Irregular Warfare Podcast - China’s Strategically Irregular Approach: The Art of the Gray Zone

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

How does China operate in the space between war and peace to gain strategic advantage in Asia and globally? What do these gray zone activities look like, and how do they facilitate China’s influence in the region? What are the consequences of inconsistent US policy and posture in the Pacific in countering China’s rise? This episode features a conversation with Ambassador David Shear and Dr. Zack Cooper, who explore what China's efforts in the gray zone mean for the United States. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Hi everyone, this is Shauna Sinnott, one of the co-directors of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Thank you for listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, our flagship effort, which seeks to bridge the gap among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to support the community of national security professionals. On behalf of the entire IWI team, I'm thrilled to be able to invite you to our first annual conference, which will take place virtually on 10 September 2021. This event will bring together leading thinkers from across the IW community to reflect on the role of IW in the 20 years since 9-11, to include multiple small group discussions on pressing IW issues, an inter-university academic workshop focused on

IW scholarship, a panel moderated by Dr. Jake Shapiro and featuring Ambassador Douglas Lute, Thank you. To learn how to register, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or visit our website by searching for the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We look forward to seeing you there. really are engaged in a strategic campaign to increase their influence throughout the region and diminish American influence throughout the region. And they're using diplomatic tools, they're using economic tools, they're using public affairs tools, that Wolf Boyer diplomacy is a case in point. So they're using an across-the-board, not only you might say all-of government approach to increasing their influence in the region, they're using an all-of-society approach. If what matters to us in Asia is making sure that China can't coerce our friends, it really matters that we are there and seen as being reliable. And the worst thing we can do is to be seen as

fleeing halfway across the Pacific so that we don't put ourselves at risk. We've got to be there day in, day out. And I think this idea that somehow we can de-risk ourselves by, you know, fighting from afar while our allies are inside the threat ring, that is the wrong approach. or inside the threat ring, that is the wrong approach. Welcome to episode 34 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am Shauna Sinnott, and I will be your host today along with Laura Jones. Today's episode considers what China's efforts in the gray zone mean for the U.S. approach to influence in Asia and globally, setting foundation for understanding where and how the United States might choose to

counter these efforts through relationships and forward presence. Our guests begin by characterizing the manner in which China engages in a strategically irregular approach, necessitated by its weakness relative to its U.S. rival in the conventional military sense. They then discuss what these efforts mean for other Asian nations and how those effects matter in the U.S. competition for influence. They conclude by critiquing inconsistencies in the U.S. approach to policy in the Pacific, recognizing that countering China's influence requires building and maintaining relationships through consistency which will open opportunities throughout the region.

Dr. Zach Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies U.S. strategy in Asia, including alliance dynamics and U.S.-China competition. He teaches at Georgetown University and Princeton University, co-directs the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and co-hosts the Net Assessment Podcast. Zach was previously the senior fellow for Asian security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He served as Assistant to the Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism at the National Security Council

and as a Special Assistant to the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Department of Defense. Ambassador David Scheer served for 32 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, most recently as the Ambassador to Vietnam, and was serviced in Sapporo, Beijing, Tokyo, and Kuala Lumpur. He was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs from 2014 to 2016, when he performed the duties of Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. David is a recipient of the State Department's Superior Honor Award and the Defense Department's Civilian Meritorious Service Award. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

International Studies. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Zach and Dave. Dr. Zach Cooper, Ambassador David Shearer, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We're excited to have you here. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. So I'd just like to start by putting this in context. So we're talking in this episode about China on this Irregular Warfare podcast. And I think that could come across as a little

surprising to some people because usually we talk about China in the context of great power competition. Zach, I'd like to start with you. What's the importance or value of talking about China in the context of gray zone activities that touch on this irregular spectrum of competition and conflict? Well, I think when most people talk about contingency with China, they're often thinking about a huge conflict, right? Very, very high end strikes on mainland China, maybe strikes on thinking about a huge conflict, right? Very, very high end strikes on mainland China, maybe strikes on the continental United States, a big war over Taiwan or something else. But the reality is that day to day, what we're seeing with China looks nothing like that.

What it looks much more like is day to day conflict happening below the level of armed conflict, below the level of a large conventional fight. And in fact, what's happened over the last decade or so is that China has shown that it can very effectively change the status quo, not by engaging in high-end conflict, by actually avoiding it, right? By doing all kinds of things below this threshold that are very hard for the United States to respond to. And so I think for American policymakers and other folks that are interested in this area, it's not actually that we failed to deter the high-end fight. We have deterred that so far. What we failed to deter is

all this low-level gray zone coercion. And so I think that's what demands a lot more time and attention from all of us in Washington and out in the field. And Dave, you've seen a lot of this from both the diplomatic perspective with your post in the Pacific, but also from the policy perspective within the Department of Defense. Could you give us an overview from that broader strategic level of what China is doing in this space? Sure, thanks. These gray zone tactics that China is using are in part effective because the U.S. just doesn't pay enough attention to places like Southeast Asia. The Chinese know this, and because of that, they're willing to take on a higher level of risk.

