Michael O’Hanlon
198 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
planning but in that o statecraft—in integrating economic and mili-
tary tools to develop a new and more realistic concept o deterrence.A NEW FORM OF DETERRENCE
The Trump administration’s two principal strategic documents, the 2017
National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy, both
stress the United States’ blossoming rivalry with its great-power com-
petitors, China and Russia. The £² identi¿es both as “revisionist pow-
ers” that “want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian
model.” Most notably, Trump has increased the annual U.S. defense bud-
get by around $100 billion since taking oce, including in it generous
funding for high-tech weapons modernization, among other priorities.
But in the eort to strengthen deterrence, it is important to ask how
a U.S. war with China or Russia would likely start. Put dierently,
where and how might deterrence, and speci¿cally extended deter-
rence, actually fail?
China and Russia know they are weaker than the United States ac-
cording to raw military metrics. Both are thus highly unlikely to launch
the kind o all-out surprise attack against a U.S. treaty ally that would
require American retaliation. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that
China would invade the main islands o Japan, where some 50,000
U.S. troops are currently stationed, or that Russia would attempt to
annex an entire £¬¡¢ country, even a small Baltic state. Both Beijing
and Moscow know that such open aggression would be met with over-
whelming U.S. force.
Yet it is much easier to imagine Beijing or Moscow carrying out smaller
tests o U.S. resolve. Perhaps Russia would, as it did in Ukraine, send
so-called little green men—soldiers in green army uniforms without in-
signia—into a small town in eastern Estonia under the pretext o protect-
ing ethnic Russians there. Putin has declared a right to protect Russian
speakers anywhere they live, especially on former Soviet territory, pro-
viding him with a tailor-made pretext for such aggression. But what he
might truly relish is the chance to nibble at a piece o £¬¡¢ territory and
put the alliance on the horns o a major dilemma. Would Article 5 o the
North Atlantic Treaty, which guarantees that alliance members will de-
fend one another in the event o an attack, require a military counterat-
tack from £¬¡¢ in such a situation? Putin might hope that £¬¡¢’s 29
members would tie themselves in knots over how to respond. In the
event that £¬¡¢ members, hoping to avoid a great-power war over a