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

by Elbridge A. Colby

Credibility is especially important when facing a mighty aspirant like China, because Beijing’s employment of a focused and sequential strategy can play on the fundamental misalignment of interests and perspectives among the states in the anti-hegemonic coalition, particularly between an external cornerstone balancer like the United States and its regional confederates. A very powerful aspirant such as China can try to frame a conflict as largely about local issues—about disputed claims, for instance, or matters of internal sovereignty—so that the stakes appear remote to Americans and other Asian states.

Credibility is a fraught topic, and its role has often been exaggerated, sometimes grossly, including particularly in this context of alliances. One of America’s most searing experiences, the war in Vietnam, was in key respects a result of overestimating the importance of credibility to American foreign policy.22 Partly in reaction to that experience, some maintain that credibility makes little difference in international life.23

A person or firm that is willing to cut corners in one area is usually thought more likely to do so in others. Thus a reputation for general credibility is valuable, and a perfect record would be a great asset.

A state that is too conservative risks being overtaken by those willing to run greater risks. Thus, to best serve its interests in the world, a state, especially an important state like the United States, may need to make commitments it cannot be absolutely sure it can sustain. Indeed, the United States officially acknowledges that it consciously “takes risk” in its defense planning; it is not fully prepared or equipped all the time, everywhere.27

For the United States, following such a perfectionist course would be antithetical to its core purposes. Upholding unwise promises, especially for a state that is supposed to promote the interests of its citizenry, is not the ultimate measure of merit; looking out for its citizens’ security, freedom, and prosperity is, even if that involves walking back some pledges.

When a state is not able to fully follow through on all its commitments, it has to husband its strength and resolve and make hard choices. Under these conditions, sacrificing lesser commitments on behalf of more important ones actually tends to increase the state’s credibility with respect to the more important ones. This is only logical: if a state needs to preserve its strength and will, then it must reduce its less important obligations.

In some conditions, then, failing to follow through on certain pledges is actually evidence of a state’s commitment to other, higher-priority commitments.

The United States led in expanding NATO to encompass almost all of Europe; Washington also made far-reaching pledges in the Middle East. Some of the more ambitious elements of these policies may charitably be ascribed to the difficulties of charting an uncertain future; but some seem to demonstrate, if not hubris, then a confidence in the endurance of America’s primacy, the end of power politics, or both that China’s rise has discredited.

Such states will therefore look at the United States’ differentiated credibility. They will look at how it has treated that particular commitment or those similarly situated in the past. If America has sacrificed and risked much to uphold this or similar commitments in the past, this suggests that it judges upholding this kind of commitment worth a great deal of sacrifice and risk.

Thus if the United States, under the shadow of China’s focused and sequential strategy, were to balk at defending a state in Asia to which it had provided a security commitment against Beijing, this decision would have profound implications not only for other allies in the region but for the anti-hegemonic coalition as a whole. It would provide direct evidence of America’s unwillingness to defend a confederate in the Western Pacific under the darkening shadow of Chinese military power—evidence that could not but be pointedly relevant to governments in Seoul, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and even Canberra, Tokyo, and New Delhi. This action would speak far louder about the United States’ cost-benefit calculus regarding China and Asia than its behavior in a clearly distinguishable situation such as the conflicts in Afghanistan or Syria. Differentiated credibility is therefore of enormous importance in the context of the anti-hegemonic coalition.

The key, then, is for the United States to include enough states in its defense perimeter such that together these alliances enable a coalition strong enough to deny China hegemony in Asia—particularly by being strong enough to prevail in a systemic regional war—but also be discriminating enough not to overextend itself. Crucially, the United States’ choice is essentially binary—states are either in or out of its perimeter. It is tempting to hedge by making partial or ambiguous commitments, but this is imprudent in the face of a very strong aspirant like China. Ambiguity is tenable when a potential attacker is weak. When such an opponent can be effectively resisted at relatively low cost, ambiguity about a defense perimeter is tolerable and even attractive, because the aspirant cannot do anything too consequential and the ambiguity preserves leverage over the vulnerable states’ behavior.

