The US has China surrounded with bases, yet it is still fixated on 'deterrence'

A US fighter jet takes off from Basa Air Base in the Philippines. AFP

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore at the end of May, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that “we are reorienting towards deterring aggression by Communist China” and that “China’s behaviour towards its neighbours and the world is a wake-up call”. Perhaps the editors of The Economist had this in mind when they put together the current edition of the magazine, which contains no fewer than eight articles attacking China.

These ranged from the country’s alleged “weaponisation of rare-earth elements”, to the “need” for America and its Asian allies to spend more to deter China – “the threat from China’s military build-up is obvious”, the magazine stated – to “China’s squeeze on supply chains”, a column on “facilitating Chinese tariff-dodging”, and another on a Chinese cough syrup that supposedly “has the colour and consistency of mud”.

A long piece about the US “reviving wartime airfields to face China” contained an expert estimation about how many bombs a day the country’s military could “rain on” US bases in the region, such as in Okinawa, Japan, or Guam, an American overseas territory that forms part of the so-called second island chain, which runs from Japan to Western New Guinea. It was 2,000 bombs or missiles daily on targets within 500 nautical miles, apparently.

I doubt this was the author’s intention, but what the last bit of sabre-rattling drew attention to was just how close an enormous array of US military bases and personnel are to China. If you see them on a map, it looks as though the Chinese coast is almost completely hemmed in by them. Japan alone has 120 bases, according to one estimate (there is no clear agreement on what constitutes a base, so these vary considerably in size, but 120 is a large number however you slice it), and South Korea 70.

The plan to constrain and limit China is crystal clear. When the US won access to four military bases in the Philippines in 2023, the BBC reported that Washington had “stitched the gap in the arc of US alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south. The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints – Taiwan and the South China Sea”. A few months ago, Newsweek published a map showing the reach of US missiles “on China’s doorstep”.

All this could not be more explicit. This is not like the risible fiction maintained during Nato’s decades of expansion into Eastern Europe that the group was a purely defensive alliance, and that it had nothing – nothing at all! – to do with Russia. No. This is all about deterring China – and includes stationing American military personnel as close as 10 kilometres from the Chinese coast, on Kinmen Island, from where the skyline of the mainland city of Xiamen is perfectly visible. Since Kinmen is ruled by Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a renegade province with which it must be reunited, you don’t get much more provocative than that.

But deterring China from what, precisely? China hasn’t fought a war for 46 years. The US, on the other hand, has been involved in such an endless stream of conflicts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that it is with good reason they are known as the “forever wars”.

China hasn’t fought a war for 46 years

The American academic David Vine estimates that the US has 313 military base sites in East Asia. How many does China have near America? Zero. In fact, it has only one overseas base, in Djibouti. There may be much speculation that others are being planned or built, but none have been confirmed.

Given the US history in the Americas – including war with Mexico, the occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, interventions in the Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Dominican civil wars, the Bay of Pigs incursion in Cuba, and invasion of Grenada (and that’s only a partial list from the 20th century) – a good case could be made that it is the threat from the US to the region that is “obvious”. A third party, such as China, is surely needed to “deter” US aggression and “destabilising actions”, to use Mr Hegseth’s words.

But of course, such a suggestion would never be entertained. It’s one rule for the US, which insists it has the right to conduct “freedom of navigation operations” wherever it likes, including in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, and another for China; when its navy conducted drills within 330km of Sydney, Australia – a long way from its 20km territorial seas – this March, CNN reported that it “caused deep consternation”.

There are plenty of other issues that could be gone into here, and it is true that there are many territorial and maritime disputes in the Asia-Pacific to which China is a very interested and determined party. But if the likes of Mr Hegseth and The Economist’s excitable writers could only put themselves in the shoes of others, they would have to concede that Beijing has shown remarkable restraint in the face of this enormous – and frankly hostile – military build-up right on its doorstep.

If there is one lesson that ought to be drawn from the war in Ukraine, it is that a powerful military alliance parking its tanks on the borders of a country it publicly identifies as a threat is unlikely to be seen as a friendly gesture. It might just provoke the conflagration it is supposed to avert. This was what the US diplomat and historian George Kennan famously warned about Nato expanding to Russia’s borders in 1997 – and he was right.

If you agree with the late Pope Francis, as I do, that “war is always and only a failure: it is a road leading nowhere”, then the West’s strategy failed with Russia. Rather than fall into a delirium of anticipation about a future conflict with Beijing, bellicose voices in the US and Europe would do better to remember Mr Kennan’s prescience – and try to avoid failing twice.