Abstract
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine confirmed that revived great-power competition has heightened the prospect of global conflict, while restoring the concept of deterrence to centre stage. The stakes in a conflict in East Asia, however, would be even higher than those in Ukraine. A war over Taiwan could bring the United States and China, the world’s two greatest powers, into a direct military conflict which would represent a contest for regional or global leadership and would be likely to draw other powers into the fight. Such a war – in which the nuclear question would be ever-present – can currently be described as ‘possible, avoidable, but potentially catastrophic’.
In this Adelphi book, Bill Emmott evaluates the diplomatic and deterrence strategies that countries in and outside the Indo-Pacific region are using to try to reduce the risk of that conflict occurring. This book examines these strategies in the light of the lessons of the Ukraine war and identifies yardsticks with which to gauge their potential effectiveness and sustainability. Our goal, Emmott argues, must be for all sides to regard such a US–China conflict as ‘inevitably catastrophic and therefore inconceivable’.
We are all deterrers now. But are we really serious about it in the Indo-Pacific, the place where it matters most? Have we truly appreciated what deterrence entails and what is at issue? The suspicion that gave rise to this Adelphi book is that the answer to the first question may be ‘yes’, but the answer to the second is ‘only in part’.
Having been a central element of strategy during the Cold War, deterrence faded from prominence during the first decade of the twenty-first century when non-state actors and rogue states rather than nuclear superpowers became the West’s principal adversaries, and a desire to replace deterrence with pre-emption took hold, primarily in the United States.Footnote1 To call the 1990s a ‘unipolar moment’ was an exaggeration tinged with some hubris, but it did capture the fact that a third world war was no longer a serious threat and that the US enjoyed overwhelming military predominance, making deterrence in its by-then traditional, nuclear form less relevant.Footnote2
Whatever it should be called, that moment is over. The revival of great-power competition has brought the prospect of global conflict, and with it a focus on deterrence, back to centre stage. Yet in its first big test, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, deterrence failed. One could argue that it was never really tried: after all, Russia had received only minor punishments after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. International life continued fairly normally for Russia, and it even hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2018. Nonetheless, plenty of efforts were made to discourage it from invading its neighbour, including economic engagement, diplomatic reassurance and warnings.
As we now know, whether one terms it deterrence, compellence or just coercive diplomacy, none of that discouragement worked and Russia went ahead in February 2022. It was not deterred by any fear of sanctions or isolation, nor by being told that it would thereby be breaking international law and the United Nations Charter, nor by evidence of the reach and quality of American intelligence-gathering. Nor was it deterred by the possibility that the West would respond to an invasion by expanding the training and provision of weapons to Ukraine in which Western countries had already been engaged since 2014. It is now clear that in the absence of any declared willingness by NATO forces to intervene, only a belief that Ukraine’s resistance would be strong and perhaps inflict serious costs would have been capable of deterring what was evidently a determined invader, and that President Vladimir Putin appears to have expected his forces to prevail in a matter of days. That view was buttressed by Russia’s willingness to threaten the use of nuclear weapons as a means to ensure that NATO leaders did not change their minds. Moreover, it is conventional to say that deterrence must come with reassurance, and yet all efforts at the diplomatic assurance of Putin that Russia’s security was not under threat also failed, perhaps having been doomed from the outset.
In fact, the biggest diplomatic assurance that Putin received acted as an encouragement, as it was an assurance from a ‘strategic partner’ that their two countries had shared goals in international affairs. It came three weeks before his invasion when, in Beijing on 4 February 2022, Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping signed a lengthy Joint Statement saying among many other things that Russia and China would ‘stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions [and] intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext’.Footnote3
That declaration made it clear that Russia and China consider it their right to have spheres of influence around their borders, and to follow their own definitions of ‘security and stability’, while themselves interfering in other sovereign countries should they see fit.
Such a statement was itself intended to have a deterrent effect, in this case chiefly on the West through the clear inference that two of the world’s three strongest nuclear powers were now acting in concert. It simultaneously served as a rallying cry to other countries that might wish to resist Western leadership or Western interpretations of international law and might like Chinese or Russian support in doing so. The challenge that any Western strategy would need to counter had thereby been magnified, even if this Russo-Chinese strategic partnership that knows ‘no limits’, according to the Joint Statement, has not yet taken the form of a military alliance.Footnote4
Thanks to that magnified challenge, deterrence – whether adjectivally enhanced as being ‘extended deterrence’ to protect allies under America’s nuclear umbrella or more newly as ‘integrated deterrence’ connecting multiple domains as well as multiple partners – is now the name of the game in US and wider Western policy in the Indo-Pacific.Footnote5 To put it brutally, deterrence failed in Europe, so it had better be employed more effectively around the Asian danger spots of Taiwan and North Korea.
