You might find James Holmes’s op-ed at Foreign Policy interesting. He opens his piece which advocates for a unitary straight line strategy in dealing with China by arguing that the U. S. suffers from the sheer multiplicity of strategies:
Me, I’d be slightly more circumspect about the state of China strategy in Washington. Call me a hairsplitter and a professor. But in reality, overabundance is the problem. President Barack Obama’s administration has more China strategies than it can shake a stick at, under the aegis of its pivot to Asia. They bear strange labels like “Air-Sea Battle,†“JAM-GC,†“offshore control,†and “archipelagic defense.†What the administration lacks is a settled strategy vis-à -vis the Asian titan.
which I believe reflects a misunderstanding of American culture and history as well as a misunderstanding of the nature of strategy. Throwing a grab bag of tactics into a hat doth not a strategy make. He goes on to advocate for a “sequential campaign”:
So let me add some sequentially minded principles for a winning strategy to those broached by Forbes. One: Set priorities among theaters, freeing up extra air and naval forces for deployment to the Far East. Self-discipline matching commitments with resources could convince China its sequential strategies will fall flat. Two: Enlist U.S. allies and partners to police their own neighborhoods, reducing the load on the U.S. hegemon. If, say, Europe took charge of the North Atlantic and Mediterranean, India oversaw the Indian Ocean, and Japan and South Korea set aside their differences to police Northeast Asia, new operational vistas would open up for American commanders.
Three: Devise operations that give the lie to the narrative Beijing has been spinning in recent years — namely that China is the rightful owner of Asian waters and skies, even those apportioned to its neighbors under the law of the sea. Use it or lose it should be Washington’s motto on freedom of the seas. In other words, any nautical freedom U.S. forces don’t exercise to its utmost is a freedom fated to vanish over time.
And Beijing’s island claims? Let’s ignore any claims to island outposts such as Scarborough Shoal or Mischief Reef, both deep within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Chinese forces there are invaders — and are entitled to no legal standing beyond that customarily afforded invaders. Sail right by them early and often to make a point: Occupy these flyspecks if you must, but you have zero rights in adjacent waters or the skies overhead. Likewise, voyages should be charted to deny efforts to change the legal status of geographic features by “reclaiming†sand from the seafloor — in other words, by manufacturing artificial islands.
And four: Settle on a strategy for winning in wartime. Prevailing in peacetime strategic competition demands convincing observers you’d win in wartime. It’s tough to make a potential foe a believer in your capabilities and resolve if he thinks you’re strategically adrift. Strategic competition is a war of perceptions. To do better in that fight, let’s focus U.S. maritime strategy while making it more linear. Will doing so automatically deliver victory in this twilight struggle? Nope. But it’s a start. The more sequential Washington’s approach, the better.
I think that exhibits an ignorance of our society and history. We are a very large, diverse, historically egalitarian (at least aspirationally) country. Sequential strategies, especially in the modern day, require consensus that we have only rarely been able to muster or a hereditary aristocracy.
What we have had is an emergent strategy. As Chesterton pointed out a century ago in his book-length essay “What I Saw in America”, we are a country founded on a creed. That creed is presently being rocked by the forces of globalization, interests, and hypocrisy—our own failure to live up to our creed.
I don’t look forward to our abandoning that creed. To paraphrase what Chesterton wrote elsewhere when we abandon our national creed we will not believe in nothing. We will believe in anything and if you doubt it, look around you.
Meanwhile, I think that Mr. Holmes is thinking of some other country. The most we can hope for is a “cumulative campaign” and if he wants to find the force multipliers in that campaign he should look to our people, our culture, and our values—our “soft power” as Joseph Nye felicitously expressed it. China’s hard power, its military and economic force, attracts only the world’s worst dictators. It’s only by combining our own military and economic power with our soft power that we will arrive at a strategy for opposing China, to whatever degree that’s necessary.
