US-China Nuclear Relations: The Impact of Strategic Triangles 9781626379527

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 The Importance of Strategic Triangles
2 The US-China Strategic Nuclear Relationship
3 The Major Power Game: The United States, China, and Russia
4 Proliferation Pariahs in the Mix: North Korea and Iran
5 Complex Relationships: The United States, China, and US Regional Allies
6 Competitive Deterrence? The United States, China, and South Asia
7 Third Actors and US-China Nuclear Strategies
Bibliography
The Contributors
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

US-China Nuclear Relations

US-China Nuclear Relations The Impact of Strategic Triangles edited by

David Santoro

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2021 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

„ 2021 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-62637-907-7 (hc)

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

To thinkers and doers working at the intersection of multiple disciplines

Contents

Acknowledgments

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The Importance of Strategic Triangles David Santoro

The US-China Strategic Nuclear Relationship David Santoro

The Major Power Game: The United States, China, and Russia John K. Warden

Proliferation Pariahs in the Mix: North Korea and Iran Robert Einhorn Complex Relationships: The United States, China, and US Regional Allies Brad Glosserman

Competitive Deterrence? The United States, China, and South Asia Toby Dalton

Third Actors and US-China Nuclear Strategies David Santoro

Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

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Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK WAS COMPLETED WITH THE ADVICE, GUIDANCE, AND insight of so many people that it would make little sense to list them all. As the editor, I am of course thankful to each and every one who contributed directly or indirectly to this project, but here I would like to express my special gratitude to those who had a powerful influence. Naturally, at the top of my list are my coauthors: Toby Dalton, Robert Einhorn, Brad Glosserman, and John K. Warden. I thank each of them for offering a unique and original contribution to this book. I also thank them for complying with my instructions about their chapters. I do not think I was too heavy-handed in my requests, but if I was, I trust they realized my intention was to ensure consistency across the volume and that it is more than the sum of its parts. Last I checked, I was still on good terms with all four coauthors—a sign that, at a minimum, I did okay. I am indebted to my organization, the Pacific Forum, which established numerous Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues—particularly under the leadership of Ralph Cossa and now Robert Girrier—many on strategic nuclear issues in Asia and beyond. The idea for this book grew out of my work at the forum, notably my involvement in the “China-US Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,” a now-suspended Track 1.5 dialogue process that I had the privilege to help run. Over the years working on this process and others, I became convinced that it was necessary—indeed essential—not only to conduct much more in-depth research and analysis on US-China relations and nuclear weapons, but also to broaden the scope and consider the role and influence third actors exert on Washington and Beijing, and vice versa. This book is the result of this line of thinking, and my hope is that it ix

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will help advance knowledge and perhaps also ongoing discussions, both at the unofficial and official levels. A special thank you goes to my former (now retired) Pacific Forum colleague Carl Baker, with whom I have had countless talks about China, Asian security, and of course this book, especially when I was conceptualizing its structure. His insights and recommendations were of great help. The book benefited from many critical reviews from numerous informed and thoughtful readers. Among others, Fiona Cunningham, Anya Fink, Mike Fitzsimmons, Bruce Klingner, Daniel Markey, Frank Rose, and Scott Snyder reviewed a select number of preliminary chapter drafts, and their advice for improvement was invaluable. One person I want to thank especially is Brad Roberts, who reviewed and made numerous useful comments and suggestions on the entire manuscript. I am thankful for his assistance with this project and, for that matter, for all the work he has done for the national security community over the years, both inside and outside government. His work has been an inspiration to me and many others, and the reader will notice that he is quoted profusely. Of course, I would be remiss if I did not also thank Marie-Claire Antoine, senior acquisitions editor at Lynne Rienner Publishers. Working with her and her team has been an excellent experience and a real pleasure. She made incisive and judicious recommendations at all stages of the editing process and, significantly, she was patient with me when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and my productivity decreased quite a bit during the lockdown. News flash, everyone: It turns out that writing at home with a three-year-old running around everywhere is very challenging; don’t try it. Finally, and most important, I want to thank Laetitia, my wife, and my daughter, Ava, who is now four (and continues to run around everywhere). Laetitia and Ava have borne many of the consequences of my obsession with this project, knowingly (in Laetitia’s case) and unknowingly (in Ava’s case). Yet both have been wonderful and a constant source of support. —David Santoro

1 The Importance of Strategic Triangles David Santoro

THE UNITED STATES IS IN THE MIDST OF REASSESSING ITS POLICY toward China. That reassessment is comprehensive in scope and, therefore, includes nuclear policy. At root, it involves addressing the following question: How should the United States adapt to compete most effectively against an increasingly powerful and combative China? Until recently, and since the early 1970s, the United States was disinterested in making “strategic competition” the organizing principle of its relationship with China. Rather, the US goal was to engage China; integrate it into the international system; and “wait” until it changed economically, politically, and geopolitically. The goal, plainly, was to encourage China to endorse market forces, implement democratic reforms, and accept the existing Asian and international orders. That approach was best encapsulated in a 2005 speech by then US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick, who said that the United States wanted China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the world.1 Not surprisingly, during that time, the United States paid little attention to the nuclear dimension of its relationship with China because, quite simply, that dimension was expected to evolve in a positive direction as Beijing transformed. Another reason was that China had developed only a small nuclear arsenal, which for a long time it chose to expand and perfect very slowly; US officials, therefore, thought that they could safely ignore it. 1

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From the mid to late 2000s, however, despite promising signs in some areas, doubts began to grow in the US national security community that China would ever make the expected transition. One major red flag was Beijing’s military modernization efforts, which became more sustained and even accelerated with the spectacular growth of the Chinese economy. Concerns increased further after the Great Recession of 2007–2009, which had disastrous effects for most countries but left China unscathed, and seemingly convinced Beijing that its authoritarian model of governance was superior to all the others, notably to the Western liberal democratic model. Beijing became much more assertive to advance its interests in Asia and beyond, especially, though not exclusively, in the South China Sea. Although it was not immediately obvious, Xi Jinping’s accession to the top of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 was the final nail in the coffin, closing off any remaining hope that China would change to the United States’ liking. Quickly, it became clear that Xi would rule China with an iron fist and that, under his leadership, Beijing would stop, and even backtrack on, economic reforms as well as more actively contest, rather than accept, the existing Asian and international orders and propose alternative institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a potential rival to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Despite these developments, until recently the United States had made only minor adjustments to its policy toward China. To be sure, Washington had increasingly hedged against Beijing’s new assertiveness, notably by strengthening its alliances and developing new partnerships in Asia. Engagement, however, remained the order of the day. From a US perspective, while China had clearly not turned into a strategic partner, it had not become a strategic competitor either. Little, in these circumstances, was done to adjust US nuclear policy, strategy, and posture vis-à-vis Beijing. The 2016 US presidential election provided an opportunity (and a platform) to debate US policy toward China and, with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House in 2017, that policy began to change. It was first reflected in the administration’s key strategy documents. For the first time, the 2017 National Security Strategy labels China (and Russia) a “revisionist power” and explains that the longstanding US policy of engaging rival states and including them in international institutions and global commerce to transform them into benign actors had failed.2 The document goes on to stress that Washington will now change course and focus on competing against these states. Other documents, notably the 2018 National Defense Strategy,

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echo this line of thinking, suggesting that China is by far the United States’ primary strategic competitor and calling for a “seamless integration of multiple elements of national power” to push back against Beijing.3 These themes also appear in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which indicates that “while the United States has continued to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons, others, including Russia and China, have moved in the opposite direction.”4 Here, too, the message is clear: Washington will adapt its approach. Though initially tentative and not implemented in a consistent manner, by and large the Trump administration has since moved to intensify competition against China in virtually all dimensions of the bilateral relationship and, as the following chapter will detail, there are already signs that this competition is extending into the nuclear domain. Significantly, while there are deep disagreements about strategy, the shift toward a more competitive stance toward China is one of the few policy areas that currently enjoys broad bipartisan support in the United States. Republicans and Democrats agree that the United States should adopt a new, comprehensive China policy, one that seeks to firmly balance, if not outrightly counter, Beijing’s actions. This is a sentiment also increasingly shared by the US public. The Covid-19 pandemic, which is ongoing at the time of this writing, will likely strengthen this sentiment among both US officials and the US public, and drive Washington to push back even harder against China. This is not because there is evidence that the Chinese government responded late to the virus after it first emerged in Wuhan. It is not even because Chinese officials silenced whistleblowers and covered up critical information about the virus’ spread and severity, which is now having devastating health and economic consequences throughout the world, including in the United States. But it is because Beijing has been actively trying to reshape the narrative in its favor and use the pandemic for geopolitical gains, and in particular at Washington’s expense. Beijing, for instance, has launched a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the virus on others (notably, the United States) and there are indications that it might seek to capitalize on the world’s distraction to pursue its foreign policy goals more aggressively, be it in the South China Sea, vis-à-vis Taiwan, or elsewhere. This overview makes one thing clear: the US-China rivalry that has emerged in recent years is here to stay, and it is likely to continue to intensify in the foreseeable future. What is more, that rivalry has not insulated any dimension of the bilateral relationship, not even the nuclear dimension, which until then had remained largely muted.

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This book, as the following pages will explain in greater detail, reflects on the impact that this growing US-China nuclear rivalry will have on the Asian and international security orders. It focuses on the interplay between the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship and other key states. The book does so by following a triangular approach: it examines, in turn, the nuclear relationships between the United States, China, and a third state (or a set of third states) with an eye to improving understanding of the current and looming “nuclear geometry” in Asia and beyond, and to drawing implications for US policy. Some scholars had long anticipated that there would be trouble in Asia, and with China in particular. In the early 1990s, as Francis Fukuyama posited his influential thesis that humanity had reached the “end of history” with the end of the Cold War and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (a thesis quickly countered by Samuel Huntington, his mentor), Aaron Friedberg explained that this optimistic outlook would not apply to Asia.5 In a landmark International Security article published in the winter of 1993–1994, Friedberg argued that bipolarity had given way neither to unipolarity nor to multipolarity, but to a set of regional subsystems in which clusters of contiguous states with different force levels interact mainly with one another, a feature he labeled “multi-multipolarity” or “regional multipolarity.”6 He went on to explain that Asia, unlike Europe, was not heading toward more peaceful and prosperous times but, on the contrary, that for a myriad of economic, social, political, and geopolitical reasons the region was “ripe for rivalry” and even likely to become “the cockpit of great power conflict.”7 Friedberg predicted that Asian countries would engage in intense arms races and that smaller states would choose sides among the regional and major powers, allying with some to balance others. Later, in his book A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (2011), Friedberg would contend that China’s goal is to “win without fighting” and displace the United States as the leading power in Asia.8 A few scholars shared Friedberg’s pessimism at the time.9 Many others, however, disagreed with the fundamentals of his thesis, explaining that Asia was fast developing security cooperation and economic interdependence, a dynamic that had begun in the late 1970s and, they argued, would extend far into the future. For instance, Robert Scalapino contended in a 1991 Foreign Affairs article that:

Ripe for Rivalry 2.0

The Importance of Strategic Triangles The future of Asia and of American relations with Asia are promising. The risks of a major power conflict are small. Most subregional tensions have eased and, with very few exceptions, the costs of armed struggle, even between smaller states, are such as to make that option highly undesirable to the leaders concerned. Meanwhile the new priorities are on economic development. Hence pragmatism is ascendant, ideology at a lower premium.10

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At the turn of the century, these scholars pointed to evidence suggesting they had been right, as China was seemingly developing into, and increasingly being viewed as a benign status quo power, with smaller Asian countries refraining from forming a coalition to contain it.11 These scholars also stressed that China’s “New Diplomacy” of engaging regional institutions and its neighboring countries, including some former enemies such as South Korea, Vietnam, and India, had a soothing effect on the region’s quiet concerns about Beijing’s increasing power.12 It appeared that Asia might not be, or ever would be, “ripe for rivalry” as Friedberg had assessed but, despite a few important hotspots and the possibility of flash points, that the region might instead be in for a long peace or, as Thomas Berger put it in a 2000 article in Review of International Studies, “set for stability.”13 Yet as the 2000s progressed, several scholars began to acknowledge that there were many looming questions about the future of Asian security and stability in light of the systemic change in the power balance anticipated from the rise of China and other regional states. Still, these scholars remained cautiously optimistic because, they calculated, change in Asia would probably be incremental, evolutionary, and relatively peaceful; there would not be revolutionary change through hegemonic war. To support their argument, these scholars advanced various reasons. One was that power increases, for China and others, would be gradual, could suffer reversals, and that in any event Chinese power would not come close to matching US power in the foreseeable future.14 Another reason was that a rising China might seek to alter the status quo to serve its interests and enhance its influence, but would also feel constrained by US power as well as reluctant to press too hard because it would want to be seen as a positive force in Asia and the world, not as a revisionist power.15 A third reason was that except for the Taiwan situation, there was no issue that could lead to war between the United States and China. A final reason was that Beijing had not begun to articulate an alternative approach to regional governance and that, despite success in its policy

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of good neighborliness, it still had a long way to go to develop trusting relationships with regional states. Accordingly, the argument went, change in Asia would not be tension free, but it would likely take place peacefully. Fast-forward to the early 2020s and, as discussed earlier, the landscape looks considerably different. To be sure, China is still much weaker than the United States, Beijing does feel constrained by US power, and there has not been revolutionary change through hegemonic war. But over the past decade Beijing has worked hard to change the regional status quo much more aggressively than anticipated, seemingly without regard for the reputation costs. Moreover, while the Taiwan situation remains the most volatile, there are now other areas where confrontation could begin, notably in the South China Sea, but also in other domains such as in cyberspace. Finally, while they have been received with mixed feelings by regional states and others, Beijing has made impressive progress in setting up alternative regional and even global institutions of order that advance its interests. In short, the nature and pace of change in Chinese behavior and actions, not to mention developments in China, have been generally negative and have surprised many over the past few years. That is why Friedberg’s “ripe-for-rivalry” thesis has come back in fashion with a vengeance. As Friedberg himself put it in a 2018 Survival article, “There appears to be a growing consensus in Washington, and in the capitals of many other advanced industrial democracies, that prevailing [engagement] policies towards China have failed and that an alternative approach is now urgently required.”16 Not surprisingly, then, important scholarly work on the current and looming challenges posed by China (and how the United States should respond) began to surface in the 2010s. Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon (2015), which describes China’s strategy to replace the United States as the global superpower, is a case in point.17 Also significant are Henry Kissinger’s On China (2011), a comprehensive study on Chinese diplomacy and US-China relations that recommends the creation of a Pacific Community along the lines of the Atlantic Community to promote security through inclusivity and mutual respect; Hugh White’s The China Choice (2013), which explains that the United States must accept China as an equal partner and share power; and Graham Allison’s Destined for War (2017), which argues that, while it is not inevitable, war between the United States and China is nevertheless a real possibility.18

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These developments are echoed in the history of nuclear weapons over the past thirty years, as well as in its analytical literature. After the Cold War, many in the United States and the West thought that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and hopes for the “end of history,” the end of nuclear weapons was near or, at least, within reach—for good reasons. It suddenly became possible for the United States and Russia to conduct deep cuts on their arsenals, allowing the United Kingdom and France to do the same. Washington, London, Paris, and at first even Moscow also proceeded to push their remaining nuclear weapons into the background of their defense policies, farther than at any point since the dawn of the nuclear age. Well into the 1990s, the pursuit of disarmament (and nonproliferation) replaced the pursuit of deterrence capabilities as the new priority in nuclear affairs. As Richard Paulsen put it in his book, The Role of US Nuclear Weapons in the Post–Cold War Era (1994), “The nuclear arms race did an about-face in 1991 and became a disarmament race.”19 From the mid- to late 1990s, however, several scholars began to ring the alarm bells, explaining that a “second nuclear age” was emerging.20 That term had several meanings and interpretations but, at its most basic, it sought to convey the idea that the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of nuclear weapons for one simple reason: more countries were taking an interest in acquiring these weapons. The term second nuclear age also suggested that the emerging nuclear landscape would be different from the first. Two aspects stood out in particular. One was the relationship between nuclear and conventional weapons, which was beginning to evolve rapidly, leading to new, complex forms of deterrence, including those involving the offensedefense balance. Another aspect was a fast-changing Asia with the advent of new nuclear-armed states mostly in that region (with India, Pakistan, and then North Korea crossing the nuclear threshold), several states with latent nuclear capabilities (notably Japan), and an increasingly powerful nuclear-armed China. In this emerging multitechnology and multiplayer geometry, many wondered if deterrence would hold as well as it did in an environment dominated by only two states, as was the case during the Cold War.21 Concerns were especially high given the great asymmetry of forces between the new nuclear-armed states, their close proximity to one another, their tight strategic interconnectedness, and the broader instabilities inherent to Asia that Friedberg had described a few years earlier.22 Some scholars were deeply pessimistic, arguing

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that intense arms racing was likely and the risks of nuclear use were high, much higher than even during the Cold War, because many of the new nuclear-armed states were led by authoritarian leaders dissatisfied with their regional security orders. Richard Betts opined in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article that, in the post–Cold War world, “there is less danger of complete annihilation, but more danger of mass destruction.”23 Thérèse Delpech concurred, writing in Survival later that same year that “the risk of nuclear use may be higher in regions where non-status-quo power with authoritarian regimes prevail.”24 These scholars, plainly, argued that all the ingredients for nuclear instability were present. Other scholars pushed back, stressing a decade later that these dire predictions had not materialized. On the contrary, nuclear weapons, they said, had largely contributed to the security of states and reinforced stability in Asia. This is the chief conclusion of Muthiah Alagappa’s comprehensive study The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia (2008), which built on Kenneth Waltz’s thesis that the spread of nuclear weapons may have some important stabilizing effects.25 In that study, Alagappa explained that nuclear weapons in Asia remained mostly in the background, but nevertheless had a powerful influence because of the “long shadow” that they cast, informing in fundamental ways the strategic policies of the major powers and their allies with far-reaching—positive—consequences for regional security and stability. He further contended that deterrence in a condition of asymmetric power relationships was, and would remain for the foreseeable future, the primary role of nuclear weapons in Asia, adding that more offensive (compellence, coercive diplomacy, war fighting) and defensive (counterforce damage limitation) roles of such weapons as well as strategic defense against them would be of marginal utility. In short, Alagappa argued that deterrence had been, and would continue to be, the dominant strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons in Asia. Many questioned that optimism, arguing a few years later that the outlook for Asia’s nuclear future was negative, for three reasons. First was because evidence emerged that Asian states, and regional powers generally, held fundamentally different views about the role and utility of nuclear weapons and, as a result, that deterrence might not remain the dominant strategy. In a 2010 International Security article, Vipin Narang identified “three distinct types of regional power nuclear postures: a catalytic posture, an assured retaliation posture, and an asymmetric escalation posture.” 26 He argued that with a catalytic posture, regional powers seek to entice a superpower—typically

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the United States—to intervene on their behalf and smooth over regional conflicts, as was the case of Israel in the 1970s and Pakistan in the 1980s. Narang then explained that, with an assured retaliation posture, regional powers intend to retaliate if they are the victim of a nuclear attack, as is the case of China and India today, and, with an asymmetric escalation posture, that their goal is to present a credible threat of a first nuclear strike in response to a conventional attack, as was the case of France during the Cold War, and is the case of Pakistan today. Other scholars stressed that regional powers gave additional roles to nuclear weapons. For instance, in a limited war context, some might consider nuclear use to force adversaries to back down; this is the “escalate-to-de-escalate” logic often attributed to Russia.27 Meanwhile, others might “use” nuclear weapons for bargaining or coercive purposes, as in the case of North Korea. Second, scholars explained that strategic interactions in Asia and elsewhere now involved more than just nuclear weapons, a problem which, as mentioned earlier, emerged in the late 1990s but became much more prevalent from the late 2000s. Scholars stressed that the development and deployment of increasingly sophisticated strategic defenses, which for now remained limited in scope, could soon fundamentally alter the balance between deterrence and offense, especially in Asia where states had only small nuclear forces. States with effective ballistic missile defenses, plainly, might soon have the option to reduce significantly, if not eliminate completely, their vulnerability to nuclear weapons, de facto rendering deterrence ineffective and leading to new potentially less stable strategic situations. Scholars also highlighted that the development and deployment of long-range, highly lethal conventional weapons were rapidly obscuring the nuclearconventional distinction, with profound implications for the integrity of the nuclear threshold and for stability. An additional problem was the rise in prominence of the role of space and cyber in strategic conflict, which could pose similar stability issues because of imprecise rules of engagement in these domains and the possibility of spillover effects into both the conventional and nuclear domains. These scholars, in sum, argued that while there never was a distinct redline of escalation into the strategic realm, that line was now becoming increasingly blurry, foreshadowing increasingly dangerous times. Third, several scholars pointed out that another problem was that Asian states increasingly interacted in complex, polygonal relationships rather than dyadic ones. In a 2011 Asia Policy article, Christopher Twomey explained that China, India, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States now all looked at

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more than one regional player as they framed their security policies, and he showed that several key triangular relationships were emerging such as between the United States, China, and Russia, or between the United States, North Korea, and China, among others.28 These are developments that a few scholars had anticipated a few years earlier: Brad Roberts, for instance, described many of these emerging patterns of complex strategic interactions in a 2000 monograph, Nuclear Multipolarity and Stability.29 Twomey, like Roberts and a few others, argued that such polygons—triangles—of strategic interactions were deeply unstable and fertile for conflict, as exemplified in George Orwell’s famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which describes a world divided into three superstates—Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania—in a state of perpetual war, with two superstates sometimes aligning against the third, and all three often switching alliances. These scholars also highlighted that the inherent instability of triangular relationships was backed up by international relations scholarship and game theory. In his foundational book Systems of States (1977), for instance, the late international relations professor Martin Wight concluded that “triangles tend to be mobile figures of shifting alliances and negotiations,” adding that “triangles, like duels, are relationships of conflict, and are resolved by war.”30 Subsequent game theory work on “truels” (a three-party expansion of a duel) confirmed these findings, and more recent scholarship reached similar conclusions, pointing to the emergence of a growing number of “security trilemmas,” notably in Asia—actions taken in one bilateral relationship that have cascading effects in another.31 While disagreeing about the new age’s likely impact on security and stability, second nuclear age scholars nonetheless agreed about its fundamental features: that it was a multitechnology and multiplayer geometry with Asia as the epicenter. These scholars also all pointed out that these dynamics flew in the face of the “disarmament race” initiated by the United States, much of the West, and a few others in the early 1990s. As Brad Roberts explained in a 1998 monograph, The Future of Nuclear Weapons in Asia, “The nuclear future desired by many in the West (and elsewhere) of nuclear deemphasis and ultimate abolition is held hostage to developments in Asia. If the actions of governments are to have any hope of shaping events in ways conducive to our interests and aspirations, the analysis that informs them must begin to come to terms with the realities and perceptions that shape nuclear trends in Asia.”32 When attempting to raise awareness in Washington and elsewhere about ongoing strategic dynamics in Asia, second nuclear age

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scholars typically focused on India and Pakistan given their overt nuclearization in 1998, which set the subcontinent on a new path and raised numerous questions about its security and stability as well as the possibility of spillover effects into the broader region. North Korea, which began testing long-range missiles in the late 1990s and crossed the nuclear threshold in 2006, was also much in focus, especially given the implications for US regional allies, notably South Korea and Japan, as well as US deployed forces in the region. A few scholars, however, were quick to stress that the focal point of interest—and the big question mark in the years ahead— was China because it was well on its way to becoming a global power, because there was considerable uncertainty about its nuclear future in the context of its rise, and, significantly, because it had unique strategic interconnections and interactions with both the established major nuclear powers and the rest of Asia. Roberts made that latter point clear in his 2000 monograph, highlighting that “China’s nuclear identity is both global and Asian—its nuclear relations with the United States and Russia are dominant, but it is also keenly aware of its nuclear relations to the Asian subsystems.”33 Christopher Twomey concurred, stressing a few years later that China “sits at the fulcrum of several triangular security dilemmas in the strategic realm.”34 As a result, scholarship on China’s “nuclear profile” began to emerge, much of which built on the seminal works by Alice Langley Hsieh as well as John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai on the origins of Beijing’s decision to enter the nuclear club and the early evolution of the Chinese nuclear strategy and weapons program.35 Examples include books such as Avery Goldstein’s Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century: China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution (2000), Paul Bolt and Albert Willner’s China’s Nuclear Future (2005), and Jeffrey Lewis’s The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (2007).36 Much of that scholarly work sought to answer the question of whether China, which had “only” developed, and for a long time maintained, a small nuclear arsenal, would preserve a minimum deterrence posture or pursue more ambitious means to engage in limited deterrence in the context of its rise.37 The results were almost unanimous: they showed that minimum deterrence continued to capture the essence of China’s approach to nuclear weapons and that there was no indication that Beijing would change that approach in the foreseeable future, despite its military modernization program and the slow but steady growth of its nuclear arsenal.

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Until recently, however, and despite actions by some politicians pushing Washington to reconsider its engagement with Beijing (by alleging, for instance, that China had conducted covert operations within the United States during the 1980s and 1990s that contributed to the enhancement of its nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction), work on the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship was extremely scarce, to the displeasure of several strategists.38 At the turn of the century, for instance, Roberts lamented that the US national security community recalled China as “little more than a footnote in the history of the nuclear era”39 and, a few years later, he argued that US officials were still (wrongly, in his view) treating Beijing as an “afterthought.”40 In the early 2000s, only a handful of analysts were pressing Washington to start thinking about the relationship it should seek to develop with this “forgotten nuclear power” because, they insisted, “over the next decade it will likely be China, not Russia or any rogue, whose nuclear weapons policy will concern America most.”41 A few scholars had made similar complaints decades earlier. In 1981, for instance, Timothy Huntington argued that China’s nuclear arsenal is “a facet of international power too often ignored.”42 Then, in 1989, Chong-Pin Lin insisted that there was “insufficient Western attention” devoted to that problem, warning that: An inward-looking, melancholy-faced, and slow-moving panda will not overnight become a howling and mauling grizzly. The panda, however, has the potential to gradually transform itself into an outward-looking, self-assured, and dynamic dragon. The nature of the dragon, belligerent as Saint George’s assailant monster or benevolent as conceived in Oriental mythology, depends on the persuasion of the political rule in China. In either case, the days when China’s nuclear weapons strategy could be taken lightly are now history.43

Behind the scenes, several Track 2 and Track 1.5 (i.e., unofficial) US-China nuclear-focused dialogues were launched from the mid2000s. Involving a select group of US and Chinese government officials and subject matter experts, these processes not only sought to help Washington and Beijing better understand each other’s views and perceptions about nuclear weapons, but also to contribute to developing what could become the contours of a stable and predictable bilateral nuclear relationship. A considerable amount of (good) work was done but, for many years, Washington did not treat

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these processes as a first-order priority which, unsurprisingly, suited Beijing perfectly: by and large, Chinese participants even advocated against giving too much prominence to that relationship.44 The scarcity of work on, and the limited attention given to, the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship is not surprising. By and large, and for a long time, scholarship in the field has been focused on the US-Russia relationship (and on the US-Soviet relationship during the Cold War) because Russia has been, and remains, a nuclear peer competitor to the United States. Still today, for instance, Russia is the only country in the world deemed capable of completely destroying the United States. By contrast, China was never a nuclear peer and even now, the asymmetry between the two powers is vast: China is a much weaker nuclear power than the United States. What is more, and contrary to the beliefs held in the West immediately after the Cold War, the “Russia nuclear problem” has not faded away. Washington and Moscow failed to move nuclear weapons from the foreground into the background of their relationship, a failure that became obvious after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, which led to the downward spiral of US-Russia relations, including in the nuclear domain, with far-reaching consequences for European security and stability. Incidentally, these developments have shown that the second nuclear age narrative has limits because, unlike what many had predicted, it is now clear that the nuclear future will not be written in Asia only: US-Russia nuclear relations and strategic dynamics in the Euro-Atlantic area will continue to play an important role in shaping that future. In addition to Russia, the United States has had other priorities that have overshadowed China, and these priorities have filled much of the nuclear scholarship space. Moreover, and as the next chapter will explain in more depth, the United States assumed for a long time that China was part of the solution to address these priorities. One such priority has been the so-called pariah states with nuclear weapon ambitions, notably North Korea, which have forced the United States to devote a considerable amount of time and energy to work with regional allies, notably South Korea and Japan, to adapt extended deterrence and assurance. Another priority has been strengthening the nonproliferation regime to make it more difficult for nuclear weapons aspirants (such as Iran) to reach their goal and, after the September 11 attacks against the United States and in the context of increased awareness about the potential risks of nuclear terrorism, strengthening the nuclear security regime. Finally, while they have never been considered a US priority given

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the absence of direct implications for the United States or US allies, Washington has paid more attention to India and Pakistan than to China because of the rising possibility of nuclear use on the subcontinent, be it during the 1999 Kargil War or as a result of subsequent (and recurrent) skirmishes, incidents, or standoffs between the Indian and Pakistani militaries. Yet with the US-China relationship becoming increasingly competitive and China featuring prominently in the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, where it is regarded as a significant “problem country,” the tables have now turned. To the United States, China has become a nuclear priority of the first order and, as a result, new scholarship on China and nuclear weapons has begun to proliferate in recent years. This scholarship can be divided into two broad lines of work. One line has focused on further exploring China’s “nuclear profile,” particularly in the context of its increasingly sustained military modernization efforts. Several foreign policy think tanks have produced important studies in this area. The RAND Corporation, for instance, has issued two major reports: China’s Evolving Nuclear Deterrent (2017) and China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence” (2016). 45 Independent scholars have produced cutting-edge work, too. This is the case of professors Fiona Cunningham and Taylor Fravel, who have published the articles “Assuring Assured Retaliation” (2015) and “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation” (2019) in International Security, and Tong Zhao from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has released Tides of Change: China’s Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines and Strategic Stability (2018).46 By and large, despite notable exceptions, this body of work has shown that China remains a much weaker nuclear power than the United States and that, for now, Beijing maintains its traditional minimum deterrence posture. At the same time, however, these studies explain that Beijing is gaining strength and developing an increasingly sophisticated arsenal.47 The other line of work has focused on unpacking the ins and outs of the long-neglected US-China bilateral nuclear relationship, with some studies emerging a little before the “formal” US shift to strategic competition, as the relationship was starting to ebb. Examples include Michael Wheeler’s monograph Nuclear Parity with China? (2012); Brad Roberts’s chapter “The Evolving Relationship with China” in his book The Case for Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (2016); Michael Nacht, Sarah Laderman, and Julie Beeston’s

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monograph Strategic Competition in China-US Relations (2018); and Caitlin Talmadge’s paper “The US-China Nuclear Relationship: Why Competition Is Likely to Intensify” (2019).48 Foreign policy think tanks have also produced some work in this area, including a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Nuclear Weapons and US-China Relations (2013), and more recently an edited volume by the National Bureau of Asian Research, US-China Relations in Strategic Domains (2016).49 On the whole, this body of work has shown that nuclear weapons, once in the background of the US-China relationship, are likely to move increasingly into the foreground, an indication that Washington and Beijing will soon be in much more dangerous (and uncharted) territory. This recent scholarly work has done great service in that it has helped improve knowledge about China’s general approach to nuclear weapons and the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship. So far, however, one critical dimension has been overlooked: the interplay between the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship and other states. Plainly, there has not been a thorough analysis of the role and influence that other states exert on that relationship, and how Washington and Beijing relate to such states, especially in the context of increasingly intense and competitive US-China strategic relations. This is an important gap because the United States and China have, as mentioned earlier, deep interconnections and interactions with several other states, many of which are key players in the global and Asian nuclear orders. At the major power level, the United States and China have a special relationship with Russia. But both are also intertwined with multiple other systems and subsystems, in Asia and beyond. Each has an interest in, and is therefore connected to, developments with pariah states such as North Korea and Iran. Both US and Chinese strategic thinking and actions are driven by developments in US regional alliance relationships and partnerships. The United States and China, finally, are each connected, in their own unique ways, to strategic nuclear dynamics in South Asia. There is another reason why examining the role and influence that several key states exert on the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship is worthy of special attention: that is the asymmetric nature of that relationship. Because the United States and China do not have a peerto-peer relationship in the nuclear domain, other states have, at least in theory, a considerable opportunity to shape that relationship. This is especially true now given that many such states have become increasingly powerful and have developed, as a result, greater agency over the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship.

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Accordingly, it is paramount to reflect on the impact that tighter US-China nuclear bipolarity will have on other states because this dynamic will, to a large extent, shape and even potentially reshape the future of the global and Asian strategic nuclear landscapes. This comes down to asking the following questions: What effects will tighter nuclear coupling between Washington and Beijing have on the regional and international security orders? Specifically, how will growing competition change Washington and Beijing’s thinking and actions vis-àvis other capitals? How will other states adapt in the face of such competition? Will there be any “triangulation” attempts, in that states will seek to exploit the emerging rivalry between the United States and China as a means to shape the balance of power to their advantage?50 Will states instead bandwagon with one side over the other? Or will they hedge their bets as US-China strategic competition is unfolding? What are the consequences of such dynamics? Finally, from a US perspective, what are the implications, and what should Washington do to anticipate and shape these dynamics in its favor? This book analyzes the interplay between the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship and other key states by following a triangular approach. It examines, in turn, the strategic nuclear relationships between the United States, China, and a third actor (or a set of third actors), focusing particularly on developments that have taken place since US-China relations began to grow increasingly competitive. This analytical approach—“US-China-X”—will help assess change and continuity in each triangle, providing key insights into how the Asian and global nuclear orders could evolve in the foreseeable future. With that approach, the book is intended to be a contribution to a better understanding of the current and looming nuclear geometry in the emerging era of US-China strategic competition. It also aims to draw important implications for the United States and make recommendations for US policy. In pursuit of these goals, this book proceeds as follows. It begins with a more complete examination of the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship. Conceived as a baseline for the book’s analytical focus, and written by me, Chapter 2 reviews the evolution of the relationship from the time China jump-started its nuclear weapons program to today, highlighting elements of both change and continuity. It also examines relevant developments in the broader, non-nuclear relationship with an eye to explaining their influence on the policymak-

About the Book

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ing process and how US-China bipolarity has grown over time. In so doing, the chapter touches on the roles and influence that other states have had on the evolving US-China bilateral nuclear relationship. The four subsequent chapters build on that analysis by zooming in on specific US-China “strategic nuclear triangles.” Authored by John Warden, Chapter 3 examines the US-China-Russia triangle, arguably the most important because it comprises the world’s three major nuclear-armed states. Historically, the United States and Russia have regarded China as a “lesser included case” because Beijing has had a much smaller nuclear arsenal; that is why, so far, only the United States and Russia have had an arms control relationship. Since the end of the Cold War, however, China has steadily expanded and perfected its nuclear arsenal, and it has also engaged in significant military developments in other areas. In recent years, the US emphasis on competition against authoritarian powers has pushed Russia and China close, including on nuclear issues. These dynamics have created concerns in Washington about the future direction of China’s relationship. This chapter evaluates plausible futures for the US-Russia-China nuclear triangle and how it could affect the US-China relationship. Chapter 4 then focuses on the triangular relationship between the United States, China, and the pariah states: North Korea and Iran. Written by Robert Einhorn, this chapter explains that the pariah states violate international laws and norms and that the United States and China, while in (very) general agreement about the diagnosis of these states’ behavior and actions, do not typically see eye to eye about the ways and means they should employ to address these problems. As a general rule, for instance, while China favors a diplomatic approach, the United States is more inclined to resort to sanctions, and it does not rule out the use of force. How growing US-China nuclear bipolarity is likely to impact management of the “pariah state problem,” and, specifically, how the pariah states will adapt to that new reality, is the focus of this chapter. In Chapter 5, Brad Glosserman looks at the strategic nuclear triangle formed by the United States, China, and US allies in Asia as well as Taiwan. The logic of this triangle is simple. US regional allies and Taiwan each have a special relationship with the United States, one anchored, in varying degrees, in mutual defense commitments that include, at least for some, protection under the so-called US nuclear umbrella. Meanwhile, US allies and Taiwan all have a complicated—and generally distrustful—relationship with China, especially now that the regional balance of power is rapidly shifting

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in Beijing’s favor. This chapter examines how these dynamics are likely to evolve in the face of increased US-China nuclear coupling. Penned by Toby Dalton, Chapter 6 explores another significant strategic nuclear triangle, the one between the United States, China, and South Asia; the subcontinent hosts two long-standing bitter enemies, which are also emerging as powerful nuclear-armed states: India and Pakistan. In this triangle, both the United States and China, in addition to envisioning a war with each other and, therefore, to having a relationship of mutual deterrence, have complicated relationships with the two South Asian nuclear powers. The United States is getting strategically closer to India by the day, and it engages, but generally has deep distrust for, Pakistan. China, for its part, is strategically close to Pakistan, but it strongly distrusts India; de facto, China also has an emerging deterrence relationship with India. This chapter examines the impact of growing US-China strategic competition on these dynamics. The book’s final chapter, written by me, sets out the conclusions from this work. It brings together all the chapters’ findings and reflects on broader strategic considerations to draw lessons for the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship and, more generally, for the Asian and global nuclear orders. The chief argument is that there is now ripeness for general nuclear rivalry and, therefore, that the prospects for the future are not bright, even though opportunities to stabilize these orders still exist. Significantly, however, our analysis in this book reveals that the nuclear future will not be determined solely by the United States and China; other players will shape that future as well. This concluding chapter also considers the implications for the United States. It returns to the question posed at the beginning of this introductory chapter and asks, “What should the United States do?” in light of these conclusions and lessons, and it closes with several recommendations for US policy. The chapter stresses that today, more than ever, the United States should set clear priorities and goals and, to that end, that it should focus on the major power game and seek to stabilize its strategic interactions with China and Russia; address the pariah state problem by pursuing negotiating processes with North Korea and Iran; engage its regional allies and partners and opt for greater political and strategic integration with them; and limit nuclear dangers, wherever and whenever possible. As a study of the interplay between the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship and other key states, this book is the product of my personal research on China, Asian strategic dynamics, and

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nuclear policy writ large, and it also draws heavily on what I have learned in shaping and running various Track 1.5 and Track 2 strategic dialogues in Asia for over a decade. In this latter regard, particularly formative has been my first-hand involvement in the Track 1.5 China-US Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue, which my organization, the Pacific Forum, spearheaded in collaboration with the Beijing-based China Foundation for International Strategic Studies between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s (and with support from the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency). My participation in various other dialogue processes of a similar nature, including with Russia, North Korea, US allies in Asia and Europe, as well as several other key actors, has also deeply influenced my thinking and, therefore, this book’s orientation, conceptual framework, and approach. Significantly, these experiences have taught me the value of engaging the best specialists to investigate either specific issue areas or to provide thorough country expertise, an approach reflected in this book, as it is multiauthored and relies on established scholars in the field for the four US-China strategic nuclear triangles in focus.

Notes

1. Robert Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility?” remarks by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick for the National Committee on US-China Relations, New York City, September 21, 2005, https://2001-2009 .state.gov/s/d/former/zoellick/rem/53682.htm. 2. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, 2017), 25. 3. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2018), 4. 4. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2018), 2. 5. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 6. Aaron L. Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia,” International Security 18, no. 3 (Winter 1993–1994): 6. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: Norton, 2011), 156. 9. See Richard K. Betts, “Wealth, Power, and Instability: East Asia and the United States after the Cold War,” International Security 18, no. 3 (Winter 1993–1994): 34–77; Denny Roy, “Hegemon on the Horizon? China’s Threat to East Asian Security,” International Security 19, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 149–168; Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal, “Rethinking East Asian Security,” Survival 36, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 3–21. 10. Robert Scalapino, “The United States and Asia: Future Prospects,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 5, America and the Pacific, 1941–1991 (Winter 1991): 39. 11. See David C. Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks,” International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 57–85; Alastair Iain Johnston, “Is China a Status Quo Power?” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 5–56.

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12. See Evan S. Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s New Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 6 (November–December 2003): 22–35; David Shambaugh, “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order,” International Security 29, no. 3 (Winter 2004–2005): 64–99; Bates Gill, Rising Star: China’s New Security Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007). 13. Thomas Berger, “Set for Stability? Prospects for Conflict and Cooperation in East Asia,” Review of International Studies 26, no. 3 (July 2000): 405. 14. David Shambaugh, “China’s Military Modernization: Making Steady and Surprising Progress,” in Strategic Asia 2005–6: Military Modernization in an Era of Uncertainty, edited by Ashley Tellis (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2005), 67–103. 15. Johnston, “Is China a Status Quo Power?” 16. Aaron L. Friedberg, “Competing with China,” Survival 60, no. 3 (June–July 2018): 7. 17. Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon (New York: Henry Holt, 2015). 18. Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011); Hugh White, The China Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Graham Allison, Destined for War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). 19. Richard A. Paulsen, The Role of US Nuclear Weapons in the Post–Cold War Era (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1994), xv. 20. See Keith Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Thérèse Delpech, “Nuclear Weapons and the ‘New World Order’: Early Warning from Asia?” Survival 40, no. 4 (Winter 1998–1999): 57–76; Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Colin Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (London: Lynne Rienner, 1999). Note that Paul Bracken later expanded his thoughts in The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Henry Holt, 2012). 21. The “stability” of the Cold War is often oversold, however. There were major crises during the Cold War, many that brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war, including during the Berlin crisis (1961), the Cuban missile crisis (1962), and the Able Archer 83 command post exercise carried out by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1983). 22. Of note, international relations theorists are divided about the effects of multipolarity. Some, such as Kenneth N. Waltz and John J. Mearsheimer, believe that it begets instability, while others, such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, think the opposite, that it enhances stability. 23. Richard K. Betts, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 1 (January–February 1998): 26. 24. Delpech, “Nuclear Weapons and the ‘New World Order,’” 74 (emphasis added). 25. Muthiah Alagappa, ed., The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better,” Adelphi Papers 21, no. 171 (January 1981): 1-32. For similar arguments, see Michael Horowitz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 2 (April 2009): 234–257; Robert Rauchhaus, “Evaluating the Nuclear Peace Hypothesis: A Quantitative Approach,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 2 (April 2009): 258–277. 26. Vipin Narang, “Posturing for Peace? Pakistan’s Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability,” International Security 34, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 41. Narang expanded his thoughts in the book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 27. For a study on this question, see Dave Johnson, Russia’s Conventional Strike Capabilities, Regional Crises, and Nuclear Thresholds (Livermore, CA: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, 2018).

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28. Christopher P. Twomey, “Asia’s Complex Strategic Environment: Nuclear Multipolarity and Other Dangers,” Asia Policy 11, no. 1 (January 2011): 51–78. Twomey later expanded his thoughts in “The Asian Nuclear System in Comparative and Theoretical Context,” in North Korea and Asia’s Evolving Nuclear Landscape, Special Report No. 67, edited by Aaron L. Friedberg, Christopher P. Twomey, Matthew Kroenig, Michito Tsuruoka, J. James Kim, Sugio Takahashi, Jina Kim, and Robert Jervis (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017), 7–16. 29. Brad Roberts, Nuclear Multipolarity and Stability (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2000). Two years later, Roberts wrote another monograph, Tripolar Stability: The Future of Nuclear Relations Among the United States, Russia, and China (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2002). 30. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), 176, 179. 31. See D. Marc Kilgour and Steven J. Brams, “The Truel,” Mathematics Magazine, December 1997; Robert E. Harkavy, “Triangular or Indirect Deterrence/Compellence: Something New in Deterrence Theory,” Comparative Strategy 17, no. 1 (January–March 1998): 63–81. See also Linton Brooks and Mira Rapp-Hooper, “Extended Deterrence, Assurance, and Reassurance in the Pacific During the Second Nuclear Age,” in Strategic Asia 2013–14: Asia in the Second Nuclear Age, edited by Ashley J. Tellis, Abraham M. Denmark, and Travis Tanner (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2013), 266–299; Gregory D. Koblentz, Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age, Special Report No. 71 (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations, November 2014). 32. Brad Roberts, The Future of Nuclear Weapons in Asia (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 1998), 9. 33. Roberts, Nuclear Multipolarity and Stability, 31–32. 34. Christopher Twomey, “China’s Response to Its Complex, Multipolar Nuclear Neighborhood,” lecture, Georgetown University, April 7, 2016. 35. Alice Langley Hsieh, Communist China’s Strategy in the Nuclear Age (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963); John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China’s Strategic Seapower: The Politics of Force Modernization in the Nuclear Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 36. Avery Goldstein, Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century: China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Paul Bolt and Albert Willner, eds., China’s Nuclear Future (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005); Jeffrey Lewis, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). See also Litai Xue, “Evolution of China’s Nuclear Strategy” in Strategic Views from the Second Tier: The Nuclear Weapons Policies of France, Britain, and China, edited by John C. Hopkins and Weixing Hu (San Diego: University of California Press, 1994), 167–192. 37. For definitions of minimum and limited deterrence, see Committee on the USChinese Glossary of Nuclear Security Terms, English-Chinese, Chinese-English Nuclear Security Glossary (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008), 33–34, 36. 38. These allegations were made in the Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China (US Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1999), commonly known as the Cox Report after Representative Christopher Cox. The special committee was set up in June 1998 and the redacted version of the report released to the public in May 1999. It is accessible at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851 /pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf. 39. Brad Roberts, China-US Nuclear Relations: What Relationship Best Serves US Interests? (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2001), ES-2. 40. Brad Roberts, Asia’s Major Powers and the Emerging Challenges to Nuclear Stability Among Them (Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2009), 33.

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41. Brad Roberts, Robert A. Manning, and Ronald N. Montaperto, “China: The Forgotten Nuclear Power,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 4 (July–August 2000): 53. 42. Timothy Huntington, “China’s Nuclear Arsenal,” Harvard International Review 4, no. 3 (November 1981): 19. 43. Chong-Pin Lin, “From Panda to Dragon: China’s Nuclear Strategy,” The National Interest, no. 15 (Spring 1989): 53, 57. 44. For a summary of key takeaways, see Michael O. Wheeler, Track 1.5/2 Security Dialogues with China: Nuclear Lessons Learnt (Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2014). For a more up-to-date study, see David Santoro and Robert Gromoll, “On the Value of Nuclear Dialogue with China—A Review and Assessment of the Track-1.5 ‘China-US Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,’” Pacific Forum Issues and Insights 20, no. 1 (November 2020). 45. Eric Heginbotham, Michael S. Chase, Jacob L. Heim, Bonny Lin, Mark R. Cozad, Lyle J. Morris, Christopher P. Twomey, Forrest E. Morgan, Michael Nixon, Cristina L. Garafola, and Samuel K. Berkowitz, China’s Evolving Nuclear Deterrent: Major Drivers and Issues for the United States (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2017); Michael S. Chase and Arthur Chan, China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016). 46. Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Assuring Assured Retaliation: China’s Nuclear Posture and US-China Strategic Stability,” International Security 40, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 7–50; Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 44, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 61–109; Tong Zhao, Tides of Change: China’s Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines and Strategic Stability (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2018). 47. In September 2011, a highly contested report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber argued that the Chinese nuclear arsenal was understated and that as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the “Underground Great Wall of China.” The full report is available on the website of the Washington, DC–based Federation of American Scientists at https://fas.org/nuke /guide/china/Karber_UndergroundFacilities-Full_2011_reduced.pdf. 48. Michael O. Wheeler, Nuclear Parity with China? (Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2012); Brad Roberts, “The Evolving Relationship with China,” in The Case for US Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 141–175; Michael Nacht, Sarah Laderman, and Julie Beeston, Strategic Competition in China-US Relations (Livermore, CA: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, 2018); Caitlin Talmadge, “The US-China Nuclear Relationship: Why Competition Is Likely to Intensify” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, September 2019). 49. Elbridge A. Colby, Abraham M. Denmark, and John K. Warden, Nuclear Weapons and US-China Relations: A Way Forward (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2013); Travis Tanner and Dong Wang, US-China Relations in Strategic Domains (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2016). 50. Developed during the Vietnam War by Henry Kissinger, the policy of triangular diplomacy was conceived as a means to manage US relations with the Soviet Union and China. Its goal was to exploit the ongoing rivalry between the two Communist powers to strengthen US hegemony and diplomatic interest.

2 The US-China Strategic Nuclear Relationship David Santoro

CHINA FEATURES PROMINENTLY IN THE US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of February 2018, where it is regarded as a significant “problem country.” The NPR describes China as one of the two primary contenders of the United States (the other is Russia) in a deteriorating international security environment characterized by the return of major power competition. As the document explains, “Russia and China are contesting the international norms and order we have worked with our allies, partners, and members of the international community to build and sustain.”1 The NPR goes on to stress that “while the United States has continued to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons, others, including Russia and China, have moved in the opposite direction.”2 This is unprecedented. US strategic nuclear thinking and policy, as explained in the previous chapter, never gave China a major focus. On the contrary, for many years the United States did not even consider China to be a nuclear problem. What has happened? Why has China become so central to US nuclear policymaking in recent years? What does that mean for the current and future USChina strategic relationship? To answer these questions, it is necessary to begin with a review of the origins and evolution of US nuclear policy toward China through to the mid-2010s, notably until US president Donald Trump took office in early 2017. Only with such a background analysis can there be an assessment of the developments since the mid-2010s, as 23

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well as an explanation for the shift in focus to “strategic competition against China.” Also critical is understanding developments in the broader US-China relationship because, unlike in the US-Soviet (and later US-Russia) relationship, the nuclear dimension was never central in interactions between Washington and Beijing after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.

Under the US Radar: Nuclear China Until the Mid-2010s The US Approach to China Until the Mid-2010s

From containment. One word summarizes the initial US approach to China after 1949: “containment.” Washington focused on containment because it believed that Beijing, like Moscow with which the Chinese leadership was allied, was driven by an aggressive, expansionist ideology that would threaten its noncommunist neighbors. The US belief was reinforced after Beijing supported the Sovietbacked North Korean People’s Army following its invasion of South Korea in 1950, and after serious crises over Taiwan later that decade. (Because they had been close allies during World War II, Washington continued to support the Chinese Nationalists and recognize them as the “true” leaders of China when they relocated to Taiwan after their defeat against the Communists in 1949.) Practically, the US containment strategy translated into the deployment of US forces to Asia and the conclusion of bilateral alliances with the Philippines (1951), South Korea (1953), the Nationalist government of Taiwan (1954), and Japan (1960), as well as multilateral security arrangements: the Australia-New Zealand-United States Security Treaty (ANZUS, 1951) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, 1954). Washington also encouraged its allies to refrain from entering into diplomatic relations with Beijing, and it cut off trade and orchestrated an embargo of China. Moreover, at home, the US government prohibited Americans from even visiting China. Yet by the early 1960s, US-China relations began to change. Washington wanted Chinese support to end the war in Vietnam, and it also sought to split China further from the Soviet Union, a process which had begun on its own in 1960 because fundamental differences emerged between Moscow and Beijing in their interpretations and practical applications of Marxism. Meanwhile, Beijing wanted support for its resistance to Soviet pressure. That led to US president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the Shanghai Commu-

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niqué, in which the United States acknowledged the One-China Policy, the policy holding that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China. This overture led to the normalization of US-China relations, which took place in late 1978 when US president Jimmy Carter broke off relations with Taiwan and established official relations with Beijing, which terminated the US containment strategy.3

To engage but hedge. The United States replaced its containment strategy by an approach best described as “engage but hedge.” After normalization, Washington began to engage China in all areas: diplomatic, cultural, scientific, educational, and, above all, economic. These efforts grew rapidly, especially after China’s “reform and opening” policies in the 1980s. That is why the Bill Clinton administration sought comprehensive engagement with China, which it called a “constructive strategic partner.”4 While insisting that it become a “responsible stakeholder,” the George W. Bush administration agreed, backing Beijing’s membership to the World Trade Organization and seeking its integration into a concert of powers to address rising terrorist threats after the September 11 attacks against the United States.5 The Barack Obama administration, too, echoed these themes, calling for a “positive, constructive, and comprehensive relationship with China” and welcoming Beijing’s proposal for “a new type of relationship between major countries in the 21st century” grounded in mutual understanding and strategic trust.6 The United States, however, never embraced China without restraint. As it engaged, Washington was always hedging. The George H.W. Bush administration, for instance, stated that “we must carefully watch the emergence of China onto the world stage and support, contain, or balance this emergence as necessary to protect US interests.”7 Subsequent administrations remained equally cautious, and the United States worked hard to maintain a favorable power balance in Asia by keeping its forward-deployed forces; preserving and, whenever possible, strengthening its alliances; remaining committed to Taiwan; and concluding new partnerships. Washington had good reasons to be cautious. In addition to Beijing’s decision to suppress the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests violently, crises regularly erupted: over Taiwan in 1995–1996, after a US aircraft bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and when a Chinese fighter collided with a US reconnaissance aircraft over Hainan Island in 2001, to name a few. Several issues also remained unresolved over human rights, proliferation, or trade. Moreover, Beijing’s military modernization became increasingly

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intense, as it grew slowly until the 1990s but shot up in the 2000s, especially after 2007, just before China became the world’s secondbiggest economy (in 2010). The goal of hedging, as Aaron Friedberg has explained, was to “preserve stability and deter attempts at coercion or overt aggression while waiting for engagement to work its magic.”8 Washington, plainly, was hedging until engagement “paid off” and transformed China into a power that accepted the existing international order, endorsed market forces, and implemented democratic reforms, as had been the case for most of the rest of the Communist world after the Cold War. By the late 2000s, however, it became clear that, despite achieving successes in some areas (notably in nonproliferation and nuclear security), the US strategy toward China had largely failed. After the Great Recession of 2007–2009 (which did not affect China much), Beijing felt emboldened and became increasingly critical of the international order, notably of the US alliance system, proving that it was even willing to use economic and military tools to assert itself. Cases in point are: Beijing established new multilateral mechanisms and institutions, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to further its interests in Asia and beyond, and it applied considerable pressure in the East and South China Seas to support its territorial claims. Moreover, instead of endorsing market forces, Beijing maintained and even began to expand its use of mercantilist tools, and the Chinese Communist Party, especially under Chairman Xi Jinping’s rule, became more repressive at home and more militantly nationalistic, seemingly in an effort to achieve the “China Dream” of national rejuvenation. Significantly, in 2010, a Chinese officer from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu, stated that “China’s big goal in the 21st century is to become number one, the top power.”9 Similarly, also in 2010, when then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton asked China to respect freedom of passage in the South China Sea, Yang Jiechi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, declared: “China is a big nation, others are small nations and that is a fact,” suggesting that the strong would dominate the weak regardless of international law on sea-lanes.10 Washington responded by emphasizing hedging, an effort that first began to emerge slowly under George W. Bush with his “longterm shift in focus” to Asia, but truly crystalized with Obama’s “rebalance to Asia” launched in late 2011.11 Even this effort, however, proved too tentative and was never fully implemented, because of both fiscal constraints and distractions elsewhere in the world.

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Still, by the end of Obama’s second term, and despite initial hopes that Beijing’s call for a “new type” of relationship would pay dividends, there was broad agreement across the US political and national security spectrums that China had “defied American expectations” and that a new, much more aggressive US strategy was necessary and even urgent.12

The US Approach to Nuclear China Until the Mid-2010s

From the nuclear red scare. The US approach to nuclear China through to the mid-2010s needs to be understood against the backdrop of the broader, just described US approach to China during that time. Unsurprisingly, then, when Washington began to be concerned by China after the establishment of the PRC in 1949, its fears increased considerably as it was becoming clear, notably after the Korean War and Taiwan Strait confrontation of 1954–1955, that Beijing was developing a nuclear arsenal. Herman Kahn captured it best, stating in 1960 in indirect reference to China that “a number of powers which, unlike the Soviet Union and the United States, may not be so cautious in outlook, will be getting much richer and technically more competent and may retain their non-status quo outlook.”13 In 1961, a Joint Chiefs of Staff report echoed these concerns, predicting that Beijing’s “attainment of a nuclear capability will have a marked impact on the security posture of the United States and the Free World, particularly in Asia.”14 Washington was especially concerned because the Soviet Union initially agreed to provide nuclear assistance to China, and the Chinese arsenal was meant to be a national asset and, as Avery Goldstein put it, “a contribution to the socialist camp’s collective deterrent capability.”15 Washington, however, quickly realized that Sino-Soviet nuclear cooperation never materialized because Moscow, too, was concerned about Beijing going nuclear: Soviet officials became worried that China could entrap them in a clash with the United States, a development they desperately wanted to avoid, especially in the context of the Dwight Eisenhower administration’s “New Look” in foreign policy and the threat to launch massive retaliatory strikes against aggressors. 16 US officials, as a result, tried to prevent Beijing from reaching its goal by promoting arms control and nonproliferation and even exploring military options against the Chinese program, including with the Soviets.17 The historical record shows that US officials seriously considered preventive military strikes but

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eventually abandoned the idea, considering that such strikes would be ineffective and that they would be unnecessary and too risky.18

To an “ignore-China” policy. Yet shortly after Beijing tested its first atomic device in October 1964, Washington decided that the United States could live with a nuclear China. One reason was that Washington realized that Beijing had neither the ability nor, seemingly, the willingness to engage in nuclear competition. US officials took time to reach that conclusion, however. After Beijing tested its first hydrogen weapon in June 1967, for instance, there was a strong push in Washington for the deployment of a thin antiballistic missile system called “Sentinel” (and later renamed “Safeguard”) to protect major US cities.19 Washington eventually abandoned the project and, over time, it became clear to US officials that the views of Chinese leaders, notably Mao Tse-tung, at the time China built its arsenal had a powerful influence on Chinese nuclear strategy and that they were here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.20 These views, based on the limited utility of nuclear weapons, supported maintaining a strategy of assured retaliation and not integrating nuclear strategy with conventional strategy or pursuing any form of nuclear war fighting, even limited. More specifically, Chinese thinking on nuclear weapons rested on the belief that these weapons serve only to prevent nuclear coercion and deter nuclear attack. That is why Beijing claimed, and to this day continues to claim, to have a “self-defense nuclear strategy” and why it maintained tight control over its arsenal—Beijing never delegated authority over nuclear strategy to senior officers of the PLA.21 That is also why Beijing gave the Second Artillery Force, the component part of the PLA created in 1966 to control Chinese nuclear weapons, the sole mission of conducting a nuclear counterstrike, and why it “only” developed a small nuclear force and refused to engage in arms races. Beijing, plainly, focused on developing “the minimum means of reprisal,” just enough to conduct an effective nuclear counterstrike.22 In turn, that is why Beijing developed a nuclear force based on missiles rather than gravity bombs (missiles are more adequate for counterstrike purposes), why it maintained a de-mated force posture (because it had no intention to engage in nuclear war fighting), and why it adopted a no-first-use (NFU) policy and gave negative security assurances to non–nuclear weapons states.23 The other reason that led Washington to decide that the United States could live with a nuclear China was motivated by the belief, detailed earlier, that the benefits of US-China rapprochement out-

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weighed the costs of confrontation or conflict. The United States concluded that its primary adversary was the Soviet Union and, therefore, that it was better off having China on its side. US officials also reached that conclusion because, despite China’s initial fears of US encirclement and determination to respond to what it perceived as US “nuclear bullying,” Beijing grew rapidly more worried about Moscow and, as a result, ended up directing its nuclear arsenal primarily against the Soviet Union, not the United States.24 Beijing, then, prioritized building medium- and intermediate-range missiles rather than long-range missiles. To be sure, such missiles posed a threat to US bases and allies in Northeast Asia, but Washington took comfort in Beijing’s slow development of long-range delivery systems capable of reaching the US homeland; Beijing only deployed such systems in 1981 and, over the next fifteen years, it placed no more than approximately twenty nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles into silos, where they were highly vulnerable to preemptive attack.25 In hindsight, Beijing’s decision to orient its arsenal primarily against the Soviet Union was not surprising: China had always had reservations about the Soviet Union, even before a formal treaty of alliance was signed, and it went nuclear in part because it felt that Moscow could not be trusted.26 Beijing was later vindicated when, in March 1969, Sino-Soviet forces engaged in border fighting and Moscow threatened action against China’s nascent nuclear capability.27 It was in that context that US officials concluded that the United States was better served by exploiting and cementing the Sino-Soviet split, which meant siding with China. Accordingly, as it began to engage (while also hedging against) Beijing from the 1960s, Washington gradually adopted, de facto, an “ignore-China” policy when it came to strategic nuclear issues. The United States, plainly, chose not to pay much attention to the Chinese nuclear weapons program. That policy was not meant to last forever, however. In 1965, for instance, Morton Halperin stressed that the United States should not be concerned by a nuclear China for now and in the short term, but he added that: “In the long run they [the Chinese] undoubtedly see a nuclear capability as giving them an ability to deter an American attack and thus to assure the permanence of the Communist regime and, at the same time, laying the groundwork for a more vigorous attempt to expand Chinese influence throughout the world.”28 Yet Washington’s ignore-China policy took deep roots in US circles and became the default approach not only for the reasons

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mentioned above (especially because China chose not to engage in nuclear competition against the United States), but also because starting in the 1990s Beijing slowly began to endorse the multilateral arms control and nonproliferation regime. China became a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1992, and it subsequently signed up to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, among other key treaties and conventions. To the United States, then, it appeared that China would not become much of a nuclear problem.

