Are America and China destined to fight a new Pacific war?

Does Sparta always have to fight Athens? That is the question asked by Harvard academic Graham Allison in Destined for War, a book subtitled Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? The trap in question was first defined by the Greek historian Thucydides when seeking to explain the causes of the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 BC). Thucydides wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

Allison goes on to identify sixteen occasions over the subsequent 2,400 years when rising powers and their status quo rivals have squared off in confrontations that defined the history of their times. Twelve of these confrontations ended in war and Allison’s warning is that America and China are in danger of making it thirteen.

A Sino-American conflict could take many forms. Tariff barriers, Chinese dollar holdings or the insidious role of Huawei Technologies Co Ltd might represent the opening shots, but any hot war is likely to be prosecuted in the Western Pacific. The strategic geography of the area is defined by two island chains. The first takes a line drawn from the Japanese Islands, through Taiwan and south to The Philippines, enclosing the East and South China Seas. The second also starts in Japan but veers east to Guam and ends in Indonesia, enclosing the Philippines Sea. These two imaginary lines in the ocean mark the regions where US and Chinese naval forces are already contesting sea control of the Western Pacific.

At the risk of boring the general reader and patronising the specialist, a brief digression into the nature of sea control might be useful. Unlike land, sea cannot be held by military force. Undifferentiated geography and vast scale mean that the best that naval forces can hope to achieve is the limited (in both time and space) control of a surface sea area, the air above it and the depths below it, in order to use it for wider tactical or strategic purposes. Although sea control is a transient, ephemeral condition, it is one of the things that has historically defined imperial power. Using the sea for your own purposes and denying it to your enemies is what characterised the struggle of Greece against Persia, of Rome against Carthage, of Britain against Spain, France and Wilhelmine Germany, of the Allies against the Axis Powers and of Nato against the Warsaw Pact. Since the battle of Midway in 1942, which decided the outcome of the Pacific war with Japan, sea control has been a core assumption of American strategic power and one of the guarantees of its superpower status. It is also an assumption that will be increasingly challenged by the cheapness and ubiquity of its opposing condition: sea denial.

America has invested heavily in the instruments of sea control and, above all, in aircraft carriers. The latest of the US Navy’s eleven carriers is the Gerald R. Ford. Commissioned in 2017, it weighs in at 110,000 tons, carries around 80 fabulously expensive aircraft and cost $17.5 billion to develop and build. For that amount of money, the Chinese could produce several thousand of their DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles, any one of which could sink a US carrier. And it gets worse, in that the DF-21D has a longer range than the F-35 aircraft that the Gerald R. Ford will carry. This means that the carrier could be at the bottom of the Pacific before it could launch a single fighter.

This example is a grotesque oversimplification of what would be a vastly complex maritime engagement, but it is intended to convey a single point: that technology is taking the marginal cost of sea control up, while taking the marginal cost of sea denial down. In turn, this means that the terms of engagement of maritime warfare are moving decisively in favour of sea denial. As a result, China is now able to contemplate an Anti-Access/Area Denial (known as A2/AD in the trade) strategy in the Western Pacific, aimed at precluding US surface ships from the 1.7 million square miles of ocean between the Chinese mainland and the first island chain, through which half the world’s merchant tonnage passes. Against this background, the boast by erstwhile Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson that the UK could deploy its only operational aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, in the South China Sea to keep China in line falls somewhere between the risible and the delusional.

True to its Confucian strategic tradition, China seeks to avoid immediate confrontation and build marginal advantage over time. The large-scale dumping of industrial aggregate is a novel way to prosecute national strategy, but that is exactly what China is doing around the Spratly Islands. Since 2013, Chinese engineers have been dredging the floor of the South China Sea to create seven artificial islands — each one an immobile and unsinkable aircraft carrier — that now total a surface area of 3,000 acres among the Spratlys’ 600 contested rocks, shoals and islets. Their ownership is claimed by China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines, but only China can enforce its claim. China also chooses to interpret the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to imply a 200-mile economic exclusion zone around any sovereign outcrop, even a large sandcastle. America, along with most major maritime nations, takes the more conventional view that UNCLOS implies a 12-mile territorial sea limit. That leaves 188 nautical miles available for miscalculation as America, true to its Napoleonic strategic tradition of decisive action, insists on exercising freedom of navigation in contested waters.

That summarises the first part of a complex and dangerous story, which is all about keeping the Americans out; but there’s a second part and that’s all about keeping the Chinese in. North Korea remains a client state of China and apparently immune to the diplomatic charm of the Trump administration by insisting on retaining, and developing, its nuclear weapons. In response, America has deployed its Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system to South Korea, a capability designed to intercept incoming missiles. Unfortunately for the strategic stability of the Western Pacific, it’s not only North Korean missiles that can be intercepted from South Korea, but also Chinese ones.

The Chinese nuclear capability is largely invested in land-based missiles and Beijing has therefore seen the deployment of THAAD on the Korean peninsula as a fundamental disruption of the deterrent relationship between China and America. One way to restore the balance will be to shift Chinese nuclear investment from land- to sea-based systems, in particular nuclear submarines, in order to guarantee a second-strike capability if land-based missiles are compromised. Given the range limitations of its missiles, the current Jin Class Chinese nuclear submarines would need to get to the oceanic depths of the central Pacific in order to guarantee the engagement of a full target set in the continental US. In turn, that would require them to negotiate the constricted waters in the gaps between the land masses of the first island chain, where the sensor systems and the vastly technologically superior Virginia Class of US hunter-killer submarines will lie in wait.

Just as the A2/AD strategy seeks to turn the Western Pacific into a Chinese lake, so the Archipelagic Strategy, which would see America building its forward defences on the first island chain, seeks to contain Chinese naval power to coastal waters and retain sea control of the wider Pacific for enduring US use.

Within this brief review there may be the possibility of an uneasy balance along a line running from Japan to the Philippines, but the risks are high and the stakes even higher. A situation that combines the broad rhythms of history, national destinies, competing world systems, maritime strategy, international law, nuclear deterrence and presidential egos is as difficult to control as it is to predict. We must simply hope that this time Sparta and Athens are not predestined for war.