FOR ALL the focus on maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas, there is an even greater peril in Asia that deserves attention. It is the rising salience of nuclear weapons in the region. China’s military buildup—in particular its growing capabilities to blunt America’s ability to project effective force in the western Pacific—is threatening to change the military balance in the area. This will lead to a cascade of strategic shifts that will make nuclear weapons more central in both American and Chinese national-security plans, while increasing the danger that other regional states will seek nuclear arsenals of their own. Like it or not, nuclear weapons in Asia are back.

For seventy years, the United States has militarily dominated maritime Asia. During this era, U.S. forces could, generally speaking, defeat any challenger in the waters of the western Pacific or in the skies over them. Washington established this preeminence and has retained it in the service of a strategy motivated both by parochial interests such as protecting American territory and commerce as well as by more high-minded aspirations to foster the growth and development of prosperous, liberal societies within the region. Military primacy has been the crucial underwriter, the predicate of broader American strategy.

This primacy is now coming into question. China’s advancing “anti-access/area-denial” (A2/AD) capabilities as well as its expanding strike and power-projection capabilities will present a mounting challenge to the U.S. force posture in the Pacific region—and thus to America’s strategy for the Asia-Pacific as a whole. Beijing appears to be seeking to create a zone in the western Pacific within which the military power of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will be able to ensure that Chinese strategic interests are held paramount—in effect, to supplant the United States as the military primate in the region. The oft-cited DF-21D “carrier-killer” ballistic missile is only one small facet of this much broader Chinese effort, which encompasses the fielding of a whole network that integrates a range of increasingly high-quality platforms, weapons, sensors, and command, control and communications systems. Because of this effort, U.S. forces attempting to operate in maritime Asia will now have to struggle for dominance rather than simply assume it.

Indeed, anxiety about the relative military balance between the United States and China is building among the defense officials charged with monitoring it. As Frank Kendall, the Pentagon official with chief responsibility for developing and acquiring new military systems, wrote in a recent paper focused on the implications of China’s military buildup:

While the U.S. still has significant military advantages, U.S. superiority in some key warfare domains is at risk . . . U.S. Navy ships and western Pacific bases are vulnerable to missile strikes from missiles already in the inventory in China . . . The net impact is that China is developing a capability to push our operating areas farther from a potential fight, thereby reducing our offensive and defensive capacity . . . The Chinese are developing an integrated air defense system that puts U.S. air dominance in question, and in some regions, air superiority is challenged by 2020.

Kendall summarized his assessment with the judgment that

China is rapidly modernizing its forces and is developing and fielding strategically chosen capabilities that are designed to defeat power projection capabilities the U.S. depends upon. Technological superiority the U.S. demonstrated over 20 years ago, and which we have relied upon ever since, is being actively challenged.

Nor is Kendall an outlier in this assessment—rather, his view represents something like the evolving baseline understanding among defense officials and experts. Comparably informed and thoughtful defense leaders like Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work have said very similar things.

As a result, the United States is beginning to mount an effort to respond to China’s growing capabilities—for instance, through the Defense Department’s recently announced “Offset Strategy” initiative. The Pentagon rightly appears to be focused on maintaining American advantages in the effective projection of conventional military force even in the face of a resolute and highly capable opponent like Beijing. This goal stretches across procurement decisions, revisions to plans and doctrines, changes to deployment and basing, and attitudes toward the exploitation of technology. Outside commentators have tended to conflate this broad effort with the department’s laudable Air-Sea Battle initiative, which is clearly an important segment of the larger attempt to counter challenges to U.S. military superiority, but is still only a part of it. Ideally, this initiative will be successful and will allow the United States to maintain its traditional dominance in maritime Asia. But even if the Pentagon cannot wholly achieve this objective, maintaining even a partial edge in the military balance against China will give the United States valuable deterrent and coercive leverage in what will very likely be a fraught relationship with Beijing.

But achieving even this more modest aspiration is more a hope than a certainty. And the persistence of sequestration, the American political system’s unwillingness to decisively shift resources toward maintaining the military edge in Asia, and the abiding necessity or allure of involvement in other regions raise questions as to how reasonable this hope is. Thus, we cannot be sure how successful the United States will be in retaining its military edge in the region.

In fact, prudence suggests a more pessimistic assessment about the future balance between U.S. and Chinese military strength in the western Pacific. Such moderate pessimism stems not only from domestic political constraints, but also, more importantly, from the assessment that the Chinese economy, even if it slows further (as seems probable), is likely to keep growing significantly—along with the budget for the PLA, which has continued to grow at high levels even as China’s economy has already slowed. And as the Chinese economy continues to mature and advance, we may reasonably expect that the Chinese military will continue to become more technologically sophisticated, professional and capable of effectively conducting what the Chinese refer to as “warfare under informationized conditions”—that is, modern, high-tech war. This will inevitably put pressure on the enormous—and unusual—military advantages that the United States has enjoyed in recent decades.

Accordingly, the future military balance in the western Pacific will, at the very least, be far more even between the United States and China than was previously the case, and likely will become increasingly competitive. Over time, indeed, the balance may tip against the United States and its allies, at least in certain regions and with respect to particular contingencies about which we have traditionally cared. Take Taiwan. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense stated in 2013 that the United States would not be able to block a Chinese invasion of the island by 2020. Of course, one might ascribe this judgment to special pleading on the part of Taipei—except that Taiwan’s is not an isolated assessment; many defense experts share this view. Nor should we expect a shift in the balance with respect to Taiwan to be the end of this trend. Rather, if the United States fails to maintain its edge over China, Beijing is likely to be able to attain practical military superiority in areas of maritime Asia other than Taiwan, and over the long term perhaps well beyond it.

 

SUCH A development would have profound strategic consequences. The United States has seen an open and friendly order in maritime Asia as crucial to its interests at least since Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” opened Japan in the nineteenth century; since the Second World War, it’s seen its own military supremacy in the Pacific as the best way to secure and promote that order. If China can attain military dominance or even simply advantage in this area, the world’s most dynamic region, then U.S. interests as traditionally understood are likely to suffer, perhaps seriously. It will be Beijing rather than Washington that will serve as the ultimate arbiter of what is and is not acceptable in Asia. It is a reasonable assumption that such a power structure would be considerably less congenial to Washington’s interests—let alone those of U.S. allies—than the current order.

Assuming that the United States will not concede such regional hegemony to Beijing, that the United States and its allies will continue to have significant areas of tension and disagreement with an increasingly capable China, and that the United States will remain ready to use military force to defend or vindicate its and its allies’ interests in Asia, this means that the United States may come to blows with a power deploying military forces of roughly comparable and, in some circumstances, possibly superior effectiveness. In simpler terms, it means that the outcome of a conflict between the United States and China will be more uncertain and that, if current trends are not redressed, the United States might well ultimately find itself on the losing end of a major military engagement in the western Pacific.

This shift toward a more even military balance will lead to significant changes in the Asia-Pacific. It will likely make China more assertive, since Beijing will be more confident that resorting to military force could pay off for it in regional disputes it cares about, especially if a conflict can be kept relatively limited. This point should not be controversial: the notion that greater strength makes one more assertive and ambitious is well demonstrated, both in international politics and in everyday life. China’s rising assertiveness in its near seas in recent years has been fueled by the nation’s general sense of growing power as well as the expanding inventory of assets available to pursue its ambitions. For instance, China’s far more developed maritime and oil-drilling capabilities are playing a major role in Beijing’s increased pushiness in the South China Sea.