Concerns return. From the late 1990s, however, several US politicians and pundits began to raise concerns about China which, they argued, was becoming too big a nuclear problem to ignore. In 1998, a Select Committee created by the US House of Representatives and led by US representative Christopher Cox found that China had conducted covert operations within the United States during the 1980s and 1990s to enhance its nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and build other weapons of mass destruction.29 Others were quick to add, quite rightly, that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beijing had stopped worrying about Moscow, that the ChinaRussia relationship was even beginning to flourish, and, more importantly, that the Chinese focus had now shifted to the United States. With the deterioration of US-China relations following Beijing’s crackdown on the democracy movement in June 1989, the breathtaking demonstration of the superiority of US military technology in the Gulf War of 1990–1991, and the display of US military might during the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, Beijing became increasingly worried that Washington would flex its muscles in ways that conflicted with Chinese interests. That is why China gradually ramped up the modernization of its strategic force, the diversification of its delivery systems, and the number of nuclear weapons with the United States in mind; India, over time, also became a Chinese focus, albeit a much more distant one. Significantly, Beijing developed an arsenal more capable of striking the US homeland, and it considerably improved its ability to project power into neighboring waters and in the space and cyber domains, posing a growing threat to the United States’ forward military presence and putting US allies and partners at risk. For the United States (and for US allies), a major problem was— and still is—Beijing’s silence about the size of its growing nuclear arsenal. Today, experts estimate that the Chinese arsenal has roughly doubled over the past decade and a half, consisting now of approxi-

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mately 320 warheads.30 While it is much smaller than the US and Russian arsenals (estimated to sit at approximately 5,800 and 6,375 warheads, respectively), it is bigger than the United Kingdom’s (estimated to consist of 215 warheads) and France’s (estimated to include 290 warheads).31 Another problem was—and remains—Beijing’s refusal to articulate a level at which it would have “enough” nuclear weapons. Relatedly, in the 1990s, China became the only country of the Permanent Five (P5) of the UN Security Council that left open the possibility of producing more fissile material for explosive purposes, and it also opted against adopting transparency measures about its capabilities of the kind adopted by the other P5 members. Opacity, in sum, has been Beijing’s traditional practice. As PLA Major General (retired) Yao Yunzhu put it, “For a state adopting a no-first-use policy and intending not to waste too much money on unusable weapons, dependence on opaqueness to bring about greater deterrent value is a wise choice.”32 This is in line with Sun Tzu’s thinking that “the essence of warfare is but the art of ambiguity.”33 From a US perspective (and from the perspective of US allies), Beijing’s rapid modernization and expansion of its nuclear delivery systems also became deeply problematic. 34 In the 2000s, Beijing’s land-based nuclear missile force began to grow fast, and today includes mobile, solid-fueled systems: approximately eighty intermediate-range ballistic missiles and ninety intercontinental ballistic missiles; of late, the most notable additions have been the dual-capable DF-26 and DF-31AG, and the DF-31 (the latter are still in development).35 Significantly, because the 1987 IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty bans US and Russian land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500–5,500 kilometers and does not apply to China, Beijing has been free to develop a sophisticated arsenal composed of INF-range systems, posing a mounting threat against US Asian allies (and US deployed forces in Asia). Over time, Beijing also began to develop penetrative aids and MIRV-ing existing missile models, notably the DF-5C, while pursuing hypersonic glide vehicle technology, which makes systems more maneuverable, faster, and more capable of penetrating existing missile defense systems. 36 Finally, Beijing began to bring online sea and air nuclear platforms, and is now on the verge of entering the exclusive club of nuclear-armed states possessing a nuclear triad. The PLA navy developed China’s first credible sea-based nuclear capability in the form of four Jin-class (Type 094) ballistic missile submarines, each capable of carrying twelve JL-2 MIRV-capable submarine-launched ballistic missiles;

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China’s next-generation ballistic missile submarines, the Type 096, will likely be armed with the JL-3 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which are still in development.37 The PLA air force, for its part, developed a new strategic bomber (dubbed H-20) coupled with nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missiles.38 Beijing, of course, argued all along that these developments were purely defensive, that China’s self-defense nuclear strategy and NFU policy remained intact, and that its modernization efforts were consistent with its tradition of minimum deterrence and solely aimed at developing a “lean and effective” force.39 These are code words to highlight Beijing’s goal to ensure that its nuclear forces remain reliable and survivable, especially in the context of improving US missile defense and conventional strike capabilities as well as the US refocus on Asia, notably the strengthening of US regional alliances, which Beijing regards as directed against China and as an attempt to maintain US military hegemony. As one senior Chinese scholar stressed, “No question it’s always been about containing China and maintaining US primacy.”40 Yet in addition to doubting the strength and even the veracity of China’s NFU policy, Washington became worried that Beijing might abandon minimum deterrence. 41 The concern that Beijing might “sprint to nuclear parity” with Washington and Moscow became serious, especially because the United States and Russia, unlike China, were building their nuclear arsenals down, not up.42 Even without such a sprint (which never materialized), many began to worry that Beijing might increasingly gain “strategic equivalency” with Washington (and Moscow) and exploit its growing strength at the nuclear level with more provocative actions at the conventional and gray zone levels of conflict, according to the logic of the “stability-instability” paradox, an international relations theory positing that the probability of nuclear war between countries with sophisticated nuclear arsenals is low but, paradoxically enough, that that of indirect conflicts or conventional war between them is high.43 Significantly, scholarship on China’s “theory of victory” suggests that Beijing might want to take advantage of its growing strategic strength. Brad Roberts has shown that if it cannot subdue its enemy without fighting (per Sun Tzu’s wisdom), Beijing developed military concepts and capabilities allowing it to conduct a short, decisive war on its neighbors—be it in the East and South China Seas, over Taiwan, in the Korean Peninsula, or elsewhere—quickly seize territory, and present the United States (the region’s security

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guarantor) with a fait accompli.44 Then, to deter and, if necessary, push back against US intervention (and US regional allies), Beijing fielded numerous strike systems and an array of forces in all domains, notably and increasingly in space and cyber. Significantly, for instance, China became the third country after the United States and Russia to demonstrate its capability to protect itself from satellite surveillance in the event of war after it conducted an antisatellite test in January 2007. From a US perspective, of course, these developments greatly complicate deterrence of China, including the US defense commitments to US allies; unsurprisingly, many US allies became increasingly worried, too. Washington also became concerned that China’s evolving nuclear capabilities would soon present Beijing with new strategic options. The Chinese modernization program could lead Beijing to change its stance on nuclear counterattack: it could adopt a launchon-warning posture, abandoning its traditional stance to retaliate only after it has absorbed a nuclear strike. The improved mobility, readiness, and informatization of assets and the PLA’s space-based early-warning system make adoption of such a posture increasingly possible. The emerging nuclear roles of the PLA navy and air force make it even easier because nuclear warheads have to be mated with delivery systems on sea and air platforms. Yet it is unclear if a launch-on-warning posture would be compatible with an NFU policy, especially given that Beijing always pointed to its de-mated posture as evidence that it abided by NFU principles. Another related area of possible change centers on Chinese thinking about adopting a limited nuclear war-fighting posture as a result of the increasing commingling and co-location of its nuclear and conventional assets, the diversification of its nuclear forces (notably its emerging nuclear triad), and its work to enhance “integrated strategic deterrence.”45 These developments could lead Beijing to endorse war fighting as an option for its nuclear forces, especially if Chinese officials came to fear that in a mounting crisis the United States might consider nuclear use. There is no evidence that Beijing has done so, however: for now, Chinese military documents continue to envision only a nuclear counterattack (i.e., in response to nuclear use) and in a way that bears unacceptable costs on the United States and its allies.46 Finally, Washington became concerned by Beijing’s nuclear command, control, and communication systems and the risk of inadvertent escalation. While the PLA was tasked to pursue “dual deterrence and dual operations” (i.e., wield both nuclear- and conventional-capable

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missiles) as early as in the mid-1980s, the modernization, diversification, and expansion of China’s conventional force, as mentioned earlier, began to grow fast only in recent years. Fears emerged that the continued introduction of new dual-capable missiles, the increasing dispersal of land-mobile missiles, and the steady rise in the number of deployable nuclear weapons would complicate the command, control, and communication systems of China’s land-based nuclear delivery systems. What is more, many stressed that the emerging nuclear roles of the PLA navy and air force would add extra, and probably major, layers of complexity. Plainly, the concern was—and still is—that a human error or malfunction could increase instability or lead to inadvertent escalation. Would command, control, and communication systems be modernized in a timely fashion, as nuclear modernization proceeds? Would the PLA navy and air force have their own nuclear missions? Would they develop nuclear warhead management know-how and capability of their own? How would Beijing and the PLA communicate with PLA navy assets? Would they, for instance, introduce predelegated authority to launch nuclear weapons? All these worries have been magnified by China’s refusal to engage in strategic nuclear arms control and join the process of nuclear reductions. While endorsing much of the multilateral arms control and nonproliferation regime, Beijing has conditioned its willingness to limit and reduce its forces on deep cuts in the US and Russian arsenals; significantly, the United Kingdom and France (the other two nuclear weapons states under the NPT) did not, and each conducted reductions of their own. China’s goalposts have kept moving, however. In 1982, China said that it would join nuclear arms control talks only after the United States and the Soviet Union halted the testing, manufacture, and deployment of nuclear weapons, and reduced their arsenals by 50 percent. Then, in 1988, China modified its position, promising to join the arms control process not at the 50 percent mark, but after further “drastic reductions” by the United States and Russia. In 1995, China stated that it would not adopt nuclear restraint measures unless the United States and Russia reduced their arsenals “far beyond” those envisioned by current arms control talks, abandoned tactical nuclear weapons and missile defenses, and agreed to a joint NFU pledge. Since then, Beijing’s standard talking point has been that China would join the arms control process “when the conditions are ripe,” leaving that terminology unexplained. In sum, the interim progress made by the United States and Russia in reducing their nuclear arsenals did not lead to a Chi-

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nese decision to join the process and, during that time, China pressed on with the development and deployment of an arsenal posing increasing threats to the United States, and to US allies in particular.

But US policy did not change. Despite these concerns, there was no shift in US policy vis-à-vis China. Until the mid-2010s, the United States adopted a laissez-faire attitude. That is why, as mentioned in the previous chapter, several scholars began to complain that China was “little more than a footnote in the history of the nuclear era,” an “afterthought,” and even a “forgotten nuclear power” in US strategic thinking.47 There are two reasons why US policy vis-à-vis China did not change. First is because the United States had other priorities, which it deemed more important than China. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US focus shifted from the Soviet Union to the “loose-nuke” problem: the possibility that poorly guarded nuclear weapons or nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere (notably in South Asia) might fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals, or that nuclear experts might share their know-how with bad actors. Around that same time, another priority was nuclear reductions and the disarmament agenda, a process driven by the United States and Russia, which others, including China, were expected to join at some point. Then, starting in the mid- to late 1990s, the priority (for the United States and many US allies) shifted to preventing small “pariah” states from acquiring nuclear weapons, notably Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. After the September 11 attacks, an additional area of focus was strengthening the nuclear security regime, to prevent terrorists from taking their actions to the next level and conducting a nuclear terror attack. These priorities left Washington little time to focus on China, despite rising concerns about Beijing’s activities. Second, and significantly, Washington took the position that addressing these priorities, notably the pariah state and nuclear terrorism problems, required at least partial Chinese cooperation. That is why, for instance, Washington worked hard (in vain) to use Beijing’s influence over Pyongyang to prevent North Korea’s nuclearization and why, especially in the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and then in subsequent years, the United States and China conducted a considerable amount of joint work on nuclear security.48 The belief that China was part of the solution to deal with these problems led the United States to put its concerns about Chinese activities on the back burner and, in many ways, to accommodate Beijing.

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Case in point, the United States was careful not to make significant adjustments to its deterrence posture in Asia to account for changes in China’s nuclear and conventional capabilities. Washington implemented a comprehensive strategy for strengthening deterrence in the region primarily with an eye on the mounting North Korean nuclear threat. That strategy did not target China, with only one important caveat: the US regional ballistic missile defense posture sought to provide protection from any missile attack, regardless of its source.49 The United States, however, stopped “ignoring” China from the 2000s. Unlike the 1994 NPR, which took little note of China, the key strategy documents put out by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations emphasized the need to pay attention to evolving Chinese nuclear and conventional capabilities. Both administrations also called for nuclear dialogue with China, and a presidential summit commitment to launching such dialogue was secured (but never honored) in April 2006. The 2010 NPR, in particular, gave China an important focus. It insisted on the US commitment to securing “strategic stability” with China, as with Russia, hoping that such a goal would facilitate the establishment of nuclear dialogue with Beijing as well as help create the conditions for Chinese participation in arms control and nuclear reductions. As the 2010 NPR reads, “The United States will pursue high-level, bilateral dialogues on strategic stability with both Russia and China which are aimed at fostering more stable, resilient, and transparent strategic relationships.”50 Yet no nuclear dialogue was established and, therefore, no foundation was built to explore the requirements of US-China strategic stability. Chinese officials consistently declined US offers to engage in dialogue, arguing, as mentioned earlier, that “the conditions were not ripe” because the US arsenal was much larger than China’s and because, they claimed, they would stand to lose as they would be required to accept a level of transparency that would compromise the survivability of their strategic force. Of course, rejecting dialogue did not stop Beijing from seeking reassurance from Washington: Chinese officials encouraged the United States to adopt an NFU policy and to accept mutual vulnerability as the basis of the US-China strategic relationship, as in the US-Russia strategic relationship.51 But the United States refused. Washington chose to remain out of the NFU business and to neither accept nor reject mutual vulnerability with China. Because US-China relations were becoming so complex (much more than US-Soviet relations during the Cold War), Washington’s preference was for policy changes to be the consequence of dialogue on the interplay

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between nuclear and non-nuclear offensive capabilities, defensive weapons, new forms of competition in the space and cyber domains, and the broader conventional force balances between the United States, China, and other regional powers, notably US allies. Significantly, and as mentioned earlier, Washington’s refusal to adapt policy was matched by its refusal to adapt its military posture. By the mid-2010s, however, Washington had become deeply frustrated with Beijing’s continued rejection of dialogue, especially given the strong, foundational work done at the Track 2 and 1.5 levels, as well as important scholarship produced by US and Chinese scholars.52 A significant source of frustration was also Beijing’s decision to initiate a major overhaul of its military to develop “worldclass forces” by 2049, with unclear implications for China’s nuclear strategy and weapons program.53 Moreover, as the broader US-China relationship was becoming increasingly competitive, and as the United States was gearing up to make important decisions about the modernization of its arsenal in the context of rising nuclear dangers, including sabre-rattling by North Korea and, after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, Russia, it appeared inevitable that the US-China strategic nuclear relationship would not escape change as well.54 Plainly, after ignoring China for decades and then trying, in vain, to engage Beijing while adopting a laissez-faire attitude vis-à-vis its nuclear decisions and developments, Washington became poised to change course. Nuclear weapons, which until then had remained largely in the background of the bilateral relationship, would soon, and for the first time, move further into the foreground.

A Bumpy Nuclear Ride Ahead: The Recent US Policy Shift Vis-à-Vis China

There is one key takeaway from this historical overview: by the mid2010s a US policy shift vis-à-vis China appeared unavoidable and, according to many in the US government, overdue. Because of such widespread consensus across the US political and national security spectrums in favor of a policy change, it was not surprising that in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the leading Republican and Democratic candidates, talked about moving away from the engage but hedge strategy and toward a more assertive approach that promotes power balancing and even pushback. Shortly after Trump was elected, that shift began to be implemented in the US-China relationship writ large, and there are now clear signs that the nuclear domain will not be spared.

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US-China Relations Since the Mid-2010s

Escalating tensions. During his campaign, candidate Trump had pledged that he would name China a currency manipulator on his first day in office and impose a 45 percent import tax on its goods.55 He was also critical of Beijing for not using its leverage to push North Korea toward denuclearization.56 Moreover, once elected, Trump broke with the traditional US practice of a One-China Policy by taking a call from Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen and subsequently indicating that he might use Taiwan as a bargaining chip with Beijing in the South China Sea.57 Earlier, Trump had even suggested that his administration would be soft on Russia and hard on China, leading some to speculate that there would be a reverse power play of the one that took place during the Cold War: the United States would engage, accommodate, and even possibly cooperate with Russia to better balance China.58 None of this came to pass. Once in office, President Trump stated that his administration would honor the One-China Policy.59 Moreover, he quickly established a personal connection with Xi Jinping, leading to an agreement to conduct a US-China “comprehensive dialogue,” and he did not seek a reset with Russia, confessing that relations with Moscow “may be at an all-time low.”60 Because early on in office Trump’s priority was to urge Beijing to pressure Pyongyang, which was conducting frequent nuclear and missile tests, he also told Xi that he would be prepared to ignore for some time what he saw as unfair Chinese trade practices if China delivered on North Korea.61 From the summer of 2017, however, despite successful efforts to strengthen UN Security Council sanctions against the North Korean regime, US-China relations cooled down again because the situation on the Korean Peninsula did not improve, leading Trump to assume that Xi was not willing (or able) to pressure Pyongyang enough to denuclearize. The Trump administration, as a result, began to turn on the heat against Beijing on trade. Negotiations took place but did not produce results, and the administration imposed tariffs on Chinese goods in early 2018.62 Other issues contributed to the cooldown, too: the administration ramped up freedom-on-navigation operations in the South China Sea, proceeded with arms sales to Taiwan, and transited warships through international waters in the Taiwan Strait. While the Trump-Xi personal connection remained, US-China relations became deeply contentious. The publication by the Trump administration of the National Security Strategy (NSS) in December 2017 and National Defense

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Strategy (NDS) in January 2018 confirmed that shift. The NSS, which describes the world as “an arena of continuous competition,” explains that the policies of engagement of rival states and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce to turn them into benign actors, and even potential partners, failed.63 The NSS indicates that the United States, therefore, should change course and compete against these states, notably Russia and China, which it identifies as “revisionist powers” because, it says, they contest and want to upend the European and Asian security orders.64 The NDS echoes these themes, stressing that “the central challenge to US prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition,” and calling for a “seamless integration of multiple elements of national power” and the enlisting of US allies and partners to better respond to the challenges posted by China and Russia.65 Both the NSS and NDS also make clear that, while checking a revanchist Russia is important, the United States is now primarily concerned about China. As Elbridge Colby, the lead architect of the NDS, put it in a congressional testimony about the strategy: “The NDS calls for a substantial increase in investment for European posture designed to quickly and materially address the imbalance in military power on NATO’s Eastern flank and improve the Alliance’s ability to defeat [Russia], followed by a plateauing of this investment in the medium term to focus on the more substantial long-term Chinese threat.”66 US-China relations continued their downward trajectory after the release of the NSS and NDS. In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Hudson Institute criticizing China across the board and stressing that competition against Beijing was now the order of the day.67 This echoed an earlier speech by then National Security Council senior director for Asia Matt Pottinger, who had indicated that the United States was merely “adapting [its] game to China’s style of play.”68 Tensions, then, skyrocketed over trade, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and even increasingly over values and human rights, as the Trump administration also became critical of Beijing’s control over technology, the treatment of its minorities, notably in Xinjiang, and its handling of the protests in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, while the administration did not bill them as anti-China documents, the US Department of Defense’s Indo-Pacific Strategy Report of June 2019 and the US Department of State’s A Free and Open Indo-Pacific Report of November 2019 clearly indicate an effort to counter and even push back against Chinese activities.69 The Covid-19 pandemic, which began in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and has since spread and caused massive health and economic

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challenges throughout the world, has brought the US-China relationship to a new low point. Rather than becoming, as many had hoped (naïvely), an opportunity for Washington and Beijing to cooperate and improve their relations, Covid-19 became the catalyst for growing US-China rivalry. As Bates Gill put it, “The COVID-19 crisis has injected an already-inflamed US-China relationship with new levels of ill will as each side blames the other for the disease’s spread and struggles to spin global opinion in their favor. The stakes grow ever higher as the blame game further aggravates US-China competition over matters of governance, values, and ideals.”70 At the time of this writing, there is no end in sight to such growing rivalry, especially because, as the pandemic spreads, China seems to have adopted an increasingly aggressive stance around its periphery and in areas where China’s sovereignty is contested (and where there are many US allies and partners). Be it over Taiwan, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, or even the ChinaIndia border, China’s foreign policy has not moderated. On the contrary, its assertiveness has increased considerably and, as a result, US pushback has strengthened. For instance, in the speech delivered in Phoenix in June 2020, Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’Brien equated Xi Jinping to Joseph Stalin and lambasted China’s Communist Party for its malign activities in the world, in the United States, and even in China, stressing that “the days of American passivity and naivety regarding the People’s Republic of China are over.”71 All indications also suggest that the incoming Biden administration will maintain a firm approach to China. Accordingly, in just a few years, the US-China relationship deteriorated immensely. The world witnessed what Evan Medeiros called “the expanding roots of bilateral [US-China] competition, which now covers security, economics, technology, and ideas about governance.”72

Outstanding questions. US endorsement of strategic competition as the new organizing principle to deal with China has left multiple questions unanswered, however. What is the United States competing for? What is Washington hoping to achieve by competing against Beijing? What does “winning” look like? During the Cold War, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger asked similar questions about US policy goals vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, which many national security professionals wanted to cast as strategic superiority over Moscow: “What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do we do with it?”73 The United States has

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not begun to answer these questions when it comes to strategic competition against China. Moreover, are the goals set out in the NSS and NDS realistic? In its assessment of the NDS, for instance, the NDS Commission finds that the United States will continue to fall behind China (and to a lesser extent Russia) unless new operational concepts are developed and whole-of-government approaches pursued. As the commission’s report puts it, “America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt. If the nation does not act promptly to remedy these circumstances, the consequences will be grave and lasting.”74 A report by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney concurs, finding that Washington’s ability to maintain a favorable balance of power in Asia is fast declining and arguing that it is necessary, therefore, to adopt a strategy of collective defense as a way of offsetting these shortfalls. Specifically, the report claims that “America has an atrophying force that is not sufficiently ready, equipped or postured for great power competition in the IndoPacific—a challenge it is working to address…A strategy of collective defense is fast becoming necessary as a way of offsetting shortfalls in America’s regional military power and holding the line against rising Chinese strength.”75 Finally, and relatedly, it is unclear that the United States will receive the region’s backing as it intends to compete against China. While some regional states welcome a more active US role, many do not want to be caught in the middle; they do not want to have to choose between Washington and Beijing. As Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong put it in a recent Foreign Affairs article, “Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, are especially concerned, as they live at the intersection of the interests of various major powers and must avoid being caught in the middle or forced intro invidious choices.”76 This problem is compounded by inconsistencies made by the Trump administration, notably the president himself, who sent mixed messages about US intentions in Asia by eschewing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a major multilateral draft trade agreement); engaging in conflicts with allies (over burden sharing); ignoring, and even withdrawing from, many regional security institutions; and sometimes even suggesting that strategic competition against China may not, in the end, be the order of the day.77 For instance, following his meeting with Xi at the Group of 20 (G-20) in June 2019, Trump stated: “I think we’re going to be strategic partners. I think we can help each other.”78 Also sowing doubts about US reliability were the revelations made by John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national

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security advisor from April 2018 to September 2019: Bolton, among other things, alleged that Trump pleaded with Xi for domestic political help, subordinated national security issues to his own reelection prospects, and even ignored Beijing’s human rights abuses.79 That said, by 2020 the United States as a whole had abandoned the engage but hedge approach. While important questions remained, US-China relations were in for a rough ride looking ahead, and it was clear that the strategic nuclear dimension would not be spared.

The Current and Evolving US-China Strategic Nuclear Relationship

Growing concerns. While they date back to the late 1990s, US concerns about China had grown considerably by the mid-2010s because Washington felt that China, which initiated major military reforms and continued to reject nuclear dialogue with the United States (while adopting an increasingly assertive regional posture), might be on the verge of changing its nuclear strategy and expanding its weapons program in a way that would tip the balance of power in its favor. As Caitlin Talmadge put it, the United States became “concerned about the erosion of what it sees as a longstanding position of nuclear advantage relative to China.”80 To reiterate, however, the concern was less that China “sprints to nuclear parity” with the United States (and Russia) than it achieves “strategic equivalency” (i.e., developing an arsenal sufficiently sophisticated to be more assertive and even aggressive at lower ends of the conflict spectrum). That is why Trump’s 2018 NPR stresses that “China continues to increase the number, capabilities, and protection of its nuclear forces” and “is pursuing entirely new nuclear capabilities tailored to achieve particular national security objectives while also modernizing its conventional military, challenging traditional US military superiority in the Western Pacific.”81 While acknowledging that “China’s declaratory policy and doctrine have not changed,” the NPR also highlights that Beijing’s “lack of transparency regarding the scope and scale of its nuclear modernization program raises questions regarding its future intent.”82 The NPR further notes that “while the United States has continued to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons,” China and others, notably Russia and North Korea, “have moved in the opposite direction.”83 US concerns might be overblown. One line of analysis suggests that US concerns might be overblown. So far, the most significant (or

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most visible) change to China’s nuclear weapons program in the context of the military reforms has been renaming the Second Artillery Force the PLA Rocket Force and upgrading it to full-service status, equal to the army, navy, and air force. Until then, the Second Artillery Force had been an independent branch that was considered equal to one service. The new Rocket Force name and its upgrade to a full service might merely codify the force’s de facto status. David Logan made that case, stressing that the change mainly gave the force the status and prestige it deserves. As he pointed out, The Second Artillery’s organizational clout had steadily grown in the last 15 years. Prior to the creation of the Rocket Force, the Second Artillery commander and other senior leaders enjoyed ranks and grades equivalent to that of their counterparts in the services. The Second Artillery had the same constellation of bureaucratic structures as the services, including a Political Department, Logistics Department, Armaments Department, and Command Academy.84

In these circumstances, the most likely developments in the foreseeable future would involve the continuation of steady, yet relatively modest, growth of the Chinese nuclear arsenal. Similarly, China’s long-standing nuclear policy and strategy which, as mentioned earlier, are, and always have been, deeply ingrained in the Chinese psyche, would be maintained. According to Chinese official statements, multiple Chinese media reports, and Chinese strategists, this is what to expect. In describing the Rocket Force, Xi used language similar to the one authoritative Chinese document describing the Second Artillery Force, notably the 2015 Defense White Paper (China’s latest at the time of this writing).85 For instance, he said that the Rocket Force would be “a fundamental force for our country’s strategic deterrent, a strategic pillar for our country’s great power status, and an important cornerstone in protecting our national security.”86 A China Daily article also added that China’s nuclear policy would remain unchanged: “Reiterating the no-first-use nuclear weapons policy and the country’s defensive nuclear strategy, [Ministry of National Defense Spokesman] Yang [Yujun] said China always keeps its nuclear capabilities at the minimum level required for safeguarding its national security.”87 In Track 1.5 and Track 2 engagements as well as one-onone discussions, Chinese strategists echoed these words: the reforms, they said, would not lead to nuclear change. Moreover, in addition to dismissing systematically (to this day) the possibility that Chinese nuclear forces adopt a war-fighting role,

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Beijing insisted that technological and operational improvements of its forces would not affect China’s long-standing policy and strategy. The PLA’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy, for instance, suggests that adoption of a launch-on-warning posture would be consistent with China’s NFU policy: “Rapid launch of nuclear missiles for counterattack is consistent with [China’s] no first use policy and could effectively prevent further loss of nuclear forces, and increase the survivability and counterattack capabilities of [China’s] nuclear power.”88 Also worth noting is that despite the creation of a new, operational command structure for the PLA, the Rocket Force’s command, control, and communication systems do not appear to have changed. An article in Rocket Force News stated that the Rocket Force is “a strategic military service directly controlled and used by the Central Party Committee, Central Military Commission, and Chairman Xi.”89 Chinese strategists, similarly, insisted that the command authority of the nuclear forces in particular (but of conventional assets too) remains centralized under the Central Military Commission. Some even argued that such centralization could be reinforced as a result of the reforms.90 That is why they dismissed concerns about potential issues involving China’s command, control, and communication systems, adding that new technologies would enhance control, including the emerging PLA navy and air force nuclear platforms.91 If all these points are confirmed, the Rocket Force can be expected to continue to focus on expanding and improving its conventional assets, while keeping (maybe even pushing?) nuclear forces largely into the background, even as Beijing is bringing online new and more diversified nuclear-capable systems (including a nuclear triad) and making progress toward a more integrated strategic deterrence posture. Significantly, a recent study showed that the Rocket Force could strengthen its conventional mission over the nuclear mission because the latter is less dynamic and deemed much less prestigious, making it more difficult, as a result, for officers who choose it to ascend to the ranks of senior leadership.92

But US concerns might also be justified. Yet another line of analysis suggests that, on the contrary, US concerns might be justified. The new Rocket Force name and upgrade to full-service status might signal or lead to much greater autonomy, even independence, for the force, potentially opening the door to radical changes in China’s nuclear force structure and posture, and in turn in policy and strategy. Despite the insistence of the Chinese leadership, media outlets, and expert community that the reforms will not bring about change for

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China’s nuclear strategy and weapons program, change, even major change, is a possibility. Bates Gill and Adam Ni stressed that despite important similarities with the Second Artillery Force, official characterizations of the Rocket Force seem to point to a much more expansive role and greater expectations for the new force.93 They explained that at the Rocket Force’s inauguration ceremony in December 2015, Xi articulated a new formulation for the force’s strategic requirements, arguing that it needed to “possess both nuclear and conventional [capabilities]” and be prepared to conduct “comprehensive deterrence and warfighting” operations.94 While, as mentioned earlier, the requirement to possess both nuclear and conventional capabilities is not new, the emphasis on “comprehensive deterrence and warfighting” is, they opined, significant because it suggests that the Rocket Force now needs to operate not only across different regions and distances, but also across land, sea, aerospace, and electromagnetic spectrums, and do so for both deterrence and war-fighting purposes.95 The fact that Xi added that the Rocket Force should enhance its ability for “strategic balancing” (obviously of the United States) also suggests that Beijing might envision a greater role for the force, including of its nuclear components.96 If this assessment is correct, faster growth of the Chinese nuclear arsenal could be in the works. China might also decide to adopt a much more aggressive nuclear posture, including the peacetime mating of warheads, an increase in alert status, endorsement of a launch-on-warning posture, and abandonment of the long-standing NFU policy and traditional practice of minimum deterrence. These are steps that some PLA officers (a minority, so far) have recommended occasionally. 97 Significantly, in the context of mounting tensions between Washington and Beijing (notably after the release of the NPR), some Chinese officials and PLA officers—still a small minority—were reportedly “quite active” in lobbying Beijing to implement changes of that sort.98 Should such changes be implemented, China’s nuclear doctrine and forces would be much more closely aligned with the country’s conventional doctrine and forces. They would have both a deterrence and a war-fighting mission. Presumably, nuclear and conventional forces would also be (further) integrated, and Rocket Force and emerging navy and air force nuclear assets would become active, rather than passive, components of China’s evolving integrated strategic deterrence posture. Such integration could even be further enhanced through coordination with the new PLA Strategic

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Support Force, an independent branch (and a product of the ongoing military reforms) which, as John Costello and Joe McReynolds described it, is intended to “create synergies between disparate information warfare capabilities in order to execute specific types of strategic missions that Chinese leaders believe will be decisive in future major wars.”99 In these circumstances, it is possible to envision that command, control, and communication systems over China’s nuclear forces be relaxed or that the Central Military Commission end up abandoning its role of command authority. Beijing and the PLA could choose to give some authority to the theater commands to make nuclear use easier in the event of a crisis or war, which would amount to a 360degree departure from China’s traditional nuclear policy and strategy.

Next steps for nuclear China and future trends for the US-China strategic nuclear relationship. It is too early to tell whether the military reforms will, as Chinese authorities and strategists claim, lead to continuity rather than change for China’s nuclear strategy and weapons program. Yet even if the balance tipped in favor of the “continuity scenario,” some degree of change would take place, probably sooner rather than later. It is virtually guaranteed, for three reasons. First, there is almost no doubt that the Chinese nuclear arsenal will continue to grow. The question is not whether it will grow, but how fast, and how big it will become. Speculations abound. For instance, US senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently stated that “reports indicate China is on track to double its nuclear stockpile over the next decade.”100 Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, went further, indicating that “over the next decade, China is likely to at least double the size of its nuclear stockpile.”101 Occasionally, these speculations found echoes in Chinese media outlets. A May 2020 Global Times editorial, for instance, argued that “China needs to expand the number of its nuclear warheads to 1,000 in a relatively short time.”102 Independent experts, however, have been generally skeptical about these predictions, stressing that US assessments have a long history of overestimating the growth trajectory of the Chinese nuclear arsenal.103 Rather, some have assessed that Beijing might be aiming to build an arsenal of, or close to, 600 warheads maximum, which would be consistent with Chinese fissile material stocks.104 Still, while it is difficult (perhaps even impossible) to predict the future size China’s of nuclear arsenal with accuracy, there is broad

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consensus among experts that, as Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda put it: “Although China’s nuclear arsenal is far smaller than that of Russia and the United States, the growing and increasingly capable Chinese nuclear arsenal is pushing the boundaries of China’s ‘minimum’ deterrent and undercutting its promise that it ‘will never enter into a nuclear arms race with any other country.’”105 Looking ahead, this conclusion makes it difficult for Beijing to continue to remain silent about the current and future size and shape of its nuclear forces and activities. Plainly, China will likely have to become more transparent and possibly abandon its traditional practice of opacity as a whole. Second, it will become increasingly difficult for China to maintain its long-standing nuclear policy and strategy because of the rapid and impressive modernization, diversification, and expansion of its nuclear forces, especially the emergence of a nuclear triad. Even if Chinese officials want continuity, they most likely will have to, at a minimum, adjust the country’s policy and strategy, de facto or in more real, measurable ways. They have already begun to do so: they have worked hard, as mentioned earlier, to reconcile possible adoption of a launch-on-warning posture with China’s NFU policy; many experts question whether that is a tenable position. Discussions in Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues also suggest that Chinese strategists are well aware that technological developments will begin to loom large on China’s policy and strategy and that, looking over the horizon, some degree of change is probably unavoidable. For instance, when describing the likely impact of technological developments, Chinese strategists, of late, have been careful to stress that the “broad contours” of China’s policy and strategy will not be affected.106 That is why US officials have become increasingly skeptical about the permanence of China’s nuclear doctrine over the long term. For instance, in response to a question following his testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services in February 2020, Charles Richard, commander of US Strategic Command, went so far as to say that it was possible to “drive a truck though [China’s] no first use policy.”107 Third, it is highly unlikely that the modernization, diversification, and expansion of Chinese forces which, significantly, are taking place at a rapid pace, will not create some complications for command, control, and communication systems, even if control is maintained by the Central Military Commission. Plainly, over the next few years, business as usual is not in the cards for China’s systems: Beijing and the PLA will have to make important adjustments.

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In sum, while the jury is still out regarding what the reforms have in store for China’s nuclear strategy and weapons program, one thing is clear: Beijing is reaching an inflection point and will soon have to make decisions to, at a minimum, adjust many of the features that have been central to its approach to nuclear weapons since 1964. As suggested earlier, Chinese authorities would probably have reached that decision point regardless of the reforms. The question is whether the reforms will trigger radical change or slower, more managed change. Much of it will likely depend on how the reform process proceeds, notably who “wins” the growing inter- and intraservice competition, which is reportedly becoming “extremely severe” because “everyone is competing for Xi’s ear.”108 What, then, are the implications for the US-China strategic nuclear relationship? Irrespective of what change Beijing decides to implement (and to some extent, how that change is implemented), the outcome can be positive. Chinese nuclear forces might end up more reliable and more survivable which, according to classic deterrence theory, would help strengthen strategic stability and reduce the risks of conflict due to the fear of escalation.109 In support of that argument is also the fact that China has always pursued a defensive military strategy, one which Beijing characterizes as “active defense” of Chinese national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and which promises only a counterattack (i.e., a response to aggression). As stated in The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces (2013), “We will not attack unless we are attacked; but we will surely counterattack if attacked.”110 If that is the case, then at least in theory the USChina strategic nuclear relationship could become less, not more, competitive as a result of Beijing’s anticipated decisions to adapt its nuclear strategy and weapons program. A negative outcome is also possible, however. Chinese decisions and developments might fuel competition and lead to arms race instability and, worse, crisis instability and the overall deterioration of strategic stability. Quite simply, and as mentioned earlier, the United States might fear that China will either sprint to parity (or come to close to it) or feel emboldened with a more sophisticated nuclear arsenal and, as a result, become aggressive at the lower ends of the conflict spectrum. This is a legitimate concern because China’s “active defense” strategy is defensive in nature, but it also seeks to protect Chinese sovereignty in a system in

Conclusions

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which Beijing considers that sovereignty to be incomplete because it reflects the legacy of the “century of humiliation.” Besides, Chinese military documents include multiple references to a statement attributed to Deng Xiaoping that “active defense is not simply only defense, there is offense within defense.”111 According to that line of thinking, therefore, Washington will conclude that it is best served by trumping Chinese military developments and competing to maintain and even expand its nuclear advantage over Beijing, which is likely to become increasingly aggressive. On balance, the latter scenario is more likely. Significantly, it was precisely the fear of an emerging stability-instability paradox that led the United States to intensify its competition against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, even as Washington and Moscow found themselves increasingly entrenched in a situation of mutually assured destruction. Similar developments are especially likely in the US-China context because the United States is well ahead of China in the nuclear domain and, therefore, Washington will probably find it easy—and tempting—to increase and cement its superiority over Beijing. What is more, Washington will likely conclude that doing so is necessary given that the regional conventional balance of power is fast shifting in China’s favor. The idea, plainly, is that a more decisive US nuclear advantage over Beijing will compensate for Washington’s widening loss of conventional superiority in the region.112 For these reasons, and of course assuming domestic politics and budget realities permit, bolstering the US nuclear advantage vis-à-vis China is likely to appear appealing to Washington. There are signs that Washington has already opted for this course of action. The US decision in 2018 to, in the near term, modify a small number of existing submarine-launched ballistic missiles and, in the longer term, pursue a modern nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, was made primarily with Russia in mind, given Moscow’s behavior since its annexation of Crimea.113 China, however, was a secondary yet important concern. Similarly, the US decision in 2019 to withdraw from the INF Treaty was made in response to Russia’s violation of the treaty. Yet here too, numerous Trump administration officials stressed that the withdrawal decision was made with China in mind; in a private discussion, for instance, one administration official said that China’s growing military force was “the strategic reason for the US withdrawal.”114 Significantly, following its first flight test of an INF-range (conventional) missile shortly after the demise of the treaty, the US secretary of defense also pointed out that “we want to make sure that we, as we need to, have

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the capability to deter Chinese bad behavior by having our own capability to strike at intermediate-ranges.”115 These decisions suggest that Washington will no longer remain idle in the face of Chinese military developments. A logical consequence, of course, could very well be Beijing choosing to give its nuclear strategy and weapons program a sharper turn, which would fuel an action-reaction cycle and, for the first time, lead to an intensified US-China competition in the nuclear domain. In any event, while many questions remain about what the future holds, it seems clear that there is no room for a return to business as usual. It is too late to hope that nuclear weapons will remain in the background of the bilateral relationship; they have begun, and will continue, to move into the foreground. The US-China relationship, plainly, is ripe for nuclear rivalry. Looking to the future, there seem to be two possible trajectories. One is an unconstrained action-reaction cycle, the other a less intense, or more managed, cycle. The first trajectory would involve the United States and China engaging in the downward spiral of an intense arms race, with no end in sight and little in place to manage it. Down this pathway, strategic stability would deteriorate greatly and, logically, the risks of conflict would increase. The second trajectory, meanwhile, would also include a US-China action-reaction cycle, but that cycle would be less intense, and Washington and Beijing would strive to keep it in check through strategic dialogue at first, then agreements of various sorts to manage differences and avoid or limit instability. Down that pathway, despite competitive dynamics, strategic stability would be a joint US-China goal, and Washington and Beijing would work hard to try and prevent or manage conflict. While it remains unclear what trajectory Washington and Beijing will take, at present the first seems more likely than the second. Of late, the United States has presented China with a choice between two alternatives. One would involve China agreeing to strategic dialogue with the United States and to joining the arms control process, possibly in a trilateral format with Russia. President Trump first called on China to engage in arms control in a tweet sent on December 3, 2018, on the heels of the US decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty: “I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race.”116 Since then, and while providing no detail about what an agreement with China would look like, the Trump administration has, on multiple occasions, pressured Beijing to agree to dialogue and arms

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control.117 Should Beijing refuse, however, the administration has been clear about the alternative. As Trump put it in his 2019 State of the Union speech: “Perhaps we can negotiate a different [INF] agreement, adding China and others, or perhaps we can’t—in which case, we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far.”118 Ambassador Marshall Billingslea, the US special presidential envoy for arms control, recently reiterated this promise of an unconstrained competition—Beijing’s second “option”—stressing in a speech at the Hudson Institute that the United States knows “how to win these races [and] how to spend the adversary into oblivion.”119 China has refused to engage in any form of strategic dialogue and arms control with the United States. After Washington formally invited Beijing, in late 2019, to initiate official talks, the Chinese leadership rejected the offer, stating that “it is our clear and consistent position that China has no intention to take part in a trilateral arms control negotiation with the US and Russia.”120 In the months (or years) ahead, Beijing may change its mind. But until then, or rather until dialogue starts and substantive progress is made, the nuclear competition that has begun between the United States and China will continue to intensify, unchecked, regardless of who is in the White House. Given Washington and Beijing’s deep strategic interconnections and interactions with several other key states, what impact will tighter US-China nuclear bipolarity have on the regional and international security orders? How will it change Washington and Beijing’s thinking and actions vis-à-vis other states? How will these states adapt? What are the likely consequences of such dynamics and, specifically, the implications for the United States? The four chapters that follow address these questions.

Notes

1. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, February 2018), 2. 2. Ibid. 3. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which created domestic legal authority to conduct unofficial relations with Taiwan. The TRA also enshrines the US commitment to assisting Taiwan to maintain its defense. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan passed the “Six Assurances,” key principles designed to reassure Taiwan that Washington would continue its support of Taipei even in the absence of formal diplomatic relations. 4. Joint United States-China Statement, White House, Washington, DC, October 29, 1997, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-1997-11-03/pdf/WCPD-1997 -11-03-Pg1680.pdf. 5. Robert Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility?” remarks by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick for the National Committee

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on US-China Relations, New York City, September 21, 2005, https://2001-2009 .state.gov/s/d/former/zoellick/rem/53682.htm. 6. Barack Obama, remarks at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, November 16, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/realitycheck/the-press-office /remarks-president-barack-obama-town-hall-meeting-with-future-chinese-leaders; Xi Jinping, speech at the National Committee on United States-China Relations, Washington, DC, February 15, 2012, https://www.ncuscr.org/content/video-vice-president -xi-jinping-policy-address. 7. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, January 1993), 8. 8. Aaron L. Friedberg, “Competing with China,” Survival 60, no. 3 (June–July 2018): 11 9. Liu Mingfu, quoted in The Telegraph, “China ‘Should Sprint to Become the World’s Most Powerful Country,’” March 1, 2010. Liu Mingfu later expanded his thinking in The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (Beijing: CN Times, 2015). 10. Yang Jiechi, quoted in Bernard K. Gordon, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Rise of China,” Foreign Affairs, November 7, 2011. 11. Memorandum from Andrew Marshall to Secretary of Defense, “Near Term Actions to Begin Shift of Focus Towards Asia,” Rumsfeld Papers, Office of the Secretary of Defense, May 2, 2002, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/2518/2002-05 -02%20from%20Andy%20Marshall%20re%20Near%20Term%20Actions%20to %20Begin%20Shift%20of%20Focus%20Towards%20Asia.pdf. The “rebalance” was first articulated by then secretary of state Hillary Clinton in “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011. A month later then president Obama gave a speech in Canberra stressing that the United States is “here to stay as a Pacific power”; see Associated Press, “Obama Tells Asia US ‘Here to Stay’ as a Pacific Power,” November 16, 2011. 12. Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, who respectively served at the Department of State (and also at the White House in Ely Ratner’s case) during the Obama administration, make that clear in “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (March–April 2018): 60. 13. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 151. 14. Memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “A Strategic Analysis of the Impact of the Acquisition by Communist China of a Nuclear Capability” June 26, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961–63, vol. 22, 84–85. 15. Avery Goldstein, Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century: China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 111. 16. Ibid. 17. William Burr and Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Whether to ‘Strangle the Baby in the Cradle,’” International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001): 54–99. 18. Goldstein, Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century, 104. 19. US Army Center of Military History, Department of the Army Historical Summary, FY 1969 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1973). 20. M. Taylor Fravel, Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), notably 236–269. 21. For a long time, China’s nuclear strategy was based on the statements made by Chinese leaders and internal doctrinal publications. References to China’s “selfdefense nuclear strategy” first appeared in the 2006 Defense White Paper. See Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, China’s National Defense in 2006 (Beijing: Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2006). 22. Jeffrey Lewis, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

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23. Immediately after conducting its first nuclear test in 1964, China declared that “the Chinese Government hereby solemnly declares that China will never at any time and under any circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons.” Since then, Beijing has emphasized China’s NFU commitment in all official statements and publications. See “Statement of the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” October 16, 1964, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, PRC FMA 105-01262-01, 22-26, available at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/134359.pdf?v =b1e04ac05705#:~:text=The%20development%20of%20nuclear%20weapons,States %20launching%20a%20nuclear%20war.&text=The%20Chinese%20Government %20hereby%20solemnly,first%20to%20use%20nuclear%20weapons. 24. Concerns that the United States would use tactical nuclear weapons during the Korean War, a threat Washington made almost explicit, was a major factor in Beijing’s decision to go nuclear. Significantly, Beijing declared on conducting its first nuclear test in 1964 that it was meant to respond to “the United States imperialist policy of nuclear blackmail and nuclear threats.” Ibid. 25. See Goldstein, Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century, 122–123, for rough dates on the initial introduction, pace of deployment, total numbers, and warhead yield of China’s various nuclear missile systems. 26. Ibid., 65. 27. Ibid., notably 71–76. 28. Morton H. Halperin, “China in the Postwar World,” China Quarterly, no. 21 (January–March 1965): 86. 29. The Select Committee was set up in June 1998 and the redacted version of the report released to the public in May 1999. The Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China (US Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1999), https://www.govinfo .gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf. 30. Shannon N. Kile and Hans M. Kristensen, SIPRI Yearbook 2020 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 326. Note that there is no certainty to this figure given China’s lack of transparency. Some estimates suggest that China’s arsenal is significantly bigger: up to 1,600–3,000 weapons. See, for instance, Phillip Karber’s report “Underground Great Wall of China,” available on the website of the Washington, DC-based Federation of American Scientists at https://fas.org/nuke/guide/china /Karber_UndergroundFacilities-Full_2011_reduced.pdf. These higher estimates, however, are largely based on speculation. Most experts do not believe they are credible. 31. Shannon N. Kile and Hans M. Kristensen, SIPRI Yearbook 2020, 326. 32. Yao Yunzhu, “China’s Perspective on Nuclear Deterrence,” Senior Leaders Perspective, Spring 2010, 29. 33. Sun Tzu, quoted in Goldstein, Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century, 135. 34. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Development Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019 (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2019), notably 65–67. 35. DF stands for Dongfeng or East Wind in Mandarin. 36. MIRV stands for multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, and characterizes a missile with a payload containing several warheads, each capable of being aimed at a different target. 37. China’s old Xia-class submarine has not gone on patrol and is usually assumed to be not operational/nor deployed. Also, JL stands for Ju Lang San or Giant Wave in Mandarin. 38. There is disagreement among experts as to whether China’s old H-6 bomber is nuclear capable. The US Department of Defense typically assesses that it is. H stands for Hong. 39. M. Taylor Fravel reports that the “lean-and-effective” formulation was first uttered by Commander Li Shuqing in a 1978 speech. Fravel, Active Defense, 261.

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It appeared in writing in the 2006 Defense White Paper and is used in follow-on documents. 40. Interviews conducted by the author, Beijing, March 2019. 41. There has been a debate in China about the pros and cons of maintaining an NFU policy, especially in the early 2000s. While most agree that China should maintain that policy, Beijing has injected uncertainty as to whether it would go nuclear in some circumstances, notably in the case of a non-nuclear attack that would degrade its nuclear forces. The PLA’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy (Beijing, China: Military Academic Works, Academy of Military Science, 2013), for instance, talks about the need to maintain “an appropriate degree of ambiguity.” 42. Michael O. Wheeler, Nuclear Parity with China? (Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2012), 23. 43. Glenn Snyder coined the “stability-instability” paradox in the 1960s. See Glenn Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in The Balance of Power, edited by Paul Seabury (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 184–201. Brad Roberts talks about China’s quest for “strategic equivalency” in his edited volume Major Power Rivalry and Nuclear Risk Reduction—Perspectives from Russia, China, and the United States (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research, 2020), 5. 44. Brad Roberts, The Case for US Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 164–170. For an updated study, see also Brad Roberts, On Theories of Victory, Red and Blue (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research, 2020). 45. While Chinese strategists in the 1990s discussed nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of deterrence, weishe (deterrence in Mandarin) today encompasses a broader definition, including all aspects of comprehensive national power (zonghe guojia liliang): Zhou Peng and Yun Enbing, “Developing the Theory of Strategic Deterrence with Chinese Characteristics,” China Military Science, no. 3 (March 2004). For an indepth analysis, see Michael Chase and Arthur Chan, China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence” (Washington, DC: RAND, 2016). 46. Roberts, The Case for US Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, 167. 47. Each of the three quotations have been made, respectively, by Brad Roberts, China-US Nuclear Relations: What Relationship Best Serves US Interests? (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2001), ES-2; Brad Roberts, Asia’s Major Powers and the Emerging Challenges to Nuclear Stability Among Them (Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2009), 33; and Brad Roberts, Robert A. Manning, and Ronald N. Montaperto, “China: The Forgotten Nuclear Power,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 4 (July–August 2000): 53. 48. See, for instance, US-China Joint Statement on Nuclear Security Cooperation, White House, Washington, DC, March 31, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov /the-press-office/2016/03/31/us-china-joint-statement-nuclear-security-cooperation. 49. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2010), 13, 34–35. 50. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2010), x. 51. David Santoro, Asia-Pacific Leadership Network, “Asia-Pacific Strategic Nuclear Policy Dialogues 2: Asia’s Four Nuclear Armed States,” Policy Brief No. 27 (APLN/CNND, Seoul, January 2017), notably 1–4. 52. For key takeaways about Track 2 and Track 1.5 dialogue processes, see Michael O. Wheeler, Track 1.5/2 Security Dialogues with China: Nuclear Lessons Learnt (Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2014). For a more up-todate study, see David Santoro and Robert Gromoll, “On the Value of Nuclear Dialogue with China—A Review and Assessment of the Track-1.5 ‘China-US Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,’” Pacific Forum Issues and Insights 20, no. 1 (November 2020). Joint US-China scholarship includes, for instance, Lewis Dunn, ed., Building Toward a Stable and Cooperative Long-Term US-China Strategic Relationship

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(Honolulu: Pacific Forum; Washington, DC: Science Applications International Corporation; Beijing: China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, 2012). 53. President Xi and others first announced their intention to launch military reforms at the Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party Congress in October 2013. Yet it was at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 2017 that Xi stressed that the people’s armed forces should become “world-class forces” by mid-century. For a comprehensive analysis of China’s reforms, see Phillip C. Saunders, Arthur S. Ding, Andrew Scobell, N. D. Yang, and Joel Wuthnow, eds., Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2019). 54. Santoro, “Asia-Pacific Strategic Nuclear Policy Dialogues 2,” 4. 55. Maggie Haberman, “Donald Trump Says He Favors Big Tariffs on Chinese Exports,” New York Times, January 7, 2016. 56. Colin Campbell, “Donald Trump: Here’s How I’d Handle that ‘Madman’ in North Korea,” Business Insider, January 6, 2016. 57. Anne Gearan, “Trump Speaks with Taiwanese President, a Major Break with Decades of US Policy on China,” Washington Post, December 3, 2016. See also Donald J. Trump, tweet, December 5, 2016. 58. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did the opposite in the 1970s: they courted China to better balance the Soviet Union. 59. “Readout of the President’s Call with President Xi Jinping of China,” White House, Washington, DC, February 9, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings -statements/readout-presidents-call-president-xi-jinping-china/. 60. “Statement from the Press Secretary on the United States-China Visit,” White House, Washington, DC, April 7, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings -statements/statement-press-secretary-united-states-china-visit/; “Joint Press Conference of President Trump and NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg,” White House, Washington, DC, April 12, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements /joint-press-conference-president-trump-nato-secretary-general-stoltenberg/. 61. Donald J. Trump, tweet, April 11, 2017. 62. “President Donald J. Trump Is Addressing Unfair Trade Practices that Threaten to Harm Our National Security,” Factsheet, White House, Washington, DC, March 8, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j -trump-addressing-unfair-trade-practices-threaten-harm-national-security/. 63. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, December 2017), 28. 64. Ibid., 25. 65. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2018), 2, 4. Emphasis in original. 66. Elbridge Colby, Testimony Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hearing on Implementation of the National Defense Strategy, Washington, DC, January 29, 2019, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Colby_01-29 -19.pdf. 67. Mike Pence, “Remarks Delivered by Vice President Mike Pence on the Administration’s Policy Towards China,” Hudson Institute, Washington, DC, October 4, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president -pence-administrations-policy-toward-china/. 68. Matt Pottinger, quoted in “Dealing with China, America Goes for Confucian honesty,” The Economist, October 4, 2018, 43. 69. US Department of Defense, Indo-Pacific Strategy Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2019); US Department of State, A Free and Open IndoPacific—Advancing a Shared Vision (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2019). 70. Bates Gill, “China’s Global Influence: Post-COVID Prospects for Soft Power,” Washington Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 97.

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71. Robert O’Brien, remarks at the Arizona Commerce Authority Conference Center, Phoenix, June 24, 2020, https://china.usc.edu/robert-o%E2%80%99brien-chinese -communist-party%E2%80%99s-ideology-and-global-ambitions-june-24-2020. 72. Evan S. Medeiros, “The Changing Fundamentals of US-China Relations,” Washington Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 95. 73. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 1175. Note, however, that a few years later Kissinger revised his statement, indicating at his Senate hearing on the SALT II Treaty on July 31, 1979, that “if we opt out of the race unilaterally, we will probably be faced eventually with a younger group of Soviet leaders who will figure out what can be done with strategic superiority.” US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, The SALT II Treaty, Hearing, Part 3, 96th Gong, 1st session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 169. 74. United States Institute of Peace, Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2019), v. 75. Ashley Townshend, Brendan Thomas-Noone, and Matilda Steward, Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the IndoPacific (Sydney, Australia: US Studies Centre, 2019), 3. 76. Lee Hsien Loong, “The Endangered Asian Century—America, China, and the Perils of Confrontation,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July–August 2020): 52. 77. Richard Haass has labeled Trump’s foreign policy the “withdrawal doctrine” in “Trump’s Foreign Policy Doctrine? The Withdrawal Doctrine,” Washington Post, May 27, 2020. 78. Donald Trump, remarks by President Trump in Press Conference, Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks -president-trump-press-conference-osaka-japan/. 79. John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020). 80. Caitlin Talmadge, “The US-China Nuclear Relationship: Why Competition Is Likely to Intensify” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, September 2019), 5. 81. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, 2018, 11, I. 82. Ibid., 11. 83. Ibid., V. 84. David C. Logan, “Making Sense of China’s Missile Forces,” in Phillip C. Saunders, Arthur S. Ding, Andrew Scobell, N. D. Yang, and Joel Wuthnow, eds., Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2019), 412. 85. State Council Information Office of the PRC, China’s Military Strategy, Beijing, 2015. 86. Wang Shibin and An Puzhong, “Founding Ceremony for Army Leading Organization, Rocket Force and Strategic Support Force Held in Beijing,” China Military Online, January 1, 2016. 87. Zhao Lei and Li Xiaokun, “Three New Military Branches Created in Key PLA Reform,” China Daily, January 2, 2016. 88. Chinese Academy of Military Science, The Science of Military Strategy (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Military Science, 2013), 23. 89. Huang Jinxin, “My Views on the Rocket Force as a Strategic Military Service,” Rocket Force News, January 13, 2016. 90. Interviews conducted by the author, Beijing, August 2018. 91. Discussions held at the Track 1.5 “U.S.-China Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,” Maui, Hawaii, April 2018. 92. Logan, “Making Sense of China’s Missile Forces,” 418–419. See also Logan, “Career Paths in the PLA Rocket Force: What They Tell Us,” Asian Security 15, no. 2 (May 2019): 103–121.

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93. Bates Gill and Adam Ni, “The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force: Reshaping China’s Approach to Strategic Deterrence,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 73, no. 2 (January 2019): notably 162–163. 94. Ibid., 162. 95. Ibid., 162. 96. Ibid., 163. 97. Discussions held in various Track 1.5 and Track 2 forums. See also Gregory Kulacki, “China’s Military Calls for Putting Its Nuclear Forces on Alert” (Washington, DC: Union of Concerned Scientists, January 2016). 98. Interviews conducted by the author, Beijing, March 2019. 99. John Costello and Joe McReynolds, “China’s Strategic Support Force: A Force for a New Era,” in Phillip C. Saunders, Arthur S. Ding, Andrew Scobell, N. D. Yang, and Joel Wuthnow, eds., Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2019), 438. 100. James Risch, Chairman Risch Opening Statement, Hearing on Future of Arms Control Post-INF Treaty, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, May 15, 2019, https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/chairman-risch -opening-statement-at-hearing-on-future-of-arms-control-post-inf-treaty. 101. Lieutenant General Robert P. Ashley Jr., “Russian and Chinese Nuclear Modernization Trends,” remarks at the Hudson Institute, Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, May 29, 2019, https://www.dia.mil/News/Speeches-and-Testimonies /Article-View/Article/1859890/russian-and-chinese-nuclear-modernization-trends (emphasis added). 102. Hu Xijin, “China Needs to Increase Its Nuclear Warheads to 1,000,” Global Times, May 8, 2020. 103. Hans M. Kristensen, “DIA Estimates for Chinese Nuclear Warheads” (Washington, DC: Federation of American Scientists, May 31, 2019). 104. Thérèse Delpech, Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Policy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2012), 120. 105. Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “The Pentagon’s 2019 China Report” (Washington, DC: Federation of American Scientists, May 2019), https://fas.org /blogs/security/2019/05/chinareport2019/#:~:text=Although%20China’s%20nuclear %20arsenal%20is,with%20any%20other%20country.%E2%80%9D%20And. 106. Discussions held at the Track 1.5 “U.S.-China Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,” Beijing, June 2016. 107. Charles A. Richard, Statement of Charles A. Richard, Commander, United States Strategic Command, Before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Washington, DC, February 13, 2020, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media /doc/Richard_02-13-20.pdf. 108. Discussions held at the Track 1.5 “U.S.-China Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,” Maui, Hawaii, April 2018. 109. Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 110. Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces (Beijing: Information Office of the State Council, April 2013). 111. Yu Jixun, ed., The Science of Second Artillery Campaigns (Beijing: Press of the People’s Liberation Army, 2004), 259. 112. See Elbridge Colby, “Welcome to China and America’s Nuclear Nightmare,” The National Interest, December 19, 2014; Elbridge Colby, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War: A Strategy for the New Great-Power Rivalry,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 6 (November–December 2018): 25–32. See also Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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113. US Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, 2018, XII. For an analysis of Russia’s strategy, see Dave Johnson, Russia’s Conventional Precision Strike Capabilities, Regional Crises, and Nuclear Thresholds (Livermore, CA: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, February 2018). 114. Interview conducted by the author, Washington, DC, July 2019. 115. US secretary of defense, as quoted in Michelle Nichols, “Russia, China Seek UN Security Council Meeting on US Missile Developments,” Reuters, August 21, 2019. 116. Donald Trump, tweet, December 3, 2018. 117. At present, it is unclear if the Trump administration wants incorporation of China into the US-Russia New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), or if it wants a new agreement. If it wants the latter, it is unclear if that agreement would focus on nuclear warheads or deployed forces, or if it would include a verification regime. Moreover, it is unclear if the administration favors a trilateral agreement (with Russia) over a bilateral agreement. 118. Donald Trump, “State of the Union Address,” Washington, DC, February 5, 2019. 119. Marshall Billingslea, Special Presidential Envoy on the Future of Nuclear Arms Control, Hudson Institute, Washington, DC, May 21, 2020, https://www.hudson .org/research/16062-transcript-special-presidential-envoy-marshall-billingslea-on-the -future-of-nuclear-arms-control. 120. “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s Regular Press Conference,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Beijing, June 17, 2020, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa _eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/t1789509.shtml.

