Challenging the US is a historic mistake

Like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, today’s China is a rising power determined to dominate its region and convinced that American strength is waning. It runs the risk of experiencing a similar fate if it attacks Taiwan.

A soldier holds a Chinese flag during joint military exercises of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in Kyrgyzstan in 2016. Picture: AFP

Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping rests on certain basic assumptions: that in a just world, China should be hegemonic in East Asia, the centre of a system in which the other regional powers pay their respect and take direction from China, as was the case for two millennia prior to the 19th century; that regions once considered by Beijing to have been part of China should be “reunified” with it; and that a revived China should have at least an equal say in setting the norms and rules of international life. These goals are achievable, Xi asserts, because the world is undergoing “great changes unseen in a century”, namely, the “great rejuvenation” of Chinese power and the decline of American power. “Time and momentum are on our side,” according to Xi.

There is no denying China has acquired substantial global power and influence in recent decades. Even if this is “peak China”, as some suggest, it is already East Asia’s economic hegemon and, were it not for the US, would likely become the region’s political and military hegemon as well (though perhaps not without a conflict with Japan). Left to itself, a modernising China could one day dominate its neighbours much as a unified, modernising Germany once dominated Europe and a modernising Japan once dominated China and the rest of East Asia. Those powers also believed that “time and momentum” were on their side, and in many respects they were right.

Yet those examples should give Chinese leaders pause, for both Japan and Germany, while accomplishing amazing feats of rapid expansion for brief periods of time, ultimately failed in their ambitions for regional hegemony. They underestimated both the actual and potential power of the US. They failed to understand that the emergence of the US as a great power at the beginning of the 20th century had so transformed international circumstances that longstanding ambitions of regional hegemony were no longer achievable. At this moment of high tension over Taiwan and the Chinese spy balloon detected last week over the US, Xi runs the risk of making the same historic mistake.

The world entered a new phase when the US emerged as a great power. As Theodore Roosevelt observed in 1900, the US, due to its “strength and geographical situation”, had become “more and more the balance of power of the whole globe”. This was no metaphor. As Germany discovered in World War I, the US could determine the outcome of any major regional conflict by bringing its vast wealth, population and productive capacity to bear on one side or the other. Although the Germans correctly calculated their military and economic superiority over their neighbours, the additional millions of fresh American troops and billions of dollars of supplies made their situation untenable. As one top German general said: “We cannot fight the whole world.”

In World War II, Germany and Japan may have correctly judged their chances of success against their regional opponents. By early 1942, more than half the planet’s productive capacity was under the control of the Axis powers – Germany, Japan and Italy. Yet even then the entry of the US into the war marked the beginning of the end for all three powers and their regimes. As an exasperated Hitler observed, the Americans and British together had “the world at their disposal”. In addition to America’s size, wealth and productive capacity, it enjoyed something close to invulnerability from foreign invasion. Hitler once remarked that Germany had as much a chance of conquering America as America had of conquering the moon, and he admitted soon after the US entered the war that he had no idea how to defeat it.

As Winston Churchill put it after Dunkirk, the British would fight on until “in God’s own time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old”.

Hitler promised to leave “America for the Americans” if the US would just leave “Europe for the Europeans”, which was to say, for Germany.

For the first decade and a half after the end of World War I the US stepped away from direct involvement in Europe, the European powers did indeed try to settle their own problems in the only way left to them – by accommodating the rising power and growing ambitions of Germany.

Appeasement ended after 1938 not just because Hitler reneged and took the rest of Czechoslovakia but because it became clear the Americans, led by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, were changing their minds about the importance of Europe. Even this flicker of hope was enough to make them resist. Hitler blamed the US both for Poland’s rejection of his territorial demands in 1939 and for Britain and France’s decision to declare war after he invaded.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Atlantic Charter meeting aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales.

In both world wars, the aggressors believed the US would not try to stop them. Such miscalculations were understandable. The American military in both 1917 and after 1939 was not remotely prepared for industrial warfare on a global scale. In 1917 the Americans could not deploy more than 25,000 troops abroad for any length of time and lacked a navy capable of operating with effect in both the Pacific and Atlantic theatres. In 1939 the Luftwaffe had 8000 new aircraft; the US had 1700 mostly outdated planes. The German army had 2000 new tanks; the US 325, many of World War I vintage. Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese Navy had more and better warships than anything in America.

Nor did the US in 1939 possess the industrial plant required to boost weapons production quickly. Any significant build-up would require retooling factories and a transformation of the national economy that would take at least two years. In any case, the neutrality legislation that barred the US from even embargoing an aggressor persisted well into 1939. “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?” Hitler remarked.

