Who Denies Wins: How to Prevail in a War against China in Asia

He is come to open the purple testament of bleeding war.
                                 —William Shakespeare, Richard II

 In 2023, after two decades of protracted Middle East and South Asian insurgency conflicts, the United States and its allies find themselves confronting a powerful peer competitor in Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Middle Kingdom is a communist state growing in military strength and strategic confidence every year and is openly committed to overturning the geopolitical status quo in Asia. The Pentagon estimates that by 2025 China will have roughly an eight-to-one advantage over the US in numbers of ships and submarines deployed in Asia. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is also expected to lead in combat aircraft and in larger land-based ballistic missiles in the region, while its nuclear arsenal is on track to double in size by 2030. Beijing’s massive military build-up has ended the era of global strategic dominance the US enjoyed between the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021.

Given that in 2001, the US military budget was fifteen times larger than that of China, the speed of the shift in the balance of military power in Asia has been breathtaking. Beijing has taken less than half the time to modernise its military to world-class status than Japan took during the Meiji Restoration from 1868 to 1912. All available evidence indicates that Xi’s China is pursuing a long-term strategy Asia designed to break apart the US’s alliance system and drive America out of the region. Since Asia is now the centre of world economic power, accounting for 40 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), it is the region where America’s most important geopolitical and economic interests lie. The US cannot prosper as a global power in an Asia that falls under Chinese supremacy. Accordingly, for both Republican and Democrat administrations, resisting Beijing’s attempt to achieve regional supremacy has become the overarching objective of US grand strategy in the twenty-first century.

There have been innumerable studies of American strategy in recent years, but none have been as cold-blooded and forensic as that penned by Elbridge Colby in The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (2021). Colby, a former senior intelligence officer — and grandson of William Colby, Director of the CIA under presidents Nixon and Ford — served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Strategy and Force Planning in the Trump administration in 2017-18. As the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, Colby was responsible for driving a stake through the heart of the 9/11 “forever wars”. The 2018 National Defense Strategy elevated great power competition with China, military modernisation and deterrence, to renewed prominence in US statecraft and set a direction for policies pursued by the Biden administration.

The Strategy of Denial, published three years after Colby left government service, is a quest to find a “middle way” for American strategy between grandiose post-Cold War ambitions and the end of unipolar dominance. Its pages reflect an important shift in American defence thinking away from strategies of offence based on unipolar power towards “defence by denial” strategies that are optimised to deal with the challenge of managing great power competition in Asia. Over the past decade, a plethora of American defensive strategies have emerged under such names as “mutual denial”, “defensive defense” and “active denial” for waging a long-term geopolitical competition with Beijing. While these strategies have areas of commonality, they often differ in emphasis, detail and prescription. The importance of Colby’s book is that he brings synthesis and clarity to the meaning of a strategy of denial while also providing military logic to underpin its precepts.

At the heart of The Strategy of Denial is a ruthless analysis about military power and the manner in which it can be employed. Colby explains to readers the purpose of his work:

This is a book about war: what it would look like and how to wage it to prevail. Its unabashed aim is to give the United States and those who ally and partner with it a strategy for doing just that.

America’s enemy in the war Colby envisages is a revanchist, ambitious and authoritarian China. Preventing China’s regional hegemony in Asia is the most important strategic objective of the United States and requires strict priority in US defence planning.

The policy framework that unfolds in The Strategy of Denial is a reaction to the lost gamble on China’s “peaceful rise” by a generation of American policy-makers. From Clinton through Bush to Obama, there was a policy orthodoxy in Washington that China could be coaxed and wooed by diplomacy and economics into being a “responsible stakeholder” in an American-dominated world order. This orthodoxy alongside the parallel illusion of maintaining a “geography of the peace” based on an enduring regional balance of power—with China dominating continental Asia and America supreme in maritime Asia—have been shattered by Xi Jinping’s revisionist strategic ambitions from Hong Kong through Taiwan and the South China Sea and into the South Pacific.

America as Asia’s external cornerstone balancer

Central to Colby’s study is his conviction that Beijing is pursuing a “focused and sequential strategy” to change the balance of power in Asia in its favour. The US response to this challenge must be to realign its statecraft around the cardinal strategic aim of constructing and leading an “anti-hegemonic” Asian coalition that can deter, and if necessary, prevail in any test of arms with China. Such a strategy must be clear-eyed about the weaknesses and strengths of America and its Asian allies and partners.