3 The Major Power Game: The United States, China, and Russia John K. Warden

OF THE MANY THIRD PARTIES AFFECTING THE US-CHINA STRATEGIC nuclear relationship, none is likely to be as important as Russia. The political relationships among the United States, China, and Russia are complex and evolving, and each country has a significant nuclear arsenal in the midst of modernization. It has been the US-Russia bilateral relationship, and not the US-Russia-China triangle, that has driven the evolution of the global nuclear order thus far but China, and its relationships with Russia and the United States, is likely to have a larger impact over the coming decades. Throughout the nuclear age, the United States and the Soviet Union, and now the United States and Russia, have been the key players shaping the global landscape of nuclear weapons. The two countries have had the most weapons and, through their competition, have driven innovation in nuclear weapons capabilities, doctrine, and strategy. Washington and Moscow have also led the way on strategic arms control, agreeing to a series of treaties designed to reduce and shape their nuclear arsenals in service of stability. China, meanwhile, has been an interested observer, closely watching developments in the United States and Russia to make sure their security is not negatively affected while avoiding being drawn into the competition. China’s nuclear arsenal is much more modest in size, its nuclear doctrine is more restrained, and it has not developed and fielded the diverse array of nuclear capabilities that the United States and the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. 59

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Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons largely receded to the background as Washington and Moscow sought to build a more constructive relationship. In the 1990s and 2000s, the United States and Russia attempted to chart a new path for their political relationship and agreed to a series of agreements that dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons that each country deployed. During the same period, Washington was engaging Beijing to push China in the direction of democracy and liberalism with little to no concern about the US-China nuclear relationship. Perceiving a reduced likelihood of major conflict and enjoying superior conventional military capabilities, the United States deemphasized its nuclear capabilities, reducing deployed forces at home and abroad, and repeatedly deferred modernization of its nuclear capabilities. In recent years, the relationships between the United States and both Russia and China have shifted in a negative direction, jumpstarting rejuvenated military competition.1 Russia and China are each pursuing strategies and capabilities to challenge the US and allied interest. With Moscow, relations with Washington turned sharply negative following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soured further when Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. With Beijing, the US policy community gradually came to bipartisan agreement that economic engagement was not bringing promised benefits. The potential security threat posed by China came into focus as Beijing, backed by growing economic and military strength, began to aggressively challenge the maritime status quo in the South China Sea. Russia and China, meanwhile, appear to see their interests more in line and are increasingly exploring cooperation. Against this changing political backdrop, the nuclear weapons capabilities of each country are also in flux. Russia, China, and the United States are each modernizing their nuclear arsenals. Russia is recapitalizing its full range of nuclear weapons capabilities, from strategic-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to theaterand tactical-range nonstrategic systems, including those that violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.2 China, meanwhile, is increasing the quantity of its nuclear forces and their operational capability, including by adding submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and nuclear-capable bombers to its already formidable force of intercontinental- and theater-range ground-launched missiles. The United States, for its part, is in the early stages of a recapitalization of its strategic triad of ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclearcapable bombers. It has also withdrawn from the INF Treaty, citing Russia’s noncompliance, and had expressed skepticism about extend-

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ing the US-Russia New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the current bilateral strategic arms control treaty between the United States and Russia. With political relations among the United States and Russia and China souring, there is a great deal of uncertainty about the future of US-Russia-China nuclear relations. To what extent will nuclear weapons return to prominence and become an important area of military competition among the three powers? If there is a more competitive US-Russia nuclear relationship, how would it affect the US-China nuclear relationship? How would intensified US-China strategic competition affect the US-Russia nuclear relationship? In this chapter, I address these questions by examining the US-Russia, US-China, and Russia-China dyads and exploring possible ways that trilateral relations among the three could contribute to nuclear competition and cooperation.

Factors Driving Change in US, Russian, and Chinese Nuclear Strategy

The role of nuclear weapons in the US-China relationship will be shaped by the character of the relationships among the United States, Russia, and China, as well as the role of nuclear weapons in each country’s national security strategy. A number of factors are affecting what nuclear strategy and associated policy, capabilities, and posture the three powers have adopted and are likely to maintain going forward. Each country is likely to make certain decisions for its own internal reasons, whether resulting from bureaucratic politics, organizational inertia, the influence of the defense industry, or the desire for international status. The strategy that each country pursues will also be influenced by what resources and capabilities are available. Economic troubles will constrain the resources for nuclear and other military modernization while technological advances in areas such as hypersonic glide vehicles or missile defenses could reveal options for policy, capabilities, and posture that were previously out of reach. But for all three sides of the USRussia-China triangle, the external security environment and threat perceptions thereof will also play a critical factor in decisions regarding nuclear strategy. If any of the three encounters proliferation in its region or a stronger rival, for example, it may reconsider whether its nuclear strategy is adequate. For each country, the actions and capabilities of the other two will have a significant effect on its nuclear weapons choices.

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Nuclear weapons are military instruments that have significant political power. But their utility does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it depends on a country’s nuclear capabilities relative to the strategic and operational capabilities of its competitors. Broadly, there are three main reasons the United States, Russia, and China might adjust their nuclear weapons policy, capabilities, or posture. First, any of the three powers might feel compelled to adjust its nuclear posture based on new understanding of the requirements of strategic deterrence, even while keeping its overall nuclear strategy constant. All three sides of the triangle are likely to seek to maintain the strategic nuclear forces required to threaten unacceptable harm against the other two. By doing so, they are able to significantly raise the potential cost of conflict and meet the minimum requirement for deterring conquest. But simply having nuclear weapons is not sufficient to threaten unacceptable harm. For the threat of nuclear escalation to be credible, a state must have nuclear forces that are able to survive counterforce strikes and deliver a response that would impose significant damage despite the opponent’s active and passive defenses. Each state has its own requirements for the level of nuclear damage that it must threaten to meet the standard of unacceptable harm, determined by what it is attempting to deter with its nuclear weapons and what it thinks is required to coerce its potential adversaries. A state is likely to adjust its nuclear posture if its thinking about the requirements of deterrence change or to account for improvements in its competitors’ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), strike, and defense capabilities. A power may feel a need to adjust its nuclear posture even if its potential adversary does not explicitly seek to deny its minimum nuclear deterrent. Improvement in a potential adversary’s non-nuclear military capabilities designed to facilitate conventional war fighting, for example, might nonetheless reduce a state’s confidence that it can meet its nuclear deterrence requirements, prompting an adjustment in nuclear policy. To increase survivability, a state has a number of options. It could increase the size of its nuclear force or develop nuclear forces that are more likely to survive. It could also adjust its posture by, for example, concealing, dispersing, and hardening its nuclear capabilities or placing potentially vulnerable forces on a higher level of alert so they are likely to be available for employment on warning of attack. Second, any of the three powers might expand the objectives of its nuclear strategy and adjust its strategic nuclear posture accordingly. The United States, Russia, or China might, for example, attempt to gain an escalation advantage by developing credible first-strike capa-

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bilities that could threaten to negate, or at the very least functionally limit, their potential adversary’s nuclear arsenal. At various points in the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union sought this type of superiority, thinking that having the upper hand would improve its likelihood of achieving favorable crisis and conflict outcomes.3 The quest for counterforce capabilities that can hold its adversary’s nuclear forces at risk can lead a country to qualitatively or quantitatively enhance its nuclear arsenal. To target and disable a sophisticated adversary’s nuclear forces, a country would require nuclear forces that are able to destroy mobile and hard and deeply buried targets on operationally relevant time lines. As a result, a country seeking counterforce capabilities might seek nuclear forces with greater accuracy and tailored for specialized effects; it might also seek a larger nuclear force so that it has the ability to conduct a counterforce strike while keeping significant nuclear forces in reserve. Assuming that its intentions and capabilities are clear, one state’s objective of achieving a counterforce capability sufficient to negate its adversary’s nuclear forces is incompatible with its opponent’s ability to maintain a secure second-strike capability. The likely result is that both states will compete to develop nuclear forces to achieve their mutually exclusive objectives, potentially at significant cost. The desire for nuclear escalation superiority was a key driver of the US-Soviet arms buildup, which led each side to an arsenal of more than 10,000 nuclear weapons at Cold War peaks. Over the course of a long-term competition, one state or another may achieve an upper hand in a counterforce competition—as both the United States and the Soviet Union perceived they did at points in the Cold War—but those escalation advantages are likely to be fleeting, and may be of questionable utility. Alternatively, it is possible that, at some point, either one state accepts being in an inferior position or both sides decide that continued competition is not worth the payoff. After years of grueling arms competition, Washington and Moscow recognized the futility of competing for numerical nuclear superiority. Each accepted essential equivalence in nuclear arsenal size and ratified that arrangement in a series of arms control agreements. Beijing, by contrast, has thus far avoided seeking to develop a significant counterforce capability against either the United States or Russia, remaining content with a nuclear arsenal that is much smaller. A final reason that one of the three powers might adjust its nuclear posture is to improve its ability to wield nonstrategic nuclear weapons to gain coercive leverage in a crisis or a regional war. States may rely on threats to employ nonstrategic nuclear weapons and concepts of

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limited nuclear war fighting—with weapons whose primary purpose is to destroy military targets in a regional conflict—to gain coercive advantage and favorably shape outcomes. In addition to the competition over megaton-class city-busting nuclear weapons and counterforce capabilities at the high end, there was also a US-Soviet competition over the ability to achieve operational objectives using nuclear weapons in a conflict in Europe. The United States assessed that the Soviet Union had conventional superiority in the early part of the Cold War and developed a variety of tactical nuclear weapons capabilities, including nuclear-armed short-range ballistic and cruise missiles, artillery shells, and more. Adding nuclear warheads to these systems greatly increased their effectiveness. For advanced militaries, the utility of nuclear weapons is lower today than it was at the height of the Cold War. The perceived stakes of most potential conflicts are also lower, and the political cost of violating the tradition of nonuse of nuclear weapons would be much higher. Conventional military capabilities have also improved dramatically; the relative difference in effectiveness between a nuclear weapon and the best non-nuclear alternative for many missions is far less. Conventional explosives can be delivered far more accurately, and they have been supplemented by cyber, electronic, counterspace, long-range precision strike, and other capabilities that reduce the missions and tasks that require nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, there are reasons that the three powers might see nonstrategic nuclear weapons as important political and military instruments.4 Compared to conventional capabilities, nuclear weapons are likely to have an outsize psychological impact on an opponent’s assessment of potential cost and risk. Operationally, they are also likely to be more effective against hard and deeply buried targets, and they can be used to overcome lack of targeting information or delivery accuracy or make up for a limited conventional munitions inventory. In this regard, a major power might field tactical nuclear weapons capabilities to offset a general perception of conventional inferiority in potential limited conflict scenarios or a more specific weakness in its non-nuclear military toolkit. In reaction, that country’s opponent may assess that it has to improve its own posture to deter limited nuclear escalation, setting off a nonstrategic nuclear forces arms competition. Whether at the strategic or operational level, all three powers may consider adjustments to their nuclear posture because of deliberate actions by an opponent that is attempting to generate coercive leverage by altering the nuclear balance or other factors that affect their perceptions of the adequacy of their nuclear forces. Evaluating

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the future of the US-China-Russia nuclear relationship, therefore, requires understanding not only the likely ways that the powers might choose to compete to gain nuclear coercive advantage, but also the ways that political and military actions a power takes for other purposes could indirectly and potentially unintentionally cause one of the other two to adjust its nuclear policy, capabilities, or posture. The US-Soviet, then US-Russia, relationship has largely defined the global nuclear landscape. The United States and Russia have led the way on nuclear strategy, doctrine, and capabilities and even today account for the vast majority of nuclear weapons in the world. The Cold War relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was characterized by arms competition and, eventually, some mutual restraint in the form of arms control. With the end of the Cold War, competition gave way to potential partnership, and nuclear weapons faded to the background. But in recent years, the US-Russia relationship has turned in a negative direction and nuclear weapons have reemerged as a potential area of competition. The prospect of future bilateral arms control is uncertain, increasing the likelihood that the United States and Russia will once again engage in a significant nuclear arms competition at the strategic and operational levels. As the United States and the Soviet Union postured for advantage in the Cold War, they pursued a diverse array of strategic and tactical nuclear forces, and then eventually submitted to reciprocal restraint in the form of arms control. Each judged the adequacy of their military posture and nuclear forces by how they would perform in a major conflict against the other. In the 1950s, the United States emphasized nuclear weapons because of the prohibitive cost of maintaining a conventional defense of Europe.5 The US strategy was to threaten “massive retaliation” with nuclear weapons to deter Moscow from attacking a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) state. But once the Soviet Union developed nuclear forces capable of striking the continental United States, the United States no longer had a clear escalation advantage. The result was two overlapping levels of nuclear competition. At the strategic level, both attempted to develop sufficient nuclear capability to threaten what the other valued most, including key population and economic centers. But they also attempted to reduce their own vulnerability to nuclear strikes by developing counterforce capabilities that could destroy the adversary’s nuclear forces

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before they were employed and defend against an incoming nuclear attack. The result was a quantitative and qualitative arms competition with both sides attempting to enhance the survivability of their own nuclear forces through promptness, concealment, and hardening, and to improve their ability to strike the adversary’s nuclear forces with improved accuracy and yield. Conventional capabilities, for the most part, did not play a central role in either side’s assessment of the strategic nuclear balance. Eventually, many in the United States and the Soviet Union recognized the futility and risk of arms racing and agreed to a series of strategic arms control agreements designed to: (1) reduce incentives for arms buildups (arms race stability); and (2) encourage nuclear postures that would not provide either side with an incentive to conduct a counterforce nuclear strike for fear that the other side might conduct a counterforce strike first (first-strike stability). Beginning with the establishment of a crisis management hotline in the 1960s and continuing with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Interim Agreement in the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to advance these goals. After a period in which strategists in Moscow and Washington were focused on developing the capability to fight and win nuclear wars, arms control introduced a profound change in thinking. 6 Many acknowledged the risk of arms race and first-strike instability and were willing to live with essential equivalence of strategic nuclear forces rather than escalation superiority. But critically, even after accepting mutual restraint on its nuclear forces, the United States and the Soviet Union still maintained damage limitation in conflict as an objective and attempted to curate a relative advantage. The United States, for example, sought improved intelligence to track and target mobile missiles and submarines, which enabled it to improve its capability to conduct counterforce strikes despite agreed-on limits on strategic nuclear force levels.7 At the operational level, both sides developed nuclear capabilities that would help them win, or at least not lose, a major conflict in Europe. Nuclear weapons were—and remain—extraordinary military instruments compared to conventional alternatives. Moreover, particularly in the early part of the Cold War, norms against the use of nuclear weapons had not yet developed. Both superpowers, as a result, integrated nuclear weapons throughout their military planning and posture. Even after the United States shifted from a strategy of massive retaliation to “flexible response” and improved its ability to defeat a largescale Soviet attack against Western Europe with conventional forces, it

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nonetheless continued developing nuclear forces and employment concepts aimed at achieving military objectives in Europe while keeping the conflict confined. The Soviet Union shifted from an early Cold War plan to win a nuclear war by employing its nuclear weapons early and often to concepts that allowed for conventional-only conflict and potential limited nuclear strikes in Europe.8 Both sides developed nuclear weapons to offset particular areas of conventional inferiority. The Soviet Union, for example, developed nuclear-armed antiship cruise missiles, antiship rockets, torpedoes, and depth charges to offset US naval superiority while the United States developed enhancedradiation nuclear weapons, artillery shells, and other capabilities that could neutralize Soviet armor. Like with the strategic arms competition, there was also a recognition of the risk involved with buildups of tactical nuclear weapons. Despite a constant search for escalation advantage, neither US nor Soviet planners were confident that they could introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict in Europe in a way that would favorably shape the outcome.9 The costs of even a theater nuclear war would have been monumental, and the risks of escalation to strategic nuclear war were too high. Recognizing the ways that theater nuclear forces could contribute to first-strike instability and escalation risk, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to disavow landbased, theater-range missiles with the ratification of the INF Treaty in 1987. By the end of the Cold War, both sides sought the ability to achieve their objectives in a conflict in Europe without having to cross the nuclear threshold. The trend of reduced salience of nuclear weapons in the USRussia relationship dramatically accelerated when the Soviet Union collapsed. Throughout the 1990s, Russia’s economy was weak, and its military hollowed out. War in Europe was no longer seen as a realistic possibility, which created opportunities for partnership. In the nuclear realm, this was a period of unprecedented cooperation. The United States and Russia placed binding limitations on strategic offensive arms through the ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), resulting in a dramatic reduction in the overall nuclear arsenals of both countries. Both sides reciprocally announced the withdrawal of the majority of tactical nuclear weapons from operational deployments and the elimination of many weapons systems. The United States and Russia also carried out significant cooperation under the auspices of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, which sought to limit the proliferation of nuclear capabilities and know-how. For the most part, these efforts were

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driven by each side no longer perceiving a threat, rather than the Cold War objective of restraining the perceived danger of ongoing nuclear competition. Many Western analysts and advocacy organizations went so far as to say that nuclear weapons were obsolete and should be eliminated. But unfortunately, Russia and the West were not able to fundamentally transform their political relationship. Tensions started to build beginning in the late 1990s, with many in Moscow believing that the United States was taking advantage of Russia’s weakened status to undermine its sovereignty and infringe on its sphere of influence, and many in Washington concerned about Russia’s reversion to authoritarianism at home and support for antidemocratic forces abroad. The relationship improved with cooperation after the September 11 attacks, but turned negative following Vladimir Putin’s return to power in 2012, and further deteriorated when Russia annexed Crimea, then intervened in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The Barack Obama administration, which in 2009 hoped to reset relations with Moscow, came to see Russia as a geopolitical rival that threatened the political and territorial integrity of Europe, including that of US NATO allies. The potential threat posed by Russia came into even sharper focus when Moscow intervened in Syria, interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, and attempted to assassinate a UK national using a chemical weapon agent. By 2018, Russia was described by the US government as a formidable competitor that posed a military threat to the United States and its allies.10 As the political relationship between the United States and Russia has shifted, so too has the nuclear relationship. Three trends underlie pessimism. First, questions about the future of strategic arms control raise the possibility of rejuvenated arms competition at the strategic nuclear level. The United States and Russia were able to continue strategic arms control with the ratification of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in 2003 and the New START Treaty in 2010; the former committed to reduced overall arsenal sizes while the latter formalized reductions and restrictions on deployments of strategic delivery vehicles and warheads. With the New START Treaty in effect, the United States and Russia are limited to 1,550 accountable deployed strategic nuclear warheads and bombs and 700 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers assigned to nuclear missions. As a result, even as the United States and Russia embarked on programs to modernize and recapitalize their respective nuclear forces, they did so under a transparency and verification regime that helped limit nuclear competition.

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But the trajectory for continued arms control is uncertain. The United States and Russia were able agree on the New START Treaty following the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty during the George W. Bush administration. But the Obama administration’s attempts to pursue a follow-on that would include additional reductions to strategic offensive weapons as well as limitations on nonstrategic and nondeployed weapons were rebuffed by Moscow, which insisted that any follow-on must take in restrictions on US ballistic missile defense and include other weapon systems, including space and counterspace capabilities. Arms control came under further strain when the United States publicly accused Russia of testing and then deploying systems that violated the INF Treaty. The United States subsequently withdrew from the treaty in 2019 and is now developing conventional groundlaunched, medium- and intermediate-range missiles. The United States and Russia have an option to extend the New START Treaty for up to five years beyond its expiration in 2021 but, at the time of this writing, it is unclear whether they will agree to do so. Moscow has come out in support of extension and shown some willingness to address US concerns about its new nuclear systems that were revealed after New START was ratified. The Donald Trump administration, however, expressed skepticism of extension, with officials more willing to highlight the agreement’s limitations—that it, for example, does not cover nonstrategic nuclear weapons or include China—than its benefits. Even without a formal arms control regime in place, it is likely that any strategic nuclear arms competition, at least in the near term, will be somewhat muted. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have accepted essential equivalence of deployed forces at the strategic nuclear level and have not attempted to significantly expand their nuclear forces to improve counterforce capabilities vis-à-vis the other. Despite substantial reductions in their nuclear stockpiles, the United States and Russia maintain large, survivable nuclear postures that are not highly sensitive to increases in the total size of their opponent’s nuclear forces. As long as US ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and Russian mobile ICBM transporter erector launchers (TELs) remain highly survivable, increases in arsenal size will not threaten either side’s confidence in its ability to survive a nuclear first strike and impose unacceptable damage.11 However, without the transparency and predictability of New START or a replacement treaty, there may be some incentive to make nuclear posture adjustments aimed at garnering nuclear coercive leverage. The two sides may attempt to move additional forces from nondeployed to deployed status, upload additional warheads on deployed

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nuclear delivery platforms, or field more nuclear forces than they had originally planned. If one side makes adjustments, the other may perceive that it is at a disadvantage, triggering an action-reaction cycle. Now in the midst of nuclear modernization, both the United States and Russia will have the ability to pursue qualitative and quantitative improvements in their nuclear posture that go beyond like-for-like replacements. While Russia has deployed multiple new ICBM and SLBM variants in the past two decades, the United States will not begin to field new nuclear delivery platforms and missiles until the late 2020s and into the 2030s. The fact that US and Russian modernization schedules are out of sync may increase the likelihood of a back-and-forth arms competition. Russia, for example, could take advantage of open production lines to deploy larger numbers of ICBMs during the 2020s. It could also seek to deploy novel capabilities such as the long-range torpedo, nuclear-powered cruise missile, and airlaunched ballistic missile that it has demonstrated, potentially in significant numbers.12 The United States, conversely, could seek to bolster its posture in the short term by, for example, adding warheads to deployed ICBMs and SLBMs, and then could, over the long term, field additional or significantly improved ICBMs or a larger number of SSBNs and strategic bombers. Second, advances in strategic non-nuclear military capabilities may increase pressure on Russia or the United States to adjust their strategic nuclear posture. Particularly following the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, Moscow has been concerned that the US pursuit of homeland missile defenses, combined with improved ISR, long-range conventional strike capabilities, and nuclear forces could threaten the survivability of Russia’s nuclear forces. Washington, on the flip side, worries that continued advances in Russian integrated air and missile defense might significantly reduce the effectiveness of US nuclear delivery platforms. In addition, Washington has noted the threat to its traditional early-warning capabilities posed by Russia’s improved long-range conventional strike, counterspace, and cyber capabilities. With present capabilities, concerns on both sides about nonnuclear capabilities altering the strategic nuclear balance are overstated, but it is possible that the underlying dynamics of the counterforce-survivability competition could shift. Since the late Cold War, the state building survivable nuclear forces has generally had a significant advantage over the state seeking counterforce capabilities. Arranging nuclear forces in dispersed and hardened facilities that are difficult to strike and concealing submarines and mobile launchers in

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vast operating areas, major nuclear powers have been fairly confident in the survivability of their nuclear forces. But improvements in technology, including more robust ISR and advances in cyber and maneuvering hypersonic weapons, are making it easier to find and strike mobile and hardened targets, even against sophisticated competitors.13 It is also possible that improvement in sensors and processing capabilities will significantly improve the capability of missile defenses against intercontinental-range missiles. If the technological balance does shift to make strikes and defenses against nuclear forces increasingly viable, both Russia and the United States are likely, at the very least, to take steps to counter the effects of technological changes and adjust their nuclear posture to improve survivability. It is also possible that one or both may be tempted to pursue counterforce advantage. Third, regardless of what happens at the strategic level, Russia and the United States are likely to renew operational nuclear competition. While the general trend remains for both the United States and Russia to focus primarily on conventional military competition in Europe, nuclear weapons may take on a larger role. The United States and NATO are adjusting conventional posture so they have a credible forward defense that can deter Russia from attempting to quickly conquer territory in NATO’s east. Russia, for its part, is modernizing its conventional strike capabilities to offset US and NATO conventional military advantages and reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons.14 In a broad sense, improving non-nuclear capabilities continue to reduce the importance of nuclear weapons for achieving political and military objectives. Furthermore, Washington and Moscow each understand the escalation risk that would be associated with introducing nuclear weapons into a conflict. But Moscow also recognizes that it is unlikely to be able to match the conventional military capability of a united, fully mobilized NATO. Historically, Russian military strategists have viewed theater nuclear weapons as a useful offset because of both their operational utility and the perceived effectiveness of nuclear threats against the West. Russia has a diverse set of up to 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, many of which have been recently upgraded or are in the midst of modernization. 15 Russia has, for example, deployed multiple new ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in the past two decades. There is some dispute over the role of theater nuclear weapons in Russian military strategy. Some argue that Russia’s political leaders would use nuclear weapons only in the most limited circumstances—to respond to nuclear use or fearing that the existence of the Russian state is at stake.16 Others argue that, based

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on its capabilities, exercises, and publicly available strategy and doctrine, Russia may interpret threats to the existence of the Russian state more broadly and consider limited nuclear strikes in a range of circumstances, potentially early in a conflict.17 The US perception that Russia relies on nonstrategic nuclear weapons to achieve operational objectives has already triggered a reaction. Since the retirement of the Tomahawk Land Attack MissileNuclear (TLAM-N) during the Obama administration, the US nonstrategic nuclear posture has consisted exclusively of a relatively small number of nuclear gravity bombs that can be delivered by US and allied dual-capable aircraft (DCA). In its latest Nuclear Posture Review, the US Department of Defense used Russian doctrine, exercises, and capabilities as a justification for the exploration of supplemental US nuclear capabilities to strengthen deterrence of Russian limited nuclear employment.18 In this regard, the United States has now deployed a limited number of low-yield warheads on its SLBMs and is exploring concepts for a nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM). Over the next decade, this competition could intensify. Russia might come to perceive that the conventional military balance is shifting against it or determine that it needs additional nonstrategic nuclear weapons to offset newly deployed US capabilities. Russia could increase its deployments of GLCMs, continue to field additional tactical nuclear weapons capabilities, or further integrate nonstrategic nuclear weapons into its military planning and posture. The United States, on the other hand, might attempt to augment its DCA posture or deploy nuclear-capable SLCMs on surface ships or submarines patrolling the Euro-Atlantic. With the collapse of the INF Treaty, there is no arms control regime in place to cover nonstrategic nuclear weapons, increasing the likelihood of arms competition. For most of the nuclear age, the US-China nuclear relationship has been fairly muted. US nuclear planning has centered on Russia, with China viewed as somewhat of a lesser included case. The general view has been that if the United States has sufficient nuclear forces to deter Russian aggression or nuclear use, then it has sufficient capability to deter China as well. On the other side, China acquired nuclear weapons to deter nuclear coercion by major powers, but has viewed its arsenal as having only limited utility. Going forward, as China’s economic and military strength grows and strategic compe-

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tition between the United States and China intensifies, nuclear weapons will likely take on a more important dimension in the USChina relationship. China publicly maintains a policy of no-first-use (NFU) of nuclear weapons and has consistently argued that the sole function of its nuclear forces is to deter nuclear attack and prevent nuclear coercion.19 Many Chinese nuclear experts argue that nuclear weapons have extremely limited utility in conventional wars.20 As a result, China has demonstrated considerable restraint in its nuclear weapons development; it has neither attempted to build an arsenal to numerically match the United States and Russia nor pursued the diverse array of tactical nuclear capabilities that the United States and the Soviet Union fielded in the Cold War. Rather, the primary objective of Chinese nuclear modernization has been to ensure that it has a credible second-strike capability against the United States. China’s nuclear forces primarily consist of intermediate- and intercontinentalrange land-based ballistic missiles, along with, more recently, a limited number of SSBNs and a future nuclear-capable bomber.21 It is estimated to have only hundreds of nuclear warheads, and its forces are at a lower level of day-to-day readiness than those of the United States.22 But even while showing considerable restraint, China’s nuclear strategy and capabilities have adjusted as Beijing’s understanding of the requirements of assured retaliation have evolved.23 Despite China’s NFU policy, many US analysts contend that China plans to use forms of nuclear brinksmanship in a conflict. They argue that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force plans for two types of military campaigns involving nuclear forces. The first includes various deterrence activities that are designed to remind adversaries of the possibility of nuclear escalation and convince them to back down. Such acts of intimidation might include warnings, increasing the readiness of forces, moving missile launch units to show preparations for combat, demonstration launches, or even publicly lowering the threshold for nuclear use.24 The second is a nuclear counterstrike campaign designed to retaliate against an adversary’s use of nuclear weapons.25 Since the 1980s, the PLA has sought capabilities that can achieve “close defense,” the ability to hide and move to enable survivability, and “key-point counterstrikes,” the ability to inflict unacceptable damage. 26 Such a campaign would likely include a variety of countervalue and military targets, but would not be designed to limit damage from an adversary’s nuclear forces. 27 According to traditional Chinese ideas about deterrence and the role of nuclear weapons, the

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time of a Chinese nuclear response to a nuclear attack would not be relevant. But an increasing number of Chinese scholars now argue that nuclear deterrence requires some war-fighting capabilities and potentially higher alert levels to be credible.28 With a small nuclear arsenal, China has been unwilling to engage in formal arms control with the United States. Since the early 2000s, the United States has sought a dialogue with China that would have discussed nuclear weapons issues and set the stage for informal and eventually formal arms control. The US objective was to reduce misunderstanding and attempt to keep nuclear weapons out of renewed US-China strategic competition. The Obama administration made some progress in expanding engagement on these issues, but Beijing has resisted moving toward concrete actions, insisting that its participation in arms control is not appropriate given the size of its nuclear arsenal relative to the United States and Russia. In the Trump administration, the United States has floated ideas for involving China in new versions of either the INF Treaty or the New START Treaty. It also proposed an official dialogue following the release of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.29 In both cases, Beijing demurred. China remains uninterested in formal restrictions on its nuclear forces and the associated verification and inspection regimes that would be required. Thus far, US-China military competition has remained mostly non-nuclear, but there is significant potential for spillover to the nuclear realm, whether by explicit choice of one of the competitors or inadvertently because of developments in the non-nuclear competition. As in the US-Russia relationship, improvements in nonnuclear capabilities such as ISR, long-range strike, and counterspace weapons are likely to impact how the United States and China judge the survivability and effectiveness of their nuclear forces. Even if China sticks to the broad outlines of its policy of nuclear restraint, it is apt to adjust its nuclear posture to ensure that it remains survivable and able to inflict unacceptable damage on the United States. China currently has the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but is in the midst of a nuclear modernization effort that is expected to significantly expand the size of its force. 30 China might also choose to adjust, or even entirely reconsider, its nuclear policy and assign a greater role to nuclear forces in its defense strategy. There are two ways that China could significantly alter its nuclear policy vis-à-vis the United States. First, China could abandon its commitment to maintaining a lean and effective nuclear force and seek essential equivalence with US strategic nuclear forces. China’s

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motivation could be a belief that attaining approximate parity would convey some political or status benefit. It is also possible that China could seek to develop for the first time an ability to threaten counterforce strikes against a significant portion of US nuclear forces. In either case, China would have to increase the size of its deployed nuclear arsenal by an order of magnitude. If PLA targeting requirements for nuclear weapons expand, that may prompt China to place its nuclear forces on a higher level of alert or even consider developing a prompt, launch-on-warning capability. Second, China could pursue more robust regional nuclear strike options that might assist in favorably terminating a regional war with the United States. China has significant nuclear-capable regional strike capabilities, but nuclear strike options do not appear central to China’s strategy for countering US intervention in a regional conflict. China’s long-standing view that nuclear escalation is unlikely to be controllable has led to a decoupling of China’s nuclear and conventional strategy.31 However, China’s approach could change if it determines that it is unable to effectively compete with the United States at the conventional level or if it assesses that it needs to counter the potential for US limited nuclear escalation. In this scenario, China might revisit its NFU policy and seek a broader array of theater nuclear strike capabilities. While China’s institutional commitment to nuclear restraint is longstanding, there have been major changes within the Chinese national security establishment that may create space for significant changes. The PLA Rocket Force was elevated to a full service in 2016. As it develops its culture, the Rocket Force may revisit some of the thinking traditionally associated with the PLA Second Artillery Corps. For example, within the Rocket Force, nuclear and conventional missile forces operate in separate launch brigades, but many of those brigades are subordinated to the same bases and personnel move between conventional and nuclear missions. Over time, the strategy, doctrine, and training of each half of the PLA Rocket Force may begin to resemble the other. Operational concepts for Chinese conventional missile forces could spill over, leading Chinese political and military leaders to seek more war-fighting nuclear capabilities. Former US Defense Department official Brad Roberts notes that “the United States has not so far made significant adjustment to its deterrence posture in Asia to account for changes in China’s nuclear capabilities.”32 However, in recent years, in the context of intensifying geopolitical and military competition, there is increased risk of USChina nuclear competition. China may reconsider the role of nuclear

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weapons in its defense strategy, prompting adjustments to either its strategic or operational nuclear posture. But even if China keeps its policy of nuclear restraint, only building up its strategic nuclear arsenal to ensure survivability, the United States may still react. As China increases the size and survivability of its nuclear force, the US ability to threaten counterforce strikes against China’s nuclear arsenal will likely deteriorate. If the United States thinks that a credible damagelimitation capability is needed to deter China from acting aggressively toward US allies, it may act to improve its ability to hold China’s nuclear forces at risk.33 In this case, US and Chinese objectives would be mutually exclusive, likely triggering a nuclear arms competition. Nuclear weapons have, for the most part, not been a central component of the China-Russia relationship. Neither China nor Russia views the other as its primary security threat and, for the most part, both size and shape their respective strategic nuclear postures with US conventional and nuclear forces in mind. However, strategists in Moscow and Beijing do consider the potential that bilateral relations could deteriorate, creating a complicated task of defending a long land border. In this regard, both view their own theater-range nuclear forces as a hedge against the potential for a greater conventional and nuclear threat.34 While Russia and China are not formal allies, they have pursued limited military cooperation. Impediments remain that are likely to prevent a Russia-China alliance akin to US partnership with the United Kingdom or Japan, but the trend has been toward closer ties. If this continues, it would have implications for the USRussia-China nuclear relationship. China and the Soviet Union emerged from World War II as ideological allies, but shortly thereafter split based on competing visons for communism. The relationship reached its nadir in 1969, when the two sides engaged in a series of border skirmishes that resulted in heavy casualties and nuclear signaling on both sides. At the time, the Soviet Union even contemplated striking China’s nascent nuclear weapons capability. In 1972, the United States attempted to further drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union when it formally recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC). By the mid-1980s, the possibility of Sino-Soviet conflict had faded, but China and the Soviet Union remained competitors. There is debate about the likely trajectory of the Russia-China relationship. 35 Russia and China are not natural allies. Their long

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land border and competing economic and political interests in Central Asia are natural flash points that many see as permanent impediments to an alliance relationship. There are also questions about whether Russia—whether under President Putin or a future leader— will be comfortable accepting the role of the junior partner as China’s relative power increases. Yet the trend since the end of the Cold War has been toward greater cooperation. The Russia-China relationship has strengthened since the mid-1990s, resulting in diplomatic coordination and some military cooperation. Diplomatic and military collaboration has further accelerated, and begun to take on an anti-US undertone, after the United States grouped the two as authoritarian challengers to the US-led international order in the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS).36 China and Russia have worked together in three ways related to nuclear weapons. First, they have pursued low-level confidence-building measures to reduce nuclear risk. In 1994, the two sides signed a military agreement that set forth mutual detargeting and NFU of nuclear weapons.37 The agreement is largely symbolic, but it occurred at a time that China and Russia were taking tangible steps to demilitarize their land border dispute. In 2009, Beijing and Moscow agreed to a ballistic missile launch notification agreement modeled on similar USSoviet agreements.38 While limited in scope, the launch notification agreement is significant because it was arguably the first bilateral nuclear arms control measure that China agreed to with either Russia or the United States. Second, Russia and China have continued to expand their militarytechnical cooperation.39 Since the 1990s, Russia has assisted with China’s military modernization, but the degree of assistance changed in the 2010s when Moscow made Beijing the first foreign buyer of its S-400 air and missile defense system and its Su-35 fighter, two of Russia’s most advanced capabilities. More recently, Russia has begun assisting China with the development of a missile early-warning capability.40 Another area of increasing military cooperation is combined exercises. Russia and China have exercised together since the 2000s, but recently have increased the frequency and scope of cooperation. Combined exercises are a political signal of the strength of the SinoRussia relationship, but they also lay the groundwork for combined operations in a future contingency. Third, Russia and China have begun to coordinate their opposition to actions by the United States that they assess as threatening strategic stability. The two countries are cooperating more at United Nations and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) fora, aligning

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their position and using common talking points to criticize the United States. In 2016 and 2019 they issued joint statements on strengthening global strategic stability. Without referring to the United States specifically, the 2019 statement described growing instability because “some individual powers pursue unilateralism and bullying, causing a series of consequences.” The statement also proposed the ChinaRussia approach as “conducive to resisting the wrong practices of some individual powers seeking absolute security.”41 Perhaps the most likely direction for the future of the ChinaRussia relationship is continued cooperation in areas of mutual interests without a full-fledged military alliance. In this case, the trend of increased cooperation on bilateral risk reduction, regarding military technology and exercises, and in international fora related to nuclear weapons would likely continue. But it is also plausible that Russia-China cooperation enters a new phase. An improved Russia and China security relationship could trigger increased military-technical cooperation on advanced technologies related to missiles, radars, and computing. The upside potential of such potential is much higher now that China is developing and fielding advanced military capabilities, compared to the past when all transfers went from Russia to China. If such cooperation did lead to a significant capability breakthrough, either for strike capabilities or defenses, it could reduce the effectiveness of US nuclear forces. As a result, the United States might increase the size of its deployed nuclear force or pursue improved capabilities to enhance penetrability. Even more worrying from the US perspective would be a strategic partnership between Russia and China that approaches, or is formalized as, a military alliance. In this circumstance, the United States would worry that any conflict with Russia or China would likely mean a conflict with both. That would have far-reaching effects on US military planning and requirements, including for US nuclear policy and posture. However, it is also plausible that the China-Russia relationship turns sharply negative as a result of clashes in Central Asia or shifts in domestic politics, leading to a far more competitive strategic and nuclear relationship. If either Russia or China views the other as a significant security threat, they are likely to view the other’s nuclear forces quite differently. In particular, they would likely have concerns about existing and planned intermediate-range nuclear forces that could quickly strike deep within both countries. In this case, Russia and China would likely adjust their nuclear postures to account for two potential adversaries rather than one.

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The evolution of the relationships between the United States and Russia, and Russia and China, both generally and regarding nuclear forces, will have a significant impact on the US-China nuclear relationship. Following the intense US-Soviet nuclear competition in the Cold War, nuclear weapons issues remained largely out of focus, as the United States, Russia, and China sought to strengthen political and economic cooperation. But hope for geopolitical transformation has receded with the United States declaring that it is in a renewed major power competition with both Russia and China. The return of military competition, combined with significant military-technological advancements and ongoing nuclear weapons modernization efforts, increases the risk that nuclear arms competition will once again be a defining feature of major power rivalry. The shifting political dynamics among the three powers will have a direct bearing on the role of nuclear weapons. Each country’s decision about nuclear weapons strategy and capabilities is likely to be influenced by its bilateral relations with the other two and how the bilateral relationship between the other two affects its threat perceptions. There are three general ways to conceive of the future trilateral relationship among Russia, China, and the United States: one cooperative and at least one competitive relationship, three-way competition, or three-way cooperation. Each plausible future would have an important impact on the nuclear policy, capabilities, and posture of each country. A strategic triangle with one cooperative relationship and at least one competitive relationship could take multiple forms. In one disposition, one side of the triangle could be friendly, a second competitive, and the third indifferent. In this case, the strategic triangle would be defined mostly by the competitive bilateral. Another form of this type of triangle would be a single power isolated against two hostile powers that have formed an alliance. In this case, the isolated power would have an acute perception of threat because of the likelihood of conflict with each of the other two powers and the risk that conflict with either power would be joined by the third. For each power, another risk of a military alliance between the other two is that the alliance would facilitate technical military cooperation, increasing the pace of defense innovation in both countries. With two nuclear-armed powers closely aligned, the country left out would perceive a far greater security threat and likely seek to improve its nuclear weapons capabilities or take greater risks in nuclear strategy. By contrast, the two allied countries may have less of an incentive

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to expand and upgrade their nuclear forces because they can rely on each other for protection. A second possibility is that Russia, China, and the United States each has important conflicting interests with, and is skeptical of, the motivations of the other two, leading to three-way competition. In this circumstance, there may be aspects of competition and cooperation with each side seeking to maximize its own position without driving the other two closer together. Any of the three powers might choose to build up its nuclear forces, either because of improvements in its competitors’ conventional military capabilities or shifts in the military balance regarding key contingencies. In a situation of one cooperative and at least one competitive relationship or three-way competition, it is possible that the United States, Russia, and China might enter a “security trilemma.”42 An action that one state takes to defend itself against a competitor could trigger the third state to react, thinking the action could be targeted at them. The result could be an inadvertent arms competition between the first mover and the third state that neither wanted. With at least two dyads competing and uncertainty about the how future political dynamic might evolve, there would be an increased likelihood of inadvertent nuclear arms competition. In the case of three-way US-China-Russia competition, there are a number of ways that intensified political-military competition could affect the strategic nuclear relationship. In one model, there could be intensified military rivalry in the US-Russia and US-China relationships, but without any country significantly altering its nuclear weapons policy, capabilities, or posture. Alternatively, intensified military competition could spill over to nuclear weapons. There would be significant risk that, for example, an intensified USRussia nuclear competition would trigger China to improve its nuclear capabilities, fearing that capabilities being fielded for another purpose might nonetheless threaten it. If these types of arms competitions play out, leaving no country with improved security, then the United States, Russia, and China may be more willing to consider multilateral arms control agreements designed to restrain further nuclear buildups. Still a third possibility, which is far less likely, would be for relations among the three powers to improve such that military confrontation fades to the background. It is plausible, for example, that Russia, China, and the United States set aside or resolve their differences and focus on dealing with shared challenges such as climate change, global pandemics, or transnational terrorism. In this

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circumstance, the three powers might be willing to work cooperatively toward dramatic reductions in their nuclear arsenals, not because of a need to control arms competition, but rather because the change in the security environment would have relaxed their perception of the requirements for deterrence.

Conclusions and Implications for US-China Nuclear Relations and US Policy

As the United States considers the direction of its relationships with Russia and China and the future of its nuclear strategy, it should account for the challenges posed by the US-Russia-China triangle. China’s decisions regarding its nuclear policy, capabilities, and posture will likely be driven by a number of factors, including internal bureaucratic factors, changes in military technology, and endogenous aspects of the US-China political and military relationship. But China’s strategic nuclear choices also have the potential to be shaped by Washington’s strategic competition with Russia and the BeijingMoscow relationship. There is significant cause for pessimism. Renewed US-Russia and US-China strategic competition are already accelerating conventional military buildups. Shifting conventional balances are likely to cause each power to consider how nuclear weapons could be used to offset potential conventional military shortcomings. Meanwhile, advances in military technologies that are improving ISR, cyberweapons, long-range strike capabilities, and counterspace capabilities have led Russia, China, and the United States to consider adjustments of their nuclear postures to ensure survivability and effectiveness. As long as major power military competition persists, the most likely outcome is rejuvenated nuclear competition. While nuclear competition is regrettable, the United States should not avoid it at all cost. Nuclear arms competitions are economically costly and may increase the risk of miscalculation. But there are circumstances in which accepting those risks is better than the alternative of ceding coercive leverage to a competitor. If Russia or China were to seek to alter the nuclear balance, either at the strategic or operational level, then the United States may need to respond by adjusting its conventional and nuclear posture to signal its commitment to preserving the political status quo. If it chose not to compete, the United States would leave its allies more vulnerable to coercion and increase the likelihood that Russia or China would initiate a conflict.

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Nevertheless, the United States should attempt to manage the risk associated with military competition and, in particular, the risk that conventional and nuclear competition with Russia spills over to US-China nuclear competition. Broadly, the United States and its allies benefit from China maintaining a restrained nuclear weapons policy and posture characterized by an NFU policy, a nuclear arsenal of modest size, limited theater nuclear weapons capabilities, and nuclear forces on a relatively low level of alert. Renewed USRussian competition could put pressure on China to reassess its traditional policy of nuclear restraint. With bilateral US-Russian arms control teetering on the edge of obsolescence and modernization programs in progress, the United States and Russia may once again compete for advantage in strategic and tactical nuclear weapons capabilities. From Beijing’s perspective, a US nuclear buildup, even if ostensibly targeted at Russia, would raise concerns that the United States has aggressive intent vis-à-vis China.43 It is possible that Beijing would interpret the upgrades to US nuclear forces as, in fact, undertaken to negate China’s nuclear second-strike capability. Moreover, a renewed US-Russia nuclear arms competition might strengthen the position of those in the Chinese bureaucracy who want a large role for nuclear weapons in Chinese strategy. Fearing the implications of improving US capabilities or recognizing an opportunity to justify expansion of its nuclear forces, China might build up its deployed strategic nuclear force numbers to approach the United States or expand its arsenal to incorporate tactical nuclear weapons into its operational plans for high-intensity conflict involving the United States. As a result, the United States would likely see a greater nuclear threat from China, triggering an action-reaction cycle. To prevent a trilateral security dilemma from emerging, the United States should, first, attempt to manage its conventional and nuclear competition with Russia. Even while competing for political, economic, and military advantage, the United States should pursue targeted opportunities for formal and informal arms control designed to reduce the risk of miscalculation and unnecessary arms buildups. For the most part, this will likely take the form of continuing and potentially building on traditional arms control mechanisms such as the New START Treaty. New START imposes modest limitations on the US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals and, most important, facilitates transparency to avoid worst-case assumptions about each other’s capabilities and intent. China can and should be brought into the process of nuclear arms control. But particularly as long as its

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arsenal remains limited and its policy restrained, the United States should not condition continued strategic arms control with Russia on China’s involvement. Second, the United States should also attempt to manage military competition with China. The United States should provide assurances to China to persuade it not to build up its nuclear forces. Reassurance could take the form of increased dialogue, informal confidencebuilding measures, or adjustments to US military deployments.44 Washington could pursue small initiatives, such as a ballistic missile launch notification agreement or reciprocal visits to missile defense sites, then move on to more ambitious formal initiatives. Eventually, such initiatives might pave the way for bilateral or multilateral arms control. Any nuclear arms control agreement with China, however, would be complicated by the likely imbalance between US and Chinese nuclear forces and the presence of other important military capabilities like conventional hypersonic glide vehicles and advanced missile defenses that would affect the nuclear balance. There are some hypothetical initiatives whose terms could apply equally to the United States, Russia, and China. In place of the INF Treaty, for example, the three powers could consider an agreement that would prohibit nuclear-armed, intermediate-range, ground-launched missiles. While such a treaty could, in theory, keep a ground-based missile arms competition at the conventional level, it would likely be opposed by Russia and China, which have such capabilities deployed. For the most part, Washington, Beijing, and Moscow will have to explore possibilities for asymmetric arms control that include imbalanced and possibly flexible limits on both nuclear and non-nuclear systems.45 Realistically, reassurance and arms control efforts would have only a marginal chance of preventing US-China nuclear competition. But they are nonetheless worth the effort, if only to demonstrate to US allies and other interested observers that the United States was intensifying nuclear competition with China reluctantly. In addition, even in a competitive nuclear relationship with China, certain confidencebuilding measures, such as the establishing of crisis communications hotlines, could manage the risk of miscalculation. Finally, even if the United States cannot successfully prevent intensified nuclear competition with Russia and China individually, it should nonetheless attempt to prevent Russia and China from forming a political-military alliance. A Russia-China partnership has the potential to put significant pressure on the US nuclear posture. First,

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increased military-technical cooperation could improve Chinese and Russian military capabilities. Cooperation might increase the effectiveness of Russian and Chinese air and missile defenses, reducing the penetrability of US nuclear forces, or facilitate the development of a Chinese early-warning and launch-on-warning capability. Second, political-military cooperation would greatly complicate US military planning. US planning generally assumes that the United States has to be able to achieve its objectives in a conflict with one adversary while retaining sufficient conventional and nuclear capability to deter another from carrying out opportunistic aggression. If Russia and China are allied, the United States would have to account for the possibility that Russia or China would intervene on the other’s behalf in a potential conflict. Combined, Chinese and Russian conventional and nuclear capabilities might provide a significant advantage over the United States at the theater and strategic levels. In this scenario, the United States, and potentially its allies, would face significant pressure to expand nuclear capabilities well beyond current requirements. Therefore, even as it renews major power competition with Russia and China, the United States must take care to prevent a RussiaChina entente from emerging. This will require careful balance. An element of US strategy for major power competition should be finding ways to keep Russia-China cooperation limited by, for example, attempting to foster distrust between Moscow and Beijing by promoting cleavages in Central Asia. But such efforts may not succeed, particularly if the United States continues to group Russia and China together as a common authoritarian threat. If China is the higherpriority US rival and China and Russia move toward an alliance, the United States may have to consider seeking a partial accommodation with Moscow, or at least attempt to dampen strategic rivalry with Russia by emphasizing areas of cooperation. It is hard to imagine Washington making such a move in the near future—particularly as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power—and doing so at any time would require making hard-to-accept concessions. But if the alternative is an alliance between two of the three largest nuclear powers, the United States may have no better option. There are many ways that political and military relations among the United States, Russia, and China could develop over the coming decades, and significant potential for disruption and discontinuity. No matter the security environment, the effect of US-Russia and China-Russia dynamics should remain a key consideration in US nuclear policy and its approach toward China.

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The views, opinions, and findings expressed in this chapter should not be construed as representing the official position of either the Department of Defense or the Institute for Defense Analyses. The author is grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Fiona Cunningham, Anya Fink, Mike Fitzsimmons, Brad Roberts, and David Santoro. 1. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2018); Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review 2018 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2018). 2. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review 2018; US Defense Intelligence Agency, Global Nuclear Landscape 2018 (Washington, DC: US Defense Intelligence Agency, 2018), 9. 3. Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 4. In this chapter, the phrase “nonstrategic nuclear weapons” is used synonymously with “theater nuclear weapons” and “tactical nuclear weapons.” It refers to nuclear capabilities whose primary purpose is use against military targets in a regional conflict. These capabilities are generally shorter range, lower yield, or both. “Nonstrategic nuclear weapons” are distinguished from “strategic nuclear weapons” whose primary purpose is to conduct strikes against an adversary’s homeland, including its nuclear forces, its war-supporting industry, its cities, and other things that it highly values. 5. Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 153–165. 6. Alexey Arbatov, “Understanding the US-Russia Nuclear Schism,” Survival 59, no. 2 (April–May 2017): 39–40. 7. Austin Long and Brendan Ritterhouse Green, “Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, nos. 1–2 (January 2015): 38–73. 8. John G. Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shull, Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, Vol. 1: An Analytical Comparison of US-Soviet Assessments During the Cold War (McLean, VA: BDM Federal, September 22, 1995); Notra Trulock III, “Soviet Perspectives on Limited Nuclear Warfare,” in Swords and Shields: NATO, the USSR, and New Choices for Long-Range Offense and Defense, edited by Fred S. Hoffman, Albert Wohlstetter, and David S. Yost (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), 53–85; Stephen M. Meyer, “Soviet Perspectives on the Paths to Nuclear War,” in Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War, edited by Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye Jr. (New York: Norton, 1985), 167–205. 9. John K. Warden, Limited Nuclear War: The 21st Century Challenge for the United States, Livermore Papers on Global Security No. 4 (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research, July 2018), 5–9. 10. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, 2017); Office of the Secretary of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America. 11. Vince Manzo, Nuclear Arms Control Without a Treaty? Risk and Options After New START (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2019). 12. Robert P. Ashley Jr., “Russian and Chinese Nuclear Modernization Trends,” remarks at the Hudson Institute, Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, May 29, 2019, https://www.dia.mil/News/Speeches-and-Testimonies/Article-View/Article /1859890/russian-and-chinese-nuclear-modernization-trends/. 13. Paul Bracken, “The Cyber Threat to Nuclear Stability,” Orbis 60, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 188–203; Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The New Era of Counterforce: Technological Change and the Future of Nuclear Deterrence,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 9–49; Brendan Ritterhouse Green, Austin Long, Matthew Kroenig, Charles L. Glaser, and Steve Fetter, “The Limits of Damage Limitation,” International Security 42, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 193–207.

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14. Anya Loukianova Fink, “The Evolving Russian Concept of Strategic Deterrence: Risks and Responses,” Arms Control Today, July–August 2017; Kristin Ven Bruusgaard, “Russian Strategic Deterrence,” Survival 58, no. 4 (August–September 2016): 7–26. 15. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review 2018, 53. See also Amy F. Woolf, Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2018), 26–28. 16. Olga Oliker and Andrey Baklitskiy, “The Nuclear Posture Review and Russian ‘De-Escalation’: A Dangerous Solution to a Nonexistent Problem,” War on the Rocks, February 20, 2018; Bruno Tertrais, “Russia’s Nuclear Policy: Worrying for the Wrong Reasons,” Survival 60, no. 2 (April–May 2018): 33–44. 17. Dave Johnson, Russia’s Conventional Precision Strike Capabilities, Regional Crises, and Nuclear Thresholds (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research, 2018); Katarzyna Zysk, “Escalation and Nuclear Weapons in Russia’s Military Strategy,” The RUSI Journal 163, no. 2 (2018): 1–12; Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review 2018, 8–10, 30–31. 18. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review 2018, 52–55. 19. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019, Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2019), 65–66; Sun Xiangli, “The Development of Nuclear Weapons in China,” in Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking, edited by Li Bin and Tong Zhao (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), 79–101; Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Assuring Assured Retaliation: China’s Nuclear Posture and US-China Strategic Stability,” International Security 40, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 7–50. 20. Li Bin and Tong Zhao, eds., Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016); Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 44, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 61–109. 21. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019, 30–67. 22. Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75, no. 4 (June 2019): 171–178. 23. M. Taylor Fravel and Evan S. Medeiros, “China’s Search for Assured Retaliation: The Evolution of Chinese Nuclear Strategy and Force Structure,” International Security 35, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 48–87. 24. China People’s Liberation Army Second Artillery, The Science of Second Artillery Campaigns (Beijing, PRC: PLA Publishing House, 2003), 281–296; Timothy R. Heath, Kristen Gunness, and Cortez A. Cooper, The PLA and China’s Rejuvenation: National Security and Military Strategies, Deterrence Concepts, and Combat Capabilities (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016), 47. 25. Eric Heginbotham, Michael S. Chase, Jacob L. Heim, Bonny Lin, Mark R. Cozad, Lyle J. Morris, Christopher P. Twomey, Forrest E. Morgan, Michael Nixon, Cristina L. Garafola, and Samuel K. Berkowitz, China’s Evolving Nuclear Deterrent: Major Drivers and Issues for the United States (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2017), 28–31; Heath, Gunness, and Cooper, The PLA and China’s Rejuvenation, 48; Michael S. Chase and Arthur Chan, China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016), 40–44. 26. Cunningham and Fravel, “Assuring Assured Retaliation,” 14. 27. Heginbotham et al., China’s Evolving Nuclear Deterrent, 32; Fravel and Medeiros, “China’s Search for Assured Retaliation,” 76–77. 28. Tong Zhao, “Changes in and the Evolution of China’s Nuclear Thinking,” in Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking, edited by Li Bin and Tong Zhao (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), 267–272. 29. Author discussion with US gov. official. Washington, DC. July 17, 2019.

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30. Ashley, “Russian and Chinese Nuclear Modernization Trends.” 31. Cunningham and Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence?” 61–109. 32. Brad Roberts, The Case for US Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 31. 33. Caitlin Talmadge, “The US-China Nuclear Relationship: Why Competition Is Likely to Intensify” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, September 2019); Austin Long, “US Nuclear Strategy Toward China: Damage Limitation and Extended Deterrence,” in America’s Nuclear Crossroads: A Forward-Looking Anthology, edited by Caroline Dorminey and Eric Gomez (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2019), 47–55. 34. Alexei Arbatov and Vladimir Dvorkin, The Great Strategic Triangle (Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 2013), 4–14; Brad Roberts, Tripolar Stability: The Future of Nuclear Relations Among the United States, Russia, and China (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2002), 30–34. 35. See, for example, Artyom Lukin, “The Russia-China Entente and Its Future,” International Politics (2020), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00251-7; Christopher Weidacher Hsiung, Facing the “New Normal”: The Strong and Enduring SinoRussian Relationship and Its Implications for Europe (Stockholm: Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 2019); Nadège Rolland, “A China-Russia Condominium over Eurasia,” Survival 61, no. 1 (February–March 2019): 7–22; Alexander Korolev, “On the Verge of an Alliance: Contemporary China-Russia Military Cooperation,” Asian Security 15, no. 3 (2018): 233–252; Samuel Charap, John Drennan, and Pierre Noël, “Russia and China: A New Model of Great-Power Relations,” Survival 59, no. 1 (February–March 2017): 25–42. 36. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America. 37. Hsiung, Facing the “New Normal,” 10. 38. Luke Champlin, “China, Russia Agree on Launch Notification,” Arms Control Today, November 2009. 39. Richard Weitz, The Expanding China-Russia Defense Partnership (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, May 2019); Hsiung, Facing the “New Normal,” 17–18; Lukin, “The Russia-China Entente and Its Future.” 40. Dmitry Stefanovich, “Russia to Help China Develop an Early Warning System,” The Diplomat, October 25, 2019. 41. Zhang Jun, “Working Together to Maintain Global Strategic Stability and Promote World Peace and Development” (Beijing: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, June 12, 2019), https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt _665385/zyjh_665391/t1672187.shtml. 42. Linton Brooks and Mira Rapp-Hooper, “Extended Deterrence, Assurance, and Reassurance in the Pacific During the Second Nuclear Age” in Strategic Asia 2013– 14: Asia in the Second Nuclear Age, edited by Ashley J. Tellis, Abraham M. Denmark, and Travis Tanner (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2013), 292; Gregory D. Koblentz, Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age, Special Report No. 71 (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations, November 2014). 43. Tong Zhao, “China in a World with No US-Russia Treaty-Based Arms Control,” in Nuclear Arms Control Without a Treaty? Risk and Options After New START, edited by Vince Manzo (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, March 2019), 121. 44. Elbridge A. Colby, Abraham M. Denmark, and John K. Warden, Nuclear Weapons and US-China Relations: A Way Forward (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2013), 16–26. 45. Heather Williams, “Asymmetric Arms Control and Strategic Stability: Scenarios for Limiting Hypersonic Glide Vehicles,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42, no. 6 (October 2019): 789–813; Tong Zhao, “Opportunities for Nuclear Arms Control Engagement with China,” Arms Control Today, January–February 2020.

