How To Beat China Without Really Trying
Reading Trump defense appointee Elbridge Colby's grand strategy book
The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Yale University Press, 2021. 384 pp.
When president-reelect Donald Trump appointed Elbridge A. Colby, a deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration, to serve as his Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Colby tweeted his intentions “to focus our defense policy on restoring peace through strength.” Because the position is one of six key civilian appointments that control the military, Colby’s opinions will matter greatly, both to the president and for defense policy. If his book is any indication, the defense policy of the second Trump administration will be almost exclusively focused on the threat of Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait.
To meet that threat, Colby proposes a strategy that deters Chinese aggression in the first place, that “does not ask of anyone, including China, anything they cannot nobly and with dignity give.” Rather than attempt to plan for a long war of attrition with China, Colby says the goal should be to deny China “military predominance” that would make Beijing the hegemon of Asia. Ideally, an America-led “anti-hegemonic coalition” should focus on winning “a systemic regional war.” This will require cutting back on American “legacy committments” in Europe and the Middle East. Colby was instrumental in the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy which called for a focus on Asia. Trump therefore joins the continuing line of presidents who have begun their terms of office with a desire to ‘pivot to Asia.’
In something approaching a mathematical proof, Colby makes a methodical argument for his strategy, which “minimizes US risk, commitment, and expense” to create a “credible and effective” deterrent to Chinese aggression. While America would be the “external cornerstone balancer” of this “anti-hegemonic coalition,” mutual defense responsibilities would be shared with regional partners.
“The victory mechanism of such a strategy is to provide enough confidence in American protection to enough regional states that they believe they can safely affiliate with the anti-hegemonic coalition, thereby making the coalition strong enough to prevent China from attaining regional predominance,” Colby writes. Instead of becoming the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific region, the United States would prefer that no single power dominates the region at all.
Colby explains why the most likely scenario in the Taiwan Strait is a series of surprise attacks (“fait accompli”) in which China seeks to overwhelm one potential enemy at a time (“focused and sequential”), seeking to divide enemy powers in order to conquer them. Beijing will see this as the most viable option for victory. Colby calls for a counter-strategy of denial: to achieve victory, China must be the one to occupy foreign soil; therefore Beijing bears the burden of escalation.
Furthermore, if the People’s Liberation Army cannot take and then hold territory, China will be defeated. The United States should therefore plan for a limited war that defends Taiwan by merely stopping or repulsing a Chinese invasion, Colby says. Such a strategy does not require a huge increase in force levels. The advantage in such a war, and “quite possibly a decisive one,” will instead go to “the side that prepares itself in accord with the better strategy for limited war.”
Even the target list can be limited. Colby’s strategy depends on what John Mearshimer called “the stopping power of water” to complicate Chinese ambitions for Taiwan. Despite being the largest fleet in the Pacific these days, the PLA Navy has only so many amphibious landing ships, for example, so they will immediately become the highest-value targets. Knock them out of action and Chinese victory options are limited accordingly.
To succeed at this strategy, the United States need not pre-position large, expensive new forces in the theater. Colby would instead position only enough forces on the soil of American partners that China “must attack [them] in great force” to succeed. This strategem, which Colby calls “the binding approach,” forces China to threaten or attack the regional states defending Taiwan, galvanizing them against China.
“The crucial task for the United States and the coalition is to present Beijing with a dilemma: to prevail in the focused war it seeks, Beijing must have to act in ways that will motivate coalition states to fight and fight hard and others to support them,” Colby writes. Every complication for Chinese victory helps to deter Chinese leadership. “Just as the Soviet Union never saw enough of an advantage to precipitating a war in Europe during the Cold War, true success would be for China to see how things would likely unfold and never risk war in the first place.”
Europe itself would be deprecated as an American theater of action. “The United States should remain engaged in Europe to ensure a favorable regional balance of power, but in a considerably narrower and more concentrated way than in Asia, because of the absence of a plausible regional hegemon in Europe,” Colby writes. Whatever Vladimir Putin’s ambitions against the West, he has so far failed to dominate Europe, indeed Russian power to intimidate Europe has slipped a great deal since Colby’s book was published in 2021. Rather than a fait accompi, the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine turned into a long, expensive war that has diminished Russian military power.
Writing before the assault on Kyiv, Colby said that America “should not agree to add Georgia or Ukraine to NATO because both are highly exposed to Russian attack while offering no meaningful advantage to the alliance that is remotely comparable to the costs and risks that their defense would impose on it.” One might make the simple counter-argument that Ukraine can already offer NATO 800,000 dead or wounded Russians. His argument is geopolitical, however; it is shaped by the geography that makes Ukraine vulnerable to Russian aggression, for Colby puts a premium on defensibility. “Put simply, adding a state as an ally should not require the United States to break or exhaust itself trying to defend it,” he writes.
