Chinese retaliation causes nuclear war

A trade war would do enormous damage. It could foster a resentful and aggressive China and lead to the situation foreseen by Mearsheimer (2001), where a declining America decides to halt China’s rise.

Decisions for war or peace

Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell’s China’s Search for Security (2012) is noteworthy for its systematic inclusion of economic factors in a security oriented analysis. The driver of China’s foreign policy is its search for security, the book claims. Where the offensive realist Mearsheimer sees regional hegemony and global power as means to acquire national security, the defensive realists Nathan and Scobell distinguish between security and hegemony: Beijing wants security but not global power. When Beijing says it wants peace it means stability so it can ‘concentrate on economic development’ (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: 28). A country’s foreign policy is driven by its factual interests, although the causal path from interest to policy may be distorted by misinformation, miscalculation, value commitments, institutional weaknesses or leadership shortcomings. Nathan and Scobell think China will remain a ‘status quo power in a system designed by the West’ but hold it possible that future Chinese leaders may challenge US pre-eminence if Washington does not keep up the economic foundation for US power (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: 13, 346, 357). What could unravel the global system would not be China’s rise but US decline. This is the main risk, as they see it. If ‘the West weakens itself to the point of creating a power vacuum’, then China will acquire bases around the world and replace the dollar with the renminbi in its foreign trade. The US would thus have to decide whether and when to resist, and this could lead to war. The recipe for peace is that the US maintains its strength and conducts a cautious foreign policy. China is likely to act rationally on the basis of its search for security (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: xi, 359). It follows from their reasoning that the risk of war will increase if China can no longer depend on the US for its economic development, while the US retains sufficient military power to believe it can win a war. Again it is seen that a politically motivated reduction in the Sino–US economic interdependence is a likely precursor to any crisis leading to war.

If Nathan and Scobell’s reasoning is combined with Roach’s analysis of financial politics and Copeland’s ‘trade expectation’ argument it seems that the key to minimizing the risk of war is to rebalance the global economic system in a way allowing the major powers to remain codependent. A combination of mutual nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence is likely to preserve global peace as long as no major power expects to see a rapid decline in its relative power. Deterrence and inter-dependence are both, however, precarious. One depends on credibility, the other on the expectation that flows are kept open within a mutually beneficial financial and trading system.

The arguments cited so far are all structural, building on the assumption that deterrence and interdependence prevent or reduce the risk of war regardless of who holds power in Beijing, Washington (and Tokyo) or, to put it differently, assuming that no government will be knowingly prepared to set the world ablaze or accept the cost of a global economic recession. Some scholars are weary of structural arguments and prefer to look at leadership or agency. Who ensures caution in Chinese and US decision-making? Is it the two presidents themselves? Is it the standing committee of the Chinese Communist Party politburo and the US National Security Council? Is it the Pentagon and the PLA? Is it China’s Prime Minister and the US Secretary of the Treasury or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve? Is it transnational company executives with access to decisionmakers? Or is it media, think tanks and other opinion-makers? Ultimately the two presidents decide, so their capacities, priorities and motivations are essential, as well as the opinions of their formal and informal advisers. This should inform the research agenda.

This paper shall now look at four approaches to the question of agency, some referring back to the outbreak of World War I in Europe. The 2014 centennial brought multiple comparisons between Europe 1914 and Asia 2014. Some of the best are assembled in Rosecrance and Miller’s The Next Great War?: The Roots of World War I and the Risk of US–China Conflict (2015). Their main message is that the so-called Thucydides trap is not just bilateral. What made the Peloponnesian War inevitable was not only ‘the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta’ but that Corcyra attacked Corinth, so Sparta felt it necessary to come to its ally Corinth’s defence, leaving Athens little choice but to support its ally Corcyra (Allison, 2015: 77–78; Coker, 2015: 109). North Korea could conceivably pull China into war with the US, as it did in 1950. Japan, Taiwan or the Philippines could drag the US into war with China: ‘The most likely route to war with China is via a dispute involving one or more of the United States’ Asian allies’ (Miller, 2015: xxi).