4 Proliferation Pariahs in the Mix: North Korea and Iran Robert Einhorn

NORTH KOREA AND IRAN POSE SERIOUS CHALLENGES TO INTERnational peace and security. Both have engaged in provocative external activities, abused the human rights of their people, pursued nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems in violation of their international obligations, and been the target of numerous UN Security Council sanctions. The United States and China have a common interest in discouraging North Korea and Iran from possessing nuclear weapons and in avoiding instability and military confrontations in their regions. These converging interests have enabled Washington and Beijing to work together from time to time in negotiations to end Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s nuclear programs. But US and Chinese interests on North Korea and Iran have often diverged, with China as Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s friend and the United States as their foe. The policies the United States adopts toward the two regimes may adversely affect the interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and vice versa. Those US and Chinese policies—and the eventual outcomes of efforts to achieve North Korean denuclearization and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—could have significant and potentially negative impacts on relations between the United States and China, including on their strategic nuclear relationship. Moreover, increasingly adversarial Sino-US bilateral relations could reduce the space for cooperation 89

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between Washington and Beijing in addressing the North Korean and Iranian challenges and could even make those challenges more acute. In this chapter, I examine two triangular relationships—the first involving the United States, China, and North Korea and the second involving the United States, China, and Iran. I focus more heavily on the first, as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) triangle—given Beijing’s greater political and security stake in the Korean Peninsula than in the less proximate Gulf—has the greater potential to significantly affect the Sino-US relationship, either positively or negatively. I then discuss the second triangle and explain why—in light of China’s cautious, hedging, and largely economicsdriven strategy toward the Middle East—the Iran triangle is less likely to have a major influence on the course of US-Chinese relations, especially their strategic nuclear relationship. The triangular relationship among the United States, China, and North Korea originated in extreme circumstances—when China sent hundreds of thousands of “volunteers” across the Yalu River in October 1950 to aid its North Korean ally and fought US and South Korean forces to a bloody stalemate that resulted in well over a million fatalities of military personnel and an even larger number of civilian deaths. In the seventy years since the Korean War, the United States and China have both regarded events on the Korean Peninsula as critically affecting their national interests. For the most part, those interests have diverged, with the two outside powers supporting Korean allies on opposite sides of the 38th parallel. From time to time, however, the United States and China have sought common ground in dealing with North Korea, especially in addressing the challenges posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

The US-China-North Korea Triangle

From the 1953 Armistice to the late 1980s, the primary US objectives vis-à-vis North Korea were to deter and defend against DPRK conventional military aggression against South Korea and US forces stationed there and to ensure stability on the Korean Peninsula. The principal policy tool for promoting that objective was the military alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK)—buttressed by the presence of substantial US military forces, a unique US-ROK combined military command structure, the stationing between the late 1950s and 1991 of US tactical nuclear weapons

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in the South, and occasional threats, explicit or implicit, to use nuclear weapons to defend South Korea, such as Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger’s 1975 warning that the United States would consider nuclear use in the event of North Korean aggression.1 The US-South Korean alliance did not prevent a range of North Korean provocations below the level of large-scale conventional attack, including the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968, the shooting down of a US Navy EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft in 1969, the beating to death of two US servicemen in the Panmunjom Joint Service Area in 1976, and the attempt to assassinate South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan in Rangoon in 1983. Still, the US-ROK alliance in its first four decades succeeded in preventing a major military confrontation on the Korean Peninsula and provided the stable, peaceful environment that enabled the Republic of Korea to become a prosperous democratic country. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the North Korean threat had changed. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its economic and military support for the DPRK and the decline of the North Korean economy reduced the threat of a large-scale invasion of the South (although Pyongyang retained the capability to devastate Seoul with massive artillery and rocket attacks). But the deterioration of the North’s conventional military capabilities was accompanied by its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Ever since the late 1980s, when Washington became convinced that North Korea was seeking nuclear weapons, the nuclear issue has been the central focus of US policy toward the DPRK. The initial US goal was to prevent North Korea from obtaining a nuclear capability. Once the North succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons, the US goal was to eliminate them—and, until that goal could be achieved, to deter nuclear attack and nuclear-backed conventional aggression. The emerging North Korean nuclear threat required the United States to place greater emphasis on bolstering the credibility of its nuclear umbrella, both to deter the DPRK and to reassure US allies (and reduce their incentives to acquire their own nuclear capability). This was especially important in light of the withdrawal of US tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991, which reflected the end of the Cold War rather than any US assessment of North Korea’s nuclear plans. Since the early 1990s, US military planners have sought to bolster extended nuclear deterrence in a variety of ways, including by stationing strategic assets in the region (e.g., strategic bombers in Guam), maintaining nuclear-capable fighter-bombers that could be deployed to the region in a crisis, and ensuring an effective nuclear

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triad, the bedrock of the US nuclear deterrent. As North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities advanced, especially post-2010, Washington stepped up efforts to protect allied and US forces and territories from missile attack, including by strengthening regional and US homeland missile defenses and developing offensive strike capabilities that could preempt North Korean missile attacks. US military planners have periodically conducted internal studies of whether the preventive use of military force against DPRK nuclear and missile facilities could eliminate the North Korean nuclear threat. But each time, they concluded that the use of military force could not reliably destroy all of North Korea’s well-hidden and increasingly mobile capabilities and that it would involve an unacceptable risk of triggering a major war on the Korean Peninsula and possibly beyond. With military force ruled out as too risky, diplomacy assumed a significant role in US efforts to address North Korea’s nuclear capability. Every US administration from George H.W. Bush to Donald Trump has pursued its own version of a dual-track strategy involving pressure and diplomacy. The dual-track approach produced results— including the 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework, the 2005 Six Party Talks’ Joint Statement on denuclearization, and the 2012 Leap Day Deal—but they were all limited and short-lived and did not prevent North Korea from advancing toward its goal of a nuclear deterrent. In 2017, President Trump’s first year in office, North Korea demonstrated major progress in its nuclear and missile programs, including by testing a thermonuclear weapon and flight-testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). With the international community alarmed by the North’s actions, the Trump administration was able to mobilize support in the UN Security Council for the toughest sanctions ever imposed on the DPRK, including a ban on the export of coal and strict limits on the import of petroleum products. Washington vowed to pursue a “maximum pressure campaign” and signaled resolve with assertive US-ROK military exercises, movements of US naval vessels, and flights of Guam-based strategic bombers over the Korean Peninsula. With Kim Jong Un boasting of his “nuclear button” and Trump threatening “fire and fury,” the risks of military confrontation, intentional or inadvertent, seemed to grow. However, largely at Kim Jong Un’s initiative and with the strong encouragement of South Korean president Moon Jae-in, diplomacy took center stage in 2018 and 2019. Heavily motivated by the toll sanctions were taking, Kim launched a charm offensive, claiming that North Korea—having achieved its goal of acquiring a powerful nuclear deterrent—could now give priority to economic development.

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Chairman Kim and President Trump met in Singapore in June 2018 and agreed on the broad goals of achieving peace on the Korean Peninsula, normalizing US-DPRK bilateral relations, and “working toward” the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. In response to a request from Kim, Trump ordered the suspension of major US-ROK joint military exercises—a gesture of unilateral restraint that paralleled Kim’s unilateral suspension of nuclear tests and flight tests of long-range missiles. But the US-North Korea dialogue soon bogged down. At the February 2019 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, the United States rejected North Korea’s proposal to shut down much of the DPRK’s nuclear complex at Yongbyon in exchange for the lifting of the most consequential UN sanctions, and the North Koreans rejected the US proposal for the complete elimination of all DPRK weapons of mass destruction programs in exchange for Trump’s offer of generous but vague US support for making North Korea a prosperous country. For the remainder of 2019, Pyongyang took an uncompromising position, giving the United States an end-of-year deadline for adopting a much more flexible approach and resisting meetings at the working level. At the one working-level meeting that the North agreed to hold—in Stockholm in October—US negotiator Steve Biegun, according to a senior administration official, showed considerable flexibility, proposing a first-stage deal to shut down part of the DPRK’s nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief and other concessions (in contrast to the initial Trump administration position demanding complete and early denuclearization and providing sanctions relief only after major progress toward denuclearization had been achieved). But the North Korean delegation dismissed the US proposal out of hand and offered no new ideas of its own. At the plenary meeting of the Korean Workers’ Party’s Central Committee at the end of December 2019, Kim Jong Un seemed to rule out any prospect of negotiations with the United States, at least in the near term. He said North Korea would no longer feel bound by its unilateral moratorium on testing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and would further strengthen its strategic nuclear capabilities. Instead of counting on negotiated sanctions relief to boost their economy, North Koreans, Kim warned, should prepare themselves for a protracted confrontation with the United States, during which they would have to live under US sanctions and depend once again on self-reliance.2 Kim Jong Un may have come to the conclusion that a deal with the United States—at least with the Trump administration—was not possible on terms he could accept. He may therefore have decided to

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wait for the results of the November 2020 US presidential election before determining his future course of action, particularly whether to reengage with Washington. In any event, the unprecedented challenges posed by Covid-19—for the United States, North Korea, and the world at large—significantly reduced prospects for returning to the negotiating table in 2020.

US Interests and Priorities on North Korea Going Forward

With the prospect uncertain at best that the threat from North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities can be successfully addressed through negotiations, the following are US priorities vis-à-vis North Korea in the period ahead:

• To deter and defend against coercion or aggression against the United States or its allies by a North Korea that will most likely retain its nuclear capabilities indefinitely. That will require ensuring that US and ROK conventional forces remain well equipped, ready, and highly capable; reinforcing the credibility of the US extended nuclear deterrent; protecting US and allied forces and territories from North Korean missile attack (including by enhanced regional and US homeland missile defenses); and increasing trilateral US-ROK-Japan defense cooperation. • To maintain strong pressure against North Korea, including by seeking to maintain international support for strict enforcement of existing Security Council sanctions; threatening and imposing sanctions against third parties for helping North Korea evade sanctions; pursuing additional sanctions in the event of new North Korean provocations; and cooperating with other countries to thwart illicit DPRK procurement of equipment and materials for its nuclear, missile, and other destabilizing programs. • To reinforce US alliances with South Korea and Japan. That will require maintaining a strong US diplomatic, economic, and military presence in the region (countering fears that the United States is retreating from the region); reaffirming US political commitments at the highest level; playing a more active role in resolving differences between Seoul and Tokyo that impede tripartite defense cooperation; giving allies a more prominent role in planning the US extended deterrent; and reducing any incentives the allies may have to acquire their own nuclear weapons. • To continue exploring whether negotiations can eliminate or reduce the North Korean nuclear threat. If complete denuclearization

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remains unachievable at least at the present time, consideration should be given to an interim agreement that would verifiably cap nuclear capabilities as a step toward complete denuclearization. • To explore with China whether it is possible, despite overall adversarial Sino-US relations, to find common ground on North Korea, either to promote productive negotiations on nuclear and missiles issues or, in the absence of negotiations, to discourage North Korean provocations and prevent US-DPRK tensions from resulting in instability and armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Over the past seventy years, there has been a significant shift in Chinese policies and attitudes toward North Korea—evolving from a special relationship described as close as “lips and teeth” with strong party-to-party and military-to-military ties to a normal “state-to-state” relationship that can hardly be characterized as an alliance and in which the interests of the two sides often diverge and mutual trust is in short supply. In the wake of the Korean War, the Soviet Union and China were North Korea’s main benefactors, providing generous aid and credits that enabled the North to rebuild its industrial infrastructure and enjoy rapid economic growth. In 1961, by playing his two communist partners against one another, Kim Il Sung, the North’s founding leader, managed to conclude separate treaties of “friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance” with Moscow and Beijing that obligated China, in the event North Korea was attacked, to “immediately render military and other assistance by all means at its disposal.”3 But despite Pyongyang’s heavy dependence on the USSR and China for its security and economic development, Kim Il Sung resisted their influence and often acted contrary to their wishes. China’s leaders were frequently frustrated and angered by Kim Il Sung’s defiance and by what they saw as reckless behavior that could embroil the region in armed conflict. Nevertheless, in the decades following the Korean War, Beijing regarded a close, even if irksome, relationship with the DPRK as a strategic asset and worked hard to maintain it. A turning point toward more distant Sino-DPRK relations came in the early 1990s. A key factor was the normalization of China’s relations with South Korea and the rapid expansion of Chinese-ROK economic ties. Pyongyang saw Beijing’s adoption of a “two Koreas” policy as a fundamental act of betrayal. The discovery of North Korea’s illicit effort to acquire nuclear weapons also damaged the relationship. China opposed the North’s

Chinese Objectives and Policies Toward North Korea

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pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, regarding it as a major threat to regional stability. Moreover, China had joined the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty in 1992 and saw its support for nonproliferation norms as a way to improve its relationship with the United States and enhance its international image as a “responsible stakeholder.” Although North Korean nuclear scientists had received training in China (and the Soviet Union), there is no evidence that support for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program came from China (unlike in the case of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, to which China had earlier provided critical assistance). Following China’s first nuclear test in 1964, Mao Tse-tung reportedly turned down Kim Il Sung’s request to share atomic secrets, asserting that nuclear weapons were unnecessary for a small country.4 North Korea’s first nuclear weapons test in October 2006 began an eleven-year period of Chinese support for a succession of UN Security Council sanctions resolutions triggered by Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests, all of which were conducted in the face of high-level Chinese appeals for restraint. The most economically damaging of those sanctions were adopted in 2016 and 2017 and followed nuclear and missile tests that demonstrated surprisingly rapid advances in North Korean capabilities. China used its position on the Security Council to dilute some of those sanctions, wishing to avoid destabilizing the North Korean regime and to minimize adverse effects on Chinese commercial interests. But departing from its general opposition to economic sanctions as a policy tool and reflecting its extreme displeasure with North Korea’s behavior, Beijing joined the United States and other members of the Council in voting for increasingly harsh measures. The years between 2011 (when Kim Jong Il died and Kim Jong Un succeeded him) and 2017 were a period of estrangement between China and North Korea. Provocative North Korean actions unnerved Beijing authorities. These included the 2010 sinking of the ROK naval vessel Cheonan and the lethal shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, as well as the execution in 2013 of Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong Un’s uncle, and the 2017 assassination in Malaysia of Kim Jong-Nam, Kim Jong Un’s half-brother. After assuming office in 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping met several times with ROK president Park Geun-hye and even visited Seoul without first having met with Kim Jong Un. Xi apparently held the young and seemingly impetuous North Korean ruler in low regard and saw North Korea as a disruptive and potentially dangerous regional actor. An increasing public debate emerged in China

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about the value of its relationship with the DPRK, with members of the Chinese elite arguing that the North had become more of a strategic liability than a strategic asset and asserting that the 1961 bilateral Treaty of Friendship would not require China to come to North Korea’s defense if Pyongyang initiated a conflict.5 Kim Jong Un’s diplomatic initiatives in early 2018—including his meeting with President Moon Jae-in in Panmunjom and his Singapore summit with President Trump—brought an end to the period of Chinese-North Korean estrangement, if not to the mutual mistrust that had soured their relationship for many years. With Seoul and Pyongyang committing to pursue an ambitious agenda of NorthSouth reconciliation and the prospect of the United States and DPRK working together to resolve the nuclear issue, normalize their bilateral relations, and develop arrangements governing the future of the Korean Peninsula, China decided it could not afford to be left on the sidelines if it wanted to ensure that Chinese interests would be protected as high-level diplomacy unfolded. Accordingly, President Xi held a series of meetings with Kim Jong Un in 2018 and 2019—including Xi’s June 2019 visit to Pyongyang, the first visit of a Chinese top leader to North Korea since 2005—that reinvigorated the bilateral relationship and served the interests of both parties. For Kim, restoring the China connection strengthened his bargaining position vis-à-vis the United States. For Xi, the meetings provided an opportunity to reassert China’s influence in Pyongyang and to signal to the United States and others that China was determined to have an important voice in developments affecting the future of the Korean Peninsula. Pleased that US-DPRK engagement had replaced the tensions of 2017, Beijing wanted to keep negotiations alive and forestall a return to fire and fury, despite the failure of the Hanoi summit and the impasse that followed. While wishing to avoid an active mediating role between Washington and Pyongyang—a role it played from 2003 to 2008 as convener and chair of the Six Party Talks, but had no desire to assume again—it has provided advice to the two protagonists, counseling continuation of dialogue, patience, flexibility, and, especially to the North Koreans, avoidance of provocations that could scuttle the negotiating process and increase regional tensions. Although China insists that it is scrupulously enforcing existing Security Council sanctions against North Korea, there is evidence that Chinese entities have been involved in sanctions evasion (including illicit ship-to-ship transfers facilitating North Korean coal exports), that China’s compliance with cross-border trade restrictions

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has been uneven, and that China has dragged its feet in fulfilling its Security Council–mandated obligation to send all North Korean workers back to North Korea.6 US officials acknowledge these and other enforcement shortcomings and believe that Chinese authorities should devote greater resources and political will to correcting them. But citing trade statistics that show dramatic reductions in Chinese imports from and exports to North Korea, they assess that, even with significant enforcement lapses, overall Chinese compliance with UN sanctions has been an important factor in placing Pyongyang under unprecedented economic pressure. At the same time, Beijing has become increasingly opposed to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against North Korea. It has helped Pyongyang economically in ways permitted by UN sanctions, including by providing large amounts of food supplies and by significantly boosting the numbers of Chinese tourists to the North. Together with Russia, it has sought a Security Council resolution providing limited sanctions relief, albeit unsuccessfully given the US ability to block such a resolution.7 In the absence of major North Korean provocations, such as a resumption of nuclear testing, China will be reluctant to support new UN sanctions against the DPRK. Despite ups and downs in Sino-DPRK relations in recent years, China’s interests and priorities vis-à-vis North Korea have largely remained constant and, in the period ahead, include the following:

Chinese Priorities Toward North Korea Going Forward

• To ensure peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the region, avoiding tensions and conflicts that could jeopardize Chinese security and economic interests. While Beijing remains distrustful of its neighbor, disturbed by its behavior, and willing to join with the United States and others to impose sanctions when warranted, it is not prepared to sever that relationship or to apply pressures powerful enough to destabilize the regime—a result with unpredictable consequences that could spill over to Northeast China and the entire region. • To resolve the DPRK nuclear issue, ideally through complete denuclearization. China believes North Korea’s nuclear capability would be a persistent source of instability and potential conflict, would provide a justification for the strengthening of the US military presence in the region, and could eventually motivate Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons. But in China’s view, complete denuclearization, if it is achievable at all (and many Chinese doubt

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that it is), will be a long and gradual process, requiring incentives for the North, especially sanctions relief, at every step of the way. • To ensure that developments on the Korean Peninsula are consistent with China’s geostrategic and economic interests. That means preserving Chinese influence in a separate North Korean state that remains dependent on Beijing politically and economically and oriented toward China and not toward the United States or ROK. It also means promoting a strong political and economic relationship with South Korea, ideally a South Korea pulling away from US influence. • To scale back and eventually eliminate US military forces from South Korea and to reduce US military presence in East Asia. But China recognizes that this long-standing goal cannot realistically be achieved in the near term. Its near-term objective is to prevent the United States from responding to North Korea by increasing what Beijing sees as the US military threat, including by deploying additional missile defenses, basing additional strategic assets in the region, conducting large-scale joint military exercises with allies, and strengthening US-ROK-Japanese defense cooperation. • To avoid unnecessarily antagonizing the United States. While the Sino-US power balance has shifted significantly in China’s favor in recent years and Beijing is capable of pushing back hard against the United States when it chooses to do so, it knows that Washington is still capable of undermining Chinese interests on matters Beijing considers of great importance such as trade. It therefore chooses its fights carefully, often accommodating the United States when it can do so consistent with core Chinese interests. Thus, on North Korea, China has walked a fine line, supporting US-initiated UN sanctions and pressing Pyongyang to reach agreement with Washington while resisting regime-threatening sanctions and demonstrating that it can play a spoiler role if its interests are not taken into account. Shared US and Chinese interests in avoidance of armed conflict, stability on the Korean Peninsula, and denuclearization have allowed the two countries to work together from time to time on North Korea. They were the two main drivers of the Six Party Talks from 2003 to 2008. They were the principal drafters of key Security Council sanctions resolutions. Even after the failure of the Hanoi summit, they consulted closely on next steps, and Washington welcomed Beijing’s effort to encourage Pyongyang to adopt a more flexible negotiating position and avoid provocations. Their cooperation over the years has

Converging and Diverging Interests

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been based on a mutual recognition that their two countries were indispensable to reaching a positive outcome on North Korea. But for much of the past seventy years, China and the United States were wary of each other’s policies toward North Korea and each believed the other’s actions were often inconsistent with its interests.

US Concerns About China’s Behavior Toward North Korea

Although Washington no longer sees China as North Korea’s committed military ally and does not believe Beijing authorities deliberately assist the DPRK’s nuclear or missile programs or actively support evasion of UN sanctions, it holds the Chinese government responsible for failing to take effective steps to thwart illicit North Korean procurement or sanctions evasion. US authorities frequently call on Beijing to stop North Korean entities from operating illicitly in China and to prevent Chinese banks and other entities from intentionally or inadvertently assisting North Korea’s procurement or sanctions-busting schemes. But often the Chinese response is inadequate. Whatever the cause of China’s often lax enforcement of UN sanctions and its own national export controls—corruption, insufficient resources, lack of guidance or political will at the national level—US officials contend that the shortcomings could be fixed if China gave them the necessary priority. The United States has also regarded Chinese efforts to impede US and allied responses to the North Korean military threat as inconsistent with US interests. Beijing’s aggressive campaign to persuade South Korea not to permit US deployment of the Terminal HighAltitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) missile defense system—which failed to prevent deployment but resulted in a ROK promise not to allow deployment of additional THAAD batteries, not to join the US missile defense network, and not to establish a US-ROK-Japan security alliance8—was viewed as an especially egregious case of Chinese interference in allied defense plans vis-à-vis North Korea. China has also been an outspoken opponent of trilateral US-ROK-Japan defense cooperation and has joined North Korea in opposing USSouth Korean joint military exercises and other actions the allies have taken to enhance deterrence of the North. Successive US administrations have also been disappointed at what they saw as China’s unwillingness to use the leverage at its disposal to compel North Korea to resolve the nuclear issue. With China accounting for roughly 90 percent of North Korea’s trade and providing most of its food, energy, and other vital supplies, Washington

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often assumed that Beijing, despite its protestations of limited influence in Pyongyang, could single-handedly compel North Korea to accept the elimination of its nuclear capabilities. China’s failure to use its leverage decisively—including its efforts to dilute UN sanctions resolutions and shield the North from regime-threatening pressures—was taken in Washington as evidence that Beijing prioritized stability over denuclearization and was not a fully committed partner in dealing with North Korea.

Chinese Concerns About US Behavior Toward North Korea

While recognizing the potential value of collaborating with the United States, China has often viewed US policies on North Korea as problematic and incompatible with its interests. Beijing has objected to what it viewed as the United States’ overemphasis on pressure, especially economic sanctions, as a means of pursuing its objectives on North Korea. Not only has China regarded sanctions as ineffective in inducing DPRK restraint and flexibility in the negotiations, it has feared that harsh sanctions could result in hardships and instability in the North that could adversely affect its interests, including by triggering a massive flow of North Koreans into Northeast China. It has also resented the impact of UN sanctions on what it sees as legitimate Sino-DPRK trade and has opposed the imposition of unilateral US sanctions on Chinese entities. Although the Chinese have rarely broken ranks publicly with US negotiating positions on North Korea, they have harbored concerns that overly demanding US positions could undermine prospects for agreement. They see denuclearization as a long-term process, requiring patience and step-by-step progress with reciprocal benefits along the way. They had strong doubts that the Trump administration’s original approach—rapid denuclearization with benefits to the North withheld until late in the process—could succeed and sought to move the administration in what they regarded as a more promising direction. They presumably welcomed the more flexible approach adopted by the United States at the Stockholm working-level meeting in October 2019. The Chinese have also been concerned by what many suspect has been the true US objective on North Korea: to bring down the regime and hasten reunification of the Korean Peninsula on US and South Korean terms. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it welcomed former secretary of state Rex Tillerson’s “four no’s” on North Korea—that the United States will not seek regime change, the collapse of the regime, rapid acceleration of reunification, or US military forces north

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of the 38th parallel.9 But many Chinese nongovernmental experts, and presumably many government officials, continue to believe the principal US goal is regime change, an outcome with unpredictable consequences perceived to be highly damaging to Chinese interests. Beijing is also acutely concerned by the military steps the United States and its East Asian allies have taken in response to the North Korean threat—steps that Washington and its allies considered essential to counter DPRK advances in its nuclear and missile programs, but which China feared could lead to armed conflict with the North and, at least as disturbing from a Chinese perspective, could adversely affect the strategic balance between China and the United States and even undermine China’s nuclear deterrent. The Chinese have been troubled by a wide range of US and allied military responses and by the prospect of future actions. The list includes the ROK’s development of operational plans and offensive strike capabilities to attack North Korean missile sites preemptively or in retaliation; Japan’s efforts to ease its constitutional restrictions on the use of military force; US efforts to strengthen trilateral USROK-Japan defense cooperation; the prospect of increased presence in the region of US “strategic assets” (e.g., strategic bombers, nuclearcapable nonstrategic aircraft, aircraft carriers, missile-carrying submarines); deployment in the region of advanced US intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets with the capability to reach deep into Chinese territory; calls by ROK opposition leaders to return US tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea; and—not least—the strengthening of regional and US homeland missile defenses. Chinese officials have been especially vocal about missile defenses. Although Washington maintains that its THAAD missile defense system in South Korea is directed solely at countering the North Korean missile threat, Beijing authorities claim that THAAD’s X-band radar can detect and track launches of Chinese ICBMs and relay flight information to the US missile defense network to enable interception—a claim disputed by the United States.10 The Trump administration’s 2019 Missile Defense Review (MDR) reasserts key policies of previous administrations—in particular, that US missile defenses will be sized to protect the US homeland from North Korean or Iranian missile attack and that the United States will rely on deterrence, rather than missile defenses, to protect the homeland from missile attacks by Russia or China.11 But the Chinese doubt that this reflects Washington’s true intentions. They are concerned by references in the MDR to ensuring the ability to surge missile defense capacities when necessary and to exploring advanced

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technologies that the Chinese believe could be applied to defending the US homeland against their missiles (e.g., space-based sensors, high-energy lasers, space-based interceptors). They are also aware of President Trump’s comment that the US goal is “to ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States anywhere, anytime, anyplace.”12 So, notwithstanding US denials, China suspects the United States will pursue missile defenses capable of defending US territory from a Chinese missile attack that—in combination with offensive nuclear and conventional strike systems capable of preempting Chinese ICBMs launches and antisubmarine warfare systems capable of detecting and destroying Chinese missilecarrying submarines—could undermine China’s nuclear deterrent and leave China vulnerable to US coercion. Many Chinese scholars assert—and many Chinese officials probably believe—that the United States is using the North Korean missile threat to justify an expansion of US missile defense capabilities with the primary intention of countering Chinese missiles. Indeed, it is widely assumed in Beijing that Washington uses the overall security threat posed by North Korea as a pretext for reinforcing its alliances and military presence in East Asia, with the real objective of containing China. Some Chinese even advance the theory that the United States is not genuinely interested in resolving the North Korea nuclear issue, but seeks to keep it alive to strengthen its case for maintaining a robust and essentially anti-Chinese military posture in the region.13 For most of the four decades since rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, their respective policies toward North Korea—sometimes compatible with one another, sometimes not—have been pursued in the context of a relatively benign US-Chinese relationship. That bilateral relationship, however, has deteriorated sharply in recent years in the political, economic, and security realms. The United States and China continue to share interests in maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in eliminating North Korea’s nuclear capability. But in an increasingly adversarial environment, the political space for working together on behalf of those shared interests has narrowed.

The Future of the US-China-North Korea Triangle

Possible Outcomes of Efforts to Denuclearize North Korea

Even if current prospects for successful negotiations with North Korea are pessimistic, efforts to resume those negotiations will almost

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surely be made with Joe Biden as US president. The following sections discuss possible outcomes of international efforts to address North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities and assess the impact of the various outcomes on the US-Chinese relationship, including the bilateral strategic nuclear relationship.

Complete denuclearization. The United States, China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and most other states support the complete elimination of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities as well as the elimination of its nuclear-capable missile delivery systems. But notwithstanding Kim Jong Un’s vague commitment at the 2018 Singapore summit to “work towards” the goal of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, nothing he has said or done since then suggests that he has any intention of giving up his nuclear deterrent altogether. Indeed, it appears that the North adheres to its long-standing definition of that goal, which includes elements the United States and its allies could not accept, such as the elimination of the US nuclear umbrella. Another reason this outcome is so unlikely is that compelling North Korea’s acceptance of denuclearization in an agreed period of time would require a level of US-Chinese collaboration—including Beijing’s willingness to join with the United States in placing the North under extreme pressure (e.g., an embargo on energy supplies)— that is hard to imagine, especially given current Sino-US relations. China’s leaders would fear that devastating economic sanctions could produce severe hardships in the North resulting in massive cross-border refugee flows, destabilize the regime with unforeseen consequences, and produce bitter reactions in Pyongyang that could undermine prospects for future Chinese influence in the DPRK. If, despite these major obstacles, complete denuclearization could somehow be realized, it would amount to an extraordinary USChinese joint success that might have positive spillover effects on the overall bilateral relationship. Moreover, the elimination of the DPRK nuclear threat, if verifiable and sustained over time and accompanied by credible constraints on the North’s missile programs (especially its ICBM capability), could lead to a reduction of the US military footprint on the Korean Peninsula and in the region and decrease incentives for Washington to enhance its missile defense capabilities in ways that aggravate China’s concerns about the credibility of its own nuclear deterrent. However, while complete denuclearization could thus help stabilize the strategic nuclear relationship between the United States and China, it is an extremely unlikely outcome, at least for the foreseeable future.

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An interim nuclear agreement. In the likely event that complete denuclearization proves unachievable, the United States and other interested governments could pursue an interim agreement as a step toward that goal. Such an agreement might seek to cap North Korea’s capabilities by banning the production of fissile material, nuclear testing, and flight tests of nuclear-capable missiles. It could commit the parties to continue negotiations toward complete denuclearization but, in light of Pyongyang’s current unwillingness to give up its nuclear deterrent altogether, would not set a deadline for reaching that end state. Depending on the compensation it would receive (especially in terms of economic sanctions relief), North Korea might well be amenable to such an agreement, especially because it would be allowed to retain, at least for the time being, the nuclear weapons it had already produced. An interim agreement along these lines would not be possible without close US-Chinese cooperation and compromise. The United States would have to go along with the Chinese view that denuclearization is a long-term process and that North Korea would need to be rewarded, including with some sanctions relief, for steps well short of complete denuclearization. For its part, Beijing would have to join Washington in applying strong—even if not regime-threatening—pressures to get Pyongyang to accept strict limitations on its programs and the intrusive, nationwide inspection measures needed to verify an interim deal. An interim deal driven largely by the United States and China, assuming they were willing to carve out this area of cooperation in an otherwise adversarial relationship, might give a boost to bilateral ties and increase their readiness to seek common ground in other areas. However, a deal capping, but not eliminating, North Korea’s nuclear deterrent—and offering no guarantees that complete denuclearization would ever by achieved—would not significantly reduce US and allied requirements for deterring and defending against the North and would therefore not be expected to result in much of a reduction, if any, in US military presence in the region or in US regional or homeland missile defense capabilities. But it could avert a substantial increase in those capabilities and therefore alleviate, to some extent, China’s concerns about US strategic intentions and capabilities and their implications for Beijing’s nuclear deterrent. Failure of negotiations followed by advances in DPRK nuclear and missile programs. In the absence of either complete denuclearization or an interim deal, talks between the United States and North Korea— if they could be resurrected—would eventually break down, North

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Korean nuclear and long-range missile testing would probably resume, the nuclear threat posed by the DPRK could dramatically increase, and the United States and its Northeast Asian allies would presumably respond by ramping up economic pressures against the North and strengthening their deterrence and defense capabilities. The allies might be expected to conduct large-scale joint military exercises, signal their resolve with high-profile demonstrations of US commitment (e.g., overflights of the Korean Peninsula by US strategic bombers, visits or rotational deployments to the region of US strategic assets), pursue conventional strike capabilities for preempting or responding to North Korean missile launches, strengthen their regional and US homeland missile defenses, and step up trilateral US-ROK-Japan defense cooperation (assuming the dispute between Seoul and Tokyo can be overcome). The North Koreans could respond with their own military measures and other provocations. Tensions in the region would grow, as would the risk of miscalculations and misperceptions that could result in armed conflict. Confronted by US demands for harsh new sanctions that could destabilize Pyongyang and target Chinese companies and by allied military steps that could provoke the North and threaten China’s own deterrent capabilities, Beijing might well defy and actively seek to undermine US efforts to pressure the DPRK and increase its offensive nuclear forces to ensure a reliable retaliatory capability. Instead of seeking to bridge differences between Washington and Pyongyang—a role it has played in the past—China could come down squarely on the North Korean side. The North Korea issue could thus join other divisive issues that have adversely affected the US-Chinese bilateral relationship. The extent to which a negotiating breakdown would lead to US and allied military enhancements and a further deterioration of SinoUS relations would depend significantly on North Korean actions. It is conceivable that, following the demise of diplomacy, Pyongyang would proceed with relative moderation, perhaps maintaining its suspension of nuclear testing and avoiding ICBM-range missile tests. In that event, the US military response might also be measured, and the impact on US-Chinese relations could be relatively modest. In these circumstances, the calm that prevailed for much of 2018 and 2019 could be maintained for a while longer. But in the absence of productive diplomacy, domestic pressures to resume suspended military activities would be strong in Pyongyang—as well as in Washington and allied capitals—and, sooner or later, those activities, and accompanying tensions, would likely resume.

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However, even in the event of a return to the fire and fury of 2017, China and the United States would share an interest in preventing heightened tensions from getting out of hand and resulting in armed conflict. In such circumstances, it is possible that Beijing and Washington could engage quietly to keep potentially escalatory military steps and inflammatory rhetoric within bounds and avoid inadvertent movement toward a direct US-DPRK confrontation. Nonetheless, while such limited but constructive engagement could avert the worst outcomes, it would not prevent advances in North Korean programs and US and allied responses to those programs from having an unsettling impact on the US-Chinese strategic nuclear relationship. Perhaps the most stressful and unpredictable outcome to affect the future of the US-China-North Korea triangle would be a sudden change of regime in Pyongyang. Regime change could occur in any number of ways: from a military coup replacing one North Korean elite with another to the chaotic collapse of central authority; from an entirely indigenous event to one instigated from abroad; or from survival of a separate North Korean state to reunification. Most experts believe the likelihood of regime change is low, especially in the near term. Kim Jong Un seems to have consolidated his power and ensured the loyalty of the North Korean elite through a combination of generous rewards and brutal intimidation. China would probably be prepared to go to great lengths to keep the current regime in power in the face of foreign (i.e., US) pressures to bring it down. Still, given the opacity of the North Korean system, confident assessments of the durability and longevity of the current regime are impossible to make from the outside. US and Chinese interests in the event of regime change would hardly align. Beijing would want to see the survival of an independent North Korean state friendly to China and would oppose a reunified Korea with its capital in Seoul and US forces on its doorstep. Washington would prefer to see reunification under South Korean control or, should a separate North Korea survive, the United States would want a new regime in Pyongyang that would abandon its nuclear and other destabilizing capabilities and stop posing a threat to South Korea and the security of the region. Should regime change suddenly and unexpectedly occur, there would be an acute risk that the countries with the greatest stakes (South Korea, China, and the United States) would intervene unilaterally to protect their interests and soon find themselves in a direct

The Possibility of Regime Change

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military confrontation with each other. To avoid such a confrontation— and to address a possible loose nukes situation in which controls over North Korean nuclear weapons and materials break down—the United States has sought to engage China in joint contingency planning for a regime collapse scenario and has suggested assurances designed to alleviate Chinese concerns about possible outcomes. For example, that in the event of reunification, the United States would not deploy its military forces north of the 38th parallel. The Chinese, however, have so far rebuffed US proposals to engage in such discussions.14 Depending on the precise scenario, regime change in Pyongyang could sharply increase tensions and severely impact the Sino-US bilateral relationship, even creating the risk of direct military confrontation. Given serious strains in current US-Chinese relations, the probability that the two countries (perhaps joined by South Korea) will engage in contingency planning in advance must be considered low, leaving ad hoc coordination in the midst of a collapse scenario, with its attendant uncertainties, as the best hope of avoiding worstcase outcomes.

Possible Implications of Increasingly Adversarial US-Chinese Relations

As discussed above, the breakdown of US-DPRK nuclear negotiations, the renewed, rapid advancement of North Korean nuclear and missile programs, and the increase in US and allied military capabilities in response to those programs could have an adverse impact on the stability of Sino-US strategic nuclear relations. This would likely be the case regardless of the state of overall bilateral relations between Washington and Beijing. But in an environment in which US-Chinese relations are becoming more confrontational over a range of other issues— including trade, competition for leadership in advanced technologies, the South China Sea, Taiwan, cyber intrusions, Hong Kong, and human rights—the adverse impact could be significantly amplified. In such an environment, domestic support in Washington and Beijing for bilateral cooperation, even in areas of converging interests, could sharply decline. Potentially valuable channels of communication could close. On the North Korea issue, not only would China no longer be expected to work with the United States in pressuring Pyongyang to limit its nuclear and missile programs and avoid provocative behavior, but Beijing could also decide to embrace its erstwhile North Korean ally more closely and shield it more actively against US-led pressures. If China came to fear an accelerating threat of encirclement and containment—with the United States perceived

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to be organizing an anti-Chinese coalition involving Japan, the ROK, Australia, and others, as well as ratcheting up military capabilities aimed at China (including the possible deployment of land-based intermediate-range missiles in East Asia and the strengthening of regional and homeland missile defenses)—it might regard the restoration of an alliance-like relationship with North Korea, together with a close security partnership with Russia, as a necessary counter to US designs. Indeed, in an increasingly polarized and adversarial East Asian security environment divided along these lines, China might conceivably come to see value in North Korea maintaining its nuclear capability as a deterrent to an aggressive US regional posture and could become more tolerant of DPRK procurement of proliferation-sensitive and other military technologies—a significant shift in Beijing’s attitude that the United States would regard as a serious threat to its strategic interests. Similarly, in such an environment, the United States might be more inclined to ignore Chinese claims that US military responses to the North Korean threat undermine China’s nuclear deterrent—and might even consciously seek to design military responses to the DPRK that are also intended to counter the threat from China. Such destabilizing developments are highly speculative and far from inevitable, even should US-PRC relations take a significant turn for the worse. But they are an indication of how, in the absence of determined and skillful efforts by Washington and Beijing to stem the deterioration of their bilateral relationship, the triangular USChina-North Korea strategic relationship could evolve in a more problematic direction in the future. The US-China-Iran triangle and US-China-North Korea triangle have several similarities. In both, the United States and China have had a shared interest in the third country not possessing nuclear weapons or provoking a regional military confrontation. In each, the third country has been a friend of China and a foe of the United States. In both triangles, the United States has regarded the nature of the third country’s regime as a significant part of the problem, whereas China has either been indifferent to the third country’s form of governance (in the case of Iran) or has strongly wanted to keep the existing regime afloat (in the case of North Korea). In each, Washington and Beijing have sometimes cooperated (including in supporting nuclear negotiations) and sometimes have found their interests diverging (including in the imposition of US unilateral sanctions).

The US-China-Iran Triangle

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But the triangles differ in significant ways. In particular, China’s stake in Iran is very different from its stake in North Korea. Especially given the geographic proximity of the Korean Peninsula, China has a vital interest in avoiding instability that could spill over to Northeast China or lead to a sudden Korean reunification that could shift the regional power balance in Washington’s direction. Beijing is therefore determined to play a central role in shaping the future of the Korean Peninsula, including by exercising political influence in Pyongyang and actively encouraging a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue. China has less of a stake in Iran.

China’s Stake in Iran and the Region— Growing but Still Limited

To be sure, China’s stake in Iran and in the Middle East generally has grown substantially ever since it became a net oil importer in 1993 and access to the region’s energy resources became a critical factor in its economic development. Indeed, even earlier, China played a major role in rebuilding Iran’s infrastructure after the end of the Iraq-Iran War in 1988, providing Tehran with capital and consumer goods, labor, and engineering services in exchange for petroleum products.15 China expanded its economic ties with Iran in the 1990s and 2000s, often taking advantage of opportunities created when sanctions triggered an exodus of Western companies and becoming Tehran’s leading foreign investor, trading partner, and purchaser of crude oil.16 Today, Iran is a key link in Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Moreover, China’s relationship with Iran has not been based entirely on economic factors. The two countries share a bond of opposition to what they see as efforts by the United States to contain them and maintain its hegemony in their regions as well as US efforts to interfere in their internal affairs. In that connection, China abstained on a 1980 UN Security Council vote to condemn the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, and Iran supported China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.17 China has seen Iran as a major, stable regional power that, unlike most Arab countries, is not under US influence, while Iran has viewed China as a potential counter to US attempts to pressure and isolate it. Sino-Iranian trade has not been confined to civilian goods and services. During the Iraq-Iran War, China was Iran’s principal arms supplier. Under a 1990 military technology cooperation agreement, China supplied Iran with a range of surface-to-surface, antiaircraft, and antiship missiles (including an advanced antiship cruise missile

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modeled after the French Exocet) as well as various types of electronic surveillance, guidance, and targeting technologies.18 Although it suspended most sensitive military cooperation in the late 1990s in response to US pressure and UN sanctions, it resumed its place as a major supplier of military equipment to Tehran in the wake of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA)—albeit military supplies not covered by the UN conventional arms embargo. In anticipation of the October 2020 termination of the UN embargo, the two countries agreed to boost their defense cooperation during a visit to Tehran by Xi Jinping in 2016.19 In coming years, we can expect China’s geostrategic interest in the Middle East to grow, to protect its huge economic investment in the region, and to advance its aspiration to play a major role on the world stage. But while its stakes in the region as a whole are increasing, its stake in Iran is still limited. In particular, it is not committed to Iran in the same way it is committed (however unenthusiastically) to North Korea. Beijing’s stake in Iran is limited because it believes its interests in the Middle East, especially its economic and energy security interests, are best protected by what Andrew Scobell and Alireza Nader call its “wary dragon” strategy20: promoting good relations with all countries and not focusing predominantly on any one of them, avoiding entanglements in regional disputes, resisting security commitments to regional states, and maintaining a minimal regional military presence. Consistent with this cautious strategy, China has hedged its economic bets by pursuing strong commercial and energy ties with both Iran and Saudi Arabia (and other Arab states), and it has frequently gone along with US pressures against Iran rather than jeopardize more important economic ties with the United States—including by ending nuclear cooperation with Iran in 1997, curbing missile and other military transfers in the late 1990s, voting for Security Council Resolution 1929 in 2010, reducing imports of Iranian crude oil in 2012–2013 and 2018–2019, and slow-rolling a major gas development project during the JCPOA negotiations. According to John Garver, China, at least so far, has carefully balanced its relations with the United States and Iran. It “ranks maintaining stable, cooperative relations with the United States above developing a strategic partnership with Iran. But Beijing has also shown determination not to sacrifice Iran and not to stand too fully with the United States against Iran.”21

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China wants a stable and peaceful regional environment in which it can pursue its largely economic interests but, in contrast with its relative activism in Northeast Asia, is reluctant to play a central role in promoting stability in the Middle East and prefers to leave that role to others—at least until recently, the United States.22 And while it would go to great lengths to prevent the collapse of the North Korean regime, it seems to have little stake in who governs in Tehran, as long as they are friendly to Chinese interests. Given China’s heavy stake in North Korea, US policies toward the DPRK, as discussed above, can have strong adverse effects on Chinese interests and therefore on the US-China bilateral relationship. In contrast, China’s relatively lower stakes in Iran, together with Beijing’s pragmatic hedging strategy toward the Middle East, mean that tough US policies vis-à-vis Iran will not necessarily do significant damage to China or the Sino-US relationship. For example, in the 2012–2013 period, while complying with US oil sanctions by significantly reducing its purchases of Iranian crude oil, China was able to protect its economic interests by increasing oil purchases from the Saudis and other oil producers, demanding deep discounts from Iran on the oil it continued to buy, and boosting Chinese exports to Iran in exchange for Iranian oil revenues escrowed in Chinese banks in accordance with US sanctions. This is not to say the US-Chinese relationship is insulated from developments on the Iran issue. China has strongly opposed the US withdrawal from the JCPOA and its maximum pressure campaign against Iran, regarding the Trump administration’s coercive policy as a disruptive factor in a region where China’s economic interests are served by stability. Beijing believed the administration’s negotiating position on Iran is too uncompromising, disapproved of the apparent US pursuit of regime change in Tehran, and resented the impact of unilateral US Iran sanctions on Chinese companies, such as the July 2019 imposition of sanctions against the state-owned oil trading company Zhuhai Zhenrong for importing Iranian crude in defiance of US efforts to stop Tehran’s oil exports.23

US Policies on Iran Do Not Jeopardize Core Chinese Interests

But at least so far, US policies toward Iran do not jeopardize core Chinese interests. Those interests, especially Beijing’s interest in energy security, are affected more by developments in the region as a whole than by developments confined to Iran. Thus, US sanctions

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compelling a reduction of imports of Iranian crude oil—or targeting some Chinese companies for evading Iran sanctions—do not have a major adverse impact on Chinese economic interests or US-China relations. Only developments such as closure of the Strait of Hormuz or a large-scale military confrontation that significantly interrupted China’s energy supplies from the Gulf region (and not just from Iran) could significantly affect important Chinese economic interests. Many Chinese may well have regarded the Trump administration’s anti-Iran campaign and its strong support for its regional partners (e.g., Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) as motivated less by concern with Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs and more by a desire to preserve US dominance of the Middle East. They also may have seen the administration’s policies, including its efforts to discredit Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative in the eyes of Middle East states, as designed to curb China’s influence in the region. But compared to the serious security challenge that China believes is posed by the United States and its allies in East Asia, the prospect of an emerging competition with the United States for political and economic influence in the Middle East is likely to be viewed in Beijing as much less threatening. And unlike in the case of North Korea, where China is deeply worried about the collapse of the regime, Beijing’s hedging strategy in the Middle East reduces its concerns about possible domestic political shifts in Iran or other states of the region.

Chinese Policies on Iran—Limited Impact on Sino-American Relations, At Least So Far

With respect to US views of Chinese policies toward Iran, Washington does not regard Beijing’s current policies toward Iran as putting critical US interests at risk. The Trump administration was unhappy about several of those policies, including China’s efforts to sustain its economic ties with Iran despite US sanctions and particularly Beijing’s continued—even if significantly reduced—purchases of Iranian crude oil in the face of US demands that such purchases be terminated completely. Washington also resented China’s reluctance to condemn Iran’s ballistic missile program and other destabilizing regional activities, China’s criticism of the US targeted killing of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, and China’s holding the United States responsible for Iran’s decision to stop abiding by JCPOA restrictions on its nuclear program. While these are irritants in Sino-US relations, unless China takes steps that Washington would find much more worrisome—such as supplying Iran with sensitive

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nuclear or missile technology or major conventional arms—the impact on the overall US-China relationship will be limited. Perhaps the major difference between the North Korean and Iranian cases is how China perceives the implications for itself of US military responses to the threats posed by those two countries. As discussed above, US and allied responses to the North Korean nuclear threat have been viewed in Beijing as tilting the strategic balance in the United States’ favor and even undermining China’s nuclear deterrent. To a significant extent, that Chinese reaction has been based on the proximity to China of several elements of the US response, including US military forces, missile defense radars and interceptors, long-range ISR capabilities, and other US strategic assets.

US Military Responses to Iran Do Not Threaten China’s Nuclear Deterrent

US military responses to the Iranian threat are viewed in Beijing as much less threatening to Chinese security interests. The United States has long maintained a sizable military presence in the Middle East, dedicated heavily in recent years to the defeat of the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria but increasingly focused on working with regional partners to counter Iran’s destabilizing regional activities. Although both the Obama and Trump administrations have wanted to reduce the US military footprint in the Middle East (as part of Obama’s rebalancing toward Asia and Trump’s emphasis on great-power competition with Russia and China), the persistence of regional security challenges has made that difficult. Iran responded to the US maximum pressure campaign, and especially to the killing of Soleimani, by increasing its military provocations, directly or through proxy forces, against US and partner interests in the Middle East. Iranian or Iranian-backed militia actions included efforts to sabotage Gulf shipping, the shooting down of a US reconnaissance drone, a highly damaging drone strike against a major Saudi oil facility, and missile and rocket attacks against military bases and diplomatic installations in Iraq where US personnel were located. To defend US and partner interests and prepare for the prospect of an escalating military confrontation with Iran, the United States augmented its military capabilities in the region, including by deploying additional air defense units, fighter and bomber aircraft, naval vessels, and military personnel. Despite President Trump’s stated intention to draw down US military forces, US troop strength

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in the Middle East grew from 60,000 in May 2019 to around 83,000 in early 2020.24 However, with Trump continuing to favor troop reductions, many Iraqi politicians calling for such reductions, and the Trump administration still seeking to adjust US worldwide force deployments to prioritize the challenge from China, future US force levels in the Middle East are uncertain and will depend significantly on the evolution of the Iranian threat and the Biden administration’s approach toward the region. The Chinese presumably would not welcome a buildup of US regional military capabilities. But their concern with such a buildup would largely be political, as it would signal a renewed US intention to remain engaged in the Middle East rather than scale back its regional presence—and could therefore be viewed as an impediment to Beijing’s growing ambition to increase its own political clout in the region. Largely because US and partner responses to the Iranian threat would be so distant from China, because the nature of those responses do not threaten Chinese strategic retaliatory capabilities (e.g., Patriot air defense batteries), and because of the dearth of China’s own military assets in the Middle East that could clash with US regional forces (so far only a naval base in Djibouti), US regional military capabilities are unlikely to be seen in Beijing as posing a serious security threat. Indeed, to the extent that continuing regional challenges inhibit US efforts to shift military resources to East Asia, the maintenance or buildup of US forces in the Middle East could even be seen as having some value for China. So, at least until now, US and Chinese policies toward Iran have not had a major impact on Sino-US relations, especially their strategic nuclear relationship. But what about the future? An important factor will be whether US-Iranian relations remain on a dangerous collision course or whether the two principal antagonists can somehow reach an accommodation that addresses the nuclear issue and Iran’s regional behavior. President Biden inherits a formidable challenge with Iran. While the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign, along with Covid-19, have devastated the Iranian economy, they have not compelled Tehran to accept the administration’s far-reaching demands. Indeed, a defiant Iran is moving incrementally to rebuild its nuclear program in violation of the JCPOA’s restrictions.

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Biden has pledged to return the United States to full compliance with the JCPOA if Iran does the same. He believes a restoration of compliance with the original 2015 deal would be the best starting point for negotiating a new agreement that would strengthen the JCPOA—including by deferring its expiration dates for key nuclear restrictions—and address Iran’s destabilizing regional activities. However, prospects for returning to the JCPOA and reaching a new agreement are uncertain. Opposition within Iran to engaging with the United States has been reinforced by the domestic outcry over the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020, constraining the ability of President Hassan Rouhani to negotiate a return to the JCPOA before the June 2021 Iranian presidential election. Even if the JCPOA can be restored, Iran may strongly resist the concessions it would need to make to arrive at the new follow-on agreement favored by the Biden administration. The outcome of US efforts to achieve such a new agreement could have implications for US-Chinese relations.

Implications of a New Iran Agreement for Sino-American Relations

A new agreement with Iran would not give a significant boost to USChinese bilateral relations in the same way that a North Korea agreement could benefit that relationship—in part because a North Korea deal would require close Sino-US cooperation, whereas if the JCPOA negotiating experience is any guide, China would not play a major role in new negotiations with Iran and would leave the heavy lifting with Tehran to the United States, the Europeans, and Russia. Nonetheless, a new agreement with Iran could reduce or avoid several potential irritants between Washington and Beijing. A new Iran deal that relaxed or eliminated US sanctions on oil purchases and other commercial and investment activities would allow China to resume full energy cooperation with Iran and enable Chinese companies to engage with Iran without fear of US penalties. A new agreement that imposed reliable, long-term limits on Iran’s nuclear program and significantly curtailed its long-range missile threat could, to some extent, reduce US incentives to pursue military capabilities potentially threatening to China’s nuclear deterrent, particularly enhanced homeland missile defenses. And an agreement that curbed Tehran’s aggressive regional behavior and reduced tensions between Iran and US partners—including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—would reduce the risks of regional conflict that could increase Beijing’s energy security concerns.

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But prospects for a new agreement with Iran, especially one addressing Tehran’s regional activities, are uncertain at best. In the absence of a new agreement, Iran and the United States could take steps that would aggravate US-China relations. Iran could expand its nuclear and missile programs and move closer to the nuclear weapons threshold and the ability to target the United States. Washington could respond by ramping up sanctions, penalizing Chinese companies and other sanctions-defying entities, and reinforcing its regional military capabilities. Tensions between Iran and its proxies and the United States and its regional partners would grow and the likelihood of armed conflict, whether intentional or inadvertent, would increase. In such a tense and polarized regional environment, US and Chinese interests would become more divergent. China could be expected to become increasingly defiant toward US sanctions and Washington’s maximum pressure campaign and increasingly aligned with Iran and its regional allies against the United States, at least rhetorically and politically. With the Middle East already becoming a region of growing Sino-US competition, albeit mostly in the economic and political realms, the failure to achieve a new agreement with Iran and the ensuing worsening of the regional security environment could intensify that rivalry. But the impact of these regional developments on the strategic nuclear relationship between Washington and Beijing is likely to be small. A buildup of US and partner military capabilities in the Middle East in response to growing Iranian nuclear and missile programs would not be seen in Beijing as posing the significant security threat that a US buildup in Northeast Asia would pose. As suggested above, a large part of the reason is geography. The kinds of systems the United States would deploy in the Middle East to counter the Iranian threat do not have the range or technical capability to threaten China or its nuclear deterrent. Moreover, given the absence of security ties between China and Iran as well as Beijing’s barely token military presence in the region, the likelihood of direct conflict between US and Chinese forces in the region is exceedingly remote. China would do its utmost to avoid involvement in any Middle East armed conflict, especially one involving the United States. In addition, although the growth of Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities would strengthen the political case in the United States for increasing its homeland missile defenses, US decisions on the size of its homeland defenses will be driven more by North Korean nuclear and ICBM capabilities—which already exist—than by potential future

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Iranian capabilities. China would have little basis to fear that a US response to advances in Iranian capabilities would significantly add to the threat it believes the possible upgrade of US missile defense capabilities in response to North Korean programs already poses. It is possible that future dynamics in the US-China-Iran triangle, if they veer in an especially problematic direction, could affect US threat perceptions. In a tense and polarized Middle East—with overall USChinese relations deteriorating and China aligning itself more closely with Iran against the United States—it is conceivable that China would engage in activities toward Iran that Washington would find profoundly troubling. Such activities might include transferring equipment and material to help Iran expand its nominally peaceful uranium enrichment capacity or defending and even providing material support for Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile programs. Washington would regard such activities—all of which China engaged in in the past, but ceased in the face of strong US pressures and UN sanctions—as potential contributions to an Iranian nuclear weapons program and to Tehran’s aggressive regional posture and, as such, a significant threat to US strategic interests. A resumption of these Chinese activities is unlikely. Such support for destabilizing Iranian programs would alarm Iran’s neighbors with whom China, under its hedging strategy, would like to maintain good relations. It could lead to even greater turmoil in the region, which is counter to Chinese hopes for a stable environment to promote its economic goals. And despite a deteriorating relationship with the United States, China would presumably not wish to unnecessarily antagonize the United States, especially in a region which, notwithstanding Beijing’s growing stake and involvement, remains significantly lower in its hierarchy of interests than its East Asian neighborhood. So, the US-China-Iran triangle may in the future evolve in a way that makes Iran and the Middle East a greater source of discord between the United States and China than it has ever been. But US and Chinese policies toward Iran and the region are unlikely to have the unsettling effect on their security relationship, especially their strategic nuclear relationship, that possible developments surrounding the North Korea issue could have. The dynamics of the US-Chinese-North Korean and US-Chinese-Iranian triangles will be a factor in US policymaking going forward—more so in the case of the North Korea triangle than in the Iran triangle.

Conclusions and Implications for US Policy

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The best way to prevent the North Korea triangular relationship from adversely affecting relations between the United States and China, and especially their strategic nuclear relationship, would be the conclusion of an effective nuclear agreement with Pyongyang. The Trump administration occasionally expressed the view that its maximum pressure campaign could achieve North Korea’s complete denuclearization without China’s help. But it should be clear, especially since Xi Jinping’s efforts in 2018 to restore Chinese influence in Pyongyang, that any positive outcome on North Korea will depend critically on China, whether in assisting in pressing Pyongyang to accept a verifiable nuclear agreement or in encouraging North Korean restraint in the absence of an agreement. If the United States wants China to use its leverage assertively to get the DPRK to accept a nuclear deal, it will need to adopt a more pragmatic approach to North Korea—credibly forswearing a policy of regime change that Beijing finds threatening, showing greater restraint in the imposition of US unilateral sanctions (including against Chinese entities), and pursuing an incremental approach to negotiations such as starting with an interim agreement capping DPRK nuclear capabilities. For its part, China will need to enforce Security Council sanctions conscientiously and use its influence to pressure North Korea to accept meaningful and verifiable limits on its nuclear and missile programs. A nuclear deal may not be achievable, however, even if the United States and China were willing to cooperate. Pyongyang may resist even an incremental approach to denuclearization, given the limits it would place on its programs and the rigorous monitoring arrangements that would be required. If diplomacy proves futile, North Korea could accelerate its nuclear and missile programs, the United States could react by ramping up its military responses as well as its unilateral pressures against North Korea (including secondary sanctions against third parties), and China could align itself more closely with the DPRK and actively defy the US-led sanctions campaign. But even in these circumstances—and even in the context of a worsening overall US-PRC bilateral relationship—the United States would have an interest in maintaining channels of communication with China on North Korean issues. The two countries could pursue low-profile bilateral contacts, including military-to-military ones, aimed at preventing US-DPRK tensions from escalating to armed conflict, an outcome neither side would want. Washington would especially want Beijing to use its influence to rein in provocative North Korean behavior on the Korean Peninsula.

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The United States would also have an interest in addressing China’s concerns about the implications for the security, and especially for its nuclear deterrent, of US and allied efforts to strengthen their deterrence and defense capabilities against the North Korean threat. The United States does not want China to feel that it must build up its nuclear forces to ensure a reliable retaliatory capability and therefore should want to dispel Chinese concerns. At the same time, the United States is determined to do whatever is necessary to defend itself and its allies against North Korea. Squaring the circle— deploying robust capabilities against the DPRK threat without triggering unwarranted concerns in Beijing—is not easy, as China’s fierce opposition to THAAD deployment in South Korea illustrates. This triangular dilemma cannot be fully resolved. It is virtually impossible to convince the Chinese that certain US responses to the North Korea threat (e.g., significantly increasing the number of Ground-Based Interceptors in Alaska to protect the US homeland against North Korean missile attack) will have no implications for Chinese retaliatory capabilities. And the dilemma will only become more acute if the DPRK’s nuclear and missile programs continue to advance. But the United States should seek to reduce the adverse triangular impact on the US-China strategic nuclear relationship.

• A nuclear deal with North Korea, perhaps an interim agreement along the lines suggested above that capped DPRK capabilities, would not obviate the need for US and allied measures to deter Pyongyang and would not eliminate China’s concerns about the implications of such measures for its deterrent. But it could reduce pressures for major increases in allied capabilities and therefore could alleviate, to some extent, Beijing’s concerns about the threat to its retaliatory capabilities. • The United States and its allies should pursue their deterrence programs in ways that do not unnecessarily arouse Chinese concerns and lead to overreactions. China cannot have a veto over allied defense plans. The deployment of THAAD in South Korea, for example, was warranted despite Beijing’s vehement protests. But the allies should be sensitive to how the Chinese will perceive their defense measures and should consider whether adjustments can be made (e.g., in the location and orientation of missile defense components) that would minimize Chinese concerns without compromising the effectiveness of the measures against the North Korean threat. • Washington should continue to seek a bilateral strategic dialogue with China that would provide an opportunity for the United

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States to make a detailed, technically based case that key regional and homeland missile defense programs (including THAAD in the ROK and the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System in Alaska and California) are aimed at North Korea and not China and are consistent with the MDR’s assertion that nuclear deterrence, not missile defenses, will address Chinese (and Russian) missile capabilities. Such a dialogue, which the Chinese have so far resisted, would also provide an opportunity to convey to Beijing the general message that, despite the increasingly adversarial state of bilateral relations, the United States wishes to pursue a strategic relationship that avoids a destabilizing arms competition, reduces mutual mistrust and worst-case planning, and decreases the likelihood of misperception and miscalculation that could lead to armed conflict. It would also provide a forum in which China could share information about its programs and plans that could address US concerns about its still opaque strategic intentions and capabilities. The North Korea scenario that probably involves the greatest risk of bringing the United States and China into direct military conflict is the sudden collapse of regime authority in Pyongyang. Engagement with the United States (and perhaps also South Korea) regarding the possible implosion of its North Korean ally is obviously an extremely sensitive matter for China, which is why it has been so reluctant in the past to enter into such talks. And in an environment of strained US-PRC relations and closer PRC-DPRK relations, the likelihood of such engagement is even lower. However, in light of the high stakes for both Washington and Beijing, it would be desirable to consider ways in which future contingencies on the Korean Peninsula could be addressed. If consultations at the official level are not possible for the time being, perhaps discussions and simulations involving former officials and other nongovernmental experts could be used to familiarize and sensitize the parties to the pressures and challenges that could confront them in that highly stressful scenario. Given the substantial risk that developments in the US-China-North Korea triangle could adversely affect the stability of the US-Chinese strategic nuclear relationship—for example, by providing a motivation, or at least a justification, for Beijing to expand its nuclear forces to ensure a reliable retaliatory capability—the United States has good reason to consider policies, such as those suggested above, for reducing those adverse effects. In the case of the US-China-Iran triangle,

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there is a much lower probability that even a sharply deteriorating regional security environment would adversely affect the Sino-US strategic nuclear relationship—and accordingly there is a much less pressing need for Washington to pursue its policies toward Iran and the region with a view toward avoiding or minimizing adverse effects on that relationship. Nonetheless, policies that Washington should pursue for other reasons—to curb Iranian nuclear and missile programs, diminish the threat to the United States’ regional partners, promote less adversarial relations between Iran and its regional rivals, and minimize prospects for armed conflict—could also further reduce the likelihood that future US-China-Iran dynamics would undermine the stability of strategic nuclear relations between Washington and Beijing. And just as the most promising way to avoid or reduce adverse strategic impacts from the North Korea triangle is to conclude a new nuclear deal with Pyongyang, the best way to further preclude the possibility of such adverse impacts from the Iran triangle is to conclude a new deal with Tehran, one that reliably blocks Iran’s path to nuclear weapons and ideally also curtails its destabilizing regional activities. But as discussed earlier, negotiating a new deal with Iran will be challenging. To improve prospects for such a deal, the Biden administration will need to scale back the unrealistic demands the Trump administration outlined in 2018 and focus heavily on achieving restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities that are of longer duration than those contained in the JCPOA. It should also pursue constraints on Iran’s missile programs, particularly on long-range systems and on Iran’s exports of missile and rocket technology to regional proxies. And it should press Tehran to curb its provocative regional activities as well as encourage a relaxation of tensions between Iran and its regional rivals, especially Saudi Arabia. In exchange, the United States will need to offer generous sanctions relief that the Iranians can count on to boost their economy. However, even if the United States adopts a more realistic negotiating posture and manages to regain the support of the Europeans and even the Russians and Chinese for its approach, there is no guarantee that a deal can be reached. In the wake of US withdrawal from the JCPOA and US reimposition of harsh sanctions, many Iranians— especially the hard-liners likely to replace the relatively moderate supporters of President Hassan Rouhani—believe the JCPOA was a huge mistake and are unwilling to trust the United States again. As noted above, the collapse of the JCPOA and failure to negotiate a new deal could result in significant advances in Iran’s nuclear

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and missile capabilities, stepped-up US and partner military deployments in response to Iranian actions, greater tension and polarization throughout the region, and increased divergence between US and Chinese interests in the region. In similar circumstances in Northeast Asia—with a breakdown in US-DPRK negotiations and increased risks of regional armed conflict—there would still be strong mutual interest for the United States and China, despite their worsening bilateral relationship, to pursue contacts aimed at preventing the situation from getting out of hand. In the case of a worsening security environment in the Middle East following the failure of negotiations with Iran, the value of USPRC engagement would be less apparent, given that China’s policies toward Iran and the Middle East are not viewed in Washington as affecting critical US security interests in the same way that China’s policies toward North Korea and Northeast Asia affect those interests. Nonetheless, in those circumstances, the United States should look for opportunities to engage China to explore what can be done to reduce regional tensions and to try to moderate their emerging competition in the Middle East and prevent it from becoming a mutually damaging additional source of conflict in an increasingly antagonist relationship. Effectively managing the US-China relationship—competing where necessary, but finding common ground where possible—will be at the top of the US foreign and national security agenda for the remainder of the twenty-first century. But so will addressing the challenges posed by third countries, particularly the nuclear and missile programs of North Korea and Iran. The policies Washington adopts toward those third countries may affect the increasingly fraught Sino-US bilateral relationship, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. And likewise, the state of that relationship and the ability of Washington and Beijing to cooperate in support of shared interests may affect the outcome of international efforts to meet those third-country challenges. An important test for US policymakers going forward will be reconciling the needs of the United States’ China policy with the needs of addressing the threats posed by North Korea and Iran. For now, with US and Chinese policies toward North Korea more consequential for each other’s interests than their policies toward Iran, the US-China-North Korea triangle may be more difficult to manage than the US-China-Iran triangle.