Ambiguity becomes more problematic, however, as the costs and risks of effectively defending allies rise and the consequences of failing to do so become more grave. In these circumstances, vulnerable states will naturally seek more credible assurance that they will be effectively defended and will naturally tend to regard ambiguity as evidence of lack of resolve—as will the aspirant.

The United States should not try to be half-pregnant: it should thus either commit to Taiwan’s effective defense or withdraw its pledge and separate its differentiated credibility from the island’s fate. Importantly, the former does not require a formal treaty; a clearly communicated commitment to defend the island from China would be sufficient.

Because the United States can singlehandedly or with impromptu coalitions defeat any plausible challenger to regional hegemony anywhere outside Asia and Europe, it should seek to avoid, reduce, or eliminate costly or demanding commitments in other parts of the world, including the Middle East, so that it can concentrate on the most demanding theater. It should therefore scale down its commitments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That said, the United States can still seek to form or sustain more limited partnerships in these secondary regions, in part to reduce its own exposure and demands on Americans.

But it should not agree to add Georgia or Ukraine to NATO because both are highly exposed to Russian attack while offering no meaningful advantage to the alliance that is remotely comparable to the costs and risks that their defense would impose on it.10 Sweden and Finland are a closer call. Both have capable militaries, and the alliance is already exposed in Northern Europe with the Baltic states and Norway. Although Sweden and Finland would provide rather modest added capability, given the alliance’s massive power advantage over Russia, they would bring an advantageous geographic position and capable, forward-deployed forces; moreover, adding them would involve bringing forward and solidifying an existing defensive line rather than creating an entirely new defensive position. Thus, although the United States should be cautious, their inclusion in NATO might be worthwhile.

This question is particularly pointed when a powerful losing side like China might appear to care more than the United States about the stakes at issue, for instance, Taiwan. China might be willing to bear much more suffering and risk to achieve its goals, and even if it were defeated within a given rule set, it might prefer to escalate to a more favorable rule set despite the attendant risks. This quandary is especially salient when survivable nuclear arsenals overhang the contest. In such circumstances, a side losing within a given rule set can always resort to nuclear employment in a bid for escalation advantage.

Wars are almost always limited, then, and any war between the United States and any participating members of the anti-hegemonic coalition and China would almost certainly be limited. In a limited war between two nuclear-armed states of roughly comparable power, the upper hand will go to the combatant best able to limit the conflict using rules within which it can gain a meaningful advantage, exploit those boundaries to achieve its objectives, and place its opponent in a situation from which escalation out of defeat will seem prohibitively costly or risky.

The United States’ core concern is not to fully understand China or predict its every move—it is to keep Beijing from doing things that run contrary to important American interests. Washington’s core interest is thus fundamentally defensive: it wants to deny any other state hegemony over a key region of the world. America’s concern, in essence, is whether China jeopardizes this interest. The United States thus needs to understand China only to the degree required to serve this goal.

A state like the United States should deal with this inherent uncertainty about what China will do by identifying China’s best military strategies and planning its defense around them.

We can qualify the best in best strategies by two factors. First, it describes strategies that would rationally advance China’s interests—meaning that they would result in gains that outweigh the costs. Second, they would advance China toward its goal of regional hegemony.

surprise is ultimately not the problem: being gravely damaged or conquered is. What matters, then, is if surprise is coupled with a good military strategy—that is dangerous.

Another line of argument posits that, while the United States may be able to identify the sources of its principal threats, it should focus on the most likely military strategies of these potential opponents rather than their best ones. Many observers maintain, for instance, that the United States should not overinvest in preparing for high-end conflict against China because Beijing is more likely to pursue strategies below the level of armed conflict, advancing its cause while minimizing the risk of large-scale war. This is important because much contemporary defense discussion concentrates on the gray zone,

But focusing on this likelihood criterion fails on two fronts. First, common events are not always or even normally the most consequential, and consequential events are what the United States should particularly care about.