Secondly, they're effective because the Chinese are able to employ a lot more tools than we are able to employ a lot more tools than we are able to use. There's really no distinction in the Chinese leadership's mind between public and private interests, which means that they can harness civilian resources much more effectively than we can. And this is demonstrated most visibly in the Chinese use of their maritime militias and their fishermen. The Chinese have a much more integrated, across-the-board civilian-military approach to getting what they want in places like the South China Sea and in the East China Sea as well. You know, when we discuss regular warfare, we often refer back to the definition in the IW Annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy. And influence is a major component of that.

This seems to be an application of influence at a much more macro scale, if that makes sense. The Chinese really are engaged in a strategic campaign to increase their influence throughout the region and diminish American influence throughout the region. And they're using diplomatic tools, they're using economic tools, they're using public affairs tools, that Wolf Boyer diplomacy is a case in point. So they're using an across-the-board, not only, you might say, all-of-government approach to increasing their influence in the region, they're using an all-of-society approach. It's interesting, Dave, that you frame it like that with the all-of-society approach, because it really seems from this that the gains that China makes in the region are the result of

their efficacy in mobilizing normal people to do seemingly normal things. But then these cumulative tactical wins eventually render significant strategic payoff. Zach, how does this happen in plain sight? If you look back at the last decade of South China Sea tactics from China, for example, you see a number of different things. First, you see efforts by China to physically take territory using some of these gray zone tactics. So there's a famous case around Scarborough Shoal that Dave knows better than almost anyone, in which the United States actually ended up negotiating an agreement for the Philippines, our ally, and China to disengage

from the Shoal, where Philippine fishermen have long fished, and which is within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone. The Chinese side didn't actually disengage. They promised to, apparently, and then stayed there. And as a result, the Chinese basically now hold Scarborough Shoal. So there have been cases like this where China now holds territory that it didn't hold before, if not territory, at least underwater seamounts. And then you've got cases like the Seven Islands and the Spratly Islands and the South China Sea, where through incremental movements, the Chinese government has been able to build islands, right?

In most of these cases, there was literally nothing above water before they began their island building campaign, and then construct huge bases on them. And so this push that we've seen, whether it's taking territory or building new territory, and then constructing and militarizing it, that's all been done through gray zone activities, right? Things that were very carefully done using asymmetric tools, slowly over time that were hard for the United States to push back against. So it seems like it's not just China's actions in the space, but also the United States in action and response. I was ambassador to Vietnam

2011 to 2014. And in late 2013, I visited a Vietnamese think tank associated with the Ministry of Defense. And I was speaking with the director of the think tank, a Vietnamese general, giving him my pitch on the South China Sea and on the need for greater U.S.-Vietnam cooperation on the South China Sea. And in the middle of my pitch, he raised his hand and said, stop. In 2012, the Chinese took over Scarborough Shoal, your ally, the Philippines territory. If you can't protect your own ally, why should we trust you? The message was very clear. It hurt us in the region, as has subsequent Chinese gray zone operations in the area. So this has a dramatic,

tangible effect on our credibility and our reliability as an ally. Can we go in, probably start with you, Zach, on this one to go into what the actual logic is between why China is employing in the gray zone and taking this more asymmetric approach? Is that because they're just such a strong presence in the region that they're able to operate both conventionally as well as on the periphery? Yeah, well, so I've done a bit of work on this. And I think what we've seen is there are a couple of factors. So first, not to get too theoretical here, right? But one thing that we know is that the Chinese looked at what happened in the 1990s. And I think they took a lesson away from the US success in the Persian Gulf War, and also from this crisis in 1995-96 over Taiwan. And they

learned that actually challenging the US directly might not be the best idea, right? And so they and other countries around the world tried to come up with tactics or strategies that would help give them options to push back effectively without having to do so in the conventional military realm. And so what we saw was very effective capability development in terms of anti-access area denial capabilities. So things like long range missiles and diesel submarines in terms of high end capabilities, but also a growing emphasis on trying to find ways to avoid having to fight the US in the first place. And the theoretical part of this is something called the stability instability balance, right? Which is this notion that if you have stability between two countries at a very high level,

say the nuclear level, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to have instability at the conventional military level below it, right? In fact, the more confident you are that there's not going to be a nuclear exchange, the more risk-taking you can be in the conventional military world. And I think we're seeing the exact same thing happen now. The Chinese are pretty confident that there's not going to be a nuclear exchange. They're also pretty confident that the US doesn't want to have a conventional military fight at the moment, and neither do the Chinese. And so they say, okay, well, let's just go and do as much as we can below that level, below that threshold in