Colby is admirably frank in stating that, alongside the loss of its unipolar military superiority over China, the Achilles heel of US strategy in the Indo-Pacific arena is the reality of geography. Put simply: China is in Asia; continental America is not. Because the US is not physically located in Asia, the regional stakes for Washington, while high indeed, are not existential. Colby recognises the long memory of American retreat from South Vietnam in 1975, while the Middle East and South Asian conflicts between 2001 and 2021—especially the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan—sapped Washington’s reputation in Asia for reliability. Like Britain before it, America has a default option: it can always execute an “East of Suez” moment and retreat from Asia. Even if such a “stoop to conquer” disengagement signalled the end of the US’s global dominance, the American polity would endure and continue to remain supreme in its own hemisphere.

Colby faces squarely the dogged issue of American long-term credibility in Asia that stalks the corridors of the region’s capitals. Australian observers such as Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell have highlighted the region’s “China choice” and Australia’s “fear of abandonment” respectively. The Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani has gone further, wondering in a 2020 study whether the Sino-American struggle is not already over and that “China has won” in the minds of many Asians. To remedy a regional sense of unease about an American “East of Suez” moment, Colby argues that any anti-hegemonic coalition against China must possess a strong American centre of gravity that demonstrates Washington’s staying power. He calls for the application of what he describes as “differentiated credibility”. This concept is explained as the degree to which important actors in the Asian region are convinced an American-led coalition against China’s “focused and sequential strategy” can prevail in any test of Sino-American arms should a “systemic regional war” break out in the Indo-Pacific.

In pursuing differentiated credibility with allies and partners, Washington must win the confidence of potential member states that the benefits of joining an anti-Beijing coalition are worthwhile. Colby writes:

if the United States, under the shadow of China’s focused and sequential strategy, were to balk at defending a state in Asia to which it had provided a security commitment against Beijing, this decision would have profound consequences not only for other allies in the region but for the anti-hegemonic coalition as a whole. It would provide direct evidence of America’s unwillingness to defend a confederate in the Western Pacific under the darkening shadow of Chinese military power—evidence that could not but be pointedly relevant to governments in Seoul, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and even Canberra, Tokyo and New Delhi.

Acknowledging the complexity of Indo-Pacific geopolitics and the diversity of the region, Colby is careful to reject the idea of a zero-sum game between deterrence of, and deference to, China. For states as varied as Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, relations with China are likely to reflect a different array of factors of geographical proximity and economic calculation. Each Asian state is likely to engage in different policies, value propositions and risk assessments in strategic relations with China. By way of example, Colby compares Australia with Vietnam, noting, “simply because of distance, Australia is far less vulnerable to Chinese military attack than, for instance, Vietnam. Even if both states have the same level of resolve to protect their independence, Australia’s risks in doing so are less severe than Vietnam’s.”

Since there is no Asian version of a NATO to facilitate a common regional security architecture, any pro-American anti-hegemonic group of nations is likely to be a “coalition of the willing” rather than an expanded alliance. In seeking to enlist the support of countries such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam—all of whom have strong traditions of diplomatic non-alignment—the US must accept that the choice for Asian states in strategic relations with China is not a binary one of “balance and deter” or “bandwagon and defer”. Rather, strategic choice for many states is situation-specific and occurs across a spectrum of statecraft in a vast region more suited to informal coalitions than the formal alliance statecraft associated with NATO Europe. In turn, Asia’s very diversity conditions the application of America’s differentiated credibility. The latter will be calibrated in Washington by estimates in the Pentagon of an Asian state’s willingness to spend on self-defence and to demonstrate national resolve in resisting China’s drive for regional supremacy. Here Colby issues an important corollary to his pledge of American differentiated credibility: “The less allies do,” he writes, “the more they will test not only the resilience of America’s commitment to denying China hegemony over Asia but its ability to do so.”

The vehicle for Washington’s pledge of differentiated credibility for its allies and partners in Asia is for America to serve as the region’s “external cornerstone balancer” against Chinese predation. On this vital point, it is important to note that Colby’s concept of America as a cornerstone balancer in Asia differs from the older idea of the United States acting as an “offshore balancer”, a view propounded by policy scholars such as Stephen Walt, John J. Mearsheimer and Christopher Layne. Offshore balancers are, in Colby’s view, overly focused on allied burden shifting, local balancing and American retrenchment at the expense of neglecting the power dynamics of coalition building. In contrast, he writes, “I emphasize the critical and active—not ‘offshore,’ which heavily connotes aloofness—role of the cornerstone balancer in forming, sustaining, and protecting the anti-hegemonic coalition.”

