The new National Security Strategy talks tough — but here are the options the United States actually has, and the pros and cons of each.
The Trump administration’s new is remarkably critical of China, warning that its “efforts to build and militarize outposts in the South China Sea endanger the free flow of trade, threaten the sovereignty of other nations, and undermine regional stability.” Yet even as U.S. leaders have
a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” they have yet to explain how this approach will apply to and be implemented in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, the situation there has reached a critical stage as Chinese advances accumulate, America’s room for maneuver diminishes, and observers throughout the region wonder whether the United States is up to the challenge.
As we discuss at greater length in a recent
in the
Naval War College Review, America’s standing in the Indo-Pacific largely depends on its ability to uphold existing rules of the road. In particular, the United States and its allies and partners have
“freedom of navigation and overflight, respect for international law, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.” Thus, from a geopolitical standpoint, the struggle over the South China Sea is not about
, but about who sets the geopolitical framework for the region, and whether states in Southeast Asia and the greater Indo-Pacific region will align with the United States or China.
The Obama administration
to develop an effective strategy for countering China’s drive for hegemony in the South China Sea, which has featured island-building, militarization of disputed features, harassment of U.S. vessels and aircraft, coercion of U.S. allies and partners, and other salami-slicing tactics designed to gradually provide Beijing a position of overwhelming advantage. So far, the Trump administration has fared little better. Administration officials initially took a hard line, with Secretary of State–designate Rex Tillerson suggesting that Washington might physically prevent Beijing from
its artificial islands in the Spratlys. Then the issue appeared to
from the policy agenda as the administration focused on bilateral trade and North Korea as the dominant issues in U.S.-China relations. Although the U.S. military has
freedom-of-navigation operations (FONOPs) to challenge China’s (and other states’) excessive claims, the administration has given the impression that it lacks an overall strategy for addressing Chinese advances.
Four Strategic Options
Getting America’s South China Sea strategy right requires thinking systematically about what Washington should seek to achieve and what it should hazard in the effort. It has become common, in recent years, to hear calls for the United States to get
with China over its assertive and frequently coercive behavior. Yet it is far less common to hear in-depth discussion of what the long-term goal of such a program should be, whether that goal is actually achievable, and how much cost and risk the United States should accept along the way. What is needed is to elevate the strategic debate by identifying and assessing the options for countering China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea. Four main strategies are possible: rollback, containment, offset, and accommodation.
Rollback: The most ambitious strategy would aim to reverse China’s gains. This approach would seek to force Beijing to withdraw from key features in the South China Sea, or at the very least to demilitarize those features by removing the military facilities and capabilities. In addition to barring access to the islands, a rollback strategy might attempt to force Beijing to walk back its maritime claims in the South China Sea—in particular, to abandon the nine-dash line and accept the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling, which held that China must derive its maritime entitlements from legitimate claims to land features.
The core premise of a rollback strategy is that China’s increasing dominance in the South China Sea poses an unacceptable risk to U.S. interests, and that the South China Sea will become a “Chinese lake” unless Beijing’s advance is not simply halted but reversed. The trouble, however, is that this approach probably cannot be executed at acceptable cost. Even in the best-case scenario, rollback would lead to a severe disruption of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship and alienate many U.S. allies and partners who want Beijing’s advance stopped—but not at the cost of full-on confrontation. At worst, it could plunge Washington and Beijing into precisely the military conflict that American policy makers long have sought to avert. For these reasons, it is highly unlikely that rollback will be attempted; indeed, only a handful of the most hawkish U.S. national security experts have advocated such a strategy, and even then only in private rather than public settings.
Containment: Should the risks associated with rollback prove prohibitive, a second strategic option is containment. The goal here would be to stop China from using force or coercion to alter any element of the status quo in the South China Sea, and particularly to prevent it from building additional features or seizing features held by other nations. The basic logic of this approach is that, while rollback may be too dangerous, any further erosion of the situation in the South China Sea is unacceptable. Additional Chinese gains would undercut the credibility of American leadership and guarantees in the region and risk allowing Beijing to complete its dominance incrementally.
Containment would permit Beijing to keep what it has, but it would draw the line firmly against further advances. The United States would issue sharp, clear warnings against further Chinese expansion or coercion, coupled with hard-edged policies—perhaps including the use of force—meant to substantiate those warnings. The United States would, for instance, station substantial military forces in and near the South China Sea to respond quickly if Beijing sought to seize features held by other nations; it might also consider landing U.S. forces on features controlled by American allies and partners to discourage aggressive Chinese moves.
Containment is thus a hard-edged, confrontational policy. Its primary selling point is that it is both less risky and less difficult to execute than rollback because it relies on deterrence—preventing China from seeking new gains—rather than
—requiring Beijing to accept the humiliation of giving up gains it has pocketed already. Containment is nonetheless difficult, costly, and potentially dangerous to execute, and would require enormous patience and persistence. Critics such as Hugh White have
whether the South China Sea is worth a war for Washington; containment, like rollback, requires the United States to answer that question in the affirmative.
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