Ever since the defeat of Japan in World War II nearly 80 years ago, the United States has been the preeminent military power in East Asia. Today China is on the verge of matching or even eclipsing the U.S. military’s presence in the region, having marshaled its newly acquired wealth and technological prowess to expand the scale and capabilities of its armed forces.
The military balance between the U.S. and China in Asia is “very delicate and trending in an unfavorable direction in this decade for the U.S. and its allies,” Elbridge Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative, a policy-research organization, and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, told me. “We should regard ourselves in a dead-heat race against an incredibly formidable competitor and take nothing for granted.”
The implications for American security and global influence are immense. The U.S. has not confronted a potential adversary that is so close a peer in military strength or industrial capacity since the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and has not actually fought one since it battled the Axis powers in World War II. As China’s relationship with Russia deepens, Washington must also worry about fighting two nuclear powers simultaneously on opposite sides of the world.
A few years ago, the possibility that the U.S. and China could come to blows in the near term seemed far-fetched. That is no longer the case, as tensions have been rising over the status of Taiwan. A leaked memo recently grabbed headlines with a quote from Michael Minihan, a U.S. Air Force general, arguing that war with China could erupt in 2025. Hopefully, such predictions will remain hypothetical, because a war with China would be a catastrophe for both sides, win or lose.
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But war is not the only concern. American military dominance in the western Pacific has underpinned the American economic and security system in East Asia. A shifting balance of military power in the region could strain American alliances by raising doubts about Washington’s ability or willingness to protect its Pacific partners. Washington would then struggle to sustain the region’s liberal order against intensifying Chinese pressure.
Beijing may be counting on exactly this. Sam Roggeveen, a former senior strategic analyst at Australia’s top intelligence agency, says that China’s leaders are banking on the United States to “eventually reduce its commitment to its allies in Asia, and at that point China will have a force available … to exploit that gap, and China itself becomes the dominant power.”
China’s ascent as a military power is therefore concerning not only because of the near-term risk of conflict over Taiwan, but also because it raises fundamental questions about America’s role in the region and the world. As China’s military might mounts, Washington will need to commit ever greater resources to maintain American primacy. The balance of power in the Pacific will, in the end, be determined as much by political will as by weapons systems. Will the U.S. have the fortitude to preserve its leadership in Asia? Or will it lose out to a more determined China?
The fact that Washington faces such a dilemma is an unfortunate irony. China has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the U.S. security system in Asia, which ensured the regional stability that made possible the income-boosting flows of trade and investment that propelled the country’s economic miracle.
Today, however, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping claims that China’s model of modernization is an alternative to “Westernization,” not a prime example of its benefits. Chinese leaders have come to see the chain of American bases and alliances in the region as a cage containing the country’s rightful rise into Asia’s premier power. (In a sense, Beijing feels the same way Washington would if a potential adversary had troops stationed in Canada and Mexico.)
That’s why China’s top leaders routinely affirm the attainment of a “world class” military as a key pillar of the nation’s great “rejuvenation,” or the restoration of its historic wealth and power. And China has invested heavily in building such a military. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Beijing’s military budget reached $219 billion in 2022, more than double what it was a decade earlier (though it is still less than a third of U.S. spending during the same year). With that investment, China has undertaken what Colby asserted is “an unprecedented, historic military buildup that is the largest since the Cold War, possibly since the Second World War.”
China’s navy has already overtaken its American counterpart to become the world’s largest by number of ships. According to the Pentagon’s latest assessment of China’s military, the Chinese air force—the world’s third-largest—“is rapidly catching up to Western air forces and continues to modernize with the delivery of domestically built aircraft,” including a bomber that will enhance its ability to use nuclear weapons. As of 2021, Beijing was constructing three fields with at least 300 new intercontinental-ballistic-missile silos, while its efforts to upgrade the country’s nuclear capabilities “exceed previous modernization attempts in both scale and complexity,” according to the report. The Pentagon projects that China will expand its warhead stockpile from some 400 today to 1,500 by 2035.
Technologically, too, the Chinese have been steadily whittling away at American advantages. Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies, wrote to me that China has made a priority of developing missiles to target ships and aircraft that fly faster and farther than similar U.S. weapons, such as land-launched ballistic missiles. Though China’s advantage is small, he added that “the bottom line is that we are engaged in a near peer or peer competition, and we are unlikely to dominate in all areas” of missile systems. The U.S. intelligence community was flabbergasted after China tested a high-tech hypersonic missile in 2021.
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The Chinese are amassing this force in the exact theater where war is most likely to break out—in maritime East Asia, probably around Taiwan—which is also not far from their home base. That location gives Beijing a substantial advantage. China does not (yet) project military power globally. Its interests, and its military assets, are largely concentrated in East Asia. By contrast, the U.S., as a global superpower with commitments all over the world, keeps only a portion of its military forces in Asia. In the event of a war, says John Culver, a retired CIA analyst who once served as Washington’s top intelligence officer for East Asia, “for the U.S., the game is to move what it doesn’t have in the theater and to get it there to be relevant to the fight, whereas China starts with this hypothetical war in your front yard.”
The United States faced a similar situation in the Pacific during World War II, when the Navy had to project power far from home and deep into hostile territory. Chinese strategists have prepared to counter just such a projection of force, or, at the very least, to raise its cost. China has developed advanced missile systems, for instance, that can smash U.S. bases in the region and target American aircraft carriers steaming across the Pacific at great distances from the Chinese mainland, potentially putting them out of action before they can make a difference in the fight.