the gray zone area. And as long as we don't force the US to really escalate, it leaves you at what technically we would call a sort of a shelling point, a point that's easy for the US to stop conflict and very hard for us to continue to escalate, right? So we don't actually want to have to go ahead and sink a Chinese vessel. So the Chinese can do a whole lot that runs right up to that line. And it makes it very hard for us to respond. So I think that's really what we've seen over the last decade is China trying to test what they can do with different kinds of capabilities with different kinds of escalations, and seeing what actually gets a U.S. response. And where they have gotten a very firm U.S. response, they actually back away pretty quickly,

which is something we don't talk about enough. Dave, what does China think the United States threshold is for reaction? And how did you navigate that when you were in the position to determine if the U.S. presence abroad should respond to something that China was doing in the region? Well, I think the Chinese, starting in 2012, engaged in some, what you might call opportunistic adventurism, testing the extent to which the United States would push back in Southeast Asia. And what they do and how they do it in the gray zone depends not only on their calculation of levels of capability, but on the extent to which they think the Americans are paying attention. And during the Obama administration, as the Chinese completed the work of reclaiming territory on these Spratly Island features, it became clear

to the Chinese that there was a limit, and that limit was Scarborough Shoal. In early 2016, it became pretty clear to us that the Chinese interest in building on Scarborough Shoal was increasing. And we mounted a fairly strong campaign, including a strong message from President Obama that that was not the thing for the Chinese to do. And if they did it, it would seriously affect the relationship. The Chinese held off and they've continued to hold off. I think the Chinese understand that Scarborough Shoal is different from, say, Mischief Reef. What is the end goal for all this? What is China working towards?

What is their overall objective? Is this a Xi Jinping-driven effort, or is this an overall long-term Chinese strategic movement? This is very much a long-term Chinese strategic movement, and it didn't start with Xi Jinping. a long-term Chinese strategic movement, and it didn't start with Xi Jinping. Most observers recognize that the Chinese started becoming more assertive in places like the South China Sea, starting at the end of the previous administration in China, the Hu Jintao administration, probably in the 2007-2008 time frame. I think the really hard thing for many of us is to figure out what the endgame really is here. And I think one reason that it's difficult is that Chinese objectives may

be changing over time. So if you look back through history at rising powers, what you tend to see is that those rising powers change their objectives really quickly, especially during the period where they go from thinking that they're relatively weak to thinking that they're relatively strong. And so I think this growing confidence is leading China to do things not just on the maritime domain, but in other areas, which are frankly self-defeating, right? Where actually we're seeing China press probably too hard and starting to get a counter reaction. But as with many rising powers, it's easy once you feel your power to then become more emboldened by it. It's very hard to then feel the dramatic downside effects that that's having

elsewhere. We have absolutely no idea what would come after Xi Jinping. So my view is we have to be incredibly flexible in how we deal with our understandings of what Chinese leaders are will expand as their capabilities and options expand. The explosion of Chinese wealth and the modernization and expansion of Chinese military forces and capabilities has really given the Chinese leadership more options, not only in the immediate neighborhood of China, but across the board regionally. Do you think that as that changes, their approach will change as well? Yes, it's more than likely. And you see that, for example, in the issuance of 14 demands of the Australians last year, I believe. Demands relating to Australian domestic politics, relating to Australian domestic politics, a blatant intrusion into Australian domestic affairs that the bilateral Sino-Australian relationship hasn't gotten over yet.

Do you think that as they continue to grow, will they continue to be comfortable operating in that grey zone space? Or do you think they'll mature out of the grey zone space to a more conventional competition? My sense is, Laura, very much along the lines of what you just suggested. Of course, they're going to become not just more capable of operating the gray zones and more confident in doing so. But as the balance of power shifts, and as China becomes more capable relative to the United States, that leaders in Beijing are going to accept more risk of an actual conventional fight. And I think that's what we've seen over the last few years. Now, that's not to suggest that they actually want a conventional fight,

but I think they have become more and more confident in their own capabilities. And why shouldn't they be? Whether that means that they then try to focus more on challenging us conventionally and less on challenging us in the gray zone, I think is primarily a function of whether we're actually effective at countering them in the gray zone. If we can't counter them effectively in the gray zone, there's no reason for them to have to escalate. I think the real question is, if we could counter them at the gray zone now, would they escalate to the more conventional military level? My guess is they're not quite ready to go there yet, but I think they're

certainly getting much more confident. And five, 10 years from now, that's going to be a real possibility. Just very briefly, I think it's important to contrast the relative success the Japanese have had in the East China Sea with our lack of success in the South China Sea. The Japanese are a very strong ally. We know why we would go to war in Northeast Asia, probably more clearly than we do in Southeast Asia. The Japanese have extremely capable military forces as well as an extremely capable Coast Guard. And we've seen that Coast Guard perform quite effectively vis-a-vis the Chinese in the vicinity of the Senkakus, to the point where the Chinese will increase or decrease the frequency