In expounding the notion of cornerstone balancing, Colby is careful to explain that American aims in Asia remain limited to upholding the current regional status quo. There is no messianic desire in American statecraft to try to overthrow the Chinese state by regime change. On the contrary, the strategic aim of any anti-hegemonic coalition must be narrowly premised on mustering the military capability necessary to deny Beijing any territorial objectives that it may be tempted to try to seize from its neighbours.

A defensive perimeter

Emphasising differentiated credibility and upholding America’s role as cornerstone balancer in the Indo-Pacific do not, however, nullify the geographic reality of distance facing Washington. Colby concedes that China’s local geographical position in Asia allows Beijing to pursue its “focused and sequential strategy” to intimidate, seduce or neutralise pro-American states. Such a salami-slicing strategy has great appeal to Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party since it simultaneously denies America the opportunity to build an anti-hegemonic coalition while avoiding a shooting war in the Indo-Pacific.

To prevent Chinese supremacy, it is necessary for the US to define and uphold a defensive perimeter for an anti-hegemonic coalition in maritime Asia. US alliances and quasi-alliances in Asia are all with island states and one peninsula, South Korea. This security architecture provides a baseline for a defensive perimeter that extends from Japan and Taiwan in East Asia through the Philippines and South-East Asia to Australia and the small island states of the South-West Pacific. It is predominantly a maritime perimeter.

Two of America’s major allies, Japan and Australia, serve as the perimeter’s northern and southern strategic anchors respectively. Given its proximity to China, Japan is “the linchpin of the American defensive position in Asia”. Australia, meanwhile, presents itself as a classic test case for American differentiated credibility in Asia. The island continent sits alongside the archipelagic states of the South and Central Pacific that form “a second island cloud” for American force projection, strategic depth and resilience. Colby notes that while Australia is far away from China, it is a long-standing and capable US ally deserving of support. He asks rhetorically, “If the United States cannot effectively defend Australia, what hope do China’s closer neigbors have for effective US aid?”

If Japan and Australia serve as a coalition perimeter’s northern and southern guardian states, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan are vital to the first island-chain that forms a critical military boundary for China. Any anti-hegemonic coalition without the Philippines and Taiwan would open a major gap in the first island chain, allowing China to project its naval power into the broader Pacific and South-East Asia. Moreover, the geography of South-East Asia from Vietnam and Thailand through Indonesia, and Malaysia to Singapore and Myanmar, traces the first island chain and helps confine Chinese power projection to the South China Sea.

These geographical realities mean that the first island chain states and parts of South-East Asia around the South China Sea are likely to be “the locus of strategic competition between the US-led anti-hegemonic coalition on one side and China and its pro-hegemonic affiliates on the other”. It is in South-East Asia where “the rubber meets the road” for the US and its allies. With the possible exception of Singapore, South-East Asia remains vulnerable as “contested space” between the US and the PRC. Countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam remain aloof from Washington, with Thailand, an American ally, being unreliable as a “significant swing state” when it comes to relations with Beijing.

Having outlined America’s strategic stakes in the defence of maritime Asia, Colby moves on to consider what is required for a realistic military strategy. A key assumption of The Strategy of Denial is that any war in Asia between nuclear-armed powers such as the US and China will be a limited conflict. It will be waged by two rational actors who, while seeking major strategic advantages, understand the principles of proportionality and limitation to prevent any armed conflict from escalating into existential nuclear destruction. Channelling the work of earlier American strategic theorists such as Robert Osgood, Bernard Brodie and Henry Kissinger on limited war, Colby suggests, “it would be utterly irrational and foolish to adopt an unrestrained approach to fighting China over stakes short of America’s national survival because doing so would invite damage well beyond what the stakes were worth”.

