A Strategy of Denial for the Western Pacific
China aspires to dominate the Indo-Pacific region—the impact of which would dramatically undermine Americans’ security, freedom, and prosperity. The only workable strategy is to deny China this goal. The naval services will play a central role.
By Elbridge Colby
March 2023 Proceedings Vol. 149/3/1,441
THE AMERICAN SEA POWER PROJECT
The primary threat to core U.S. interests is that China could dominate Asia, and from that position atop more than half the global economy, undermine Americans’ prosperity, freedom, and even security. This is not a merely speculative fear. Beijing is pursuing regional hegemony over Asia, and if successful, it will very likely pursue the kind of global preeminence that would enable it to directly intervene in and exercise a domineering influence over Americans’ lives.
map of china
As a result, nothing else in the international system is as fundamentally dangerous to U.S. interests as Chinese hegemony over Asia. Accordingly, U.S. policy must prioritize avoiding that outcome, but must do so in ways that correlate the risks and costs the American people incur in doing so with the stakes, which are vital but not genuinely existential. In practice, this requires working together with Asian states in an antihegemonic coalition focused on denying Beijing dominance over the region.
Contrary to some commentary that suggests the military dimension in this dynamic is not that important, the U.S. military’s role in this strategy is central. This is because Beijing will likely not be able to dominate Asia without resorting to military force. While China has enormous and growing economic and other nonmilitary forms of influence, it is finding it difficult to use its leverage to get neighboring countries to accept what would essentially be a tributary relationship. Its efforts to do so have largely backfired—as demonstrated in places such as Australia, India, Japan, and Taiwan—and an increasingly aggressive China’s standing (as reflected in global polling) has declined precipitously.1
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/march/strategy-denial-western-pacific
