Confronting Gathering Threats: U.S. Strategic Policy

Strategic Insights, Volume IV, Issue 9 (September 2005)

by Michael Nacht

Introduction

The Cold War is fast becoming a distant memory. Even the term “post-Cold War era” is now rarely used in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the launching by President Bush of the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). But for the United States, as the only nation-state at present with truly global interests and global reach, it is necessary to be consistently vigilant of not only immediate concerns but of those developments over the horizon that could pose major difficulties in the future.

Central to American power, obviously, is enormous economic wealth and technological dynamism that has facilitated the deployment of extraordinarily capable conventional and nuclear forces. A critical partner of this power is the structure of international relationships—especially in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East—that have been adroitly used by Washington in the furtherance of this power.

But as we move through the first decade of the 21st century, what is beginning to emerge is a global situation in which the United States does not face a single adversary similar to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, which dominated American strategic thought for half a century. Both of these states had political ideologies deeply antithetical to American values. Both states played limited or negligible roles in American economic policy. And, in each case, the United States was able to marshal important supporters throughout the world in advance of American policy.

But the gathering threats facing the United States in the contemporary era are qualitatively different.

Islamic Jihad

This threat is based on a particular interpretation of Islam that has spread to scores of countries throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and probably even within the Muslim communities of Canada and the United States. The threat is not “state based” and indeed the stated goal of its titular leader Usama Bin Laden is to destroy the very system of nation-states created in Europe in the 17th century and replace it with a new Islamic Caliphate that stretches from North Africa to South East Asia, and eventually covers the world.

America’s economic, military, and political support for Arab and other Muslim states is itself a rationale used by the Jihadists to recruit adherents intended to overthrow the very regimes that welcome this support. And militarily, as evidenced in Iraq and elsewhere, the Jihadist use of suicide bombers in urban areas and against critical infrastructure facilities has largely nullified the classical elements of U.S. military power.

New Nuclear States

From roughly 1960 to 1990, United States' nuclear non-proliferation policy, while far from fully successful, focused on dissuading many of its allies—Germany, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan—from acquiring nuclear weapons. Pledges to maintain, strengthen, or withdraw U.S. security guarantees were instrumental in dissuading these governments from pursuing their nuclear programs to weapons deployment. Even when Ukraine found itself with a nuclear arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the fashioning of security, economic, energy and political arrangements that were crucial.

Later in the 1990s, when both India and Pakistan detonated nuclear devices and declared themselves nuclear weapons states, the sense of threat to American interests was considered minimal, and both states have since developed much closer strategic ties with the United States, although for very different reasons. The current major nuclear proliferation cases—North Korea and Iran—represent much deeper concerns. The former, if successful, would represent a successful policy by a new nuclear state to deter the United States from a successful counter proliferation policy by holding major targets like Seoul and Tokyo at risk, a lesson with enormous negative precedential value. It could also trigger a chain of new nuclear states which, if it included Japan, could fundamentally alter the security system of East Asia for the first time in a half-century. The second could trigger armed conflict with Israel, stimulate additional proliferation in the Middle East, and reduce even further the low probability of bringing peace and stability to the region.

China as a Great Power

The United States has never in modern times faced a situation where one of its closest trading partners and targets for direct foreign investment is also a strategic rival. With the resolution of Taiwan’s status an enduring source of potential Sino-American conflict, the intersection of the two states’ complex economic interdependence will have substantial and unpredictable impact on their overall relationship, which will be driven in both countries by important domestic constituencies.

In this context, the analysis that follows addresses the following questions:

1. How has U.S. security strategy affected nuclear relations among the major powers over the last decade?
2. Is Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) among great powers, and especially in Sino-American relations, a relevant concept today?
3. What do the Bush Administration’s new national defense and military strategies mean for U.S.-PRC relations?
4. How is the United States' strategic approach toward China likely to evolve in the coming years?

I. How Has U.S. Security Strategy Affected Nuclear Relations among the Major Powers over the Last Decade?

In the past ten years, the United States' security strategy has endured a dramatic transformation. When Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, running on a political platform of “it’s the economy, stupid,” he and his senior advisors embraced the notion that, with the end of the Cold War, the era would be dominated by domestic and international economic concerns. Then U.S. Ambassador to the UN articulated an approach of “assertive multilateralism,” which collapsed after the fiasco in Somalia when 18 U.S. combatants were killed after the United States could not obtain UN approval to protect them.