Colby’s assumption that any major armed conflict in the Indo-Pacific will take the form of a limited war has the advantage of ruling out ambitious American strategies of preventive war involving regime change in China. As long as the US refrains from strategies that seek China’s national destruction or the collapse of the Chinese communist system, the incentives to avoid nuclear war on both sides will be strong. The anti-hegemonic coalition must be able to frame and fight a limited war against China over interests that are systemically important but not existential. Military escalation must be controlled to avoid unforeseen risks and consequences on both sides. “A battle of knife cuts and ultimately sharp and deep stabs” must not be allowed to descend into swordplay to the death.

The Taiwan test: Fait accompli and China’s theory of victory

Because the envisaged anti-hegemonic coalition of the US, Japan, Australia and possibly India would, in aggregate terms, be more powerful than China, Beijing’s best strategic options are to systematically isolate and subordinate pro-American states. The Chinese aim will be to render America’s differentiated credibility and its role as a cornerstone balancer hollow. Taiwan looms as the test case of American resolve to fight for its allies and partners in Asia. Colby quotes Ralph Cossa, the former President of the Washington-based Centre for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) Pacific Forum, on the vital importance of Taiwan to America’s credibility in Asia:

Based on hundreds, if not thousands, of discussions with Korean, Japanese and other Asian officials and security specialists, I am convinced that the credibility of US alliances in Asia and elsewhere hinges upon the credibility of the de facto US defence commitment to Taiwan … US allies are comfortable with a degree of strategic ambiguity, especially since they don’t want to publicly commit to lining up against China, but look to Taiwan as the proof in the pudding/canary in the coal mine. If the US failed to honour this, allies would lose faith, seek independent nuclear capability or accommodation with Beijing.

Taiwan is particularly vulnerable as a forward outpost of the American defensive perimeter in Asia. If Taiwan falls to China, then the states of South-East Asia are the next logical targets beginning with the Philippines or Vietnam. If all South-East Asia can be suborned by Beijing, a pro-China hegemonic grouping might emerge that is powerful enough to defeat any quadrilateral coalition of the US, India, Japan and Australia. A China dominating South-East Asia’s enormous economy would be a geostrategic disaster for the United States, since the region would provide a springboard for Beijing to project power into Central Asia, the Middle East and even the Western Hemisphere.

In seeking subordination of its neighbouring states, Colby believes Beijing has two options: a punishment approach (using coercion or limited violence to impose costs until capitulation occurs) or a conquest approach (employing brute force to impose its will). Of these two approaches, Colby is convinced a conquest approach using a swift, fait accompli strategy represents China’s preferred “theory of victory”. This is because a fait accompli attack exploits the gap between any coalition’s latent power and how much that coalition is willing to dedicate to contest an attack on Taiwan. If China is able to launch a fait accompli strategy successfully against Taiwan, or other vulnerable states such as Philippines and Vietnam, American credibility in Asia would be shattered. Moreover, India’s power and prestige in Asia would be diminished by these geopolitical reverses while Japan and Australia would fall prey to long-term strategic isolation at the hands of Beijing.

Denial defence and binding strategy

To prevent such an epoch-changing shift in the Asian balance of power, Colby devotes a chapter to military strategy. He argues that the best strategy for America is not an unaffordable quest to restore 1990s-era military dominance over China. Despite the high quality of its military forces, the US needs to avoid pursuing a strategy of compellence against China that risks escalation and stretches its resources. The best strategy for Washington is a denial defence of its interests, allies and partners in Asia using sufficient forces to make it prohibitively difficult for an opponent to achieve a military objective.

A denial strategy by the United States makes China, the revisionist power, assume responsibility for beginning any war of aggression in Asia before the altar of world opinion. A denial defence also meets China’s “focused and sequenced strategy” on its own strategic terms by seeking to blunt Beijing’s direct military operations against a vulnerable state. The aim of denial is to defeat local aggression, not to subjugate an adversary. In this sense, the strategy of denial invites China to assume the burden of the offensive—to risk becoming Athens at Syracuse, Germany in the Battle of Britain and Argentina in the Falklands—by running the gauntlet against a strong local defence.

A perfect strategy based on offensive supremacy must not be allowed to become the enemy of a good defensive strategy that upholds a status quo that favours Washington and its supporters. As Colby puts it, “a denial standard is highly compatible with an effective coalition approach to limited war”. If an offensive fait accompli Chinese strategy is denied, Beijing must then confront the uncomfortable issue of escalating hostilities or be forced to accept local defeat and fall back towards a strategy of coercion. If China chooses to escalate offensive military operations, then it would risk the perils of a protracted conventional conflict and the possibility of escalation to a nuclear exchange with no winners.