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1. Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 2. 2. Jesse Johnson, “North Korea’s Kim Warns of ‘New Strategic Weapon’ as Nuclear Freeze Falters,” Japan Times, January 1, 2020. 3. Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty, https:// www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/china_dprk.htm. 4. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, 2. 5. Anny Boc, “Does China’s ‘Alliance Treaty’ Still Matter?” The Diplomat, July 26, 2019. 6. Colin Zwirko, “China Rejects Leaked UN Report Details of Sanctions Breaches to Help North Korea,” NK News, February 11, 2020. 7. Michelle Nichols, “China, Russia Propose Lifting Some UN Sanctions on North Korea, US Says Not the Time,” Reuters, December 16, 2019. 8. Ankit Panda, “What China Gains with Its Détente with South Korea over THAAD,” The Diplomat, November 7, 2017. 9. “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang’s Regular Press Conference,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Beijing, December 13, 2017, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa _eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/t1519191.shtml. 10. Michael D. Swaine, “Chinese Views on South Korea’s Deployment of THAAD,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 52 (Winter 2017). 11. Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2019 Missile Defense Review (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense), 30–31. 12. David Vergun, “Trump Pledges to Protect America from Any Enemy Missile” (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, January 17, 2017). 13. Such Chinese views are discussed in Toby Dalton, Narushige Michishita, and Tong Zhao, “Security Spillover: Regional Implications of Evolving Deterrence on the Korean Peninsula” (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 12, 2018), 29. 14. Hyun-Kyung Kim, Joy Li, Patrick Mayoh, and Tom O’Brien. “Peace and Prosperity on the Korean Peninsula: Getting China to the Table,” edited by Diana Park (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center, April 2017). 15. John W. Garver, China’s Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 569. 16. Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai, Triple Axis: Iran’s Relations with Russia and China (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 33. 17. Ibid., 74. 18. Garver, China’s Quest, 576. 19. Farzin Nadimi, “Iran and China Are Strengthening Their Military Ties,” PolicyWatch No. 2728 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, November 22, 2016). 20. Andrew Scobell and Alireza Nader, “China in the Middle East: The Wary Dragon” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016), 2. 21. Garver, China’s Quest, 577. 22. Scobell and Nader, “China in the Middle East,” 75–76. 23. Edward Wong, “US Punishes Chinese Company over Iranian Oil,” New York Times, July 22, 2019. 24. Lolita C. Baldor, “US General Says Troop Surge in the Middle East May Not End Soon,” Associated Press, January 23, 2020.

5 Complex Relationships: The United States, China, and US Regional Allies Brad Glosserman

WHILE CHINA HAS LONG BEEN CENTRAL TO US STRATEGY IN Asia, and nuclear deterrence central to US security planning, there has been little official bilateral engagement between the United States and China on nuclear weapons. Not surprisingly, then, there has been no systematic assessment of the impact of US alliances on US-China nuclear dynamics. In this chapter, I aim to fill that gap. There is no simple answer or analysis, however. Unlike Europe, where the United States has created a multilateral security system that is anchored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which has evolved over decades and reflects a long-shared history and sense of community, the five US alliances in Asia (as well as the long special relationship the United States has with Taiwan) are discrete and bilateral (although there has been steady growth in contacts between those allies; the weave of relations is thickening). They operate in profoundly different ways and confront strikingly different security challenges. Each ally and partner has a unique relationship not only with Washington, but also with Beijing; as a result, each relationship has a different impact on the US-China strategic dynamic. To provide some insight into the vexing question of the US Asian allies’ influence on the US-China nuclear relationship, in this chapter I identify core components of US and Chinese nuclear policy, and explore generally their relationship to US alliances, focusing on the challenges of extended deterrence (ED) and extended nuclear deterrence (END). I then turn to each specific alliance—with Australia, Japan, 125

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the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand, and the relationship with Taiwan—and look at them in more depth. I conclude with speculation about future challenges and potential futures. The starting point for any analysis of US nuclear policy is recognition of the critical role of alliances in US security strategy, despite glaring differences between the United States’ and each of its partners’ capabilities. The importance of those alliances means that US administrations have prioritized the security of allies almost as highly as that of the United States itself—any meaningful distinction between them could well be fatal to those relationships—and this logic extends to the role played by US nuclear weapons. As one authoritative statement of US policy makes clear, nuclear forces “represent the ultimate deterrent capability that supports U.S. national security. Extended deterrence is key to U.S. alliances, both in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and in Asia, assuring allies and friends of the credibility of U.S. security commitments.”1 The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) explained that US nuclear capabilities make “essential contributions” to the deterrence of aggression, both nuclear and nonnuclear, and their deterrence effects are “unique and essential.”2 Those nuclear capabilities serve other functions as well. The US nuclear deterrent and the protection it affords its allies reduces the number of nuclear-armed states by reducing their need to acquire such capabilities; in other words, the US extended deterrent is a tool for nonproliferation.3 Australian strategist Rod Lyon argues that the extended deterrent constrains allied (mis)behavior more generally: “The US has no interest in having its nuclear commitment determined solely by an ally’s willingness to identify a particular interest as vital. So it uses its provision of an extended nuclear assurance as a tether upon an ally’s excesses—something it would be less well placed to do if that ally possessed its own nuclear arsenal.”4 In recent years, as threats have evolved, the United States and its allies have worked more closely to promote integrated deterrence and greater burden sharing.5 This process has demanded that the allies develop a more sophisticated understanding of deterrence and the roles that they can play in it. As befits a region with discrete threats, perceptions, and alliances, the results have been mixed, with some allies acquiring a better grasp of deterrence dynamics—especially the nuclear element—than others. These conversations now

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play a critical role in shaping alliance deterrence policy and, accordingly, impact the US-China nuclear dynamic as well. Another core element of US nuclear policy is rejection of a nofirst-use (NFU) policy regarding nuclear weapons. This reflects several beliefs: that the United States should “retain some ambiguity regarding the precise circumstances that might lead to a U.S. nuclear response”6; concern that a strict NFU policy would preclude US use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for attacks against its ally, which would increase allied insecurity and promote decoupling; the need to retain a credible threat against the use of other weapons of mass destruction that the United States no longer possesses; and doubts about the credibility of any such pledge. During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, US security policy was marked by a deliberate and public attempt to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons. That policy unsettled some US allies—the Japanese were particularly unnerved by the decision to shelve the Tomahawk nuclear cruise missile—but concerted attempts to consult with them about the impact of the move successfully blunted many concerns. It is not clear if that policy continued in the Trump administration. While the most recent NPR notes that “[t]he United States would only consider the employment of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies, and partners,” it adds that “extreme circumstances could include significant nonnuclear strategic attacks [which] include, but are not limited to, attacks on the US, allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure.”7 This has been interpreted to mean that attacks on warning systems in space or cyber infrastructure could warrant a nuclear response. In addition, analysts point to deployment of the new W76-2 low-yield Trident submarine warhead, which started in late 2019 and early 2020, as proof that the threshold for nuclear use is being lowered.8 In contrast, Chinese nuclear policy is premised on the absolute need to maintain a survivable second-strike capability. This is “the cornerstone of China’s deterrent and the fundamental guarantee of national security.”9 Chinese officials and experts invariably underscore the need for a relationship with nuclear rivals that is characterized by mutual vulnerability and insist that it is a necessary condition for strategic stability. For them, the lessons of history are clear: China must be able to threaten retaliation and the prospect of unsustainable damage on an adversary to be free from the threat of coercion and thus fully sovereign. Li Bin, a leading Chinese authority on nuclear weapons, argues that from this perspective China is like the United

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States: both use nuclear weapons to deter nuclear attacks.10 Allied military capabilities are viewed through this prism: while US allies do not have the means to threaten deterrence by punishment, they can deploy capabilities—such as missile defense—that can deny China the means to effectively wield its nuclear arsenal (deterrence by denial). A second core element of Chinese nuclear policy is no-first-use (NFU). China has pledged that it will never use nuclear weapons first “at any time or under any circumstances.”11 Despite periodic debates among its strategic community about the wisdom of that decision, there is no indication that the policy will change. Some Chinese strategists assert that its NFU policy renders nuclear weapons irrelevant to any discussion of the United States’ East Asia allies. “China doesn’t see [nuclear use] as regional theater versus strategic level issue, because if China used them regionally [in East Asia] it would be against a non-nuclear weapon state, which goes against its nofirst-use policy and would have huge ramifications.” 12 In conversations with US interlocutors, Chinese participants routinely press for the United States to make a similar NFU pledge. In addition to a general US skepticism about such policies, US participants counter that NFU would cut the legs out from under US alliances since it is the threat of nuclear retaliation on behalf of its allies that is the basis (along with conventional capabilities) for the US deterrent. The third pillar is the minimum deterrent. Chinese strategists insist that their government will never get dragged into a nuclear arms race. Instead, its nuclear force will always be determined by “the minimum means of reprisal,” which means that its deterrent capability is based on a “merely retaliatory nuclear strike capability.”13 In short, China will maintain its nuclear force at the minimum level required for national security.14 The final pillar (for the purposes of this chapter) is rejection of extended nuclear deterrence. Yao Yunzhu argues that “China is opposed to the policy of extended nuclear deterrence, or the policy of providing ‘nuclear umbrellas’ by nuclear weapon states to their allies.”15 China has no alliances, so this concept is fundamentally alien to Chinese strategic thinking.16 The provision of a nuclear umbrella to allied countries is objectionable for other reasons, too. Most basically, it complicates Chinese military planning, requiring the consideration of additional forces and altering calculations of required capabilities for defense or coercion. Moreover, Chinese believe that extended nuclear deterrence is incompatible with NFU, as the US commitment to defend an ally with its nuclear arsenal implies nuclear first use, given China’s NFU pledge (if it is honored).

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There are several ways that alliance-related issues reverberate in the US-China strategic nuclear dynamic. The first concerns the nuclear guarantees that are presumed to be part of extended deterrence commitments. While there is a tendency to blur and equate extended deterrence and extended nuclear deterrence, they are separate. It is little known that none of the five alliance documents includes nuclear guarantees. In some cases, the United States has offered them to Asian allies—Japan and South Korea—but it has not done so in others. Yet the mere prospect of an unfurled nuclear umbrella forces China to prepare for that contingency. If broadly speaking,17 the primary US concern is deterrence, then China’s chief concern is coercion. Beijing fears that US nuclear weapons will be used to prevent China from defending its national interests. As one scholar explained, “The original motive for the development of China’s own nuclear program was America’s nuclear blackmail against China, and America’s subsequent highly aggressive strategic actions have only served to remind China of this deeply unhappy memory.”18 Distinctions between the two concepts can blur, however, especially among Chinese analysts; one country’s “shield” can be another country’s “sword.”19 For China, the calculation is even more complicated, as it must consider the use of allies’ capabilities as part of the US shield and sword. The second issue is nonproliferation. As noted, the United States has long believed that extended deterrence commitments to allies have dampened those countries’ desire to acquire their own nuclear weapon capabilities. Extended deterrence commitments will likely play a key role in any global disarmament process since the path to that end-state will be long and complex, and reassurance of partners and allies will be a critical part of that process. Chinese analysts are not so sanguine. Chinese support for the use of extended deterrence as a nonproliferation tool has waxed and waned in recent years. At times, there has been grudging acceptance of US ED commitments to its allies—in echoes of the US logic—but there have been growing complaints about those commitments. Chinese charge that extended nuclear deterrent commitments have prompted North Korean proliferation, either by highlighting the value of nuclear weapons and thus encouraging Pyongyang to acquire its own capabilities, or by creating insecurities in the North Korean leadership. Alternatively, Chinese complain that US extended deterrence commitments encourage risky or irresponsible behavior among its allies who then provoke Beijing. A third issue is missile defense (MD). The US views regional missile defense systems as an effective means of deterrence that

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denies Pyongyang the ability to threaten forward-deployed US assets or those of its allies. As such, it has become an integral part of the US nuclear triad. For China, such systems represent two distinct threats. First, Beijing does not believe US claims that MD systems are intended to neutralize only pariah state nuclear programs or that it cannot (and will not) undermine Beijing’s deterrent. It fears that radars and interceptors, if reconfigured, can undermine China’s second-strike capability; when US interlocutors insist that capacity is not possible today, Chinese worry that it is only a matter of time. As Yao Yungzhu has noted, China worries about “ballistic missile defense development cooperation and future joint deployment. . . . For China has to reevaluate the sufficiency of its nuclear arsenal to counter US missile defense systems and retain a guaranteed ability to retaliate.”20 China also worries that missile defense capabilities can be linked to create a regional defense network that fundamentally alters the balance of power in East Asia. Unlike Europe, where Washington helped create and sustain a multilateral security framework, in Asia the United States has worked through bilateral alliances that were separate and insulated from each other. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the United States has encouraged its allies to strengthen ties among themselves and with the United States to encourage efficiency, to promote new divisions of labor, and to address new security threats. Beijing has become accustomed to the old arrangements and has recognized that it can exert more pressure on US allies when bilateral alliances are the principle architecture. It can flex its considerable economic muscle more effectively when the only opposing voice is that of Washington, rather than a coalition of like-minded governments. Beijing views this new security weave as a way to check its rise and contain the spread of its influence. Thus, China sees MD as the means for creating an integrated regional defense system, one that could include Taiwan, and would transform the Asian security architecture to China’s disadvantage. A final important consideration in the Chinese nuclear calculus is the political dimension of strategic stability. As the United States sought to establish a framework for nuclear weapons in the post– Cold War era, the Obama administration settled on the concept of strategic stability as the organizing principle for its strategic policy.21 While it was originally articulated for the US-Russia relationship, the Obama administration made clear that “maintaining strategic stability in the U.S.-China relationship is as important to this Administration as maintaining strategic stability with other major

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powers.”22 In discussions with Chinese officials and experts, US interlocutors insisted that strategic stability was the most that the United States could offer when Chinese sought acknowledgment of mutual vulnerability as proof that Washington accepted the legitimacy— survivability—of China’s nuclear deterrent. Over time, the concept received reluctant acceptance from Chinese strategists. Yet when those strategists assessed strategic stability, they used a two-dimensional framework that consisted of a narrowly defined nuclear calculation that balanced survivable forces and a second more inchoate political calculus that reflected the broader US-China relationship. This political dimension figures in a discussion of the allies’ impact on the US-China nuclear dynamic since the overall relationship between an allied government and that in Beijing shapes Chinese perceptions of the ally’s intentions, which then determines the perceived need for defense or deterrent capabilities. In other words, US allies perceived to be friendly to China and less aligned with the United States are considered less of a threat and, therefore, have less impact on strategic dynamics. Governments closely aligned with US thinking and policy are viewed as more hostile and must be incorporated into the threat assessment. Each US alliance has a different impact on the US-China strategic nuclear dynamic. That should not be a surprise given the unique features of each alliance, the different capabilities each partner (and thus each alliance) has, and the variegated threat perception in each capital. In this section, I look at each US alliance and assess its impact on the US-China nuclear dynamic. New thinking about the origins of US alliances in Asia should shape analysis of those relationships and their impact on US-China strategic nuclear dynamics.23 While the US alliance system emerged from a series of events that produced the Cold War—communist government takeovers in Eastern Europe and the descent of the Iron Curtain in Europe, the defeat of the Kuomintang by Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950—Washington was also worried that fiery leaders with US backing and support, such as Syngman Rhee in Seoul and Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei, would drag the United States into their own fights. US policymakers were deeply concerned by the prospect of entrapment by those leaders, “provoking conflicts with North Korea and mainland China (respectively) that might embroil the United

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States in a larger unwanted war on the Asian mainland when the primary theater of concern for US national security was Western Europe.”24 The United States established bilateral security alliances to reduce the possibility of such entanglements: those arrangements gave Washington deep penetration and insight into and a concomitant influence over allied national security institutions and mechanisms. Bilateral US alliances also “afforded the United States a powerplay advantage—it exercised near total control over foreign and domestic affairs of its allies and it created an asymmetry of power that rendered inconceivable counterbalancing by those smaller countries, on their own or in concert with others.” 25 This analysis provides a historical and strategic framework that echoes the conclusions of Lyon and the nonproliferation logic (noted above). The US-Thailand alliance has no discernable impact on US-China strategic relations. That is not surprising. There are no official statements suggesting that US nuclear deterrence guarantees extend to Thailand. One scholar has noted that there are no formal mutual defense arrangements with Thailand, and no “ongoing legal framework that calls for regular review and negotiation.”26 Rather, the partnership is based on the 1954 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) Manila Pact and the 1962 communiqué between Thai foreign minister Thanat Khoman and US secretary of state Dean Rusk. “Parts of the Manila Pact remain in force, such as Article V, which requires signatories to ‘act to meet the common danger’ in the event of an attack in the treaty area . . . but it is less clear that the ThanatRusk Communiqué is still operative.” The Thai government has argued that the 1962 communique was abrogated by the Nixon Doctrine, but the alliance endures nonetheless. 27 In recent years, the United States has had difficult relations with Thailand as the Thai military has overthrown successive democratically elected governments in Bangkok. China has seized the opportunity to build a closer relationship with the Thai governments. By the middle of 2019, the pendulum was swinging again. The United States had resumed arms sales to Bangkok and relations with the US military were again on the upswing. That shift is purported to reflect concern among members of the Thai military that the country is getting too close to China as well as anxiety in the United States about reports of a secret deal by which China would build a naval base in southern Cambodia, a move that could have a profound impact on the regional balance of power. 28 It is revealing that there has been no

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mention of Thailand in over a decade of US-China Track 1.5 and Track 2 strategic nuclear discussions.29 In contrast with Thailand, there is a formal mutual defense arrangement with the Philippines, although there has been a dispute about US obligations to come to Manila’s defense. Under the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), concluded in 1951, Washington reserves the right to intervene following attacks on Philippines armed forces or vessels, but there is no commitment to do so.30 While US national security officials called the MDT a “rock solid commitment” in 2014, the deputy national security advisor then referred to a South China Sea conflict as “hypothetical” and refused to speculate on what the United States would do in a contingency. This led one US analyst to conclude that Washington “does not intend to clarify the role of U.S. extended deterrence in the South China Sea or strengthen its support for the Philippines’ territorial claims.”31 Of particular concern to the Philippines is the applicability of the treaty to the South China Sea, where Manila and Beijing have territorial disputes. The two longstanding statements of US policy—a 1979 communique from the US secretary of state and another twenty years later from the US ambassador to the Philippines—were ambiguous. In early 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ended the speculation by explicitly noting that the area was covered by the treaty.32 Also, unlike Thailand, the Philippines has been mentioned in USChina nuclear discussions. Concerns take two forms. First, Chinese caution US counterparts about the provision of security guarantees to Manila, suggesting that the Philippines will use those commitments to stir up trouble in the region. Typical was the 2011 warning that extended deterrence guarantees could “embolden” the Philippines to more openly and aggressively challenge China, especially over conflicting territorial claims. 33 Alternatively, Chinese strategists worry that US defense commitments would draw the United States into any conflict with the Philippines, transforming the balance of forces and altering outcomes. Given the tensions that have arisen between Manila and Beijing over disputes in the South China Sea, that risk is real. Since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines in 2016, Manila has adopted a more accommodating policy toward China. Duterte has said that he wants to reorient toward Beijing and separate from Washington. His government has not demanded enforcement of the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in

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favor of the Philippines in the case filed by his predecessor. That attitude has helped dampen suspicion of Philippine intentions in Beijing and minimized the potential impact of the alliance on US-China nuclear dynamics. There is tension between the views of Duterte and that of the Philippines national security establishment—although Duterte himself seems uncertain about what he wants—which has produced pendulum-like swings in signals from Manila. Observers espied a swing back toward the United States in Manila in the summer of 2019, but in early 2020 Duterte threatened to end the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which many believe would effectively end the alliance. By June 2020, Manila had signaled that termination was no longer in the cards.34 Following Joe Biden’s victory in the November presidential election, Philippine foreign affairs secretary Teodoro Locsin announced that Manila was suspending the decision to abrogate the VFA for a second time so “that the two allies can work on a long-term mutual defense arrangement.”35 The US-Australia alliance is considered by some to be the closest of the United States’ five Asian alliances, a reflection of a long history and shared culture. Australia’s 2016 Defense White Paper argues that “a strong and deep alliance is at the core of Australia’s security and defence planning. The United States will remain the pre-eminent global military power and will continue to be Australia’s most important strategic partner.”36 The United States echoes that sentiment, calling Australia “a vital ally, partner, and friend of the United States. . . . Defense ties and cooperation are exceptionally close. U.S. and Australian forces have fought together in every significant conflict since World War I.”37 Central to the alliance are US nuclear weapons, as “only the nuclear and conventional military capabilities of the United States can offer effective deterrence against the possibility of nuclear threats against Australia.”38 Yet while extended nuclear deterrence is an enduring part of Australia’s official defense policy, “there is no known publicly available US official statement specifically providing an assurance of US nuclear protection for Australia in the face of nuclear threat or nuclear attack.”39 One study uncovered only one Australian statement to that effect, in the 2000 Defence White Paper, which states that “Australia relies on the extended deterrence provided by US nuclear forces to deter the remote possibility of any nuclear attack on Australia.”40 The United States has recognized its ally’s reliance on the US deterrent since the 1960s, but the silence continues.41 Still, every US

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president in the nuclear era has said the country would consider the employment of nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances when its vital interests, or those of an ally, are at risk, implying (at least) that all allies fall under the US nuclear umbrella (even though discussions about the specifics of that guarantee vary from ally to ally).42 This low profile is to some degree a product of geography. Australia’s “location far to the south of Eurasia means that there is less need for nuclear capabilities in ANZUS than in other US alliances in the region. Australia is a low priority for attack by nuclear-armed adversaries and has no historical or territorial grievances that could lead to escalation or open conflict.”43 Yet Australia is a source of some concern for China. It hosts several facilities critical to US command and control of its nuclear forces.44 China is acutely aware that Australia is a close ally of the United States, and Chinese nuclear planners responded with concern when the United States revitalized its alliances in the region as intended by President Obama’s rebalance. In Track 1.5 dialogues, Chinese participants complained about the decision to send US troops to Darwin, characterizing it as part of an attempt to contain China.45 Historically, Canberra has had a limited role to play in providing deterrence. A recent assessment concluded that “Australia cannot independently deter Chinese coercion; but it can complicate Beijing’s risk calculus by supporting US deterrence efforts, building domestic and regional resilience, and fostering collective action in the Pacific and Southeast Asia.”46 That may be changing, however. Recognizing that “the strategic environment has deteriorated more rapidly than anticipated . . . [and] is in the midst of the most consequential strategic realignment since the Second World War, and trends including military modernisation, technological disruption and the risk of state-on-state conflict are further complicating [the] nation’s strategic circumstances,”47 Australia has updated its defense outlook to “focus on ensuring that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) can shape Australia’s strategic environment, deliver credible deterrence and respond to challenges to our interests.”48 The update “prioritizes the acquisition of strike weapons to increase the ADF’s maritime deterrence and long-range land strike capabilities,”49 a move that is sure to irritate Chinese defense planners. Canberra’s chief concern continues to be ensuring continued US engagement in Asia, however. “Australia is anxious about Washington’s commitment to regional stability and sees US nuclear weapons as essential to preserving the existing order.” 50 Even with the 2020 Defense Update, Australia acknowledges that “only the nuclear and

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conventional capabilities of the United States can offer effective deterrence against the possibility of nuclear threats against Australia.”51 Canberra’s efforts to sustain the US presence are another offense in the eyes of China. Stronger ties to and closer alignment with the United States, in conjunction with Canberra’s pursuit of greater cooperation with Japan, the decision to ban Huawei from Australia’s fifth-generation (5G) telecommunications network, and charges of Chinese interference in the country’s domestic politics, have convinced Beijing that Australia—or at least the current Liberal-National coalition—is hostile to it. This is Australia’s most important impact on US-China nuclear dynamics. Consistent with an alliance created after the invasion of South Korea by the North in 1950, the alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK) has been dominated by Korean Peninsula concerns, the threat from North Korea in particular. The size of the North’s military, its proximity—not only sharing a border with South Korea, but being deployed less than 100 miles from Seoul—and the history of invasion mean that deterrence is foremost in the minds of alliance planners in both countries, as Korean analyst Kim Hyung Wook bluntly explained: “Living with North Korea as an imminent danger, South Korean vital interests are also under threat, which necessitates the sincere provision of US extended nuclear deterrence.”52 The United States has responded with explicit statements of its commitment, such as in the 2009 US-ROK Joint Vision statement that noted the “continuing commitment of extended deterrence, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella.”53 The following year, the two governments began to flesh out the intellectual foundations of that pledge when they established the Extended Deterrence Policy Committee, and talks continue in the Extended Strategy and Consultative Group (formed in 2016). The particular form of that commitment has evolved. US troops have been forward deployed on the Korean Peninsula since the end of the Korean War and, while their numbers have been reduced, nearly 30,000 remain. Until the early 1990s, the United States deployed tactical nuclear weapons on the peninsula, but they were removed as part of a global withdrawal at the end of the Cold War. Since North Korea acquired its own nuclear capability, there have been calls by South Korean strategists and the public for the reintroduction of those weapons, either to balance Pyongyang’s threat or to

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serve as a bargaining chip for the removal of the North’s arsenal. 54 Thus far, the United States has resisted that entreaty. South Koreans have traditionally paid little attention to China’s nuclear capabilities. One study concludes that China’s ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] per se do not pose a direct threat to South Korea. However, China’s SRBMs [short-range ballistic missiles] and IRBMs [intermediate-range ballistic missiles] do pose a strategic threat for their potential use in support of North Korea should a conflict erupt on the Korean peninsula. The worst-case scenario for South Korea is that these short- and intermediate-range missiles may be used to attack military targets based in South Korea. These missiles may also be used to interrupt or deny U.S. naval and aerial reinforcements to the peninsula, in effect neutralizing U.S. extended deterrence.55

Nonetheless, authoritative South Korean analysts profess to not being bothered by the prospect of significant (one-third) reductions in US strategic nuclear weapons.56 While Seoul has evinced less concern about US and Chinese strategic arsenals, China is not so sanguine about South Korean behavior. The South Korean government’s July 2016 decision to deploy a Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) system infuriated Beijing. Even though THAAD is designed to intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and has extremely limited ability to address China’s long-range strategic missiles, Beijing insists that the THAAD system is directed at China and threatens to undermine its deterrent.57 It responded with an aggressive campaign of economic retaliation, slowing or banning Chinese tourism to Korea, imposing tariffs on Korean goods in China, and conducting snap inspections of companies associated with the decision such as Lotte, which provided the land where the system would be deployed. One study estimated the damage could have reached $15 billion.58 China also suspended military exchanges and some diplomatic meetings. Beijing eased its hard line in 2019. China’s 2019 Defense White Paper slammed the United States for deploying the THAAD system in the ROK, intimating that Seoul had no role in the decision.59 The Beijing government apparently recognized that its policy had done great damage to public perceptions of China in South Korea at the very time that there was a growing convergence in views between Seoul and Beijing on regional issues. The government of Korean president Moon Jae-in is committed to engaging North Korea, and his incremental approach with less emphasis on denuclearization aligns with

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Chinese preferences—and risks creating tensions with the United States (despite President Trump’s readiness to pursue top-level diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un). Moon also sees Beijing as a vital partner in efforts to promote inter-Korean projects. The policy shift indicates that Chinese strategists are more focused on the big political picture—the comprehensive relationship—than on strategic concerns narrowly defined. ROK influence on the US-China strategic nuclear relationship has been indirect, but that may be changing. There is a growing realization among South Korean strategists that the “Chinese military is the greater enduring challenge behind the more imminent threat of North Korea and this perception is increasingly influencing ROK capability development and acquisition decisions.”60 Political factors weigh heavily on (read: inhibit) US-ROK military cooperation regarding China, but “geographic advantage, numbers of their conventional forces, integration of conventional and strategic forces, A2AD capabilities, and tactics are all aspects of the PRC military posture that concern the ROK,” argues Paul Choi, an ROK strategist and regional security specialist. He adds that “the PRC nuclear capability is a concern not only by itself but for how it empowers other aspects of China’s military posture.”61 ROK defense planners are considering a range of options—missile defense, with space-based sensors, boost phase/left-of-launch capabilities, low-yield nuclear capabilities, intheater prepositioned stocks—that could be used against North Korea and China. Seoul is already seeking larger payloads and longer reach through revised missile guidelines that would equip the ROK military for “diversifying” security challenges—threats that include China.62 In other words, South Korea, and the US alliance with the ROK, could assume more weight in the Chinese strategic calculus. Unlike other US alliances in Asia, the US-Japan alliance has a real and direct impact on US-China nuclear dynamics. That should not be surprising, given the role of the alliance in regional security and the contentious nature of the Japan-China relationship. The tensions that dominate relations between those two regional powers ensures that Tokyo will figure in nuclear calculations in both Washington and Beijing. Japan is considered the most important US ally in the region and the US-Japan alliance is referred to as the “cornerstone of peace, security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region,” which plays “an indispensable role in upholding a rules-based international order and

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promoting the shared values of the American and Japanese people.” 63 Consistent with that status, US administrations have made clear their readiness to defend their ally with every tool in the US arsenal, including the nuclear umbrella. President Trump reiterated the “unwavering” commitment to defend Japan with “the full range of U.S. military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional” when he met Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo in February 2017.64 Foreign policy and defense officials reaffirmed that the Senkaku Islands, the subject of a territorial dispute with China, were covered by Article 5 of the US-Japan security treaty in April 2019.65 In his first phone call with Japan’s prime minister after his November win, President-elect Biden confirmed that he, too, took that position.66 Significantly, the April 2019 meeting of the Security Consultative Committee (SCC, often referred to as the “2+2 meeting”) extended the treaty’s purview to cyberspace—a new and uncertain domain—noting that “a cyberattack could, in certain circumstances, constitute an armed attack for the purposes of Article V of the Japan-US Security Treaty.”67 While the precise contours of this statement are not clear—the particular “circumstances” will be considered on a case-by-case basis and how cyber and other domains interact remains the subject of intense study—it could impact nuclear calculations given the central role cyberspace has assumed in nuclear command and control. Japan is also the poster child for the US claim that its extended deterrence commitments promote nonproliferation.68 Despite a worrying external security environment and a “latent” nuclear capability— the country has the civilian nuclear technology and the plutonium, leading one expert to call it a “threshold nuclear power”69—the government remains committed to its non-nuclear status because of the US extended nuclear deterrent.70 Japan figures more prominently in the nuclear balance by virtue of its growing role within the alliance. For over two decades, Japan has steadily assumed greater responsibility within the security partnership: the most recent iteration of the “Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation” note that “the two governments will promote cooperation across a wide range of areas, including through diplomatic efforts, to strengthen the deterrence and capabilities of the Japan-U.S. Alliance.”71 The most visible of these efforts is a robust missile defense program, which currently consists of Aegis-equipped destroyers, Patriot batteries on land, and the planned introduction of new “superdestroyers” with Aegis capabilities.72 There is discussion of deployment of a state-of-the-art Homeland Defense Radar in Japan that would be able to detect ICBM launches and intercept any

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that threaten the US homeland or its allies.73 Japan is also stepping up antisubmarine warfare (ASW) efforts, which could impact China’s nuclear deterrent as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moves more of its weapons to submarines.74 A final and recent side effect of the alliance’s reliance on the US nuclear deterrent has been a growing understanding of deterrence among Japanese strategists and planners, which has produced a shift in the nature of alliance conversations on this topic. Until the second North Korean nuclear crisis in 2002, Japan was largely quiet about the role of nuclear weapons in alliance planning.75 That crisis triggered real concern in Tokyo about the US extended nuclear deterrent—there were fears of decoupling in the face of a North Korean nuclear capability—to which Washington responded with the creation of a bilateral strategic nuclear policy dialogue, the US-Japan Extended Deterrence Dialogue. It has become a biannual meeting that includes in-depth discussions of deterrence as well as visits to sites relevant to deterrence such as the US Strategic Command in Omaha. As a result, one former US nuclear official believes the “Japanese are among the most sophisticated and nuanced of all allies on nuclear deterrence theory and doctrine and policy.” 76 This evolution has given Japanese strategists the opportunity to weigh in on US policy and those interventions have assumed increasing significance. For Japanese, the constraints imposed by their constitution magnify the importance of US extended deterrence—and extended nuclear deterrence—commitments. One analyst explained that “Japan, which maintains an ‘exclusively defensive defense’ policy and does not possess any capability to retaliate against other countries’ territory, expects US extended nuclear deterrence to continue to play an important role in deterring a wide range of possible challenges to its national interest.”77 Then Japanese foreign minister Kono Taro applauded the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, “which clearly articulates the US resolve to ensure the effectiveness of its deterrence and its commitment to providing extended deterrence to its allies, including Japan.”78 Or, as another Japanese observer more bluntly noted, “When the new 2018 NPR came out, which emphasized, you know, possible use of nuclear weapons, we strongly welcomed it.”79 Japanese officials have urged the United States to keep certain nuclear weapons to maintain capabilities that were “flexible, credible, prompt, discriminating, stealthy and sufficient to dissuade.” They have also suggested that “the United States should place nuclear deterrence at the core of US-Japan security arrangements.”80

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Japanese strategists are divided about the impact of China’s growing nuclear capabilities. Satoh Yukio articulated one view when he concluded that survivable second-strike forces “do not affect the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella. The increased vulnerability of the United States to Chinese nuclear retaliation does not reduce the effectiveness of US deterrence of China.”81 Another scholar even argues that “the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella over Japan would not be seriously damaged even if the US concluded an agreement of nuclear no-first-use with China or Russia” (if the US and Japan maintain an adequate military balance against those forces).82 There is concern about Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities, however, and a palpable fear that a North Korean ICBM could decouple the United States from its allies in the region. Yamaguchi Noboru called such a capability “a game changer” that “is scary to Japan,” warning that “if North Korea reaches the capability to launch a nuclear warhead to the continental United States, and the US is going to negotiate with North Korea, that may provide other countries much incentive to go nuclear.”83 This reaction to a North Korean nuclear weapon alarms Chinese strategists, as explained below. Other Japanese are less sanguine about Chinese capabilities. Their chief concern is that stability in strategic forces will undermine stability at the regional level. They worry that mutual vulnerability when combined with China’s modernization of air and naval forces will allow Beijing to exploit crises in the Asian theater. This stabilityinstability paradox dominates much Japanese thinking about Chinese nuclear forces, and the concern becomes especially pronounced whenever the conversation turns to US force reductions that could encourage a “sprint to parity” by China. A fear that the United States will be less inclined to challenge Chinese assertiveness is one form of decoupling that has been communicated to the United States through deterrence dialogues and consultation mechanisms. And if some Japanese can accept a US NFU policy, that is not the view of the Japanese government. Japan is believed to have argued strongly against the US adoption of a NFU declaratory policy and a declaration that the “sole purpose” of its nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack. According to one former official who worked on the document, the Obama administration’s NPR rejected the “sole purpose formulation” after it “carefully considered the views of its allies in Northeast Asia (and elsewhere).”84 Japanese support deeper cooperation with the United States to strengthen deterrence. They acknowledge that they must do more to support the alliance and, over the past decade, have done so. US and

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Japanese planners have worked to better integrate their forces—as well as those of South Korea in trilateral defense cooperation—to deter regional adversaries. One analyst agreed that extended nuclear deterrence is significant, but cautioned that it is just one way among many of guaranteeing an ally’s security and responding to threats. Rather than just relying on END, it is imperative for Japan to reinforce its efforts, under close coordination and cooperation with the US, to construct stronger conventional capabilities—including addressing anti-access or area denial capabilities, developing missile defense and sharing roles, burdens and capabilities—for adequately deterring the low-intensity, limited challenges that Japan may face, as well as denying an adversary’s escalation or achievement of objectives.85

These efforts alarm China. China’s 2019 Defense White Paper highlights Japan’s defense modernization efforts: “In an attempt to circumvent the post-war mechanism, Japan has adjusted its military and security policies and increased input accordingly, thus becoming more outward-looking in its military endeavors.”86 If Chinese strategists once accepted the US argument that its extended deterrent restrained allies, they are much less inclined to do so now. First, they charge that the assurance it provides to those governments promotes provocative behavior. In Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues, Chinese participants have warned about the potential for third parties—usually Japan and the Philippines, although Vietnam sometimes makes the list—to drag the United States and China into conflict.87 Alternatively, they assert that the United States is encouraging Japanese militarism, and that the United States cannot control Tokyo.88 Second, Chinese insist that the United States and its allies exaggerate Chinese and North Korean threats to justify their own military expansion.89 Third, they believe that a more effective alliance with more capable partners threatens China’s deterrent. Yao Yunzhu has argued that “the most significant factor that will influence China’s nuclear calculus will be US deployments of national and advanced theater missile defenses.”90 Chinese strategists worry that Japanese concerns in combination with US ambivalence toward strategic stability will push the United States to seek ways “to expand its nuclear advantage vis-à-vis China through the use of missile defenses and new technologies that improve counterforce targeting and lower the threshold for nuclear use.” 91 At the same time, Chinese worry that allied missile defense efforts, both current and anticipated, “could degrade China’s nuclear second-strike ability to

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the point where it emboldens the United States to consider striking first with nuclear weapons.”92 A final Chinese concern is Japan’s potential to proliferate. Yang Yi of China’s National Defense University toted up the factors pushing Japan to go nuclear—the belief that it would be targeted by a nuclear-armed North Korea, a lack of confidence in the US extended nuclear deterrent, fear of China’s military capabilities, its desire to be a major political power, and its nuclear technology—and concluded that it is “the most worrisome country.”93 The prospect of nuclear dominoes, Japan the first to fall, is one of the most powerful influences on Chinese thinking about North Korea’s decision to acquire nuclear capabilities. Hanging over thinking in both Tokyo and Beijing about nuclear weapons and their associated dynamics is the two countries’ political relationship. They are long-standing rivals for regional leadership, and they share a bitter history. Japan’s defeat of China in the closing days of the nineteenth century separated the island of Taiwan from the mainland, a division that continues to this day. Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s was brutal and bloody, resulting in millions of lives lost and ill will that dominates contemporary relations. The two governments continue to contest the legacy of that war and, in one particular case, territory: Japan and China both claim the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in Chinese), and that dispute has assumed new intensity in recent years after the discovery of oil reserves in the nearby seabed and as China has become more assertive in regional affairs. As this competition intensifies, Japan’s alliance with the United States assumes greater importance in protecting Japanese interests or impeding Chinese efforts to protect or assert its own. At the same time, however, geography and economics demand that Tokyo and Beijing develop a working relationship. Hostility cannot dominate their relations, especially when nuclear weapons are an inescapable part of them. Thus, while the US-Japan alliance has a more direct effect on US-China nuclear dynamics than does any other US alliance in Asia, as in other cases the impact is variable, as much (if not more) a function of Japan-China political relations than a reflection of the nuclear numbers. While Japan has had a direct impact on US-China strategic nuclear dynamics, Taiwan is integral to the nuclear relationship. Indeed, there are good reasons to question whether the US relationship with Taiwan can even be analogized to US alliances in Asia. The United States had

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an alliance with the Republic of China from 1954, but it ended in January 1980. The US Congress, disapproving of the normalization of relations with Beijing, passed the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) in 1979 in response. It obligates the United States to sell Taiwan sufficient arms to provide for its own defense and it also states that efforts to determine Taiwan’s future by nonpeaceful means will be considered a threat to the security of the region and of “grave concern” to the United States. US presidents have said that the United States would defend Taiwan if it were the victim of an unprovoked attack by China. Some liken the TRA to a formal security guarantee.94 The United States has periodically brandished its deterrent against China, sending the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait in 1950 when the Korean War broke out to warn against an invasion to reunify the island and dispatching two aircraft carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait area in 1996 after aggressive Chinese missile tests. The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review cautioned that “a military confrontation over Taiwan” could serve as an “immediate contingency” that could trigger nuclear use.95 More important than the US relationship with Taiwan is China’s thinking about the island. Beijing considers Taiwan to be a rogue province that is part of China and that its separation from the mainland is a burning historical injustice that must be rectified. The Chinese government has identified Taiwan as a core interest, which means that it is nonnegotiable, and China will brook no interference in the realization of the goal of cross-strait reunification. Every modern Chinese leader has reaffirmed the nation’s commitment to that objective. On January 1, 2019, President Xi Jinping warned that China would not rule out the threat of military action to reclaim Taiwan: “We make no promise to give up the use of military force and reserve the option of taking all necessary means.”96 The sensitivity of the Taiwan issue, China’s unyielding determination to reunify the island, and the US commitment to the defense of a population that is increasingly alienated from the mainland have made Taiwan the most likely cause of a US-China war. Chinese military officers have explicitly threatened the United States with a nuclear strike over Taiwan: in one exchange, a US official was warned that “in the 1950s, you three times threatened nuclear strikes on China and you do that because we couldn’t hit back. Now we can. So you are not going to threaten us again because, in the end, you care a lot more about Los Angeles than Taipei.”97 The most likely trigger of a conflict is a declaration of independence by Taiwan. From there, it is easy to anticipate how fighting

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escalates to an exchange of nuclear forces. In one scenario, US efforts to break a submarine-enforced blockade of the island inadvertently threaten the nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines that form China’s naval nuclear deterrent. In another, the attempt to degrade China’s conventional ballistic missile force spills over into its nuclear missiles, a not unlikely outcome given the co-location of base headquarters and the overlap of their command and control networks and their support infrastructures.98 Chinese strategists have voiced particular concern over the possibility of deployment of missile defense systems to Taiwan. As Yao Yunzhu has explained, A limited missile shield would relieve Americans of possible Chinese nuclear retaliation, permitting them to intervene more readily and threaten nuclear use as it did in the 1958 Taiwan crisis. It could encourage Taiwan to take more provocative moves towards independence by reducing the deterrent effect of PLA’s missile force. It would signify a semi-alliance relationship between the US and Taiwan. And it will reduce the effectiveness of China’s military operations against the island.99

As one of China’s “core interests,” the PLA has developed warfighting scenarios and operational plans to ensure the realization of Chinese objectives in a cross-strait conflict. Even with an NFU doctrine, those plans almost certainly include nuclear escalation (or responding to nuclear use). There will be debates about the degree to which this constitutes “strategic” nuclear plans and policy in either country, but there is no mistaking the simple truth that the state of cross-strait relations, as in the case of US alliances in Asia, shapes US-China strategic relations broadly defined. When the United States appears to be moving toward closer relations with Taiwan—usually a result of arms sales or higherlevel government to government contacts—or when relations between Taipei and Beijing become strained—usually the product of a more independence-oriented president coming to power on the island— tensions rise between the United States and China. President Xi’s strident comments at the beginning of 2019 reflected frustration and anger following the refusal of Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen, from the independence-favoring Democratic Progressive Party, to adopt Beijing’s One-China Policy and warming US ties with Taiwan, including both US arms sales to and higher-level contacts with Taipei. Worryingly, the Taiwan issue has become an irritant as the US-China relationship deteriorates, a product of trade tensions and a hardening of US views toward the country more generally.

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Other alliance-related developments will figure more prominently in the US-China strategic nuclear relationship. First, there is the impact of the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. While Washington was most concerned about Russian cheating on the agreement, US security planners were also troubled by the fact that China was not a party to the treaty, which put the United States at a disadvantage in the Asian theater.100 China has built up the world’s largest and most diverse arsenal of ground-launched missiles and inventory that contains more than 2,000 ballistic and cruise missiles; US officials estimate that about 95 percent of them would violate the INF if China were a signatory.101 One analysis concludes that China’s nuclear-capable mediumand intermediate-range missiles support military and deterrence strategies toward a number of regional powers, Japan among them. Moreover, China’s land-based missiles with conventional warheads “nearly all of which would be restricted under the INF Treaty, present a more immediate challenge to the United States and its allies and partners. Chinese policymakers view these conventional missiles . . . as a pillar of their warfighting strategy and useful across the spectrum of conflict, from deterrence and coercion to fighting wars.”102 US and allied strategists argue for the deployment of such missiles by the United States or its allies within Asia because they are lowcost ways to enhance strike options and because they would complicate Chinese planning, forcing Beijing to devote funds to defense that might otherwise be spent on offensive capabilities.103 China has assessed the US move as part of a more general shift away from arms control, and analysts worry that it portends the deployment of ground-based missiles on US allies’ territory or on Guam. That conclusion seems mandatory: if the United States is sincere in its concern about China’s omission, then it must seek to insert ground-based weapons into the region as the treaty does not ban seabased or air-launched missiles. Hugh White argues that “the strategic logic of America’s plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty plainly suggests that such a request [basing nuclear-armed missiles, aimed at China, on Australian territory] is a real possibility.”104 It is by no means clear that allies would accept US missiles, however. The ROK is still smarting from the THAAD blowback and the Moon administration would likely have not made that decision in the first place. While backing US logic for both withdrawal and the placement of missiles in the region generally, Japan is not enthusiastic about hosting such deployments either.105

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China would almost certainly respond. According to Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University, US deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Asia would mean “the development of Chinese missiles is likely to rapidly accelerate. . . . This is the logic of an arms race.”106 PLA analyst Zhou Bo said that US allies and partners in Asia should “think twice” about whether their “security depends more on improving relations with an immediate neighbor or standing with a distant ally,” and warned of punishment like that inflicted on South Korea after Seoul decided to accept the THAAD system.107 The INF discussion has merged with a larger debate about the role of missiles in the region. South Korea has been vexed by North Korea’s growing nuclear capability and parts of the ROK strategic community have urged the United States to redeploy nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, arguing that they provide a counter to Pyongyang’s weapons or that they can serve as a bargaining chip to get the North to dismantle its own nuclear arsenal in exchange for the removal of US missiles. While the United States has resisted those entreaties, Seoul did get the United States to agree to a substantial lengthening of the range of ROK missiles, which would allow it to strike all of North Korea and some parts of China.108 This is part of what Seoul now calls an “omnidirectional” defense policy: while more cynical observers note tensions with Japan and conclude that those new capabilities could be used against targets to the east, knowledgeable ROK analysts (and planners) point out that Beijing would be in range. 109 Japan too has acknowledged the case for regional missile options, and has begun to consider the development of indigenous strike capabilities (but only for conventional warheads). 110 That discussion assumed new urgency in the summer of 2020 after Tokyo canceled the planned deployment of its Aegis Ashore missile defense system.111 China is well aware that those countries could never field sufficient numbers of conventional missiles to serve as a genuine deterrent, but planners in Beijing would have to factor in the existence of that capability as well as the prospect of autonomous decisionmaking in Seoul and Tokyo regarding their use. Like Russian nesting dolls, this discussion then leads to debate about the forward deployment of US nuclear weapons in Asia more generally. The 2018 NPR’s call for more flexible nuclear options might foreshadow this development, but it would also necessitate new nuclear-sharing procedures that could transform Chinese thinking about targeting within Asia. Australian strategist Lyon argues that

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Brad Glosserman the current ‘fly-in-fly-out’ profile is too limiting. Brief deployment of delivery vehicles ‘signals’ US nuclear commitment. But it compares unfavorably with the US commitment to Europe, which has a degree of permanency about it both in relation to stockpiles and nuclear sharing. In Asia US nuclear ties appear—and disappear—at the speed of a jet aircraft. . . . I wonder whether ‘reach-back’ can carry the traffic of the new strategic environment. I suspect forward deployment would do more for assurance than deterrence, but even on the deterrence side of the ledger it would give both China and North Korea pause for reflection.112

The reference to Europe is revealing. Asian allies (most often strategists in Japan) have closely studied the European nuclear experience and frequently refer to it in when discussing regional options.113 US counterparts typically parry calls for similar arrangements in Asia, arguing that Asian analysts do not understand the reality of NATO nuclear policy—that the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) does not in fact “plan” nuclear war fighting—and that the fundamentals are different—most significantly, nuclear weapons are not forward deployed.114 Nevertheless, Northeast Asian allies continue to refer to NATO as a model and benchmark. While continuing to insist that the two are not analogous, US strategists now see possibilities in the more collaborative (European) approach. Most basically, greater inclusion of Asian allies in nuclear discussions—a process that began with the creation of the extended deterrence dialogues with Japan and the ROK—would give those governments a better sense of the reality of nuclear planning as well as more responsibility for decisions that involved nuclear use.115 The importance of this evolution for USChina strategic nuclear dynamics is taken up in more detail below. A third issue is nuclear proliferation. International acceptance (even de facto) of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal could transform the calculus of US allies regarding indigenous nuclear capabilities. Nuclear dominoes could fall. Japan has long been considered a latent nuclear power, possessing the plutonium and the technological knowhow to be able to construct a bomb within a relatively short period of time. Legal and political constraints are viewed as the chief obstacles to such a decision; in fact, the most compelling rationale for forgoing nuclear weapons is strategic. Japanese security planners know that a nuclear arsenal would be of extremely limited utility, would divide the nation, and would undo a half-century of diplomacy that has been based on the country’s status as the world’s only atom-bombed nation. But if Japan were to go nuclear, then the ROK would be hardpressed not to follow. And if the ROK was compelled to match the

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North’s capabilities—a rationale often articulated sotto voce in Seoul—Japan would come under great pressure to do so as well. This chain of events—no matter who went first—would transform the Northeast Asian strategic landscape, and it is difficult to envision Taiwan not exploiting the opportunity to follow suit. That would constitute a qualitative shift in the cross-strait status quo and China has warned that it would not be permitted.116 It is not clear if US alliances would survive proliferation by those allies; such a decision would be a telling vote of no-confidence in the United States. China’s response would be equally uncertain, but proliferation would likely spur recalculation of the minimum number of weapons needed for deterrence. Proliferation could also transform regional thinking about security architecture and arms control. After North Korea was accused of cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States, subsequent negotiations included discussion of a new subregional security order. The core issue for the United States (and its allies) was getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, but central to that outcome was the creation of a security environment that afforded Pyongyang sufficient confidence to make that choice. As a result, one of the five working groups established in the Six Party Talks focused on creation of a Northeast Asia peace and security mechanism. Today, Pyongyang insists that it will give up its nuclear weapons only as part of a global nuclear disarmament initiative, or when all possible threats to it are eliminated; if that is not just a negotiating position—and it likely is not—then a solution is only possible with a regional arms control regime or new security structure.117 China insists that it will not join a nuclear arms control regime until “conditions are ripe,” which has been interpreted to mean when the world’s largest nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, reduce their arsenals to a size equal to that of China. There was always little chance of cuts sufficient to make that plausible, but suspicion of (if not hostility to) arms control among US conservatives, the reemergence of great-power competition as the guiding strategic principle in Washington, and the suspicions that increasingly dominate US-China relations make that future even more unlikely. China is similarly opposed to joining a revitalized INF arms control regime. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang argued that “the multilateralization of the INF Treaty involves a series of complex issues covering political, military and legal fields, which draws concerns from many countries. China opposes the multilateralization of this treaty.” 118 Or as State Councilor Yang Jiechi explained, “China develops its capabilities strictly according to its

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defensive needs and doesn’t pose a threat to anybody else. So we are opposed to the multilateralization of the INF [Treaty].”119 Widespread proliferation in Northeast Asia could transform the Chinese calculus, however. Beijing can afford to take an aloof position while the United States and Russia possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and China faces a limited number of potential nuclear-armed adversaries. Regional proliferation could double the number of countries against which China must defend itself, and its logic regarding large imbalances in arsenal size would inoculate new nuclear powers against demands to restrain their own capabilities. That, in combination with the deployment of a more robust regional missile defense architecture, might prompt Beijing to rethink its position and accept multilateral arms control negotiations. Finally, there is the issue of greater cooperation among the United States and its allies in Asia. For many regional security analysts, deeper integration is all but inevitable. Successive US administrations have been pushing regional allies to do more in their own defense and to contribute more to the provision of regional peace and stability. Governments in Tokyo and Canberra, and Seoul to a lesser degree, have been doing that. One of the most important initiatives is helping to build capacity among Southeast Asian governments, the Philippines and Thailand among them, through the provision of equipment or through training and exercises. This is one expression of the thickening of security relations among US allies in the region (and beyond; some European governments are increasingly engaged in Asia), a process that is evolving but not yet transforming the hub-and-spokes model that has dominated Asia’s security architecture since the end of World War II. Regional governments now embrace trilateral and quadrilateral security initiatives (although their limits become quickly apparent under scrutiny). The logic behind integration is compelling. While the Indo-Pacific region has become the priority theater in US security planning,120 Washington retains global interests and must be ready to defend them. Despite increasing US defense budgets, fiscal constraints are tightening: the prospect of trillion dollar deficits is sobering. Allies face similar restraints. Finding greater efficiencies is a must. Defense capabilities are proliferating and the gap between US capabilities and those of its allies is shrinking. That is not the case across the board, but allies excel in certain areas and Washington is encouraging them to do more in the name of burden sharing. For example, the spread of submarines in the Indo-Pacific (a predominately maritime theater) has prompted regional navies to develop ASW capa-

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bilities; Japan excels at this. Such burden sharing demands more robust communications networks, which requires yet another type of integration and poses threats of its own. Cyberspace is a critical component of strategic systems, demanding protocols, procedures, and protections all its own. National security bureaucracies are only beginning to grapple with issues attendant to its emergence as a strategic domain and their implications. One of the most fundamental is the degree to which attacks in cyberspace trigger Article 5 commitments—as is now the case with Japan—and how alliances will respond. Deeper integration also makes sense to US security planners because it gives allies more say in and greater responsibility for allied decisionmaking. It will take some time to develop procedures that appropriately apportion those burdens and give partners the means to provide their input, but the resulting decisions will be more equitable and respectful of alliance equities by definition and should thus be more democratic and just. Allied governments have similar motivations. Those governments have recognized that US charges of free or cheap riding have some validity and are ready to address those complaints to demonstrate commitment to the alliance and to be better partners. Allies see gaps in US capabilities and seek to fill them; this is evident in South Korean efforts to extend the range of its missiles, Japanese discussion of the acquisition of strike capabilities, and Australia’s 2020 Defense Strategic Update and 2020 Force Structure Plan, which prioritizes long-range strike capabilities, as well. They are cognizant of the vulnerabilities resulting from overreliance on the United States for defense and security, and the diminished room for maneuver and initiative that results. Having greater capabilities recalibrates alliance relationships, giving allied governments more say over the terms of alliance behavior and engagement. Increasing integration is not a given, however. There is another explanation for allies’ behavior: they could be acquiring capabilities and building security relationships among themselves as a hedge against inconsistent or unpredictable US behavior. Tensions within US alliances are not new. Allies have complained as frequently about US behavior as Washington has complained about theirs. To take the two most recent examples, George W. Bush was too confident and too muscular in the practice of his foreign policy while Barack Obama, by contrast, was too cerebral and too ready to challenge perceived “strategic imperatives.” But doubts about US resolve and commitment reached new levels during the Trump presidency. 121 This reflects a fundamental uncertainty in allied capitals (and sometimes

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in Washington too) about Trump’s commitment to US alliances. Previous US presidents criticized allies, but those complaints challenged their partners to do more to preserve and strengthen the prevailing regional order. There was no such certainty that Trump was committed to that structure or that he appreciated its value.122 In every allied capital in Asia, official pronouncements were unequivocal, but it took real work to miss doubts about the credibility of the US commitment to its defense under Trump.123 The most sophisticated critique of the implications of the Trump presidency among Asian allies is that of Australian strategist Hugh White, who devotes a chapter in his latest book to the prospect of Australia acquiring a nuclear capability, a debate that has been necessitated by a loss of faith in the US defense guarantee.124 Trump lost the November 2020 election but Asian allies fear that the forces that animated his foreign policy will outlive him. No US ally has been more critical of the United States than the Philippines under President Duterte. In 2016, he announced his country’s “separation” from the United States, adding that “in military, not maybe social, but economics also. America has lost.”125 That comment must be taken with the proverbial handful of salt: Duterte is a mercurial leader prone to emotional outbursts, his remarks predate the Trump presidency, and other members of his administration have walked back the more extreme declarations (as noted in the previous discussion). Nevertheless, Duterte’s thinking should be noted because he makes explicit a concern that is usually glossed over: the rise of China. Governments throughout Asia are grappling with the implications of China’s extraordinary trajectory. It is evident in economic relations. China is the leading source of imports for each US ally in Asia (as well as the United States itself), and the top export destination for Australia and South Korea. Beijing has not hesitated to use its economic leverage to influence decisionmaking in regional capitals; the THAAD controversy is the most obvious example, but it is by no means unique. China is alarmed by the prospect of deeper integration of security politics and practices among US allies, seeing it (rightly) as a check on its ambitions. As Washington promotes greater interdependence among its partners, China will do its utmost to thwart that objective, using whatever carrots and sticks it has to block progress. China’s rising capabilities may impede integration in another, cruder way: allies may question the ability of the United States to check Chinese ambitions. In other words, allies may forgo closer ties to the United States because of fear that Washington, regardless of

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intent and resolve, cannot protect them from China. That is a bleak and alarming proposition, but one that must be acknowledged as possible. A 2019 study by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney reached precisely that conclusion, noting that “America no longer enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific and its capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain.” It added that “Chinese counter-intervention systems have undermined America’s ability to project power into the Indo-Pacific, raising the risk that China could use limited force to achieve a fait accompli victory before America can respond; and challenging US security guarantees in the process.”126 The authors argue—and I agree—that the appropriate response to this deterioration in the regional balance of power is deeper integration among the United States, its allies, and like-minded nations. But it is also possible that some governments will conclude that the best way to deal with this situation is bandwagoning with China rather than balancing against it. Some historians argue that this is the traditional Asian response to a hegemonic China and that impulse should be expected to reassert itself as China continues to rise.127 The nature of twenty-first-century security challenges demands multilateral responses—not just to address transnational dangers, but because the preeminent threat is posed by nuclear-capable adversaries that seek to decouple the United States from its allies. Deeper integration makes that goal ever more difficult. It may well be time to ask whether the United States should discard its long-standing policy of “extending deterrence” and instead develop “joint” or “shared” deterrents, so that it is clear to allies and adversaries alike that security is fundamentally an integrated and partnered responsibility.128 Missile defense is a prime example of this evolution. These systems are spreading across Asia, and they must be more tightly coupled to be effective. While it is difficult to generalize across US alliances in Asia, some observations and conclusions are inescapable. First, the nature of US alliances in Asia and the variegated threat perceptions among those countries means that ambiguity in alliance commitments is inevitable. There is no one-size-fits-all policy for deterrence, assurance, and reassurance; this is the origin point for the doctrine of “tailored deterrence,” which seeks to match deterrence policy to the particulars of a given situation. Traditionally, that ambiguity has been thought to

Conclusions

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serve US interests; that may no longer be true, but it is not clear how it can be fixed. Second, while the strategic calculus has traditionally been a function of numbers, weapons systems, and other technical considerations (while also accounting for intentions), Beijing appears to pay more attention to the overall US-China relationship in its thinking. Because the frameworks of alliance concerns in Asia are essentially trilateral—the United States, the ally, and China—Beijing has more opportunities to shape alliance thinking: it can transform its relationship with the United States or with the ally. The absence of a multilateral security framework distinguishes the Chinese calculus from that of Russia, which confronts NATO. This also means that Chinese thinking about the value (or threat) of an alliance is a function of Beijing’s confidence in its ability to deal with a particular ally. US planning must anticipate and incorporate the interplay of these structural and trilateral political factors. Finally, new alliance relationships—not new alliances—are going to emerge in Asia. Deeper reliance on and integration with allies will also demand that the United States create new structures to empower or give voice to those partners. US alliances in Asia were initially formed to ensure that those partners did not create trouble and drag Washington into their disputes—and the risk of entrapment persists to this day—but they must now embrace a more genuine partnership. Inequalities will remain, but alliance planning and procedures must be more democratic. This evolution will be critical to the survival of these relationships as Asia assumes an ever more prominent role in US foreign policy.

