05/05/2016: The 21st Annual Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture: China’s Rise and the Challenge to East Asian Security with Professor Thomas J. Christensen

Bruce Dickson:
I learned that 15, 20 minutes ago. With that we were expecting to have more people but given the fire in the Metro, people who tried to get here may not be able to get here. It’s been a great season for Metro hasn’t it. There was one fire and one delay after another. My name is Bruce Dixon. I’m director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. This evening’s event is our annual event remembering Gaston Sigur, both his contribution to GW as well as his involvement in US public service. Gaston Sigur received his PhD in history from the University of Michigan. After which he worked for the Asia Foundation in different locales around the world. He came to GW in 1972 both to teach and to direct, what at that time was the Institute for Sino-Soviet Studies. He was in that role for about 10 years when he was chosen by President Ronald Reagan to become the Senior Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council and later became Special Assistant to the President for Asian Affairs.

Bruce Dickson:
He was out of government briefly. Returned to the GW and then went back into government, both as a senior advisor but also Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. While he had that position in the mid ’80s during the Reagan administration, was credited with major achievements in promoting the US Japan relationship as well as having a significant impact on democratization in South Korea. After the 1988 election, when the first Bush administration came into being, President George H. W. Bush appointed him to continue serving as Assistant Secretary of State.

Bruce Dickson:
He finally retired from public service in 1989 and returned to GW. Although 1989, remember at the time the world was changing. What used to be the Sino-Soviet Institute quickly was no longer appropriate, given the change of times. What had been the Sino-Soviet Institute was split into two. One half what is now the Institute for European Russian Eurasian studies, the Soviet half of the Institute. Then the Sigur Center evolved on what had been the Sino half of the Institute. It was originally from the beginning named in honor of Gaston Sigur. The original name was the Gaston Sigur Center for East Asian Studies and was later shortened to simply to the Sigur Center for Asian Studies to be more encompassing, not just an East Asia but South and Southeast Asia as well.

Bruce Dickson:
This event is meant to both memorialize his achievements and his contributions as well as a way of in doing so, having a speaker who had similar profile as Gaston Sigur did in terms of having a bigger role in public service as well as a strong academic background. Before introducing our speaker today, I want to introduce and highlight a few other people who have been a prominent part in the study of Asian studies here at GW. First of all, in the lobby of our center, we have a much larger version of this photograph. Which is with Gaston Sigur meeting in the oval office with President Reagan at that time, Vice President Bush and Secretary of State, George Shultz. We’ve got a much larger version in our lobby, but we want to provide this copy of it to his family. We’re fortunate tonight to have Gaston’s wife, Mrs. Estelle Sigur here, son Paul Sigur. I’d like to share this photo and give it to you for your taking. I also want to recognize Bill Johnson who was the original Associate Director of the Sigur Center. He had been himself a long time professor here at GW and was involved both in the founding of the center and its development in its early years. Bill, thank you for being here. Thank you for your contribution over the years.

Bruce Dickson:
We’re fortunate tonight to have as a speaker, Thomas Christensen. Tom is professor. A William P Boswell professor of Rural politics of Peace and War in Princeton University and also Director of Princeton’s China in the World Program. Also Director of the Masters of Public Policy program and the Truman Scholars program. One of the longest business cards probably you can have. From 2006 to 2008 he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the second Bush administration. With particular responsibility for relations with China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. His most recent book was entitled the China Challenge, Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power, which came out last year. It was an editor’s choice at the New York Times book review. Selected as book of the week on CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria. Tom is a life member of Accounts on Foreign Relations and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Presented in 2002 with a distinguished public service award by the US Department of State. It’s hard to imagine anyone who sort of exhibits the characteristics of Gaston Sigur that we are here to celebrate. So with that, Tom Christensen.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Thanks so much, Bruce for your overly kind introduction. I’m really honored to give this talk here because of the person that it honors. I’m very honored by the presence of the Sigur family. Somebody who made an enormous impact on US foreign policy towards Asia and was a true scholar academic leader. A role model for me in my career, and it’s great to be here in the Harriet Harding auditorium because Harriet Harding was a role model for me as an academic. To see David Shambaugh here, I think he shares that with me, that Harriet was someone who exhibited the way it should be done when you studying US China relations as a scholar. It’s a tremendous honor for me to be here. Before I start, I have to say I still work for the state department as a part time advisor. I have to give a disclaimer because this is being recorded, that all the views are my own and not those of the state department or the U S government. My wife always jokes that anybody who knows your views would know that they don’t represent anybody else’s.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I have to say that. Now it’s done. These are my views. Today what I’m going to talk about is the the regional security environment in Asia, particularly for the United States, its allies and its security partners. which is a large group of nations when you include all of those. How does the rise of China pose challenges for regional stability for all of those actors? I think the real regional security challenge is trying to discourage China, dissuade China from settling its many disputes with its neighbors through coercion and the use of force and thereby destabilizing the region.

Thomas J. Christensen:
That’s very important to the United States and obviously to its regional allies and partners. I think that this challenge is somewhat different than the challenge you’ll read about in the media. The challenge that you’ll read about in punditry circles and sometimes even in academia. What you’ll often read about, is a concerted effort by China to drive the United States out of East Asia entirely, on the one hand, or an effort or a reality where China will become a global challenge or superpower challenger to US leadership around the world and will become a problem for the United States and regions everywhere.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I don’t see either of those challenges as particularly pressing for the next couple of decades. I think that this other challenge is real and present and it’s going to get more intense over the next several years. The reason I say that is I see no persistent evidence that China has as a doctrine or a strategy to drive the United States out of East Asia entirely, in the near term. I don’t see any capabilities that China has, if you do a full net assessment of China’s capabilities that would allow China to become a global challenger to US security interests around the world in the next couple of decades, even if China were so inclined. When you do a net assessment, I can talk about in the Q and A if you like, of military power, economic power, and particularly diplomatic power, where the United States has 60 plus allies and China has North Korea. It doesn’t look like China’s poised to have that kind of global competitive power, even if it were so to choose.

Thomas J. Christensen:
That’s where the good news ends because China doesn’t need to be a peer competitor of the United States to pose a challenge to the U S interests and who in the military sense for deployed U S forces. It is already powerful enough to destabilize East Asia today. That power is only going to grow over the next several years. I think that what the United States and its allies need to do is to dissuade China from using that capacity to try to settle its many disputes with its neighbors in a way that would destabilize this region. That is important, not just to the United States and its regional allies, but the whole world.

Thomas J. Christensen:
The world is highly integrated in a way it’s never been before. When real scholars talk about pre-World Rwanda, Europe, and they said there was a lot of trade interdependence and it didn’t prevent conflict. They’re really exaggerating the analogies to today, because today the world is much more interdependent. So, if East Asia goes in a bad direction, the global economy and the global stakes will be very negatively effected.

