Military Means Alone Cannot Deter US War with China: Former Naval Intelligence Commander

A U.S. Navy helicopter is set to land on the flight deck of the USS Nimitz (CVN 68) aircraft carrier while off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, on Jan. 18, 2020. Mario Tama/Getty Images

China’s communist regime is the most destabilizing player in the Indo-Pacific, according to a retired head of naval intelligence, but tempering its reactionary behavior is no simple task.

To prevent a war between the great powers, the United States will need to go beyond investing in military equipment and leverage all means of national power, according to retired Rear Admiral Mike Studeman.

Mr. Studeman, who previously served as director of the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office and commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, said that the United States must influence the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decision-making while avoiding crippling its power so completely as to make the regime reckless like a rogue nation.

“The strategic view is you don’t want China to be some beleaguered country that has to act out in ways that are highly disruptive,” Mr. Studeman said during an Aug. 8 talk at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

To that end, Mr. Studeman said the United States should better coordinate its military, economic, diplomatic, and cyber strategies to shape the regime’s decision-making while also ensuring it does not make a catastrophic miscalculation and start a war.

“China’s behavior right now has been the most destabilizing element in the western Pacific, and so everybody is concerned. And everybody… is highly attuned to ensuring that China doesn’t miscalculate.”

“We need to be looking at all forms of influence that will prevent a combat environment or a crisis that will, in fact, be devastating for the globe.”

‘No Winner’ in China-US War

Mr. Studeman said that the CCP had become increasingly reckless and reactionary under its general secretary, Xi Jinping, who assumed power in 2013.

During that time, he said, the regime’s transformation “from a one-party dictatorship to a one-man dictatorship” has increased the likelihood of miscalculation by the regime, which no longer benefits from the myriad views of its leadership, but instead is subject to the whims of Xi alone.

That could make a possible CCP invasion more likely, Mr. Studeman said, because Xi alone does not appear to fully comprehend the magnitude of the disaster that would follow—both globally and for the CCP at home.

“If [Xi] tries to go after Taiwan, [it] will lead to the downfall of the Chairman and the Party Secretary, and I think he underestimates this,” Mr. Studeman said.

“There’s no real winner in any of this.”

Ezra Cohen, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, agreed with that assessment and added that the United States needed to move beyond creating “off ramps” for China to de-escalate and start actively pushing the regime towards those off-ramps with all means of national power.

“We can create the environment that will keep things pre-conflict, and that’s really what the objective is,” Mr. Cohen said.

“To be successful at this pre-conflict stage, it’s not just about what the U.S. military is going to do. It’s about what the entire power of the U.S. federal government is going to do.”

As such, Mr. Cohen said, the United States could work to counter the CCP’s sophisticated campaign of irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific by coordinating the actions of the Departments of Defense, Justice, Commerce, and the Treasury.

Military deterrence alone, he said, would not stop a conflict from erupting.

“We really need to move off of this now, this idea that it’s just going to be denial, that it’s just going to be hard-power deterrence,” Mr. Cohen said.

China Escalates Tensions With US

The comments follow a trying week for the already-fraught U.S.-China relationship.

Chinese and Russian warships conducted their largest-ever joint naval operation last week. Eleven Chinese and Russian vessels in international waters near the coast of Alaska drew an escort of four U.S. destroyers to ensure that Chinese and Russian forces did not enter U.S. territorial waters.

Though the scale of the exercise is new, the incident is not—in and of itself—unusual. A similar, smaller drill took place in September of 2022, involving three Chinese and four Russian naval vessels.

The United States responded with a single Coast Guard vessel.

At the time, Rear Adm. Nathan Moore, the 17th Coast Guard District commander, said in a statement that the joint Chinese–Russian formation “operated in accordance with international rules and norms” while noting that U.S. naval forces would “meet presence-with-presence to ensure there are no disruptions to U.S. interests in the maritime environment around Alaska.”

Similarly, the CCP has been testing the limits of U.S. influence abroad, leveraging economic policies to foster its own brand of illiberalism on a global scale, according to former national security adviser Robert O’Brien.

“The [CCP] is relentless in trying to change the way that we live our lives,” Mr. O’Brien said during an Aug. 2 talk at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

“They’re trying to change the liberty [we have], to change the way we live, and to change the way the world is organized. And that’s dangerous.”

Mr. O’Brien said that the CCP regime was operating “across every region of the world,” seeking to uproot the influence of democratic nations and establish diplomatic and economic means of coercing smaller countries.

“They talk about ‘win-win,’ but in reality, it’s ‘win-lose.’ China wins, and everyone else loses,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“In Xi Jinping’s eyes, the only way China can win is if everyone else loses.”

Tom Ozimek contributed to this report