Notes

1. US Department of Defense, National Security and Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2008), 1. 2. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2018), 2. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Rod Lyon, A Shifting Asian Nuclear Order, Special Report (Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2016), 23. 5. Integrated deterrence refers to a broad set of capabilities that cuts across various domains, including space and cyber. Effectively deterring across this spectrum remains a challenge, but preliminary assessments suggest that it creates new vulnerabilities as well as new opportunities for allies insofar as they can contribute to deterrence without having nuclear capabilities. 6. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, 2018, 22. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. See, for example, William Arkin and Hans Kristensen, “US Deploys New Low-Yield Nuclear Submarine Warhead” (Washington, DC: Federation of American

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Scientists, January 29, 2020). The Trump administration is continuing a plan established by the Barack Obama administration, but it now includes the creation of several new nuclear weapons capabilities. See Arms Control Association, “Fact Sheets and Briefs; U.S. Nuclear Modernization Programs” (Washington, DC: Arms Control Association, August 2018). 9. Tong Zhao, “US-China Strategic Stability and the Impact of Japan,” in A Precarious Triangle: US-China Strategic Stability and Japan, edited by James Schoff and Li Bin (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2017), 29. 10. Li Bin, “Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Nuclear Thinking and Their Origins,” in A Precarious Triangle: US-China Strategic Stability and Japan, edited by James Schoff and Li Bin (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2017), 11. 11. People’s Daily, “Statement by the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” October 17, 1964. 12. A Chinese strategist in James Schoff and Li Bin, eds., A Precarious Triangle: US-China Strategic Stability and Japan (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2017), 7. 13. Sun Xiangli, “The Development of Nuclear Weapons in China,” in Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking, edited by Li Bin and Tong Zhao (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), 96. 14. Wu Riqiang, “How China Practices and Thinks About Nuclear Transparency,” in Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking, edited by Li Bin and Tong Zhao (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), 228. 15. Yao Yunzhu, “Chinese Nuclear Policy and the Future of Minimum Deterrence,” Strategic Insights 9, no. 9 (September 2005): 2. 16. That said, the language of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the PRC and the DPRK comes very close to creating an alliance. It states that “in the event of one of the Contracting Parties . . . being involved in a state of war, the other Contracting Party shall immediately render military and other assistance by all means at its disposal.” The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance Between the PRC and the DPRK, July 11, 1961, https://www .marxists.org/subject/china/documents/china_dprk.htm. 17. A sweeping generalization follows. 18. Wu Riqiang, “Issues in Sino-US Nuclear Relations: Survivability, Coercion and Escalation,” (UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Research and Analysis, London, June 21, 2013). 19. Li Bin argues that “nuclear deterrence and compellence are often indistinguishable. Chinese scholars often do not make a deliberate distinction between the two, so when Chinese scholars use the term ‘nuclear deterrence,’ it includes the idea of nuclear compellence, which makes their use of the term ‘nuclear deterrence’ equivalent to the term ‘nuclear coercion’ as it is used by U.S. scholars.” Li Bin and Tong Zhao, eds., Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking, (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), 10. 20. Yunzhu, “Chinese Nuclear Policy and the Future of Minimum Deterrence,” 7–8. 21. The best analysis of the origins, meanings, and implications of strategic stability is Elbridge Colby and Michael Gerson, eds., Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations (Washington, DC: Strategic Studies Institute, 2013). 22. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2010), 34. 23. This analysis draws on Victor Cha, Powerplay: The American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 24. Ibid., 4. Japan, Cha notes, is a slightly different story. 25. Ibid.

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26. Catharin Dalpino, “Obama in Thailand: Charting a New Course for the Alliance?” Asia Pacific Bulletin, no. 188, December 4, 2012. 27. Ibid. 28. Marwan Macan-Markar, “Thailand-US Defense Ties Heal as China Makes Gains in Cambodia,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 18, 2019. 29. This and subsequent mentions of US-China Track 1.5 and Track 2 discussions refer to more than a decade of US-China strategic nuclear dialogues that the Pacific Forum has run or facilitated, and in which I played an organizational role. Reports from most of those meetings are available at the Pacific Forum website, www.pacforum .org. 30. “Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of the Philippines,” August 30, 1951. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/phil001.asp. 31. The quotes and the conclusion are from Mira Rapp Hooper, “Uncharted Waters: Extended Deterrence and Maritime Disputes,” Washington Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2015): 136. 32. Pia Ranada, “South China Sea Covered by PH-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty— Pompeo,” The Rappler, March 1, 2019. 33. Ralph Cossa, Brad Glosserman, and Matt Pottinger, “Progress Despite Disagreements: The Sixth US-China Dialogue on Strategic Nuclear Dynamics,” Pacific Forum Issues & Insights 12, no. 5 (February 2011): 5. 34. Jason Gutierrez, “Philippines Backs Off Threat to Terminate Military Pact with the U.S.,” New York Times, June 2, 2020. 35. Reuters, “Philippines Extends Termination of U.S. Troop Deal, Eyes LongTerm Defense Pact,” November 11, 2020. 36. Australian Department of Defense, 2016 Defense White Paper, (Canberra: Australia Department of Defence, 2016), 15. 37. US Department of State, “US Relations with Australia: Bilateral Fact Sheet,” Washington, DC, January 21, 2020, https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with -australia/. 38. Australia Department of Defence, 2016 Defense White Paper, 121. 39. Richard Tanter, “Just in Case: Extended Nuclear Deterrence in the Defense of Australia,” Pacific Focus 26, no. 21 (April 2011): 121. 40. The quotation is from Australian Department of Defence, White Paper: Defence 2000—Our Future Defence Force (Canberra: Australia Department of Defence, 2000), 36. 41. Stephan Fruehling, Andrew O’Neil, and David Santoro, “Escalating Cooperation: Nuclear Deterrence and the US-Australia Alliance,” Deterrence Brief, November 2019. 42. I am indebted to Brad Roberts for highlighting this point. 43. Ashley Townsend, David Santoro, and Brendan Thomas-Noone, “Revisiting Deterrence in an Era of Strategic Competition: US-Australia Indo-Pacific Deterrence Dialogue,” United States Studies Centre, Sydney (February 2019), 14. 44. Lyon, A Shifting Asian Nuclear Order, 23. 45. Ralph Cossa, Brad Glosserman, and David Santoro, “Progress Continues, but Disagreements Remain: The Seventh US-China Dialogue on Strategic Nuclear Dynamics,” Pacific Forum Issues & Insights 13, no. 6 (January 2013): 5. 46. Townsend, Santoro, and Thomas-Noone, “Revisiting Deterrence in an Era of Strategic Competition,” 2. 47. Australian Department of Defence, 2020 Defence Strategic Update, Canberra, 2020, 3. 48. Ibid., 33. 49. Ibid., 37. 50. Townsend, Santoro, and Thomas-Noone, “Revisiting Deterrence in an Era of Strategic Competition,” 14. 51. Australian Department of Defence, 2020 Defence Strategic Update, 27.

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52. Kim Hyung Wook, “South Korea Still Needs Extended Deterrence,” in Weathering Change: The Future of Extended Nuclear Deterrence, edited by Rory Medcalf (Sydney, Australia: Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2011), 24. 53. Joint Vision Statement of the United States of America and the Republic of Korea, White House, Washington, DC, June 16, 2009. https://obamawhitehouse .archives.gov/the-press-office/joint-vision-alliance-united-states-america-and-republic -korea. 54. See, for example, Choi Kang, “A South Korean Perspective,” The Asan Forum, September 1, 2013; Lee Jong-heon, “Calls for Nuclear Weapons in South Korea,” United Press International, October 21, 2009. 55. Ahn Sung Kyoo, Choi Kang, and Kweon Eun You, “Implications of China’s Ballistic Missiles for Korean National Security,” Issue Brief (Asan Institute of Policy Studies, Seoul, November 10, 2015), 1. 56. Kang, “A South Korean Perspective.” 57. See, for example, the discussion in Ralph Cossa, Brad Glosserman, and David Santoro, “Reaching an Inflection Point? The Tenth US-China Dialogue on Strategic Nuclear Dynamics,” Pacific Forum Issues & Insights, 16, no. 20 (December 2016). 58. Pulse, “China’s THAAD Retaliation May Cost Korea’s GDP $14.76bn; Private Study,” March 8, 2017. 59. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” Beijing, July 2019, 4. 60. Paul Choi, personal communication with the author, June 11, 2019. 61. Email communication with the author, June 11, 2019. 62. See Brad Glosserman, “Far, Far More than Meets the Eye: Extended Deterrence in Complex Crisis in Northeast Asia,” Report from the Sixth US-Japan-ROK Extended Deterrence Dialogue, Pacific Forum Issues & Insights 20, no. 2 (June 2020). See also Brad Glosserman, “Seeds of New Thinking in Seoul,” PacNet, no. 48, July 19, 2018. 63. Japan Ministry of Defense, “Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee,” Tokyo, April 19, 2019. https://www.mofa.go.jp/files/000470738.pdf. 64. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Joint Statement,” Tokyo, February 10, 2017. https://www.mofa.go.jp/files/000227768.pdf. 65. Japan Ministry of Defense, “Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee.” The islands are called the Daioyu in Chinese. 66. Tajima Yukio, “Biden affirms security treaty applies to Senkakus in Suga call,” Nikkei Asia, November 12, 2020. 67. Ibid. 68. Kurt Campbell and Tsuyoshi Tsunohara, “Japan: Thinking the Unthinkable,” in The Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices, edited by Kurt Campbell, Robert J. Einhorn, and Michael Reiss (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 218–253. 69. Mark Fitzpatrick, Asia’s Latent Nuclear Powers: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2016), 66. 70. Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, “The US-Japan Alliance and the Problem of Deterrence” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, February 22, 2018). 71. Japan Ministry of Defense, “Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation,” Tokyo, 2015. https://www.mod.go.jp/e/d_act/anpo/shishin_20150427e.html. 72. Japan’s missile defense plans are a work in progress following the June 2020 decision by Defense Minister Kono Taro to cancel the Aegis Ashore deployment. As of the end of 2020, the government of Japan opted to acquire two “superdestroyers” equipped with Aegis capabilities but that proposal seems ad hoc. Kobara Junnosuke, “Japan’s plans for 2 superdestroyers to cost more than Aegis Ashore,” Nikkei Asia, November 25, 2020. 73. Julian Ryall, “US Plans to Detect Chinese Missile Launches with Radar in Japan,” South China Morning Post, January 29, 2019.

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74. Japan Ministry of Defense, “Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation,” 2015. 75. A notable exception occurred during the US-Soviet negotiations over intermediate-range missiles, when Japan complained that the weapons had to be banned and not just removed from Europe. 76. Elaine Bunn, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, in Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, “The US-Japan Alliance and the Problem of Deterrence” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, February 22, 2018), 8. My organization, Pacific Forum, has also contributed with bilateral and trilateral USJapan-ROK extended deterrence dialogues, an initiative supported by the Department of Defense. 77. Tosaki Hirofumi, “Japan Still Relies on Extended Deterrence,” in Weathering Change: The Future of Extended Nuclear Deterrence, edited by Rory Medcalf (Sydney, Australia: Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2011), 22. 78. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Release of the Nuclear Posture Review: Statement of Foreign Minister Taro Kono,” Tokyo, February 2, 2018, http://www.mofa.go.jp/press/release/press4e_001893.html. 79. Michishita Nobushige, in “The US-Japan Alliance and the Problem of Deterrence” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, February 22, 2018), 22. 80. Both quotations are by Eric Heginbotham, in “The US-Japan Alliance and the Problem of Deterrence” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, February 22, 2018), 14. This position necessitates a balancing act for Japanese policymakers who also remain committed (rhetorically at least) to nuclear disarmament. The circle is squared (or at least explained) in Brad Glosserman, “Japan’s Disarmament Tightropes and Triangulation,” in Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, edited by James Brown and Jeff Kingston (New York: Routledge, 2018), 61-74. 81. Satoh Yukio, US Extended Deterrence and Japan’s Stability, Livermore Papers on Global Security No. 2 (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research, 2017), 31. 82. Shinichi Ogawa, http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/BorderStudies/en/essays/transcripts /pdf/Shinichi_Ogawa.pdf. 83. Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, “The US-Japan Alliance and the Problem of Deterrence,” 17 84. The official was Brad Roberts, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy. The quotation is from Zhao, “US-China Strategic Stability and the Impact of Japan,” 38. 85. Tosaki, “Japan Still Relies on Extended Deterrence,” 23. 86. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” 4. 87. See Cossa, Glosserman, and Pottinger, “Progress Despite Disagreements”; Cossa, Glosserman, and Santoro, “Progress Continues, but Disagreements Remain.” 88. Ralph Cossa, Brad Glosserman, and David Santoro, “US-China Strategic Nuclear Relations: Time to Move to Track-1 Dialogue: The Ninth US-China Dialogue on Strategic Nuclear Dynamics,” Pacific Forum Issues & Insights 15, no. 17 (February 2015). 89. Schoff and Bin, A Precarious Triangle, 7. 90. Yunzhu, “Chinese Nuclear Policy and the Future of Minimum Deterrence,” 7–8. 91. Schoff and Bin, A Precarious Triangle, 9. 92. Ibid., 8. 93. Yang Yi, “East Asia’s Nuclear Future,” in Perspectives on Sino-American Nuclear Issues, edited by Christopher Twomey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 128.

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94. Linton Brooks and Mira Rapp-Hooper, “Extended Deterrence, Assurance and Reassurance in the Pacific During the Second Nuclear Age,” in Strategic Asia: 2013– 14: Asia in the Second Nuclear Age, edited by Ashley Tellis, Abraham Denmark, and Travis Tanner (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2013), 274. 95. The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review was and remains classified, but there is considerable reporting of its contents. See, for example, Hans Kristensen, “US Nuclear Planning After the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review,” presentation, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, October 21, 2004. http://www.nukestrat.com/pubs/Brief2004_MarylandUniversity .pdf; United States Department of Defense, “Nuclear Posture Review Report 2001: Excerpts,” Washington DC, January 8, 2002, 5. https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci211z /2.6/NPR2001leaked.pdf. 96. Chris Buckley and Chris Horton, “Xi Jinping Warns Taiwan that Unification Is the Goal and Force Is an Option,” New York Times, January 1, 2019. 97. The official was General Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of the Chinese General Staff, and the US official was Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman Jr. Barton Gellman, “U.S. and China Nearly Came to Blows in ’96,” Washington Post, June 21, 1998. 98. Caitlin Talmadge, “Beijing’s Nuclear Option,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 6 (November–December 2018): 44-50. 99. Yunzhu, “Chinese Nuclear Policy and the Future of Minimum Deterrence,” 7. 100. “President Donald J. Trump to Withdraw the United States from the IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,” White House, February 1, 2019. https://www .whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-withdraw-united-states -intermediate-range-nuclear-forces-inf-treaty/. 101. US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “China’s Missile Program and US Withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,” Staff Report, Washington DC, February 4, 2019. 102. Ibid., 4. 103. Sugio Takahashi and Eric Sayers, “America and Japan in a Post-INF World,” War on the Rocks, March 8, 2019. 104. Hugh White, “US Could Ask Australia to Host Nuclear Missiles,” The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), January 17, 2019. 105. Takahashi and Sayers, “America and Japan in a Post-INF World.” 106. Shi Yinhong, quoted in US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “China’s Missile Program and US Withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,” 5. 107. Zhou Bo, quoted in US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “China’s Missile Program and US Withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,” 6. 108. Chico Harlan, “South Korea Extends Missile Range Under New Deal with the US,” Washington Post, October 7, 2012. 109. See Glosserman, “Far, Far More than Meets the Eye”; Glosserman, “Seeds of New Thinking in Seoul.” 110. James Schoff and David Song, “Five Things to Know About Japan’s Possible Acquisition of Strike Capability” (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, August 14, 2017). 111. Brad Glosserman, “Japan’s Strike Options Assume New Urgency,” Japan Times, June 22, 2020. 112. Rod Lyon, personal communication with the author, May 31, 2019. 113. Tsuruoka Michito, “The NATO vs. East Asian Models of Extended Nuclear Deterrence? Seeking a Synergy Beyond Dichotomy,” Special Forum, The Asan Forum, June 30, 2016. 114. Clark A. Murdoch and Jessica M. Yeats, “Exploring the Nuclear Posture Implications of Extended Deterrence and Assurance: Workshop Proceedings and Key

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Takeaways,” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 2009), 27, 53. 115. See Glosserman, “Far, Far More than Meets the Eye.” By the fall of 2019, Japanese officials were voicing more skepticism about the applicability of the NATO model and less desire to see it replicated. 116. The Economist, “Dancing with the Enemy,” January 13, 2005. 117. The United States is not the only threat to North Korea; even with an alliance once touted to be “as close as lips and teeth,” North Korean interlocutors have made clear that they too see China as a potential adversary. 118. “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang’s Remarks on the US Suspending INF Treaty Obligations and Beginning Withdrawal Process,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Beijing, February 2, 2019. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa _eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2535_665405/t1635268.shtml. 119. Robert Emmott, “China Rebuffs Germany’s Call for U.S. Missile Deal with Russia,” Reuters, February 17, 2019. 120. See US Department of Defense, Indo-Pacific Strategy Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2019), 1. “The Indo-Pacific is the single most consequential region for America’s future.” 121. Tanaka Hitoshi, “The Crisis of US Credibility in East Asia,” JCIE East Asia Insights, October 2019. For a more positive assessment of Trump administration policy, see Y.A., “The Virtues of a Confrontational China Strategy,” The American Interest, April 10, 2020. 122. Tucker Higgins, “Trump Questions Japan Defense Pact,” CNBC, June 26, 2019. 123. See, for example, Nakayama Toshihiro, “Can the Japan-US Alliance Survive the Trump Presidency?” Nippon.com, May 16, 2017; Zack Cooper, “Hard Truths About the US-Australia Alliance,” The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), July 9, 2018; Japan Times, “Worry over US-South Korea Alliance Grows Ahead of Trump-Kim Summit,” February 23, 2019. 124. Hugh White, How to Defend Australia (Melbourne, Australia: La Trobe University Press, July 2019). To be clear, White’s is a minority position in Australia, but he is a compelling and forward-looking analyst and his arguments demand attention and consideration. 125. Ben Blanchard, “Duterte Aligns Philippines with China, Says US Has Lost,” Reuters, October 20, 2016. 126. Ashley Townsend, Brendan Thomas-Noone, and Matilda Stewart, Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defense in the IndoPacific (Sydney, Australia: US Studies Centre, 2019), 2 127. David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 128. To be clear, I am calling for an end only to use of the term extended deterrence. The United States should continue to extend its nuclear deterrent to those allies.

6 Competitive Deterrence? The United States, China, and South Asia Toby Dalton

NUCLEAR COMPETITION IN SOUTHERN ASIA APPEARS TO GROW deeper by the day. The list of indicators is long: acquisition by Pakistan, India, and China of more precise ballistic and cruise missiles; development of multiple reentry vehicle capabilities; launches of reconnaissance satellites and tests of antisatellite (ASAT) weapons; pursuit of ballistic missile defenses (BMD); and increases in nuclear arsenals. Debates on nuclear posture and declaratory policy are heating up while arguments in support of restraint and confidence-building dialogue receive little sympathy among policymakers. Nuclear deterrence attracts more disciples in the region, even as the tenets are under increasing political and technological strain. These developments seem to share common threads in Islamabad, New Delhi, and Beijing—and, even though it is geographically distant, Washington. The existence of these indicators notwithstanding, the drivers of nuclear competition in Southern Asia are a matter of conflicting narratives. Pakistanis justify their adoption of tactical nuclear weapons as a response to a perceived Indian desire to escape the confines of nuclear deterrence to wage war “under the nuclear threshold.” For their part, Indians assert that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are a function of a Chinese encirclement strategy aimed at circumscribing India’s aspirations to be a global power. Meanwhile, Chinese worry that US BMD programs, including cooperation with India and US allies in East Asia, indicate that Washington seeks to undermine 161

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China’s nuclear deterrent. US officials, increasingly concerned about more aggressive Chinese military behavior in the East and South China Seas, look to close perceived deterrence gaps by augmenting theater BMD and precision-strike systems, and enhancing military alignment with allies and partner countries on China’s periphery. In this chapter, I focus on the intersections between the Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, and US nuclear narratives about the region. Unlike other “triangles” studied in this volume, the existence of a causally linked Southern Asian nuclear competition involving these four states is less obvious, as is its “geometry.” If the security dilemmas are contained mainly between Pakistan and India and between China and the United States (setting aside India-China relations, for the moment), then sharper competition between Beijing and Washington may have relatively few spillover effects in South Asia. Similarly, more conflictual India-Pakistan relations should not have major implications for US-China relations. Arms race dynamics and security spirals in these two dyads would remain separate, meaning policy options for managing nuclear competition could be bilateral. Yet if the security dilemmas among the four states are causally linked, then the picture is far more complicated and the future far more uncertain. Competitive effects in one dyad could have ripple effects on others. Complex deterrence relationships might push states toward larger, more capable strategic arsenals to deal with threats from multiple adversaries, exacerbating crisis instability. Arms control or other restraint measures would also require asymmetric, multiparty arrangements among states with unequal distributions of power, which in other regions have proved incredibly difficult to negotiate, let alone sustain. These issues frame the puzzle that I explore in this chapter: how best to understand the past, present, and future shape of nuclear competition in Southern Asia, specifically the development and posturing of nuclear weapons and related offensive and defensive military systems. Is nuclear competition in Southern Asia based on a set of differentiated security dilemmas that are largely self-contained within each pair of states, or are there causal relationships between them that create systemic effects? As US-China strategic competition grows, what effects might it have in South Asia? Similarly, what impacts might more intense competition in South Asia have on USChina relations? Finally, which potential drivers of competition— technology, nuclear posture, broader geostrategic alignments, domestic politics—might be most important?

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There is little doubt that strategic competition exists between the United States and China, and between India and Pakistan. ChinaIndia nuclear relations are less clear-cut, characterized by a mix of deep economic integration, occasionally fraught military relations, and clear regional security competition. The puzzle for analysts is about the relationship between these three dyads, and specifically whether and how nuclear weapons catalyze effects that flow between them. Analytic models are the most useful way to generate hypotheses about the directionality and causality of such spillover effects. In this chapter, I employ three models for heuristic purposes to highlight distinct and competing ideas about the nature and geometry of nuclear competition in Southern Asia. The three models are:

Three Models of Strategic Southern Asia

• A “top-down” inverted triangle, with South Asia serving as a theater of US-China competition. • A “strategic chain” with linkages between the three competitive dyads—Pakistan-India, India-China, and China-US—that create spillover effects between them. • A “stratified, quadrilateral competition” with nuclear rivalry concentrated in a US-China global strata and an India-Pakistan regional strata, with complex interdependence operating between the two strata that affects the likelihood of spillover from one strata to the other.

The United States and India are strategic partners, as are China and Pakistan. The United States seeks to facilitate India’s rise and aims to enmesh New Delhi in a broader regional framework that implicitly seeks to blunt China’s global influence.1 Washington led global diplomacy to remove barriers to nuclear trade with India, which arguably permitted India to expand its nuclear weapons program. For its part, China invests considerable funding in Pakistan through the Belt and Road Initiative to extend its strategic reach across Asia. This builds on long-standing Chinese support for Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs, presumably to keep India preoccupied in the subcontinent and to help Pakistan maintain a rough nuclear balance with India. These parallel strategic partnerships comprise the legs of a top-down strategic triangle (Figure 6.1) that feeds competition in South Asia, and which Washington and Beijing utilize in their global competition, but without any upward feedback loop that directly impacts US-China nuclear stability.

The Top-Down Inverted Triangle

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Figure 6.1 The Top-Down Model of Nuclear Competition in Southern Asia

The US-India and China-Pakistan strategic partnerships intensify nuclear rivalry in South Asia. According to this model, South Asia serves as a theater for US-China competition. Beijing and Washington could seek to bolster the strategic programs of their partners in South Asia as a means of damaging the other’s interests. For instance, Washington may cooperate with Indian BMD programs to build a regional shield aimed at blunting China’s offensive missile capabilities. Alternatively, China might provide similar technologies to Pakistan to counteract US-India cooperation and prevent India from gaining a nuclear advantage. Further, Chinese nuclear and missile buildup and changes in nuclear posture or policy deriving from US-China strategic competition might lead India to take countervailing steps such as increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal or fielding missiles with multiple warheads. This model does not envisage bottom-up influence reverberating from the region back onto US-China competition. Plainly, what happens in the region stays in the region. More specifically, the model would predict that the United States and China would not make changes in their strategic programs as a result of events in South Asia, especially Indian nuclear or missile developments in the case of China. Beijing possesses a larger conventional military and more advanced nuclear arsenal than India, and any adaptation or augmen-

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tation of its strategic programs to address threats from the United States would inherently also give it greater capability against India. The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 established a security dilemma between Pakistan and India, since punctuated by three wars and several dangerous militarized crises that could escalate to use of nuclear weapons. India and China also experience a security dilemma, though more narrowly bounded than that between Pakistan and India. India and China fought a limited border conflict in 1962, and China’s first nuclear test in 1964 was among the impetuses for India’s decision to go nuclear. As described previously in this volume, China and the United States also experience a security dilemma that is driving each to acquire strategic capabilities. Together, these three overlapping security dilemmas form a strategic chain that links the nuclear programs of all four states.2 (See Figure 6.2.) The basic logic of the strategic chain is that “while Pakistan responds strategically to India, India responds both to Pakistan and China, which in turn responds both to India and the United States.”3 Implicit in this characterization, as opposed to the top-down model described above, are strategic effects generated by actions at any point along the chain that can flow in either direction. Actions initiated by the United States could generate downstream effects in Pakistan, and vice versa. From the standpoint of influence on US-China competition, the key link in this model is that between India and China. If Indian developments cause China to take measures that, in turn, factor into US-China nuclear relations, South Asia would serve as more than a theater for competition: it could catalyze a deepening of the USChina security dilemma.

The Strategic Chain

Figure 6.2 The Strategic Chain Model of Nuclear Competition in Southern Asia

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The United States and China are the dominant actors in the international system. US-China competition is essentially global, between great powers; nuclear weapons are one aspect of this contest. US and Chinese national security strategies and nuclear weapons modernization programs contain references to growing bilateral competition, despite persistent and substantial asymmetries in the sizes of their arsenals. In comparison, India-Pakistan competition is regional, based on a complicated history and ideational factors, with nuclear capabilities that are in rough parity. Unless a nuclear war occurs in South Asia, events there are unlikely to have global implications. ChinaIndia competition is not as obviously nuclearized as US-China and India-Pakistan relations. Both New Delhi and Beijing are acquiring strategic technologies and keep a wary eye on each other. But they also share a no-first-use (NFU) declaratory policy that arguably stabilizes deterrence by dampening action-reaction impulses, and it is difficult to imagine a limited border conflict escalating into a major conflict that would involve nuclear deterrence. One way to characterize the variation in strategic competition between Pakistan and India, India and China, and China and the United States is to conceive of a quadrilateral framework defined by two horizontal strata: a global strata involving the United States and China; a regional one involving India and Pakistan; and an interstrata space involving “a complex and contradictory set of PakistanIndia-China-United States relations, in which each is both friend and foe to the others.”4 This space is not primarily defined by nuclear competition, rather something closer to complex interdependence. (See Figure 6.3.) This model posits that the drivers of competition are largely intrinsic, that competition stays contained between the United States and China and between India and Pakistan. The question is more about the permeability of the boundaries between the two strata, and the extent to which the complex relations that exist between all four states amplify or dampen competition in either strata. In the complex, interstrata space, contemporary US-Pakistan relations are complicated by a history of close military relations and cooperation in Afghanistan, with growing estrangement and fears in Pakistan of US threats to its nuclear arsenal. India and China have significant economic trade, but experience periodic military tensions over unresolved Himalayan borders. Interdependence is often presumed to dampen the potential for conflict and, in this instance, could mitigate potential spread of competition from one

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strata to another.5 Significantly, as opposed to the top-down and strategic chain models, the strata model would predict no clear spillover effects from US-China competition influencing India-Pakistan nuclear relations, and vice versa. No model is a perfect map to reality, and some evidence may align with more than one model. In their simplifications, each of these models distorts some important attributes of strategic competition in Southern Asia. Critically, they also obscure underlying variables that help explain dynamics in individual states or dyads such as bureaucratic politics, technology choices, and civil-military relations. These limitations aside, the models are sufficiently distinct to generate competing ideas about the direction of competition between the four states in question, which is necessary for assessing which geometry best describes the region. Interestingly, the greatest variation in the predictions of the three models centers on the ChinaIndia dyad. The top-down model ascribes it no weight, which ensures no upward feedback loop. The strategic chain model stipulates the existence of a security dilemma that bridges the four actors. And the strata model suggests a complex relationship that keeps nuclear relations at less than full strategic competition.

Figure 6.3 The Stratified Quadrilateral Model of Nuclear Competition in Southern Asia

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Alignments, Realignments, and Strategic Developments Before the Bomb: 1950–1998

Following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Beijing and Washington often engaged directly in South Asian affairs. Perceived Cold War imperatives served as primary shapers of US, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani relations in South Asia. After its fragile birth, Pakistan sought to manipulate Cold War rivalries to attract an external balancer against India. The United States and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement in 1954. China signed a friendship agreement with Pakistan in 1956, a relationship that grew after the SinoSoviet split in 1960, Sino-Indian border conflict in 1962, and the Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971. Like Washington, Beijing viewed Pakistan through the prism of Cold War politics as a useful regional counterweight to the Indo-Soviet partnership.6 Ultimately, Pakistan played a role in facilitating the normalization of US-China relations in 1972, leading to a US-China-Pakistan alignment that endured until the late 1980s. Meanwhile, India adopted a formal position of nonalignment, but more closely aligned with the Soviet Union. In 1971, New Delhi signed a friendship and cooperation treaty with Moscow that cemented a defense and security relationship, which endures in several respects today. India began its nuclear research program in 1948, and Pakistan followed in 1954. Both programs benefited substantially from the US Atoms for Peace program, under which advanced states shared nuclear technology with developing countries for peaceful purposes. Despite the peaceful basis of this early cooperation, however, questions about nuclear weapons naturally arose in both India and Pakistan. From the beginning of its nuclear age, Indian leaders were ambivalent about acquiring nuclear weapons, but nonetheless wove ambiguity about the long-term potential for such weapons into the fabric of program planning. Successive Indian political leaders sustained a technical program and an opaque governance structure that created the foundation for a nuclear weapons effort. Ultimately, George Perkovich assesses, “the founders of India’s nuclear establishment recognized and welcomed from the beginning the options its military dimensions gave to India, notwithstanding [then prime minister Jawaharlal] Nehru’s genuine hope that India could retain a purely peaceful mission. They did this in 1948, before the Communist takeover of China, before any military threat from China was appreciated, and, indeed, before a major external threat to India was posited.”7

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A short but intense border war between China and India in 1962, followed by China’s first nuclear test in 1964 led Indian strategists to call for development of a survivable nuclear force, less for reasons of deterring specific Chinese threats than a more general requirement to balance Beijing.8 Fears of Chinese coercion grew after Washington and Beijing began to normalize relations and Washington informed New Delhi that it would no longer side with India in a future confrontation against China.9 Yet for some Indian strategists, the China threat was a less compelling rationale for nuclear weapons than other arguments; namely, status and currency in the global corridors of international politics. These arguments mean that it is not possible to attribute India’s nuclear decisionmaking solely to top-down considerations. Ultimately, Indian political leaders agreed to a plan by nuclear scientists to demonstrate a “peaceful nuclear explosive,” but decided not to initiate a fullscale weapons program.10 India’s May 1974 nuclear test shocked many capitals, yet was summarily ignored in Beijing, passed off as causing no military concern.11 Significantly, following the test (though not because of it), China and India resumed diplomatic relations in 1975 and trade relations in 1977.12 Official debate in Pakistan over whether to pursue nuclear weapons started much later than in India. In its first decade of statehood, Pakistan had no means to organize a nuclear weapons program, and instead focused on winning military aid and support from the United States. There was little public debate about acquiring nuclear weapons until the charismatic, populist politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began to advocate vociferously for nuclear weapons in the early 1960s. After China’s first nuclear test in 1964, then foreign minister Bhutto concluded that India would also go nuclear and that Pakistan would therefore have to follow suit to deter India.13 In 1965, Bhutto initiated successful diplomacy with China to secure its help with nuclear weapons, a result he would later term “his greatest achievement and contribution to the survival of our people and nation.”14 For Pakistan, successive defeats in wars with India affirmed arguments inside the government and military that nuclear weapons were a security imperative. After Bhutto became prime minister in 1971, followed by the devastating loss of East Pakistan and the capture of some 90,000 prisoners of war by India, he launched the weapons program with a challenge to Pakistani scientists to construct a bomb within three years.15 India’s 1974 test hastened the bomb effort. In Feroz Khan’s account of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, the Indian test was “a defining moment for the Pakistan military. Until then, it had been seemingly oblivious to the implications

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of the nuclear ambitions in the neighborhood and ignorant of the development in India.”16 To jump-start its nuclear weapons program, the Pakistani government launched in the late 1960s what could be described as a major shopping expedition, seeking nuclear fuel cycle technology from China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and later Belgium, France, and Germany. Initially, Pakistan sourced nuclear weapons design information from declassified US Manhattan Project documents.17 Chinese nuclear assistance also began to flow to Pakistan in 1976 and was probably important in helping Pakistan speed past challenging technical hurdles that otherwise could have slowed, but likely not fully impeded, its program. Pakistani accounts of Chinese technical assistance tend to characterize it as a “supplemental contribution,”18 but also stipulate that China’s nuclear assistance remains a tightly held secret.19 There are no Chinese sources that describe this relationship or China’s motivations for assisting Pakistan’s nuclear weapons effort. Western analyses tend to ascribe Chinese assistance more weight than Pakistani narratives. China reportedly transferred 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (in return for access to Pakistan’s advanced centrifuge design purloined from European companies by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan), ring magnets for Pakistan’s centrifuges, and technology and heavy water for Pakistan’s plutonium production reactors at Khushab. One report also described Chinese transfers of a validated nuclear weapon (the CHIC-4) and technology to build a bomb initiator, and extensive training of Pakistani nuclear weapons scientists.20 This account also argues that China even conducted a nuclear test for Pakistan in 1990. This top-down Chinese intervention in the region is critical, though Pakistan clearly was highly motivated to seek out such assistance. The missile race in South Asia lagged the nuclear competition by over a decade. India inaugurated an Integrated Guided Missile Development Program in 1983, consisting of two parallel lines of effort: the liquid-fueled, short-range Prithvi; and the solid-fuel Agni, intended initially as a longer-range technology demonstrator. Pakistan initiated its missile program in 1987, drawing on training and rocket motor technology provided through US assistance to Pakistan’s nascent space program in the 1960s, and perhaps also French sounding rocket technology.21 Pakistan began with the short-range, solid-fuel Hatf-1, which it tested first in 1989 after India had tested its first Prithvi missile. As with nuclear weapons technology, Pakistan’s missile program received a boost in the early 1990s when China began to transfer missiles.22 Analysts believe China also supplied cruise missile technology,

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solid-fuel motor technology that would provide a basis for longerrange ballistic missiles, and a turnkey missile production facility constructed at Fatehjang, outside Islamabad.23 Probably so that it would not be dependent on just one supplier, Pakistan also acquired North Korean liquid-fuel missile technology during the 1990s. Early developments in India and Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs show the presence of both top-down drivers and a bilateral security dilemma: South Asia was a theater of Cold War competition (primarily between the United States and Soviet Union, less the United States and China), as the top-down model would indicate, yet featured periodic India-Pakistan conflict that was a product of their unique history, which is more indicative of the strata model. As Indian and Pakistani leaders made decisions about crossing the nuclear threshold, both regional threat perception and top-down factors continued to play a role. India initially was concerned about China’s weapons in the 1960s, then shifted focus to Pakistan’s weapons development in the 1970s, consistent with the strata model. Interventions by the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had a substantial impact on the course of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development effort, suggestive of the top-down model. From the mid-1970s, after India’s nuclear test, the United States mounted a new effort to restrict nuclear technology trade, leading to the founding of what became the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 1979. As evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons efforts mounted, Washington also urged Western nuclear suppliers to shut off the technology spigot to Islamabad. But once Pakistan was again a “frontline” state in the US contest with the Soviet Union after 1979, Washington grew more restrained in its efforts to pressure and contain Pakistan’s nuclear activities, in the process waiving its own nonproliferation requirements to sustain military support to Pakistan.24 For most of the 1980s, therefore, Chinese nuclear technical assistance and US military support flowed simultaneously to Pakistan, making it a far more formidable threat to India. In particular, Washington supplied some forty F-16s, which Pakistan reportedly modified to carry a nuclear gravity bomb.25 By the time of the so-called Brasstacks crises between India and Pakistan in 1987, a nascent form of nuclear deterrence had already taken hold in South Asia.26 As elsewhere, the unraveling of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s scrambled the South Asian order and new, more complex alignments emerged. No longer needing to confront Soviet troops in

Crossing the Threshold

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Afghanistan following their withdrawal in 1989, the United States shifted policy on Pakistan in a belated effort to use sanctions and other economic pressures to contain Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program. At the same time, both China and the United States improved relations with India, which welcomed the engagement as it lost support from a crumbling Soviet Union. China even became a supplier of fuel for Indian nuclear power reactors, and Chinese president Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese leader to visit India in late 1996. The net effect was a solidified China-Pakistan alignment, but also an increasingly cooperative China-India relationship (albeit periodically seized by the disputed border), ruptured US-Pakistan ties, nascent India-US partnership, and a general Russian retrenchment from the region apart from continued military sales to India. All of these developments seemed to diminish the importance of top-down drivers and shift the region more toward the quad indicated by the strata model. Further, the shifts in political alignment reshaped the South Asia security space in ways that contributed to India and Pakistan opting to make their nuclear capabilities overt.27 In early 1998, a new Hindu nationalist government came to power in India committed to transforming India’s incipient nuclear capability into a force in being. The first step was to order a round of nuclear tests, which India conducted on May 11 and 13, 1998. Indian officials provided two justifications for the tests and decision to build an arsenal. First, they described a general requirement for strategic deterrence as part of India’s aspirations for a global role. One senior Indian official argued that “we had to show a credible deterrent capability not only to the outside world, but to our own people.”28 The permanent extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995, which froze India outside the treaty unless it disarmed, motivated this argument.29 The other justification was the perceived threat from China, and especially Chinese assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs. Days before the tests, Indian defense minister George Fernandes publicly called China “potential threat number one,”30 while in a letter to then US president Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee argued that “we have an overt nuclearweapon state on our borders . . . which committed armed aggression against India in 1962.”31 Many questioned the China justification, however, wondering how nuclear weapons would deter China from initiating low-level border aggression.32 The mixed evidence around India’s nuclear tests seems to fit neither the top-down nor the strata model. Two weeks after the Indian tests, Pakistan “settled the score,” in the words of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, conducting its own nuclear

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tests on May 28 and 30, 1998.33 There was no doubt about Pakistan’s rationale for testing, given its perceived imperative to achieve strategic parity with India. The United States, China, and others condemned the tests by both countries and passed UN Security Council Resolution 1172, which called the tests a threat to international peace and security and demanded that India and Pakistan reverse their programs. The tests also triggered punitive, congressionally mandated US sanctions, which had sought to deter the two from making their nuclear weapons overt. The sanctions hit both economies hard, especially Pakistan’s. Assessing this early period of Southern Asian strategic history, the data lend some support to the top-down model. The United States and China both sought partnerships (for different reasons) with Pakistan with the intent of influencing regional events in ways that affected the speed and character of nuclear weapons development by both Pakistan and India. As well, India and Pakistan sought to draw the United States, China, and the Soviet Union into the region when it suited their purposes and played on these Cold War rivalries to maximize benefits, including in their strategic programs. The caveat is that for much of this period, the United States and China were on the same side (Pakistan’s) and, most vividly after 1972, not in direct competition with each other. They both engaged Pakistan largely in the context of competition with the Soviet Union and, in China’s case, in opposition to Indo-Soviet alignment and probably to “box in” India within the region. There is less evidence to support the strategic chain model. The China-India border conflict predated nuclear weapons, and China’s nuclear arsenal was aimed not at India but at deterring the United States and Soviet Union.34 Though China’s nuclear weapons development in the 1960s spurred India’s own developments, George Perkovich’s detailed history of the Indian nuclear program makes clear that domestic politics and international status were also important drivers, at times probably more so than the perceived China threat, and, over time, sharper concerns about deterring Pakistan’s nascent nuclear capability. China-India relations seldom engaged the United States after the 1962 border conflict.35 Notwithstanding New Delhi’s threat perception of China, from the mid-1970s Sino-Indian trade began to flourish, which better aligns with the strata model. Meanwhile, the conflicts and crises between India and Pakistan during the prebomb period had their roots in the complex and violent origins of both states and unresolved territorial issues. US and Chinese interventions and assistance seemingly did not alter the direction or depth of regional

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competition, as evidenced by the wars and crises between India and Pakistan during this period. This competition was amplified by spillovers in the region from Cold War dynamics, but remained contained in the region.

Realization and Evolution of South Asian Nuclear Strategy: 1998–2020

Continuing trends observed in the prebomb period, the two decades after the 1998 South Asian nuclear tests saw intensified competition between India and Pakistan, persistent Chinese assistance to Pakistan’s missile programs, and deepening US-India security cooperation. But the unraveling of the broader Cold War framework permitted regional security dynamics to overtake great-power competition as drivers of Southern Asian competition. These changes seemingly diminished the importance of top-down factors in the nuclear competition and the formation of a clearer quadrilateral shape resembling the strata model. When India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, neither had debated nor adopted a nuclear strategy. At the time, New Delhi and Islamabad were still developing missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to each other’s territory to supplement existing aircraft delivery options. Questions of nuclear posture and arsenal requirements took a back seat to technology developments.36 In 1999, India announced a draft nuclear doctrine, which it formalized with minor modifications in 2003. The doctrine describes four pillars: credible minimum deterrence, NFU, a triad of nuclear delivery options, and massive retaliation to inflict unacceptable damage.37 The document makes no mention of either China or Pakistan and is, instead, consistent with a general approach to nuclear deterrence. (Had the doctrine been more specific about China and Pakistan, it would be a key piece of evidence for the strategic chain model.) Reflecting the more political nature of this approach, former Indian national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon wrote, “India’s nuclear weapons are not meant to redress a military balance, or to compensate for some perceived inferiority in conventional military terms, or to serve some tactical or operational military need on the battlefield.”38 Pakistan, in contrast, never announced its nuclear doctrine, preferring to maintain ambiguity about the circumstances under which it might consider using its weapons. That said, the contours of Pakistani doctrine are well established: minimum credible deterrence, a rejec-

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tion of NFU, a nuclear posture responsive to changes in deterrence requirements, and development of a second-strike capability.39 Unlike India, which did not stipulate a target of its nuclear deterrence, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are described as being “India specific.” The early parameters for nuclear deterrence in South Asia were shaped by a military conflict between India and Pakistan in the Kargil sector of Kashmir in 1999, and a subsequent crisis in 2001–2002 sparked by an attack on the Indian parliament linked to terrorists based in Pakistan. But the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and ensuing US campaign in Afghanistan brought the United States back into the region and again reset strategic relations among the major players. US reengagement in Southern Asia also ensured that top-down factors continued to be important in defining the region. As in the 1980s, the United States now needed Pakistan’s support to sustain military operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The George W. Bush administration repealed the sanctions on India and Pakistan resulting from their 1998 nuclear tests. Washington also resumed military and other economic support to Pakistan, which had ceased when the United States sanctioned Pakistan for nuclear weapons activities in 1990. Both actions made clear that while Washington might oppose further nuclear weapons development by Pakistan, it would no longer use sanctions or withhold military support to pressure Islamabad for nuclear restraint. The assistance received by Pakistan and the diminution of international pressure during this period probably permitted a substantial infusion of funding into its strategic programs. While the United States and Pakistan were rebuilding a military partnership after a decade of estrangement, the George W. Bush administration also sought to advance work begun under the Bill Clinton administration to forge a new relationship with New Delhi. In July 2005, during then Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington, the two governments announced an expansive vision for a new strategic partnership. Its centerpiece was a civil nuclear cooperation initiative, under which the United States would change domestic law and international policy to facilitate peaceful nuclear trade with India. US officials asserted that, in return, “India was taking steps to bring its nonproliferation policies and practices in accord with ours and the international community.”40 Yet by supplying nuclear fuel to India, critics argued, the United States freed up India to use more of its own domestically mined uranium for nuclear weapons, removing what they believed had been a significant prior constraint on the development and size of India’s nuclear arsenal.41

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In justifying this shift in US policy toward the region, President Bush argued that “[t]he development of the much closer relationship of India and the United States is not directed at any country. It’s not a function of our relation with any other country. It stands on its own.”42 Yet the subtext of Bush’s remarks was obvious: concern about a rising China. Though no US or Indian official went on record to stipulate that the new India-US partnership aimed to balance China, others believed this, especially the Chinese. Fudan University scholar Shen Dingli assessed, for instance, “The United States has decided that using India to check and balance China is of more importance than nonproliferation, and that worries China. . . . But China does not want to push India towards the United States.”43 “The U.S. wants to use India to contain China,” a report by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs China Arms Control and Disarmament Association asserted, “but out of its own strategic interests, India is most unlikely to form an alliance with the U.S. to contain China.”44 These arguments suggest that Chinese leaders recognize the possibility of a strategic chain, but seem eager to prevent a China-India nuclear security dilemma from forming. Pakistan and China expressed concerns about the new India-US partnership, though both also recognized there was little to gain in opposing it. (Significantly, Pakistan sought in vain a similar nuclear agreement from Washington.) Instead, Islamabad and Beijing took the opportunity to deepen their own nuclear and military cooperation. Notwithstanding pledges it made when it joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 2004 to cease nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, China agreed to build two nuclear power plants at the Chashma site in central Pakistan. Later, the two countries also signed an agreement for China to construct two more reactors just outside Karachi. Now, for the first time since the mid-1960s, China and the United States were cast on opposite sides in South Asia, with each seeing partnerships as a means of checking the influence of the other in the region. India and Pakistan also saw value in securing support from the United States and China, respectively. Yet both also sought balanced relations, neither wanting to depend wholly on a single great-power partner lest its calculations change. This complex overlap of relations, despite the strong top-down interest of China and the United States in the region, aligns with the geometry of the strata model. During the early 2000s, in parallel with the new alignments emerging in the region, nuclear competition between Pakistan and India began to

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accelerate, especially as their missile development programs started to bear fruit. For India, a primary driver of its evolving posture toward Pakistan was frustration resulting from the 2001–2002 crisis, when India mobilized its armed forces but was deterred from launching military operations. The Indian army began to formulate plans for a rapid reaction mechanized infantry response—a force that could be launched quickly over the border to carry out punitive retaliation after a terrorist attack blamed on Pakistan, while staying beneath Islamabad’s nuclear redlines. These plans came to be known as “Cold Start.”45 Despite lack of official adoption of the Cold Start doctrine, as well as doubts about its practical deterrence effects and operability, the Indian army proceeded to develop and begin exercising Cold Start.46 While the Indian army was formulating its Cold Start plans, Pakistan wasted no time in developing a counterpunch in the form of battlefield nuclear weapons. China, again, played a role in Pakistan’s development of short-range, low-yield weapons by reportedly providing a multiple rocket launch system (the A-100) that became the basis for Pakistan’s Nasr tactical nuclear-capable missile.47 Yet the inspiration for the idea to threaten nuclear use against invading armored brigades came not from China, but from the flexible response strategy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Cold War, which sought to deter a Soviet military invasion of Germany.48 When Pakistan first tested the Nasr in 2011, it announced a new policy of “full-spectrum deterrence,” which would have tactical, operational, and strategic elements.49 The net effect was to lower the threshold of nuclear use perceived by India, and thus increase escalation risks, in a future India-Pakistan confrontation. Such confrontations continued to occur. The 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, attributed to the Pakistanbased Laskhar-e-Taiba, and frequent attacks on Indian bases near the line of control in Kashmir in 2016 created crisis situations that might have escalated into direct military conflict. India, however, did not launch a Cold Start operation after these attacks, and for the most part nuclear weapons played no specific role in each episode distinct from the general state of deterrence that exists in the region. Against the backdrop of periodic Indo-Pakistani crises, and longterm Chinese missile support to Pakistan, India sought to improve the credibility of its nuclear posture. Among other developments, it tested and fielded longer-range ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons deeper into China, including one with the potential to carry multiple warheads; fielded the third leg of its desired nuclear triad with submarine-based weapons; and strengthened its command and control by establishing a nuclear planning unit within the Prime

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Minister’s Office.50 In addition, India began to develop a BMD system to protect itself against incoming missiles. According to Indian analyst Rajeswari Rajagopalan, “India’s policy on BMD is primarily driven by the threat of short-range missiles in Pakistan. Even though there are missile threats from China, these did not figure prominently in Indian calculations for a BMD shield. Nonetheless, China was an indirect factor. The Chinese transfer of M-9 and M-11 missiles [to Pakistan] in the early 1990s stirred the Indian debate on BMD.”51 In China, however, Indian nuclear and missile developments raised little alarm vis-à-vis Sino-Indian deterrence. For instance, retired Chinese general Yao Yunzhu, writing in 2012, argued that “both China and India have been securely locked in a relation of mutual deterrence, and if both adhere to NFU doctrine, the nuclear threshold should be safely high.”52 Instead, Chinese experts mainly worry that a nuclear imbalance between India and Pakistan could contribute to conflict in South Asia, but they evince relatively little concern about an upward feedback resulting from China’s assistance to Pakistan. The closest Chinese experts come to acknowledging the potential for such a feedback loop is to stipulate generically, as General Yao does, that “missile defense capabilities are destabilizing in a mutual deterrence situation.”53 Thus, the most volatile aspect of future deterrence in South Asia may not be Pakistan’s introduction of tactical nuclear weapons, but the deployment of missile defenses and attendant fears that they could be used to enable a first-strike counterforce strategy to degrade an adversary’s nuclear capability. Some Indian experts and former officials seem to think along these lines and have begun to debate it openly.54 Pakistan is not waiting to see if India pursues a robust missile defense system; it has tested land-, sea-, and air-delivered variants of the Babur cruise missile, which might be better able to defeat Indian missile defenses. Pakistan also initiated purchase of Chinese submarines on which it could, in the future, deploy nuclear weapons, giving it a more survivable nuclear force, albeit one with much more complicated operational and command and control requirements.55 The evolution of Indian and Pakistani nuclear postures and associated increase in diversity of delivery options—and, in India, exploration of defensive systems—suggests that arms race dynamics have taken hold in the region. Nongovernmental estimates of nuclear weapons and missile inventories in both countries indicate some growth from 50–70 weapons each around 2010, to perhaps 130–140 for India and 140–150 for Pakistan by 2018.56 Both India and Pakistan are also modernizing their conventional militaries, not just their

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nuclear arsenals. Media reports indicate, for instance, that each has or is in the process of procuring advanced fighter aircraft (Pakistan, the Chinese JF-17 from China; India, the French Rafale), attack submarines (Pakistan, the Chinese Type 039B diesel electric; India via lease of Russian Akula-class nuclear submarines), and air defense systems (Pakistan, the Chinese LOMADS-LY80; India, the Russian S-400). Significantly, China replaced the United States as Pakistan’s largest defense supplier after 2009 while India began to procure more US military equipment alongside continued major system imports from Russia.57 There are multiple stimuli for these developments, but internal security dynamics in the region appear to be a stronger input as compared to top-down, great-power competition interests from China and the United States. In the background of intensifying nuclear competition between India and Pakistan, both China and the United States sought to increase their economic and security engagement in the region. As part of China’s broader Belt and Road Initiative to connect trade routes across Asia, in 2015 Beijing and Islamabad commenced work on a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The project involves major infrastructure investments to link the Chinese western interior to an upgraded seaport at Gwadar via an improved transit corridor running the length of Pakistan. Thousands of Chinese workers are involved in road, energy, and other CPEC projects. The rationale for this initiative is economic in orientation, but it also has security implications, giving China a stronger interest in the Arabian Sea and, presumably, leverage on Pakistan’s foreign and security policy.58 At the same time, building on the foundations of the partnership announced in 2005—and extending the “Asia pivot” initiated in 2013 by the Barack Obama administration—in 2018 the Donald Trump administration announced a new vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. 59 This new Indo-Pacific strategy is premised on a belief that the region “increasingly is confronted with a more confident and assertive China that is willing to accept friction in the pursuit of a more expansive set of political, economic, and security interests.” 60 In that spirit, the United States has sought to bind together Australia, India, and Japan in a new quadrilateral security framework. The governments involved have been careful to avoid branding this quad as an “anti-China” alliance. Behind the rhetoric, however, there is divergence over the aims of the quad. For the United States, the partnership is intended to counter “revisionist” Chinese behavior in the region.61 “The United States is not pursuing

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a policy of Cold-War containment with China,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated. “Rather we want to ensure that China acts responsibly and fairly in support of security and prosperity of each of our two countries.”62 India, however, articulated a more cooperative vision. At the 2018 Shangri-La Dialogue, for instance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi argued that the quad is not “a grouping that seeks to dominate. And by no means do we consider it as directed against any country. A geographical definition, as such, cannot be. India’s vision for the Indo-Pacific region is, therefore, a positive one.”63 Essentially, India is far more reticent about challenging China in the region, preferring to balance its relations in ways reminiscent of its nonalignment policy during the 1950s and 1960s. Accordingly, even if the US and Chinese partnerships in the region resemble the inverted, top-down triangle, the complex relations among the states seem to fit the strata model better. There are three analytic takeaways from the period following the 1998 Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests and the maturation of nuclear strategy and posture in Southern Asia. First, continuing the pattern from the prebomb period, nuclear competition between India and Pakistan and the action-reaction cycle observed in the evolution of their nuclear postures had mainly bilateral drivers. India built out a triad of delivery systems based on plans set in 1999, not a change in perceived threat or new requirements that emerged during this period (with the caveat of an antisatellite capability, discussed in the next section). What change can be observed in Indian nuclear discourse, relating to possible counterforce options, seems directed exclusively at Pakistan. Moreover, it is not clear that the Indo-US nuclear initiative resulted in any significant (or at least measurable) changes in Indian strategic programs or behavior in ways that diminished China’s security. For its part, Pakistan evolved its nuclear strategy to counteract India’s effort with Cold Start to escape from nuclear deterrence, consistent with its approach to nuclear deterrence beginning in the late 1980s. This evidence is consistent with both the strata and top-down models: growing strategic competition between the United States and China did not have major spillover effects, and competition between India and Pakistan remains organic to the region. Second, after a period of flux in strategic alignments at the end of the Cold War, by the mid-2000s the Indo-US and Sino-Pakistan strategic partnerships solidified. For the United States, partnership with

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India and development of an Indo-Pacific strategy aimed increasingly at containing China. For China, partnership with Pakistan continued to serve as a counterweight to India in the region. Yet the balance between broader economic and energy security considerations and Beijing’s desire to contain Indian power within South Asia is not clear. This emphasis on strategic partnerships lends some support to the top-down model, as both Beijing and Washington see South Asia as a theater of competition. In contrast to the prebomb period, however, there was less US and Chinese engagement in the strategic programs in India and Pakistan, consistent with China’s joining the NPT and promulgating nuclear export controls. Chinese missile support continued, but seemingly with less pace and depth than before. As China grew wealthier and more technologically advanced, it began to utilize economic development and conventional military sales as tools of influence in Pakistan. The effect appears to be to concentrate India’s deterrence focus on Pakistan, however, rather than on China. This missing evidence of a Sino-Indian security spiral suggests that the strategic chain model is not yet fully linked. Finally, it is difficult to isolate specific top-down, great-power competition effects on the nuclear dynamic between India and Pakistan resulting directly from the United States and China utilizing strategic partnerships in South Asia as part of their global competition. For instance, given India’s progress toward fielding a nuclear triad and development of the Cold Start doctrine, coupled with Pakistan’s concerns about a relatively larger Indian conventional military force, Pakistan probably would have adopted tactical nuclear weapons irrespective of the Indo-US partnership. US and Chinese strategic partnerships seem to have affected the speed of developments, less the direction or depth of regional competition. Pakistan was undoubtedly able to field tactical nuclear weapons faster due to Chinese assistance than it could have otherwise, for instance. A broader question is whether strategic partnerships might embolden either Indian or Pakistani leaders to take risks or make decisions they would have avoided absent great-power patronage. The evidence from recent crises is too fragmentary to make any reliable assessment, but the possibility remains that top-down stimulus from great powers could produce spillover effects during a future crisis that reverberate back on US-China relations. On balance, however, the evidence better fits the strata model: the effects of strategic partnerships appear to be offset by continued complex US relations with Pakistan and deep Sino-Indian trade ties (discussed in more depth in the next section), rather than adding a notable additional stimulus to India-Pakistan competition.

