Deterring Chinese Aggression: Theoretical Approaches for the South China Sea
Introduction
The requirement for the United States and its allies to deter Chinese territorial aggression in the South China Sea region remains an enduring feature of the strategic environment. While this imperative emerges from the clear necessity to safeguard political stability in an area of global economic interest, it also incurs the risk that miscalculations, misinterpretations, or missteps could catalyze catastrophic military outcomes between nuclear powers. Given the potential cost of escalation associated with more direct military interventions, US leaders should employ theoretical concepts relating to coercive deterrence, indirect approaches, and sea power strategies to understand how to influence Chinese behavior in ways that accommodate the reality of the strategic environment while allowing avenues for negotiation and de-escalation.
This integration of theoretical concepts, so long as they remain practical and relevant, offers opportunity to better understand both the problem of Chinese aggression and potential solutions. As argued by the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his seminal treatise, On War, “the primary purpose of any theory is to clarify concepts and ideas that have become, as it were, confused and entangled.” In this sense, US and coalition leaders can employ abstract theories to conceptualize and refine military strategies in order to apply graduated deterrence that avoids uncontrolled escalation. This requirement, which occurs within a commercial context where conflict could have global ramifications, becomes critical concerning the threat to Taiwanese autonomy and Japanese and Filipino offshore sovereignty.
Strategic Context
The rise of China as a political, economic, and military hegemon has proved a defining phenomenon of the 21st century. While the Asian power achieved meteoric G.D.P. growth to become the world’s second largest economy over past decades, it has invested heavily in intercontinental trade to both export products to numerous clients and import the commodities of modernization at scale. This latter requirement, in particular, has seen China become the world’s largest importer of crude oil from distant sources that most prominently include Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. More importantly, similar to other East Asian economies, much of imported crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok via tanker and is vulnerable to prolonged disruption or delays.
How to deter Chinese military aggression without provoking undesired escalation? The answer, as part of a broader national and coalition agenda, may lay in turning China’s rising economic strength and global integration against them.
Like its economic trajectory, China has transformed its military over past decades with dramatic investments intended to amplify its coercive influence. As argued by Admiral John Aquilino, commander of the U.S. INDO-PACIFIC Command, in March of 2024, “the PRC continues to advance its comprehensive military modernization program to transform the PLA into an integrated, joint, high-tech, network-centric military force” in order to “supplant United States security leadership in the region.” With this expansion of military capability to fight in all domains, China has shown intent to subjugate Taiwan, seize contested archipelagos in proximity to Japan and the Philippines, and as stated by Aquilino, “alter the international system to one that encourages repressive, authoritarian governance.”
This belligerence from a historically insecure power that is both an influential actor in the global economy and a threat to US and allied interests in East Asia presents a complex problem: how to deter Chinese military aggression without provoking undesired escalation? The answer, as part of a broader national and coalition agenda, may lay in turning China’s rising economic strength and global integration against them. Specifically, by employing coercion through deterrence by punishment, devising indirect approaches that reduce cost and risk, and applying sea power strategies that project out-of-theater blockades instead of direct counter-offensives, the United States and its allies can communicate credible deterrence without igniting a destructive war—ideally within a calibrated strategy that allows for nuanced diplomacy.
Theory in Application
Coercion theory is the first and overarching concept that could inform effective US strategy in the South China Sea region. Defined by Cold War economist Thomas Schelling as, “the threat of damage” in order to “structure someone’s motives” and make them “yield and comply,” it can manifest in two primary forms: compellence and deterrence. While the former employs threats or escalations to force an actor to take a specific action, the latter employs the promise of future harm to convince them not to. Further, though compellence usually requires proactive initiative, deterrence is often indefinite and more expensive to maintain. Schelling’s work becomes especially relevant with nuclear tensions, where the most credible and moral effect is often to employ the awesome weapons to passively deter violation of sovereign territory.
Despite the illegality of such a violation, the probability of nuclear escalation resulting from any US joint counter-offensive to repel PLA forces or retake the island could prove prohibitively costly and undermine the original value of the political aim.
In the volatile environment of the South China Sea, deterrence, rather than compellence, thus remains the logical mechanism to avoid conflict and preserve stability. More specifically, a variation called deterrence by punishment, where, according to the late theorist and professor, Glenn Snyder, the coercing power “grants the gain” but “deters by posing the prospect of war costs greater than the value of the gain.” This option, which differs from deterrence by denial ideas that threatens to proactively deny or block achievement of the desired territorial gain, would allow the United States to form diverse and disparate coalitions in order to better influence Beijing’s decision calculus with promises of economic harm without immediately resorting to large-scale combat in close proximity to sovereign Chinese territory.
This argument for deterrence by punishment, rather than denial, may be critiqued as being too reactionary and not forceful enough to prevent a dramatic event such as a Chinese military offensive against Taiwan. However, despite the illegality of such a violation, the probability of nuclear escalation resulting from any US joint counter-offensive to repel PLA forces or retake the island could prove prohibitively costly and undermine the original value of the political aim. Taken further, U.S. promises of a direct military response in and near Chinese sovereign territory—as opposed to threatening to deny a distant, but vital, interest—could have counter-productive results by triggering a preemptive Chinese offensive or initiating a destabilizing military build-up for a future war which Beijing may see as existential.
