Deterrence vs. Compellence in the Trump 2.0 Era
Mahmud Ali
Distinguished Fellow, CNIA; Distinguished Research Fellow, GGI; ex-Adjunct Professor at Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya
Photo: Microsoft Design
US President-elect Donald Trump's announcement, two months before taking office for the second time, that he could impose 'nearly 40% tariff' on imports from China in early 2025 seemed to confirm suspicions that Trump's second stint as POTUS would inflict severe economic damage not only on China, but also the USA itself, and on their major trade-partners. [Trump to unleash nearly 40% tariffs on China in early 2025, hitting growth: Reuters poll | Reuters] Trump's nomination of several China-policy hardliners to cabinet-level and other senior positions in his incoming Administration reinforced fears that Trump was determined to deepen and widen the 'great-power competition' with China he launched early in his first term. [Trump's hawkish cabinet picks signal tough stance on China | US News | Sky News] Trump's successor-cum-predecessor, Joseph Biden, had run his own presidential campaign on the premise that he was the 'anti-Trump', but on China, Biden built on Trump's counter-China narrative and policy-praxis, refining this strategic inheritance by expanding the US-led counter-China coalition, encouraging allies and partners from the Old World and New to hem China in and prepare to cut it off should deterrence fail. [How Biden took Trump's China policy and raised the stakes – DW – 03/05/2024]
China, clearly troubled, has however, remained relatively quiescent, electing to focus attention, policy-responses and resources to internal-balancing, encouraging domestic state- and private-sector actors to sharpen their own technological prowess, explore new and alternative markets, and boost resilient autonomy while waiting for a change in US, and Western, approaches to China's 'national rejuvenation.' Beijing's economic, scientific, diplomatic and military initiatives have proved only partly successful. Russia's war with Ukraine, Beijing's deepening alignment with Moscow, Western threats to China's determination to effect national reunification with Taiwan, and China's sci-tech innovations bypassing US-led sanctions - all contributed to ending hyper-globalisation, and triggering the planet's re-polarisation with fault-lines and flashpoints creating an incendiary strategic landscape on which a small spark could detonate a conflagration. [War with China: A View from Early 2024 > US Army War College - Strategic Studies Institute > Display]
A concerning transition
Interstate friction can, when taken to extremes, lead to lethal conflict. When major powers engage in such applications of mass-violence, the loss in lives, limbs and property can be extensive. Current Israeli operations in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in southern Lebanon, and the Russian-Ukrainian war, now approaching the completion of its third year - are visible instances. The fear of escalation of these conflicts to directly involving the USA and its NATO allies is not entirely misplaced, as the latter's resources have precluded Russian victory over Ukraine, and the prospect of a decapitating Iranian strike on Israel. But the bar to escalation has been lowered - as the recent launch of a Russian MRBM against a Ukrainian target, and USAF involvement in the IDF's defences against Iranian missile-and-drone strikes, demonstrated. That raises questions about the success and/or failure of deterrence - a key strategic theme in contemporary conflict-discourse.
With the world having had to grapple with the meaning and consequences of the USA's 'great-power competition with China' proclaimed by POTUS Donald Trump in December 2017 as the central theme of his Administration's National Security Strategy [NSS] policy-document, a grand-strategic legacy on which the outgoing Biden Administration built significantly - the imminent prospects of a Trump 2.0 Administration makes this consideration timely.