Few imagined the US of 1939 would become the US of 1942, producing weapons and materiel at a rate that defied past experience. Between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1945, American shipyards produced 141 aircraft carriers, eight battleships, 807 cruisers, destroyers and destroyer escorts, and 203 submarines. Carmakers and others converted assembly lines to produce 88,410 tanks and self-propelled guns, 257,000 artillery pieces, 2.4 million trucks, 2.6 million machine guns and 41 billion rounds of ammunition, along with 170 aircraft per day for a total of 324,750 over the course of the war.

And who could have anticipated the furious blood lust that seized Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor that turned a generally pacifist America into a bloody-minded America.

Chinese leaders today may be making the same error as past aspiring hegemons. And China, for all its growing might, starts from a less formidable position. The US, its allies and partners (which include most of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and others) produce more than half the world’s wealth, while China and Russia together produce about 20 per cent.

The Chinese military, though large and growing, also remains untested by battle and Vladimir Putin’s military has not matched its reputation.

China has also begun its drive for regional hegemony from a much weaker starting point. It does not even control all the territory in the region it regards as its own: notably, Taiwan and some islands in the East and South China Seas. It is surrounded by powerful neighbours – an India that is about to surpass China in population; a Japan that has the third-largest economy in the world and could become a powerful nuclear state overnight; a South Korea that wields substantial economic and military power; and, of course, Australia. All of these countries are fearful of China’s rising power and are either allied to the US or look to it to help defend themselves.

Putin, facing similar obstacles in Europe, has discovered the resilience of the American-led system and his neighbours’ willingness to resist superior Russian power when protected by it. Would the people of Ukraine, for all their courage and heroism, still be fighting Russia without the support of the US and its allies?

Beijing faces a parallel problem in Taiwan. For most of the past three decades governments in Beijing have hoped the people of Taiwan would gradually yield and agree to unification with the mainland. Instead, the Taiwanese have been able to defy Chinese pressure because of the support and commitments they receive from the US. The Chinese are bitter about this. They believe the “One China” policy, dating from the Nixon administration, was supposed to reduce American support for Taiwan to the point where the Taiwanese would feel they had to accept Beijing’s offer of union. Things have not turned out that way. Nazi Germany defeated France, the strongest land power in Europe at the time; China has not been able to compel a small, isolated island less than one-50th its size to knuckle under.

Even if the Chinese did succeed in forcing Taiwan to “reunite”, either by military assault or naval blockade, would China then be in a position to exercise hegemony across East Asia? Or might that be the beginning of the end for this Chinese regime? The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent destruction of American forces in The Philippines and the western Pacific were astonishing victories over the US, but they were also the beginning of the end for Imperial Japan. Beijing may well be able to take Taiwan, and the US, typically slow to prepare and respond, may not be able to prevent it. But what then?

Perhaps Xi believes the US, Japan and the other powers in the region will simply adjust to the new reality. Many Americans may now think the same. There would certainly be voices in the US calling for restraint. But, while an attack on Taiwan would not have the same effect on Americans as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US is already very anxious about the threat of China, even when an attack on Taiwan is only prospective. It would be foolish for the Chinese to assume such an attack would not prompt the American public to support a far more aggressive approach.

Whether the ensuing conflict is hot or cold, China would have to expect to face the full weight of the American-led liberal world order. Japan, which has already modified its pacifist constitution to allow greater military co-operation with the US, would likely militarise further and might even start producing nuclear weapons. India would become more concerned about China, as would all of China’s neighbours other than Russia. Even Europe is likely to view a Chinese act of aggression as yet another threat to the democratic order it is defending in Ukraine. And all will look to the US.

Xi may believe American power has declined dramatically but, as Putin has discovered, the contrary is true. The ability of the American-led order to defend itself is far greater than it was in the first half of the 20th century. In 1917 and 1939, the US had no overseas allies; today it has more than 50 allies and strategic partners across the globe. Prior to 1945, the US had no significant overseas military presence outside the western hemisphere; now it has the world’s only true blue-water navy and military bases throughout the world.

In the 1930s the American peacetime military was incapable of taking on other great powers; now it has a large, highly equipped and battle-tested force superior to all other militaries. And it exercises, with its rich allies, a remarkable degree of control over the global economy, with sanctions and other financial weapons that did not exist until the last three decades.

Is the US still able to outproduce an adversary as it did in the two world wars and during the Cold War with the Soviet Union? We don’t know what a more fully mobilised 21st-century America would look like, but there is reason to think it would be formidable. This year the US will spend less than 4 per cent of GDP on defence; in the Reagan years it spent just under 7 per cent. If the US spent that now on the military, it would amount to $2.3 trillion, more than the $1 trillion it spends today.