In an age of long-range missiles, precision munitions and distributed kill chains, a US-led denial defence favours the archipelagic geography of maritime Asia against fait accompli attacks. Of all America’s potential coalition partners, only Vietnam is truly vulnerable to a Chinese land invasion. The ultimate aim, then, of a strategy of denial is an “inside-out approach” to turn China’s own anti-access and area denial strategy against America around. “Just as Beijing has sought to deny US forces the ability to operate inside the first island chain,” writes Colby, “so the United States, Taiwan, and other allies should seek to be able to deny Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) ability to operate in the Taiwan Strait.” In terms of operations, the logic of a strategy of denial falls on a spectrum of armed conflict with three options ranging from direct denial of any attack; a recovery operation employing defence-in-depth; and a military reconquest of lost territory by air and amphibious assault.

A major advantage of a direct denial defence against China in the Taiwan Strait is that operations can be limited to inflicting local, not total, defeat against engaged forces. Yet a strategy of denial need not be entirely passive. A denial strategy can embrace a countervailing “frame shift” that combines defensive action with a tailored and limited counter-offensive. The latter might involve the application of selective and conditional cost imposition on Beijing’s forces and some of its coastal facilities in a struggle over Taiwan. At its most effective, a strategy of denial requires the integration of direct military denial with limited cost imposition to try to keep any Asian war below the nuclear threshold. Properly applied and waged according to the rules of limited war, a denial defence may be the most effective way of inducing China to accept local defeat and agree to terminate any war. Colby accepts that grave risk and escalation will accompany any military scenario, but he does not flinch from outlining the denial requirements for waging a limited war in Asia.

An American strategy of denial might prove difficult to apply in defending Taiwan, the Philippines or Vietnam. As Colby concedes, denial might fail since it requires the US, Taiwan, Japan and Australia to “promptly and resolutely adapt their strategies and forces to meet the requirements of a denial strategy”. Yet, even if allied or coalition forces become sufficiently integrated to prosecute a denial strategy for Taiwan and the Philippines, they may suffer heavy casualties at Chinese hands and decide to recoil from the risks of an expanding systemic regional war. A fait accompli attack by Beijing exploiting the weight and velocity of China’s local military superiority might simply be too much to contain. The PLA, covered by a bristling missile shield and fighting from proximity, might simply “punch through” any defensive coalition forces arrayed from far-flung nations.

If a denial strategy fails and a Ukrainian-style defence-in-depth proves inadequate, then a recapture approach by the coalition to liberate Taiwan or Luzon by air and amphibious assault might need to be undertaken. Here American alliance partners would “form the steel skeleton” of an amphibious counter-offensive aimed at recapture of allied territory in what Colby describes as “an extraordinarily ugly fight”. Such a transition to a counter-offensive is the ultimate test of American differentiated credibility. A counter-offensive risks rapid escalation to all-out war and the likelihood of Chinese missile strikes on the American homeland. As Colby notes, a successful denial defence that prevents the initial seizure of local objectives by China is far preferable to ugly reconquest scenarios that conjure up memories of Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

Colby’s analysis of the perils of all-out war between China and America serves to highlight the challenges faced by Washington in fighting in Asia. His assessment illuminates “the central quandary facing the United States in seeking to deny China hegemony over Asia: American interests are significant but not necessarily of the highest order”. Any American willingness to defend distant allies in Asia is likely to be measured against the level of resolve by Asian states to see China as a common threat and to unite their strategic efforts in what Colby designates as a “binding strategy”. A collective or binding strategy is the corollary to an effective strategy of denial, and serves to signal that any Chinese attack on Taiwan or the Philippines will precipitate a systemic regional war.

Colby explains the linkage between denial and binding:

a denial defence is the use of American and other power to stop China from seizing and holding allied territory; the binding strategy is a deliberate effort to compel China to have to behave in ways that catalyze US, allied, and partner resolve if it pursues its hegemonic ambitions.

Ideally, for both the denial and binding strategies to become effective to defend Taiwan and the Philippines, Asian states must be willing to embrace an “integrated denial defense-cum binding strategy” that can manifest into an anti-China coalition. Here the aim for a US-led coalition is to create a “boa constrictor effect” on the PRC—the more Beijing seeks to escalate its way out of a military quandary, the more it will widen and strengthen its circle of opponents.