“Sweden and Finland are a closer call,” however. Conveniently, both nations have joined NATO since 2022, and because of 2022. Their added strength now ensures that the defensive NATO alliance enjoys overwhelming conventional force superiority over Russia. He wonders “whether NATO should withdraw from the more vulnerable states in Eastern Europe, especially the Baltic states, that create demands on the US military while adding little to the alliance’s strength.” But the alliance is now stronger than it ever was, and in the wake of Putin’s new invasion of Ukraine, European members are finally heeding Trump and raising their defense spending levels. Maybe Europe can handle the defense of the Baltics?
For if China was to succeed in a fait accompli that conquered Taiwan, Colby would have the American anti-hegemonic coalition set out to re-conquer the island. Why is the American “quasi-alliance” with Taiwan so much more vital than the defense of the Baltics that Americans should sacrifice a great deal to restore Taiwanese sovereignty, but not theirs?
For that matter, the impasse over NATO membership for Ukraine could be solved with a second “anti-hegemonic coalition” of eastern European member-states. If Poland, Sweden, Finland, and the Baltics all signed mutual defense and aid treaties with Ukraine, Putin or his successor would risk a united counter-attack along his entire western flank if he tried another invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin would then risk enlarging a war by inviting NATO response if they attacked Ukraine’s NATO-member allies. The United States would of course provide intelligence and munitions, but in this arrangement, any direct American role in the conflict would be set back by an additional step. Why does Colby reserve all his creativity for defending Taiwan?
Colby would take “an ecumenical approach” to partnerships: “the United States and any anti-hegemonic coalition should not weight heavily factors unrelated to the core criteria of power and defensibility, such as ideology, religion, or ethnicity,” he writes. America should weigh the costs and risks of alliance against the possible benefits, be more selective on the basis of marginal utility, and find a happy space between undercommitting and overcommitting to the defense of allies. Every partner state will have their own level of trust that America will defend them against aggrression; Colby calls this “differentiated credibility.”
Colby is very conscious of the need for public acceptance of any such responsibility the United States undertakes. He rules out preventive wars which sap public support and consume resources. Only the most important military threats should recieve the Pentagon’s attention. “Calls to use military force for anything but these primary challenges should thus receive a highly skeptical review and generally be resisted,” he writes. While he acknowledges that “selective nuclear proliferation” against China may be necessary, South Korean or Japanese nukes should be the “last resort” for deterrence.
After all, he is trying to contain any possible war with China, restricting its size. “Restrictions on the ends sought during a war matter because, in the simplest terms, a limited war must leave the defeated with something, or else the losing side will have little reason to end the conflict,” Colby says. Again, by happy coincidence, Ukraine provides a testing-ground for his ideas: everyone seems to agree that Kyiv must lose territory in any peace agreement, but no one gives the to-be-defeated Ukraine any reason to agree to end the conflict.
In order to accept a peace agreement, a defeated state “must see itself as better off settling than continuing to fight; a nation is much less likely to agree to end a war if it believes its adversary is intent on overthrowing its government, annexing a large chunk of its territory, or threatening its very existence.” Colby would be generous with a defeated China, not threatening these outcomes, so as to not back Beijing into a corner from which they might lash out with nuclear force.
Meanwhile, overthrowing the Ukrainian government and annexing more Ukrainian territory are the actual stated goals of Russian aggression. If Moscow gets the ‘peace’ that Putin demands, Ukraine’s very existence will remain threatened into the foreseeable future, for the annihilation of Ukraine is in fact a sacred project, the most important of what Colby terms the “core goods” valued in the current Kremlin.
China “might be able to use brute force to seize part or even all of a coalition member’s territory, but since the attacker cannot defeat the rest of the coalition’s forces — which may include the victim’s remaining forces as well as those of its allies and partners — it must rely on some degree of coercion to convince those states not to try hard enough to take the territory back,” Colby writes. Putin has indeed frightened the Biden administration into prevarication, forestalling the liberation of Crimea and the Donbas just by rattling his nuclear saber.
To his credit, Colby does understand the necessity of arming Ukraine in order to deter Chinese aggression. Beijing has watched the conflict closely to get a sense of how America would respond to an attack on Taiwan. America’s defense industrial base ought to be our best strategic deterrent, but it has been neglected for decades, while for seven months last year, congressional politics interfered with the flow of ammunition and war material to Ukraine and halted efforts to enlarge those production capacities. China saw this evidence of weakness and had reason to doubt the American will to defend Taiwan, making war with China more likely.
Colby’s current employer, the Center for a New American Security, is a mainstream ‘think tank’ associated with the Democratic Party. The weaknesses of Elbridge Colby’s thesis are not original to himself. They are the inherited weaknesses of an American strategic culture which resolutely refuses to regard cultural issues as meaningful to strategy. In the real world, potential enemies and allies do not obey the logic of Washington, human geography is at least as important to victory as physical terrain, and the enemy always gets a vote on what the rules and limits will be.