Today, the technological superiority of American weaponry on the battlefield is evident in Ukraine. It’s possible the Chinese could surpass the US in innovation and development in an all-out, head-to-head competition, but it seems unlikely.

Are the American people up to a major confrontation with another great power? It would be dangerous for a potential adversary to assume they are not. Whatever condition the American political system may be in, it is not appreciably worse than it was during the 1930s. That, too, was a deeply polarised America, including on the question of whether to intervene in the world’s conflicts. If ever there could be a cure for American political polarisation, a conflict with China would be it.

Can it be worth it for Xi to bring on such a confrontation? Consider Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine. Even if Russia were to prevail – which looks increasingly unlikely – Ukraine’s neighbours would arm themselves to the teeth, and a new iron curtain would fall along the western borders of Ukraine. Putin’s objective of regaining Russian hegemony in eastern and central Europe would likely be unreachable.

A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would pose the same problems. Beijing might achieve a significant strategic victory, but it would alarm the world, pushing American allies into a closer embrace with Washington and frightening the American public into an all-out effort to contain and weaken China.

China’s fundamental problem, after all, is not Taiwan’s continuing de facto independence. It is the unfavourable configuration of power in the world, of which Taiwan’s defiance is only a symptom. The Chinese will likely always chafe at the liberal global hegemony American power sustains. They will be uncomfortable relying for the security of their shipping on the goodwill of the US Navy. They will be unhappy having their historic ambitions frustrated. China is the latest “have not” great power. Like Germany and Japan in the years leading up to World War II, it wants vast wealth and power, a large sphere of influence, control of the seas and a seat at the head table setting the rules of international affairs.

But what Xi wants and what China can have are two different things. China is succumbing to a common malady of rising powers – an inability to be satisfied with “good enough”.

Under Otto von Bismarck, Germany was a satisfied power, likely to become the hegemon of Europe simply by being the continent’s biggest economy and most populous nation. Indeed, he feared any further German expansion or signs of ambition would lead the other European powers to gang up against it. His strategy was to balance Germany’s competitors against one another, and he was content to let Britain rule the seas and to preserve a rough balance of power in Europe with Russia and France.

The next generation of German leaders had greater ambitions, however, commensurate with their greater power. And they feared they would be prevented from their fair share of global influence by Britain, France and Russia. Fear of being contained and denied drove Germany to precisely the end it most feared. As historian Michael Geyer describes it, “a catastrophic nationalism” led Germans into a “real-life disaster in order to avoid mythical catastrophe”.

Japan pursued much the same tragic course. The Japanese had accomplished amazing feats by the end of the 19th century. From a position of near complete isolation, Japan emerged after the Meiji revolution in the late 19th century as the strongest power in East Asia, defeating China in 1895 and Russia a decade later.

But younger generations of Japanese leaders were not satisfied. The Japan that emerged from World War I was stronger than ever but uncomfortably dependent on the two Anglo-Saxon powers. Many Japanese believed their country could not keep up in the competition, win the respect it deserved and acquire the land it needed to expand unless it became an empire. Japan’s ambitions were not unreasonable for a rising power; it just turned out those ambitions could not be accomplished without conflict with the US.

Modern Chinese thinking is not so different. China’s leadership sees further growth, power and expansion as necessary to its survival. They believe the US and other powers seeking to constrain China are bent on its destruction – or, more specifically, on the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party. The goal of the US and its allies, Xi told a party conference early in his tenure, is “to vie with us for the battlefields of people’s hearts and for the masses, and in the end to overthrow the leadership of the CCP and China’s socialist system”.

Ideology is now also a major obstacle to China’s further “unification”. China’s crackdown on democratic institutions and forces in Hong Kong has greatly increased Taiwan’s hostility to the idea of One China, just as US support encourages the Taiwanese to resist Beijing’s pressures. The two together are a disaster for Chinese ambitions.

Can Xi reconcile himself to these limits, to a world that will continue to be defined by the liberal hegemony of the US?

The Japanese faced this dilemma in 1941. By that point, leading Japanese military officials believed ultimate victory against the US was unlikely. Yet the option of backing down and accepting “Little Japan” was too humiliating. It meant giving up the dream of a new Japanese-led Asian order. For prime minister Hideki Tojo, as for other Japanese leaders in 1940 and 1941, war was more honourable than accepting an American-imposed peace, even a losing war.

As Tojo put it: “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes and” – in the Japanese expression for taking the plunge – “jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu (temple).”

Xi, too, may decide to take the leap. If so, he is likely to join Vladimir Putin, the Soviets, and the Axis leaders of World War II in bringing a tragedy upon his people and the world.

The Wall Street Journal

Robert Kagan is the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. His new book is The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (Knopf).