Thomas J. Christensen:
What we have in East Asia today is a rising China that you know about from the economic sphere? In the military sphere, it’s rather dramatic as well. China has had a fast growth in its economy since 1978, but it’s had a very fast growth in its military capacity since particularly 1999. It’s a key year in China’s military modernization. What was traditionally a military that was based on two things, a land army that had its dual purpose. I want you to focus on the dual purpose. The protection of the Chinese communist party against domestic and international enemies, right? It’s a party army. It’s not a national army. It’s designed to protect the Chinese communist party against domestic and international enemies. That’s the traditional army and that is supplemented with a relatively rudimentary nuclear deterrent against nuclear powers in the day. By public reports, a couple of dozen liquid fuel, intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach targets like the United States or the former Soviet Union.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Again, according to public reports, with warheads that were separated from those missiles. they would have a long response time as a kind of minimum deterrent against a nuclear attack against the PRC. That’s the traditional military. What’s happened particularly since the late 1990s is China is able to get off shore with military power into the East China sea, in the South China sea in a way that it couldn’t. It has developed these power protection capabilities with its Navy, it’s Air Force, it’s road mobile, accurately tipped ballistic missiles, conventionally tipped ballistic missiles. I’ll talk in a moment about the nuclear tipped missiles.

Thomas J. Christensen:
It continues to modernize its nuclear force and it’s using a solid road mobile missiles now, instead of those liquid fueled ones. Which would have a much shorter response time in a crisis. Therefore provide a much more robust nuclear deterrent against actors who might try to use conventional or nuclear forces to denude China’s nuclear deterrent. China is able to get off shore with these forces, with these Air Forces, with these Navy forces and with the now strategic rocket force, formerly the second artillery to raise costs to superior military forces of the United States in conjunction with its allies.

Thomas J. Christensen:
These are asymmetric capabilities according to China’s own doctrinal writings. Chinese doctrinal writers recognize that the most likely great power adversary that China will face. They don’t use word the United States usually, but it’s pretty clear who they’re talking about, has superior power to the Chinese military. What they’re trying to do is design asymmetric strategies to leverage a weaker military force to achieve political goals against that superior. I say that because a lot of American writings will talk about China closing the gap with the United States overall and maybe keeping the United States from operating at all in the East Asia region under terms like anti-access area denial, which is the Pentagon’s A2/AD phrase. I think some of those phrases exaggerate contemporary Chinese military power in a way that actually provides China more coercive power than it has earned.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Because China’s goal is to make the United States think twice about projecting power to the region by raising costs and by calling it anti access area denial. It kind of implies that China has the capability to physically prevent the United States from projecting power in the region. I don’t think that’s true. The Chinese doctrinal writings don’t portray it that way. They talk about deterring, delaying American intervention and reversing the American decision to intervene if it so chooses, which is consequential enough. I’m not downplaying the importance of those capabilities and doctrines. That’s consequential enough. We don’t need to come up with more dramatic terms to describe it.

Thomas J. Christensen:
The way that China has developed these capabilities is to develop relatively high tech systems in certain areas that pose challenges to the superior US forces. I talked before about accurate conventionally tipped ballistic missiles, road mobile systems, including according to public reports in recent years, the ability to attack moving targets at sea with a ballistic missile. Because the ballistic missile when it reenters the atmosphere is able to do terminal guidance toward a target.

Thomas J. Christensen:
This is important because one of the US advantages around the world is the ability to project Naval aviation power on aircraft carriers to distant places. And if those aircraft carriers are at greater risk, that might give a future U S president pause about putting those carriers in those places to project power. Another capability is submarines. Not quite as high tech, but quite effective. China has imported and reverse engineered various Russian diesel electric submarine technologies that pose challenges to forward deployed US Navy forces. Which again are superior. But now are challenged and the costs of deployment of projecting US power in that region is greater.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Obviously when you’re talking about an ally like Japan, it’s a direct problem for their Navy when China has these submarine capabilities. Those submarines can launch various weapon systems that are quite sophisticated. They can launch submarine launched cruise missiles, some relatively sophisticated ones, especially in recent years. That can pose challenges to forward deployed forces. They have a fairly sophisticated torpedoes and they can lay fairly sophisticated sea mines in a kind of blockade scenario for say a Taiwan conflict that could pose real challenges for what would again otherwise be superior US forces.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Then there are cruise missiles on boats, some fast boats that the Chinese have developed. They can travel in large numbers and those cruise missiles can pose challenges as well. Advanced aircraft, fourth generation aircraft that can again get off the coast into the waters around China and air defenses which I think are underappreciated. China has first imported and then reverse engineered some very sophisticated air defense systems that basically put a kind of umbrella off the Chinese coast and make it more difficult and more costly potentially for advanced air forces to operate in the area around China. Anti-satellite weapons which reduce potentially one of the great advantages of the United States has. Which is what’s called a C4ISR, a fancy term acronym, which basically means the ability to see the battle space and control forces within it from space based assets. If China can attack those lower orbit satellites in a way that denudes that capability, it can reduce US advantages. Cyber attacks, a lot of cyber attacks are talked about in the commercial realm. There are military, imported cyber capabilities that could potentially put at risk US response time.

Thomas J. Christensen:
My colleague James Mulvenna has written about this publicly and he has talked about the fact that while US combat systems are on secure networks that are harder for adversaries to penetrate some of the logistics capabilities of the U S military still rely on unclassified cyber spines that could be attacked in ways that could slow down the US response to a problem. Then there’s the nuclear piece. I want to focus on this for a moment. You’ll see why a little bit later in the talk. China is modernizing its nuclear force to include a larger number of road mobile nuclear tipped, solid fuel missiles that would have shorter response times. They’re supplementing that with submarine based nuclear forces for the first time according to public reports. They will be able to, or they are able to put out to sea nuclear weapons on submarines as a kind of second leg of a dyad, a nuclear dyad.

Thomas J. Christensen:
All of this is a setup for why this force, which is not a pure competitor of the United States poses huge strategic challenges for the United States and its allies. My basic bottom line on this is that in the post cold war era, the United States has become accustomed to dealing with regional conflicts against potential or real adversaries in the following fashion. Putting at risk those target’s ability to put at risk for deployed US forces early on in a conflict. Either as a deterrent or as an actual war fighting strategy to basically take out the capabilities of the other side to hurt US forward deployed forces and raise costs for the United States. That takes the form of taking out air defenses, taking out command and control of adversaries very early on in rather robust attacks. When people say, “Oh, we just need a no fly zone over country X.” If country X is a sophisticated country, that’s a relatively violent operation. Because what you’re doing is you’re taking out all the radar systems and all the air defenses of that country.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Because what you’re doing is you’re taking out all the radar systems and all the air defenses of that country. So there’s going to be a very violent initial set of actions by the United States to set up that no fly zone. So that’s how the United States has gotten used to operating. The problem is that many of the assets that I describe are based on the mainland of China, or are stealthy in the form of submarines, so the temptation would be for a U.S. President or commander to take the fight deep into China early on, to protect the four deployed forces operating out here from potential attack from assets on the mainland. That would make sense from a forced protection point of view, which is the job of a commander and a President is going to be concerned about that as well.

