Chinese leaders take delight in the results of wargames such as the one conducted recently at CSIS, which showed that America could win in the Taiwan Strait but only at a terrible cost.
Editor’s Note: These remarks were delivered at the U.S. Naval War College Foundation Newport Summer Symposium, panel on Conventional Deterrence, August 19, 2022.
The topic of this panel is conventional deterrence vis-à-vis China, so I thought it would be fun and maybe even enlightening to try some role reversal and consider how China thinks about deterring America through conventional means. We sometimes seem to assume that we can deter an antagonist for all time if we make its leadership a believer in our power and resolve. And so we might, for awhile. But dynamism pervades strategic competition. Contenders grapple constantly for strategic advantage, trying to one-up each other.
The red team tries to deter us even as we try to deter the red team. So it’s worth looking at deterrence through their eyes. If I’m Xi Jinping & Co., how do I deter U.S. intervention in the Taiwan Strait, the hotspot that dominates the news of late?
Well, if I were Xi, I would crack open my volume of Clausewitz. While the Prussian grandmaster was writing about open war, he also hands us tools for thinking about peacetime deterrence. The Chinese Communist Party leadership subscribes to his logic but carries it to the nth degree. For example, founding chairman Mao Zedong repurposed the Clausewitzian definition of war as a continuation of political intercourse carried out with the addition of violent means. Mao proclaimed that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed.
This all-consuming, bloody-minded outlook possesses party leaders to the present day. It manifests itself in China’s bullying “wolf warrior” diplomacy, in its doctrine of “three warfares” to shape the peacetime strategic environment, in its predatory lending, and in everything else China does to bolster its standing in Asia and the world.
We and our allies and friends dream of perpetual peace; for China war is perpetual, regardless of whether contenders are slinging gunfire or missiles at one another or not. This is what we’re up against.
kaynak;https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/08/how-does-china-deter-america-in-the-taiwan-strait/