and severity of their operations. But the situation is pretty stable. The Chinese aren't building any facilities on the Senkakus to counter maritime militia or Chinese coast guards or overflight? Well, the problem is our allies and partners in Southeast Asia don't have the capability, and in some cases, the will to counter the Chinese as the Japanese are countering them in the East China Sea. And the Americans can't do it on their own, especially if they're not being supported by allies like the Philippines. Dave, I think you've lived quite a while in Japan, you know, right? And I think Sapporo and Tokyo. And so you know

this better than most. But I think the other reality that you're pointing to is that we just have a very close alliance with Japan that isn't replicated with not just other countries in Southeast Asia, but really anyone else, in my view, in all of Asia, right? So it's a lot easier for us to work closely with the Japanese to push back against China than it is even with the Australians to some degree. We see our interests as just very, very closely aligned. Our values is very closely aligned. And the Japanese military is big and capable. Let me add to that by saying that this points to an asymmetry, a strong asymmetry in our

strategic posture in East Asia. In Northeast Asia, we have a clear line of defense. We have strong alliances. We have lots of our own forces deployed forward in Northeast Asia, and our allies have capable military and non-military assets. It's just the opposite in Southeast Asia. And I was in Japan in the 90s when the services wanted to move units from the Philippines to Japan. And we all thought, oh, well, we can lose the Philippines as long as we can put stuff in Japan. It turned out quite not to be the case. We need to be able to operate freely out of the Philippines. And that ability is in danger. Americans tend to think of the things that China is doing in the context of how it affects

us and how China is trying to influence the United States as its rival. But can we flip this and look at it from the perspective of these Asian nations of what China's actions actually mean for their own strategic interests? And you've already alluded to many of those with Vietnam and Australia and Japan and the Philippines, but they are very distinct. And I think we tend to gloss over how China's actions affect them. As the Chinese were building up their capabilities on those features in the Spratly Islands, particularly as they started militarizing them late in the second Obama administration, we would ask ourselves, well, what's the military benefit to the Chinese of

doing this in the Spratlys? And the military side of the Pentagon would come back to them and say, no military significance. We can take them out in a day. When in fact, what's most important to the Chinese and to the ASEAN claimants is the immediate diplomatic value of those facilities. The Chinese greatly expanded their ability to intimidate the ASEAN claimants by doing what they did, partly just by thumbing their nose at the Americans, partly by building those physical, new physical capabilities way beyond the mainland shore. They can better assert administrative control over those features. They can entice ASEAN fishermen to come in from the storm. And by the way, just let us put this stamp about Chinese territory in your passport.

They can station not only more military assets out there and keep them there longer, they can station civilian assets like Coast Guard and maritime militia. They can gain greater South China Sea maritime domain awareness. They can challenge the standard interpretation of the UN law of the sea. They can complicate US military planning in phase zero. And overall, they can overawe and intimidate the ASEAN claimants. They've been successful at that. However, the United States doesn't have to roll back Chinese presence on those features in order to mitigate the intimidation. We can do that by other means, by strengthening our alliances, by strengthening

our commitment, by strengthening our overall military presence, by paying more attention to Southeast Asia. And I think that gets at one critical aspect that Americans often overlook, which is what many in the region actually care about, right? So often we'll talk about the importance of freedom of navigation operations, which when we do it really means whether the U.S. can fly, sail, and operate wherever we want to, wherever international law allows. to wherever international law allows, that doesn't really matter to most of our friends in Asia, right? What matters to them isn't whether the US can sail through the South China Sea, it's whether they can use their own exclusive economic zones in the way they're legally supposed to be able to. Can they fish in the areas that they're legally supposed to have exclusive fishing rights? Can they explore for oil and gas in those areas? Those are the things that I think a lot of the claimants in the South China Sea and a lot of the Pacific Islands care most about. And unfortunately, for much of the

last decade, those are not the things we've talked about, right? We've talked about the challenge to US freedom of navigation, and we've insisted that we can operate wherever we want. But it's been our friends like Vietnam and the Philippines and Malaysia that have actually had to bear the burden of not being able to fish where they are supposed to be able to fish. And I think a shift in how Americans talk and think about Southeast Asia would necessitate a shift in focus away from the things that are just important to us towards the things that are important to our friends. And I think here I give Lloyd Austin and his team a lot of credit. When he was in Singapore about a month ago, he spoke very directly about the U.S. desire to help our friends with their legal claims.

