US-China Military Relations: Building Confidence While Raising Tensions

November 11, 2018 marked the 100th anniversary of the armistice ending World War I. While most focused properly on the European continent, it was also cause to reflect on the U.S.-China relationship. In that relationship can be found a World War I anology: The potential for a clash between the seemingly waning hegemon and the rising Pacific power apparently posed to challenge it.

While there is domestic disagreement within the United States over the Trump administration’s ongoing trade war against China there is nevertheless a hardening bipartisan consensus to be tougher with China economically, politically, and militarily. “Great Power Competition” now pervades strategy, policy, and weapons acquisition conversations in the United States, a phrase reminiscent of the balance-of-power obsession in Europe in the decades leading up to the Great War. For its part, China is increasing social and political repression, expanding its influence over strategic geography beyond the Western Pacific, and its buildups and assertiveness in the South China Sea are unabated.

These trends would seem to give renewed urgency to the “Thucydides Trap” theory advanced by Harvard professor Graham Allison, warning about the danger posed by China’s faith in its own rise and the United States’ reaction to it. But both China and the United States seem to be conscious of the most dangerous risks. Along with each recent indication of rising tensions there appear to be mitigations or compensatory acts to keep the relationship in the realm of competition without spilling into conflict.

In late September, China denied a planned October port visit to Hong Kong by a U.S. warship, and then a planned trip by U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis to meet Chinese officials in Beijing was called off after the United States imposed sanctions against senior Chinese military officials. But at the same time China made these public demonstrations of dismay, they also sent an emissary to the Pentagon to reassure senior U.S. officials that Beijing still wanted a productive military relationship with the United States. Mattis and China’s defense minister, General Wei Fenghe, later met on the sidelines of a security conference in Singapore. Barely two months after China denied one Hong Kong port visit, the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and several escorting vessels pulled into the port for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in late November.

Following the unofficial meeting in Singapore, Wei and Yang Jiechi, the Communist Party’s senior foreign affairs official, traveled to Washington and met with Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a diplomatic and security dialogue. The two sides affirmed that the U.S.-China military relationship should be a stabilizing influence in the countries’ broader relationship and then committed to deepening existing confidence-building measures.

On the South China Sea, while both countries said they share a desire for peace and stability in the contested region, the United States’ insistence on safe and professional conduct by government vessels and aircraft, and calls on China to withdraw missile systems it has deployed to the bases it has built in the Spratly Islands, were more one-sided.

The call for safe and professional conduct in the South China Sea comes in the context of persistent harassment and coercive behavior by Chinese ships and aircraft. The U.S. Defense Department said there have been 18 unsafe or unprofessional incidents between U.S. and Chinese military units since 2016, most occuring between aircraft.

One of the most serious incidents, however,  came at the end of October when a Chinese destroyer closed on the USS Decatur to within 45 yards during a Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) near Gaven Reef in the South China Sea, forcing the U.S. warship to take evasive maneuvers to prevent a collision. This incident appears to have been much closer than even a 2013 encounter when the USS Cowpens was cut off by a PLA Navy warship escorting China’s aircraft carrier Liaoning.

But even this incident showed signs of Chinese concern over unintended escalation. As the Chinese ship approached the Decatur, its crew put protective rubber fenders over the side. While the Chinese ship was likely mostly concerned with its own hull, the fenders would have limited damage to both vessels had they bumped. This mitigation suggests that although the Chinese warship knew its maneuver risked a collision with the Decatur, it didn’t intend one. More importantly, it means that while China was willing to accept some risk to send a message, it didn’t want to risk that message being misinterpreted as a hostile act, and potentially escalating into a clash or conflict.

While the United States and China may agree on wanting to keep the South China Sea peaceful and stable, other positions remain intractable; the United States still asserts rights to navigate and conduct operations in waters where China asserts sovereign rights to deny that activity. November’s diplomatic and security dialogue seemed to leave this fundamental disagreement unspoken but appeared to indirectly acknowledge the risks that flowed from it. Beyond strengthening existing confidence-building measures, it was announced that the United States and China would also begin work on a Crisis Deconfliction and Communication Framework that sounds aimed at preventing incidents like the Decatur’s encounter from escalating.

The track record of these sorts of agreements is uneven, however. Earlier confidence-building measures reflect China’s reticence to give up harassment tactics and coercive behavior. The 1998 Military Maritime Consultative Agreement that set up annual bilateral safety talks between the United States and China is often compared to the Cold War-era INCSEA agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it contained none of the older agreement’s communications protocols or proscriptions of dangerous behavior. Memorandums of understanding signed in 2015 came closer to limiting dangerous behavior but were suggestive rather than binding, and gave each party broad discretion to define whether its actions were safe or unsafe. The 18 unsafe incidents tracked by the U.S. Defense Department since those memorandums were signed highlight the agreement’s shortcomings.

After the Cowpens’ near-collision in 2013, a senior U.S. defense official who had previously managed the U.S.-China military relationship noted that the United States and China approached confidence building measures with fundamentally different objectives in mind. The United States hoped that closer ties and new agreements would mitigate incidents and prevent crises, while China engaged the United States hoping to induce it to limit operations and deployments in the region.

For all the demonstrated shortcomings of those past agreements, it may be more appropriate to view the negotiation of military-to-military confidence-building measures as signals of broad intentions for U.S.-China relations, rather than for the unit-level interactions they nominally govern. Ultimately, the decision to escalate a maritime or air incident into a crisis or clash is not up to the two militaries, but to their respective political masters.