U.S. security elites are obsessed with the threat posed by China and Russia to U.S. global primacy. This is a serious strategic miscalculation. The United States’ global network of powerful allies and bases (of which China and Russia have hardly any), unrivaled blue-water Navy, and possession of the only truly global currency mean that no other country can challenge Washington on the world stage as a whole.
Nor indeed is there any real evidence that they wish to do so. It is not just that a non-nuclear attack on NATO is impossibly far beyond Russian capabilities; until its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia devoted great efforts to trying to woo Germany and France. Russia has no interest in provoking the United States into a maritime blockade that would devastate Russia’s energy exports, nor China in disrupting a global trading and financial system on which it depends for most of its trade. No U.S. ally or alliance system is under threat from a rival power as long as they and the United States restrict themselves to their own defense. Washington is in firm control of the great economic powerhouse of Western Europe and maritime East Asia, as well as its own hemisphere.
All other things being equal, U.S. global primacy is already secure for a very long time to come. The problem is that all other things are not equal.
Since the end of the Cold War, too many U.S. strategists have forgotten a fundamental rule both of geopolitics and of war: that all real power is in the end local and relative. That is to say, it is the amount of force, money, or influence that a state is able and willing to bring to bear on a particular issue or place compared with the amount that rival states can bring to bear. So, what is true of the world as a whole may be totally untrue of eastern Ukraine or the South China Sea.
This truth is exemplified by the experience of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody can seriously suggest that Iran, let alone Pakistan, is anything remotely resembling a serious rival of the United States on the world stage. In Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, however, Tehran and Islamabad proved more powerful.
This was for a whole set of local historical, cultural, and religious factors—but it was also quite simply because, unlike the Washington, they were, are, and always will be neighbors of those countries. As such, they had the proximity, the ability, the will, and the patience to exert more power and run more risks than the United States was ever willing and able to do.
As U.S. President Barack Obama pointed out in 2016, this is also true of Ukraine. That country is a core interest for Russia in a way that it is not for the United States. Obama’s point about comparative commitment was reinforced rather neatly by the recent news that the Biden administration has urged Ukraine to halt its attacks on Russian oil refineries, critical to the financing of Russia’s war in Ukraine—the reason being that the administration fears that these attacks could drive U.S. gasoline prices higher and cost U.S. President Joe Biden reelection in November. Russia meanwhile has reconfigured its economy for war and expended the lives of tens of thousands of its soldiers in an effort to dominate Ukraine.
Yet the United States has found itself challenging Russia, China, and Iran on ground where they hold vast and growing advantages. Washington is replicating a classic military error: risking your main position by committing resources to the defense of ultimately undefendable outposts and, in the process, risking both exhaustion and so many local defeats in detail that in the end they bring about complete defeat.
The immediate issue is the war in Ukraine. By proposing NATO membership to a country that no U.S. administration ever intended to go to war to defend, Washington has exposed Ukraine to likely disaster and the United States and NATO to severe humiliation. U.S. high-tech weaponry has been important to the Ukrainian defense, but industries in the United States and European Union are failing very badly in providing Ukraine with sufficient quantities of basic ammunition. Western countries also, of course, cannot provide Ukraine with new soldiers to reinforce its severely depleted ranks—unless they go to war themselves and risk nuclear annihilation for places that until very recently nobody in the West considered vital. On the other hand, Russia’s ability to defeat Ukraine in the east of that country—at huge cost to Russia in casualties and equipment—by no means indicates either the ability or the desire to launch a direct attack on NATO.
The wise strategic course for the United States is therefore to seek a compromise peace—akin to the 1955 Austrian State Treaty, negotiated with the Soviet Union—whereby the great majority of Ukraine is independent but neutral and the issue of the Russian-occupied territories is deferred for future negotiation (the approach Washington has taken to Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus for the past 40 years). Such a deal should be seen not as a U.S. defeat but a tactical withdrawal to prepared positions from an indefensible salient. This should be combined with European rearmament and moves to strengthen the defenses of existing NATO members that border Russia, including most especially the Baltic states.