The highest priorities for the Administration were to assist in the democratization of Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union; to encourage economic, political and military engagement with China, in part to promote pluralism and democratic interests in Chinese domestic politics; and to complete the de-nuclearization of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Clinton turned out to be an activist and selective military interventionist as President, but with no seeming overall strategy. Besides Somalia, U.S. forces were sent to Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans as well as to Haiti. There was a tense showdown with North Korea over its nuclear program until the Agreed Framework was reached in 1994, and a crisis in Sino-American relations over Taiwan not long thereafter.

On the nuclear front, Clinton moved cautiously but unsuccessfully to win U.S. Senate ratification of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He chose to implement a “stockpile stewardship” program to keep the United States' nuclear deterrent reliable and credible without further testing or new weapons development. He sought to renegotiate the ABM Treaty with the Russian Federation—never completed—to permit deployment of theater missile defenses so that U.S. forces and allies could be protected against regional nuclear threats, notably Japan in the face of North Korea’s projected capability. And he failed to respond militarily, with the exception of a very selective strike in Afghanistan and Sudan, to a series of terrorist attacks including the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Khobar Towers attack of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the devastation of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar as Salaam in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

Perhaps this smorgasbord of national security activities reflected both a time in which there was no perceived existential or even significant long-term threat and also the President’s and his senior advisors’ eclectic approach to foreign policy. At the end of the Clinton years, it was difficult to offer a succinct definition of what constituted U.S. security strategy.

This selective, cautious, and somewhat vague approach to security policy was radically transformed by the Bush administration—especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and members of the National Security Council staff were of the view that U.S. security policy had to have clarity, consistency, and an articulate commitment to a no-nonsense approach to the protection of U.S. national interests. When the Administration entered office, there is little doubt that the intent was to return to a focus on the major powers, as had been stated in Foreign Affairs articles by Condoleeza Rice and Robert Zoelick before the election.

In particular, there was a high priority placed on the United States' withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in order to facilitate a more rapid deployment of theater and national missile defenses that were seen as necessary to combat the growing missile threat from China and “rogue states” such as North Korea and Iran. There was also a clear emphasis on seeing China as much more of a strategic competitor than a strategic ally. And there was a commitment not to engage in the sort of “nation building” in developing countries which Clinton had conducted since this was seen as an unnecessary distraction and diversion of resources from more central issues. More broadly, it is probably safe to say that the Bush team had an “ABC”—anything but Clinton—approach to foreign policy and to policy generally. A clear break from the past across the board was the intent of the new team.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 altered a number of these going-in approaches and accelerated others. The Bush administration over the course of the next three years issued a set of important documents outlining its overall strategic approach including statements on national security strategy, counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and homeland security. The emphasis in language and in follow-up action was now-on:

• Preemptive use of force against terrorist threats and those who support them, which leapt to the forefront as the nation’s leading national security priority. “Those who support them” was a key rationale for the actions to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, leading to far more elaborate “nation building” efforts than had ever been initially envisioned

• Reiteration of the intent to withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in order to move rapidly toward deployment of theater and national missile defense, in light of a missile threat that had been defined by the Rumsfeld Commission in 1998 as far more serious than the one characterized by the Intelligence Community Staff’s National Intelligence Estimate. This was completed with the United States' withdrawal from the Treaty and the signing of the Moscow Treaty in June 2002 that called for a reduction in deployed strategic nuclear forces by the United States and the Russian Federation, but with limited details and no verification procedures.

• Use of allies when feasible, but strong indications of a willingness to act alone if the situation was warranted. Over time, this became known as an emphasis on “unilateralism,” whether fully accurate or not.

• Establishment of aggressive counter proliferation policies to remove weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from the hands of those who might use them against the United States. A Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) that led to the formation of a group of more than two dozen nations cooperating to interdict items directly related to WMD capabilities—including interdiction on the high seas in international waters. This emphasis on counter proliferation was a clear shift away from more passive acts of “non-proliferation” relying on diplomacy and international law.

• Opening up the possibilities of developing new nuclear weapons that would be specifically designed to target deeply buried, hardened, underground targets, and that would have low yields and inflict very limited collateral damage.

How have these security initiatives affected nuclear relations among the major powers? Consider the views of each state in turn:

Russia

Russia has found itself with limited capacity to influence major international events since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. It had no ability to limit the expansion of U.S. military and political influence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to lead the UN-supported coalition against Iraq in 1991 or the subsequent effort to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003. Being itself a target of irredentist Chechen forces that often targeted innocent civilians, Moscow was sympathetic to a number of Bush’s GWOT initiatives, and permitted the deployment of U.S. forces in different Central Asian states to facilitate the United States' invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

But at the same time Mr. Putin and the Russian leadership is not interested in being the lap dog for U.S. policies, and sees many of these policies as against Russian national interest. There remains concern throughout important elements of the military high command that see the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the emphasis on missile defense as a direct threat to the credibility of the Russian nuclear deterrent. Increased budgetary support for follow-on offensive missile systems, including those with maneuverable reentry vehicles (MaRVs), has been the response.

