China will outspend the US – that breaks down containment and accelerates hegemonic decay

Gone are thus the days when the United States could outspend its foe, leading it into bankruptcy. In not a distant future, just the opposite may be happening. The United States will be hard-pressed if it tries to follow suit on Chinese deeper pockets’ spending. As Paul Kennedy asserted, the need to divert investment away from butter toward guns, leads any great power to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes and deepening domestic splits over spending priorities. As previous “number one” have experienced, he argues, when their relative economic strength ebbs, the growing foreign challenges to their receding position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, thus accelerating its decay. Hence, America’s obvious danger in following the Soviets’ footsteps. Moreover, in order to be effective a containment policy requires to be on the winning side of the budgetary competition. Otherwise, any measure taken in pursuit of that purpose could be outmatched and outspent by the counterpart. A good example of this was given by the 1977 Soviet deployment of the SS-20 intermediate missiles in Europe, which was met by America’s counter-deployment of the Pershing II missiles, reputed to be fifteen times more accurate than the SS-20s (Gaddis, 2005 [4, Chapter 6]; Kennedy, 1989 [2, p. 689]).

As mentioned, Michael Pillsbury believes that once China attains economic predominance, it shall be forced to protect its new status through military force and that would translate into increasing military expenditure. This would be in tune with Paul Kennedy’s idea that although many nations have wealth at their focus in the beginning, once they attain prosperity their priority switches to the protection of said wealth. China’s increasing military expenditure is already in sight. By 2025 China could be allocating up to US$585 billion to the official budget of the People’s Liberation Army. However, it is estimated that the real defense expending could be fifteen to 20 percent higher than that, as military-related expenditure would be also included in other budgets (such as the State’s science and technology budget) or allocated to other forces (the People’s Armed Police, the Coast Guard, the naval militia, and the civil defense forces). Not surprisingly, in a key conclave of the Chinese Communist Party held in November of 2020, it was unveiled that the plans to attain a fully modern military on par with that of the United States by 2027 had already been drawn. This date commemorates the centennial of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. The United States can expect to be subjected from that year on to an increasing budgetary competition in this area (Buttler-Bowdon, 2015, p. 145; Pillsbury, 2015, Chapter 9; Shambaugh, 2020, p. 348; The Economic Times, 2020).

The Lack of Geopolitical Feasibility

But more significant than its lack of economic preponderance in relation to China would be the lack of geopolitical feasibility of America’s containment. This clearly differs with the containment of the Soviet Union during the first Cold War. Once Stalin had understood that no new gains were possible in Europe beyond the Iron Curtain, Soviet expansionism moved to the Third World at the beginning of the 1950s. Conversely, in 1956 rebellious Hungarians turned against their own Soviet puppet regime. When the Kremlin sent the Red Army to restore order, it was met by a brave popular resistance that with Molotov cocktails in hand ran the Soviets out of Budapest. This was the moment that the Americans had been waiting for since 1945—a nationalistic uprising against the Soviet occupation. However, Eisenhower decided to respect the Iron Curtain boundary line and not to intervene. Hence, both parties would respect the red lines of the other, thus greatly reducing the threat of a direct confrontation between them. The United States and the Soviet Union would engage in a power competition by way of proxy wars in client states but would always avoid going to the jugular of the other side’s strategic sensibilities. The only exception to this rule came by the adventurous positioning of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, seventy miles away from American mainland. This almost led to a nuclear confrontation in 1963 (Dailey, 2018, pp. 243, 244).

Opposite to the USSR’s containment, it is unrealistic to assume that China can be constrained to remain indefinitely as a secondary player in a region that for millennia was tributary to its power. Even more unrealistic would be presuming that it might be restrained in relation to its ambition to incorporate Taiwan to the People’s Republic. What is herein involved is not only the restoration of its glorious past, but China’s “great unification” of its territory. The “great rejuvenation” narrative, that gathers and unifies the energy of almost 1,4 billion Chinese, is at the other side of America’s containment drive. This is a totally different proposition from America’s containment of the Soviets in Afghanistan or Congo. Even more, containing a force implies confining it within a certain boundary in order to avoid its expansion, and what China wants is essentially to avoid outside penetration within its self-defined boundaries.

At the same time, the distance from California to the South China Sea is around 7400 miles and from Hawaii almost 6000 miles, whereas from California to Taiwan is 7000 miles and from Hawaii close to 5300 miles. Meanwhile, the distance between mainland China and Taiwan is just ninety miles (eighty-one miles at its closest point, to be precise), while part of its coastal areas is within the South China Sea. Hence, John Mearsheimer’s notion of the stopping power of water in relation to long sea distances fully applies in relation to the United States. But even if that would not be considered as a sufficient deterrent barrier by the United States, the firm control of the operational theatre by China should indeed be taken very seriously. The latter comes not only as a result of its short distance from the mainland, but from the flooding of the area by China’s powerful navy and from its construction of what has been labelled the “great wall of sand”. All of this is duly supported by China’s missiles’ might. According to Michael R. Auslin, indeed, it is arguable that the Chinese military can already assert control over the waters and the skies of the South China Sea and even of the first island chain. Furthermore, he says, policy makers in Washington are increasingly worried that America’s power to prevail in the area is not commensurate with U.S. commitments (Auslin, 2020 [2, pp. 13, 16]; Fabey, 2018, p. 231; Mearsheimer, 2001, pp. 114–128).

Indeed, America is badly prepared to confront this pushing-out pressure by China. Not only its Air Force and Navy ceased working as a team at the end of the Cold War, but both forces decided to give priority to short-range missions over long-range ones. The Air Force moved its emphasis from long-range strategic bombing aircrafts to short-range tactical fighters, dramatically cutting back the former as a percentage of its overall force. The Navy on its side yanks off, all together, from longrange strike missions. America’s campaigns in both Kuwait and Kosovo, which depended on aircrafts flying short distances from their airfields or aircraft carriers, helped crafting the new policy. The accentuation is thus on short-range, high sortie rates and precision strikes. This implies that while the Chinese have developed an intermediate-range area-denial strategy, the U.S. forces need to approach its targets to be effective. On top of that, America’s F-22 and F-35A are by design short-range fighters. Fifth-generation stealth strike aircrafts, on its side, do not have sufficient range to reach their targets unless supported by highly vulnerable “big wing” oil tankers (Hendrix, 2018).

A geopolitical containment that must prevail not only against the unified will of almost 1,4 billion Chinese in what they perceive as their historical entitlement but also against huge distances and the firm control of the operational theatre by the counterpart is hardly a realistic option. What is herein involved seems to surpass what is attainable short of a major war. And even if America summoned the will to commit its armed forces against China, its dependence on short-range air and naval approaches makes it unsuitable to confront that country’s layered defensein-depth. Under such circumstances, America’s consistency of purpose in following containment seems clearly insufficient to prevail. Moreover, the military balance between China and the United States will temporarily shift further in the former’s favor in the late 2020s, when many aging American ships, submarines, and planes will have to be retired (Beckley & Brands, 2021).