The reasons for this are simple and stark. The first is that, as the Russo-Chinese strategic partnership makes clear, there are no neat regional boundaries or delineations where greatpower competition is involved. As Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida Fumio said in his opening keynote speech to the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2022, ‘Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow’, and by this he did not merely mean that one regional tragedy might be repeated elsewhere but rather that Europe and East Asia are now connected as one strategic space.Footnote6
The second reason is that the stakes in a conflict in East Asia, especially one over Taiwan, are even higher than those in Ukraine. In the current state of global rivalry, the incompatibility between the Chinese and American views of the status of that strategically located island – China sees ‘the status quo’ as entailing a move towards reunification; America and others see it as the avoidance of coercion – is an inherent source of instability. Such a war would be likely to bring the world’s two greatest powers into direct military conflict with one another, would be likely to represent a contest for regional and potentially global leadership, and would therefore stand a high chance of drawing other powers into the fight. This is not a new danger, nor one newly observed: in his 2019 Adelphi book Dangerous Decade: Taiwan’s Security and Crisis Management, for example, Brendan Taylor wrote that ‘the prospects for a Taiwan conflict are real and intensifying’ and that ‘they are not yet being treated with the seriousness nor the urgency that they deserve’.Footnote7
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed that, as have the also-intensifying US–China tensions. However, even that heightened seriousness retains elements of unreality, to which the so-far contained and conventional nature of the Ukraine war has perhaps contributed. Taylor’s warning that the next Taiwan crisis could readily ‘escalate into catastrophic conflict’ is still not driving the discussion as much as it should.Footnote8
Scholars and think tanks frequently come up with scenarios and war games in which a conflict over Taiwan remains contained and conventional.Footnote9 That is, to be sure, the hope of the potential invader. But the question must be asked: if the Chinese and US militaries ever do go into battle with one another, raining down missiles on each other’s bases, shooting down each other’s aircraft and sinking each other’s ships, as such scenarios assume, why should this war not be expected, as a core planning assumption, to escalate? Why would each side not expect, as soon as one opponent starts to feel that it is losing, that the most destructive weapons of all would come into play? After all, Russia has made regular threats to use nuclear weapons since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and while their potential use against Ukrainian forces has lost credibility over time, these threats have been thought sufficiently serious to deter NATO forces from direct intervention.
Is it not stunningly optimistic to assume, as wargamers and scenario workshoppers often seem to do, that China and the US could kill tens of thousands of each other’s troops, and potentially face conventional defeat and outcomes which at that point appear strategically existential, but somehow ignore nuclear weapons? In reality, the nuclear question would be ever present in the minds of both sets of political leaders as well as in public opinion in both countries. Just as the archetypically dark Cold War question concerned what might happen if the choice of trading Bonn or Paris for Boston were to present itself, so the inevitable question surrounding the US–China confrontation can be brutally boiled down to, on one side, whether capturing Taiwan would really be worth putting Beijing at risk, and on the other, whether defending Taipei would really be worth risking Los Angeles.
After all, it was just as possible to come up with scenarios during the Cold War in which American and Soviet troops fought limited conventional wars or even limited nuclear ones. However, the risk that such wars would not remain limited was too high and too potentially devastating for such imagined scenarios to be relied upon, so they were not. The worst-case scenario needed to be the one that dictated diplomacy and strategy.
The danger that is hiding in plain sight today is that this fundamental lesson of the Cold War is being overlooked or at best played down. Diplomacy and strategy, indeed, are in part engaged in a tussle over whether a so-called ‘Taiwan contingency’ should be thought of as a local issue – an ‘internal matter’ by the Chinese definition – or as merely an unwelcome, violent disturbance to ‘the status quo’ in the language of some others, or as a conflict that would be central to the US–China contest for strategic dominance and hence with global implications. There are arguments, to be sure, for all three interpretations. But it would be safest for all of us if the prevailing assumption, the one that drove strategy, were the worst of the three. For the likelihood of escalation, and with it catastrophe, is too high to be discounted.
Admittedly, all sides are pursuing strategies that can to differing degrees be described as ones of deterrence, which represent welcome measures to try to prevent a war from starting, and which can also be understood as trying to discourage adversaries from thinking that such a war could be swift or limited in nature. Such conventional means of deterrence can also be thought of as measures to try to convince all sides that a war could be won only through escalation into a major conflict, although the potentially nuclear nature of such a conflict is rarely mentioned, nor even hinted at. Nonetheless, one lesson of the Cold War is that conventional deterrence must be strong and credible enough to prevent any war starting that might make the nuclear sort become necessary. Strong conventional deterrence also makes war less likely to occur because it allows the defender a more credible range of strategic responses, rather than being faced with either acquiescence in the adversary’s encroachments or being forced to threaten nuclear apocalypse.