And I think that's an absolutely critical thing for the United States to do. One victory the U.S. did have and the ASEAN claimants was the issuance of the arbitral panel decision on the South China Sea, which basically ruled that Chinese claims in the Spratly Islands are inconsistent with international law, and the Chinese has no claim to any features within the Philippine EEZ. Unfortunately, that decision was handed down at the very end of the Obama administration as the new Duterte administration was coming in. So those two factors basically took the wind out of any diplomatic hay we could have made from that decision. That decision is still out there. It's still international law. And the Biden administration, I think, will dust it off

and hopefully start using it as their regional strategy evolves. We talked a lot about military operations and kind of top level government objectives within the gray zone on the Chinese side. Can we hit a little bit more that whole of government view of the economic coercion that they perpetuate? My view is that the Chinese have been very effective at using non-military tools to get what they want in Asia over the last few years. And one reason is because they have a growing economic presence in the region, right? So if you go back about 20 years, the US was the. was the primary trading partner of a lot of countries in Asia and around the world.

And now something like two thirds of countries globally have China as their number one trading partner. And almost every country in East Asia has China as their primary trading partner. So this gives China lots of leverage and leverage that it uses very actively. Let me add to that. This gives China lots of leverage and leverage that it uses very actively. Let me add to that. My number one priority early in my tenure was to get the Vietnamese to agree to join negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And I worked very hard with the U.S. Trade Representative's Office to do that.

The Vietnamese agreed to join negotiations in 2013. And I made two arguments with the Vietnamese. One of them was based on the economic benefits they stood to reap from being a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I also argued with the Vietnamese that joining TPP was a strategic choice, that it allowed them to diversify their trading relationships and not become totally dependent on their trade relationship with China. They got that immediately. It took Washington a while to get that, but Washington did. In fact, President Obama used that argument in an NSC meeting I was in once, which was very gratifying, actually. So when we pulled out of the TPP, we pulled a rug out, a strategic as well as an economic

rug out from under the Vietnamese. So it seems like a lot of China's gray zone activities are either intended to stay below the radar or they have a specific audience within Asia. Are there some of their activities, though, that are specifically intended to elicit a response from the US? Yeah, I think different Chinese actions have different intended effects. So some of them are what we would call fait accompli approaches, right, which are meant to actually just change the status quo very quickly without getting any kind of response. And I think that's what we saw, for example, at Scarborough Shoal in 2012. An effort to grab territory and the desire was to do it quickly before the US or the Philippines could respond.

I think there are other actions that are intended more to change behavior. So the USNS impeccable incident, for example, in 2009, my read on that is that the hope that China had was that they would increase the risk to ships like the Impeccable operating off of China's coast, and that that would convince the United States not to actually operate there with ISR assets. That failed, of course, but in my mind, that absolutely was a coercive effort to change behavior on the part of the United States. And then I guess the final group, I would say, are efforts to sort of intimidate, to change policies. I think the Australia case that Dave mentioned, you know, the 14 points that China threatened Australia with, that's certainly an effort to coerce Australia into

changing its political approach. You can see the same thing on Taiwan, where China has been using all kinds of tools and tactics to convince people on Taiwan to change how they approach political issues, military issues, economic issues. I think for the most part, those approaches have backfired, which is sort of ironic, right? We've been talking about how effective a lot of China's gray zone approaches have been. But, you know, take the Taiwan case. The time that this has been used most actively was to put pressure on the people on Taiwan not to vote for Tsai Ing-wen and her DPP government. And what happened? Beijing seemed to have a pretty counterproductive plan. It got her elected, then reelected,

in large part by putting way too much pressure on Taiwan. So I do think you see a lot of pressure from China on countries around its borders, but it's not always effective. In addition to getting Tsai Ing-wen elected, it's gotten the KMT to rethink its policy on one China, which is a big backfire. Are there any other notable examples of where Chinese operations in the gray zone failed and maybe where their tactics didn't quite pay off? Chinese operations in the gray zone failed and maybe where their tactics didn't quite pay off? In the report that I mentioned earlier, we looked at nine cases of gray zone activity.

And in seven of those nine cases, China did not achieve its objectives. So in two of those cases, China did. The two cases that we looked at, one was the island building campaign and the other was Scarborough Shoal. And it's not a surprise that those are the things we're talking about here, right? Because those are the times that China has used gray zone tools to really change the status quo in a very negative way. So I think part of the challenge here is it's not that China always succeeds. It's that every time that we enter one of these tests, there's a lot of downside risk for us if China does succeed and very little downside risk for China. We haven't made China pay the price for these coercive tools. And I think one thing we have to do in the future

is, look, if China makes a big move against the Philippines or Vietnam or Japan using these gray zone tools, and that move fails, we have to make sure that China still pays some diplomatic price for doing this. Otherwise, they're just going to try again and again and again, and eventually it'll work. We hit on Taiwan briefly, but could you delve into that a bit more and address how competition there could lead to a U.S. response, and also discuss the gray zone tactics China utilizes to try and maintain influence over Taiwan. I think there are several levels to the Chinese effort to increase their sway over Taiwan. And I think, as Zach has mentioned, we tend to think of

