prevent the rise of such a powerful superstate.23

A comparable logic holds for US relations with Russia. The stronger China is, the more the United States and other states have an interest in Russia’s participation in, or even just tacit support for, an anti-hegemonic coalition against China. Given Russia’s significant power and its geographical position astride China’s northern border as well as regions where China could increase its power base, such as Central Asia and Northeast Asia, Moscow is a natural potential collaborator with or even member of an anti-hegemonic coalition against China. Moreover, Moscow shares this interest. Russia would find its autonomy and even its territorial integrity at substantial risk were China to establish hegemony over Asia. Because Russia is far weaker than China and likely to become more so given their respective growth trajectories, an unchecked China would mean that Russia’s autonomy and integrity would increasingly become a matter of China’s sufferance. This vulnerability will be all the greater the more isolated Russia is from any anti-hegemonic coalition against China in Asia, since any such coalition will be less likely to try to protect Russia if Moscow refused to cooperate with it. The United States and Russia thus share an interest in preventing China’s regional hegemony in Asia, and this shared interest points toward increasing collaboration over time.

Accordingly, the prospects for anti-hegemonic coalitions in the world’s key regions should lead the United States to focus on acting as an external cornerstone balancer in Asia to ensure the formation and maintenance of a coalition against any Chinese bid for regional predominance. The United States should remain engaged in Europe to ensure a favorable regional balance of power, but in a considerably narrower and more concentrated way than in Asia, because of the absence of a plausible regional hegemon in Europe. In the Persian Gulf, the United States should focus on ensuring that the wealthy Gulf states do not fall under another state’s predominance, but this should not be difficult given the absence of any plausible regional hegemon. The rest of the world does not demand significant focus.

Alliances, in other words, are strong and usually costly signals of intent to fight for interests that are not manifestly compelling.5 They therefore deter the potential opponent by increasing the likelihood of an effective collective response if the adversary challenges an alliance member, including through the kind of focused wars that do not, on their face, seem to call for a large response.

Largely for these reasons, the United States retains a web of alliances, including with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines in Asia, as well as a quasi-alliance with Taiwan, and with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe (and Canada).6 Washington also has less formal but nonetheless deep relationships in the Middle East with the key Gulf states, Israel, and Jordan.

The formation or sustainment of alliances between the United States on the one hand and regional states on the other is a natural method of addressing this problem. This tendency may lead to the formation or sustainment of multiple alliances, including interconnected ones and even a single, fully integrated alliance. But it need not result in a single, interconnected alliance for an anti-hegemonic coalition to succeed. Not all members of the coalition need to be allies for it to be effective. Nor do all members of the coalition that are allies need to be allied with one another. These points are particularly important with regard to Asia for several reasons. First, an effective anti-hegemonic coalition may contain allies (including quasi-allies, those that are also recipients of US security commitments), nonallies—hereafter termed partners—or both.

Ultimately, then, it is the coalition that denies China regional hegemony. An effective coalition accomplishes this goal by bringing enough states together to prevail in a systemic regional war. Alliances, meanwhile, promote the coalition’s ability to operate effectively. Thus, whereas alliances may improve the efficacy and reliability of a coalition, they are not strictly necessary.

Second, even coalition nations that are in alliances need not be allied with each other to act against a common foe. A multilateral alliance has the advantage of bringing to bear the full power of a network of states, whereas a disaggregated network of bilateral or smaller multilateral alliances does not.

An alliance defense must be effective and credible, and failing to tend to these requirements risks undermining not only an individual alliance but related ones, and even the broader anti-hegemonic effort. Stretched too far, an alliance network can weaken and even break. This was a problem with the Pactomania of the 1950s, which helped lead the United States into the agonizing Vietnam War and threatened to impair, if not collapse, its whole Cold War effort.13

The key element of a meaningful alliance facing an aspiring regional hegemon is that the alliance promises an effective defense of its members.

Such a defense must be more than theoretically effective. It must also be credible.