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Yesterday we outlined the basic arguments in Barry Posen’s Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. Today, we outline how the argument would travel to Asia.
Posen acknowledges that a rising China poses risks against which the US has to hedge. But he starts by underlining that China does not pose the same kind of risk that the Soviet Union did—as a country that straddled the entire Eurasian land mass—and that China’s own security environment is by no means unproblematic. It is increasingly constrained by its dependence on world trade, has non-trivial minority problems and is surrounded by countries that are smaller but also growing rapidly and quite capable.
What should the US do? Posen sees the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia as a containment policy, an unfortunate misinterpretation that nonetheless mirrors dominant Chinese views (fed, it should be noted, by the self-fulfilling prophecies of offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer). In fact, engaging China was a centerpiece of the pivot and the US has done surprisingly little to carry through on its balancing elements beyond declaratory policy and paying more diplomatic attention to the region. But Posen is rightly concerned with the harder variants of the pivot that would like to see a robust military response to China’s rise, including through force postures associated with the “air-sea battle” concept that have a strong offensive component.
Posen’s main observation about Asia is that we should be no more concerned about China’s rise than those that are sitting closer to Beijing. If China is problematic, then India, Russia and Japan as well as the middle powers in the region will respond accordingly. But to do so, they need to be incentivized to look after their own defense by greater American restraint. It is precisely here where Posen’s strategy could have surprisingly unintended consequences.
With respect to Japan, Posen offers up two core suggestions, acknowledging that both require caution: that the US-Japan Security Treaty be “renegotiated”; and that the US reduce its footprint in Japan to those forces required to retain “resilience” against a surprise attack. Posen does not provide much detail on what a renegotiated alliance would look like, but the core of the proposal seems to be that the alliance would become an actual alliance rather than a one-way security guarantee. Japan would not only have greater responsibility for its own defense but the new arrangements would allow Japan to come to American assistance as well.
The Abe administration is undertaking just such a revision of the alliance by seeking greater freedom of maneuver to engage in collective self-defense (we expressed our skepticism about how far he would get here). But a drawback of Posen’s proposal is that the restraint function of the alliance is lost; rather than providing assurances to China, the US-Japan relationship would become just that: an arrangement that would appear to have little other purpose than containment of China. Put differently, a strategy designed to show restraint could in fact have just the opposite effect unless the signals to China were handled with unusual—and unlikely—aplomb.
On the Korean peninsula, we are actually more sympathetic; we have argued at some length that the peninsula is much more stable than it appears (here and here). Posen goes so far as to argue that all US ground troops could be withdrawn with little strategic effect; he even thinks—almost certainly wrongly—that such a withdrawal would provide us some leverage vis-à-vis China and North Korea on the nuclear issue. But even if Posen’s proposals are highly unlikely to come to pass for political reasons, they do neatly underline a dilemma in the policies advanced by alliance stalwarts; Bruce Klingner is among the most thoughtful and informed. On the one hand, Klingner continually reminds us of how South Korean defense capabilities fall short of what is desired. Yet at the same time, he argues against any weakening of the alliance—such as OPCON transfer—that would in fact incentivize a more robust assessment of needed capabilities. As Posen would argue, if you want the Japanese and South Koreans to figure out their defense requirements, there is no better way to do that than a thoughtful, but deliberate, draw-down.
If these actions seem radical, they are. However, they are offset by an important caveat, contained in Chapter Three (“Command of the Commons: The Military Strategy, Force Structure, and Force Posture of Restraint”). What gives Posen’s work heft is his knowledge of the hardware. In this important chapter, he outlines the maritime strategy that is at the military core of the restraint approach. Here, Posen’s language is somewhat more expansive, arguing that US grand strategy requires “command” of the commons, by which he means not only the high seas but increasingly space as well. If ground forces (and bases and exercises) can be cut quite radically—with the Army and the Marine Corps bearing the brunt—“the navy bears most of the weight in supporting a Grand Strategy of Restraint and is the key service for achieving and exploiting command of the commons.” He outlines the case for a robust submarine force and a surprisingly conservative defense of nine carriers, allowing some modest cuts from the current eleven and the ten active air wings attached to them. The main revisionist point about the naval force is that it would not be seen as the handmaiden of expeditionary forces except in extreme contingencies; rather, it would be focused on a lighter-touch maritime strategy that focused on presence, including along the Asian island chains.
Posen is not hopeful that his favored strategy will prevail, but he addresses a number of the problems discussed here such as how to transition from the current status quo toward a leaner diplomacy and force structure. It is easy to take centrist consensus as the equivalent of wisdom. But this is a mistake, and it is refreshing to stress-test the status quo with thinking that is outside the box.