In his contribution to the Rosecrance and Miller volume, Richard N. Cooper (2015) discusses economic interdependence and war. He begins by confirming the often-heard argument that the outbreak of World War I provides evidence that high economic interdependence is no guarantee against war (Cooper, 2015: 57). Then he rehabilitates the often ridiculed Norman Angell, whose The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of the Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (1910) did not actually argue (at least not mainly) that war was impossible but warned against the naval race between Britain and Germany because it could lead to a mutually destructive confrontation. After comparing the level of economic interdependence between the European powers in 1914, Cooper goes briefly through the July–August decision-making in Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Paris and London, holding Tsar Nicholas II’s decision to mobilize as the factor making war unavoidable. Cooper emphasizes that the fatal decisions were made by relatively few people and that none of them foresaw the destructiveness of the war that followed: ‘If leaders had forecast the actual costs, they (and even the generals) undoubtedly would have worked much harder to avoid war’ (Cooper, 2015: 69).3 Such miscalculation can hardly be repeated today or in the foreseeable future. Given the existence of nuclear weapons, the memory of World Wars I and II, and how close the world was to Armageddon during the Cuban missile crisis, and also the awareness of the colossal conventional capabilities of the USA, China, Japan, Russia and India, any responsible statesman or woman today must know that all-out war brings mutually assured destruction. It is not possible for any sane leader to deliberately provoke all-out war. What remains possible is to gamble that the adversary backs down in a crisis, so that an individual state can provoke with impunity or win a limited war. The latter happened in Korea and Vietnam at a time when the USA and USSR—and China from 1964—were Asia’s only nuclear powers. An additional complication today is that a limited war could take the form of a cyber-war.

Christopher Coker’s The Improbable War: China, the United Statesand Logic of Great Power Conflict (2015) offers the opposite argument of Cooper’s on the basis of constructivist thinking. Coker feels that the world is in danger of making ‘exactly the same mistakes today, as we are telling ourselves the same stories we did in 1914’, namely that inter-state war has become a matter of the past. There is the same ‘complacency about great power conflict’. Material factors alone cannot explain conflicts. They are driven by ideas, passions and beliefs. A big problem between China and the US is ‘resentment’ (Coker, 2015: 18–19, 65). An abundance of dangerous stories are told that could lead to war. The Chinese tell themselves the story of past humiliation, and look at the future in terms of basic conflict: ‘It looks as if the Chinese are preparing for a protracted confrontation with Japan’. The Americans tell themselves the Thucydides trap story, and are more and more nervous about China’s rising power: ‘Confrontation … is the American default mode, its unique cultural style’. If this situation persists, war may follow regardless of material factors. What the world needs is a ‘new normative consensus’ and ‘a constructive cultural dialogue’ about Chinese and Western values (Coker, 2015: 80, 119, 181).

Although this runs counter to Copeland’s key finding that causes of war are relational and are not on the ‘unit level’ (Copeland, 2015: 435), it follows from Cooper and Coker that the drivers of unit-level decision-making must be studied. In his chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia, Yuen Foong Khong (2014) puts forward a forceful argument in favour of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) as an alternative or necessary supplement to International Relations (IR) theory. If the relative peace and economic dynamism of East Asia—and the relationship between the two—are to be understood, Khong claims that threat perceptions, national identity, ideology, and leadership, must be taken into consideration. IR neorealism is unable to explain why the East Asian region has seen relative peace and stability: ‘It is the FPA variables, rather than international structure, that do the heavy lifting when it comes to … explaining Asia’s relative peace and stability’ (Khong, 2014: 91). He finds that regional peace has come as a result of leadership changes in the region, with new leaders coming to power at certain junctures to implement growth-promoting export-oriented economic policies. These have led to substantial economic growth, which in turn has incentivized policymakers to avoiding actions that threaten peace and stability. Ominously, however, the same economic growth has enabled governments to invest heavily in modern weaponry, and this has increased the need for a strong US economic and military presence (Khong, 2014: 97).

