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11 March 2021

'Seizing Weakness’: The Geopolitical Dimension of U.S.-China Relations

By Francis P. Sempa

The Atlantic Council recently released “The Longer Telegram,” a China strategy proposal written by an anonymous former U.S. national security official consciously emulating the 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X” (later revealed as the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning George F. Kennan) and advocated for the policy of containment. A year before “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” appeared, Kennan had written a 5000-word telegram from Moscow (which was known thereafter as “The Long Telegram”) warning Washington about the emerging Soviet threat to the global balance of power.

The Atlantic Council paper made headlines throughout the world. It presents China's economic, military and political challenges to U.S. global interests in stark terms. It analyzes China's strengths and potential vulnerabilities. It discusses China's internal political dynamics and suggests that the United States can favorably influence China’s internal political evolution. The paper also defines “core” U.S. global interests and contends that U.S. long-term strategy must be based on four fundamental pillars of American power: military, economic, technological, and values. It emphasizes the importance of alliances to counter both regional and global threats and calls for a U.S. "rebalance" in its relationship with Russia. It identifies areas of strategic competition and strategic cooperation between the U.S. and China. It concludes with a call for the current generation of Americans to be a worthy successor to the greatest generation “who defeated tyranny to preserve not just the nation, but the world.”

Less publicly heralded but more focused and persuasive is the recently released study of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments entitled Seizing On Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing With China’s Globalizing Military. Written by Toshi Yoshihara and Jack Bianchi, the study is less concerned than "The Longer Telegram" is with "soft power" and instead highlights China’s strategic and geopolitical weaknesses that U.S. strategy should seek to exploit.

Yoshihara and Bianchi state at the outset that the key factor of 21st century geopolitics is that China is becoming a global, as opposed to just a regional, military power. China’s growing maritime strategic reach and its Eurasian-based Belt and Road Initiative must be countered, they write, by “strategies based on a sound and balanced assessment of Chinese power, including its strengths and weaknesses.”

Yoshihara and Bianchi have mined Chinese open sources to explain the Chinese Communist Party’s conception of national power and its strategic goals. Chinese strategists use the phrase “comprehensive national power” to measure “all implements of statecraft, ranging from military strength to cultural attractiveness.” And President Xi Jinping has not been shy about promoting the strategic goal of replacing the United States as the organizer of the world order.

The authors explain that American foreign policy toward China must aim at forestalling China’s attempt to translate Eurasian land power into global sea power. This is Classical Geopolitics 101. The study quotes Carnes Lord’s observation that “if Beijing were to achieve greatness at sea, 'it would be a remarkable, if not singular event in the history of the last two millennia.’” Yoshihara and Bianchi do not recommend a passive doctrine of containment. “This is not the time to underestimate China or to downplay the challenges the PLA will likely pose across the world’s oceans,” they write. The United States and its allies “must not take comfort in China’s weaknesses. Waiting or wishing for Beijing to fail is not an option.” Chinese weaknesses, they write, must be exploited and soon because “weaknesses are not static” and China over time may overcome or neutralize its weaknesses, or even convert them into strengths.”

What are those weaknesses? First, there is China’s “looming demographic crisis,” an aging population and a declining working-age population. This will cause “fiscal pressures” that can lead to domestic political unrest. Chinese leaders recognize this weakness and have taken steps (such as ending the “one-child policy”) to alleviate the demographic time bomb.

A second China weakness is geostrategic: China is confronted by potential continental adversaries, such as India, Vietnam, South Korea, and Russia, and its long sea coast is geographically hemmed-in by island chains. Chinese strategists view China as a "composite land-sea power," and its Belt and Road Initiative aims to strengthen both its land and sea components of power, which could lead to overstretching or exhaustion over time. The authors quote two prominent Chinese analysts who recognize that China’s geography “has imposed an unavoidable constraint on the simultaneous development of landpower and seapower,” yet they also write that China “cannot neglect either seapower or landpower. Both fists must be hard.”

Here, too, China has made diplomatic and military moves to convert this weakness into a geostrategic strength. In the realm of sea power, China has invested heavily in a blue water navy, developed ports in strategic Indo-Pacific locations, and used intimidation to extend its reach in the South China Sea. On land, China’s diplomacy has strengthened ties with Russia to form a 21st-century version of the old Sino-Soviet bloc.

China also continues to experience weaknesses in its power projection capabilities. The authors explain that global power projection depends on forces and bases. China is working to strengthen both components, but it remains well behind the United States in global power projection capabilities. And China will inevitably face its own version of the so-called Lippmann Gap—the limits imposed on commitments by insufficient resources.

Yoshihara and Bianchi urge the United States and its allies to develop “long-term strategies that target Chines vulnerabilities.” Such strategies should include raising China’s “costs of empire” just as the U.S. and its allies did to the Soviet Union in the 1980s; strengthening U.S. Eurasian alliances and exploiting potential Sino-Russian tensions; countering Beijing’s diplomatic forays throughout Eurasia and Africa; bolstering U.S. naval power along the island chains off China’s coast; and exploiting China’s social, economic, and technological weaknesses.

The strategic goal set forth in Seizing On Weakness is to prevent the geopolitical nightmare envisioned by the great British geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder in his 1904 paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” and his 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality. Historically, China today presents the same challenge Napoleonic France posed to Great Britain early in the 19th century and that Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union posed to Britain and the United States in the 20th century. And in the long run, maintaining naval supremacy is the key to victory in this new Cold War. To paraphrase Alfred Thayer Mahan, it is those far distant storm-beaten American and allied warships that stand between China and the dominion of the world.

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