[NSP Research Report] US-China Maritime Competition and Prospects for the Indo-Pacific Security Order

Abstract

This study aims to grasp the current state of US-China power competition in military terms and identify the key factors influencing the competitive structure, and based on this, to forecast future developments by examining the strategic discussions and military buildup trends of the US and China. To this end, this study poses the following three questions. First, what are the characteristics of the foreign and maritime strategy discussions articulated by the national leaders and policymakers of the US and China? Second, what are the characteristics of the military buildup and military strategy of the US and China, particularly the buildup and operation of naval forces being deployed in the Asia-Pacific region? Third, can the bilateral security consultations or multilateral maritime security regimes in which the US and China are engaged control the naval buildup and potential for conflict between them? What responses are countries situated between the US and China showing, and what foreign policy should South Korea pursue? The conclusions drawn from the answers to these questions suggest that both positive and negative aspects exist in US-China relations, and the extent to which one side exerts a more dominant influence appears to be significantly influenced by the composition of the leadership, grand strategy, and their perceptions and interpretations of the other's strategy and behavior. As a middle power closely connected with both countries in all aspects—political, military, and economic—South Korea must concentrate its diplomatic and military capabilities to enable both countries to interpret and perceive each other's strategies in a more positive and moderate direction, and this will be a crucial indicator of the potential success of middle power diplomacy.

Main Text

I. Introduction

Existing studies on the foreign and military strategies of the United States and China tend to view the strategies of the two countries as reflecting differences in traditional culture, specifically the cultural differences between the West and the East. For example, Aaron Friedberg, citing observations by the French thinker François Jullien, explains that Western foreign and military strategies tend to set goals and then devise means and methods to achieve them, whereas Eastern strategies are relatively ambiguous in goal-setting and emphasize situational context (Friedberg 2011, 123-124). Henry Kissinger likens Western strategy to a chessboard, where the goal is to corner the opponent into an inescapable position to achieve decisive and total victory, while Chinese strategy is compared to the game of Go, where the objective is to delay, gain control of the periphery, and accumulate relative advantages (Kissinger 2011, 23-25). Professor Liu Mingfu of China's National Defense University also points out that while Western strategy tends to emphasize decisive engagement at critical points, as presented in Clausewitz's On War, Chinese military strategy, as emphasized in Sun Tzu's Art of War, focuses on subduing the opponent through stratagem and diplomacy rather than military victory, thus possessing a defensive character (Liu 2010, 99).

While cultural and traditional factors are not absent from influencing a nation's foreign strategy, an emphasis on the differences in strategic culture between East and West, or between China and the US, risks falling into the fallacy of cultural determinism. Fundamentally, a nation's foreign strategy is more deeply influenced by the scale of its national power resources and its resulting position in the international order. For instance, as Germany's national power resources and international standing increased in the late 19th century, Germany openly pursued a strategy of seeking a "place in the sun" in the international order, departing from the national strategy of the Bismarck era. Around the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War, as Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and pursued the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, intellectuals such as those from the Kyoto School proposed discourses that sought Japan's mission in world history and justified its rise in international standing, moving away from the international cooperationism of the Taisho Democracy period (see Kosaka Masanori, Nishitani Keiji, Takayama Iwao, Suzuki Shigetaka 1943). In other words, a nation's foreign strategy is not fixed by cultural factors but can change with shifts in its national power status. When a nation rises to the status of a great power in the international order, its foreign strategy is likely to become more active and offensive.

The international order, which exhibited a unipolar structure led by the United States after the Cold War concluded with its victory, has faced a turning point in its systemic change since the mid-1990s due to China's rapid rise in national power. China, which emerged as the world's second-largest economy as of 2010, has been narrowing the gap with the United States by increasing its defense budget by more than 10% annually. In light of this trend of economic and military buildup in China, a reversal of national power levels between the US and China is projected from the mid-2020s onwards. Around 2010, as China's economic and military power rose to the second-highest level in the world after the United States, discussions seeking changes in foreign strategy appear to have become actively prevalent within China.

Whether the rising power, China, will accept the existing US-led international order and exhibit a status quo-oriented tendency, or challenge it and adopt a status quo-altering stance, has become a matter of intense interest for international relations scholars. Amidst the indication of these two tendencies in combination, significant differences in positions regarding the maritime order in the Asia-Pacific region have become apparent between the US and China, particularly since the 2010s, and competition in military power deployment in this region is also emerging. China is strengthening its territorial claims over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Islands in Chinese) in the East China Sea and the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and enhancing its maritime capabilities to defend them. In response, the US perceives China's military activities as an anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy, advocates a rebalancing strategy towards the Asia-Pacific, and is deploying over 60% of its naval and air forces to the region to support allied and partner nations in the region engaged in territorial disputes with China.

Amidst the confrontational dynamic between the US and China, realist scholars argue for the inevitability of armed conflict between the two, applying the theory of "Thucydides' Trap," which the ancient Greek historian Thucydides observed in the war between Sparta and Athens, suggesting that when a rising power's strength increases, armed conflict with the existing great power cannot be avoided (Allison 2015; Rosecrance & Miller 2015). In contrast, other scholars emphasize the necessity of a high level of cooperation and co-evolution between the US and China (Kissinger 2011; Liu Yang 2015). Indeed, what will be the future trajectory of this strategic competition and military buildup between the US and China across the Pacific in the 21st century?... (Continued)

Author

Professor at the Graduate School of National Security, National Defense University. Graduated from the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Yonsei University, received a Master's degree in Political Science from Seoul National University, and a Ph.D. in International Politics from the University of Tokyo. Instructor at the Korea Military Academy. He has served as a policy advisor to the National Security Council, a research fellow at the Korea-Japan New Era Joint Research Committee, a consultant to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a visiting scholar at Harvard University, chairman of the Security and Defense Division of the International Political Science Association, and dean of the Department of Military Strategy at the Graduate School of National Security, National Defense University. His main research areas are Japanese politics and foreign policy, and East Asian international relations. His books and edited volumes include "Introduction of Japan's Collective Self-Defense and the Korean Peninsula" (2016, co-authored), "Comparative Military Strategy" (2014, co-authored), "The Birth of the Navy and Modern Japan" (2014), "Challenges and Tasks of International Security in the 21st Century" (2011, co-authored), "International Politics of Security" (2010, co-authored), "The Third Japan" (2008), and "Japanese Politics" (2007, co-authored).