Colby’s binding strategy has strong echoes of the debates in NATO Europe in the 1970s and 1980s over conventional defence and graduated escalation to offset the geographical advantages and massed forces of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Colby believes that India, as an emerging Asian great power, must eventually agree to bind with America and become a “critical member” of any future anti-hegemonic coalition. India could burden-share by policing the Indian Ocean and South Asia to balance China while the US, Japan and Australia concentrate on defending the Western Pacific and South China Sea. Yet it is the very absence of an Asian-style NATO that makes a binding, or collective strategy, with countries like India so problematic in the future. As Colby concedes, the US and its allies and partners in the Western Pacific are more likely to “intertwine” than integrate their different defence postures. Only time will tell whether an intertwined Asian military coalition can emerge with enough combined strength and resilience to meet the challenge posed by the PLA.

Japan and Australia in the strategy of denial

Ultimately, a binding strategy involving military integration remains better suited to formal “hub-and-spoke” treaty allies such as Japan and Australia. Colby has military prescriptions for both countries to contemplate. Japan must release its “enormous unrealized military potential” by becoming fully integrated with the US in its strategic posture to protect Taiwan, South Korea and South-East Asia. For its part, Australia must embrace a forward defence in the Western Pacific in support of an anti-hegemonic coalition against Beijing.

This strategic posture is vital for Canberra “because, though it [Australia] is distant from Taiwan and the Philippines, its fate is likely to be decided in the Western Pacific”. For a maritime state such as Australia dependent on sea communications, defeat can come about from distance. If China succeeds in dominating South-East Asia, the US will face a replay of the war with Japan from 1942 to 1945 to defend Australia. Colby concludes, “Australia thus has a strong interest in ensuring that the anti-hegemonic coalition checks China’s focused and sequential strategy well before it reaches Australia’s shores.” Since Colby’s book was published, only America’s closest allies in Asia, Japan and Australia have shown any willingness to “bind by integration” by adopting variations of a strategy of denial, and even these are not yet fully refined.

Colby ends his study by noting that Americans are willing to take risks for their allies and partners in Asia in pursuit of the common goals of security, freedom and prosperity. Yet there can be no American unlimited liability involved. Asian states who hesitate to invest in realistic collective defence and who refuse to engage in burden-sharing will only test America’s resilience and sap its public will:

Americans [might] begin to ask themselves—not unjustly—whether the effort [in Asia] is worth the costs and risks if people in the region itself do not fear Chinese dominance enough to strive to counteract it. If the nations Americans are preparing to defend at such great risk can survive Chinese hegemony over their region, this might be seen to lend strength to the argument that perhaps Americans can too.

If the United States is unable to craft Colby’s “middle way” strategy of denial between its loss of unipolar military dominance and the arrival of China as a peer military power, then Asia will face two perilous and unpalatable strategic options in the future. The first strategic option will be for the region to accept Chinese regional hegemony and the consequent loss of sovereignty and democratic freedom that will ensue. The second strategic option will be for the United States, as a last resort, to try to secure the region by permitting the spread of nuclear weapons to its allies:

Selective nuclear proliferation to such states as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even Taiwan might help bridge the gap between regional conventional defeat and US willingness to employ its nuclear forces, especially at scale.

Defence and deterrence in American strategy for Asia

The Strategy of Denial has been widely praised in the United States as one of the most important books of American military strategy so far published in the twenty-first century. Despite the outbreak of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, Colby’s laser-like focus on China and Asia has been influential in both American and allied circles. In 2022, the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy of the United States of America embraced integrated deterrence as the centrepiece of its defence strategy, articulating three logics: denial, resilience and cost imposition—all of which feature in The Strategy of Denial. Similarly, in 2023, in its National Defence: Defence Strategic Review, Australia formally adopted a strategy of denial as the central pillar of its defence strategy.

Yet The Strategy of Denial has not been without its critics. Perhaps the most thoughtful critique has come from the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in a 2023 report titled Active Denial: A Roadmap to a More Effective, Stabilizing, and Sustainable Defense Strategy in Asia. The report, by ten authors, includes contributions by noted Asia specialists such as Eric Heginbotham, Mike Mochizuki and Michael D. Swaine. While agreeing with the need to craft a defensive strategy in Asia, the authors of Active Denial believe Colby’s work is flawed due to his over-reliance on Cold War nuclear strategists and their distinction between “deterrence by punishment” (general penalties imposed on an attacker) and “deterrence by denial” (deterring or defeating an attacker’s specific action).

