Is China The Greatest Threat To the USA? – OpEd

One is not surprised at the position taken by China on Russian invasion of Ukraine and her stance on nuclear issue as a demonstration of China’s position to side with Russia as a revolt against Western dominated rules that have been in force for nearly fifty years.

Kyle Balzer and Dan Blumental in an article (November 2024) have beautifully portrayed the Chinese revolt against the West with an insistence for a so-called rule laid down by the Western powers for nearly fifty years. The Western powers led by the USA has been laying down the rules, for example World Bank has to be an American nominee and the IMF has to be a nominee of Europe. China along with Rusia has jointly challenged this position despite American threat to impose more tariff on countries that violated this practice. The Americans find themselves in a quandary as for the first time in the US history both the US Senate and the Congress are headed by Jews and by the Republican Party. America being democracy has to listen to institutions like AIPAC- an Israeli outfit which has the power to raise millions of dollars in favor of the candidate that support the Israeli cause, the most recent example being the defeat of Kamala Harris in the Presidential race against Donald Trump. The Foreign Affairs article referred to above has beautifully enunciated the problems and prospects of the USA and her allies in the coming days.  

CHINA IDENTIFIED AS THE GREATEST THREAT TO THE U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY. 

Since 2018, American defense analysts have repeatedly identified China as the greatest threat to U.S. national security. They have variously described Beijing as a “systemic challenge,” a “pacing threat,” and even a “peer adversary,” owing to China’s massive military buildup, belligerent behavior in the Asia-Pacific, and global campaign of economic coercion. These vague, buzzy phrases point to a growing consensus: that China’s ambitions greatly imperil American national interests. There is no consensus, however, on the intention behind China’s strategic moves, chief among them its rapid buildup of nuclear weapons. The U.S. defense community has largely viewed this buildup in a narrow military framework concerned with weapons capabilities and arms-race balance.

A recent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine by the researcher Tong Zhao has broadened the analysis by describing China’s nuclear arsenal not as a coercive tool to achieve well-defined military objectives but as a symbol of national strength by which Beijing can earn Washington’s respect as a major player in world affairs. But any understanding of this nuclear expansion must also account for Beijing’s revisionist intentions. China holds grand ambitions to remake the world in its image. It intends to do so by first dominating the western Pacific and then pulling much of Eurasia—a region that stretches from China’s immediate neighborhood through Central Asia and southeastern Europe—as well as Africa into its orbit. But Beijing has a geographic predicament of which it’s acutely aware: a number of states off its coastline that have signed on to U.S.-led coalitions devoted to the regional status quo, and which are galvanized by China’s own actions.

If China escalates by launching a large-scale attack along its maritime periphery, it risks a devastating and coordinated response that jeopardizes its global designs. The United States should view China’s nuclear buildup as a tool that can help Beijing resolve its continental isolation. China has initiated a short-of-war coercion campaign to dissolve the U.S. alliance system in the Pacific, and its increasingly sophisticated nuclear arsenal gives it more leverage to achieve this objective without igniting a catastrophic great-power war.  Washington should be alive to the danger. It must recognize the geopolitical designs China has for its expanding nuclear arsenal and act to preserve the regional balance. As Beijing’s coercion campaign threatens U.S. allies, Washington must implement a countervailing strategy that arrays the United States’ competitive advantages against China’s distinct vulnerabilities. 

Chinese President XI-JINPING believes he is leading his country into a new era of Chinese-dominated geopolitics. He believes a struggle between Chinese socialism and Western democratic capitalism is already underway and cites his country’s growing prosperity and influence as evidence that it is ready to supplant the United States and remold the world. Such an international order would more closely reflect China’s internal system than the liberal values that have shaped much of the world for decades. Xi is particularly confident that structural trends—as evidenced by the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of populist movements in the West—favor China’s ascendancy.  