It seems generally improbable for the vast majority of the planet's populace to comprehend the possibility of a tooth-and-claw US-China war. But the reality is that the USA has been preparing for exactly such a conflict for at least a decade. One aim has been to ensure the Eurasian supercontinent - essentially China and Russia, along with Central Asian states - never coalesced into a front united against the domination of the US-led coalition determined indefinitely to sustain the post-Soviet unipolar systemic structure commanded by the 'sole superpower' which found itself suddenly propelled into systemic primacy when the Soviet Union collapsed. USG's determination to prevent the rise - ever and anywhere - of any potential rival comparable to the former-USSR, formalised into Washington's grand-strategic vision and its consequent military mission, has been the driving tendency at the suddenly-unipolar systemic core. Approved by POTUS George H.W. Bush on 23rd April 1992, barely four months after the USSR vanished from the world's political cartography, this 'determination' established the framework for forcefully, and if necessary, forcibly, extend US unipolar systemic primacy indefinitely [Defense Planning: Guidance FY 1994-1999 April 16, 1992 ]
The decision to deploy the Primate's incomparable, unprecedented, and overwhelming military, economic, diplomatic, and scientific-technological superiority to ALL other state-actors in the 1990s - against any perceived challenge to unipolarity - transformed the security landscape, notably across the MENA region coincidentally inhabited by its largely Arab/Muslim population, into a theatre of successive wars of choice. These almost continuous campaigns had their champions and detractors within the Washington D.C. Beltway commentariat community [220308_Babel_Power_Influence.pdf] The former insisted unless challenges to the Primate's primacy, expressed in any form or manner, must be eliminated rapidly and violently. Inaction, in this view, would deepen and widen threats and challenges, eroding the 'sole superpower's ability to maintain its systemic domination.
Critics divided themselves into at least two schools - constructivists believed wanton application of force caused grievous damage to prospects of long-term peace and stability by precipitating violent reaction and ensuring an endless cycle of strikes-counterstrikes-counter-counterstrikes ad infinitum. Realists, in contrast, suggested while application of force against challengers made perfect sense, some challengers were more deserving of such treatment than others. In many of their view, MENA states were marginal to US grand-strategic goals, had only modest capacity for mischief, and could be managed without focusing US primary attention upon such secondary and tertiary actors. They insisted, even Russia, whose residual nuclear arsenal/stockpiles loomed large, was not deserving of US muscularity. Only China - growing rapidly economically, and demonstrating a capacity to flower explosively in a hundred blooms simultaneously, posed a real challenge to US primacy. China, they said, was the threat.
A New Era of China-Focused Deterrence
This perspective gained centrality in the summer of 1999. The PLA's 'missile drills' bracketing Taiwan in late-1995 and early-1996, triggering the deployment by President Clinton of two Carrier Strike Groups east- and south of Taiwan respectively, pointedly threatening to neuter any Chinese efforts to occupy Taiwan, demonstrated to both sides their incompatible goals and perhaps irreconcilable military perspectives underscoring troubling potential for future friction. The PLA's inability to even locate the USN CSGs catalysed rapid modernization efforts fusing 'mechanisation' and 'informatisation.' [The Impacts of Xi-Era Reforms on the Chinese Navy > National Defense University Press > News Article View]
Perhaps the strongest impetus for the 'China threat theory' was provided by the July-August 1999 Office of Net Assessment Summer Study, Asia 2025. 'Undertaken to review fundamental issues and questions of importance to the defense planning process,' the horizon-scanning study examined the likely permutations and combinations in the Asian security milieu as these affected US primacy. [Under Secretary of Defense (USD)(Policy) 1999 Summer Study Final Report ASIA 2025 : Department of Defense : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive ] Conducted between 25th July and 4th August, the study identified several challenges emerging across East Asia where US dominance, manifested in its unfettered force-projection capabilities, must counteract future threats. One troubling inference was the proliferation of precision-guided weapons among regional states which could, by deploying such weapons by 2025, not only constrain US freedom of military action - i.e., unfettered force-projection, but could even advance their own security goals at the cost of US ones. Additionally, should China manage to maintain its explosive rate of economic growth for any length of time, it would likely acquire the wherewithal with which to challenge US dominance across multiple domains.
This being unacceptable, ONA leaders, represented by Dr Andrew Marshall, its founder-Director himself, made several recommendations for DoD planners to take on board. The most significant of these, perhaps, was that should India remain neutral in any future US rivalry with China, or worse still, should India join hands with China against US interests, US primacy would be most severely tested. If, on the other hand, India was persuaded to not join China against the USA and, instead, collaborate with the USA against China, US primacy across the system could be sustained indefinitely, neutralising any Chinese challenge to it. Cultivation of India thus became a grand-strategic objective for USG leaders.