the all-out war scenario. Again, that's not the most likely level. I think at the lowest level, you have Chinese efforts at subversion, Chinese Communist Party united front tactics, their efforts to influence Taiwan election results, their clear meddling in Taiwan social media, their effort to cultivate southern Taiwan agricultural interests that export their produce to China, for example, their cultivation of Taiwan entrepreneurs on the Chinese mainland. All of these are efforts that we have to be very cognizant of. I think at a higher level, at the gray zone level, you have the potential for Chinese seizure of one of the offshore islands. Kinmen and Mazu, the closest islands to the Chinese mainland.

Pradas Island in the South China Sea, or even Ituaba Island, the one island occupied by the Tawans in the Spratlys. by the Taiwans in the Spratlys. These are scenarios that I think strategic thinkers have been increasingly concerned about over the past year or two, and they may or may not lead up to more intense military confrontation or conflict. Then, of course, there is a blockade of Taiwan, quarantine of Taiwan, leading to all-out war across the strait. And I think all-out war is the least likely scenario here. But the conditions that China has set in terms of narrative and influence to convince people that Taiwan is part of China, do you think that those efforts will contribute towards the potential for them being successful and potentially, you know, reacquiring Taiwan without conventional conflict?

It's very much in line with Chinese strategic diplomacy and Chinese strategic messaging, which is if you can't persuade the other side, you can at least create the impression that you want what you want, you will never give up, and you have unstoppable momentum on your side. That's a classic set of Chinese strategic diplomatic tactics that they use everywhere. And this is why I think, as Dave's saying, it's so important that we not buy into the Chinese propaganda. So I think actually the story of the last couple of years on Taiwan is a story of incredibly self-defeating moves by China, where actually if you go back, say, 20, 30 years, there was a real possibility that Taiwan would have joined the mainland and might have done it

in certain circumstances without having to actually have the Chinese military take Taiwan by force. That is just not on the table anymore, right? The people on Taiwan have watched as the one-party, one-systems promise that China made about Hong Kong has been broken. There's now no way that if you were living in Taiwan, you would think, oh, well, maybe we'll just join with the mainland and we'll continue to have our own system. No one believes that, right? And so this idea that you could use gray zone coercion to convince people on Taiwan to unify with the mainland, I think actually that idea has basically gone out the window. And most of the reason is because of Beijing's own actions. So now you're in a pretty terrible world for China, which is

either you allow the continued drift of Taiwan slightly away from China because you're driving the people on Taiwan away from the mainland, or you have to engage in either military posturing or a large-scale conflict to physically gain hold of Taiwan. Both of those are pretty bad directions to pursue from a policy standpoint for Beijing. And I think Beijing has no one to blame but its own leaders for this situation. And I think one could imagine a situation in which the Chinese despairing of reunification and despairing of the usefulness of the big military option, the leadership decides for domestic political purposes that the seizure of an offshore island is a relatively low cost, low risk thing to do. So I think we need to be very vigilant

in that respect. Because even if the seizure of an offshore island doesn't convince any Taiwans that reunification is inevitable, it may plant the seeds in people's mind, particularly in Taiwan, that the Americans are an unreliable patron. It seems that one of the lessons of this is that it takes time to develop relationships and trust with our partners and allies. And that goes all the way from the diplomatic level where you operated, Dave, down to the tactical level, which is particularly important for IW practitioners who may be involved with anything from building partner capacity in the region to countering influence campaigns, for example. But this is incredibly difficult when U.S. strategy has been so inconsistent. How do you build relationships and build trust when you don't have that continued presence or continued focus on the region? When I was a lad about 1993

in the Regional Affairs Office of the East Asia Pacific Bureau of the State Department, my Deputy Assistant Secretary saw that the Cold War had ended and it was time to shift resources from Europe and the Middle East to East Asia. This was 1992. So we made a play within the State Department for more resources for the East Asia Pacific Bureau. And I remember developing a PowerPoint slide deck on why East Asia is important and why we should be paying more attention and shifting more resources to the region. This was to have been given by our assistant secretary to Secretary of State Baker. It never happened. And that PowerPoint presentation is collecting digital dust off somewhere

in State Department archives. So I've had long experience with the gap between American declaratory policy on East Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, and what we actually do. Why don't you take it from there, Zach? I want to be clear that I think we've had some incredibly smart, thoughtful people who've put in place some smart strategies. I think our problem hasn't been with our strategy, especially if you look at the Obama administration's strategy on the rebalance.