CAN CHINESE POORLY EXECUTED STRATEGY IGNITE NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL TO STALL WESTERN INCURSION INTO CHINESE HEARTLAND 

 China’s continental position—straddling a type of land-sea boundary that the twentieth-century Dutch American strategist Nicholas Spykman dubbed the Eurasian “rimland”—raises the possibility that a poorly executed Chinese strategy could ignite a cataclysmic war with the United States and its Asian allies. Beijing has thus determined that before it can pull a vast swath of Eurasia into its orbit, it must first achieve primacy on its exposed maritime periphery. Beijing protests that its maritime flank is surrounded by two concentric, crescent-shaped island chains littered with U.S. allies and military bases.

In the 1950s, the United States, in defense of its allies, even threatened China with nuclear attack. In 1996, during the third Taiwan Strait crisis, Washington humiliated Beijing when it dispatched two carrier strike groups to support Taipei. Today, the United States is promoting trilateral cooperation with Japan and South Korea to strengthen regional defenses against ballistic missiles. As Xi watches this, the searing experiences of the past are never far from his mind. And China now has in spades something it once lacked: striking power, both nuclear and conventional, of the kind that can split Washington from its Asia-Pacific allies.

China’s nuclear expansion is believed to affect how U.S. allies perceive the regional military balance. As they make their assessments, they are taking into account the stunning nature, in both quantity and quality, of China’s nuclear breakout. The United States has an active arsenal of some 3,700 nuclear warheads, though less than half of these are deployed. Beijing is quickly closing the gap, having increased its warhead inventory from about 200 to 500 between 2020 and 2023.

The Pentagon has forecast that China will boast more than 1,000 warheads by 2030 and upward of 1,500 by 2035. And China already has a formidable capacity to employ such weapons in highly accurate strikes: it has more land-based intercontinental and intermediate-range missile launchers than the United States does. What’s more, Washington retired its only regional nuclear option—a submarine-launched cruise missile—in 2013, meaning in a potential crisis it would have no regionally based nuclear capability to reassure its allies of its security guarantee. China’s nuclear geopolitics is about destabilizing the maritime barrier now set up against it.

China’s defense establishment is also exhibiting an increasing interest in coercive nuclear strategies. Chinese military theorists now routinely refer to the country’s modernized nuclear weapons as a “trump card” that can impede external intervention in regional affairs. And many Chinese defense analysts have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear coercion in the course of Russia’s war in Ukraine has prevented NATO from deeper intervention in that conflict, suggesting that Beijing could use its arsenal to achieve similar ends.

The Chinese conception of deterrence comprises the Western notion of dissuading adversaries from taking a particular course of action, but it also includes a more expansive goal: compelling adversaries to change their behavior. And now that China has a robust missile force to conduct coercive nuclear attacks, such tactics will have more credibility in the eyes of America’s regional partners. Beijing’s improved strike capabilities could thus encourage it to publicly abandon its no-first-use nuclear policy to drive a wedge between Washington and its allies.

As the United States’ Pacific partners increasingly see or experience Chinese efforts to use nuclear-backed coercion, their view of the regional balance could shift. And seeing inaction or insufficient action from Washington in the face of this intimidation would give them justifiable cause for further alarm. Crafting an effective response to China’s overall coercive power and the nuclear buildup itself will be key to maintaining U.S. credibility in the region.

CHINA AIMS TO USE NUCLEAR THREAT TO INCREASE ITS POWER IN THE REGION.

China aims to use its nuclear breakout to pierce the rimland barrier without igniting a great-power war. Xi’s ability to dominate the conflict spectrum—from low-intensity political pressure to potential nuclear warfare—has likely emboldened him to sharpen the pressure in this region in recent months.

But China has been honing its capacity to pursue this coercive campaign for well over a decade. Japan too, has been subject to Chinese coercion since the dawn of the twenty-first century—and the pressure is rising with China’s nuclear buildup. The persistent pressure is designed to wear Tokyo down, weaken the U.S.-Japanese alliance, and normalize China’s behavior to create a new bar by which to measure future aggression.