This foundational determination profoundly coloured NDAA FY2000 (P.L. 106-65). Congress ordered DoD to terminate all contacts with the PLA via which China's military could acquire any information of professional benefit. SoD was required to issue regular reports on all contacts with Chinese officials, their duration, itinerary, purpose, expenses incurred and information shared. The US NDU was told to establish a centre devoted to the study of the Chinese military, its plans, programmes, progress, strategy, doctrine, acquisitions and operational concepts, and report these to the executive and legislative branches. The DIA was instructed to revise the 1980's-era practice of filing annual reports on Soviet armed forces, their development, deployments and war-preparations, and file similar reports on the PLA. Congress also established the USCC, a bipartisan commission designed to examine the national-security implications of US trade with China, and submit annual reports to Congress with recommendations for corrective action. [ China Primer: U.S.-China Military-to-Military Relations]
Protesting that treating China as the 'enemy' could very well lead to China behaving that way, President Clinton nonetheless took a strategic turn - visiting both India and Vietnam to lay the foundations for developing relations with both as counter-China bulwarks by successor administrations. [The President's Trip to South Asia, 13. South Asia, June 11, 1998, 'We can change the future,' Clinton tells Vietnamese | World news | The Guardian]
George W. Bush, identifying China as a strategic rival of the USA during his presidential campaign, may have proved more hawkish than Clinton had, and the 1st April 2001 collision between a US EP-3 Aries ISR aircraft and a PLA J-8B interceptor, leading to the loss of the Chinese pilot and his aircraft, and the detention of the US aircrew for a dozen days after they landed their damaged aircraft without permission at Hainan Island's Lingshui airfield offered a perfect trigger for escalation. [EP-3 Collision, Crew Detainment and Homecoming] Both sides demonstrated resolve, patience and common sense - negotiating a face-saving formula, whereby USG 'apologised' for China's losses, Beijing freed the aircrew, and the EP-3 was dismantled to be carried out in crates. Despite this inauspicious beginning, USG did not focus all its military energies on China. Subsequent critique would note Washington was distracted into waging a 'global war on terrorism', and other 'wars of choice', thereby losing focus on China and allowing it time and space to grow rapidly and in effect, become a rival to the sole-superpower's unipolar primacy. [How foreign wars are distracting the US from its biggest threat, Competing with China Explained: What Americans Need to Know | RAND, US to retain focus on China as greatest threat to international order]
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This perspective was founded on the presumption of legitimacy of the belief that the USA was the sole state-actor permitted to be an overwhelmingly 'great' power, its self-aggrandising self-interests must take precedence over all other interests, and any questioning of this axiomatic assumption must be extirpated. [Legitimacy, hypocrisy, and the social structure of unipolarity: why being a unipole isn't all it's cracked up to be (Chapter 3) - International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity, CSBA_UACP_web.pdf, Microsoft Word - 01-13-14 CNPT_PEIO_FINAL, Red Cell: The Fallacy of Perpetual US Primacy • Stimson Center] Donald Trump's own protestations to Jimmy Carter in April 2019, 'but the Chinese are overtaking us in everything', illustrated the layman's 'displacement anxiety' in a dynamically evolving post-unipolar systemic structure. [President Trump Called Jimmy Carter To Talk About China : NPR ]
The prospect of China's post-WTO accession growth so concerned primacist analysts that DoD-commissioned contractors cautioned USG that Beijing's aid to developing states in building up their port-infrastructure was potentially capable of gifting the still-tiny PLAN fleet access to foreign facilities, the so-called 'string of pearls', enable China to dominate the Indian Ocean-Pacific trade routes to the primate's detriment. US military officers came up with ways of countering such PLAN advances, including by bombing PLAN vessels in constricted ASEAN waters near 'choke points' with land-based bombers. Even if China had no desire to militarise the ports friendly governments were building with Chinese finance, Beijing worried any security-focused counteraction on its part in and around the key Strait of Malacca would catalyse potent US push-back, defeating its efforts - thus precipitating China's 'Malacca Dilemma.' [Energy Futures in Asia: Final Report - Juli A. MacDonald - Google Books; ADA476931.pdf; China’s Scattered Pearls: How the Belt and Road Initiative Is Reclaiming the “String of Pearls” and More; The Malacca Dilemma: A hindrance to Chinese Ambitions in the 21st Century - Berkeley Political Review]