Russia’s response on non- and counter-proliferation remains inconsistent. While one would think it was in the Russian national interest to stop or roll back the spread of nuclear weapons, in part because of possible linkages to the Chechen problem, Russia has been highly enthusiastic, evidently for economic reasons, to support many elements of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear energy program that clearly has links to weapons development. Russia also remains a recalcitrant partner in the Nunn-Lugar-Dominici Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, reluctant to share information and moving far more slowly in the securing of nuclear materials at U.S. expense than the Clinton or Bush team expected.

Geostrategically, Moscow interprets a number of American moves in Ukraine and Central Asia coupled with the continued expansion of NATO right to the Russian Federation border as a direct threat to their vital interests and an emphasis by Washington to create a permanent ring of states dedicated to containing Russian expansionism.

China

China for some time has seen the United States as both a vital part in the engine of its economic growth and simultaneously its main strategic competitor that alone stands in the way of Beijing’s rise to great power status and reclaiming Taiwan. No wonder that recent accounts see the Chinese elite as divided into two camps: the economic modernists and the security hawks.[1]

The modernists see China joining the United States as the second great economic power of the 21st century, and the two nations sharing the gains from increased trade ties and global growth. The hawks regard that view as naïve, and fret that American policy is to remain the world’s only superpower and to curb China’s rise. So China’s response, the hawks say, is to try to erode United States hegemony and reduce America’s power to hold China down.[2]

While China also has an Islamic irredentist movement in its western-most province to deal with, many strategists in Beijing see U.S. counterterrorism policy as consistent with Washington’s desire to contain China. The deployment of U.S. forces in Central Asia, including Afghanistan; closer ties with India; urging Japan to take a greater role in their use of military force, including participation in contingencies to protect Taiwan; continued U.S. sales to Taiwan of sophisticated weapons; and, of course, movement to deploy missile defenses in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, are all seen as anti-Chinese policies. This no doubt has helped stimulate the growth and development of more advanced Chinese nuclear forces and the deployment of more intercontinental-range missile systems capable of striking U.S. territory.

Britain, France, Germany, and Japan

Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have all been largely supportive of U.S. counterterrorism policies, including military action in Afghanistan. They split bitterly, however, over going to war in Iraq. Britain—really Prime Minister Tony Blair—sided enthusiastically with the United States, and committed about 8,000 combat forces and Japan also supported the initiative and sent non-combatants. France and Germany were openly opposed. Indeed, France used its diplomatic leverage to persuade a wide range of countries not to support the United States' proposal to use military force in Iraq until WMD inspections were much further along. Nor has either France or Germany been willing to help in Iraq after the conventional conflict turned into a highly volatile insurgency.

There has been little relationship, however, between these debates and nuclear weapons policies in these countries. Britain and France retain, from the Cold War, what was termed “minimum deterrence” capabilities, although against who is not entirely clear. Modernization efforts continue but in no way alter the fundamental character of these systems. Germany, on the other, seems firmly committed to its non-proliferation policy with no signs at all of any alteration for years to come.

India, Pakistan, and Israel

India, Pakistan, and Israel, the other three nuclear weapons states, have had their nuclear programs affected in subtle ways. India, seeking to become a global power in all fields, is using its nuclear capability as an argument for permanent status on the UN Security Council. It has growing economic, political, and military ties with the United States—a vast change from the Cold War era when it was assiduously neutral in declaratory policy, but often sided with the Soviet Union, which was its principal arms supplier and trading partner.

Pakistan, on the frontlines in the war on terror, is an ally of the United States—yet it harbors terrorists and many virulent anti-American Islamic groups. The United States has sought to provide assistance to better secure Pakistan’s nuclear forces, but there is limited public information about what, if anything, has actually been provided. The revealing of the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network has cast a shadow on Pakistan-U.S. relations, but has not necessarily affected the pace of Pakistan’s own nuclear development program. The United States intervened diplomatically at very high levels in the summer of 2003 when it appeared that an Indo-Pakistani war seemed likely. Since then, their bilateral relations have improved markedly. Both sides continue to maintain and modernize their nuclear capabilities with India deploying the larger force but perhaps Pakistan the more militarily capable.

