The Strategic Implications of a Tripolar Nuclear Order

On the instability of a tripolar world

The Chinese are catching up with the Americans and the Russians in strategic arms very rapidly. By no later than 2030, China will acquire strategic parity with the United States. India, Japan, or Europe are unlikely to join the ranks of the great nuclear powers, at least through 2030. During the course of the next presidential term, the strategic balance will become tripolar. Because of the forced marriage of Russia and China, the US will be the odd one out. This is a very unattractive and dangerous balance of strategic arms for the United States and the West.

If we’re going to insist on great power security competition, then we need to understand the strategic implications of that commitment. In a confrontation situation with China or Russia, we’ll have to worry greatly about the threat of counterforce exchange with either power.

In a Taiwan contingency, the balance of resolve already favors China. The local balance of forces-in-being too may soon favor China. That leaves our deterrent threat. As long as a counterforce exchange will leave us in a considerably superior position relative to both the insurgent powers, we may be able to deter. That is to say: as long as we enjoy nuclear superiority, China can be deterred from going to war with us because we enjoy escalation dominance—we can threaten to escalate to a counterforce exchange but they cannot.

But once China closes the strategic gap with us, we shall not be able to make such a threat credible because, instead of us, our enemies will come to enjoy escalation dominance. In a counterforce exchange, they may be able to destroy our entire offensive capability while leaving roughly half of theirs intact. Such an unfavorable strategic balance cannot fail to cast its shadow on world affairs.

In a tripolar nuclear order, China would be in a position to call our bluff and conquer Taiwan. Without a credible deterrent threat, I do not see how we can hold the line in either Taiwan or the Korean peninsula. Seeing the writing on the wall, these two states may choose to submit to China, while Japan may choose to proliferate itself.

Some may suggest that, given where we’re headed in a matter of a few short years, we must abandon our position in Taiwan and Korea, and withdraw our defense perimeter to a more defensible position. I do not think this is a good idea. It may be kept as plan B, but should not be embraced because there is a more attractive solution at hand that allows us to hold the line at the territorial status quo.

The solution is to arrange a strategic division of labor in Nato. We get Europe to acquire a strategic deterrent of the scale and capability equal to that of the US, Russia and China. The US should rebalance away from Europe toward Asia, leaving a token force in Europe to affirm our commitment to European security. But with the plan that, if the world question is reopened, we commit to fight against China with our Asian allies, while Europe commits to fight against Russia if necessary.

In effect, a true European deterrent would change the polarity of the nuclear balance. Instead of three poles, we’ll have four. China or Russia’s threats to escalate a confrontation to a counterforce exchange would then lose its credibility; something like a strategic stalemate would obtain with neither side enjoying superiority. This means that we’ll have to rely on the credibility of threats at lower levels of conflict intensity to deter revisions of the territorial order by force by the insurgents.

In a two front world war, the Europeans will be responsible to defend Europe, and we’ll be responsible to defend Asia. The sort of high intensity conventional war that our militaries are plotting would still be extraordinarily costly and dangerous, but at least we can credibly to commit to fight them. Further down the escalation ladder, we shall then be in a position to threaten to escalate if necessary. In other words, deterrence requires us to have credible threats up and down the escalation ladder. A German-led league of European armed forces should be able to credibly offer to fight anything from a brushfire war to general war on the continent. Although we will probably have to help the Europeans build up their capabilities to that level over the next few years.

Offloading the defense of Europe to the Europeans would free the United States to serve as Bridge’s ‘anchoring power’ in Asia. We shall then be able to hold the line at the territorial status quo in both Taiwan and Korea, because we shall then have credible countermeasures at every level of conflict intensity.

When the balance of forces was much more favorable to us, we discouraged Europe from acquiring a deterrent and fielding a great power military. But soon, we shall not be able to hold the line alone. Once the strategic balance begins to deteriorate in earnest, we will come to see the virtues of the arrangement being proposed here.

Schweller demonstrated the instability of tripolar worlds. In a roughly equal tripolar world, any alliance of two powers is a death sentence for the third power. By forcing the marriage of our adversaries we have made this nightmare practically unavoidable—at least unless we drastically revise our foreign policy. We must understand that such a world requires us to permanently depart Europe for Asia and leave European defense to the Europeans.

Even if we follow the above prescription, we shall not have the freedom of maneuver to pursue a protracted confrontation. As I have been arguing for some time, it is not in our interest to wreck our relations with the Chinese. The moral panic in Washington and the prestige media is unacceptable. We must think more more carefully about how to manage Sino-American relations.

The Biden escalation has dramatically increased the probability of a costly and dangerous confrontation with the strongest adversary we have ever faced. Hal Brands is wrong to dust off the Kennan template. Gideon Rachman too is wrong to compare the present to the interwar period. Unlike the interwar period or the Cold War, the balance of forces is now much more symmetric: China is much more capable of seeing through a protracted struggle against the United States than the Soviet Union ever was; a fortiori so for the much weaker insurgents in the midcentury struggle.

Before forcing the reopening of the world question, we should take stock of the risks we’re running with the present course of action. One obvious risk is that we may very well lose the cold war we’re begging for. Another risk associated with present policy direction is that it may not only fail to deter but something close to the opposite: Our aggressive moves to contain the Chinese may convince them that they must fight us to secure their place in the pecking order of nations.

The authors of the US escalation must recognize that deterrence does not work without reassurance. The goal of US China policy cannot be to prevent China from rising as an economic, commercial and industrial power. We should not attempt to arrest Chinese development because that is the surest way of convincing the Chinese that they must mount an insurgency. Instead of trying to pull the other guy down, we should try to run harder ourselves. And we must find more deliberate and less escalatory ways to persuade the Chinese to moderate their behaviour in domains where we find it unacceptable.

Sino-American relations will remain too important to mismanage for a very long time. Managing them with care will require a combination of deterrence, restraint, and reassurance.

Policy Tensor, “Biden Needs a Foreign Policy Reset.”

Washington needs to stop throwing tantrums about TikTock and balloons, and get more serious about US China policy. We must realize that there is no margin for error here. We cannot screw up willy-nilly like we could during the unipolar moment.

Top American policymakers need to explicitly articulate the goal of US China policy. What is the desired end-state here? A liberal democracy in China is not an attainable goal, no matter what policies we pursue. US China policy should be reoriented towards the more modest, more attainable, and indeed, more important goal of reaching a modus vivendi with China that is acceptable to us as the basis of coexistence in the twenty-first century.