The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) conducted an online panel discussion March 6 with leading experts on China to address efforts by the United States and its allies to confront Chinese aggression.
The event, "Deterring a Cross-Strait Conflict: Beijing's Assessment of Evolving U.S. Strategy," was supported by the CSIS's Interpret: China project and used insights learned from newly translated Chinese documents to discuss the U.S. deterrence strategy in the Indo-Pacific region and in the Taiwan Strait, the CSIS reported.
The panel moderator was Jude Blanchette, the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies. The panelists were Elbridge Colby, co-founder and principal at The Marathon Initiative; Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States; Kristen Gunness, senior policy researcher at the RAND corporation; Michael Mazarr, senior political scientist at the RAND corporation, and Sean Monaghan, a visiting fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the CSIS.
Monaghan said in the discussion that understanding the translated documents "is going to be crucial for us taking a sophisticated approach to the challenge of our time," and that what struck him was the assumption that U.S. deterrence is evolving into coercion, which he said was incorrect.
“The most dangerous scenario here is a cycle of commitment where both sides feel they have to prove their credibility,” Monaghan said.
Gunness said she "wanted to just pull the thread a little bit" on documents about U.S. and its allies, "because that is something that of course the United States has been focusing on with the Indo-Pacific strategy."
She said the documents' authors made several mentions of the U.S.-Japan statements on Taiwan and that the possibility that Japan is incorporating Taiwan into its defense strategies is concerning to China.
Analysts who write about U.S. defense policy emphasize that the U.S. seeks to bolster deterrence, Glaser said.
“They maintain that the U.S. is worried that the relative decline in its conventional deterrence capabilities could encourage China to make reckless moves. It might increase the risk of Chinese miscalculation,” she said.
Mazarr said he was struck by a "sort of a continuing theme of strategic self-righteousness that appears in the articles" and that the U.S. is "causing the problems."
Although China's stance is expected, Mazarr said, it also is a "continuing theme" that the U.S. is trying to stop China from its legitimate interests and achieving its "rightful future."
"That seemed to me to indicate some some worrisome possibilities for the effectiveness of our signalling and deterrence, because it could just sort of, you know, run up against a wall of this sense of self righteousness," Mazarr said. "So then in a crisis, for example, it wouldn't be a calculation of what the military balance is. Chinese leaders would just believe they're right."
Glaser said it is unlikely that China's president Xi Jinping has read the articles, which she described as lacking analytical pieces without any real "action items."
She said that articles such as these provide insight into what points are being shared and debated in China.
"And if the United States thinks that there is a real misunderstanding of something that the U.S. is doing," Glaser said, "reading these articles then gives us the opportunity, not only government, but also experts, to go back to the Chinese and say, you know, this particular point is a misunderstanding of U.S. policy."
“What I can infer from a lot of this is that the Chinese think there’s a sort of inexorable move away from, you know, the One-China policy, whatever exactly, that means,” Colby said.
The U.S. is in a dilemma in which it makes warnings about how quickly China might act. China’s building up its military capability traps the U.S. into a situation where any action other than rapid military reinforcement with Taiwan is seen as weak, Mazarr said.
“As long as that dynamic persists, I think it'll continue to undermine the basis for peace and moving away from it as a bridge indicated from a political standpoint would be extremely difficult,” he said.