It's really been with the execution of that. I always think back to the foreign policy article that Secretary Clinton gave when she was Secretary of State, in which she announced that the U.S. was going to refocus on Asia. And she said that there were six lines of action. First, strengthening U.S. bilateral security alliances. Second, working with emerging powers. Third, engaging with regional multilateral institutions. Fourth, expanding trade and investment. Fifth, forging a broad-based military presence. And lastly, advancing democracy and human rights.

And when I go through that list now, just about 10 years after she made that very good list, I think the story's not a good one, to be very honest. So on US security alliances, things have been pretty rocky, especially if you look at the Trump era. Now, I think Japan, Korea, Australia are in okay shape. But boy, the Philippines and Thailand are other two treaty allies. Those are pretty tough relationships right now. So okay, but not great on alliances. Other relationships with emerging powers. Well, here Clinton was talking about China. That relationship is as bad as it's been in at least, I would say, 50 years. Things are a little bit better with India, but I think we've struggled at the same time in most of Southeast Asia. So

again, mixed at best. Third, multilateral institutions. Well, yeah, we've done a little bit with the Quad recently, but our engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been abysmal in recent years. And the Association of Southeast Asian Nations itself is struggling. So barely a passing grade on multilateral institutions. And then you get into some areas that I think we've done even worse. Trade and investment, you know, as Dave was just talking about, we tried to get other countries into TPP, and then we pulled out of it ourselves. So I think we get a failing grade on that one. Forging a broad-based military presence. Well, we're now more dependent on Japan and Korea than we've ever been for our presence in the region. So not a great grade on that one either. And then

finally, advancing democracy and human rights. I mean, pretty hard to argue that we've made progress there as well, not just about what's going on in treaty allies like the Philippines and Thailand, Burma. But I mean, look at the human rights situation, not just in those countries, look at China, right? Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and then look at how we're struggling with democracy issues here at home. So I think we've got a lot of work to do. And that's Republicans and Democrats, you know, in Congress and the administration and the expert community. Everyone's a bit to blame. But we just have to do better to align our rhetoric with what we're actually doing in the region.

And what would you say about some of the efforts like the Marine Corps realignment within the Pacific, which perhaps would seem piecemeal in the context of looking at what the whole government is doing, but is not something like that a step in the right direction? Yeah, I mean, I will give Marines credit here for being, I think, by far the most forward leaning on this issue set, right? So the Marine Corps is making really tough strategic decisions in a cost constrained environment to invest in capabilities that the Marine Corps thinks are necessary to deal with China and divest of some other capabilities, right? I would say we've seen a little bit of this from some of the other services, right? The army trying to build cross domain capabilities, the Air Force this from some of the other services, right? The Army trying to build cross-domain capabilities, the Air Force focused on some of their long-range strike capabilities,

and of course, the Navy has a lot to bring to bear, but it's been much more piecemeal. And in many cases, those other services haven't really been making the hard decisions of cutting things so they can invest in these new capabilities. And that's where I think the Marine Corps has shown real leadership, saying, look, if the Marine Corps wants to engage in a China contingency, then armor is not actually going to be that useful. But, you know, look at what the Navy's done. The Navy's trying to invest in everything. And the end result is you just kind of get smaller and less capable to do anything. And I think at some point, we as a, you know, Department of Defense and individual services are going to have to make some big bets. And that's going to mean that we're going to end

up killing some sacred cows. And at the moment, the Marine Corps is really the only one that's done that. I think this isn't just a matter of leadership within the services. This is going to take presidential attention. And as long as the upper levels of the American political elite can't pay enough attention to Southeast Asia, it seems unlikely to me that they'll be able to pay enough attention to the services to do what has to be done in terms of our posture and capabilities. And I think part of it is that it's hard for many entities within the government to reconcile what we're preparing for, whether it's the high-end

conventional fight or countering these gray zone activities. And in the Marine Corps, for example, in a way it's preparing for both. So you put the service out there, position it with our allies, and they can participate in theater security cooperation, other types of engagements that do not involve high-end conflict. But yet in order to meet the possibility of high-end conflict, they still have to prepare those capabilities on a limited budget. And they're not the only ones who are having to make those tough decisions. So how do individual entities within the U.S US government reconcile those competing, you know, near fight, far fight type of priorities? And then how do those entities piece it together so that it's a more holistic strategy? Yeah, Sean, I think this is the big

risk now for the Defense Department when it comes to Asia, is that it is very attractive for us to all talk about this high end fight, you know, like Dave was mentioning earlier on Taiwan, and to get ready for that big fight and only focus on, you know, what some people would call sort of war winning capabilities, right? So you decrease your risk in the region by not having too much there. You fly from over the horizon, you rely largely on submarines. You avoid really having too much skin in the game because we know that the Chinese can hit everything out to Guam. So don't put anything in the first island chain. Don't even put much of it in Guam because you