The US has sought, with considerable success, to build a network of allies and partners in the whole Indo-Pacific region – hence ‘integrated deterrence’ – a network that is largely labelled as sharing the task of deterrence and reinforcing it. It has also adjusted the posture and capabilities of its own forces in the region so as to try to convince China that the risks and costs of an invasion or blockade are too high to make the attempt worthwhile. Taiwan, too, has been pursuing a deterrence strategy by expanding its defence budget and seeking new military capabilities, attempting to convince the potential invader that it would be able to put up costly and sustained resistance. Japan most notably, but also Australia, the Philippines and European NATO countries including the United Kingdom, are all pursuing deterrence strategies, designed to be integrated with those of the US but also hopefully of value on their own.
Moreover, the desire to discourage Taiwan from declaring independence and the US from supporting such a move can also explain China’s increased military incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) and sea space in recent years, its use of intimidatory military exercises, and even the expansion of its nuclear arsenal. Together with the military build-up China has pursued in recent decades, such measures can be seen as efforts to discourage outside intervention in a conflict over Taiwan by making it clear that the ensuing war would be hard fought and potentially escalatory.
The purpose of this Adelphi book is to examine these deterrence strategies in the light of the lessons of the Ukraine war and to identify yardsticks with which to gauge their potential effectiveness and, equally important, sustainability over time. It will thereby seek to ‘join the dots’ of these various strategies in order to show the overall picture that is emerging, in terms of strengths but crucially also weaknesses. Conventional deterrence is certainly necessary, but it is not likely to be sufficient because of the powerful interests and political psychology that are involved. We must therefore also look at what needs to be built around and alongside these deterrence strategies to increase their chances of success and avoid catastrophe.
Accordingly, the book will take an unashamedly ‘bigpicture’ approach. The author is not someone steeped in the minutiae of missile balances, military acronyms and abbreviations, cross-strait relations or Chinese strategic documents. If anything, he is a Japan specialist rather than an Indo-Pacific analyst, though in a previous book, Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, he made an earlier attempt at painting the larger regional landscape.Footnote10 All those specialisms are highly valuable, but alongside the technical details, scenario workshops and textual analyses, it is in the bigger picture that many of the key, ultimately determining factors lie: in politics, psychology and grand strategy, above all.
The final, and perhaps biggest picture of all is that while the author does not believe that descriptions of today’s great-power rivalry as ‘a new Cold War’ are either accurate or meaningful, in today’s conditions there is a need to learn from and ideally reproduce two of the best and most important features of how the Cold War confrontation came to be managed. One was the value of political and strategic consistency over time, even as political parties and leaders change; the other was the value of a diplomatic process of dialogue and negotiations that focuses on the most critical issues, which are Taiwan, arms control and nuclear weapons, for it is only through such a process that anything like a mutual understanding of what is at stake is likely to arise.
Telling ourselves that convincing the US and China to discuss other issues, such as climate, trade or finance, will somehow build understanding and bridge the gaps between them is not just wishful thinking but also a dangerous evasion of reality. The danger is hiding in plain sight. Forcing each other to talk about the real dangers will be enormously difficult and may well take years to achieve, but failing to do so risks something far worse. As Brendan Taylor wrote in this series five years ago, this is a dangerous decade, but future decades promise to be just as dangerous, if not more so.
Notes
1 Lawrence Freedman’s book Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004) is the best guide this author has found to the rise and fall of this concept.
2 Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs, 1 January 1990, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1990-01-01/unipolar-moment.
3 President of Russia, ‘Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development’, 4 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770.
4 Ibid.
5 C. Todd Lopez, US Department of Defense, ‘Defense Secretary Says “Integrated Deterrence” Is Cornerstone of US Defense’, DOD News, 30 April 2021, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2592149/defense-secretary-says-integrated-deterrence-is-cornerstone-of-us-defense.
6 Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, ‘Keynote Address by Prime Minister Kishida Fumio at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue’, 10 June 2022, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/101_kishida/statement/202206/_00002.html#:~:text=I%20will%20lay%20out%20a,cyber%20security%2C%20digital%20and%20green.
7 Brendan Taylor, Dangerous Decade: Taiwan’s Security and Crisis Management, Adelphi 470 (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS, 2019), p. 13.
8 Ibid.
9 See Henry Boyd, Franz-Stefan Gady and Meia Nouwens, ‘Deterrence Failure in a Cross-strait Conflict: The Role of Alliances, Military Balance and Emerging Technology’, IISS Scenario Workshop Report, February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/globalassets/pages---content--migration/blogs/research-paper/deterrence-failure-in-a-crossstrait-conflict-report.pdf; and Mark F. Cancian, Matthew Cancian and Eric Heginbotham, ‘The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan’, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 9 January 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasiontaiwan. Of course, there are also a number of reports or studies that do consider nuclear use (sometimes even advocating nuclear first use). See, for example, Matthew Kroenig, ‘Deliberate Nuclear Use in a War Over Taiwan: Scenarios and Considerations for the United States’, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council, September 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Kroenig-Deliberate-Nuclear-Use-in-a-War-over-Taiwan.pdf.
10 Bill Emmott, Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade (London: Allen Lane, 2008).