Thomas J. Christensen:
The problem is we’ve never done that type of operation. The United States never has, to a nuclear power. Never taken the fight deep into the homeland of a nuclear power, especially early in a conflict. The idea of doing that, it could be escalatory, and what makes matters worse is that the Chinese conventional course of capability, described in some detail and I did it for a reason, is overlapping in dangerous ways with China’s modernized nuclear force. So that a lot of the conventional course of capacity of China has been built on road mobile, solid fueled, conventionally tipped ballistic missiles, and the new nuclear force is on road mobile, solid fuel, nuclear tipped missiles. Under the same command leadership, the strategic rocket force now, formerly the second artillery. And China has based its naval coercive capability largely on submarines, and now it has introduced nuclear submarines into the mix. Why is this important? If the U.S. carries out its standard relatively offensive way of protecting four deployed forces, it may try to get at early on in the conflict, at the command and control systems in the rocket forces or in the submarine forces.

Thomas J. Christensen:
That might be tempting to do. I’m not saying anything about the U.S. is or isn’t planning to do. I’m just saying it’s logical that the commander might want to take out those forces. The problem with that is, given this overlap a future U.S. President might have to consider whether the Chinese leadership would see such an action as a way of denuding the Chinese nuclear deterrent with potential escalatory implications, because they wouldn’t be able to communicate with the other submarines or a nuclear submarine might be hit in an anti-submarine operation directly, or the command and control for a nuclear force may be compromised when a conventional missile force command and control is compromised. So that makes the problem even more complicated.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Some people take heart in the idea that China has a no first use doctrine for nuclear weapons, so no amount of American conventional strike on the Chinese mainland would ever lead to nuclear escalation because China has a no first use doctrine for nuclear weapons. I’ve done research on Chinese doctrinal writings on nuclear weapons that I found, not from my government work but from scholarly research, that on materials that are not supposed to be read by people outside the Chinese military that have gotten out of China. And it seems like no first use is a serious principle in Chinese doctrinal writings. It’s just something they take very seriously. You wouldn’t dismiss it as a term. If they were to abolish no first use, it would get our attention.

Thomas J. Christensen:
But even in that world, it seems more like a guideline than a rule. There are in the doctrinal writings exceptional circumstances under which Chinese rocketeers at least, they’re not the ones who are going to make the decision, are considering instances in which what they say the threshold of deterrence would be lowered. And that doesn’t give one much confidence that a very robust conventional conflict between the United States and China would necessarily stay at the conventional level. So that’s a concern as well.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Okay. So what does this all mean from a strategic point of view? It means that a China that’s not a peer competitor to the United States has coercive power that American leadership will have to consider, and it makes a strategic environment for the United States, its allies, and strategic partners more difficult than it might appear if you just do a net assessment of the relative military power of the two actors.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And China is a rising nation that’s rubbing up against its neighbors in new ways. And lest I seem like I’m criticizing China directly, and on a cultural level I am not, because when countries rise, they rub up against their neighbors in new ways and the big question will be, are they well equipped or is the situation well structured to encourage that rising power to act in moderate ways as opposed to immoderate ways in handling those new frictions.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So I’m not picking on China, because in 2000 I published an article with my colleague at Columbia University, Richard Betts, in which we said if China handles its rise in its region as badly as the United States handled its rise in its own region in the late 19th century, we’re in really big trouble. Because the United States ended up in totally avoidable war with Spain in the late 19th century, which was followed by a large counterinsurgency war in the Philippines, largely because of domestic politics and jingoism in the United States driving the United States in a bad direction. China has all of that in spades today for reasons related to domestic politics, and one could imagine those types of dynamics playing out in a way that makes China’s ability to respond moderately to the new frictions with its neighbors reduced in probability.

Thomas J. Christensen:
China has unfortunately many points of friction. So if we look around China’s periphery, China has maritime disputes with many of its neighbors. It has what it calls the nine-dash line, which looks something like this on the map. And that claim, which is abstract and vague, it’s not really clear exactly what is included in it. Is it all the waters, is it all the rocks and reefs or all the islands? It’s expansive under any definition, and it overlaps with the claims of other actors.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So if we go around the table, the Philippines now has a rectangular claim around the Philippines that’s consistent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. That’s a relatively new phenomenon. Then you have Malaysia, which has claims that overlap with the Chinese. They come up like this. Vietnam’s claims go way out into the Filipino claims and way into the Chinese claims out at sea. Brunei has a tight little rectangle that sticks out to sea that overlaps with the Chinese claims.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So you have multiple claimants and these claims overlap. And then if you go up to Taiwan, there’s a sovereignty dispute there, of a different sort. It has to do with the sovereign identity of Taiwan as an island and its relations with the mainland, and it takes different forms with different parties in Taiwan. But all Taiwan political parties have a dispute with the sovereign nature of Taiwan, vis-a-vis the mainland that doesn’t agree with the Beijing’s interpretation of that sovereign status with Taiwan. So you have that, and then you have the East China Sea where you have the dispute between Japan and China over what the Chinese call the Diaoyu Islands and what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So you have all these disputes, and these disputes are really important in the following sense. We’re not in a cold war with China. The United States is not in a cold war with China. The Cold War was terrible. So I want to just preface my comments on that. The Cold War was terrible. It was dangerous. I’m glad the United States fought it. I’m glad the United States won. But it was an extremely unpleasant, nasty, and dangerous experience and people like Gaston Sigur are heroes for helping our country survive that experience intact and prevail it.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So I’m not trying to say anything about the nostalgic days of the Cold War, but I am going to say something that might startle you after saying that, and that is that in many ways the course of diplomatic challenges of the United States and its allies in East Asia with a rising China, are more complicated and harder to manage than the Cold War was in many ways, in the following sense.

Thomas J. Christensen:
After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for the rest of the Cold War, for the most part the lines between the two camps, the communist camp and the anticommunist camp, were relatively clear. The geographic lines. People on both sides of those lines knew what aggression would look like, particularly in places like Central Europe. The Warsaw Pact going into West Germany, that was looking at aggression, plain and simple. NATO going into Eastern Europe with conventional forces, that was, there were exceptions like West Berlin and they were important exceptions. It’s not a coincidence that that’s where a lot of the crises where early on.

Thomas J. Christensen:
But in general there were fairly clear lines. Why is that important? We know from human psychology studies, the Nobel prize winning work of Tversky and Kahneman, that the vast majority of human beings, whatever culture they come from, whatever gender they are, whatever generation they were in, tend to pay higher costs and take bigger risks to defend what they believe is legitimate status quo or what is legitimately theirs than they do to get new stuff.