Israel, the only non-declared nuclear state widely thought to have nuclear weapons, says virtually nothing about its programs. A major stimulus to Israeli concerns is the growing Iranian capability, both in terms of longer range delivery systems and advances toward nuclear weapons deployment

II. Is Mutual Assured Destruction among Great Powers, and Especially in Sino-American Relations, a Relevant Concept Today?

It is not crystal clear how relevant mutual assured destruction (MAD) was during the Cold War, but it seems less relevant now, particularly with regard to Sino-American relations.

Note that it was U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara who, in the mid-1960s, coined the term “assured destruction” as a way to establish criteria for sizing the United States' nuclear forces. If a substantial portion of Soviet military and urban-industrial targets could be held at risk, even after a Soviet first strike, McNamara reasoned that this assured destruction capability would serve as a credible deterrent assuming a ration Soviet leadership. The Soviets never publicly endorsed such a concept. And U.S. operational planners, less concerned with “declaratory policy” (what we say) than with “employment policy” (what we do) always planned to fight a nuclear war in which the United States would prevail—whether this was really realistic or not. In short, it may well be that the most senior U.S. and perhaps Soviet decision-makers were deterred from acting because of assured destruction, but the systems below them were probably ready to fight to win if called upon to do so.

The situation in Sino-American relations today is quite different. Obviously there is a huge disparity in nuclear firepower, both quantitatively and qualitatively, favoring the United States. But this is beside the point. China has no interest in matching U.S. nuclear forces. It does have an interest in deterring the United States from intervening with conventional forces in case of armed conflict over Taiwan or in some other contingency in the future. To accomplish this goal, Chinese strategists have sought to expand the number and range of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles that could reach the United States.

A recent Chinese statement on this matter illustrates this situation. On July 15, 2005, Major General Zhu Chenghu stated that:

If the Americans are determined to interfere [in a conflict to defend Taiwan] we will be determined to respond. We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all cities east of Xian. Of course, the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds …of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese…War logic dictates that a weaker power needs to use maximum efforts to defeat a stronger rival…We have no capability to fight a conventional war against the United States…We can’t win this kind of war.”[3]

This was not the first time a senior Chinese military officer raised the prospect of Chinese use of nuclear weapons in a Taiwan conflict situation. In 1995, during the Sino-American crisis over Taiwan during the Clinton years, General Xiong Guangkai, now deputy chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, told Chas Freeman, a former senior Pentagon official and U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, that China would consider using nuclear weapons in a Taiwan conflict. Mr. Freeman quoted Mr. Xiong as stating that Americans should worry more about Los Angeles than Taipei.

General Zhu’s statement raises many interesting questions. Is it a departure from China’s no first use of nuclear weapons policy, since he was referring to Chinese first use after the United States intervened with conventional forces in the Taiwan conflict? Would the Chinese leadership really be willing to sacrifice all cities east of Xian if that meant wiping out its entire modern economic base? Do the Chinese have enough deliverable warheads to actually destroy “hundreds” of U.S. cities when U.S. estimates, perhaps incorrectly, place the current capability in the range of 45-57 missiles that can reach U.S. targets? Is General Zhu telling us that the DF-31, the DF-3lA road mobile, and the Jl-2 submarine launched ballistic missile are much further along than we think they are, or are there other new Chinese systems deployed or about to be deployed of which we are unaware?

Hence it is the credibility of the Chinese nuclear force to deter U.S. conventional intervention in a conflict over Taiwan that is central to Sino-American relations, not some abstract and somewhat misleading notion of mutual assured destruction.

III. What do the Bush Administration’s New National Defense and Military Strategies Mean for U.S.-PRC Relations?

At a recent meeting in Singapore of Asian defense ministers sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld gave a hard hitting speech on China and wondered aloud why China was devoting so many resources to building up its military capability when no country threatened China. He implied that China was perhaps harboring aggressive intent and that Asian nations as well as the United States needed to take notice.

But a somewhat different interpretation is worthy of discussion. China, given its size, population, history, and newly found economic strength, as well as its enormous economic potential, has every right to plan and dream to become a major world power. Major world powers have strong military capabilities. Enhancing such capabilities “goes with the territory,” without necessarily harboring any aggressive designs. This could be one, albeit benign, explanation for the modernization of the Chinese military.

A second interpretation is that the Chinese leadership, perhaps all future Chinese leaderships, will seek to resolve the Taiwan question. Having a military option is central to their planning. Since it is largely the threat of U.S. military intervention to defend Taiwan that has precluded China from taking action for five decades, China is in a continuous search to find ways to nullify this threat. Use of a Chinese nuclear deterrent to dissuade U.S. conventional force intervention is a plausible response.