A major war between the United States and China—even a limited and focused conflict—would almost certainly have much greater significance for Asian geopolitics than anything that happens in the gray zone, which is, after all, a euphemism for actions that do not cross the threshold of major significance.

Arguments that China would not risk a large-scale war with the United States generally (often implicitly) rely on the assessment that Beijing could not gain more than it could lose by doing so, which is in turn based on the assumption that the United States maintains a meaningful military advantage over China. Yet if the military balance of relevance to a given type of conflict were to shift in China’s favor—because,

A third camp argues that military planning should focus on the most destructive strategies that a potential adversary like China—or Russia, given its large nuclear arsenal—could wield, such as their ability to strike the US homeland with nuclear weapons.21 According to this argument, the United States should first eliminate any vulnerability to the most destructive forms of attack before allocating resources to other goals; America should therefore invest the great bulk of its resources in developing the capability to eliminate or at least reduce the damage the worst forms of attack could wreak.

First, it is exceedingly unlikely that this goal is attainable.

Moreover, the pursuit of invulnerability would consume the United States’ ability to pursue its other geopolitical goals,

The most damaging strategy an adversary can pursue, in other words, is not likely to be its most gainful one—indeed, in most cases, pursuing it is likely to be foolhardy in the extreme, if not simply insane. And insanity is vanishingly rare in state decision-making.

IN ORDER TO ATTAIN REGIONAL HEGEMONY, then, China’s best strategies are those that enable it to become stronger than the anti-hegemonic coalition such that it could win a systemic regional war. Beijing can then establish its hegemony either by threatening such a war or by actually precipitating and winning it.

The least risky and thus most attractive way for China to become Asia’s hegemon is simply to grow stronger and eventually, through the sheer weight of its power, overwhelm any realistic coalition that could form to check its ambitions. Since this strategy relies on continued growth, a rising power like China has an incentive to avoid a major conflict with the established powers because such a war would imperil its favorable trajectory. Left undisturbed, it will only grow stronger and thus better positioned to fight in the future.

The stronger China grows, the more states will see the benefits of balancing it. And if Beijing gives them no sufficient disincentive, balancing would give them goods of enormous value—freedom from Chinese hegemony—at little risk. China thus requires a strategy that discourages other nations from joining or remaining in the anti-hegemonic coalition.

Implemented effectively, the focused and sequential strategy would allow China to deter states from joining the coalition, persuade them to break from it, or induce them to renege on their commitments to it.

The most logical way for Beijing to try to fracture the coalition is by exploiting the differences in members’ willingness to tolerate the costs and risks required to adequately defend the member states Beijing targets. Although all members have an interest in ensuring the effective defense of fellow members from Chinese assault, that interest is inherently partial because each nation will naturally look above all to its own security.

Attacking a state allied with the United States would be more likely to trigger a formidable reaction from the United States because of its implications for Washington’s differentiated credibility. But at the same time, successfully subordinating the recipient of a US security guarantee would undermine that credibility and could strongly indicate—and even conclusively demonstrate—Washington’s unreliability.

Taiwan is the most attractive target for China’s focused and sequential strategy for several reasons. The first is related to China’s own interest in it. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has made clear that “reunification” with Taiwan is a national imperative.6 Xi Jinping himself has described this goal as “essential to realizing national rejuvenation.”7 But Taiwan is also an attractive target because of its importance to Washington’s differentiated credibility. That is, even though Taiwan is not a full-fledged US ally, nervous regional states are unlikely to see its fate as materially different from that which would befall full-fledged US allies in similar circumstances. Indeed, these actors, wondering about US differentiated credibility, are more likely to regard Taiwan as a canary in the coal mine than as a bird of a different feather.

the practical, quiet understanding in Asia—an understanding that Washington itself has cultivated—has long been that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense.