Thomas J. Christensen:
There’s a temptation to get new stuff, but the degree of risk taking and the degree of costs that countries are willing to pay is much, much higher in the same way that it is for individual to defend what you believe is rightfully yours, as opposed to getting new stuff. There’s still that danger of opportunism and trying to get new things. In the cold war this was a stabilizing fact, because we knew where the lines were. We knew what aggression would look like and both sides knew that the other side would be more likely to stand firm protecting what they already had, and that was a stabilizing factor. What we lack in East Asia because of these disputes that I described is exactly that. There is no accepted legitimate status quo in East Asia. I’ve talked to diplomats in the South China sea disputes from every country except Brunei, I’ve never talked to a diplomat from Bernai about this. And I get the very strong impression that all of those diplomats sincerely believe that their claims are legitimate.

Thomas J. Christensen:
That counts the Chinese. So some people say China’s revisionist in the South China sea, is China sees all this new stuff. And I think to myself, I wish that were the case. My fear is that they actually see themselves as securing something they’ve claimed since the 1930s back to the KMT regimes of Chiang Kai Shek in the 47 Republican China consultation. And then it’s actually theirs, and then others have moved in on their territory. And I have talked to the Vietnamese about it, and they say, this nine dash line is outrageous. It runs right down our coast. It was drawn at a time when we were a French colony and had no voice in international politics. So it’s totally unjust. And the Malaysians had their own post-colonial national story, for why they should have a special rights off their own coast, the Filipinos the same way.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And they all have domestic politics that are tied up in these issues that make them even harder for them to back down on. And in that sense, the diplomatic challenge is much greater than it was during the Cold War. And I would say the same thing for the Diaoyu Senkaku dispute. Japanese people really believe the Senkaku islands are theirs. And many, many Chinese people I’ve talked to really believed the Diaoyu islands are Chinese.

Thomas J. Christensen:
That’s not a happy situation. It’d be much better if some of them were lying because it’d be easier to deter them, but they all really believe it. So that worries me. Adding to the problem is domestic political challenges in various countries, but especially since I study China I’ll focus in China, and it’s my strong impression that since the financial crisis of late 2008, that China is in the worst place domestically for the challenges that I just described. And I put it in the following nutshell. I say China is more confident abroad since the financial crisis and more afraid at home at the same time. So the Chinese communist party feels like it has more leverage on the international stage because the United States had lost a lot of prestige and power in the financial crisis.

Thomas J. Christensen:
China weather that storm relatively well economically it was the sole engine of growth within the world for a few years, at least in the early part of the crisis, gained a lot of power and prestige. So the sense is that China doesn’t need to take the slights of its neighbors or the United States like it used to, because we’re stronger now in a hurry.

Thomas J. Christensen:
That has obviously negative implications for a country that has these historic claims that it’s trying to fulfill. And then of course Taiwan as well, which I’d be happy to talk more about. And then at the same time, the financial crisis made the Chinese communist party more concerned about maintaining stability at home, because it called into question some of the sustainability of the economic growth models that were in place and the need to restructure economy faster than they had already known. They needed to restructure the economy on a faster basis to restructure that economy, so as to continue to produce growth and growth being one of the two major pillars of the Chinese communist party regime in this post ’78 period.

Thomas J. Christensen:
One of them being economic performance, the other being nationalism and protection of China’s national honor on the international stage in a postcolonial nationalist narrative that said China’s been bullied since the opium war and China needs to have a greater place on the international stage than it’s had in the past. So that puts a premium on being relatively tough in these maritime disputes, either because China has an opportunity now because it’s stronger to secure territories that it couldn’t secure in the past, or because China has an incentive to react extremely neurologically or emotionally or tough to the provocations of others. And China is not the only actor in this drama. The other disputants take actions to which China reacts. So both things are true. It’s not either or. And that makes the situation even more complicated and more concerning.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I would say on the domestic political front and I think as I said before that I’ve mentioned why the PLA, we need to recognize that the PLA is a party army, not a national army. National security in China is not national security. In Chinese the terms are very ambiguous and the term guójiā which is often seen as nation is really state. It’s state security, it’s party security. And my impression, I’ve been going to China since 1987 almost every year. The only year I wasn’t there was ’89 because I had June 16th plane tickets. But I was there in ’90 to ’91 at Peking university.

Thomas J. Christensen:
The only period in the times that I’ve been going to China where the Chinese government seems more concerned about maintaining domestic stability than now, was the period just after tenement. We exclude that period. China’s government seems more concerned about maintaining domestic stability than any other period. And that’s not a force for stability in this situation. So I would say if you looked at that two by two table China is in the place where it’s more confident abroad and more nervous at home, the place where the United States and its allies and partners would like to see China, is China to more humble abroad and more confident at home for the purpose of this Concourse and Diplomatic Exchange.

Thomas J. Christensen:
This is not a new cold war. The cold war, as I said, was nasty, China’s not an adversary of the United States. It’s a potential adversary, not a real one. If it becomes that, there’ll be a lot of failure in our diplomacy, but it’s a very complicated challenge all the same. Fortunately there were some positive features. I don’t want to make it too grim and too depressing, and one of them is that that regional interdependence. People talk about trade deficits between the United States and China in hamfisted ways, particularly in a political season. They talk about trade in general in a hamfisted way, particularly in a political season, but trade and financial investment in Asia is a major force for peace because products aren’t made in individual country’s anymore. And that’s what’s really different between world war one and the present in terms of interdependence.

Thomas J. Christensen:
You have transnational investment, you have transnational production where parts of products are made all through this region brought to China, assembled, sent back out to the region, sent to Europe, sent to the United States, and things that aren’t so much made in China as they are assembled in China in many cases.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And that’s a major force for peace because if China were to go on a regional rampage in the way that not only Hitler’s Germany did, but that Wilhelm Germany went on before world war one, then China would be really not just shooting itself in the foot economically, it would be shooting itself in the head economically because it would disrupt this incredibly delicate transnational production chain that requires on time delivery of products from multiple places. So it is fragile by its very nature. So that’s a force for peace. There is more institutional infrastructure in Asia than there was in the early post cold war period, when my colleague Aaron Freedberg write his excellent article, right for rivalry. I think the way you put it, if I can quote it directly is, “the rich alphabet soup of institutions in Western Europe, in Asia are a thin gruel indeed”. I think that’s a direct quote. But actually there’s a much more rich alphabet soup now in East Asia that could serve a purpose of confidence building.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I think that a very strong U.S presence in East Asia, a very strong alliance system is a very strong force for stability and peace in the region, but it needs to be accompanied by assurances that the purpose of that presence and those relationships is not to contain China the way we contain the Soviet union. Basically prevent China from gaining any kind of diplomatic power and prestige or economic wherewithal. That would be counterproductive in spades in East Asia and could lead to massive instability if those assurances weren’t accompanying the credibility of American presence. And at the end of the day some kind of credible threat of response if China were to become extremely coercive and aggressive. And I think we’ve been successful in the past on a couple of occasions along these lines, it can be done. There are certain things I don’t like about recent policy. I don’t like a lot of the rhetoric that has been used to describe our policy, which I think is counterproductive.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I mean the Nike sneaker camp that we should just do it. We should have a strong presence. We should have strong alliance relationships and we shouldn’t put fancy labels on it. I don’t like the term the pivot, because the pivots suggests that we’re pulling forces out of other regions and aiming them at China. We should just say we need a strong presence in Asia to stabilize the region. But I do like the details that happened underneath the pivot, bolstering those diplomatic relations. A lot of the military details of the pivot were actually in training before the Obama administration came into office. So it’s an inaccurate description, but whatever you call it, it’s a good idea that we’re bolstering our military presence in East Asia. And I think it’s a good idea that we seize the opportunity of some of China’s more assertive behavior towards its neighbors to strengthen the American military relationships with countries like the Philippines, with Malaysia, and even most recently with Vietnam.

