The conventional wisdom in Washington today is that China is committed to achieving global supremacy. But that conventional wisdom is built on the dubious assumption that China’s economic growth of the past several decades will continue unabated into the future. The reality, however, is quite different. China is not destined to continue its meteoric rise as an economic power. Indeed, China’s economy is already beginning to stall. This being the case, China is unlikely to be able to pursue a revisionist policy of upending the liberal international order, even if the current leadership continues to pursue an assertive foreign policy while it is able to do so. But while the U.S. foreign policy establishment ought to plan for a period of turbulence as China’s leaders reluctantly come to grips with the reality of peak China, the more pressing need is to begin a conversation about the future of American grand strategy that takes as its jumping off point the fundamental reality that China’s rise is coming to an end.
China is peaking as a world power, and is doing so long before being able to challenge the U.S. for global leadership or, even more ambitiously, to remake the world in its own image.
That China is peaking can no longer be doubted.[1] Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, whether viewed from the perspective of demographics, economics or geopolitics, the conclusion that China is plateauing is simply inescapable.[2] China’s population is both getting old and shrinking;[3] its economy looks increasingly like those of other countries that have come to be mired in the so-called middle-income trap; and its once bright geopolitical star has begun to wane as countries around the world begin to take steps to counterbalance against what they see as an increasingly belligerent great power.[4] There are, of course, those who look at the evidence and come to different conclusions. But to many serious China watchers, the trends are increasingly obvious. China is peaking as a world power, and is doing so long before being able to challenge the U.S. for global leadership or, even more ambitiously, to remake the world in its own image.
This being the case, those strategic options premised on the assumption that China is a rising power with hegemonic ambitions are now effectively moot. As China’s power growth curve has begun to flatten, the prospect of a Chinese unipolar moment, once tantalizingly within reach, has simply evanesced. And even if many American China watchers seem unaware of this reality, it is highly unlikely the same is true of China’s leadership.
It is impossible, of course, to know precisely how China’s leaders will respond to the dawning reality of peak China. But if we assume they are both minimally rational and fully aware of the headwinds they are now encountering, we can reasonably assume they will have to choose one of the following two options.
First, and perhaps most obviously, China’s leadership could choose to strike while the iron is hot. This would entail using whatever resources are currently available to them to lock in today’s relatively favorable balance of power before their position worsens irretrievably. As with Germany on the eve of war in 1914 or Japan in the run up to Pearl Harbor in 1941, such a strategy would entail brinkmanship, risk-taking, and perhaps even a geopolitical Hail Mary pass.
While this may be the most obvious course of action for China’s leadership, however, it is also the least likely. China’s leaders read history—especially the history of the rise and fall of great powers. It is reasonable to assume they are acutely aware of the mistakes Germany and Japan made in the mid-20th Century. Assuming this to be the case, is it likely that China’s leaders would purposefully embark on a reckless—even suicidal—course of action like that of Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941?
That leaves only one viable strategy open to China’s leadership—a strategy of offshore balancing. As originally conceived by realists like Christopher Layne, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt, of course, offshore balancing was envisioned as a specifically American strategy—an alternative to what they considered to be the self-defeating postwar U.S. grand strategy of preponderance or liberal hegemony.[5] The argument was that these maximalist approaches undercut American primacy by driving Washington to ever more counterproductive expenditures of blood and treasure in an ultimately futile effort to remake the world in America’s liberal image. Offshore balancing was advocated as a more prudent way of using limited resources to achieve a more limited goal—sustainable American primacy rather than unsustainable liberal empire. It was explicitly not about the U.S. abandoning its position as the world’s sole superpower or retreating to some sort of Fortress America. It was about sustaining U.S. primacy through prudent rebalancing and retrenchment.[6]
On the face of it, then, offshore balancing would seem to be a strategic option suited exclusively to a declining hegemon—or at least to an established hegemon looking for a more sustainable strategic posture. And that is certainly how it has come to feature in academic literature. But there is nothing inherent in the logic of the strategy that limits its applicability solely to an existing hegemon like the U.S. Indeed, with a few minor modifications, it might also meet the needs of a once-aspiring hegemon peaking long before it achieves its goal of primacy. If that is the case, what might such a variant—offshore balancing with Chinese characteristics—look like?
The First, Second, and Third Island Chains (Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative)
To begin with, the Chinese variant would share with its American counterpart a fundamental commitment to primacy in its own backyard. As Mearsheimer put it in connection with the U.S., America’s global hegemony rests on its dominance in the Western Hemisphere, on excluding any extra-hemispheric great powers and preventing the rise of a potential hegemonic challenger within the hemisphere. Historically, once the U.S. had established its hemispheric supremacy, it was able to project its power confidently around the world. Absent that hemispheric dominance, the offshore balancers argue, Washington would have been too distracted by local threats to assert itself globally. Put more generically, the theory of offshore balancing holds that primacy in one’s own neighborhood is a necessary precondition for global supremacy.
In China’s case, a strategy of offshore balancing would begin with establishing its primacy in the Western Pacific or Northeast Asia. This does not mean physically occupying neighboring countries, as the Soviets did in eastern Europe following World War II. But it does mean China would have to make itself the dominant player at least out to the first island chain, which runs from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines. And that, in turn, would require the disruption of America’s alliance system in the region and pushing the U.S. military out all the way to the third island chain, which begins at the Aleutian Islands, runs through the central Pacific to Oceania, and includes Hawaii. Failing this, regional powers—from Vietnam to Taiwan to Japan—would feel able to count on U.S. support and would thus be emboldened to resist Chinese power rather than accommodate themselves to it. Simply put, the theory holds that China cannot be an effective offshore balancer if it remains on the permanent defensive in its own neighborhood, hemmed in by American bases, naval forces, allies, and security partners. To be in a position to balance the United States globally, it must not only break through the first island chain, but achieve outright regional supremacy in the Western Pacific.
