Brian M Downing
Arms race with US
China knows that the US will respond to the rise of its navy and assertiveness. That’s global politics. But just how will the US respond? China may be playing the US here.
Washington is unlikely to build more carriers than already in the works. They are large, expensive, and vulnerable. While useful projecting power and intimidating smaller countries, they are of increasingly questionable use against major ones armed with long-range cruise missiles. The US will counter in other ways: deploying more ships, planes, and troops into the region, enlarging existing installations and building new ones, increasing joint maneuvers with allies, and developing superior hardware.
This is all expensive and comes at the same time as more commitments in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Arctic, and the Middle East. The national debt is $26 trillion and counting. It will rise quite sharply in the next few years. As long as Covid-19 is with us, the economy will have to be held up by more government spending, despite far less revenue coming in from a stalled economy. The debt could easily reach $35 trillion in two years.
One consequence is that the debt may bring on a jarring fiscal crisis. More and more expenditures will go merely to debt servicing, lenders will become circumspect about treasury bonds, and governments around the world will question Washington’s viability.
A second consequence is that domestic politics will force deep cuts to the defense budget. A generation is emerging that sees WW2 and Cold War beliefs as militaristic and wasteful cant. They will insist on cutting the Pentagon budget and pulling back from foreign commitments. Better, they will insist, to work on healthcare, income redistribution, education, and many other domestic issues.
Beijing, then, may be expanding its naval power, at least in part, to cause fiscal and political problems, possibly severe ones. China can greatly aggravate the situation by selling portions of its considerable holdings in US debt. Bond prices will plummet, interest rates will soar, and politics will become more polarized, hostile, and paralyzing.
Regional responses
S Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Vietnam, India, and other concerned nations along China’s periphery and sea lanes have reacted to China’s island construction, illegal naval moves, and growing assertiveness by moving closer to the US. That’s the paradox: the more assertive China acts, the more it coalesces its adversaries around the US.
However, those countries must be looking at events inside the US and wondering how reliable the US will be in coming years and decades. The public is leaning toward domestic priorities, defense spending is coming under review, and the state may be paralyzed by factionalism and strife.
Allies do not want to give in to the inevitable and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate they should. They may feel the need to rely more on their own resources and planning. For the most part, they are quite wealthy, govern with reliable consensuses, have strong militaries, and are situated in areas that pose risks to Chinese commerce and naval bases.
Allies may opt to strengthen ties with Russia. Increased trade, especially purchases of oil and arms, may influence Moscow to moderate Beijing’s assertiveness. India and Vietnam have of course already established such ties – the former during the Cold War as the US beefed up Pakistan’s military, the latter going back to its wars of independence and reunification. Old arrangements can serve new realties.
Russia is presently closely aligned with China. The partnership is helping to restore Russian importance on the world stage but it’s doing much more to vault China into number one. As China becomes more dominant in Central Asia – Russia’s Near Abroad – and also in the Russian Far East, the partnership will become strained. Putin, with geopolitical dynamics and Russia’s vulnerabilities ever in mind, will keep his options open for a containment policy of his own one day.
© 2020 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.