Brave Power: A Principled American Response to China’s Rise

In the last decade, China’s limited adoption of free-market economic principles has fueled incredible economic growth that has put it firmly on the path to superpower status. Unlike past superpowers like Germany and Japan (prior to World War II) and Russia (during the Cold War), China has the population size and wealth—the “sinew” of power according to renowned political scientist John Mearsheimer—to compete with the United States like no other superpowers have since America’s rise to international prominence. China’s latent potential as a great power competitor with the United States has unsurprisingly generated great consternation among American national security elite. Some are already predicting that China’s economy will surpass that of the United States around 2028. Additionally, after officially naming China as a threat in 2017, the U.S. recently shifted its approach from one seeking to integrate China into Western institutions to one focused on containment and competition. These data-driven forecasts and responses imply that the United States must closely examine its power projection strategies in the near-term. Faced with looming security competition with China and desiring to preserve its top position in the world order, the United States must avoid wasteful expressions of power on the world stage and begin to bravely conceptualize—perhaps like no time since the end of the Cold War—realistic expectations of co-existence with China as a peer superpower.

A Rising China and Wasteful American Power

One of the most important actions that the United States must take to efficiently compete with China is to narrowly define its vital interests and then ruthlessly say “no” to committing military power not directly related to those interests. Bluntly, just as in business, the emergence of effective competition shrinks the margins for powerful states, demanding less waste and more discipline in their exertion of power. America’s protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan serve as examples par excellence of uncontrolled and wasteful expressions of power that America can ill-afford in security competition with China. At best, America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq represents an intelligence failure regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and at worst a personal vendetta waged by America’s political elite. Either way, a strategy  servicing only a narrowly tailored set of vital interests likely would not have warranted such a wasteful war that has, to date, cost nearly $2 trillion and over 4,000 American deaths while largely ceding Iraq to an empowered Iran. Elsewhere, the direct role that Afghanistan played in threatening American security by harboring global terrorist organizations justified the initial military campaign there. However, the ensuing two decades of largely-failed nation-building activities conducted primarily with U.S. military resources represents the inefficient “militarization” of American foreign policy that has achieved little while costing a great deal of American blood and treasure. Costly wars are a surefire way to drain nation-state power and alter the international world order. U.S. approaches to effective security competition with China—a nation-state with the potential to surpass American power—must recognize this reality and avoid wasteful and uncontrolled exertions of power.     

As the distribution of global power shifts towards Asia by virtue of a rising China, America must also re-balance its power-projection resources to avoid waste. This includes right-sizing its commitment to Europe-focused collective security arrangements such as NATO. To be sure, NATO should remain a vital entity in U.S.-led security competition activities but with a balanced U.S. commitment that reflects the power shift to Asia. In addition, rather than threatening and stoking key allies, a re-balanced commitment should incentivize allies to commit optimal resources without overly relying on the United States for security. A restructured arrangement that both signals a balanced U.S. commitment to NATO and incentivizes allied commitment could consist of an agreement by the U.S. to fund the NATO operating budget at ten times the lowest defense spending alliance member (in terms of spending as part of GDP), capping this commitment to 20 percent. According to current data the U.S. funds 16 percent of NATO’s operating budget. Under the proposed arrangement, this figure would drop to roughly 5.5 percent because NATO’s least-contributing defense-spender (Luxembourg) as a percentage of GDP currently stands at .55 percent. Of course, it may be argued that if every member of NATO reached the so-called 2 percent defense spending milestone, U.S. commitment to NATO would increase (not decrease) under this proposal and thus not achieve the intended “shift” of resources to Asia. However, if all NATO members met the 2 percent defense spending target, it would create a greatly empowered NATO that could, as already suggested by many experts, serve as the preeminent Western collective security tool against China to complement the burgeoning alliances in East Asia aimed at countering China. Balanced commitments from all allies could be an extremely powerful (and efficient) tool contributing to allied security competition with China.

Rising China and Brave Power

The above actions aim to optimize outlays of U.S. power around the globe to preserve power for competition with China. However, in the context of a rising China, they also treat a future of intense security competition with China as a foregone conclusion. Yet efforts to optimize American power in the face of an ascendant China should also question the viability and logic of assumptions that prescribe security competition with China as the only course of action and demonstrate a willingness to conceptualize a world order where China surpasses the United States as the world’s leading superpower. Preparing for such scenarios represents the essence of brave power. Brave power describes American approaches to China that accept the possibility of China achieving a level of power greater than that of the United States. They constructively explore the best possibilities of a global power equilibrium featuring a Chinese superpower with similar (and possibly greater) nation-state capabilities as the United States. To this end, expressions of American power regarding China should begin to highlight the costs of security competition to China and the American population—emphasizing that the effort expended in such competition, even if successful in the long-term, likely diminishes the overall prosperity levels that could be enjoyed by both superpowers if they jointly visualized and prioritized bringing about the natural equilibrium of both countries at or near their full potential. If such sentiments encouraging cooperation (instead of competition) seem like naive idealism, it is important to realize that they are under-girded by realist calculations that govern the dynamics of nation-state power in an anarchic international environment. In other words, realism (as its name inherently suggests) should lead to realistic expectations and actions from nation-states which, in the case of the U.S. and China, should drive impulses for cooperation. Presiding over a nation in transition from long periods of conflict in 1953, President Eisenhower wisely outlined the opportunity costs of security competition to the nation, remarking in a famous speech that every dollar spent on weapons of warfare (i.e. security competition) represented “a theft” from nobler initiatives serving American interests. At the precipice of another major transition from the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) to great power competition, America needs to remember those words and adapt its power projection strategies accordingly.

Critics of the above approach will point to China’s overt and lingering communist political tilt and immoral treatment of minorities as reasons to label China as a threat and perpetuate impulses for competition. Such ideological issues are significant and cannot be ignored. Indeed, a level of security competition is both inevitable and natural in an anarchic international community—even among allies. However, diverging values should shape the opportunities for cooperation (as they do around the world with U.S. allies who have alternative political and economic views) rather than provide an excuse for competition. For example, even though China has been reluctant to assume leadership roles and responsibilities in international economic institutions, their impressive economic growth remains adequately tethered to Western economies. This permits the U.S. to frame the contours of economic cooperation in terms of the missed opportunities for mutual development incurred because of Chinese practices inimical to international norms. This requires brave power that properly evaluates the costs and probable results of any security competition with China.    

The United States is the self-proclaimed “home of the brave,” and the specter of a rising China gives Americans the chance to live up to this moniker in ways that far transcend physical bravery. It compels the United States to have the courage to be realistic about its power going forward to avoid uncontrolled and wasteful expressions of military power. It also needs to be brave enough to smartly re-balance its commitments to traditional collective security arrangements with critical allies as power shifts away from Europe towards Asia. Most importantly, a rising China presents America with the opportunity to bravely question the viability of traditional tenets of American foreign policy, namely the universality and desirability of American political and economic values. Confronting these ideas allows the United States to boldly conceptualize a world order in equilibrium with China and perhaps forego (or at least limit) a protracted and costly era of security competition. Far from being naively utopian, such conceptualizations reflect realist calculations that will best position the United States to avoid existential miscalculations during competition and maintain its values and way of life into the future.