In light of this, a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines. It is a long-established US ally, access to which is important for US military operations in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.15 At the same time, it is a relatively weak state, and there are significant voices within it favoring accommodation toward China. Manila’s willingness to defend itself might, then, not be as high as necessary to enable an effective defense by the United States and other allies and partners. Vietnam, though not a US ally, might also make a good target. Hanoi is likely to be at least an informal member of the anti-hegemonic coalition, given its opposition to domination by China.16 If Hanoi becomes a formal ally of the United States, conversely, it could present an even more lucrative target for Beijing.

There is a reason for the old American adage never to get involved in a land war in Asia: the US military’s strengths apply far less there.17 This explains why America’s lasting alliances in Asia have historically been with island nations—and one peninsula, South Korea, which is connected to mainland Asia by a single state, North Korea.

If China could split states like the Philippines and Vietnam from the anti-hegemonic coalition while bringing other important Southeast Asian states under its sway, it might ultimately grow strong enough to defeat a coalition composed solely of Japan and India alongside the United States and more distant states like Australia.

Beijing has two broad ways of subordinating a coalition member in this manner without provoking too great a response by its allies and partners. We may call the first way the punishment approach. Under this approach, Beijing would use limited violence to impose costs on the vulnerable state until it capitulates of its own accord.

The second way might be labeled the conquest approach. Under this approach, Beijing would use what Thomas Schelling termed “brute force” to impose its will on the target state—especially by seizing control of that state’s territory—and thus present the target’s allies and partners with new facts on the ground that, Beijing would reckon, they would consider some combination of too difficult, costly, and risky to reverse.

These defects explain why blockade and bombardment strategies designed to force capitulation are rare in history. Plenty of stronger states could have blockaded their targets into submission, but such attackers almost always choose conquest because it is so much more effective; rather than wait for their victims to surrender of their own accord, the attackers simply conquer the defenders.

States usually resort to blockade and bombardment as their primary strategy when they fail at or cannot mount an invasion. Napoleon and Hitler both contemplated invading Great Britain before resorting to the punishment approach, in France’s case the Continental System and in Nazi Germany’s the U-boat campaign and the Blitz.44 The punishment approach is generally a fallback—by definition less attractive than the preferred alternative.

It is unlikely, then, that a state strong enough to pursue a conquest approach would settle for the demerits of the punishment approach. Meanwhile, a state that is too weak to try the conquest approach probably could not make the punishment approach work.

Moreover, destroying an enemy can be dangerous if its resulting weakness causes postwar rivalries over the ensuing vacuum.

Many accounts of the Cold War trace its origins in part to the vacuum left in Europe by the complete destruction of German power in the Second World War.49

With a fait accompli, the attacker uses brute force to seize part or all of its victim’s territory but tailors its use of force to convince the victim and the victim’s allies and partners that trying to reverse its gains would be some combination of unavailing, too costly and risky, and unnecessary. The fait accompli can take several forms. As a military strategy, it can involve the seizure of more or less of its victim’s territory and the defeat of more or less of its victim’s military while also incorporating elements of cost-imposition, such as blockades and bombardment.62

The fait accompli thus unites brute force and coercion, avoiding the punishment approach’s overreliance on persuasion. Under the fait accompli, the attacker no longer has to persuade the victim and its victim’s allies and partners to concede on the victim’s core goods but instead uses force majeure to seize them.

In Schelling’s phrasing, it uses brute force to seize the defenders’ territory and then relies primarily on deterrence to persuade them to accept the new reality. The fait accompli is thus a classic limited war strategy of a weaker power. Unlike a strategy that relies almost exclusively on force—which requires that the attacker enjoy military superiority over all its opponents—the fait accompli leaves at least some of the initiative with the defenders, wagering that enough of the attacker’s opponents will elect concession as the more prudent course.