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Projecting Future Nuclear Competition in Southern Asia

Historically, the top-down and strata models explain nuclear developments in Southern Asia, with the quadrilateral geometry indicated by the strata model strengthening after the end of the Cold War. What factors might change such geometry in the future? The trend lines above highlight deepening nuclear competition between India and Pakistan, to which China and the United States are linked parties. Parallel strategic partnerships (US-India, ChinaPakistan) could stimulate more vigorous arms racing between Islamabad and New Delhi, as the top-down model would predict. Yet most of the drivers of strategic competition in Southern Asia appear to be intrinsic to Indo-Pakistani relations. By the same token, the trend on Sino-Indian nuclear competition indicates that it is in only a nascent stage, if it exists at all,64 which seems to fit the strata model. Significantly, however, technology competition and downstream implications for nuclear strategy and posture could add impetus to political pressures that may begin to change this relationship in ways that establish a strategic chain. The parameters of nuclear competition between India and Pakistan seem set. Pakistan’s deterrence concept is relative and elastic: perceived increases in Indian capability will be met by augmentation of Pakistan’s capability.65 For its part, India will continue to seek means to escape Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence to coerce Islamabad. The main vector for nuclear competition will be increasingly accurate missile systems and further introduction of mobile land-based and sea-based delivery platforms to enhance survivability. The primary wild card in conflict will be India’s risk tolerance in carrying out conventional military operations in Pakistani territory.66 Both may seek to draw outside powers into this equation when it suits their purposes, especially during crises. The most visible manifestations of nuclear competition between India and Pakistan are the regular press releases following testing of various nuclear-capable missiles. From 2011, the pace of missile testing by both India and Pakistan accelerated. Some of these tests were developmental; many others were so-called user trials of systems already inducted into the strategic forces. India’s testing far outpaced Pakistan’s. Between 2011 and mid-2019, India conducted some 180 missile tests (both offensive and defensive systems) while media reports indicate that Pakistan tested missiles on 43 occasions.67 About

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a third of the Indian tests were of three systems: nineteen tests of the Prithvi II, thirteen of the Agni I, and thirty of the Brahmos cruise missile. More than twenty years after it first tested the Agni I and Prithvi II, India’s strategic forces continue to conduct regular (sometimes biannual) tests of these systems. The Brahmos—a joint development project with Russia that India will utilize domestically and may also export—was tested in various conventionally armed configurations to demonstrate its suitability for air-, land-, and sea-based operations. Several patterns emerge from a parsing of this test data. First, relative to the Prithvi missiles and early generation Agni I and II, India has tested longer-range Agni missiles far less vigorously before declaring them operational. The Agni IV and V, the latter of which is expected to be deployed “soon” according to Indian reporting, were tested just seven times each, for instance. This may imply technology maturation within the Indian missile program such that confidence in each evolutionary development is greater. Moreover, the bulk of India’s test activity since 2016—apart from the user trials noted above—is of longer-range systems and missiles intended to improve readiness and survivability. This includes the Dhanush sea-based and K-15 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and the Agni V launched from a presealed, canisterized mobile missile carrier. Pakistan’s less frequent missile testing compared to India may have a simple explanation: established and possibly ongoing Chinese technical assistance, which diminishes the need for extensive developmental testing. Since 2011, for instance, Pakistan appears to have tested Shaheen-class ballistic missiles of different ranges four times. It tested its newest medium-range missile, the Ababeel, just once, though that system probably has not been deployed yet.68 Pakistan conducted more tests of the Babur and Ra’ad cruise missiles (some twelve tests combined) and the Nasr short-range tactical battlefield system (nine tests, including some salvo launches of several missiles). For Pakistan, cruise missiles are an important element of its plans to defeat possible future Indian missile defenses and will provide initial seabased nuclear options. The Nasr, meanwhile, is the declared counter to India’s Cold Start doctrine, so the relatively higher number of tests may include some intended for signaling or credibility-building purposes, or to simulate use in battlefield maneuver conditions. There is some analytic danger in reading too much into the test data, or in falling into a circular logic in which tests are indicative of a new posture that, in turn, requires the capability tested. One Western analysis concludes, for instance, that India’s ongoing modernization effort “indicates that it is putting increased emphasis on its future

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strategic relationship with China. . . . The expansion of India’s nuclear posture to take China into account will result in significantly new capabilities being deployed over the next decade, which may influence how India views the role of its nuclear weapons against Pakistan.”69 This assessment may not be wrong, but the drivers and decisionmaking in India’s strategic programs historically have been more complex.70 Many of the systems being developed by India today and planned for the future have been on the books or rumored for years, and they are not responsive to changes in perceived threat from China or indicative of changes in posture. There is also nothing inevitable about a full buildout of all of the missiles described above. The Pakistani and Indian governments face demands from their conventional armed forces, not to mention larger economic development requirements, which will squeeze budgets for strategic programs. That said, improvements in missile readiness and accuracy, and the slow fielding of better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems, are making survivability a looming challenge for both Islamabad and New Delhi in ways that reinforce the security dilemma within the region. With questions about survivability come concerns about first-strike instability and “use-or-lose” pressures in a crisis. These pressures are influenced by two other possible technology developments: the addition of multiple warheads per missile and the fielding of BMD systems. As noted above, India’s interest in BMD derived initially from concerns about Chinese missile transfer to Pakistan. Indian scientists reportedly began a BMD development program in the mid-1990s, an effort that picked up steam in the early 2000s when India saw an opportunity for high-technology cooperation with the United States.71 Some Indian experts believe that BMD can be stabilizing in South Asia as a means of enhancing survival of India’s small nuclear arsenal and, therefore, bolstering deterrence.72 But in Pakistan, India’s BMD is a source of concern because it could enable India to limit the damage of a Pakistani nuclear strike, potentially encouraging an Indian counterforce first strike on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The case for counterforce is strengthened when BMD is adopted alongside other technologies that favor a first-strike strategy such as multiple warheads. Some Indian strategists advocate for a combination of BMD and multiple warheads, providing justification for Pakistani concerns.73 One former head of India’s Strategic Forces Command, retired general Balraj Nagal, for instance, argues that “India’s Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) should cover all vital areas, the penetration ability of missiles in the environment must be improved by

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technological means, as well as saturation strikes and Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) missiles and Maneuverable Reentry Vehicles (MaRVs) should become a mandatory feature.”74 For Pakistan, Feroz Khan and Mansoor Ahmed argue, “The synergy of these two technologies significantly increases India’s ability to engage Pakistani nuclear hard targets in a first strike and degrade Pakistani retaliatory capacity.”75 “If India proceeds with MIRVs and BMD,” they predicted in 2016, “Pakistan would feel compelled to diversify its delivery methods and develop penetration aids. Pakistan is also likely to flight-test the release of multiple warheads on some of its ballistic missiles.”76 When Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations announced the first test of the medium-range Ababeel ballistic missile in January 2017, it noted the missile’s capability of engaging multiple targets with high precision, a clear reference to multiple warheads. It further linked this missile to the “growing regional ballistic missile defense environment.”77 With first-strike instability between Pakistan and India potentially worsening as a result of missile developments and India’s BMD program, crisis escalation could become more fraught, as each side may perceive advantages to using nuclear weapons early in a conflict. The February 2019 Balakot crisis, though short and sharp, may provide an early indicator of how future crises could play out. Following an attack on Indian paramilitary forces in Indian Kashmir, which it attributed to a banned terrorist group operating from Pakistan, India carried out an air attack on a purported terrorist training facility near Balakot in Pakistan. The next day, Pakistan carried out its own air attack on an Indian military logistics base, though it purposefully (according to Pakistani statements) targeted open ground rather than infrastructure. In an ensuing aerial duel, Pakistan downed an Indian MiG-21 and captured the pilot. Reportedly, Indian officials thereafter threatened missile attacks on Pakistan, which led Islamabad to convene its nuclear command authority and warn that it would use missiles in retaliation. (Later, during his 2019 campaign for reelection, Prime Minister Modi referred to this missile threat and declared that India had been prepared for a “night of bloodshed.”78) Fortunately, both sides de-escalated the crisis the following day, when Pakistan returned the captured pilot to India.79 Yet the purported threat to use missiles during the crisis demonstrates the risks the two antagonists are taking in attempting to both deter and manage escalation. If missiles fly in a future crisis, there is no telling where the conflict might end.80 The future of Pakistan-India competition appears likely to have intrinsic drivers. The security dilemma is already sufficiently deep

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that additional stimulus by way of US-China competition in South Asia is unlikely to worsen an Indo-Pakistani deterrence equation already trending toward instability. Pakistan will continue to respond to Indian strategic developments, which in turn will be driven by a mixture of technological, military, bureaucratic, and political factors related partly to India’s competition with Pakistan and China, and partly to India’s aspirations to be a global actor. For the strategic chain model to work, there must be a mutually reinforcing security dilemma between India and China, and a clear nuclear deterrence relationship. Finding evidence to support this linkage in the context of growing Sino-Indian power competition is difficult, for their nuclear relations remain understudied. Significantly, the two governments barely recognize the existence of any kind of nuclear relationship. For instance, former Indian national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon argues, “India-China nuclear deterrence is stable and will likely remain so despite shifts leading to equilibrium at higher technological levels as both programs develop increasing sophistication. So far India and China have not discussed their nuclear weapons and their effect on the bilateral relationship or on each other’s security. This is understandable as it is only recently that India has begun to acquire the means to establish nuclear deterrence vis-à-vis China.”81 In one of the few authoritative Chinese writings on this issue, retired general Yao asserts that “India has not caused as much concern in China as has the United States. Indian nuclear weapons have not been a frequent subject of discussion in China.82 This is not only because China possesses a more advanced nuclear arsenal, but also because China and India base their nuclear relationship on an NFU nuclear doctrine.”83 Further, Yao argues that “China and India coexist in a nuclear framework characterized by reliable NFU-based strategic stability, strategic trust derived from shared identity, fewer potential flashpoints, and less reason to worry about ballistic missile defense.”84 These statements suggest relative comfort among national security professionals in both capitals with a rather diffuse strategic relationship, even as the Indian and Chinese armies periodically skirmish along their disputed border, flirting with crisis escalation, and other aspects of their relationship become more competitive. That said, debates about nuclear posture, strategic technology developments, and more frequent border clashes continue to buffet the “NFU-based strategic stability” that exists between Beijing and New Delhi. The

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pressure seems more acutely felt in India. It is common to hear from Indian experts the sentiment offered by former national security advisor Shiv Shankar: “Even though the primary drivers of China’s nuclear weapons program may be the U.S. posture and extended deterrence in Asia, Chinese developments have direct implications for Indian security and affect India’s nuclear posture.”85 Though the evidence of the “direct implications” referenced by Menon remains opaque, there are potential drivers of change that could result in a Sino-Indian link in the strategic chain. Advances in the missile arsenals of each, along with improved ISR and the evolution of BMD capabilities, are beginning to affect political attitudes about nuclear doctrine and posture. Albeit for different reasons— China because of perceived increase in a counterforce threat from the United States; India because of a desire to find ways to achieve escalation dominance over Pakistan—there are active debates in Beijing and New Delhi about revoking their respective NFU pledges.86 Whether these debates impact strategic ties depends, as retired Indian general Menon observes, “on whether the political embrace of the belief in the role of nuclear weapons that underpins China’s and India’s NFU posture restrains technology trajectory.”87 These debates are likely to grow louder in the future. As retired Chinese general Pan Zhenqiang explains, “Certain segments of Chinese public opinion have echoed this idea of abandoning the no-first-use policy, and there are also supporters of this view within the People’s Liberation Army. This position dovetails with growing nationalist sentiment in China, and in turn has fanned a further upsurge of such sentiments. Support for the first use of nuclear weapons is a manifestation of the Chinese public’s growing impulsiveness regarding national security, in tandem with growth in its national strength.”88 Among the most significant technologies on the horizon that could alter the Sino-Indian deterrence relationship are BMD and ASAT systems. As a general rule, Chinese experts tend to view BMD as destabilizing for mutual deterrence.89 Indian experts tend to view BMD more favorably, and retired general Balraj Nagal, former Strategic Forces commander, is one of its most vociferous champions. “The policy of no first use makes India’s leadership vulnerable, so the importance of BMD for making sure the government and the survivable second-strike retaliatory capability are intact after nuclear strikes cannot be overstated,” he argues. “Limited BMD remains vital for India’s effort to maintain strategic stability.”90 For now, India’s BMD program remains focused on Pakistan, but Indian analysts are watching developments in China. Retired brigadier

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Vinod Anand, for example, argues that “China’s evolving BMD capabilities as also technological upgradation of its offensive missiles degrade the value of India’s strategic deterrent against China. While Beijing might avow that their BMD is meant for the U.S. arsenal yet, equally it erodes the value of New Delhi’s nuclear deterrent.”91 To build out a layered defense system, India plans to extend the range of its BMD interceptors, which “suggests that New Delhi has begun to factor in Chinese ballistic missiles as a potential threat from which it needs to secure itself.”92 For their part, Chinese experts express most concern about potential Indo-US cooperation in missile defense, an idea with some support in both Washington and New Delhi, but for which cooperation has yet to materialize. “If China turns out to be the major consideration in these joint United States-India missile defense efforts, it will need to react,” argues retired Chinese general Yao.93 It is worth noting the parallel with East Asia, where South Korea’s 2016 deployment of the US Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) BMD system to defend against North Korea provoked Chinese economic sanctions against Seoul. ASAT weapons development also has the potential to stress Sino-Indian strategic relations in the future. China’s 2007 ASAT test spurred debate in New Delhi about its long-held position against the use of weapons in space. Unlike its BMD program, which has been on a slow development trajectory and not tied to corresponding capabilities in China and Pakistan, India’s ASAT capability is arguably a direct response. After China’s test, Ashley Tellis writes, “India quietly began to contemplate developing its own ASAT demonstrator program principally with the intention of signaling to Beijing that it too possessed the capability to hold Chinese space assets at risk—should Indian satellites ever become victim to a Chinese attack in the future.”94 In March 2019, India carried out its first successful demonstration of an ASAT capability, using one of its ballistic missile interceptors to destroy a satellite in low earth orbit. (An earlier attempt in February 2019 apparently failed.) Though official statements were circumspect, Indian analysts and former officials were direct in their messaging. For instance, former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal stated, “While we have rightly said that our test was not directed against any country, in reality just as we developed nuclear weapon capability to principally deter China, the ASAT capability also redresses the India-China strategic balance.”95 Chinese reactions to the test were muted, though some Chinese analysts observed that the test could incentivize other countries to seek space weapons. (These analysts conveniently ignored the

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role that China’s 2007 test played in spurring Indian ASAT decisionmaking.) For their part, some Indian analysts recognize the possibility that ASAT and BMD capabilities will ignite an arms race in Asia. Rajagopalan, for instance, assesses that “an Indian reaction to the Chinese test is likely to touch off a response in Pakistan. This could result in Sino-Pakistani collaboration on nuclear weapons, missiles, and space, which would significantly intensify regional competition.”96 The key question going forward is whether the demonstrated ASAT capabilities are seen in both capitals as stabilizing, or whether they magnify perceived threats to command and control of strategic systems and drive further developments. Mutual NFU doctrines seem to provide a source of Sino-Indian stability that does not exist in other nuclear dyads and, apart from accidental or inadvertent use, there are few escalatory pathways to a nuclear conflict between China and India. But that does not preclude sharper tension and escalating armed conflict over contested borders. Beijing and New Delhi went to war in 1962 and have experienced periodic militarized crises in the decades since.97 After most of these crises, such as the 2017 dispute at Doklam, near the tri-border area of China, India, and Bhutan, China-India relations reverted to a steady state. However, the crisis that erupted in May 2020 (at the time of this writing) featured disputes and physical altercations at multiple locations along the Line of Actual Control. On June 15, a sharp clash near the Galwan Valley lead to the deaths of twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese casualties, the most violent episode since the 1962 war.98 The cause of rising tensions in 2020 is not clear. One explanation is that efforts by China and India to reinforce military infrastructure inside disputed territory is interpreted by the other as an attempt to change the territorial status quo, to which neither side can acquiesce. Perhaps related, and occurring amidst broader increases and improvements in its military capabilities along the Indian border, the 2020 crisis suggests a more coordinated Chinese effort to control territory as part of a more aggressive policy on its borders. Others have suggested the crisis is a Chinese reaction to India’s decision in 2019 to change the political status of two states, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, which border China.99 Whether the 2020 crisis is a sign of greater military tensions to come or merely a sharper political irritant for the two states to manage is a matter of debate.100 Some in India argued for a boycott of Chinese goods while a number of retired senior Indians indicated that the dispute marked a turning point in relations.101 It is notable, however, that during the 2020 crisis and previous episodes, there were few suggestions that

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nuclear weapons overshadowed decisionmaking or played any significant role. In sum, there may be stress cracks in the Sino-Indian nuclear stability edifice, but no clear portents of a break. The strategic programs of both countries appear to have consistent drivers based on long-term plans and political beliefs about nuclear weapons, but as of yet no direct linkages apart from the ASAT capability discussed above. Whether the pursuit of BMD and ASAT capabilities is an early indicator of an emerging nuclear arms race is far from certain, for there are few other signs of strategic security spirals or other reciprocal dynamics that would change this relationship. Unless both opt to rescind their NFU pledges, it is difficult to imagine this pattern changing. Despite the violence in 2020, past resolutions of border crises show that territorial disputes can be managed; neither stands to gain much from military escalation and trade remains important to the economies of both. Yet complacency about the permanence of nuclear stability is not warranted. One astute Indian analyst cautions “that there will be no nuclear escalation between India and China has become conventional wisdom. The growing capabilities, competing aspirations and overweening hubris of these two neighbors, however, suggest that reliance on accepted assumptions will lead to complacency. It may therefore be time for India and China to discuss nuclear issues bilaterally with a view to mediating the uncertainties borne of their differing perspectives and postures.”102 Since the early 2000s, the US-India and China-Pakistan strategic partnerships cohered in ways that add structure to the strategic competition in Southern Asia, and also to mutual threat perceptions. For instance, a commentary in the pro-Beijing Global Times newspaper argued that “[t]he US uses India to counter China without consideration for the potential strategic risks for New Delhi. Washington also pushes India to be part of its Indo-Pacific Strategy without supporting the latter’s demand to maintain its dominance in the Indo-Pacific region.”103 An Indian commentary, meanwhile, assessed that “China’s support for Pakistan—militarily, economically, and diplomatically—has increased Islamabad’s relative power in the subcontinent and, consequently, kept India boxed in a continental stalemate.”104 Even with these strategic partnerships, however, the four states have comingled interests in the region consistent with the messy middle of the strata model. The United States and Pakistan share complex, but mutual, interests and involvement. After a decade of deep cooperation on coun-

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terterrorism, US-Pakistan relations soured starting in 2011, leading the United States to suspend military aid by 2018. Yet many experts in both Washington and Islamabad aspire to mend relations, and a summit between Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and President Donald Trump in August 2019 began to rewarm ties. The United States needs Pakistani support to wind down its war in Afghanistan and withdraw US military forces. Pakistan would prefer an orderly US withdrawal that does not provoke another Afghan civil war, with consequent refugee flows and potential terrorism blowback into Pakistan. Both states share an interest in combatting global terrorist organizations that seek a foothold in South Asia, especially the Islamic State. Even on nuclear issues, there may continue to be a narrow space for discussions on deterrence stability, nuclear security, export controls, and nuclear safety. In sum, despite growing US ties to India, there will continue to be an agenda for US-Pakistan cooperation. Similarly, apart from the security issues noted above and notwithstanding deep and long-held Indian resentment and concern over China’s strategic assistance to Pakistan, China and India have each sought to diminish potential sources of friction and maintain positive relations. The most visible manifestation of this is the trade flows between the two and deep ties built between Chinese and Indian business communities. The magnitude of the growth in trade is staggering. In 2003, India imported about $3.6 billion in Chinese goods, and exported just $2.5 billion. By 2017, China was India’s largest trading partner. India imported goods worth $72 billion and exported $12.5 billion in return. Total two-way annual Sino-Indian trade is now roughly equal to the cumulative total of China’s current and planned investment in Pakistan through CPEC. This gives both India and China strong incentives to manage competition, which is recognized in China. Another Global Times commentary urged that “putting aside debates over specific issues, China and India must keep in mind that their relations cannot take a life-or-death struggle as a foothold. The common interests they share are way larger than any differences. As both are emerging powers, which have the huge potential of being important forces in the international community, China and India should see more space for cooperation instead of contention.”105 The internal tensions in China’s Southern Asia strategy are interesting. Concurrently, China is investing in the economies of both Pakistan and India; promoting détente with India as a counterweight to the US Indo-Pacific Strategy; and aiding Pakistan’s strategic programs to prevent it from growing weaker relative to India, with a potential side effect of abetting Pakistan’s risk-taking in crises with India. This leads

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some Western analysts to question who is making policy on South Asia in China, and with what interests in mind. Some also wonder if China’s increasing economic and political liability in South Asia might persuade it to play a stronger dampening role in future crises. The nuclear past in Southern Asia at times appears to be triangular, and at other times a stratified quad. This geometry matters. Actions by the United States and China have in the past and can again in the future affect nuclear competition between India and Pakistan. Yet the arms race dynamics that exist today between New Delhi and Islamabad are mainly intrinsic. Strategic partnerships between the United States and India, and between China and Pakistan, are important, yet over time have played a diminished role in shaping, constraining, or deepening the competition between New Delhi and Islamabad than did such partnerships during the Cold War. On the current trajectory, therefore, security competition in Southern Asia seems likely to follow the strata model. India-Pakistan nuclear competition will continue to evolve, driven by regional dynamics. Growing US-China competition is unlikely to affect the intensity of Indo-Pakistani competition, or vice versa, given complex relationships that exist between the strata. However, a strategic chain could emerge in the future if the informal, protodeterrence enjoyed by India and China evolves into nuclear competition. Strong economic ties may continue to restrain impulses in Beijing and New Delhi to increase military competition. But technological progress, bureaucratic inertia, and the effects of nationalism on national security policy may create competitive pressures, as evidenced in the 2020 border crisis. The Indian Ocean, in particular, may become a theater of tension as India and China compete for resources and seek to secure transit routes. On the nuclear front, changes to the NFU policies held by both New Delhi and Beijing, generated by a convergence of nationalist politics and evolving threat perceptions (India from Pakistan, and China from the United States), could have unintended consequences. Doing away with the NFU-based strategic stability that the two states have enjoyed, and even taken for granted, could contribute to a security spiral that neither state seeks. Even in the absence of causally linked security dilemmas among these four states in Southern Asia, the United States and China will carry their competition into the region. For now, US-China competition should not encroach strategic capabilities but, as China’s naval forces extend their reach into the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, there

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is likely to be greater regional friction between Beijing and Washington. US efforts to engender deeper security—especially maritime— cooperation with India could add to this friction. Perhaps if Washington were to seek and then successfully construct an overt China containment alliance across Asia, Beijing might take countervailing steps against India and the United States that would create linkages across the security dilemmas in Southern Asia that engage nuclear forces. However, there seems to be no appetite in India to join such an enterprise in the foreseeable future. There is a wild card thus far not featured in the analysis: Russia. From Soviet times, Russia has had strong military and political ties to India. India still purchases major Russian weapons systems, and India’s nascent nuclear submarine force is built on vessels leased from Russia. Russo-Pakistani ties were long strained, especially after the Afghan war, but warmed in recent years. In 2018, Pakistan and Russia signed a military training agreement and Pakistan will purchase Russian helicopters.106 Russia could remain a nonfactor in the analysis, especially if it seeks balanced relations with both Pakistan and India, or could play a more important role in the future depending on whether it sought to bandwagon with China against the United States. If Islamabad, New Delhi, Beijing, and Washington aim to manage nuclear competition in Southern Asia, each will need to find means to address the concerns of the other parties stemming from power asymmetries, technology developments, changes in nuclear posture, and the objectives of their respective strategic partnerships. Much of this challenge falls to India and Pakistan. The two longtime antagonists must arrive—politically, militarily, technologically—at a point where mutual nuclear restraint makes sense to both. Some in India may seek to avoid negotiating with Pakistan by pointing to the need for greater capabilities to deter China, or to the problems created by Chinese strategic assistance to Pakistan. However, the reality of negotiating three-way constraints means it is practically difficult, as US interest in negotiating US-Russia-China arms control also demonstrates. China could also utilize its leverage with both countries to encourage restraint. To be seen as credible in India, though, Beijing would need to cease ongoing technical cooperation that supports Pakistan’s strategic programs. Given the persistent and low-key nature of Sino-Indian nuclear competition, Beijing and New Delhi (independent of strategic competitions and strategic partnerships involving the United States and Pakistan) could take the opportunity to solidify norms and practices that dampen the potential for sharper competition in the future. For instance, the two could codify a mutual NFU agreement. They also

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could negotiate an incident-at-sea agreement aimed at establishing naval deconfliction practices in the Indian Ocean. Of course, it would be desirable for the two to find a permanent resolution to the lingering border conflicts, though that goal has proved elusive. The potential for Sino-Indian arms control negotiations is probably even more remote. Given China’s allergy to negotiating arms control with the United States, due to the disparities in their strategic arsenals, it is difficult to imagine Beijing desiring such discussions with India. Since the 1960s, US policymakers have been concerned about nuclear stability in South Asia. Before 1998, Washington sought to dissuade Pakistan and India from pursuing nuclear weapons and urged them to join the international nonproliferation regime. US entreaties to Beijing to cease support for Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs, and for Chinese help to encourage strategic restraint in the region, fell on deaf ears. This leaves Washington with few tools to dampen strategic competition in South Asia. As Indo-Pakistani competition became more intrinsic to the region after 1998, that also meant a decrease in the US ability to sway outcomes, whether in crisis or otherwise. Successful efforts to attenuate the security dilemma there must have organic roots. The United States cooperates with India and Pakistan on counterterrorism and nuclear security, but US efforts to expand these agendas to other types of restraint measures have not been successful. For the foreseeable future, the Indo-US strategic partnership will remain the most critical instrument linking Washington to Southern Asia. The choices Washington makes about this partnership can have spillover effects in Sino-US and Indo-Pakistan competition. For instance, Indo-US cooperation on BMD systems—especially if it evolves into a regionally networked system—could stimulate further qualitative or quantitative growth in China’s strategic arsenal to restore a desired offense-defense balance more favorable to Beijing. Pakistan might also take steps to redress perceived diminution of its security, which could have negative implications for crisis stability. The net results of such an action-reaction cycle could leave Indian and US security worse off. Decisionmakers in Washington and New Delhi would want to evaluate the potential benefits and consequences of their cooperation in technologies that could feed security spirals. Similarly, Washington also must factor Indian and Pakistani geoeconomic realities—namely, the importance of China in their economies—into its strategic planning for the region. South Asia may be a theater for US-China competition, but neither India nor Pakistan can afford to sever ties with Beijing and have little choice but to play both sides, reinforcing complex interdependence in the region.

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The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable research assistance from Nick Blanchette, Kayla Matteucci, and Erin McLaughlin. 1. Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis, “The India Dividend: New Delhi Remains Washington’s Best Hope in Asia,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 5 (September– October 2019): 173–183. 2. Robert Einhorn and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, The Strategic Chain: Linking Pakistan, India, China and the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, March 2017), 1. 3. Ibid., 1. 4. Zia Mian and M. V. Ramana, “Asian War Machines,” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (April 2014): 346. 5. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye Jr., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little Brown, 1977). Recent scholarship suggests that great powers have substantial, structural advantages in using interdependence for coercion, contrary to predictions of neoliberal theories of international relations. See Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 42–79. 6. Andrew Small, The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 77–78. 7. George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: UC Press, 1999), 20. 8. Ibid., 157. 9. Ibid., 163. 10. Ibid., 80–85. 11. Ibid., 187. 12. Ibid., 197. 13. Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 55–56; Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, 195–196. 14. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, 196. 15. Abbas, Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb, 62. 16. Feroz Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 119. 17. Abbas, Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb, 65. 18. Khan, Eating Grass, 175 19. In conducting research for his book, Feroz Khan stipulates that “none of the individuals interviewed by the author was forthcoming on this topic,” and therefore caveats the basis for his recounting as “limited personal experience, some credible Western public sources, and conjecture drawn from available records.” Ibid., 171. 20. Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation (Minneapolis: Zenith, 2009). 21. Khan, Eating Grass, 235–237. 22. Ibid., 241. 23. Ibid., 240. 24. Rabia Akhtar, The Blind Eye: US Nonproliferation Policy Towards Pakistan from Ford to Clinton (Lahore, Pakistan: University of Lahore Press, 2018). 25. Abbas, Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb, 74. 26. P. R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process: American Engagement in South Asia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007). 27. India also cited the 1995 indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and adoption of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, both of which it claimed perpetuated inequality in the international system and privileged nuclear weapons states. 28. National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra, quoted in Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, 417.

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29. Article IX (3) of the treaty defines a “nuclear-weapon state” as “one which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January, 1967.” Because India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, it is not permitted to join the treaty as a “nuclear-weapon state,” only as a “non-nuclearweapon state.” See Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons at https:// www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/infcircs/1970/infcirc140.pdf. 30. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, 419. 31. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, quoted in Ibid., 417. 32. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, 440. 33. John F. Burns, “Nuclear Anxiety: The Overview; Pakistan, Answering India, Carries Out Nuclear Tests; Clinton’s Appeal Rejected,” New York Times, May 29, 1998. 34. India receives barely passing mention in accounts of China’s nuclear weapons program, and that only in the context of perceived Soviet support for India in the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict. See, for instance, John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 71–72. 35. Sino-Indian border clashes in 1987 stimulated US and Soviet diplomacy to prevent a broader war, but not military posturing or any overt nuclear threats. 36. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, 480–482. 37. Prime Minister’s Office, “Cabinet Committee on Security Reviews Progress in Operationalizing India’s Nuclear Doctrine,” press release, January 4, 2003. https:// archive.pib.gov.in/archive/releases98/lyr2003/rjan2003/04012003/r040120033.html. 38. Shivshankar Menon, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 107. 39. Sadia Tasleem and Toby Dalton, “Nuclear Emulation: Pakistan’s Nuclear Trajectory,” Washington Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 138. 40. US Department of State, “Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Steve Hadley on the President’s Trip to India and Pakistan,” Washington, DC, February 24, 2006. https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/sca/rls/rm/2006/62200.htm. India did take some steps to strengthen its nonproliferation policies, but since the 2005 announcement no US firms have received any contracts to build nuclear reactors in India. 41. For example, Henry Sokolski, “Backing the US-India Nuclear Deal and Nonproliferation: What’s Required,” testimony before a Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Nonproliferation Implications of the July 18, 2005 USIndia Joint Statement, Washington, DC, November 3, 2005, http://npolicy.org/article .php?aid=255&rtid=8. See also a rebuttal to this argument by Ashley Tellis, “Atoms for War? US-India Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and India’s Nuclear Arsenal” (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [CEIP], 2006). 42. US Department of State, “Remarks to the Press at the American Center in Mumbai,” Under Secretary for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns, Mumbai India, January 18, 2006. https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/us/rm/2006/59321.htm. 43. Shen Dingli, quoted in Chris Buckley, “China Likely to Swallow Anger over India Nuclear Deal,” Reuters, August 29, 2007. 44. Buckley, “China Likely to Swallow Anger over India Nuclear Deal.” 45. Walter Ladwig, “A Cold Start for Hot Wars? The Indian Army’s New Limited War Doctrine,” International Security 32, no. 3 (Winter 2007–2008): 158–190. 46. George Perkovich and Toby Dalton, Not War, Not Peace? Motivating Pakistan to Prevent Cross-Border Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 82–96. 47. Khan, Eating Grass, 249. 48. Tasleem and Dalton, “Nuclear Emulation.” 49. Inter Services Public Relations, press release no. PR94/2011, Rawalpindi April 19, 2011. https://www.ispr.gov.pk/press-release-detail.php?id=1721. 50. Vergese Koithara, Managing India’s Nuclear Forces (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2012).

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51. Rajeswari Rajagopalan, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense: The View from India,” in The China-India Nuclear Crossroads, edited by Lora Saalman (Washington, DC: CEIP, 2012), 66. 52. Yao Yunzhu, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense: The View from China,” in The China-India Nuclear Crossroads, edited by Lora Saalman (Washington, DC: CEIP, 2012), 74. 53. Ibid., 74. 54. Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang, “India’s Counterforce Temptations: Strategic Dilemmas, Doctrine, and Capabilities,” International Security 43, no. 3 (Winter 2018–2019): 7–52. See also Toby Dalton and George Perkovich, “India’s Nuclear Options and Escalation Dominance” (Washington, DC: CEIP, May 19, 2016). 55. Christopher Clary and Ankit Panda, “Safer at Sea? Pakistan’s Sea-Based Deterrent and Nuclear Weapons Security,” Washington Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 149, 159. 56. Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Indian Nuclear Forces, 2018,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 74, no. 6 (November 2018): 362; Hans Kristensen, Robert Norris, and Julia Diamond, “Pakistani Nuclear Forces, 2018,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 74, no. 5 (August 2018): 349. 57. Data from SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, March 2019, at https://www .sipri.org/databases/armstransfers. 58. Maria Abi-Habib, “China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Plan in Pakistan Takes a Military Turn,” New York Times, December 19, 2018. 59. See, for instance, Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Defining Our Relationship with India for the Next Century: An Address by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,” Washington, DC, October 18, 2017. 60. US Department of Defense, Indo-Pacific Strategy Report (US Department of Defense: Washington, DC: 2019), 7. 61. Ibid. 62. Matthew Pennington, “US Pushes Back at China’s Warning to Avoid Islands It Claims in South China Sea,” Associated Press, November 9, 2018. 63. Indian Ministry of External Affairs, “Prime Minister’s Keynote Address at Shangri La Dialogue,” New Delhi, June 1, 2018. https://mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl /29943/Prime_Ministers_Keynote_Address_at_Shangri_La_Dialogue_June_01_2018. 64. Frank O’Donnell and Alexander K. Bollfrass, “The Strategic Postures of China and India: A Visual Guide,” Managing the Atom Project Report, March 2020. 65. Tasleem and Dalton, “Nuclear Emulation.” 66. Vipin Narang, “Pulwama and Its Aftermath: Four Observations,” Nuclear Crisis Group Post-Crisis Brief, June 2019. 67. Data compiled from multiple sources by the CEIP. 68. US Defense Intelligence Ballistic Missile Analysis Committee, “Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat” (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH, National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), 2017), 25. 69. Kristiansen and Korda, “Indian Nuclear Forces, 2018,” 361. 70. See, for example, Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb. 71. Rajagopalan, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense,” 66–67. 72. See, for example, Rajesh Basrur, “Missile Defense: An Indian Perspective,” in Nuclear Risk Reduction in South Asia, edited by Michael Krepon (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2004), 185–202. 73. Clary and Narang, “India’s Counterforce Temptations.” 74. Balraj Nagal, “India and Ballistic Missile Defense: Furthering a Defensive Deterrent,” (Washington, DC: CEIP, June 30, 2016). 75. Feroz Khan and Mansoor Ahmed, “Pakistan, MIRVs, and Counterforce Targeting,” in The Lure and Pitfalls of MIRVs: From the First to the Second Nuclear Age, edited by Michael Krepon, Travis Wheeler, and Shane Mason (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2016), 149.

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76. Khan and Ahmed, “Pakistan, MIRVs, and Counterforce Targeting,” 169–170. 77. Dawn, “Pakistan Conducts First Flight Test of Ababeel Surface-to-Surface Missile,” January 24, 2017. 78. Times of India, “PM: Pakistan Returned Abhi or It Would’ve Seen ‘Qataal ki Raat,’” April 22, 2019. 79. Sadia Tasleem, “Understanding De-escalation After Balakot Strikes,” Nuclear Crisis Group Post-Crisis Brief, June 2019. 80. Toby Dalton, “Signaling and Catalysis in Future Nuclear Crises in South Asia: Two Questions After the Balakot Episode,” Nuclear Crisis Group Post-Crisis Brief, June 2019. 81. Shivshankar Menon, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, 112. 82. Toby Dalton and Tong Zhao, “At a Crossroads? China-India Nuclear Relations After the Border Clash,” CEIP, August 19, 2020. 83. Yunzhu, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense,” 71. 84. Ibid., 75. 85. Shivshankar Menon, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, 113. 86. Pan Zenqiang, “China’s No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” in Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking, edited by Li Bin and Tong Zhao (Washington, DC: CEIP, 2016), 71; P. R. Chari, “India’s Nuclear Doctrine: Stirrings of Change” (Washington, DC: CEIP, June 4, 2014). 87. Prakash Menon, “Sino-Indian Nuclear Dynamics,” Fletcher Security Review 6, no. 1 (Summer 2019): 30–31. 88. Zenqiang, “China’s No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” 71. 89. Yunzhu, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense,” 73. 90. Nagal, “India and Ballistic Missile Defense.” 91. Vinod Anand, “Why India Needs to Strengthen Its Nuclear Deterrent,” Economic Times, February 22, 2018. 92. Rajagopalan, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense,” 67. 93. Yunzhu, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense,” 74–75. 94. Ashley Tellis, “India’s ASAT Test: An Incomplete Success” (Washington, DC: CEIP, April 15, 2019). 95. Kanwal Sibal, “The A-SAT Test Restores the India-China Strategic Balance,” Hindustan Times, April 4, 2019. 96. Rajagopalan, “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense,” 68. 97. Jeff Smith, Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2014). 98. Russell Goldman, “India-China Border Dispute: A Conflict Explained,” New York Times, June 17, 2020. 99. Ashley Tellis, “Hustling in the Himalayas: The Sino-Indian Border Confrontation” (Washington, DC: CEIP, June 4, 2020). 100. Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab, Dragon on Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017). 101. Ananth Krishnan, “Interview: For Minor Tactical Gains on the Ground, China Has Strategically Lost India, Says Former Indian Ambassador to China,” The Hindu, June 21, 2020. 102. Rukmani Gupta, “India and China—Time for a Dialogue on Nuclear Security?” IDSA Comment, April 19, 2018. 103. Zhang Jiadong, “Trump Cranks Up Pressure on India by Rejecting Invitation,” Global Times, November 4, 2018. 104. Abhijnan Rej, “Why Did China Change Its Position Now on Listing JeM Chief Masood Azhar at the Security Council?” The Diplomat, May 2, 2019. 105. Wen Dao, “India, China Mustn’t Fall into Trap of Rivalry Set by the West,” Global Times, January 26, 2015. 106. Ayaz Gul, “Pakistan, Russia Sign Rare Military Cooperation Pact,” Voice of America, August 8, 2018.

7 Third Actors and US-China Nuclear Strategies David Santoro

PLATO FAMOUSLY SAID THAT GEOMETRY HELPS “DRAW THE SOUL to truth.” 1 Although generally remembered as a philosopher from the classical period in ancient Greece, Plato was also an avid patron of mathematics, especially geometry. Inspired by Pythagoras, he founded his “Academy” in Athens in 387 BCE, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, where he stressed that geometry was the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. To him, studying geometry was an intellectual exercise in training the mind to overcome the “illusions” of the tangible world by learning the “ideal forms,” which he deemed more real. Of course, the Athenian thinker would hardly be alone in making the assessment that mathematics, and geometry in particular, are critical in helping to understand the way the world works. Centuries later, for instance, the Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer Galileo Galilei insisted in The Assayer (1623) that it is impossible to grasp “that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe . . . if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.”2 Interestingly, Plato singled out triangles as the most basic elements from which everything in the world is created. In Timaeus, one of his most well-known dialogues written c. 360 BCE, he explained the geometrical simplicity behind the complexity of astronomical 199

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appearances, arguing that triangles, above all other elements, are the most fundamental and central.3 Plato opined that triangles represent the godhead of harmony and proportion. Many thinkers after him concurred, recognizing the unicity and centrality of triangles to explain complex problems. The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes, for instance, used them as his prime example to examine geometric truth, notably in The Geometry (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).4 Consider also this passage from the English-born American political activist and philosopher Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason (1794), which describes how triangles are no less than a general purpose representation for applications in a wide range of domains: The scientific principles that man employs to obtain the foreknowledge of an eclipse, or of anything else relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a ship on the ocean, it is called navigation; when applied to the construction of figures drawn by rule and compass, it is called geometry; when applied to the construction of plans or edifices, it is called architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the surface of the earth, it is called land surveying. In fine, it is the soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown.5

In the same vein, the fundamental assumption of this book has been that triangles or, rather, a triangular approach is useful to illuminate the complexities and inner workings of the contemporary and emerging strategic nuclear landscape. More specifically, this book has been based on the idea that examining triangular strategic relationships between the United States, China, and several other key states is essential to providing a good and thorough understanding of the current and looming nuclear geometry in Asia and beyond. Investigating these triangular relationships has been this book’s mission. It has done so to plug an important gap in the scholarly literature about US-China strategic nuclear relations. As detailed in the introduction, analysts have long overlooked the dense interconnections and interactions between the United States, China, and third actors, or at least they have not studied these dynamics as a whole, especially in recent years. Analysts have also largely ignored that several states have, or could have, considerable influence in shaping the present and future US-China bilateral nuclear relationship because

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that relationship is asymmetric and because many of these states have become increasingly powerful and have, as a result, agency. This book has explored these triangular relationships at an especially interesting time because, as I discussed in the introduction and in more depth in Chapter 1, in recent years the US-China strategic relationship has been changing exceptionally fast, and not for the better. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, it has also gone from bad to worse, with no sign that it will improve any time soon. Worryingly, for the first time, the relationship now seems ripe for nuclear rivalry. Assessing the role and impact of the multipolar context on that relationship in these evolving circumstances, therefore, has been particularly timely. The authors of Chapters 2 through 5 have, in turn, looked at four specific US-China strategic nuclear triangles. They have analyzed the roles and influence that Russia, the so-called pariah states (North Korea and Iran), US regional allies and Taiwan, and the two South Asian states (India and Pakistan) have had, currently have, and are likely to have on the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship in the foreseeable future. What have each of these four chapters found? More importantly, what have they revealed about the triangular approach? What has this approach helped explain? What are its limits? Finally, what does it not explain?

Findings from the Four Strategic Nuclear Triangles At the major power level, the triangular approach has proved helpful to explain strategic dynamics. John Warden’s analysis of the USChina-Russia strategic nuclear triangle in Chapter 2 shows that the US-Russia bipolar order of the Cold War (and early post–Cold War period) is now clearly giving way to a tripolar dynamic between the United States, Russia, and China. As Warden put it, “It has been the US-Russia bilateral relationship, not the US-Russia-China triangle, that has driven the evolution of the global nuclear order thus far, but China, and its relationships with Russia and the United States, is likely to have a larger impact over the coming decades.”6 Warden further explains that there is significant cause for concern because military competition is increasing between the three major powers and, if that persists, then “the most likely outcome is rejuvenated nuclear competition,” especially given that Washington, Beijing, and Moscow are all modernizing their nuclear arsenals.7

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In and of itself, however, the triangular approach is insufficient to explain all the complexities of major power dynamics. A dyadic approach is also essential. Warden’s analysis shows that the emerging US-China-Russia tripolar dynamic has been characterized by deteriorating relationships between the United States and both Russia and China (with the US-Russia relationship currently in dire straits and the US China relationship ailing fast) while, on the contrary, the RussiaChina relationship has become steadily more cooperative. Despite underlying tensions in their bilateral relationship, Moscow and Beijing have calculated that they should work together to better challenge US (and allied) interests. In this triangle, plainly, two dyads are increasingly competitive—the US-Russia and US-China dyads—and one dyad is becoming more, although cautiously, cooperative—the Russia-China dyad. Accordingly, while the triangular approach helps explain the current and looming major power game at the macro level, a dyadic approach remains crucial to understanding internal dynamics. That is why in making recommendations for the United States, Warden argues that Washington should deal with Beijing and Moscow together and separately. He recommends that the United States should not shy away from engaging in nuclear competition with both if necessary, but that it should also seek to avoid its more pronounced competition with Russia spilling over into its emerging competition with China. Confessing that even the best efforts to do so have few chances of success, Warden explains that the United States should at least try and limit RussiaChina cooperation. The triangular approach, in short, is a good descriptor of the major power game, but a dyadic approach is also useful because differences remain vast in the three relationships. In the emerging context of stronger US-China strategic competition, the triangular approach has also proved helpful in explaining the pariah state dimension. Robert Einhorn’s analysis in Chapter 3 of triangles involving the United States, China, and either North Korea or Iran highlights the complex interconnections and interactions between them, showing that the problem of dealing with the pariahs presents both opportunities and challenges to the United States and China. On the one hand, Washington and Beijing share an interest in discouraging North Korea and Iran from possessing a nuclear arsenal and in avoiding the regional instability that comes with it. Yet on the other hand, US and Chinese interests often diverge on how to address

The Pariah State Dimension

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those countries of proliferation concern, and US policies toward the two countries sometimes adversely affect Chinese interests, and vice versa. As Einhorn put it, these policies “could have significant and potentially negative impacts on relations between the United States and China, including on their strategic nuclear relationship,” especially in an environment in which US-China strategic competition is intensifying; such competition, in addition, reduces the space for USChina cooperation on North Korea and Iran.8 As in the case of the major powers, however, thorough understanding of the pariah state dimension cannot be done solely through the triangular approach. Here, too, a dyadic approach is important. Significantly, Einhorn found that North Korea has a much greater potential than Iran to weigh on the US-China strategic relationship (positively or negatively) because of Beijing’s greater political and security stake in the Korean Peninsula than in the less geographically proximate Gulf. In these two triangles, plainly, the impact on Washington and Beijing varies considerably depending on the pariah state and the unique relationship each has with it. Explaining dynamics involving the pariahs also requires a broader approach than just a triangular and dyadic outlook. In both cases, Russia as well as the United Kingdom and France play an essential role as permanent members of the UN Security Council: they, along with the United States and China, have the authority to impose sanctions on North Korea and Iran as well as to make decisions to use force against them. Other players are important as well. In North Korea’s case, South Korea and Japan have the power to shape dynamics and, in Iran’s case, so do many countries of the Gulf; Germany and the European Union, for that matter, have also been deeply involved in diplomatic initiatives with Iran. Accordingly, while the triangular approach is useful to analyze the pariah state problem in the context of rising US-China strategic competition, it is not sufficient because that approach does not account for all the dimensions of the problem. There is a complex geometric structure around the pariah state problem, more complex than a triangle. A dyadic approach is thus also useful to explain that structure, as is one that considers the impact of multiple other actors, notably the permanent members of the UN Security Council and countries neighboring North Korea and Iran. Examining triangular relationships between the United States, China, and US Asian allies and Taiwan helps appreciate developments in US

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alliances and partnerships in the emerging era of US-China strategic competition. It helps to show how each US ally or partner is positioning itself in that context, and the impact that this generates on US-China strategic relations. In his study in Chapter 4 of triangles involving the United States, China, and US regional allies or Taiwan, Brad Glosserman shows how, except for Thailand, US regional alliances have all, of late, increasingly weighed on the US-China strategic nuclear relationship. He explained that the Philippines has sought US assurances about the applicability of the alliance to the South China Sea (where Manila and Beijing have territorial disputes) and that, to ensure continued US engagement in Asia in the context of China’s rerise, Australia has enhanced its contribution to US strategic deterrence. These developments have been a source of concern for Beijing and have featured heavily in US-China nuclear discussions. Meanwhile, while the primary focus of the US-South Korea alliance has been North Korea, China has received greater attention, and Beijing has become wary of the indirect impact of South Korean capability development on its deterrent and its strategic nuclear relationship with Washington. No other alliance has had a more direct impact than the US-Japan alliance, however: Tokyo’s rising contributions to US strategic deterrence have been extremely worrisome to Beijing. Finally, while it is not a US treaty ally, Taiwan has nonetheless been central to US-China nuclear dynamics because of Beijing’s increasingly vocal determination to reunify the island with mainland China, and because of Washington’s commitment to Taipei’s defense. The triangular approach, therefore, is essential to understanding alliance and partnership dynamics. Here too, however, it has insufficient analytical power. As Glosserman put it, “Each [US Asian] ally and partner has a unique relationship not only with Washington, but with Beijing too” and, as a consequence, “each relationship has a different impact on the US-China strategic dynamic.”9 This suggests that a dyadic analysis of the relationship between, on the one hand, the United States and each ally/partner and, on the other, the relationship between China and each ally/partner is also crucial to having a comprehensive understanding of alliance strategic dynamics. Moreover, and significantly, US regional alliances and partnerships do not exist solely to respond to the “China problem.” North Korea, too, is a key “target,” especially in the case of the US-South Korea alliance. Neither a triangular nor a dyadic approach help explain that geometry. Similarly, neither a triangular nor a dyadic approach

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help explain US-led efforts to foster greater deterrence and defense cooperation with and among US allies and other regional actors to present a unified front to China. This is a broader, multifaceted geometric construct characterized, for instance, by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, which requires a broader approach. Accordingly, while the triangular approach has merit to appreciate developments in US alliances and partnerships in the context of rising US-China strategic competition, its explanatory power also has important limits. There is much to learn from an analysis of triangular relationships between the United States, China, and South Asia. In his investigation of these relationships in Chapter 5, Toby Dalton found that South Asia essentially served as a theater for US-China strategic interactions in the prebomb period, before India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998. Washington and Beijing sought partnerships with Pakistan to influence both regional events and the subcontinent’s march toward nuclearization and, in turn, New Delhi and Islamabad sought to draw them (and Moscow) into the region to suit their own interests. Strategic dynamics changed after 1998, however. South Asia became increasingly dominated by intensified strategic competition between India and Pakistan. Chinese assistance to Pakistan continued and a US-India strategic partnership developed but, as Dalton put it, “the unraveling of the broader Cold War framework permitted regional security dynamics to overtake great-power competition as drivers of Southern Asian competition.”10 As a result, US-China-South Asia strategic dynamics today are best described as what Dalton calls a “stratified, quadrilateral competition” with nuclear rivalry concentrated in a US-China global strata and an India-Pakistan regional strata, and with complex interdependence between the two. That means, plainly, that while the United States and China will undoubtedly carry their competition into the subcontinent, the US-China and India-Pakistan nuclear competitions will likely continue (and intensify) without affecting each other because, at least for now, the factors driving them are mostly intrinsic to each bilateral relationship. These findings suggest that, at the macro level, the dynamics involving South Asia form a geometric structure that resembles less a triangle between the United States, China, and the subcontinent

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than a quadrilateral polygon between the United States, China, India, and Pakistan with unique interconnections and interactions between them. This, again, suggests that the triangular approach has some value, but is insufficient to explain these complexities. In this case, a dyadic approach is seemingly more useful. Finally, it is important to stress that the triangular approach does not account for developments at the multilateral level. It does not explain dynamics in the global and regional arms control, nonproliferation, disarmament, and nuclear security regimes. It does not, for instance, give insights into the complex diplomatic interactions between states over the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), nor is it useful to analyze the impact of the recently concluded Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, also known as the Nuclear Ban Treaty or Ban Treaty, or the efforts to promote nuclear risk reduction, be it at the level of the permanent members of the UN Security Council or in other international or regional forums. Yet these dynamics are important because they, too, help shape the nuclear geometry in Asia and beyond in fundamental ways. All in all, this discussion suggests that the great philosophers were right: triangles are useful to explain complex problems. They do contribute greatly to explaining strategic nuclear dynamics, especially in the context of growing US-China competition. As we have seen, however, a triangular approach alone does not explain everything. A dyadic approach and an approach that takes into account larger groupings are also necessary to understand the current and emerging strategic nuclear landscape in its entirety because that landscape includes many different geometric structures, so much so that it might be more accurate to talk about nuclear geometries rather than just one nuclear geometry when describing it.

The Multilateral Dimension

The State of Play and Alternative Nuclear Futures for the Asian and Global Nuclear Orders

With these considerations in mind, let us now take a step back and reflect on what the book’s findings, taken together, suggest about the state of play for the Asian and global nuclear orders in the early 2020s and their possible trajectories in the foreseeable future. So, first, how much danger or risk exists in these geometric structures right now, in the emerging era of US-China strategic competition? For starters, it is important to recognize that there are still sev-

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eral reasons to be encouraged. Granted, business as usual is unlikely to hold in the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship. Because in recent years the broader relationship between Washington and Beijing has become increasingly competitive, there will likely be spillovers of that competition into the nuclear domain and, as we have seen, a number of actions taken by both sides suggest that an action-reaction dynamic may have already begun. Still, there is no intense US-China nuclear competition taking place at present. Nuclear weapons are mostly in the background of the bilateral relationship. That relationship, at the moment, is only “ripe” for nuclear rivalry. The same is true when it comes to the US-China-Russia relationship. Competitive dynamics are intensifying between the three countries, foreshadowing rejuvenated nuclear competition, with the United States increasingly standing as the odd man out because Moscow and Beijing seem to have concluded that they should strengthen their bilateral cooperation to counter Washington. Yet and again for now, the deterioration of the US-Russia nuclear relationship has not had an adverse impact on the increasingly difficult USChina strategic dynamic and, additionally, Russia-China cooperation remains relatively limited. Now consider the pariahs. The United States and China differ on how to respond to North Korea and Iran, and US and Chinese policies toward those two countries sometimes adversely impact their bilateral relationship. Stronger competitive pressures between Washington and Beijing will likely fuel these dynamics as well as reduce the space for US-China cooperation to deal with the North Korean and Iranian problems. That said, the United States and China (along with Russia and others, notably Northeast Asian and Gulf states) continue to share an interest in preventing Pyongyang and Tehran from keeping or developing nuclear weapons and, as of right now, there is still hope that this goal can be achieved: no one has given up on it yet. In the same vein, there are numerous vexing questions about the future of US alliances and partnerships in Asia and its impact on the US-China bilateral nuclear relationship, notably because allied governments are adapting fast to rising competitive pressures between Washington and Beijing, including in potentially destabilizing ways. Yet for the moment, stability has prevailed in the hub-and-spokes system despite these emerging dynamics. Finally, nuclear competition has intensified between India and Pakistan, but that competition has not affected the emerging competition between the United States and China, and vice versa. While that may change, at this time the interplay between the US-China

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bilateral nuclear relationship and South Asia has not evolved into a competitive strategic nuclear dynamic. Therefore, there is much to suggest that the situation in the early 2020s is not out of control—not yet. The nuclear jungle is not here and, by and large, the Asian and global nuclear orders have been stable. Such stability is reflected at the multilateral level. The NPT, for instance, continues to stand as the cornerstone of the nonproliferation regime, and its mission to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology, and advance disarmament remains intact. There are also many reasons to be discouraged. For one, while a full-blown US-China nuclear competition has not begun, there is already an emerging competitive action-reaction cycle at play between Washington and Beijing. Worryingly, that cycle is taking place even as there is still no strategic nuclear dialogue between the United States and China and, as a result, no foundation on which the two countries can build cooperative measures to manage or reduce instability. Nuclear weapons, plainly, are gradually moving from the background to the foreground of the US-China strategic relationship without any guardrails. This is uncharted and potentially dangerous territory. Similarly, while it remains limited, the nuclear dimension is getting considerably more pronounced in the US-China-Russia relationship, and Russia and China are strengthening their strategic partnership to confront the United States. A tripolar nuclear dynamic seems to make its debut in the international system, replacing the mostly bipolar nuclear order of the Cold War and post–Cold War eras dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union and then Russia. Plainly, there is now growing nuclear coupling between the United States, China, and Russia. Turning to pariah states, Washington, Beijing, and others continue to share an interest in denuclearizing North Korea and keeping Iran non-nuclear, and they have not abandoned efforts to achieve these goals, but at present the prospects for success appear bleak. Pyongyang now possesses a sophisticated nuclear arsenal and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the international agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program concluded in 2015—is in shambles. Reversing these trends will require strong international cooperation, notably between the United States, China, Russia, and others, a tall order in an increasingly competitive environment. In North Korea’s case, US-China cooperation will be essential, yet rising US-China competition makes such cooperation difficult, and Washington and Beijing are more likely to proceed with policies

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that will exacerbate, not reduce, their differences. Washington’s “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang has fueled competitive pressures with Beijing, for instance. In the same spirit, while US alliances and partnerships in Asia have remained stable in the face of intensifying US-China competition, there is the possibility of major change, notably as a result of the acquisition of independent missile capabilities and, in some cases, nuclear weapons by US allies. These developments could change the hub-andspokes system in fundamental and possibly destabilizing ways. Finally, a strategic chain linking the India-Pakistan and USChina competitions has not emerged because, for now, the ChinaIndia relationship has not evolved into a full-blown competition. Yet the recent skirmishes that took place between Chinese and Indian troops on the Sino-Indian border and the resulting cooling of relations between Beijing and New Delhi suggest that the onset of China-India competition is a distinct possibility, especially given that in recent years Chinese and Indian strategists have closely monitored each other’s strategic arsenal and developments. The subcontinent, in short, could become more than just a regional nuclear problem and change in ways that increasingly fuel instability in the broader Asian and international systems. Accordingly, while the situation in the early 2020s is not out of control, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is nevertheless getting rapidly concerning. To use the same image mentioned earlier: the nuclear jungle is not here, but it may be around the corner. The Asian and global nuclear orders seem to be on the cusp of major change, and not for the better. There is, in a sense, ripeness for general nuclear rivalry. Echoes of such rivalry are evident at the multilateral level. For instance, while the NPT remains the cornerstone of the nonproliferation regime, its future is unclear now that the Ban Treaty is in place and gaining ground, and despite what the proponents of this new treaty argue, there are vexing questions as to whether that it will strengthen or, on the contrary, weaken that regime. Looking to the future, how might the dynamics in these geometric structures evolve? What could be the next stage for the Asian and global nuclear orders in the emerging era of US-China strategic competition? There are three possible futures: a best-case scenario, a worst-case scenario, and a mixed-outcome scenario. In the best-case scenario, US-China competition continues to intensify as Washington and Beijing proceed with the modernization of their

The Best-Case Scenario: The System Stabilizes

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strategic nuclear forces, but US and Chinese officials manage to bring that competition under some control. There is an action-reaction cycle at play between the two countries, but it is not intense because both sides are talking and taking measures to maintain and even strengthen strategic stability. Down this pathway, therefore, Washington and Beijing manage to establish a robust strategic nuclear dialogue process, which helps address misperceptions each side has about the other’s policies, capabilities, and intentions. Supported by long-standing Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues, this process also helps the United States and China to understand areas of mutual concern as well as to develop cooperative means and measures to manage their differences. This collaborative work begins with the conclusion of confidencebuilding measures (CBMs) tailored to the specific requirements of the US-China strategic relationship. These measures help to build habits of cooperation among US and Chinese officials as well as enhance mutual reassurance, allowing Washington and Beijing, as a next step, to conclude more ambitious arms control agreements. Because the United States and China have vastly different force sizes and structures, these agreements are mostly asymmetric in nature. For instance, they focus on types, rather than numbers, of weapons and include moratoria or caps on the further development or deployment of particular systems. In short, in this scenario, the United States and China manage to reach a strategic nuclear modus vivendi despite competitive pressures, and they do so early enough to prevent a full-blown arms race and before there is crisis involving the two sides. Plainly, in addition to agreeing to compete primarily at the political and economic levels, Washington and Beijing commit to focusing their military competition on the conventional domain, not the nuclear domain, even though they seek to develop regimes of restraint on conventional forces as well. The US-China-Russia relationship, meanwhile, does not morph into an out-of-control tripolar competitive nuclear dynamic with the United States as the odd man out. The US-Russia nuclear relationship remains competitive and common interests are few, but there is no major crisis, and the relationship stabilizes because some level of cooperation is maintained and because there are breakthroughs in arms control, beginning with an extension of the US-Russia New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and a commitment to concluding follow-on agreements. Increased stability in the US-Russia nuclear relationship contributes to reducing competitive pressures in the US-China strategic

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relationship and, significantly, facilitates substantive progress in the emerging US-China strategic nuclear dialogue. In turn, while they remain (cautious) strategic partners and continue to hedge against the United States, Russia and China feel less of a sense of urgency to expand and deepen their bilateral cooperation. The major power game, in sum, remains competitive and by far the most consequential for international peace and security, but it does not take a dangerous turn. In the best-case scenario, the United States and China also successfully align their positions and cooperate to deal with the pariahs despite competitive pressures. In part because major power dynamics are under control, Washington and Beijing, along with Moscow and others, manage to negotiate nuclear agreements with Pyongyang and Tehran that put a lid on or, better, solve the problems at hand once and for all. While they are working toward these agreements, Washington and Beijing, again, along with Moscow and others, also work on joint contingency planning in the event of regime collapse in either North Korea or Iran, or in the event of a crisis breaking out with either country (especially North Korea). In so doing, US and Chinese officials not only build habits of cooperation among themselves (and the other parties involved), but they also prevent the pariahs, particularly Pyongyang, from adversely affecting their bilateral strategic relationship (i.e., sharpening competitive pressures). Moreover, and significantly, because they take the initiative and show leadership to deal with the pariahs, Washington, Beijing, and others manage to keep them in check. Pyongyang and Tehran actively work to defend their interests in the negotiations, but neither seeks to challenge or derail the diplomatic initiatives, and there is no crisis. These successes with North Korea and Iran also reduce proliferation incentives in Northeast Asia and the Gulf, and they have a positive effect on the nonproliferation regime. US allies and partners in Asia, for their part, continue to adapt to US-China strategic competition. Because they are kept abreast of and, in some cases, involved in Washington’s efforts to regulate its strategic relationships with Beijing and Moscow as well as the initiatives deployed to deal with the pariahs, allies and partners, notably Japan, are reassured that their interests will not be affected negatively by these dynamics. Overall, they even assess that they will reap important benefits and that risks and costs are minimal. As a result, US allies and partners do not engage in hedging, or they do so in only a limited manner. They do not, for instance, decide to resort to self-help and develop independent nuclear weapons

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capabilities. Rather, they continue to work with the United States and increasingly also among themselves and with new partners to adapt their deterrence and defense posture to the requirements of the changed and changing Asian security architecture; that is, in a way that compels an increasingly powerful China and, until it is denuclearized, North Korea to regulate their behavior in a positive and constructive manner. The hub-and-spokes system, plainly, expands and adjusts to stand as a (continued) force for stability in the evolving regional security environment. Finally, in the best-case scenario, there is also a reduction of tensions in the India-Pakistan relationship and continued or, better, strengthened stability in the China-India relationship. Resulting from active engagement and cooperation between New Delhi and Islamabad on strategic stability and arms control, the launch of substantive discussions between Beijing and New Delhi, and careful management of the US-India strategic partnership, these developments not only contribute to improving South Asian peace and security, but also, and concomitantly, to preventing the subcontinent from exporting instability to the international system (and, conversely, from receiving instability from the broader system). In the best-case scenario, therefore, the looming challenges of the early 2020s are anticipated and managed in a way that prevents their intensification. The situation is kept or, rather, brought under control despite rising competitive pressures between the United States and China and in other dynamics. The Asian and global nuclear orders, plainly, prove either sufficiently resilient to withstand the shock of stronger US-China strategic competition and other developments, or, where they are weak, flexible enough to adapt as the requirements of stability change. In that scenario, the NPT and other multilateral arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament instruments also continue to help maintain order, even as they, too, adjust to these new requirements. The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons remains distant, but there is progress toward the next best thing: nuclear risk reduction. In this scenario, US-China strategic competition intensifies significantly and at a fast pace, in part, because US and Chinese officials make no efforts or minimal ones to try and bring it under control. Plainly, the US-China action-reaction cycle that was emerging in the early 2020s gains strength and proceeds largely unimpeded because Washington and Beijing worry little about maintaining or strength-

The Worst-Case Scenario: The System Breaks Down

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ening strategic stability and, instead, focus primarily on developing policies and capabilities to compete against each other. Washington and Beijing do try to launch a strategic nuclear dialogue process, but these efforts are too weak and tentative, and they fail on arrival because competitive pressures are too strong and because the prevailing view on both sides is that dialogue and agreements on strategic stability and arms control are a waste of time. To the extent that they consider dialogue and agreements, each side sees them mainly as a way of locking in an advantage over the other which, not surprisingly, prevents any form of progress. In these circumstances, even Track 1.5 initiatives are abandoned and, while some Track 2 work continues, it is kept to a strict minimum and remains mostly an academic engagement. Down this pathway, therefore, strategic reassurance is not on the menu. US and Chinese officials do not try to reassure each other about their respective country’s policies, capabilities, and intentions. They do not seek to understand, let alone address, areas of mutual concern and do not negotiate cooperative means or measures to manage their differences, either in the form of CBMs or arms control agreements. The United States and China do not reach a strategic nuclear modus vivendi. Worse, US-China action-reaction dynamics morph rapidly into an intense arms race, with each side developing and deploying new offensive and defensive systems as well as taking an increasingly aggressive stance toward each other. US-China strategic competition becomes strong in the political, economic, and military domains and, in the latter, it takes on a nuclear character as well. Tensions rise and, because there are no guardrails, crises are many. Eventually, shots are fired and, in one variant, it escalates to an actual war and nuclear weapons are used, be it over Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, or maritime issues in the East or South China Seas. The US-China-Russia relationship takes an outright competitive and dangerous character, with nuclear weapons featuring prominently in trilateral interactions. Already in bad shape, the US-Russia nuclear relationship gets considerably worse. Washington and Moscow are no longer talking, the arms control relationship ceases to exist, there is an ongoing arms race, and tensions rise to new levels between the two countries. A crisis eventually breaks out in the European theater and, in one variant, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies end up in an escalating war with Russia; for instance, over the Baltic states and, there too, nuclear weapons are used. Not surprisingly, US-Russia dynamics adversely impact on the US-China strategic relationship, sharpening already high and rising

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competitive pressures. Because its relationship with Washington is bad and getting worse, Beijing decides to push its interests aggressively in Asia in the event of a crisis or a war in Europe involving the United States and Russia. Similarly, because its relationship with Washington is in dire straits, Moscow sees an opportunity to proceed with land grabs in Europe, including against a NATO member, when there is a crisis or a war between the United States and China in Asia. There is also the possibility that, in either case, Russia comes to the defense of China against the United States, and vice versa, an especially likely prospect if the two countries decide to formalize their strategic partnership into a military alliance, regardless of any underlying bilateral strategic issues they may have. Either way Washington finds itself in a situation where it is, at best, in a deep military crisis with both Russia and China and, at worst, in a high-stakes war with them, with nuclear use as a serious possibility. In the worstcase scenario, in sum, the major power game becomes so dangerous that it leads to major war, even possibly major nuclear war, transforming the international system. The worst-case scenario is also characterized by catastrophic developments with the pariahs. Unlike in the previous scenario, there is no effort on the part of Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and others to collaborate to conclude nuclear agreements with Pyongyang or Tehran because US-China-Russia strategic competition is so strong that neither side believes it can trust the other two, even to tackle what is, in theory, a common problem; Russia and China do coordinate their positions to an extent, however. There also is no joint work on contingency planning in the event of a North Korean or Iranian regime collapse or a crisis breaking out involving either Pyongyang or Tehran. As a result, because it is left unresolved, the pariah state problem worsens: North Korea develops and deploys an increasingly sophisticated nuclear arsenal and Iran declares itself a nuclear-armed state, fueling instability in their respective regions and, therefore, proliferation incentives. The nonproliferation regime suffers as a result, too. The United States, logically, responds with sanctions and by strengthening its regional defense and deterrence posture in both Northeast Asia and the Gulf. Yet because its relationships with China and Russia are at such a nadir, Washington does not seek to reassure Beijing or Moscow that these adjustments are targeted at only the pariahs, not them. US officials, plainly, stop discriminating the major powers from the pariahs. Now, consider what could unfold next in the case of North Korea. Beijing concludes that a stronger US defense and deterrence posture

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in Northeast Asia will undermine the reliability and survivability of its arsenal. So, in addition to accelerating the modernization of its strategic force both quantitatively and qualitatively, Beijing decides to strengthen its security ties with Pyongyang in response; recall that China and North Korea have a foundational document for this, the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty of 1961, whereby Beijing pledged to provide military assistance to Pyongyang against any outside attack. Then, armed with a much more capable arsenal and confident that it now has Beijing’s full(er) backing and support, Pyongyang becomes much more aggressive against its neighbors, South Korea and Japan. Quickly, a crisis breaks out and the United States (South Korea’s and Japan’s security guarantor) and China (North Korea’s protector) end up face-to-face at a time of extremely high tensions, making war likely with multiple pathways to nuclear use. In short, in this scenario, the pariah state problem also becomes nightmarish, with the potential of upending the regional security orders in both Northeast Asia and the Gulf. Developments between the major powers and with the pariahs have devastating knock-on effects on the hub-and-spokes system. Seeing tensions and instability rise so much as well as the United States increasingly isolated and, as a result, likely unable (perhaps even unwilling) to honor its defense commitments to them, more US allies and partners decide to resort to self-help and develop sophisticated military capabilities, including nuclear weapons, to provide for their own defense. First in line are South Korea, Japan, then perhaps Australia. Making the calculations that they stand to lose in a strategic conflict between the United States and China, others with less advanced technological capabilities, such as the Philippines, opt to distance themselves from, or even formally break ties with, Washington and side with Beijing. US allies and partners, therefore, do not try to maintain a good relationship with the United States. On the contrary, they assess their security environment to be so dire and the US ability to assure their security so limited that they decide to end their special relationship with Washington and take care of themselves or, for better or for worse, find another protector. These developments unfold either without a direct or immediate cause, simply as a result of escalating tensions and instability, or they are precipitated by a major crisis or war that ends badly for the United States; for instance, a situation where Washington fails to step up and defend Taiwan following an unprovoked aggression by Beijing. Regardless of their cause, these developments lead to a messy

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everyone-for-themselves mindset, creating new strategic dynamics and realignments, further fueling instability in the region. In essence, the hub-and-spokes system collapses and, as a result, the US role as the region’s primary security guarantor comes to an end. The worst-case scenario, finally, is characterized by escalation and then war between India and Pakistan. This war which, in one variant, includes the limited use of nuclear weapons further inflames South Asian strategic dynamics. Thereafter, New Delhi and Islamabad double down on nuclear arms racing, and these developments adversely impact the India-China strategic relationship which, in turn, becomes extremely unstable and competitive. Another factor affecting the relationship between New Delhi and Beijing is the deepening of the US-India strategic partnership, which Washington pushes hard to counter China, and which New Delhi welcomes with open arms as its security environment is deteriorating rapidly. As tensions are high and rising, Beijing and New Delhi end up clashing along their disputed border in the Himalayas and, for the first time, a nuclear crisis breaks out which, in one variant, there is an actual nuclear exchange. Either way, a strategic chain linking, via China, South Asian dynamics to nuclear interactions in the broader region emerges and becomes self-sustaining. The subcontinent, in sum, evolves for the worse and becomes an exporter of instability and war beyond its borders, affecting the Asian and global nuclear orders in fundamental ways. The worst-case scenario, in a nutshell, is the scenario the world wants to avoid at all costs. It is the scenario where the situation of the early 2020s does more than just deteriorate in response to stronger US-China strategic competition and other dynamics. In this scenario, the players in the Asian and global nuclear orders pay the price of rising instability: major wars break out and nuclear weapons are used and, as a consequence, the system breaks down, upending the existing security orders and leading to the collapse of many of the major multilateral institutions that have helped keep peace and stability such as the NPT. In these circumstances, not surprisingly, the prospects for enhanced nuclear security and nuclear disarmament are also extremely remote.