A third interpretation is that, partly due to Bush policies, Chinese leaders in Beijing see many new threats on the horizon: a reinvigorated Japan that might acquire its own nuclear forces or seek to acquire new power projection forces; a U.S.-North Korean conflict that threatens Chinese national interests; down the road a unified Korea armed with nuclear weapons; Taiwan with nuclear weapons; a much stronger India with advanced nuclear weapons; and a resurgent Russia that again seeks to dominate border areas of the Far East.

Bush administration policies almost certainly strengthen the hands of the strategic hawks in China who see a U.S. “envelopment” strategy and claim that much greater Chinese military as well as economic power is needed to counter American policies. Indeed, the seemingly messianic approach of the President in support of the spread of democracy poses a direct rhetorical threat to the Chinese leadership that is still highly authoritarian even if it is no longer totalitarian.

On the other hand, there are a number of positive contributions of the Bush policies to U.S.-PRC relations. China is playing a useful if limited role in the war against Islamic Jihad, which directly serves China’s own interests. China has been consistently encouraged by President Bush to play a constructive mediating role with North Korea, and will now host the Six Party talks involving North and South Korea, the United States, Russia, and Japan. As the primary external source of food and fuel for North Korea, China is considered to have leverage over Pyongyang decision-making and has been encouraged to play a constructive role that could resolve the crisis over the North Korean nuclear program. And, after much pressure from Washington, China claims to be a constructive partner in stopping the spread of WMD, especially nuclear weapons and missile technology. This would be an important step forward after China played such a critical role in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear and missile technologies.

IV. How is the United States' Strategic Approach Toward China Likely to Evolve in the Coming Years?

Since the start of the George H.W. Bush administration, the United States has had a two-pronged approach to China: to foster trade, direct foreign investment, and greater societal interactions in the hope that a more economically prosperous China would become more politically pluralistic; and, to simultaneously remain steadfast that the Taiwan issue had to be resolved peacefully, and that the United States would provide military support to Taiwan to defend itself.

The United States has also seen its commitment to Taiwan as part of the credibility it needs to demonstrate to keep the East Asian security system led by Japan and South Korea in a stable condition.

The economic relationship is now of huge significance to both countries. But as columnist Tom Friedman has pointed out, it is highly asymmetric. China not only provides us with our basic household goods; it also finances our debt. The U.S. economic connection, on the other hand, has permitted China to grow at 9% or more per year for several years, which it needs to do to provide jobs for all the new entrants to the labor force annually.[4]

Absent this level of economic growth, unemployment could lead to huge political unrest, and regime change cannot be ruled out.

It seems difficult to visualize a major U.S. departure from this dual approach, unless matters spin out of control in North Korea or Taiwan (through Taiwanese policies), leading to a Sino-American confrontation. Then all bets are off regarding the bilateral economic relationship, no matter how much it will hurt the United States' economy

This seems unlikely, though it is far from unimaginable.

It is best to think of U.S.-PRC relations as a struggle between centripetal forces pulling us together and centrifugal forces pulling us apart. In the former category are economic interests and the domestic groups that benefit from them, and, to a much less significant extent similar views on countering Islamic terrorism and some common interests on the North Korean question. (A divided Korea reduces the likelihood of a Japanese military resurgence that would pose a major challenge to China). In the latter category is the classical rivalry of a great power and a rising power, as well as specific differences over democracy and human rights, intellectual property rights, and, of course, Taiwan security.

For a long time the centripetal forces have dominated the centrifugal forces, and the peoples of both countries have prospered as a result. A reversal of this condition could pose a grave threat to both China and the United States.

 About the Author

Michael Nacht is the Aaron Wildavsky Dean and Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His expertise is in U.S. national security and foreign policy, and management strategies for public organizations. This paper was originally prepared for the U.S.-China Strategic Dialogue on August 1-3, 2005 in Honolulu, Hawaii, sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Contemporary Conflict (CCC) and the Pacific Forum CSIS.

 References

1. Steve Lohr, "Who's Afraid of China Inc.?," The New York Times, July 24, 2005.

2. Ibid., 1, 9.

3. Joseph Kahn, "Chinese General Threatens Use of A-Bombs if U.S. Intrudes," The New York Times, July 15, 2005. General Zhu is a dean at China’s National Defense University.

4. Thomas Friedman, "Joined at the Hip," The New York Times, July 19, 2005.