A second theory that both compliments deterrence methods and can inform US strategy is B.H. Liddell Hart’s concept of the indirect approach. According to the 19th century British war theorist, who wrote in the aftermath of the destruction he endured in trenches of the First World War, the aim of strategy is “not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this.” This means that coercion should achieve strategic ends efficiently instead of hastily applying expensive and predictable direct approaches. This concept again finds relevancy in nuclear scenarios, where, similar to the carnage that Liddell Hart witnessed in 1915, the war may prove counter-productive by raising the price of victory beyond acceptable costs.
When applied to US deterrence of Chinese aggression, the indirect approach, as a military strategy, takes the form of physical and psychological dislocation. Defined by Liddell Hart as the “result of a move” which “upsets the enemy’s dispositions” by “compelling a sudden change of front,” the strategy would move the points of friction away from the South China Sea where Beijing possesses proximate military advantage and initiate the contest in a different zone where US-led coalitions may enjoy superiority. This could require the PLA to project force beyond its practiced maneuvers and inflict cognitive disarray on how to respond to the promise or actual loss of vital interests. Again, remembering attrition in the First World War, this would re-direct hostilities away from the immediacy of the sovereign nuclear equation.
Like criticism of deterrence by economic punishment, critics may argue that a direct approach, both credibly promised and tactically prepared, is required to deter aggression. However, this discounts the probability that Americans would pay a high price to win on Chinese terms and in response to Chinese initiative and would be disadvantaged by onerous requirements for hemispheric force projection. Further, in the absence of a direct Chinese attack against the U.S. homeland as the Japanese Empire did in 1941, the human costs of a more direct approach may exceed the will of the American public to sacrifice for a distant partner with an ambiguous national status. This would align with recent polling where hypothetical actions such as providing logistical support and enacting naval blockades gained majority support.
In the event of a kinetic fleet action, US-led forces could then fight from positions of advantage while stressing Chinese capacity to deploy beyond East Asian waters.
Sea power theory can offer a third, and complimentary, concept that can inform requirements for deterrence in the South China Sea. In this regard, Julian Corbett, a British war theorist and historian who wrote at the turn of the 20th century about maritime strategy, offers a sophisticated description of how naval forces must operate within a joint strategy and national security agenda in order to achieve higher policy aims. Avoiding the temptation to center naval campaigns on decisive fleet action, Corbett argued that “command of the sea” actually revolved on gaining degrees of “control of maritime communications” for both “commerce and military purposes.” This would enable “commerce prevention” to induce “economic pressure” as part of a broader military strategy that may or may not include decisive land or sea battles.
This perspective adds deterring value by threatening any major Chinese aggression with out-of-theater naval blockades and economic sanctions to deny vital resources. Similar to the US-led coalition that embargoed Moscow following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this would turn China’s economic growth into a liability and support a scalable diplomatic and economic scheme to isolate Beijing. It would enact a Corbettian strategy of disrupting oil shipping by applying Liddell Hart’s prescription for strategic dislocation and, if required, shift naval clashes to more favorable spaces. In the event of a kinetic fleet action, US-led forces could then fight from positions of advantage while stressing Chinese capacity to deploy beyond East Asian waters.
Critics, however, may claim that the intimidation of naval blockades would be insufficient to deter territorial aggression or prove disruptive to global markets. However, when again evaluated against the costs of a counter-offensive to retake territory or inflict kinetic punishment—which would likely be expensive in ships and manpower due to proximate Chinese missile superiority—Corbett’s focus on controlling maritime lines of communication to establish positions of relative advantage offers a more flexible military action when combined with embargos, sanctions, and financial restrictions. This would calibrate U.S. strategy towards achieving the policy aim of deterring future undesirable behavior with the threat of a tailorable effect, as opposed to relying upon battle-centric approaches that risk uncontrollable escalation.
Deterring Chinese Aggression
Alfred Thayer Mahan, a leading naval warfare theorist of the late 19th century, once claimed that “force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.” This means that deterrence has its highest value when force is threatened, and believed, and often retains maximum potential prior to expenditure.
Given the international resolve recently demonstrated against Russia, it suggests that the United States can plausibly dissuade Chinese aggression in the South China Sea by combining deterrence by punishment, indirect approaches, and maritime strategies in ways that credibly threaten strategic dislocation and economic disruption. While no deterrent is absolute, and strategy must accurately assess adversary tolerance and intent, the fact remains that China, as the largest importer of crude oil in the world, remains acutely vulnerable to protracted energy disruption of any kind.
This means that any US policy designed to preserve stability in East Asia must employ effective theories and concepts to craft practical strategies. While Schelling, Liddell Hart, and Corbett provide useful ideas for understanding how nuanced deterrence can align with the value of the political object, Clausewitz’s statement that relevant theory enables “analytical investigation” of the “constituent elements of war” underscores the point. This means that, even as nuclear tensions continue to define competition in the South China Sea, the United States should consider ways to intervene that allow graduated pressure and de-escalation. While no military strategy is absolute, and the future is uncertain, it remains true that the ultimate US aim is not to seek war, but to preserve a better peace.