The Mixed-Outcome Scenario: The System Deteriorates

In the mixed-outcome scenario, US-China strategic competition continues to intensify with each side modernizing its forces. US and Chinese officials try hard to bring that competition under control but,

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unlike in the best-case scenario, they are not successful. As a result, the US-China action-reaction cycle that was in its infancy in the early 2020s gains momentum and proceeds without guardrails to maintain, let alone strengthen, strategic stability. Down this pathway, Washington and Beijing manage to jumpstart a strategic nuclear dialogue process, but it takes time for the two sides to do so and, once it is launched, substantive discussions do not begin immediately, allowing US-China strategic competition to proceed unimpeded in the interim. Then, when substantive discussions do begin, and despite support from Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives, they are not productive. US and Chinese officials fail to reassure each other about their respective country’s policies, capabilities, and intentions. They do not address areas of mutual concern or develop cooperative means and measures to manage their differences. The dialogue, therefore, does not produce tangible results. Washington and Beijing do not conclude CBMs and the prospects for developing a US-China arms control relationship appear extremely bleak; the possibility of concluding asymmetric bargains is, at best, an academic discussion. The United States and China, plainly, do not manage to agree on a strategic nuclear modus vivendi. Still, unlike in the worst-case scenario, US-China strategic competition plays out primarily at the political and economic levels, and militarily it is active in the conventional domain more so than in the nuclear domain. Moreover, while military competition intensifies in an unconstrained manner, it proceeds relatively slowly. There is no intense arms racing between Washington and Beijing and, even though the two sides find themselves increasingly at odds over key security issues, tensions increase, and there are a few close calls (notably in East Asia), no serious crisis or war breaks out. At the same time, the US-China-Russia relationship evolves into an increasingly competitive tripolar dynamic. The US-Russia nuclear relationship does not improve and, on the contrary, it continues its downward spiral. While, unlike in the worst-case scenario, there is no major crisis or war, tensions still run high between Washington and Moscow after several incidents, and both are engaged in an overt strategic nuclear arms race after they fail to strengthen strategic stability and to end the arms control deadlock. New START is not renewed and there is no agreement on, or promising prospects for, a replacement. The US-Russia arms control relationship is, in effect, dead and buried. The deterioration of the US-Russia nuclear relationship, in turn, fuels competitive pressures in the US-China strategic relationship

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and contributes to the delays in initiating the US-China strategic nuclear dialogue, and then to the failure of making substantive progress. Out-of-control US-Russia competition, plainly, spills over into the emerging US-China competition and fuels it further. Additionally, and as a result, while they continue to remain cautious about each other, Russia and China feel the need to expand and deepen their strategic partnership to counter the United States, which they both regard as an existential threat. The major power game, in short, becomes more intense and more dangerous, threatening international peace and security and leaving the United States increasingly isolated, but there is no system breakdown. In the mixed-outcome scenario, the United States and China also fail to align their positions and cooperate to deal with the pariahs. Despite rising tensions, Washington and Beijing, along with Moscow and others, do initially try to collaborate to negotiate nuclear agreements with Pyongyang and Tehran, but these efforts are either stillborn or, when they gain traction and advance, do not yield any results, because competitive pressures between the United States and China (and Russia) are too strong and because the pariahs capitalize on such pressures by engaging in skillful divide-and-conquer tactics. As a consequence, North Korea and Iran continue to press on with military developments and deployments, threatening the security architectures in Northeast Asia and the Gulf and, among other things, creating proliferation incentives in both regions. Practically, it means that North Korea develops an increasingly sophisticated nuclear arsenal and Iran becomes an overt or de facto nuclear-armed state, and it additionally means that countries such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia gradually become tempted to develop their own nuclear deterrent in response. The North Korean and Iranian nuclear successes also send a negative message to the world: that, with determination, any state can pursue nuclear weapons successfully, and do so despite adversity. Failure to solve the pariah state problem, particularly North Korea, has the effect of sharpening US-China competition because the United States responds with sanctions and by beefing up its regional defense and deterrence posture, and China, as a result, feels that its security is jeopardized. Yet this adverse effect remains limited because Washington and Beijing maintain open channels of communication, and because the United States makes every effort to show that it is adapting its defense and deterrence posture in Northeast Asia with an eye on North Korea, not China. Moreover, in part because the United States and China, along with Russia and others, do not completely turn their backs on the pariah

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state problem even if they cannot readily manage it, Pyongyang and Tehran behave carefully and do not engage in serious military provocations or actions that would threaten their respective regional security orders; plainly, there is no major crisis or war. The competitive security environment is too strong, however, to allow for Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and others to work on joint contingency planning in the event of a North Korean or Iranian regime collapse, or a crisis breaking out with either Pyongyang or Tehran. The pariah state problem, in sum, worsens considerably, but it does not get out of hand. US allies and partners, meanwhile, grow increasingly wary of rising competitive dynamics between the major powers and with the pariahs. Because they worry their security will be adversely impacted by these developments and because, in increasingly tense circumstances, they feel the United States does not reassure them adequately that it would have their backs if they were attacked, allies and partners engage in significant hedging and even outright balancing. Some opt to acquire increasingly sophisticated weapons and, as already mentioned, even develop nuclear weapons capabilities. Seeing the United States increasingly isolated and, they assess, unreliable, others decide to diversify their relationships, including with other major powers and, in some cases, to an extent with the pariahs; rapprochement between Seoul and Pyongyang becomes a possibility, for instance. These developments create strong and growing tensions between the United States and its allies, as well as between allies, and cooperation suffers as a result. Still, in this scenario, allies and partners continue to operate within the framework of their special relationship with the United States. While they take various individual actions, even sometimes controversial actions, to shore up what they consider to be increasingly important security deficits for them, they coordinate many of these actions with, or seek acceptance or tacit approval from, US officials because they still regard the United States as their primary security guarantor and, as a consequence, they put a premium on maintaining a good and healthy relationship with Washington. Thus, there is strong and increasing stress within the hub-andspokes system, but no collapse of that system. In the mixed-outcome scenario, finally, tensions in the IndiaPakistan relationship do not subside and, on the contrary, they increase as New Delhi and Islamabad engage in increasingly intense nuclear arms racing and do not make headway toward the conclusion of CBMs or arms control agreements. Simultaneously, the ChinaIndia relationship becomes unstable and competitive; strategic dialogue remains inexistent and, for instance, each side decides to weaken

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its no-first-use policy stance. Combined with the deepening of the US-India strategic partnership, this development creates an emerging strategic chain between an increasingly inflamed South Asia and the broader Asian and global nuclear orders. While neither a major crisis nor a war breaks out, the subcontinent becomes nevertheless a net exporter of instability (and, conversely, instability in the broader system feeds South Asian strategic dynamics). Accordingly, in this scenario, the looming challenges of the early 2020s are either neglected or poorly managed. The situation, then, deteriorates as strategic competition between the United States and China increases and other dynamics worsen. The Asian and global nuclear orders become much less stable and appear increasingly on the brink of significant and potentially cataclysmic change, for the worse. These negative developments are felt deeply at the multilateral level, with the NPT and other key arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament instruments coming under increasing stress, and with some even evolving into outright irrelevance. Little if any work is done to enhance nuclear security or move toward a nuclear weapons– free world. Still, there is no major crisis or war and, therefore, no system breakdown, as in the worst-case scenario.

Implications for the US-China Strategic Relationship

The three scenarios described in the previous section are in no way the only possible futures for the Asian and global nuclear orders. Nevertheless, a situation where the system stabilizes (the best-case scenario), one where it breaks down (the worst-case scenario), and one where it deteriorates (the mixed-outcome scenario) appear to cover the broad spectrum of possibilities for what comes next. Reflecting on each of these futures makes one thing crystal clear: the mixed-outcome scenario seems to be, by and large, the most likely if current dynamics continue on their trajectory and, significantly, it might be a prelude to the worst-case scenario. Without an intervention, plainly, the most likely outcome is the deterioration of the system and, eventually, if the deterioration continues and sharpens, its breakdown. This suggests that action is required to turn the tables around and get to the best-case scenario, where the system stabilizes. The question, then, becomes the following: Action by whom? Our analysis in this book has shown that Washington and Beijing’s influence on the evolution of the Asian and global nuclear orders is important as a result of their dense interconnections and interactions

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with numerous other key states. Yet a key finding is also that Washington and Beijing will not write the nuclear future on their own, and that this future will not be determined solely by their bilateral strategic relationship. Other players will shape that future as well, for better or for worse. The pathways to the best-case, the worst-case, or the mixed-outcome scenario, plainly, will depend on decisions made by more than just the United States and China. Consider dynamics at the major power level. As discussed, stability would increase if the United States and China found a strategic nuclear modus vivendi despite rising competitive pressures. Such a development not only would improve their bilateral strategic relationship, but it would also reduce, and perhaps eliminate, Beijing’s incentives to expand and deepen its partnership with Moscow to counter Washington. Conversely, failure to reach such a modus vivendi would increase the risks of instability in the US-China strategic relationship and create incentives for Beijing to embrace Moscow. Yet success or failure to reach such a modus vivendi will depend on more than just US and Chinese policy choices. A key variable is also Russia. If the US-Russia nuclear relationship stabilizes, then Washington and Beijing would be more likely to agree on a modus vivendi. If the US-Russia nuclear relationship deteriorates, however, strategic competition between Washington and Beijing would likely increase, making it more difficult for them (though not impossible) to find bilateral agreement. The point is that the Russia variable will play a critical role in whether the major power game becomes more, or less, stable. It will not be up to decisions made only in Washington or Beijing. Moscow will have a say, too, and given how much the United States and Russia dominate the strategic nuclear landscape, it is likely that the evolution of their bilateral relationship will be the most consequential to determine the direction of major power relations. The same is true with the pariah state problem. If Washington and Beijing cooperate and help conclude effective agreements to manage or, better, solve the North Korean and Iranian nuclear questions, the world would be a safer place and the US-China bilateral strategic relationship would improve in the process. Without agreements, however, the pariah state problem would likely worsen, make the world less safe, and have an adverse impact on already increasingly competitive US-China relations. These alternative pathways, however, depend on more than just US and Chinese policy choices. Concluding effective agreements with the pariahs would also require cooperation from Russia and other players, such as Northeast Asian states in North Korea’s case. Of course,

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and significantly, North Korea and Iran would have to cooperate as well. In sum, the United States and China have important agency to address the pariah state problem, especially in the case of North Korea, but much less than enough to determine its outcome because many other players also have considerable influence. The future of the hub-and-spokes system, meanwhile, seems intrinsically tied to the evolution of the major power game and developments with the pariahs. Much will also depend on the role that the United States chooses to play vis-à-vis its allies and partners, which itself will be affected by strategic dynamics with Russia and China, and with North Korea and Iran. So, if there is increased stability at the major power level, good management or a resolution of the pariah state problem, and a dedicated effort by Washington to ensure that the interests of US allies and partners are protected, then the hub-and-spokes system would likely flourish and contribute to strengthening regional peace and stability. Alternatively, if major power relations and the pariah state problem worsen, and if the United States becomes ambivalent about its defense commitments to its allies and partners, then the hub-and-spokes system would likely become at risk and could even collapse altogether. Still, US allies and partners remain independent actors capable of independent decisions and actions. The future of US alliances and partnerships will not be shaped solely by developments in the broader system and US policy choices. Take the case of Japan and South Korea, for instance. Right now, there is a strong rationale for them to strengthen bilateral security cooperation in the face of mounting North Korean and Chinese threats, and the United States has worked hard to foster such cooperation. Yet the shaky political relationship between Tokyo and Seoul, driven by domestic considerations in both countries, has prevented cooperation from reaching its full potential. The future of South Asia, as it turns out, depends little on policy choices made by Washington or Beijing, or the evolution of their strategic relationship. Whether or not the subcontinent heads toward stability depends primarily on decisions made in New Delhi and Islamabad. US and Chinese influence on these dynamics (via the US-India strategic partnership for the United States and via the China-India relationship for China) is limited. If rising South Asian strategic instability were to spill over into the broader region, it would result from a myriad of factors, many beyond the control of Washington and Beijing. Accordingly, US-China strategic competition and the actions taken by Washington and Beijing to manage such competition and deal with

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third actors will fundamentally shape the evolution of the Asian and global nuclear orders. Yet whether the next stage for those orders ends up leaning toward the best-case, the worst-case, or the mixed-outcome scenario, or variations of each, will also depend heavily on what these third actors decide to do. The implication is that the nuclear future will not be affected by US and Chinese policy choices in the same way as US and Soviet policy choices determined the nuclear past during the Cold War. (Note, however, that even back then Washington and Moscow were by far the primary “shapers” of nuclear dynamics, but not the only ones.) Today’s and tomorrow’s strategic nuclear landscape is, and will likely continue to be, much more complex.

Implications and Recommendations for the United States

In light of these findings and conclusions, let us now briefly reflect on the implications for the United States and, then, return to the question posed in this book’s introduction: What should Washington do? There are two implications for the United States. The first echoes the discussion in the previous section. Our analysis makes clear that China sits at the fulcrum of key strategic dynamics in the Asian and global nuclear orders and, as a result, that rising US-China strategic bipolarity and the way Washington and Beijing manage it will have a significant impact on these orders. As explained, however, there are also important limits: third actors have considerable agency and will thus have a powerful influence as well. From a US perspective, therefore, the implication is that China should be regarded as a critical pillar of the strategic nuclear landscape, but as no more than that: one critical pillar. The United States, plainly, should not organize its strategic nuclear policy solely around China. It needs a much broader, or much more holistic, approach. The second implication is connected to the first. Our analysis reveals that strategic nuclear dynamics have become incredibly complex, much more so than during and even immediately after the Cold War, because there are now many more players (and many more weapons, technologies, and domains of strategic significance). There is also considerable evidence to suggest that these dynamics are becoming more, not less, complex, with tight connections between the primary system (the major powers) and some subsystems (e.g., the pariahs), and with quasi-independent subsystems such as in South Asia. The implication for the United States is that its ability to influence and shape today’s and tomorrow’s Asian and global nuclear orders, while

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still immense, is now much more limited, a trend that is unlikely to change. There are simply too many independent variables right now. What, then, should Washington do in these circumstances? More specifically, what should it do to nudge the world toward the best-case scenario? For starters, the United States should be clear-eyed about these realities. It should treat China as an essential variable in crafting its strategic nuclear policy. It should not, however, make that policy all about China. Plainly, the United States should focus on China but not make China the focus. Additionally, because the system is so complex and US influence increasingly limited, the United States should recognize that it alone cannot solve all the problems at hand, or even create the conditions to solve them. For that matter, the United States should also recognize that it cannot know exactly what should be done and how. Making that recognition is important because it will help manage expectations. As Hedley Bull put it in concluding his seminal book The Anarchical Society (1977), “It is better to recognize that we are in darkness than to pretend that we can see the light.”11 What follows is that Washington should set clear priorities—that is, decide what matters to the United States and, by implication, what does not matter or matters less—and it should identify realistic goals to shape the nuclear future to its advantage. Four such priorities and goals are recommended here.

1. Focus on the major power game. Think stabilization, not stability. The United States should begin with a focus on the major power game because that game is the most consequential for international peace and security. Moreover, as our analysis has shown, the evolution of strategic dynamics between the United States, China, and Russia will influence greatly the evolution of other dynamics, notably the pariah state problem. Getting the major power game right, therefore, should be a first-order priority for the United States. Achieving some form of strategic stability between the three countries, ideally on terms favorable to the United States, should be the US goal. Yet because competitive dynamics are currently intensifying between the three countries, with the potential of foreshadowing rejuvenated nuclear competition, a more immediate or more realistic US goal should be strategic stabilization. There is a marked difference between stability and stabilization: the former is the condition of something (here, relationships) being stable or in equilibrium, and thus resistant to change, whereas the latter refers to the process of making a condition stable or, more accurately, more stable. Stabilization (i.e., making the major power game more

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stable) is the right goal for the United States because competitive pressures between the three countries currently prevent that game from reaching stability. This is another way of saying that major power competition is unlikely to stop in the foreseeable future and, as a result, the United States should first seek to address its worst or most dangerous aspects. Practically, from a US perspective, managing major power competition also means that the United States should work hard to avoid its competition with one country negatively impacting the other—notably, that its more intense nuclear competition with Russia fuels its emerging nuclear competition with China. Futhermore, it means limiting Russia-China cooperation as much as possible. How should the United States proceed to achieve this? While trilateral strategic discussions might eventually make sense, tripolar competition is not strong enough to make them a requirement for now. There are wide strategic asymmetries between the three countries, especially between the United States and Russia (both have large arsenals) and China (Beijing has a much smaller arsenal). In these circumstances, the United States should pursue two tracks: one with Russia, one with China. Step number one should be to repair its relationship with Russia which, while it will remain competitive, can stabilize if mechanisms designed to avoid or manage crises are reinvigorated and if arms control is given new life. Given how much the United States and Russia dominate the strategic nuclear landscape, Washington should also feel comfortable reengaging Moscow first, before Beijing commits to US-China bilateral engagement. Concurrently, the United States should pursue strategic nuclear dialogue with China, even as they are increasingly competing. The United States should make clear to China that, while exercising restraint, it will adapt its deterrence posture to account for Chinese military developments and deployments as they evolve, something Washington has long resisted. Yet the United States should also incentivize China’s participation in dialogue, notably by publicly acknowledging what has long been the case, and a key sticking point for Beijing: that China’s strategic deterrent is credible and that the United States and China are in a mutually vulnerable relationship. Such a “vulnerability acknowledgment,” which can (and should) be made in a manner that does not negatively affect the security of the United States and that of its allies and partners (notably Japan), would go a long way to help initiate dialogue and negotiate CBMs and eventually arms control agreements that would stabilize the US-China strategic relationship. Because there is no guarantee that these efforts will succeed, as our speculative inquiry has revealed, the United States should also

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retain credible nuclear and conventional capabilities. Moreover, the United States should continue to compete with each country, both intellectually and in strategic capabilities, to counter ways each thinks it can prevail in a crisis or a war with Washington.

2. Address the pariah state problem. Think process, not solutions. Next, the United States should address the pariah state problem because it is a serious threat to peace and security, notably in Northeast Asia (in North Korea’s case) and the Gulf (in Iran’s case). Besides, as the previous pages have explained, if left unaddressed this problem will likely fuel proliferation incentives in these regions, damage the nonproliferation regime, and have an adverse impact on major power relations. As a result, it should be a US priority as well. The US goal should be the conclusion of agreements that temporarily or, better, permanently solve the pariah state problem. Yet because the prospects for achieving these agreements are bleak in the current competitive environment, the United States would be well served to focus on the value of initiating negotiating processes with North Korea and Iran, in partnership with China, Russia, and other key states. In and of themselves, such processes would not be satisfactory, but they would help improve the current situation. Well managed, they would keep the pariah state problem in check, stem proliferation incentives in Northeast Asia and the Gulf, limit the damage on the nonproliferation regime, and, significantly, remove major irritants in major power relations. For that matter, these processes might even improve major power relations because Washington, Beijing, and Moscow would build habits of cooperation. A serious negotiating effort on North Korea, in particular, would be a major test of USChina cooperation and could help reduce emerging competitive pressures in the bilateral strategic relationship. Yet and again as our reflection of the possible trajectories for the Asian and global nuclear orders has suggested, there is no guarantee that these processes will yield results. As it engages in negotiations, therefore, the United States should also maintain a strong regional defense and deterrence posture, which it should adapt as the threats and requirements for stability change, while seeking to reassure Beijing and Moscow that they are not the target. It should maintain strong regional alliances and partnerships, too. 3. Engage US regional allies and partners. Think integration, not coordination. In an increasingly contested and competitive Asian security environment, notably in the context of China’s re-rise, the

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United States should also make every effort to engage and work more closely with its regional allies and partners. It should do so not just because they are a force multiplier, but also because they offer geographical benefits by being in theater, thereby helping the United States strengthen defense and deterrence as well as its overall ability to shape regional strategic dynamics to its advantage. The United States should pursue greater integration with its regional allies and partners as well as encourage them to cooperate among themselves. The US goal should be to expand and deepen the hub-and-spokes system to present a bigger and more tightly connected front to an increasingly powerful and combative China (and North Korea) and shape their behavior in a way that promotes peace and stability. The keyword here is political and strategic integration. It means that the United States should not simply coordinate its vision and actions with its allies and partners. Rather, it should strive to make them part and parcel of regional defense and deterrence efforts. Doing so not only would strengthen the US position and arguably improve allied security, but it would also prevent a breakdown of the hub-and-spokes if the security environment deteriorates which is, as discussed, a distinct possibility. Promoting such integration begins by comparing and contrasting US and allied regional threat assessments and working to reduce or, better, eliminate the daylight that exists between them. It also involves the United States and its allies and partners working on and operating shared or complementary capabilities. It requires, in short, the United States to move away from its role as the region’s sole security guarantor and let its allies and partners play an active role as well.

4. Limit nuclear dangers, where and when possible. Think risk reduction, not risk elimination. Finally, the United States should seek to limit nuclear dangers, wherever and whenever it can. Because any nuclear danger is one too many, the United States should in theory pay attention to all of them. Nevertheless, in practice, it should identify which dangers deserve the most attention and which ones it can more readily address. Plainly, the United States should prioritize. Working to prevent the emergence of a full-blown competition between China and India should be high on the priority list because, as discussed, such a competition could vastly complicate strategic nuclear dynamics: South Asian nuclear instability, which has so far remained within the confines of the subcontinent, could fuel further instability in the broader system. The United States, therefore, should proceed carefully when engaging India, its strategic partner, and strive

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to avoid moves that could increase competitive pressures between China and India. Washington should also be clear-eyed, however: its influence there is limited, and the best it can hope to achieve is to reduce the risk of such a competition taking off, not to eliminate it. The same is true in other areas. The United States should invest in efforts that strengthen the nonproliferation and nuclear security regimes because it benefits from preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states as well as from keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. Yet the United States alone cannot do more than reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. It needs cooperation from others, especially China and Russia, to eliminate, or come close to eliminating, those risks as well as to advance the nuclear disarmament agenda. The United States, as a result, should work hard to create the conditions of cooperation, beginning by renewing and enhancing its support for the major multilateral arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament instruments. Until then, however, the US influence in these areas will remain limited and, during that time, the guiding principle should be risk reduction, not risk elimination. These four priorities and goals might appear too modest, or not sufficiently ambitious. Yet given current and looming strategic dynamics as well as what the United States can reasonably be expected to achieve, delivering on them would be a win. It would be a win both for the United States and for the Asian and global nuclear orders because it would help bring us one step closer to the best-case scenario, where the system stabilizes even in the face of growing competition, notably in the US-China strategic relationship.

Notes

1. Plato, The Republic, c. 375 BCE, book 7, section 527b. 2. Galileo Galilei, quoted in Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 75. 3. Plato, Timaeus, c. 360 BCE. 4. René Descartes, The Geometry (1637); René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). 5. Thomas Paine, The Theological Works of Thomas Paine (London: R. Carlile, 1819), 27. 6. John Warden, “The Major Power Game: The United States, China, and Russia,” 90. 7. Ibid., 120. 8. Robert Einhorn, “Proliferation Pariahs in the Mix: North Korea and Iran,” 132. 9. Brad Glosserman, “Complex Relationships: The United States, China, and US Regional Allies,” 183. 10. Toby Dalton, “Competitive Deterrence? The United States, China, and South Asia,” 255. 11. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society—A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Palgrave, 1977; 3rd ed. 2002), 308.

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The Contributors

Toby Dalton is senior fellow and codirector of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has served in a variety of high-level positions at the US Department of Energy, including senior policy adviser to the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security and energy attaché at the US embassy in Islamabad.

Robert Einhorn is senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Program of the Brookings Institution. During his thirty-five-year career at the US Department of State, he served as assistant secretary for nonproliferation in the Bill Clinton administration and was the secretary’s special advisor for nonproliferation and arms control in the Barack Obama administration.

Brad Glosserman is visiting professor at and deputy director of the Center for Rule Making Strategies at Tama University, Tokyo, as well as a senior advisor for Pacific Forum. He is a contributing editor to The Japan Times and the English-language editor of the journal of the New Asia Research Institute in Seoul. He is also a frequent participant in US State Department and US Navy visiting lecture programs.

David Santoro is vice president and director for nuclear policy at the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum International, a foreign policy think 243

244

The Contributors

tank. He specializes in strategic and deterrence issues as well as nonproliferation and nuclear security. He is involved in many of the Forum’s Track 1.5 dialogues and helped run the Track 1.5 “China-US Strategic Nuclear Dynamics Dialogue,” the principal US-China platform on these questions, which was active in 2004–2019.

John K. Warden is research staff member in the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he contributes to studies and analysis in support of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Combatant Commands, and other national security agencies.

Index

action-reaction cycle: India and Pakistan, 180; US-China and India-Pakistan relations, 166, 194; US-China relations, 50, 82, 207–208, 210, 212–213, 217; US-Russia relations, 70 Aegis technology, 129–130, 147, 157(n72) alliances: adapting to the US-China strategic competition, 211–212; best-case scenario for the US-China relationship, 211; examining triangular relationships, 203–205; mixed-outcome scenario for the US-China relationship, 219; nuclear policy fundamentals, 126–131; regional security order, 148–151; US policy prioritizing engagement with, 226–227; US-Australia, 134–136, 151–152; USJapan, 138–143, 151; US-Philippines, 133–134; US-South Korea, 90–91, 136– 138, 151–152; US-Taiwan, 143–145; US-Thailand, 132–133; worst-case scenario for US-China relations, 215– 216, 222. See also specific alliances Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, 66 antisatellite (ASAT) weapons, 161, 187–190 antisubmarine warfare systems (ASW), 103, 140, 150–151 arms control, multilateral, 30; best-case strategic scenario, 212, 228; China’s refusal to engage, 34, 150; preventing a trilateral security dilemma, 82–83; USChina options, 83; US-China-Russia policy, 74; US-Russia treaties, 68–70; US-Soviet, 63, 66

arms race: China, Russia, North Korea, 42– 43; China’s policy fundamentals, 128; India and Pakistan, 178–179, 189–190, 192; possible US-China outcomes, 47– 48, 50, 147, 210, 213; post-Cold War acceleration, 7–8; the quest for superiority, 63; US-China and IndiaPakistan dyads, 162; US-Russia relationship, 65–66, 69–70, 217 arms reduction: US-Russia relations, 60–61, 67, 210 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 2, 26 assured retaliation posture, 8–9, 28, 73 Australia: Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, 205; US alliance with, 134–136, 151–152 Australia-New Zealand-United States Security Treaty (ANZUS), 24

balance of power: changes in regional stability, 4–6; nuclear asymmetry, 7–9; regional defense networks, 130; regional shift towards China, 17–18; US alliances in the 1980s, 25; US declining ability to maintain, 153; US failure to maintain, 41; US-China-Russia policy triangle, 62–65 ballistic missile defenses (BMD), 9; arms race in Asia, 189–190; China and India, 186–189; China-Russia relationship, 77; China’s concerns of a regional defense network, 130; India, 178; India and Pakistan, 184–185; Indo-US cooperation, 194; US-China strategy, 36;

245

246

Index

US-China-South Asia, 161–162, 164; US-Russia New START Treaty, 69 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), 31–32, 69, 145 Belt and Road Initiative, 2, 26, 113, 163, 179 Biden administration, 115–116, 122, 134, 139 bilateral security dilemma, 171 Bush, George H.W: “engage but hedge” strategy with China, 25; reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, 127 Bush, George W.: building regional security relationships, 151–152; “engage but hedge” strategy with China, 25; nuclear dialogue, 36; reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, 127; Russia as competitor and threat, 69; shift to hedging, 26–27; South Asia’s deterrence parameters, 175

Carter, Jimmy: Taiwan Relations Act, 51(n3); US-Taiwan relations, 25 China-North Korea relationship: US policy and, 119–120 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), 179 China-Russia relations, 76–79; effect on USChina relations, 81–84; growth of, 30 China-Soviet relations, 27 Clinton, Hillary, 26, 37 Clinton administration, 172; building the US-Pakistan-Indian relationship, 175; “engage but hedge” strategy, 25 coercion, 195(n5); Australia’s alliance with the US, 135; China’s belief in the purpose of nuclear weapons to counter, 26, 28, 72–73, 103, 127–129; China’s policy fundamentals, 129; US engaging in nuclear competition, 81–82; US priorities in North Korea, 94; US-China policy, 146 Cold Start doctrine (India), 177, 181, 183 Cold War, 59; potential triggers for nuclear war, 20(n22); the quest for nuclear superiority, 63; shaping South Asia nuclear relations, 168; stability-instability paradox, 49; US withdrawal of nuclear weapons from South Korea, 91 compellence, 8, 155(n19) competition, military: among the major powers, 201–202; China and India, 192; strategic scenarios, 210, 217; US and China, 74–76, 83; US and Russia, 71; US-China-Russia balance, 60–61, 79–84 competition, nuclear: alternative futures for the US-China-Russia triangle, 79–81; bilateral and multilateral relationships, 206–207; deepening levels of, 161; IndiaChina, 186–190; models of regional competition dyads, 163–167; Pakistan-

India, 182–186; partnerships and relationships in South Asia, 190–192; quadrilateral deterrence relationship, 162; risk of US-China competition, 75–76; top-down and bottom-up competition models, 173–174; Trump’s China policy, 39–40; US-China and US policy, 81; USChina-Russia balance, 84. See also great power competition competition, strategic: strategic chain competition model, 165–167, 173–174, 186, 192; top-down triangle model, 163–165, 167, 171–172, 175, 180 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 30, 195(n27) confidence-building measures (CBMs), 161, 210 conventional wars, 32, 62, 73, 146–147 conventional weapons: China-India nuclear competition, 164–165; China’s dual deterrence, 33–34; India and Pakistan, 178–179, 181; NATO, 71–72; North Korea’s decline in, 91; second nuclear age, 7; US and Russian nuclear posture, 70–71; US-Russia-China competition, 81; US-Soviet nuclear weapons supplementing, 67; utility of nuclear weapons, 64–65 cooperation: alternative futures for the USChina-Russia triangle, 79–81; China and Iran, 110–111; China and North Korea, 95; China and the Soviet Union, 27; pariah states, 35; Russia and China, 76– 78, 83–84; US and Asian allies, 150; US and China, 89–90, 105, 108, 116, 130; US and Japan, 139, 141–142; US and Russia, 67–68; US and South Korea, 138; US-Australia, 134–136; US-ChinaRussia triangle, 60–61; US-ROK-Japan triangle, 94, 99–100, 102, 106 counterattack, nuclear, 33, 44, 48 counterspace capabilities, 33, 64, 69–70, 74, 81, 154(n5) counterstrike campaign (China), 73–74 Covid-19 pandemic, 201; strengthening US competitive stance, 3; tabling US-North Korea talks, 94; Trump’s China policy, 39–40 Crimea, Russian annexation of, 68 cyber technology, 9, 30, 33; integrated deterrence, 154(n5); regional security order, 151; triggering regional confrontation, 6 Deng Xioaping: offense within defense, 49 denuclearization (North Korea), 91–95, 98– 99, 101, 103–107, 119, 137–138, 149, 208–209

Index deterrence, 7–8, 155(n19); China’s evolving posture, 73–74; China’s stance and perspective, 54(n45); effect of Iran on China’s nuclear deterrent, 114–115; emergent nuclear deterrence in India and Pakistan, 174–176; growth of nuclear competition, 161–162; Iran agreement and China-US relations, 116–118; limited, 11; minimum, 11, 32; policy fundamentals, 126–131; South Asia’s polygonal relations, 180–181; US policy in North Korea, 91–92, 94–95; US protection of allies, 126; US-Russia-China triangle policy, 62–65. See also extended deterrence; extended nuclear deterrence disarmament, nuclear: Asian trends, 10–12; China’s growing arsenal, 32; defense systems allowing, 9; extended deterrence commitments and, 129; multilateral approach to nuclear relationships, 206; North Korea’s stance on, 149; nuclear stability scenarios, 208, 212, 216, 220, 228; replacing the arms race, 7; US, Russia, and China, 23 dual-capable missiles, 31, 34, 72 dyadic strategic relations, 203

economic engagement: China and US in South Asia, 179–180; China’s investment in India and Pakistan, 191–192 economic growth: China’s growing role in US-China relations, 72–73; US allies’ concerns over China’s rise, 152–153 Eisenhower, Dwight, 27 elections, US: Russian role in, 60 “engage but hedge” strategy, 25–27, 37, 42 escalation, nuclear: Australia’s low profile, 135; US and Russia, 71–72; US-ChinaRussia policy triangle, 62–63; USSoviet nuclear relationship, 65–66 extended deterrence, 13; allies’ criticism of US policy, 153; driving China’s nuclear program, 187; nuclear planning in Northeast Asia, 148; policy fundamentals, 126, 128–130; promoting nonproliferation, 139; US-Australia alliance, 134–135; US-China relationship, 125–126, 129, 133; USJapan alliance, 139–140; US-Philippines alliance, 133; US-ROK alliance, 136–137 extended nuclear deterrence (END), 125– 126; Australia’s defense policy, 134– 135; China’s rejection of, 128; extended deterrence and, 129; US bolstering, 91– 92; US provision to South Korea, 136; US-Japan commitments, 140; US-ROKJapan triangle, 142 external security environment, 61

247

first-strike capability: arms race and arms control, 66; concerns over the US-Japan alliance, 143; escalation advantage, 62– 63; India, 184–185; Pakistan, 178, 185; theater nuclear forces, 67 first-strike instability: Pakistan and India, 185 flexible response strategy, 66–67, 177 forward deployment of US nuclear weapons, 147–148 France: China’s arms control and reduction, 34; nuclear arsenal, 31 great power competition: alternative futures for the US-China-Russia triangle, 79–81; best-case strategic outcome for the USChina relationship, 211, 221; China’s ambitions, 6, 26; China’s nuclear identity, 11; deteriorating international security environment, 23; interdependence and coercion, 195(n5); strategic triangles, 201–202; subregional security order, 149– 150; US military footprint in the Middle East, 114–115; US policy priorities, 224– 226; worst-case strategic outcome for USChina relations, 213–214 Great Recession (2007–2009), 2, 26 Ground-Based Interceptors, 120–121

hedging strategy, 90; Asian allies adapting to the US-China strategic competition, 211–212; China’s Middle East strategy, 111–112, 118; “engage but hedge” strategy, 25–27, 37, 42; US allies and partners, 211–212, 219; US policy in Iran, 112–113; US-China-Iran, 117–118; US-China-Soviet Union, 29 hub-and-spokes system, 150, 207, 212, 215– 216, 222, 227 hypersonic glide vehicle technology, 31, 61, 71, 83 India: Asian allies adapting to the US-China strategic competition, 212; best-case scenario for US-China relations, 212, 222; China-India strategic competition, 163– 167, 186–190; crossing the nuclear threshold, 7, 171–173; emergent nuclear deterrence, 174–176; mixed-outcome scenario for US-China relations, 219–220; nonproliferation regime, 196(n40); nuclear competition with Pakistan, 182–186, 207– 208; nuclear research program, 168–171; overshadowing the US-China relationship, 14; preventing competition with China, 227–228; quadrilateral competition framework, 166; Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, 205; second nuclear age scholarship, 11; South Asia’s polygonal

248

Index

relations, 180–181; strategic chain model of strategic competition, 165–166; strategic relations with Russia, 193; strategic technology maturation, 176–180; top-down triangle model of strategic competition, 163–165, 173–174; treaty adoptions, 195(n27); triangular strategic dynamics, 205–206; US Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, 179–180; worst-case scenario for US-China relations, 216. See also US-China-India triangle integrated deterrence, 126–127, 152–153, 154(n5) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), 62, 102; China and India, 187–188; China-North Korea reaction to US capability, 114; India and Pakistan, 184; Russia’s concerns over US capability, 70–71, 74; US-China and US-Russia competition, 81 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 30; China, Russia and US nuclear capabilities, 60–61, 68–70; China’s nuclear capabilities, 137; Japan’s intercept system, 139–140; North Korea, 92, 102–104, 106, 117–118, 141 interim agreements, 66, 95, 105, 119–120 intermediate-range missiles, 137, 158(n75); anti-Chinese coalition, 109; China prioritizing, 29, 31; China-Russia relationship, 78; China’s capabilities, 146–147; China’s threat to South Korea, 137; Japan’s push for a ban, 158(n75); US development of, 69; US response to China’s military modernization, 50; USChina-Russia agreement, 83 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 31–32, 49–51, 60–61, 67, 69, 83, 146 Iran: best-case scenario for US-China relations, 211, 221–222; effect of ChinaIran relations on the US-China relationship, 113–114; implications of a US-Iran agreement, 116–118; mixedoutcome scenario for US-China relations, 218–219; US policy, 112–113; US-China converging and diverging interests, 89– 90; US-China-North Korea triangle and, 109–110; worst-case scenario for USChina relations, 214. See also pariah states; US-China-Iran triangle

Japan: latent nuclear capabilities, 7; missile defense, 157(n72); nuclear proliferation potential, 148–149; Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, 205; pariah state dynamics, 203; US alliance, 138–143; US policy objectives in North Korea, 94; US reducing reliance on nuclear

weapons, 127; US withdrawal from the INF Treaty, 146 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 111–112, 115–116, 122–123

Kim Jong Un, 92–94, 96–97, 104, 107 Kissinger, Henry, 22(n50), 40–41, 56(n73) Korea, Republic of (ROK). See South Korea Korean War, 24, 53(n23), 90–92 laissez-faire policy attitude, 35–37 long-range missiles, 29, 74

Maneuverable Reentry Vehicles (MaRVs), 185 Mao Tse-Tung: China’s nuclear strategy, 28 massive retaliation strategy, 65–67, 174 maximum pressure campaign, 92, 94–95, 98, 112, 114–117, 119, 209 medium-range missiles, 29, 137, 183, 185 Middle East: China’s hedging strategy, 111– 112; China’s stake in Iran, 110–111; effect of a US-Iran agreement on China, 116–118; US military drawdown, 114– 115. See also Iran military modernization: India and Pakistan, 178–179, 183–184; Japan, 142 military modernization (China), 2, 55(n53); continuity versus change in nuclear strategy, 46–48; expanding nuclear capability, 74; nuclear counterattack, 33; nuclear delivery systems, 31–32; PLA Rocket Force upgrade, 43–46, 73–75; US-China nuclear rivalry, 50 minimum deterrence: China’s nuclear posture, 11–12, 14, 32, 45, 47; China’s policy fundamentals, 128; India’s nuclear doctrine, 174; South Asian nuclear strategy, 174–176 missile systems: China’s concerns over the US-Japan alliance, 142–143; China’s conventional and nuclear delivery systems, 31–34; China’s policy fundamentals, 129; China’s supplies to Iran, 110–111; India and Pakistan, 176– 178, 183–185; Japan, 157(n72); North Korea, 100, 106–107, 119; Russian-Indian joint development, 183; US, China, and Russia, 60–61; US and Russia, 72; US deployment to Taiwan, 145; US policy fundamentals, 129–130; US reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, 127; USChina-North Korea triangle, 102–103. See also Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) missile defense system Moon Jae-in, 92, 97, 137–138 multilateral security arrangements, 206; China’s expansion of, 26; US containment strategy, 24; US network, 125, 130, 154

Index mutual defense, 17–18; lack of a USThailand arrangement, 132; US-Pakistan agreement, 168; US-Philippines arrangement, 133–134 mutual deterrence: China and India, 178, 187–188

National Defense Strategy (NDS), 38–39, 41, 77 national security strategy: US-China-Russia triangle, 61–65 National Security Strategy (NSS), 2–3, 38– 39, 41 New START (New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), 58(n117), 61, 68–70, 82, 210 no-first-use (NFU) policy, 28, 33; China and India, 166, 186–187, 189; China maintaining, 73, 82, 128; China-Russia relationship, 77; China’s arms control and reduction stance, 34; China’s policy elements, 128; China’s uncertainty, 54(n41); Japan arguing against, 141; rejection as US policy, 127; South Asian nuclear strategy, 174–176; stratified quadrilateral competition model, 166–167; US-China mutual vulnerability, 36–37 nonproliferation regime: China, 30; China’s policy fundamentals, 129; extended deterrence constraints, 126; India, 196(n40); US-Japan alliance, 139 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, 85(n4); Russia, China, and the US, 60, 63–64, 69, 71–72 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 65, 71, 125, 148, 177 North Korea: the best-case scenario for USChina relations, 211–212, 221–222; China as threat, 160(n117); China-Iran relations and, 114; China’s policy priorities, 98–99; Chinese concerns about US policy towards, 101–103; effect of nuclear deterrence commitments, 129; examining triangular relations, 204; Japan’s military modernization, 142; mixed-outcome scenario for US-China relations, 218–219; overshadowing the US-China relationship, 13; pariah state dynamics, 203; sanctions against, 38, 89, 92–94, 96–98, 101, 106; second nuclear age scholarship, 11; Treaty of Friendship with China, 155(n16); Trump’s China policy, 38; US policy priorities, 35–36, 94–95; US tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, 136–137; US-China converging and diverging interests, 89– 90; US-China cooperation, 208–209; USJapan alliance, 141; US-ROK military alliance, 90–91; worst-case strategic outcome for US-China relations, 214–

249

215. See also pariah states; US-ChinaNorth Korea triangle nuclear arsenal (China), 1–2; early development and political concerns, 27– 28; rate and extent of growth, 46–47; restraint in building, 73–74; Rocket Force upgrade, 43–46, 73–75 nuclear arsenals: denuclearization in North Korea, 105; effect of the Soviet collapse, 7; growth of nuclear competition, 161; India and Pakistan, 178–179; preventing a trilateral security dilemma, 82–83; US and Europe, 31; US-China-Russia triangle, 60–65; USRussia arms control treaties, 68–70 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 34, 96; best-case security scenario, 212; ChinaIndia-Pakistan triad, 181; China-Russia relationship, 77–78; China’s membership, 30; importance to stability, 208; India’s exclusion, 172; mixed-outcome security scenario, 220; multilateral complexity, 206; Russia-China cooperation, 77–78; Test Ban Treaty and, 209; worst-case security scenario, 212, 216 Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), 148 nuclear posture: adjustments in US-ChinaRussia posture, 62–66, 69–72, 81; emergent nuclear deterrence, 174–175; growth of nuclear competition in Southern Asia, 161–162; India and Pakistan, 178– 180; Russia-China partnership, 83–84; strategic technology maturation, 177–178; top-down competition model, 164–165; types, 8–9; US and Russia, 69–71 nuclear posture (China), 11–13; China and India, 186–187; China-Russia relationship, 76–78; China’s more aggressive change, 45; deterrence, 54(n45); factors in the USChina-Russia triangle, 62–65; Russia and China putting pressure on the US, 83–84; US nuclear advantage, 48–51; US-China adjustments, 74; war-fighting posture, 33– 34, 43–45, 74–75 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), 3, 23, 36, 42, 45, 126–127, 140–141, 147–148, 159(n95) nuclear red scare, 27 Nuclear Suppliers Group, 171, 176 nuclear threshold: conventional weapons and, 9; India and Pakistan, 161, 171– 173, 178; North Korea, 7, 11; theater nuclear war, 67 nuclear trade restrictions, 171 nuclear triad, 31, 33, 44, 47, 130, 177, 181 nuclear umbrella, US, 17, 91, 104, 128–129, 135–136, 139, 141 Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, 67–68

250

Index

Obama administration: building regional security relationships, 151–152; “engage but hedge” strategy with China, 25–27; engagement with China, 74; nuclear dialogue, 36; Nuclear Posture Review, 141; Russia as competitor and threat, 68– 69; US military footprint in the Middle East, 114; US-Australia alliance, 135 One-China Policy, 25, 38, 145

Pakistan: Asian allies adapting to the USChina strategic competition, 212; bestcase scenario for US-China relations, 212; catalytic nuclear posture, 9; China’s assistance to the nuclear weapons program, 96; crossing the nuclear threshold, 171–173; drivers of nuclear competition, 161–162; emergent nuclear deterrence, 174–176; mixed-outcome scenario for US-China relations, 219– 220; mutual defense agreement with the US, 168; nuclear competition with India, 182–186, 207–208; nuclear research program, 168–171; overshadowing the US-China relationship, 14; quadrilateral competition framework, 166–167; second nuclear age scholarship, 11; South Asia’s polygonal relations, 180– 181; South Asia’s strategic partnerships, 190–192; strategic chain competition model, 165–166; strategic relations with Russia, 193; strategic technology maturation, 176–180; top-down triangle model of strategic competition, 163–165, 173–174; triangular strategic dynamics, 205–206; US Free and Open IndoPacific strategy, 179–180; worst-case scenario for US-China relations, 216 pariah states: best-case strategic outcome for the US-China relationship, 211, 221– 222; competitive pressures in the USChina relationship, 207; mixed-outcome scenario for US-China relations, 218– 219; third parties’ effect on the USChina relationship, 15; triangular strategic relations, 202–203; US policy priorities, 35, 224, 226; US-China bipolarity, 17; worst-case strategic outcome for US-China relations, 214– 215. See also Iran; North Korea parity, nuclear: China’s sprint to, 32, 48–49, 74–75, 141 Philippines, US alliance with, 133–134, 152, 204 political-military alliances: US, Russia and China, 83–84 proliferation, nuclear: China’s concerns over Japan, 143; China’s defense strategy,

150; CTR program limiting, 67–68; effect on US-China strategic competition, 202–203; subregional security order, 148–151; US-China-Russia triangle, 61. See also Iran; North Korea

quadrilateral competition framework, 166– 167, 205–206 quadrilateral relationships. See India; Pakistan Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, 205 reactor technology, 170, 172, 176, 196(n40) regime change: Iran, 112; North Korea, 101–102, 107–108, 121 regional environment: China’s assertive posture, 42; China’s interests in Iran, 112; China’s nuclear identity, 11; proliferation and arms control, 149–151; regional governance, 5–6; regional multipolarity, 4; response to Trump’s China policy, 41–42; third parties’ effect on the US-China relationship, 15; US military footprint in the Middle East, 114–115; US-Iran agreement, 116–118 risk reduction, 227–228 Rocket Force (PLA), 43–46, 73–75 ROK. See South Korea Russia: India’s joint systems development, 183; INF Treaty, 146; nuclear power posture, 9; pursuit of nuclear disarmament, 7; as strategic competitor, 2–3; strategic relations with India, 193; US missile strategy, 49–50; US-China bilateral relationship, 15. See also USChina-Russia triangle; US-Russia bilateral relationship

sanctions: India and Pakistan, 173; Iran, 117; North Korea, 38, 89, 92–94, 96–98, 101, 106 sea and air nuclear platforms, 31–32, 49–50, 178, 183 Second Artillery Force (China), 28, 43–46 second nuclear age, 7, 10–11 second-strike capability, 63, 73, 82, 127, 130, 141–143, 175, 187 security dilemmas, 82; China as the fulcrum, 11; India and China, 176, 186; India and Pakistan’s nuclear programs, 171, 184–186; India-Pakistan and China-US, 162, 165, 192–194; strategic chain model, 167, 176 security trilemmas, 10, 80 self-defense nuclear strategy, China’s, 28, 32 Singapore: response to Trump’s China policy, 41; US-North Korea summit, 93, 97, 104 Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty, 215

Index Six Party Talks, 92, 97, 99, 149 South Korea: China’s opposition to US THAAD deployment, 120; China’s policy, 96–97; China’s policy in North Korea, 99; examining triangular relations, 204; North Korea’s military threat, 100; nuclear proliferation potential, 148–149; pariah state dynamics, 203; US military alliance, 90–91, 136–138; US missile defenses, 102–103; US policy objectives in North Korea, 94; US-Japan-South Korea triangle, 142; US-North Korea diplomacy, 92 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 24, 132 Soviet Union: China’s arms control and reduction, 34; China’s nuclear arsenal, 27–28; effect of the collapse on nuclear arsenals, 7; India’s defense and security relationship, 168; North Korea’s security and economic dependence, 95; US attempts to split China and, 24–25; US loose-nuke problem, 35. See also Cold War stability, strategic: Japan’s concerns over China’s capabilities, 141; political dimension as Chinese policy fundamental, 130–131; possible USChina relations outcomes, 48–51; preventing China-India competition, 227–228; triangular relationships, 10; 21st-century changes in power balance, 5–6; US prioritizing, 224–226; USChina-North Korea triangle, 109; USChina-Russia triangle, 78 stability-instability paradox, 32, 49, 141 stabilization, strategic: nuclear weapons causing, 8; potential for US-China competition, 209–212; US prioritizing, 224–226 strategic chain competition model, 165–167, 173–174, 186, 192 strategic dialogue, 19, 50–51, 120–121, 219–220 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), 68–69 stratified quadrilateral competition model, 166–167, 171–174, 180 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), 60, 68, 70, 72, 183 submarines, 53(n37); ballistic missile submarines, 31–32, 69, 145 tactical nuclear weapons capabilities, 85(n4); Cold War, 64–65, 67; North Korea, 136–137; Pakistan, 161, 177– 178, 181, 183; US, China, and Russia, 34, 53(n24), 60–61, 73, 82; US and Russia, 72; US policy in North Korea,

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90–92; US presence in South Korea, 102, 136–137 Taiwan: examining triangular relationships, 203–205; proliferation potential, 149; Trump’s China policy, 38; US containment strategy, 24; US relations, 25, 51(n3), 143–145 Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, 100, 102, 120–121, 137–138, 146–147, 188 territorial disputes: China, 30; China and India, 189–190; China and Japan, 139, 143; China and Taiwan, 144–145; China’s aggressive stance, 26; US commitment to the Philippines, 133–134 terrorism, 13–14; India’s Cold Start doctrine, 177; US policy priorities, 35–36 tests, nuclear: China, 28, 53(nn23, 24); India, 196(n29); India, Pakistan, and China, 168–173; India-Pakistan competition, 182–183; North Korea, 93, 96 Thailand, US alliance with, 132–133, 204 theater systems, 85(n4); China and Russia, 76; China’s approach, 75; China’s use policy, 128; Cold War limits, 67; Russian strategy, 71; US, China, and Russia arsenals, 60– 61, 82, 84; US allies, 138, 142 theaters of conflict and competition: Cold War risks of escalation, 67; Indian Ocean and South Asia, 192, 194, 205; Japan-China stability-instability paradox, 141; potential strategic outcomes, 213–214, 227; strategic competition models, 163–165, 171; US allies, 132–133; US global scope, 150– 151; US-China dynamic, 181; USChina-Russia dynamic, 146 threat perception: cooperative-competitive triangular relationships, 79–81; India, Pakistan, and China, 172; Russia-USNato, 71–72; South Asia’s strategic partnerships, 190–192; US response to North Korea, 102 top-down triangle model of strategic competition, 163–165, 167, 171–172, 175, 180 triangles, strategic, 4, 22(n50); Asian allies and Taiwan, 203–205; major power dimension, 201–202; mobility and resolution, 10; the multilateral dimension, 206; pariah state dimension, 202–203; the South Asia dimension, 205–206; symbolic importance, 199– 201. See also specific triangles Trump administration: anti-Iran campaign, 113; building regional security relationships, 151–152; China as strategic competitor, 2–3; China-North Korea

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Index

reconciliation, 97; China’s arms control process, 50; China’s increasing nuclear capability, 42; China’s refusal to restrict nuclear forces, 74; denuclearization in North Korea, 101, 119; dual-track strategy, 92; Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, 179; New START, 58(n117); pushback against China, 37–38; Russia as competitor and threat, 69; sanctions against North Korea, 92–94; US intentions towards North Korea, 102– 103; US military footprint in the Middle East, 114–115; US reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, 127; US-China-North Korea relations, 98; US-Japan alliance, 139; US-Pakistan relationship, 191

Ukraine, Russia’s invasion of, 60, 68 UN Security Council: China-Iran relationship, 110; India and Pakistan’s nuclear testing, 173; pariah state dynamics, 203; sanctions against North Korea, 38, 89, 92, 96–98 United Kingdom: China’s arms control and reduction, 34; nuclear arsenal, 31 US-Australia alliance, 134–136, 151–152 US-China bilateral relationship, 12, 23–24; aggressive shift under Trump, 37–40; bestcase strategic outcome, 209–212, 220– 223; China’s anxiety about the USThailand alliance, 132–133; China’s lack of nuclear dialogue, 42–46; China’s military modernization and, 46–48; competitive dynamics, 207; containment strategy, 24–25; effect of China-Iran relations on, 113–114; effect of North Korea’s denuclearization, 108–109; “engage but hedge” strategy, 25–27, 37, 42; ignore-China policy, 28–30; increasing complexity of strategic nuclear dynamics, 223–224; India-Pakistan strategic competition and, 163–167; laissez-faire attitude, 35–37; mixed-outcome scenario, 216–220; nuclear red scare, 27–28; policy fundamentals, 126–131; potential for stabilization, 209–212; prioritizing great power competition, 225–226; system breakdown, 212–216; US concerns about China’s nuclear development, 30–35; US nuclear advantage, 48–51; US scholarship, 14–15; US-China-Russia triangle, 72–76; US-Philippines alliance, 133–134; worst-case strategic scenario, 212–216. See also alliances US-China-Iran triangle: China’s hedging strategy, 111–112; China’s policies on Iran, 113–114; China’s stake in Iran,

110–111; effect on China’s core interests, 112–113; effect on China’s nuclear deterrent, 114–115; effect on US policy, 121–123; implications of a US-Iran agreement, 116–118; potential challenges, 115–116; similarities to the US-China-North Korea triangle, 109–110 US-China-North Korea triangle, 10; China’s North Korean policy objectives, 95–98; converging and diverging interests, 99– 103; denuclearization in North Korea, 103–107; effect on US policy, 118–123; similarities to the US-China-Iran triangle, 109–110; US policy objectives, 90–95. See also North Korea US-China-Pakistan triangle, 18 US-China-Russia triangle, 10; alternative futures, 79–81; best-case strategic scenario for the US-China relationship, 209–212, 221–222; China-Russia relationship, 76–79; competitive dynamics, 207; implications for USChina and US policy, 81–84; increasing nuclear competition, 208; mixedoutcome scenario for US-China relations, 217–218; national security strategy affecting, 61–65; Trump’s arms control scenario, 50–51, 58(n117); USChina nuclear relationship, 72–76; the US-Soviet and US-Russian relationships, 65–72; worst-case strategic outcome for US-China relations, 213–214. See also Russia US-India relations: South Asia’s strategic partnerships, 190–192; top-down triangle model of strategic competition, 163–165 US-Russia bilateral relationship, 13; arms race potential, 65–66; arms reduction, 60; competition and cooperation, 210– 211; New START, 58(n117); shift away from cooperation, 67–68 US-South Korea alliance, 90–91, 136–138, 151–152. See also South Korea US-Soviet bilateral relationship, 65–72 US-Thailand alliance, 132–133 Vietnam War, 24 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), 134

war-fighting posture, 33–34, 43–45, 74–75 Xi Jinping, 26; China-ROK relations, 96– 97; leadership affecting US policy, 2; PLA Rocket Force upgrade, 43–46

About the Book

THOUGH CHINA REMAINS A RELATIVELY WEAK NUCLEAR POWER, it has in recent years become central to US strategic policymaking. What explains this shift? How is the US-China strategic nuclear relationship evolving? What role do other states play in shaping it? To address these questions, the authors of US-China Nuclear Relations examine a series of strategic triangles involving China, the US, and one or more key third actors (among them, Australia, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan). Their work also critically highlights the challenges and opportunities facing Washington and Beijing in this increasingly complex security arena.

David Santoro is vice president and director for nuclear policy programs at the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum.

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