…China cannot be an effective offshore balancer if it remains on the permanent defensive in its own neighborhood, hemmed in by American bases, naval forces, allies, and security partners…it must not only break through the first island chain, but achieve outright regional supremacy in the Western Pacific.
Additionally, the two variants would share a commitment to countering hegemons in regions Beijing deems critically important. For American offshore balancers like Mearsheimer, these regions include Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf—Europe and Northeast Asia because they are the major industrial centers of the world and contain all of the other great powers, and the Persian Gulf because of its oil. For a Chinese offshore balancer, in addition to its home base in Northeast Asia, the regions crucial to Beijing would likely also include Europe and the Persian Gulf. But the Indian Ocean Region might also be considered crucial because of its importance as a maritime trade route, and the Arctic might make the list because of its increasingly accessible minerals and hydrocarbon deposits—and because, as the polar ice melts, it promises to provide an alternative, less vulnerable, sea route between East Asia and Europe.
Chinese research icebreaker Xuelong in 2018. (Liu Shiping/Xinhua)
Finally, like the U.S. version, offshore balancing with Chinese characteristics would eschew permanent military deployments around the globe, resting instead on a strategy of buck-passing and vanishingly rare interventions undertaken only when local allies prove incapable of maintaining a stable regional balance.
But there the similarities would end. Given China’s distinctive geopolitical situation, Beijing’s version of offshore balancing would necessarily differ from Washington’s in at least one important way. In the U.S. case, the focus of such a strategy would be on preventing the emergence of regional hegemons. In China’s case, the focus would be on disrupting already existing regional power balances favoring, and backed by, the U.S. hegemon. It would, for example, doubtless involve disrupting the balance of power in the Persian Gulf, perhaps by backing Iran’s bid to challenge the U.S.-Saudi domination of the region. It might also entail a concerted sharp power effort to undermine American influence in Europe through the use of overt and covert means to exert its influence on political and economic elites, academia and the media.[7] It might even involve establishing itself as a great power with a significant role to play in places like the Arctic.[8] Taken to its logical conclusion, a Chinese strategy of offshore balancing would even necessarily involve efforts to destabilize American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately, the goal of any Chinese offshore balancing strategy would be to disrupt U.S. dominance in all the world’s major regions and the global commons to create a global sanctuary for China, even as Chinese power peaks and Beijing’s bid for global hegemony founders.
Only time will tell, of course, if China will fully embrace a strategy of offshore balancing. But even now there are signs Beijing is moving in this direction. In the Western Pacific, China is actively seeking primacy—pursuing maximalist claims in the South and East China Seas, pressuring Australia over a range of issues, making threatening gestures toward Taiwan, and developing the anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) capabilities necessary to deny the United States a force projection capability in the region. And in key regions beyond the Western Pacific—Europe, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the Arctic—China is taking steps to upend regional balances that favor the United States, without necessarily replacing them with Chinese-dominated ones. Similarly, Beijing’s conduct in the regions of space, cyber, and international organizations also suggests an offshore balancing approach—disrupt, deny, destabilize, but do not attempt to dominate. It may well be that we are already seeing offshore balancing with Chinese characteristics in action.
If that is the case, it raises a pressing question for American policy makers: How should the United States counter a Chinese strategy of offshore balancing? And for American offshore balancers like Walt and Mearsheimer it raises a related question: What would happen if the world’s two superpowers both adopted a strategy of offshore balancing?
Andrew Latham is a professor of International Relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, and Research Associate with the Centre for Defence and Security Studies, Winnipeg, Canada. He teaches courses on Chinese Foreign Policy, Regional Conflict and Security, US Foreign and Defense Policy, International Security, and International Theory.
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Header Image: NASA Earth Observatory image using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, Umnak Island, Alaska, 3 May, 2014 (Joshua Stevens).
Notes:
[1] Michael Beckley, “The United States Should Fear a Faltering China” Foreign Affairs, 28 October 2019.
[2] Andrew A. Latham, “China as a Faltering Contender” RealClear Defense, 14 September 2020.
[3] In 2015, Beijing raised the cap on births per married couple from one child to two. In May of this year it raised the limit again, permitting three children per married couple. These changes in policy, however, come too late to reverse a pattern now deeply ingrained in Chinese society. See Sui-Lee Wee, “China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2,” New York Times, 1 June 2021.
[4] Andrew A. Latham, “Has China Peaked?” The National Interest, 19 November 2020.
[5] Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America's Future Grand Strategy,” International Security 1997; 22 (1): 86–124. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.22.1.86; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2016.
[6] Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Once and Future Superpower: Why China Won’t Overtake the United States,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016.
[7] Frederick Kempe, “China’s Europe Strategy,” The Atlantic Council, 8 December 2018. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/inflection-points/china-s-europe-strategy/
[8] David Auerswald, “China’s Multifaceted Arctic Strategy,” War On The Rocks, 24 May 2019. https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/chinas-multifaceted-arctic-strategy/