Of course, hardware alone, even if crammed with technology, doesn’t automatically convey a military advantage. And it is difficult to really know how effectively Chinese generals and soldiers would deploy and operate the new weaponry. The People’s Liberation Army hasn’t fought a war since China attacked Vietnam in 1979 (and even then, its performance was hardly overwhelming). Xi began a significant reform of the PLA in late 2015 aimed at improving its ability to stage large-scale joint operations with its varied branches. In theory, this program would make the PLA a more formidable fighting force. But Culver cautions that Beijing is only about halfway through this process, and therefore “you kind of still have your pants around your ankles if you’re the PLA.”
Still, China’s military expansion has completely altered the rules of war in East Asia. “Back in the mid-1990s, when we had a Taiwan Strait crisis, all we had to do is show up with one or two carrier strike groups, and China had no answer to that,” Culver told me. “China now has many answers to that.”
For now, the U.S. may still have an edge. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recently conducted an extensive war game and concluded that in most scenarios, the U.S., with the help of Japan, was able to repel a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But not easily. “This defense,” the report reads, “came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers.”
In real life, such losses would take years to replace, Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser and co-author of the study, told me. “During that time, the United States would be weakened,” he said. The war “would have repercussions for U.S. defense strategy and security strategy for many years.”
Defeating China in such a conflict may not get any easier either. Cancian noted that “if current trends continue, the Chinese would be in a stronger position in 10 years than they are today.”
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Washington policy makers are clear-eyed on this threat. The Biden administration, in its new national-security strategy, identified China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it” and pledged to “continue prioritizing investments in a combat credible military that deters aggression against our allies and partners in the region.”
Some security analysts worry that Washington’s response remains short on urgency. “We are moving in the right direction but too slowly and with inadequate scale,” Colby told me. “I personally think there is a tremendous discounting of what China is capable of.” Culver said that “we’re only now starting to do the kind of investments that we really need, and it probably won’t take full effect until the mid-2030s and beyond. We need to regain the advantages we usually have.” Unless the Biden administration makes the investments its strategy entails, Cancian told me, “at some point you are bluffing.”
But an effective response to China is not just a matter of budgets and bombs. To determine what type of force to deploy in the region, American leaders need to define what kind of power the U.S. can, or wants to, be in the future. “Part of the problem is the phrase ‘military balance,’” Stephen Biddle, a defense-policy specialist at Columbia, told me. There is no generic balance of forces that implies an absolute advantage. Rather, military strength depends on how well a force is suited to its mission. And as to what the U.S. mission should be in East Asia, Biddle said, “There is a big debate going on in the United States over this issue, and I don’t think it is resolved yet.”
Much will depend on what Washington is willing to spend on its military in East Asia. As China’s military capabilities advance, the United States will have to commit ever greater resources to countering them. The political benefit of retaining a decisive military advantage over China would have to be weighed against the mounting expense. Colby, in his recent book, The Strategy of Denial, wrote that “the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the U.S. economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength.” And even if the U.S. spent what it could, the Chinese government has ample room to follow suit. Though the Chinese military budget has grown, it remains below the global average at the equivalent of 1.2 percent of national output, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“In the Cold War, the United States could spend the Soviet Union into the ground in an arms race because our economy was bigger than theirs and it was growing faster than theirs, and we knew that they couldn’t keep up,” Biddle said. “That’s not true with China. They can keep up if they want to.”
And they almost certainly do. Roggeveen says there is “an imbalance of resolve” between the U.S. and China. East Asia is more important to China than it is to the United States on account of its proximity, and China wants a status there “that at the moment is still denied to it by the U.S.,” Roggeveen told me. “I think China is going to fight harder to get that status than the United States is prepared to fight to keep it.”
The costs and risks led Colby to conclude in his book that “even though U.S. military dominance over China is certainly desirable, it is simply no longer attainable.” Instead, he recommends that the U.S. stress “denial,” which “does not require dominance, only the ability to prevent the adversary from achieving its objectives.” In this case, “success for China is to subordinate the targeted state: defeat is to fail to do so.” Similarly, Roggeveen suggested that the U.S. and its allies should “focus on capabilities that can nullify China” and make “maritime Asia too dangerous for the massive Chinese surface fleet,” which would entail beefing up submarines and aviation.
Like it or not, the changing military equation seems destined to create an East Asia that is vastly different from the one that has existed for decades. The region would be split into zones, with a no-man’s-land between them, etched into the waters of the Pacific.
“We’re headed to a likely future of competing spheres of influence,” Biddle said: “a world where the Chinese will have a sphere of influence in which it becomes very expensive for the United States to enter,” but “the United States and its allies will also have spheres of influence … that are cost-prohibitive for the Chinese to enter in a sustained kind of way. You’ll have a more differentiated pattern of power and influence in the region in which there isn’t just one hegemon who can go anywhere they want and do whatever they want.”
From an American perspective, such an outcome would not be ideal. The U.S. would be less able to use the threat of military force to coerce Beijing to alter its policies or behavior. But the spheres-of-influence scenario is also not inevitable. China can comfortably sustain its military expansion only if its economy continues to strengthen—and this trajectory is by no means assured, because the country faces serious obstacles to its growth and technological advance. Meanwhile, if the U.S. stays the course and makes wise strategic decisions, it can still achieve its chief aims in East Asia, which include deterring possible Chinese aggression and maintaining its alliances and security order in the region. Even a regionally powerful China would, in that case, be contained.
What the changing military situation in Asia highlights most of all is the continuing transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, with all its new risks to American power and interests. Such a shift does not automatically mean that U.S. power will decline. But it does require new U.S. commitments.