China faced challenges in pursuing its 'peaceful rise/development' objectives as USG took on the military path to constraining - and then, containing - its growth. To control the 'choke points' along the Malacca, Singapore, Lombok and other nearby straits through which Chinese commercial and naval vessels must pass to ensure the flow of China's economic life-blood, the USN developed an entire class of 'Littoral Combat Ships' which would be homeported at Changi in Singapore, to conduct brown-water interdiction of all Chinese shipping whenever USG decided to do so. [ LCS Returns to Singapore > United States Navy > News Stories; USS Montgomery Arrives in Singapore > U.S. Indo-Pacific Command > JTF-Micronesia; USS Charleston (LCS 18); USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10)] Beijing's 2013 launch of its Belt and Road Initiative [BRI], especially the Maritime Silk Road [MSR] component, was seen as an indirect response to the USG's choke-point threats. Although some US analysts discerned Beijing's defensive reaction in the initiative, others identified 'threats' to US interests. [Assessing China’s Motives: How the Belt and Road Initiative Threatens US Interests > Air University (AU) > Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs Article Display; Reinforcing China’s Malacca Dilemma | Center for International Maritime Security; Alleviating China’s Malacca Dilemma - Institute for Security and Development Policy]
What the USA may have seen as purely deterrent efforts to prevent PLAN expansionist activities across proximate waters, Beijing could be forgiven for interpreting as US plans to block PLAN SSBNs from taking station in the deeper water bastions within the SCS, and measures to detect their movements and hold them at the Miyako Strait and Bashi Channel choke-points, destroy them in these narrow passage-ways, and denude China of its assured second-strike retaliatory strategic deterrent. [Political Drivers of China’s Changing Nuclear Policy: Implications for U.S.-China Nuclear Relations and International Security | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; It All Comes Down to Sea Control | Proceedings - December 2023 Vol. 149/12/1,450; Sustaining the Undersea Advantage: Transforming Anti-Submarine Warfare Using Autonomous Systems | Hudson Institute; The Hunt for Full-Spectrum ASW | Proceedings - June 2014 Vol. 140/6/1,336; Tides of Change: China’s Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines and Strategic Stability | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] What appeared to be reasonable - and safe - deterrent action in US eyes often looked very like coercive strategic compellence when seen from Beijing. This mutual misperception created its own dynamic that developed an incendiary dialectic momentum.
Although US academic- and refined strategic analyses identified and illuminated the fallacy underpinning a belief in human agency to indefinitely extend any one state's systemic dominance - as though all other human collectives could forever be deprived of agency to grow and develop their own resource-bases, this self-involved, narcissistically-obsessed, and very likely empirically unsupportable extra-rational belief became the central premise underpinning the USA's 'new Cold War' against China. Trump has vowed to double-down on an anti-China stance, pressing on all domains. [ Trump has vowed to take an aggressive approach to China. What would that mean? : NPR, From G2 to Cold War 2.0: The Changing US Attitude Toward China – The Diplomat, How the U.S. Can Win the New Cold War | TIME, Washington Needs Power And Allies in China Conflict ]
One Power's Deterrence is Another's Compellence
Trump, Biden, and the counter-intuitive consensus they represented, betrays several elements:
This has generated an all-of-government, all-domains endeavour to coerce China into not doing anything that appears to question US 'world leadership', and instead, do everything that USG wishes the PRC to carry out. And what of China itself? Although the PRC did not initiate its own version of Trump's 'great-power competition', Beijing clearly understands it needs to shore up its defences in a dollar-denominated financial-commercial world. It seems to appreciate the scale of the coercive coalition arrayed against it, but has opted to act reactively, responding only where and how it feels it must [ US all-round strategic competition with China has taken shape - Opinion - Chinadaily.com.cn, China Judges Four Years of US Policy Under Joe Biden - Newsweek, US lauds China's advances, but still seeks to contain it - Chinadaily.com.cn] If this postulate proves to be rationally sound, then the well-established list of Sino-US flashpoints, e.g., Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and even Tibet/Xizang are merely symbolic pretexts for grand-strategic action defending perhaps an indefensibly evanescent structural/systemic status quo.