Taiwan remains the main target of China’s short-of-war coercion campaign. In addition to its military and political intimidation of the island, Beijing attempts to marginalize Taiwan’s standing on the world stage and erode its coverage within international legal structures. But the threat of escalation is key to subjugating Taiwan without large-scale warfare. Should Beijing decide to take extreme course of action, it would likely use the threat of limited nuclear escalation to deter U.S. and Japanese intervention. Since Beijing initiated its sprawling coercive campaign, few of the countries it has targeted have grown their military capabilities. 

TRANSFORMATION OF CHINESE ARMY INTO ASIA’S LARGEST MILITARY FORCE.

The Chinese army, on the other hand, has transformed into Asia’s largest military force, in both conventional and nuclear capability. For Xi, however, success is not about winning a head-to-head military clash that provokes U.S. intervention. Instead, success is defined as decoupling the United States from the region entirely by undermining Washington’s credibility there and compelling U.S. allies to shy away from confrontation. As China’s recent behavior suggests, China’s nuclear buildup has emboldened Xi to accept greater risks to achieve these objectives.

Beijing’s short-of-war coercion campaign has thrown Washington into a reactive, defensive stance that has unnerved its regional partners. U.S. officials have yet to address the regional strategic implications of China’s nuclear breakout. If these trends continue, China could find itself well positioned to dissolve the bonds that tie the United States to its Asia-Pacific allies. To blunt China’s momentum and regain the initiative, the United States needs a countervailing strategy that can demonstrate credibility to its regional partners and change Beijing’s calculus.

XI-JINPING’S VERNABILITIES

 Any U.S. strategy should force Xi-Jinping to make punishing tradeoffs between his goals so that he cannot harbor the illusion of advancing on one front without jeopardizing the others. China has distinct vulnerabilities. Like all nations, it has finite resources and cannot simply spend its way out of the burden of choice. This is especially true for an emerging, relatively isolated continental power with grand ambitions, a slowing economy, and the insecurity of a Marxist-Leninist regime—namely, a deep, near-obsessive distrust of its own citizens. By contrast, the United States is an established global power with a democratic system that lends itself to far-flung alliances and the creative energies of free societies. 

The economic dimension should make use of allies’ interest in American markets. By deepening trade relations in the western Pacific, Washington would convey to its partners and toBeijing that U.S. economic security is indivisible from the regional status quo. Updated bilateral trade pacts focused on sectors that China dominates—such as critical minerals and pharmaceutical supply chains—would also wean Washington and its partners off the Chinese market and harden them against Beijing’s coercion. Although American domestic politics has made the establishment of trade pacts difficult, there is an appetite in Washington for agreements that counter China’s strategy of creating economic dependencies. 

BEIJING’S PRESENT POLICY IS BASED ON EXISTING RIFTS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

The final prong of the United States’ strategy should center on politics. Beijing has been waging a largely one-sided philosophical struggle against the United States by flooding online outlets with disinformation in an attempt to exploit existing rifts within American society.

Washington has hesitated to meet this ideological challenge. But in doing so, it has forfeited the chance to exploit China’s greatest vulnerability: its political system. Beijing devotes enormous resources to controlling its 1.4 billion citizens. The United States can use this fixation to impose steep costs on China, such as by finding ways to circumvent online censorship and disseminate writing by Chinese dissidents about the government’s corruption and economic failings.

Beijing has gone to great lengths to silence individual dissidents and stamp out minor protests, suggesting it would spare no expense in countering a broader campaign. The best way to establish guardrails with China is to steer Xi’s attention away from his regional and global designs. The more he is focused at home, the less effort and fewer resources Beijing will devote to power projection.

CONCLUSION

Without a countervailing strategy that harnesses its competitive advantages, the United States risks its forward position in the western Pacific, which will be further eroded by a narrow military view of China’s nuclear breakout. Washington should exploit its asymmetric strengths and focus on revitalizing its credibility among its allies, exacerbating Beijing’s distinct vulnerabilities, and ultimately tipping the cost-benefit balance for China’s nuclear-backed coercion campaign. Once it appreciates the subtle role that China’s nuclear buildup plays in advancing Beijing’s geopolitical agenda, the United States can shift its own policies to maintain the status quo.