Thomas J. Christensen:
With Malaysia and even most recently with Vietnam. And there are successes in this story where a strong position has been accompanied by assurances in ways that created stability. And one of them was the administration I served, the Bush administration in 2007, 2008 where the United States signaled that use of force against Taiwan was unacceptable. Sold lots of weapons to Taiwan, but at the same time when the Taiwan leadership was pursuing provocative initiatives that seem like efforts to unilaterally change the status quo and cross street relations, the administration criticized first privately and then publicly those initiatives in a way that helped maintain stability. And I think the Obama administration has done a fairly good job of managing a very volatile situation in the East China city with the government reiterating it’s not the first time and it’s not part of the pivot. Reiterating the longstanding US position that unlike the other maritime disputes in which the United States takes no position on sovereignty at the Senkaku is are special in the following sense.

Thomas J. Christensen:
In the case of the Senkaku is the United States takes no position on sovereignty. But it does recognize Japanese administrative control over the islands and therefore the alliance applies to them. This was stated by the secretary of state and then it was very pointedly, and I think appropriately, stated by the president in Tokyo in 2014. And at the same time, according to all public reports, the administration has discouraged Japan from taking provocative actions in and around the islands that would poke Chinese nationals in the eye and lead to a reaction. And I think that’s the right mix. And the situation isn’t totally stable now, but it’s much more stable than it was in the 2012, 2014 period as a result.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So this can be done. It’s not science fiction, it’s hard work. It takes good diplomats like your fine husband ma’am, who can handle this type of portfolio. But it is possible to do this and I am confident that it can be done in the future. I can talk about the South China sea and the Q and A or now, and I’ll leave it up to Bruce whether I should just take questions or that the South China sea as a kind of detailed problem. I have a lot of views on it. I know it’s the pressing problem of the day, but I’m sure people will ask about it. If you prefer, I would just let-

Speaker 2:
Go ahead and open up the chair.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Okay, well it’s not trying to see the very complicated situation. The US has no position on the sovereignty of any of the reefs, islands or rocks in that area. It does have an alliance with one of the disputes, the Philippines, but it doesn’t recognize the Philippines claims. It does recognize however, a commitment as an ally to the Philippines of public ships, which includes coast guard and Navy ships for the Philippines at sea.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And it’s quite possible that Filipino ships could come under pressure or attack in the future in these disputes. So that’s a direct problem for the United States as part of the alliance system. And the Philippines had one ship, it’s beached off of Palawan. It’s the Sierra Madre. It was beached there intentionally by the Filipinos from all judgments of what happened in 1999. A couple of weeks after the US accidentally blew up the embassy in Belgrade and Yugoslavia. And in that, both had one of the worst military billets and peacetime around the world. Which is there are eight Marines who are stationed permanently on a Navy ship, which the Philippines claims is a active commission ship of the Filipino Navy. It’s one of their most mighty Navy ships.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Unfortunately from American perspective, because the Filipino Navy unfortunately, from the US perspective, is quite weak. And that poses a challenge. It’s a huge area because it’s inside the nine dash line. It’s also in the Philippines and that’s a real problem. US policy in the region has been, US demands peaceful resolution of the disputes, takes no position on the sovereignty. To me, it’s freedom of navigation, which is often misunderstood in the press. There’s a lot of talk about all the trade that goes through the South China sea and why it’s so important to keep navigation. I think this is kind of a smokescreen by my own country. So I’ll be critical of my own country on this score.

Thomas J. Christensen:
China has absolutely no incentive to block trade through the South China sea. The biggest victim of such a blockage would be China if there’s blocking trade from the South China sea. So I don’t expect China to go that route. Where the freedom of navigation is really important however, is for the US military to be able to operate in the South China sea. And if China were to use one of its more expansive interpretations of the UN convention of the law of the sea and try to prevent the US military from operating in the South China sea, that would have huge implications for US military power projection around the world. And it would have huge implications for US credibility with its regional allies.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So that’s really what that struggle with freedom of navigation operations is about. It’s about military freedom of navigation and making sure that not only the Chinese, but US allies know that regardless of artificial Island building by the Chinese and regardless of interpretation of UN convention law of the sea, the US military can and will operate in that region. The United States is also called the clear claims consistent with international law, and that’s being called into question by the Philippines at the international tribunal of the law of the sea, that this nine dash line cannot possibly be fully compliant with UN convention law of the sea, which China is a signatory of. So that’s one of the positions with the Philippines.

Thomas J. Christensen:
The other position is that China is taking illegal actions that are inconsistent with the UN convention law of the sea. In fact, in places like Scarborough Shoal where a lagoon has been sealed off by the Chinese coast guard to prevent Filipino fishermen from fishing in what is the Filipino [inaudible 00:06:20]. What is not being raised in that case is sovereignty. And the Philippines was very clever not to raise sovereignty because that court would never arbitrate sovereignty unless all the disputants were willing to be involved and China clearly wasn’t. So the Filipino case is actually very smart and it may have implications for future US policy.

Thomas J. Christensen:
There has been the sealing of that lagoon in 2012, which I’ve got a lot of a region upset. There was trying to block resupply of the Sierra Madre off of on second time to show off of a Palo. There has been oil rig activity around here that upset the Vietnamese and ended up leading to a Vietnamese reaction and riots in Vietnam that targeted ethnic Chinese and the kind of extremely nasty way and actually the victims were from Taiwan. So I guess rioters have a one China policy and they went after these poor souls. We invested from Taiwan, Vietnam. People were killed. It was serious business.