This is where the concepts of deterrence and compellence come into play. USG and its coalition-partners, often comprising states that coercively controlled much of late-Qing China's political-economy by forcing post-Opium War Treaties, and the Boxer Protocol, on a weak and fragmented imperial edifice during 1841-1941, insist they are acting to deter China from violating the sovereignty and independence of China's neighbouring states, ensure international law prevails in contested maritime- and air-spaces, and a 'rules-based order' is honoured by all state-actors. Deployments of US-and allied naval/air and missile forces in China-proximate sea- and air-spaces, concerted diplomatic isolation, commercial sanctions and technological restrictions are designed to deter China from violating this 'rules-based order'. [How the U.S. Can Win the New Cold War | TIME] Beijing, for its part, insists only the collective organisational structure - the United Nations and its related bodies - can order inter-state conduct, not any single actor nor its 'small group/bloc' acolytes. This 'US-vs.-UN' dichotomy is at the heart of US-PRC systemic contention, one that cannot be swept under the rhetorical rug with military alliances displaying muscular vigour near China's shores, or legitimacy-brandishing diplomatic storm-trooping in capitals across China's periphery.
China's responses have sought to neutralise the efficacy of US-led 'deterrent' action which - from Beijing's perspective, given China's determination to pursue 'peaceful development' as opposed to imperial annexation of colonial extraction - look very much like compellence, a very different category of strategic coercion. The deployment of THAAD missile batteries to the RoK, [This Is Why China Fears THAAD | The National Interest, Chinese wary about U.S. missile system because capabilities unknown - experts | Reuters], stationing of military units armed with US-supplied SM-6 BMD/AD missiles and Tomahawk LACMs to Japan [US &Japan Put SM-6, Tomahawk Ground Fired Missiles in Pacific, Japan buys hundreds of Tomahawk missiles from United States], transferring batteries of Typhon-class medium-range missiles to both the Philippines and Japan [ US Army eyes deployment of Typhon mid-range missile system to Japan for joint exercises ], and dispersing and reinforcing expeditionary forces in China's vicinity could all be part of USG's deterrent strategy, but the offensive nature of some of the deployments and capabilities of the lethal hardware involved could be interpreted to indicate a powerfully compellent approach to China.
Whereas deterrence is designed to deter action and generate inaction, compellence is more likely to trigger counteraction and defeat any deterrent purposes that may have shaped the original decision. THAAD batteries' radar systems' ability to peer deep into the Chinese countryside, monitoring the PLARF's deployments and activities, would significantly erode the reliability and credibility of China's residual second-strike retaliatory capacity, opening it up to a decapitating first strike. USN and allied naval dominance of the South China Sea and preparations for choking off the Miyako Strait and the Bashi Channel, for instance, taken in conjunction with all the US-led coalition's presence-operations, close-in ISR activities and force-dispersal among revived World War II archipelagic bases could be viewed as what US commanders have described as 'ready to fight tonight'. This combination of conventional and cyber and space activities targeting China - even if designed as a deterrent posture, could well present itself as a short-notice, multi-domain, systemic defenestration campaign against the PRC. Threats of this level, with no political-military communication, moderation and mitigation, have - in the 1983 Exercise Able Archer drill confronting the USSR - triggered a dramatic spiral with virtually certain loss of control, with potentially catastrophic consequences. [The war game that could have ended the world - BBC Future ]
Such a dramatic outcome may seem highly implausible to most observers. But given the record of how powerfully-armed major powers with strong mutual antipathy convoluted by mutual mistrust and misunderstanding, have brought the planet close to its destruction, semantic subtleties must be replaced with clear and direct exchanges ensuring a shared understanding of mutual 'red lines.' China's rejection of USG's 'long-arm jurisdiction' is a challenge for the evanescent primate, but given the prospects of pushing the current trajectory to its logical extremes, are there meaningfully realistic alternatives to mutual accommodation?
Retired at Canada Post / Postes Canada
2wWow that is a lot of information. Excellent analysis. You know he has commented on making Canada the 51st state 😒
Distinguished Fellow, CNIA; Distinguished Research Fellow, GGI; ex-Adjunct Professor at Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya
1moI thank my younger friends for their encouragement