The Quincy critics suggest that Colby’s idea of denial strategy resembles what they call a “control theory of conventional deterrence” because it continues to link denial to punishment. This strategic approach risks escalation to all-out war because, in a defence of Taiwan, it implies the use of punitive counterattacks on China’s coastal mainland where the PLA’s dual-use conventional-nuclear missile arsenal is located. Yet, the Quincy report ignores Colby’s careful focus on the dynamics and rules of limited war which by definition seek to control escalation to avoid a general war. On close reading, Colby’s work, while concentrating on defending Taiwan and key states in South-East Asia, does not hinge on deterrence theory. Rather, The Strategy of Denial is concerned with the requirements for waging and winning a limited military conflict in Asia by employing a denial defence primarily as a warfighting strategy.

Deterrence is nearly always conceived by military strategists as an outcome of credible warfighting capability, and never as a starting point. Furthermore, deterrence is situational rather than general in character and depends on the balance of forces arrayed in a contested area. In Asia, the aim of American military power is discriminate and limited; it is aimed at being strong enough to defeat any local attacks by China on vulnerable states such as Taiwan or the Philippines. As Colby writes, a credible strategy of denial “makes deterrence of war in the first place, though by no means easy, more feasible”.

If a strong military posture for America and its allies and partners yields deterrence, then, so much the better, but at all times the armed forces must be structured and trained to fight and prevail in the test of arms. Herein lies a key lesson for Australia from The Strategy of Denial. Despite the 2023 Defence Strategic Review declaring the Australian Defence Force to be “not fit for purpose”, Australian defence thinking is distorted by being focused on “deterrence by denial” as a starting point, as opposed to an outcome, of strategy. Australian needs to prepare to engage in limited war strategy with a credible arsenal that allows it to fight in a “steel skeleton” alliance or coalition in the Indo-Pacific. Peace and security, Colby reminds us, do not come from the kind of rhetorical flourishes, unfocused readiness and inadequate armaments that plague Australia’s approach to national defence. Rather, peace and security come from well-equipped military establishments that maintain a warlike temperament and from political leaders and strategists who understand the seriousness of statecraft and remain alert to the ever-present possibility of armed conflict.

Conclusion

With its clarity and innovative concepts of differentiated credibility, cornerstone balancing and its intellectual reinvigoration of the theory of limited war, The Strategy of Denial deserves the widest possible readership by specialist and citizen alike. It is an icy study about how to fight a war in the Indo-Pacific and how the US and its allies and partners might succeed in denying China a quick military victory to change the balance of power. To adapt the Special Air Service’s famous motto, Colby’s message is one of “Who Denies Wins”. The book’s importance lies in its author’s frank willingness to discuss the dynamics of military power within a realistic strategic framework for an American-led coalition of Asian powers to uphold a rules-based regional order. At a deeper level still, The Strategy of Denial is also a stark reminder of the fragility of Asia as a region where an immature security architecture exacerbates great power competition. There are few crisis-management mechanisms, confidence-building measures or arms control protocols that can serve to keep US-China strategic relations on an even keel.

Although it is fashionable to speak of Vladimir Putin’s penchant for nuclear sabre-rattling over Ukraine in Europe, it is in the Indo-Pacific with its systemic security weaknesses where we are most likely to see nuclear weapons employed in future years. A nuclear war in Asia is a chilling prospect but one which we must be prepared to contemplate. It is fitting that Colby’s study cites Carl von Clausewitz’s celebrated warning from his 1832 masterpiece, On War:

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish the kind of war they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

The pages of The Strategy of Denial follow the advice of the Prussian sage by seeking to explain the character, course and consequences of a potential limited war involving the United States and China in Asia. While it will always be preferable to avoid, or deter, the catastrophe of great power conflict in the Indo-Pacific, a readiness to peer into the abyss of war remains essential. With an unflinching and expert eye, Elbridge Colby performs the task outlined by Paul in the New Testament: to ensure that he who blows the trumpet give a certain, not an uncertain, sound when summoning all those who must prepare for battle.

The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict
by Elbridge A. Colby
Yale University Press, 2021, 384 pages, US$22

Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence College and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Deakin University, Victoria.