Thomas J. Christensen:
There’s been the Island building campaign in various places in the Spratlys which has been seen as very provocative by the neighbors. And harassment of fishermen from various countries including Indonesia, which is not in dispute, they’ve been harassed by Maritain law enforcement ships. And basically what this has done is provided a tense atmosphere in the South China sea that I think is largely unnecessary. And it has led various countries to cooperate more robustly with the United States. Which I think the Obama administration has appropriately taken the advantage of to improve relations with the Philippines in terms of [inaudible 00:52:10] access, improve relationships with Malaysia in terms of airstrip access for surveillance planes. Improved relations with Vietnam on the defense of it.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So I support a lot of the things the Obama administration has done in the South China sea, including the freedom of navigation operations. I wish those freedom of navigation operations however, were more quiet. They should have happened earlier. They should happen more frequently than they have and they shouldn’t be on the front page of the newspapers. Because the whole point of freedom of navigation operations is to say this is normal activity. You could build a sand pile, we’ll complain about it diplomatically, but it’s not going to prevent us from sailing right by the sand pile, which has no status. Right? So that’s what you do quietly. And China will notice, the US Navy is operating. They will notice. You can tell the allies if the allies don’t notice. It doesn’t have to be in the front page. Because when it’s in the front page, you’re calling out the Chinese government. And I tried to describe before why that isn’t an optimally good idea. Because that just adds tension where it’s not necessary. There’ll be enough tension over the existence of the U S Navy. So just do it.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And then we do these general operations in the South China sea, like the aircraft carrier Stennis was about here and secretary of defense flew out there and the Filipino defense minister flew out there and this and that. That’s all fine. I think it’s a little melodramatic. I think it’s great to have the carriers go through there on occasion. I think it’s a little melodramatic to have the Sec. Def. visit the carrier while it’s out there and make a big public relations. Because it unnecessarily again, calls out countries nationalists reactions.

Thomas J. Christensen:
But the bigger problem is this, I’ll conclude with this. The bigger problem is a lot of the struggles in the South China sea are not struggles where aircraft carriers are the most appropriate tools of diplomacy. Those aircraft carriers are designed to fight major States with major capabilities. Right? And what we’re dealing with in the South China sea increasingly is China increasing its presence through the use of what are called white hulls Coast Guard ships, not Navy ships. Dredgers that dig up sand and produce artificial islands. And increasingly what’s called the Maritime Militia.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Fishermen are tough people to begin with. But a bunch of tough fishermen in China have signed up for military service. And they carry rifles and small arms and they go out to these disputed areas and they coerce and intimidate fishermen from other countries and they establish a Chinese presence. Are you really going to use an aircraft carrier against them? Right? So it’s not so much that I want to abolish the aircraft carrier as a tool of U S diplomacy. It’s just that it’s not always the proper tool. And what I would rather see is the United States go on a very robust initiative to increase the Maritime awareness and the law enforcement and Naval capability of China’s neighbors. Because they’re the ones who actually have the claims. They’re the ones who have the dogs in the fight. And just make it more costly for China to try to bully its way to getting all of the claims, the disputed claims.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And in that process, the US isn’t taking sides. US isn’t saying we agree with the Filipino claims or the Malaysian claims. Just saying you can’t get all of the claimed islands through aggression and bullying without a high cost. And that seems like an inappropriate strategy. And at the end of the day it’s their fight, not the US fight. And sometimes I worry that some of the disputants wanted to fight to the last American. And that’s not a desirable outcome from the United States. So the United States can help. And one of the things the US can do is to provide situational awareness.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And in the process the United States should continue to take its position on the sovereignty the way it has, stick to international law, stick to international law, stick to international law. It will be mightily helpful if the US Congress would pass ratify the UN convention law of the sea. Very difficult to do. Going back to the Reagan administration, but it would it be mightily helpful for the US strategy if it was based on a law that the US had ratified? But we do follow it so we can still follow up without having been ratified. But then we have to be consistent. And there’s a Japanese claim way out here in Okinotorishima, which is a bunch of rocks with a bunch of sand. And it’s not an Island in the Japanese claim. Easy around it. They’re our allies. We don’t want to call the Japanese out on that and my understanding is that there’s places way out of the Pacific where the US does the same thing but we should stop doing it.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Let’s be consistent because peace and stability in East Asia is so important to the United States and the world. It’s worth giving up a couple of fisheries so that we can have a strategy built on principle that we can follow. And the goal again isn’t to deprive China or any given reefer rock or Island. It’s to prevent the Island disputes from being settled through coordinating force and keeping the region stent. Let it be negotiating, encourage negotiation. And it should be able to be worked out and then everyone will benefit. China will benefit. The United States will benefit.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And I’ll just close with this, it’s not a zero sum game. It’s not a cold war and it’s not a zero sum game. It’s just really complicated. It’s potentially really dangerous and it has to be managed well. And again, I’m tremendously honored to speak here and the Harry Harding auditorium at the Gaston Sigur memorial lecture because those two people for me, they’re my heroes. So thanks.

Speaker 2:
Tom’s is going to take Q and A for a bit.

Thomas J. Christensen:
For as long as you like.

Speaker 2:
So as he calls on you-

Thomas J. Christensen:
I like my job [crosstalk 00:14:27].

Speaker 2:
Please identify yourself before you start. But I get the first one. Whether intentional or not you’re now you made a point of not referring to specific leaders in specific countries, and this is really about the national interest, but about growing trends in the region. Leaving aside the specific headaches in the United States or whether Xi Jinping remains president. How much of this is influenced by administrations or your leaders or how much sort of basic differences between how the patients are perceiving their interest in the region?

Thomas J. Christensen:
Well, I think public diplomacy is really important. And public diplomacy is often the first victim of domestic politics in every country. So in this time complex environment, the signals that countries send are important. I agree with a lot of the policies that the Obama administration has raised in East Asia, but I really think the pivot language was incredibly unfortunate and consequential. Because it signals something that was unnecessarily confrontational, fed into domestic debates in China into about what the United States was and wasn’t about and it fueled the types of people in those debates that we don’t want to see win the debates. And it made it very hard for the people that we’d like to see win debates in China win.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So again, you know that’s it consequentially. I think that was driven largely by US domestic politics by a new administration that wanted to say we’re withdrawing from two Wars, but we’re still very muscular in international security affairs, so we’re pivoting to Asia. And the dependent has problems in many different ways. One of them being that it makes the United States seem like it has strategic ADHD and that they can only do one thing at once. Which means even, you’re trying to, I see my student here who’s heard me say this before. For instance… Good to see you. It is designed to reassure the Asian allies and partners that were there in a robust way, but it has to be in the back of their mind. If you pivot it in, you could pivot out so it doesn’t even check that box. And then every other ally and friend around the world thinks, why are you getting away from us?

