Battlegrounds

China continues to expand its military systems around the South China Sea, Taiwan, and in the East China Sea, near Japan’s Senkaku Islands. China’s military strategy in the region is often dubbed “anti-access and area denial,” or A2/AD. Aimed at establishing exclusionary control, the strategy integrates cruise and ballistic missiles and air defenses. The PLA has modernized its land, maritime, and air systems to extend military power out to the “second island chain,” comprising the Ogasawara and Volcano Islands of Japan and the Mariana Islands of the United States. It is also demonstrating the ability to impose costs on American air and naval forces should they attempt to intervene during a conflict. China hopes to gain coercive power over nations and territories in the region through not only demonstrated military prowess, but also economic coercion and the use of information warfare and maritime militias. Its efforts to create exclusive areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific region are particularly challenging because they are integrated as components of a “total competition” that is “the peaceful equivalent of total warfare.”49

WHAT CHINA’S campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment has in common with Putin’s playbook is the objective of collapsing the free, open, and rules-based order that the United States and its allies established after World War II, the order that some believed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, was no longer contested. What Russia’s annexation of Crimea and China’s imposition in the South China Sea have in common is the strategic behavior of probing. Historians A. Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel describe probing as the use of aggressive diplomacy, economic measures, and military actions to test the willingness of the United States and its allies to contest efforts to displace U.S. influence and to replace the free and open order with a closed, authoritarian system sympathetic to Russian and Chinese interests. The revisionist powers of Russia and China increasingly coordinate their actions under what they deemed in June 2019 a “comprehensive strategic partnership of a new era.”

During my second full day in the White House in 2017, I hosted an “all hands” meeting with the NSC staff during which I shared my assessment that China and Russia were emboldened by what they perceived as American retrenchment and disengagement from arenas of competition. The trip to Beijing convinced me even further that it was past time to reenter those arenas and compete to counter China’s campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment.

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