Obama's China Toolkit: In Need of Serious Repair

About a year ago, the Obama administration found itself on the defensive abroad.

In March, Russia formally annexed Crimea only a month after Russia-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was removed from power. As President Obama was preparing to leave on a four-country swing through Asia in April, allies were whispering misgivings about America’s insufficiently robust reaction to the Crimea crisis only a few months after the president failed to follow through on his Syrian “red line” threat.

And so to reassure nervous allies and deter further provocations, the Obama administration flexed its muscles—or, more accurately, indicated a willingness to flex its muscles in the future. While the president was in Asia, officials revealed to the Wall Street Journal that the Pentagon had developed a new toolkit for dealing with Chinese misbehavior:

...In addition to bomber flights and aircraft carrier maneuvers, the options include demonstrations of U.S. power such as increasing surveillance operations near China, and stepping up U.S. naval port visits to allies…

...Under the U.S. options, any new moves in the region by China to assert its claims unilaterally would be met by an American military challenge intended to get Beijing to back down. U.S. officials said the White House would be prepared to step up military deployments in disputed waters in the South and East China Seas, in a more direct challenge to Chinese claims there than the U.S. has taken in the past."

This fit well with the tone of the president’s trip, on which he finalized a new defense agreement with the Philippines and spoke forcefully of America’s commitment to its alliances with Manila and Tokyo. All in all, it was a reassuring week for America’s Asian allies.

But China wasted no time in calling what turned out to be an American bluff. Just days after President Obama’s return to the United States, China parked a massive oil rig, the Haiyang Shiyou 981, in disputed South China Sea waters, just 120 nautical miles from Vietnam’s coast. It was a provocative move and possibly designed in part to discern how the United States would respond.

Washington denounced the Chinese action, with Secretary of State John Kerry telling Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that the oil rig placement was “provocative,” to which, one can only imagine, Wang replied, “no, duh.” Typically, Kerry “urged both sides…to de-escalate tensions, to engage in high-level dialogue, to ensure safe conduct by their vessels at sea, and to resolve the dispute through peaceful means.”

As for that shiny new Pentagon toolkit, it was either bereft of policy options to deal with this type of “grey zone” challenge—which would mark quite the oversight given China’s preference for such tactics—or, perhaps more likely, the president decided against implementing any of them. He may have reasoned that the United States could not be seen as taking sides in territorial disputes and that Vietnam is not, in any case, a U.S. treaty ally.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it seems the oil rig’s exploratory mission, which lasted from May to July 2014, may have served an additional purpose as well: to distract China’s neighbors and the United States from an even more provocative undertaking, namely its island building campaign in the disputed Spratly Islands. Land reclamation at Johnson South Reef was first observed in February 2014; dredging at Cuarteron Reef likely began in April or May and at Gavens Reef in May or June. Land reclamation at Fiery Cross Reef and Hughes Reef began that summer. But with the apparent exception of Manila’s, all eyes were by and large on Haiyang Shiyou 981 and the Vietnamese riots its presence spurred.

With these land reclamation efforts, China is literally changing the geography of the South China Sea. Efforts to fortify these new landmasses may upset the military balance in the region, including vis-à-vis U.S. treaty ally the Philippines. Building islands essentially out of whole cloth and then building military outposts upon them—this should have attracted close American scrutiny. And indeed, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made a passing mention of the “destabilizing” land reclamation during last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue. The Wall Street Journal reported last month, when IHS Jane’s released new satellite imagery of the islands, that “U.S. officials say they have repeatedly asked China to stop the work,” to which their Chinese interlocutors have apparently replied, “nah”—probably after giving the request no consideration whatsoever.

Given that China’s land reclamation activities began at least as early as February, two months prior to the revelation of the Pentagon’s new military plans, Pacific Command must have prepared options for responding to this development. This is what combatant commands do; they plan for all sorts of contingencies, especially the predictable ones.

So, having asked nicely for the Chinese to cease and desist, and having been rebuffed (repeatedly), isn’t now the time for the Obama administration to revisit the Pentagon’s menu of policy options for dealing with provocations in the China seas? Last summer’s recently revealed three-week deployment to the Philippines of a P-8 squadron, which conducted flights over the Spratlys, could have been a response to Chinese moves in the South China Sea, but if so, it did not dissuade China from continuing its land reclamation projects, nor did its fleeting nature suggest seriousness of purpose.

Stepped-up and sustained surveillance by the surface fleet and air assets; presence missions by U.S. warships within the Spratly archipelago; live-fire exercises, perhaps designed to demonstrate how the Navy might deal with a fortified enemy islet—all would at least convey American alarm at Chinese activities and show that the United States is watching China at least as closely as is IHS Jane’s. Such responses would also signal that the United States does not fear a confrontation at sea with China, whose naval and air forces have been acting dangerously in response to regular U.S. naval operations.

In its reporting on the new Pentagon plans last April, the Wall Street Journal noted that Kerry and other “U.S. officials have privately warned their Chinese counterparts in recent exchanges…that the U.S. won’t accept moves by China to unilaterally declare another air-defense identification zone or to assert Chinese territorial claims in the South and East China Seas.” Yet Washington has given Beijing little reason to believe that the American president will take steps to stop, or at least punish, Chinese behavior that he does not “accept.”

As Beijing takes a look back at the past ten months, it must conclude one of two things: (1) the Pentagon’s Asia toolkit does not, in fact, exist or, more likely, (2) President Obama is unwilling to resort to the necessarily provocative policy options that would force China to reconsider its own actions. In either case, U.S. conventional deterrence is weakened and the United States has shown itself unwilling or incapable of responding to what is, in the case of island building, admittedly an extremely tough policy problem.

China, then, is affirmed in its own strategy for securing its claims to disputed territory in the South China Sea. Beijing will continue to take steps that the United States does not “accept” because such acceptance is irrelevant to Chinese calculations. Lack of U.S. acceptance has led to neither economic nor security costs for China, and so Xi Jinping and his Merry Men will march onwards, taking what they want, when they want it, and keeping the spoils for themselves. 

The U.S. military’s plans for responding to Chinese provocation, meanwhile, gather dust. Their relegation to a Pentagon bookshelf reminds us that the president (occasionally) likes to speak loudly while eschewing use of the world’s most powerful stick.

Michael Mazza is a research fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he analyzes US defense policy in the Asia-Pacific region, Chinese military modernization, cross–Taiwan Strait relations, and Korean Peninsula security. You can follow him on Twitter: @Mike_Mazza.