If Joe Biden is sworn in as the next U.S. President on Jan. 20, 2021, will his administration’s strategic policy toward China be any different from that architected by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper? A June 18 article by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy in the Council on Foreign Relation’s flagship journal Foreign Affairs, entitled “How to Prevent a War in Asia: The Erosion of American Deterrence Raises the Risk of Chinese Miscalculation,” suggests that it won’t, except for having even more military muscle behind it.
Flournoy, who has made no secret of her interest in being Secretary of Defense in a Biden Administration, argues that U.S. deterrent power has been eroded not only by the growth in Chinese military and economic power but also by the failure of the United States under President Trump to really carry out the Asia Pivot initiated by Barack Obama in 2012. “For the past two decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been growing in size, capability, and confidence,” Flournoy writes. “China is also emerging as a serious competitor in a number of technological areas that will ultimately determine military advantage. At the same time, the credibility of U.S. deterrence has been declining. For Beijing, the 2008–9 financial crisis gave rise to an enduring narrative of U.S. decline and Chinese superiority that has been reinforced by perceptions of U.S. withdrawal from the world — as well as, more recently, by its perception of bungled U.S. management of the pandemic and societal upheaval over systemic racism.”
Flournoy was also the architect of the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya in 2011. She complains that America has had no answer to China’s Belt and Road, nor to China’s alleged “gray zone” activities in the South China Sea. “All of this spells trouble for deterrence,” she writes. “The more confident China’s leaders are in their own capabilities and the more they doubt the capabilities and resolve of the United States, the greater the chance of miscalculation — a breakdown in deterrence that could bring direct conflict between two nuclear powers.” This, she says, will require “a concerted effort to rebuild the credibility of U.S. deterrence in order to reduce the risk of a war that neither side seeks.”