Thomas J. Christensen:
So it’s just not a good structure. And to the Obama administration’s credit, they stopped saying it themselves. So it’s not just me who was critical apparently, it was an internal discussion. So I think that’s important. If you look at Xi Jinping as opposed to who didn’t Hu Jintao, I do think it makes a difference, but I think the result is largely the same. But the process is different. This is just my interpretation. It’s very hard to tell. The Chinese system is not particularly transparent. But my sense on the Hu Jintao era after the financial crisis, there was a kind of group leadership and people watching each other’s backs on nationalist issues in the transition process to try to make sure that you looked sufficiently robust, the defensive about China’s expensive sovereignty claims in the region and that had a negative influence.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I think since she’s Xi Jinping took over there’s a different dynamic which is Xi Jinping wants to restructure the economy. He wants to clean up the party in dramatic ways and to do those things. He believes he needs to portray himself as a great leader who gets things done and takes no flack. Which is a very different dynamic than Hu Jintao era, but it plays out the same on these sovereignty disputes. A leader who gets things done secures China’s long held plains. A leader that takes no flack pushes back hard when there’s a challenge from the Philippines or there’s a challenge from Japan or there’s a challenge from the Unites States. So you’re still in the same cell, the two by two, even though the process is different. So I do, I do think it matters. And domestic politics is a big part of all this. One of the problems is all these countries save Japan, had post-colonial nationals narratives as domestic legitimizing. Whether it’s a democracy or not democracy in East Asia.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So that complicates these disputes. In a hundred years, historians are writing that the United States and China fought a war over a beached ship at the second Scarborough Shoal. An intentionally beached ship, which was declared a Navy ship. That would be a disaster. But it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of imagination to get there. That’s the scary thing about these disputes. It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of imagination to get there. You don’t have to be true science fiction authors to write that chapter of the history book from 2,125. And that’s something that we got to be able to deal with. Or fishing rights in some lagoon. Marco?

Marco:
If you were-

Thomas J. Christensen:
Nice to see you, Marco.

Marco:
Good to see you. If you were going to super impose economic diplomacy and trade diplomacy in the South China sea, what picture would you get? Would it be possible that either trade or economic disputes would actually exacerbate problems of jurisdiction regarding the islands [crosstalk 00:01:04:01]?

Thomas J. Christensen:
Well, certainly economic disputes could because if some of these regions, the Blue Dragon Region in the Southern part of Vietnam, Reed bank, which is close to that beached ship, actually have natural resources that are exploitable. The question is how many. And you understand economics. So this is Marco, we worked in the government together. He was posted in Beijing. I think Spelman is here. I have a lot of my colleagues here. So you have areas that have economic benefit for the people controlling it. So that’s a problem. And then you have fisheries. And fisheries are important. I mean it doesn’t sound like a world peace issue, but fisheries in Asia are very important economic assets. So controlling that lagoon and keeping the Filipino fishermen out is important to a lot of people in the Philippines and they vote and it’s a democracy.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So that’s a potential source of that. But I think that broader thing I described where Malaysia is producing lots of microchips that are going into computers in the Shun Jun area that are funded from Taiwan using Japanese parts, that’s a force for peace. It would be insane to break those chains over rocks and reefs. Right? So you can’t prove that because as a counterfactual, it’s the dogs that don’t bark. But I believe that this region would already be in conflict if it weren’t for that economic independence. You know, because these things are very emotional issues. And if cost weren’t very high to assert your claims more robustly, they probably already would have been asserted. And the Japan’s… There’s problems with Japan going back to 2010 over Senkaku islands. The Japanese investment patterns has not recovered to this day towards China. And that produces a lot of jobs in China. So there are real costs to these disputes.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yes, ma’am. Oh, she’s goi-

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yes, ma’am. Oh, she didn’t tape me. Okay. I’m being taped all the time, I think.

Nadia:
Welcome back. Nadia Tsao, the Liberty Times.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah.

Nadia:
You mentioned Taiwan, when you were serving in the government, now with the inauguration of the President again-

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah.

Nadia:
Do you see a different dynamic? Some people predict that based on Xi Jinping actions in South China Sea, East China Sea he’s a more aggressive leader. Do you believe that he will exercise, put pressure on Taiwan to make the President Tsai.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Wow, thanks. You know, there’s nothing like a Taiwan question that turns me back into my official government load. Right. I will not answer a hypothetical incident. It’s just, it’s just the nature of the question. Like it’s an instinct that I developed over two years system, but now I’m going to say nothing. Right. It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer, because I don’t know president Xi Jinping personally, and I spent 45 minutes in a room with him when I was Deputy Assistant Secretary. He was Vice President. I was impressed with his intelligence. I watched what’s happened in the South China Sea.

Thomas J. Christensen:
It doesn’t give me a lot of optimism about how moderately he’ll respond to perceived challenges from Taiwan. I’ve known President Tsai, I have met her many times over the years. I have tremendous respect for her. I think she’s smart. I expect her to adopt modern policies. Whether they will be satisfactory to the mainland, and the mainland will not push against her, remains to be seen. But, I really believe in the current era, the most likely cause of tension in Cross-Strait relations will be mainland disappointment. And that’s unfortunate. This idea that somehow Taiwan should parrot various phrases that previous Taiwan leaders have stated publicly, like the 1992 consensus. In order to set, maintain or create or whatever verb you want to use, a foundation for stable Cross-Strait relations. I don’t think that that should be necessary for stable Cross-Strait relations. And I hope that the two sides can find a way to work around these types of differences.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I don’t expect President Tsai to parrot those phrases. That’s not what her party’s about. But I don’t see conflict across the Taiwan cities anything but avoidable. It should be avoided. It would be a disaster, and cooler heads should prevail. So, that’s what I hope for. Hope isn’t a strategy. There’s things that countries can do to maximize the chance that that happens. But I think the big thing is I’ve been concerned and a little bit worried about some of the media reporting in China. In the official media, about expectations for future Taiwan leaders to repeat things like the 1992 consensus, which I think are unrealistic expectations. So, the question is how when those unrealistic expectations are not met, how does the mainland respond? I don’t have an answer. One would hope that someone who’s as smart as Xi Jinping would not do something counterproductive, but I can’t guarantee that that’s the case. I know that’s an unsatisfactory answer, but I don’t think it was only Yogi Berra but Yogi Berra said the future, it’s hard to do predictions, particularly about the future.

Speaker 3:
That’s great.

Speaker 4:
Tom, thanks very much for this presentation of the problem that we’re facing in the South China Sea. A lot of the measures that you suggested, I think you’re aware, these are already underway, doing a lot of these things are in our time awareness and capacity building region and so forth.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah, I don’t know how much, it’s hard to tell and I haven’t gotten [crosstalk 01:10:15].

Speaker 4:
Get the Chinese to stop and so the debate is full of frustrated people here and-

Thomas J. Christensen:
Get the Chinese to stop what though?

Speaker 4:
Stop the expansion we’re seeing in the South China Sea-

Thomas J. Christensen:
You mean the building of islands.

Speaker 4:
[crosstalk 01:10:29] using intimidating, coercive mechanisms.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[inaudible 01:10:35] But let me-

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 4:
Because I think that the [inaudible 01:10:38] is now reaching Washington is reaching to looking at the United States’ style of dealing with this issue as part of the problem. And I wanted to get your reaction to this and let me explain what I’m saying.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah, sure.

Speaker 4:
One second.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah, I’m trying to figure it out.

Speaker 4:
Obama is very cautious, incremental, transparent, predictable. He doesn’t let the issues spill over from one to the other, and he doesn’t let them get in the way of progress in important issues like climate change and things like that. And that makes it a situation with the opponent, it’s easier to read the United States, and it’s easy to see that what if they do expand some more, the so called salami slicing is not going to lead to much of a reaction.

