Just Say “No”

At Foreign Affairs Michèle A. Flournoy remarks on how the U. S. can prevent a war in Asia:

Yet even as it strengthens its capacity to deter China, Washington must also reopen a sustained high-level strategic dialogue with Beijing—a practice that every administration since Richard Nixon’s has adopted, until the current one. Reestablishing a forum in which China and the United States could regularly discuss their respective interests and perspectives, identify areas of potential cooperation (such as nonproliferation and climate change), and manage their differences short of conflict is essential; tactical discussions on trade issues are simply not enough. After all, deterrence depends on the clear and consistent communication of interests and intent in order to minimize the risk of miscalculation. Given Beijing’s assumption that the United States is preoccupied and in decline, Chinese leaders’ propensity to test the limits in areas such as Taiwan or the South China Sea, and the faulty, potentially escalatory assumptions embedded in Chinese military doctrine, such a dialogue cannot come too soon.

I’m afraid she’s whistling past a graveyard. Given her assumption, there’s nothing that the U. S. can do to prevent a war in Asia. China and the United States are not the only actors.

What we can do is reduce the likelihood of China and the U. S. going to war with each other, a conflict in which I do not believe there would be any victors. We can just say “no”. We should promote our own interests, not construe those interests too broadly, and stop promoting the interests of other countries as though they were our own.

I found this passage of her post the most interesting:

Since the 1991 Gulf War, the PLA has gone to school on the American way of war and developed an expanding set of asymmetric approaches to undermine U.S. military strengths and exploit U.S. vulnerabilities. Of greatest concern is the substantial investment Beijing has made in “anti-access/area-denial” (A2/AD) capabilities. Ranging from persistent precision strikes on U.S. logistics, forces, and bases to electronic, kinetic, and cyber attacks on digital connections and systems inside U.S. battle management networks, these capabilities are designed to prevent the United States from projecting military power into East Asia in order to defend its interests or allies. As a result, in the event that conflict starts, the United States can no longer expect to quickly achieve air, space, or maritime superiority; the U.S. military would need to fight to gain advantage, and then to keep it, in the face of continuous efforts to disrupt and degrade its battle management networks.

The Chinese military has also made rapid advances in cyber- and artificial intelligence—thanks to China’s massive theft of Western technology, state support for its leading technology companies, and doctrine of “civil-military fusion,” which requires that any commercial or academic technological advancement with military implications be shared with the PLA. Technological investments have come along with doctrinal innovations. Chinese military doctrine now holds that the side that can make and execute battlefield decisions most quickly will gain a decisive advantage in any conflict. China’s theory of victory increasingly relies on “system destruction warfare”—crippling an adversary at the outset of conflict, by deploying sophisticated electronic warfare, counterspace, and cyber-capabilities to disrupt what are known as C4ISR networks (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and thereby thwarting its power projection and undermining its resolve. Among other things, this means that the United States can no longer assume that its satellites—essential for navigation, communications, early warning, targeting, and much more—would escape attack during a conflict. Given China’s ability to interfere with, spoof, damage, or destroy U.S. satellites, Washington can no longer take space for granted as an uncontested domain during war.