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By Franz-Stefan Gady
A fascinating new paper by two academics asks us to question a fundamental assumption about China’s naval buildup.
The last two lines of Thomas Hardy’s poem “And There Was a Great Calm,” written on the occasion of the signing of the armistice in November 1918, contains the following exchange, laconically summarizing what I believe is the eternal tension that permeates foreign policy decision-making: “The Sinister Spirit sneered: ‘It had to be!’ / And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, ‘Why?’” (Side note: the writer Graham Greene prefaced his autobiography Ways of Escape with these lines and retrospectively elevating it to a guiding principle of his life.)
In short, those lines speak to the tension between those who have a natural disposition toward seeing the U.S. national interests at stake everywhere in the world (especially in crisis zones), and those who cautiously question some of the basic premises of this assumption. I would posit that especially the Socratic “Why?” part of the stanza ought to be one of the guiding principles of those who provide advice to senior-policy makers, who often by default have to assume a “It has/had to be” stance.
As I already stated in my last analysis (“The End of the Submarine as we Know it?”), I have always been rather skeptical of the anti-access/anti-denial (A2/AD) hype propagated by certain U.S. naval analysts. It smacks too much of the “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” attitude, i.e. it says much more about how the U.S. navy and its analysts envision what Chinese naval strategy ought to be, inferred from their own assumptions (made while subconsciously looking for ways to justify the raison d’être of the world’s most powerful navy), rather than the reality of Chinese naval doctrine.
Now, two American professors have published a fascinating essay entitled “Projecting Strategy: The Myth of Chinese Counter-Intervention” investigating the validity of the centrality of counter-intervention strategies in Chinese military thought. The authors, M. Taylor Fravel and Christopher P. Twomey, thus assume the stance of the Socratic “Why?” evidenced by Hardy’s “Spirit of Pity.” They state that “Chinese military writings usually use ‘counter-intervention’ only to describe the United States A2/AD concept in Chinese terms. In this way the use of ‘counter-intervention’ sustains a form of mirror-imaging by casting China’s modernization in terms familiar to U.S. defense planners.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat