Storm Warnings in the West Pacific
Only robust deterrence from Washington can thwart China’s designs in the South China Sea.
The tiny Pacific island of Guam sits just off the lip of the Mariana Trench, a fissure in the sea bed that plunges to the hadal depth of 36,000 feet (around 10,973 metres)—deeper than any other part of the world’s oceans. Guam also lies on the eastern edge of the modern world’s most perilous geopolitical zone, where unstable nuclear powers and multiple flashpoints could soon cause the entire region to fall into the abyss of war.
Guam is at once a paradise of palm-fringed shorelines and the foreboding site of three US military bases. It is a crucial link in the “second island chain” that stretches from Japan down to Western New Guinea (one of three such chains representing an old Cold War strategy to contain China). Most significantly, Guam sits just 1,700 miles (2,736 km) from Taiwan. Should the Chinese Communist Party decide to invade, this island would play a critical role.
That makes Guam a target. American war games assume as much, which is why they simulate pre-emptive Chinese attacks on the island. Beijing’s DF-26 ballistic missile has even been dubbed the “Guam Killer.” With a range of 5,000 kilometres, it could easily make the long journey from China’s desert silos to the archipelagos of the northwest Pacific, where Guam is nestled. It would devastate American forces and so begin the most consequential war the world has yet seen.
Aaron Sarin
Since the pandemic, the US Marine Corps has been steadily increasing its presence on the island. Indo-Pacific Command spent years requesting congressional funding for Guam’s runway repair capabilities, missile defence, and command-and-control centre facilities. By last year, Congress was budgeting US$3.2 billion for military projects and construction spending on Guam. This included US$545 million for the missile defence system—US$147 million more than requested.
Nevertheless, as has so often been the case throughout its 250-year history, the United States is moving at a glacial pace. The ship of state is slow to turn, someone once said, and they probably had Washington in mind. The Pentagon’s joint program office for Guam’s missile defence is now waiting for funds to be “reprogrammed” from elsewhere in the budget. A planned command centre will not be ready until the end of 2025. The island is still too vulnerable and at just the wrong moment.
We are living through Beijing’s only realistic window of opportunity to take Taiwan. By the 2030s, the temporary lull in American military power will have been corrected, and China’s economic and demographic challenges will have become so enormous and complex that the CCP will be unable to look anywhere but inward. Xi Jinping knows his time is running out. We can therefore hardly overstate the importance of strong deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
Enter Australia. Washington appears to have realised that it needs a much larger presence in the region, and the second island chain is the best place—potentially too far for the Guam Killer, but close enough to allow for the rapid defence of Taiwan should the need arise. And so Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) is now home to a growing roster of US marines, warships, and nuclear bombers. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of facilities are being constructed for aircraft, hinting at the NT’s long-term role in Washington’s plans.
“Look at the concentric circles emanating from Darwin,” says Michael McCaul, chair of the US House of Representatives’ foreign-affairs committee. “That is the base of operations, and the rotating [US] forces there are providing the projection of power and force that we’re seeing in the region.” This goes part of the way to solving an old problem that Donald Trump once identified in characteristic terms: “Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”
It’s not just Taiwan that will benefit from this new American presence. The CCP has long laid claim to the entirety of the South China Sea, using its notorious “nine dash line” concept to assert sovereignty over both land and sea all the way up to Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Philippine shores. (The late Japanese statesman Abe Shinzo would sardonically refer to the South China Sea as “Lake Beijing.”) On contested islands like Pag-asa, the Filipino residents are permanently surrounded by Chinese militia vessels stationed just off the coast, their lights beaming through the night—an ominous silent siege. Tensions have simmered throughout the region for years, and those concerning one particular shoal have recently begun bubbling over.
The Second Thomas Shoal is located in a part of the sea rather fittingly named Dangerous Ground (a label originally applied due to the large number of sunken reefs and atolls awash). In 1999, Manila made a creative bid for ownership by deliberately beaching an old World War II ship named the Sierra Madre on the shoal. The ship was marooned, manned by a small group of soldiers, and left rusting in the sun for a quarter of a century. Boats would come and go at intervals to stock up supplies.
In 2016, an international tribunal at the Hague ruled that the Philippines had exclusive economic rights in the area, a ruling that Beijing simply ignored. In the years since, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has continually harassed the resupply missions. Filipino crews have been blasted with water cannon and dazzled with military-grade lasers. Their boats have been punctured with knives and rammed by PLAN vessels as they approach the Sierra Madre (causing hull damage and the loss of one sailor’s thumb, but no fatalities to date). In an operation that seemed like a surreal return to the maritime warfare of the ancient world, PLAN servicemen armed with machetes and axes and what Manila’s military chief of staff described as “bladed weapons and spears” even tried to block a Philippine delivery.
“If not only a serviceman but even a Filipino citizen is killed by a wilful act,” says Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr., “that is very close to what we define as an act of war.” And the Philippines would not be fighting alone, as US president Joe Biden has confirmed: “Any attack on the Filipino aircraft, vessels, or armed forces will invoke our Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines.” But this is already grey-zone warfare, and the strain has prompted Manila to recall its ships from other parts of the South China Sea. The BRP Teresa Magbanua was recalled from Sabina Shoal last week, after Chinese harassment of resupply missions left the Filipino crew relying on rainwater to drink for more than a month, their water desalinator having broken down.
The potential for catastrophe is alarmingly high, making an American arsenal in the region all the more vital. Earlier this year, the US brought a Typhon missile system to the Philippine island of Luzon, which lies within striking distance of China. This was ostensibly for the purpose of joint US-Philippine exercises, but it now turns out there are no plans to recall the system. Typhon will sit there as a deterrent; part of the first line of defence along with the nearby Japanese island of Okinawa (itself home to thirteen US military bases). “We want to give [China] sleepless nights,” says one senior government official.
Further out, Guam bolsters the second line, together with that new American presence in the NT. Northern Australia sits just beneath what is now the most volatile region in the world—the West Pacific. We hear the term “Indo-Pacific” a great deal these days (it was Abe Shinzo, again, who coined the term), but this is too broad a definition to be of much use. The pivotal zone is narrower: a vertical corridor stretching south from the Korean peninsula to Northern Australia, its east-west axis spanning the 3,000 kilometres from Guam to eastern China.
Within the West Pacific danger zone, there are multiple potential flashpoints: Taiwan, Guam, Okinawa, the South China Sea. And at the region’s northernmost point, of course, is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The Pyongyang government is currently flaunting its nuclear build-up by showcasing uranium-enrichment facilities, in defiance of the UN and its impotent prohibitions. Meanwhile, Pyongyang’s artillery shells and rockets are assisting the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
From the moment of its birth, North Korea has never been anything other than a wildly unpredictable rogue state and a threat to the whole world. At the same time, it has never been free from the leash of a greater power: first the Soviets, then the CCP. Beijing has protected Pyongyang and enabled its monstrous internal human-rights abuses; paradoxically, its patronage has ensured that the rogue state never transforms all that vulgar bluster into warmaking reality. This has been a stable arrangement for decades. It doesn’t look so stable today.
Most analysts thought we were living at the beginning of a “Chinese century,” during which the Middle Kingdom would finally rise to the position of global hegemon. Some feared it, others welcomed it, virtually all assumed it. But things have turned out very differently post-COVID. The Chinese economic data gets grimmer by the month, and while we can’t predict with any certainty where this road leads, we have to consider the possibility that China’s long-term future will be one of economic, societal, and political turmoil. And if North Korea loses its guardian, the dog would be off the leash.
An invasion of Taiwan could produce the same result. Both the American and Chinese militaries will be more fully distracted than at any point in their respective histories, which would give the North Korean regime a green light to finally attack South Korea (let us not forget: the Korean War of 1950–53 never reached a formal peace settlement).
Earlier this year, Kim Jong-un abruptly ended the DPRK’s pursuit of reunification with the South, labelling the latter the “number one hostile state.” The DPRK, he said, needs to “reflect on the issue of completely occupying, suppressing, and reclaiming [South Korea], and incorporating it into the territory of our Republic.” In the opinions of former state department official Robert Carlin and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, this change creates a situation on the peninsula “more dangerous than … at any time since early June 1950,” which, as it happened, was the eve of war.
Nothing is guaranteed. But all eyes should be on the West Pacific, and on Beijing. Massive deterrence is the key. For all Xi Jinping’s emphasis on the pressing importance of taking Taiwan (a “historic mission” that “cannot be passed down from generation to generation”), and for all the leaps and strides made by the Chinese military, the president has still not made his move. Evidently, he has a personality very different to his cavalier counterpart in Moscow. If Xi won’t act until he is absolutely sure of success, then we need to perpetuate his doubts. A huge increase in the presence and rotation of Western military forces in the first and second island chains will keep him second-guessing himself, year after year. The man is seventy, overweight, and a heavy smoker; he isn’t going to live forever, so robust deterrence may be enough to spare Taiwan what currently seems inevitable.