know it's vulnerable and just fight the conflict from afar. I think that is a very attractive solution to many people, including some in the Pentagon who do cost analysis and program evaluation. I also think it is exactly the wrong approach. Because if what matters to us in Asia is making sure that China can't coerce our friends, it really matters that we are there and seen as being reliable. And the worst thing we can do is to be seen as fleeing halfway across the Pacific so that we don't put ourselves at risk. We've got to be there day in, day out,

like the Marine Corps is planning to, and we've got to accept risk on our own. And I think this idea that somehow we can de-risk ourselves by fighting from afar while our allies are inside the threat ring, that is the wrong approach. And I do think that there are some within the Pentagon who are urging us to move that direction. And I think it's really, really dangerous. In this regard, it seems to me that while we've sounded a little pessimistic about where the services are heading in this, if I were in the IW community, I'd see the fact that the services are rethinking operational concepts in the Western Pacific as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

Particularly, this is just my instinct talking because I'm not that familiar with the Marines plans, but particularly in connection with littoral operations in contested environments and the EABO concept. This looks like there's a place for IW in this, both in terms of operations and in terms of preparing the battlefield. We've touched on how the services can structurally change to meet these emerging threats or to actually counter competition in that gray zone in the Pacific. But can we talk about how we could possibly have measures of success and how we can change our measures of success? And how do you really operationalize influence? How do you measure the success of a relationship? I'm just kicking off a big project on this. So I have a lot of thoughts about this question. First, I think, Laura, this is the right question, because we actually don't measure this, which is kind of crazy, because in my mind, the competition that we are in with China is a competition over the alignment decisions of regional states.

The center of gravity is the choices of states in the region about what policies they're going to take, which way they're going to align on certain issues. So you would think we would be measuring that because that is the most important thing. And in my experience, we don't even try. We have to be able to aggregate policy decisions that other governments are making and actually make an assessment about whether we're doing well or not in certain domains. And here, I think there are four that matter. So I would look at the geostrategic domain, the economic domain, the technology domain, and lastly, what I would call broad global governance. And then look at that across individual countries. Because in some places, we're doing great on economic issues, but terrible on global governance issues. And in other places, it's vice versa.

And until we know how we're doing, we can't actually figure out where to devote our resources. And I think this is where we've been struggling. And let me just say one last thing before I hand it to Dave, which is, if you look at the first six months of the Biden administration, I'd say they've done really well in Japan, Korea, India, pretty well in Australia. The problem is that actually the places where we really need to do well now, what I would call the swing states that are making decisions about which direction they're going to go, those are the countries in Southeast Asia, which we've largely overlooked. We're sort of putting the most energy into the places that are the easiest,

not the places that are the most important. Indonesia, for example. Yeah, Indonesia is a perfect example. Indonesia is a huge, really important country where we have just not put the effort in. And we've got to measure how we're doing or else we're going to end up back in this situation 10 years from now. Yeah, let me expand on that by returning to the asymmetry in our strategic posture. During the Cold War, in order to prevent the Soviets from establishing a hegemony in Europe and Asia, we implemented a package of things. We drew a line of defense, we established alliances, we put forces forward, we emphasized deterrence. We did a lot of diplomacy on that basis. We can't implement that package in Southeast Asia, and we have to look for another package. And it's going to have to be what you might call multi-domain.

It's got to be across all of DIME, all across diplomacy, intelligence and information, military and economic. And you have to be able to think strategically across all of these different domains of statecraft. And in Southeast Asia, because we can't establish strong allies and draw a clear line of defense, we're going to have to be able to distinguish among the states that are malleable and those that aren't. We have to know what the people in those countries are thinking. And I think Zach's approach to this, you have to be highly discriminating, surgical almost.

And I think Zach's way of thinking in this regard is very, very useful. I think we have to be realistic that we've been talking about this for 20 years and we actually haven't gotten the job done. And the region knows that. And so every time that we make more promises and can't deliver, the bar gets a little bit higher. And unfortunately, expectations are raised and then not followed through on. And so I think the challenge for all of us in the policymaking community is not to talk so much about what we're going to do in Asia, but to actually do it. And that's the hard work of being in government. And Dave has done this for his career, so he knows it much better than I do.

But, you know, that's the really tough stuff of policymaking. But I think that's where we are now. It's time to execute. Zach Cooper, David Scheer, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really wonderful conversation, and we appreciate, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really wonderful conversation and we appreciate your time today. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Sean and Laura. Thanks again for listening to episode 34 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Andy and Kyle will discuss Afghanistan with author Wes Morgan and General John Allen. Following this, Shauna and I will have a conversation with Brett Colburn and Dr. Raphael Cohen on information operations. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, particularly if you want to learn more about our upcoming virtual conference on 10 September 2021.

One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we will see you next time.