Etel Solingen (2015) goes further than Khong in a comparison of pre-World War I Germany and today’s China. It is not interdependence per se, she claims, that inhibits war. Interdependence can work both ways. The main question is what kind of socio-economic coalition that dominates domestic politics. Is it a coalition with an active interest in internationalization or one that seeks to protect its nation against foreign influences? Internationalizing strategies emphasize access to global markets, capital, and technology, regional cooperation and domestic macroeconomic stability. This reduces uncertainty, encourages savings, and enhances both foreign and internal investments (Solingen, 2015: 130). Conversely, inward-looking models benefit from enhancing the viability of statist, nationalist, protectionist, and military–industrial complexes. She finds that Germany pre-World War I conforms to the inward-looking model, and that this may explain its preparedness to go to war. The socio-economic coalition dominating Chinese politics today to some extent resembles imperial Germany’s agrarian–industrial–military complex. The main similarities are a ‘combination of rapid socioeconomic change and stagnant political institutions’, and the active use of assertive nationalism as a legitimating device (Solingen, 2015: 138). More importantly, however, China’s Communist Party regime differs from imperial Germany in holding its military under firm civilian control and embracing economic internationalization. China has radically integrated its economy with the global market and become part of an international division of labour, with trans-national production chains. China’s internationalizers ‘share incentives with the West – and much of the rest – to bolster a stable global economy’. Thus the prospects of China going to war are ‘small in 2014, though nontrivial’ (Solingen, 2015: 146).

It should be noted that Solingen has nothing to say about the socio-economic coalitions that hold sway in Washington, DC. She seems, unlike Roach (2014), to assume that the threat to peace comes mainly from China. In this she also differs from Copeland, who finds that it is normally the declining power who initiates war, and Mearsheimer, who claims that China’s attempt to become Asia’s regional hegemon will force the US to contain and weaken it (Mearsheimer, 2001: 402–403; Mearsheimer, 2006: 162).

Conclusions

Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party.

Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.

US-China trade war goes nuclear---economy, trade, all indicators Hallinan 17 – Conn Hallinan (holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He oversaw the journalism program at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 23 years, and won the UCSC Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as UCSC’s Innovations in Teaching Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award. He was also a college provost at UCSC, and retired in 2004. He is a winner of a Project Censored "Real News Award," and lives in Berkeley, California). “Blundering Into A War With China.” International Policy Digest. January 27th, 2017. https://intpolicydigest.org/2017/01/27/blundering-war-china/

The last thing one wants to do with a nuclear-armed power is make it guess. The Trump administration has opened a broad front on China, questioning the “one China” policy, accusing Beijing of being in cahoots with Islamic terrorists, and threatening a trade war. The first would upend more than 30 years of diplomacy, the second is bizarre—if anything, China is overly aggressive in suppressing terrorism in its western Xinjiang Province—and the third makes no sense. China is the U.S.’s major trading partner and holds $1.24 trillion in U.S. Treasury Bonds. While Trump charges that the Chinese have hollowed out the American economy by undermining its industrial base with cheap labor and goods, China did not force Apple or General Motors to pull up stakes and decamp elsewhere. Capital goes where wages are low and unions are weak. A trade war would hurt China, but it would also hurt the U.S. and the global economy as well. When President Trump says he wants to make America great again, what he really means is that he wants to go back to that post-World War II period when the U.S. dominated much of the globe with a combination of economic strength and military power. But that era is gone, and dreams of a unipolar world run by Washington are a hallucination. According to the CIA, “by 2030 Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power based on GDP, population size, military spending and technological investments.” By 2025, two-thirds of the world will live in Asia, 7 percent in Europe and 5 percent in the U.S. Those are the demographics of eclipse. If Trump starts a trade war, he will find little support among America’s allies. China is the number one trading partner for Japan, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam and India, and the third largest for Indonesia and the Philippines. Over the past year, a number of countries like Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines have also distanced themselves from Washington and moved closer to China. When President Obama tried to get U.S. allies not to sign on to China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, they ignored him. But the decline of U.S. influence has a dangerous side. Washington may not be able to dictate the world’s economy, but it has immense military power. Chinese military expert Yang Chengjun says “China does not stir up troubles, but we are not afraid of them when they come.” They should be. For all its modernization, China is no match for the U.S. However, defeating China is far beyond Washington’s capacity. The only wars the U.S. has “won” since 1945 are Grenada and Panama. Nonetheless, such a clash would be catastrophic. It would torpedo global trade, inflict trillions of dollars damage on each side, and the odds are distressingly high that the war could go nuclear.