When China overtakes the US in East Asia militarily, Washington will have to think twice before attempting to provoke or “trap” Beijing. A key event here could be a significant strengthening of China’s nuclear potential, which would create strategic deterrence between China and the US, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov.
At the end of August, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Beijing. At the turn of the eras between two administrations — Joe Biden’s and the one that will replace it — the Chinese invited Sullivan to set the agenda and outline a list of unresolved issues that have matured in US-China relations.
Many painful points of contention have arisen. Despite not abandoning its fairly intensive interaction with Beijing, Washington continues to regularly engage in activities that undermine US-China relations against the background of individual constructive steps. Among them are regular visits of congressmen to Taiwan, the creation of military coalitions in the region, and the strengthening of its own military capabilities and the military potential of allies — including the deployment of a network of submarine location detectors in the South China and East China Seas. These steps, in addition to the superficial motivation to “prick” Beijing, are evidence of a deeper strategic choice of the United States with regards to China: the United States takes the scenario of a military confrontation with China in the region seriously.
According to the views of the American military and political leadership, interaction with China amid an intense conflict should not allow Washington to miss the moment when China upends the military superiority of the United States in the region. At the moment, the United States is confident that the military advantage in East Asia is still on its side. However, it simultaneously realises that this advantage is gradually fading. It assumes a time horizon when it will be levelled out: the end of the 2020s or the beginning of the 2030s. Assumptions of this kind are due to the fact that China continues to improve its navy, which is already significantly younger than the American one, is building its own aircraft carrier strike groups, and is creating a modern satellite constellation. In addition, Beijing is developing new conceptual foundations for its strategy and tactics of warfare to confront an equally powerful opponent.
In an effort to maintain leadership at any cost, Washington is pursuing a provocative and opportunistic line of behaviour in relation to China, as in a number of other areas. This is evident not only in the Asian region, but also in other parts of the world, including the Middle East. A year ago, Jake Sullivan, boasting of the successes of American strategy, described this region as one of the “most peaceful”. However, this was soon followed by a sharp escalation of the conflict in the Gaza Strip, which revealed how unstable the situation really is. For the Americans, what is happening represents a significant difficulty, which is aggravated by the intransigence and intractability of the Israeli leader Netanyahu. At the same time, the solution of Israel’s military problems continues to be carried out using American weapons. Netanyahu manages to present the campaign in Gaza as a successful implementation of the strategy of containing a terrorist group. A similar kind of “marketing” is also underway with regard to a possible operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
When China overtakes the US in East Asia militarily, Washington will have to think twice before attempting to provoke or “trap” Beijing. A key event here could be a significant strengthening of China’s nuclear potential, which would create strategic deterrence between China and the US. The calendar plan for building up China’s nuclear arsenal is more or less known: by the mid-2030s, Beijing intends to expand it to a thousand warheads. In addition, while Beijing previously stored warheads mainly in warehouses, it plans to put them on combat alert by that time.
Today, US-Chinese relations look like a situation of constantly increasing mutual concern over a potential military threat. The growth of tension is stimulated by intensive US attempts to unbalance China. In the context of the presidential elections scheduled for November this year, the question naturally arises about the possible trajectories of the transformation of Washington’s China policy. However, it must be acknowledged that regardless of who becomes the US president, the line of structural confrontation with China will remain. American leaders, regardless of party affiliation, have demonstrated their commitment to a picture of the world in which American dominance is a constant. Today, China remains one of the obvious obstacles to the implementation of the ideas of the American military-political establishment, so the containment strategy towards Beijing will remain unchanged.
