Is America Willing to Wage War Against China to Save the Status-Quo?

Hugh White

Security, Asia

The answer might suprise you...

The Obama administration has never plainly acknowledged that it faces a major challenge from China to the US-led order in Asia, and it has therefore never clearly explained its strategy to deal with that challenge. Because it has never been clearly explained, the strategy has never been carefully scrutinized to see whether it has a credible chance of working. Instead it has slowly become accepted as orthodoxy among the US foreign and strategic policy community without serious debate.

But we all know what the strategy is. It is to take advantage of China’s own assertive behaviour to build anxiety about China’s ambitions among its neighbors, and then harness that anxiety to assemble a coalition which will act together diplomatically to compel China to abandon its challenge, leaving the US-led order intact.

Few if any outside China would question the aim of this strategy. We can all agree that it would be great if it worked, because the regional order based on uncontested US primacy has kept Asia stable, peaceful and prosperous for decades, and nothing would serve us better than for it to last for ever.

But will it work? Robert Manning and Jim Przystup are confident it will. In their generous and well-reasoned article at East Asia Forum, they counter my argument for building a new order in Asia by arguing first that any alternative order would not be as good as the old one, and second that the strategy of building a coalition to push back diplomatically against China is working fine. Why change things to accommodate China’s ambitions, they ask, if China can be persuaded to abandon them?

I agree with the first of these arguments but not with the second. I like the old order best, but I don’t think the strategy to preserve it is working. And as it fails I fear that Washington will be left with only two disastrous options: either withdrawal from Asia or war with China. It is to avoid either of these outcomes that I advocate a new order to accommodate with China.