China represents the greatest local risk and the most complicated local issue: the greatest risk because China can impose a local defeat that could ruin the United States as a superpower and the most complicated because China considers Taiwan part of its sovereign territory. And while the United States (unlike in the case of NATO allies) is not obliged by treaty to defend Taiwan, it does have a moral commitment to try to save Taiwan from being simply conquered by China.
(The United States has also assumed a commitment to try to prevent the whole of Ukraine from being simply conquered by Russia, but that should not imply a commitment either to accept Ukraine into NATO or to preserve all the territory of Ukraine within its Soviet borders.)
Taiwan also represents the starkest contrast between U.S. global naval strength and its growing weakness in China’s (and perhaps Iran’s) immediate neighborhood. On the world’s oceans, with three Chinese aircraft carriers to America’s 11 (plus two each belonging to Britain, Japan, and India), no significant global allies, and no major naval bases, Beijing cannot mount a serious challenge to the United States beyond its own littoral waters. Against these odds, there is simply no realistic chance of China being able to invade Australia, Guam, or Japan.
Within those waters, it is a totally different matter, and the lessons of Russia’s war in Ukraine are quite shattering for U.S. naval chances in a war with China over Taiwan. The Ukrainian navy is insignificant compared with the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and before the war, it was universally assumed that Russia would dominate the Black Sea without serious challenge. But through land-based missiles and swarms of airborne and seaborne drones, the Ukrainians have been able to largely wipe out the Russian fleet and drive it from its base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. The Houthis in Yemen have been able to seriously disrupt trade through the Red Sea with only a very limited number of airborne drones.
Chinese industry can produce virtually limitless numbers of cheap drones—far too many for very expensive U.S. air defense missiles to be able to shoot down. (This may also be becoming true of Iranian drones in the Persian Gulf.) Ukraine’s Magura V5 drones cost only $273,000, have a range of around 500 miles, and can travel long distances on autopilot, only requiring a human operator as they approach their target. China is developing faster and more powerful ones, as well as unmanned submarines. If they disable enough U.S. escort vessels, U.S. aircraft carriers would be horribly vulnerable to Chinese missiles.
This does not mean that China could invade Taiwan successfully, because a Chinese amphibious force would itself be highly vulnerable to Taiwanese and U.S. drones. It does mean that China is likely in the future to have the ability to impose a blockade of Taiwan that Washington could not break without suffering catastrophic losses—losses that would in turn undermine the United States’ global position. There is also very little chance of the United States winning a war over the Chinese-occupied islands in the South China Sea.
On the other hand, should this happen, Washington could and would blockade virtually the whole of China’s maritime trade, including energy supplies from the Persian Gulf. There is no conceivable way that China’s navy could successfully access these supplies otherwise. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and energy deals with Russia and countries in Central Asia are intended to reduce this threat, but they would not do so completely or very soon.
In these circumstances, the United States has the strongest incentive to do everything in its power to keep the Taiwan and South China Sea issues quiet. Taiwan should not be surrendered, but China should be repeatedly and publicly assured of U.S. adherence to the “One China” policy. Every provocative U.S. statement or action that calls this into question should be strenuously avoided.
Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea should not be recognized, but it should also not be challenged—just as the United States does not recognize but also does not challenge Indian sovereignty over most of Kashmir, for example. Washington could also demonstrate goodwill and a desire for a reasonable compromise over the dispute over these islands between China and the Philippines by proposing solutions such as joint Sino-Filipino sovereignty.
There is no cowardice or disgrace in conducting a limited and orderly withdrawal. Every great strategist has done this when necessary. On the contrary, having the moral courage to do this is precisely one of the qualities of true statesmanship—especially when the United States’ goal of maintaining its global primacy isn’t even at issue.
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