Speaker 4:
And so there’s more attention being devoted to this and the discussions right now saying well jeepers, maybe the United States is a bit of an enabler in this situation.

Speaker 4:
The style of policy and action is such that an opponent like China in this case. It can read it easily. Okay. Expand easily and the consequences of Obama.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Okay. I’m not so sure it’s an accurate description of the reality. I’m not here to praise the Obama administration or criticize it. I think the United States has done some things that have gotten the attention of China that were relatively surprising. Various activities with aircraft for example, in various areas. Some of them big, honking aircraft like B-52’s in the East China Sea, the South China Sea. So, I don’t think it’s the case that, actors in the region, whether it be China or the other actors are always predicting exactly what the United States would do.

Thomas J. Christensen:
I do think that complaining about the island building of China undisputed and disputed waters, reefs, islands, rocks, whatever it is, and complaining that it’s provocative and taking advantage of those provocations to strengthen the U.S. military position in the region is something that’s likely to get their attention. And it goes back to what I described before, which is China’s strategy of developing asymmetric capabilities that can raise the cost of foreign deployed U.S. forces. It’s incredibly important when the United States is able to set up multiple new basins in a place like the Philippines, not just for the South China Sea, but for broad contingencies, because that increases the number of targets for Chinese missile leaders and others in the potential conflict. Incredibly important for regional awareness, which is a big part of American military advantage to be able to operate these new P-8 aircraft out of Malaysia.

Thomas J. Christensen:
None of that would’ve been possible likely given the post-colonial nationalist countries will often run against the U.S. if China weren’t seen as being assertive, aggressive. I don’t want to even say, aggressive I think of the use of force, so I’ll say assertive instead of aggressive. I haven’t seen Chinese influence. So, here in these regions, China is building these islands, I think we should complain about them. They’re not the first to build islands and not being a defense lawyer for China here. The Vietnamese built islands, the Filipinos built islands. Chinese are the last to do it, but they do it in a big way because they’re China. So they built a lot of them, and it’s undeniably destabilizing and you complain about it. But, really the most important thing from a U.S. perspective, I believe, is how these things are used.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So, the fact that they put airstrips on them is concerning. And it’s not concerning for the reasons that many people often state. It’s not concerning because those airstrips can be used against the United States. That would be extremely stupid for an adversary to use airstrips on isolated sand piles against the U.S. military. It would be a very bad place to be, as a soldier or an airman from a foreign country, if that sand pile is being used against the U.S. military. But, where it is quite dangerous, is you have these other claims from other disputants. If China started to use those artificial islands as launching pads for offenses against the holdings of other states, that would be something that would be extremely destabilizing for the region, and would run against stated U.S. policy, which is that the disputes be handled peacefully, and that would provide an opportunity for a more direct to U.S. approach toward the artificial islands than has been provided by China or the other disputants to date, it seems to me.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And that, I think, can be determined and I think that’s really the destabilizing aspect of those islands to begin with. So, if you can deter that kind of use of the islands, then you’ve done a lot. And then there’s the issue of this ITLOS case, and that’s supposed to come to a head as you know Bob, I’m really talking to the rest of the room, because I know you’re an expert on this stuff, but the ITLOS case is likely to come to pass in the next several weeks and there’s a very good chance that one of the disputed areas, Scarborough Shoal, will be decided in a way that creates a challenge for U.S. policy in the region. If the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea says that China’s activities in the Filipino exclusive economic zone are inconsistent, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and that it is illegal for China to block that lagoon, and the Filipino send fishermen there with coastguards, then there’s going to be a real issue for the United States. Because the international court, the viewer strategy again, is based on international law.

Thomas J. Christensen:
International law would be challenged by the Chinese if they challenge the Filipino ships and Filipino ships, not the reef itself, are part of the U.S.-Philippine Alliance. And then there’s a real challenge, and I think that sort of dynamic can be presented to the Chinese in ways that could alter the behavior. Will it stop them from increasing the presence in the South China Sea altogether? I don’t think so. I think there are certain outcomes from U.S. Strategic policy that are really unattainable, but shouldn’t be seen as the standard of success or failure. China is getting bigger and has more capacity. It has these claims for a long time. There are going to be more Chinese boats in the South China Sea over time, there’s going to be more Chinese activity in the South China Sea too. The question is, how destabilizing will that activity be? How violent will it be, and how much will it harm the interests of the region, the world and the United States in the process?

Thomas J. Christensen:
So, I don’t say United States has failed to deter China from building artificial islands. I don’t think that’s a standard of success or failure in that the United States should be held to. I think it is destabilizing of China to build it. I think it’s been counterproductive for China’s own national security, in getting the neighbors upset about China. China’s diplomacy in Southeast Asia was fantastically successful, I outlined this in my book, from 1997 to 2008, reassuring its neighbors that China’s rise was going to be something that was good for everybody in the region, and China has largely scrapped that since 2009, so it’s not good for China either. This is not a zero sum game. We’ve all lost, in a sense, from these provocative activities, and China has lost the most I would say.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So, knowing the book from which some of these comments were derived, I try not to make scorecards that the Obama administration did well, that the Bush administration did well. My confession is I’m a lifelong independent, of sometimes say, I’m like Groucho Marx. I would never join a party that would have me as a member. So a Groucho Marxist maybe. But, the goal is really to prescribe, proudly served in a Republican administration, but the goal is to try to learn the lessons of what’s worked and not worked in the past, so that whoever’s elected in the future will have a better playbook. And that’s really the goal. So I don’t want to beat up the Obama administration and will point out things that I think we did wrong. Thanks. It’s a long answer to a very big question. Yes, sir.

Speaker 5:
[inaudible 01:19:46] with the [inaudible 01:19:47] problems. …………But, somewhere in the middle, you talked about Philippine strategy, even attacking China. I lived in this country from 1917, before Nixon’s visit to China there were a lot of right-wing nuts who used to ask me since I was from India, if the United States might nuke China, confused me, I said that would be barbaric if it did. So given, I mean, with American involvement in the Palestinian issue, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we’ve got so much terrorism that says America is strong, Europe is high-strength. If you ever gotten into conflict, a military conflict with China, the amount of terrorism would multiply 100-1,000 from what it is now, so shouldn’t the United States think of those kinds of things. [inaudible 01:20:45]

Thomas J. Christensen:
Could the United States think? [crosstalk 01:20:45] Okay. [crosstalk 01:20:47] I would say it was very dangerous if the United States didn’t think of these kind of things. If they came [crosstalk 01:20:52] to the conclusion that a nuclear exchange between China and the United States is a very bad thing that would be a good conclusion to draw. But, you would have to think about it first, before you came to that conclusion.

Speaker 5:
You’re right.

Thomas J. Christensen:
So I think the United States is obliged, with its Alliance system in Asia, and with its interest in East Asia, to think about what may or may not cause a conflict with China and how it would be prosecuted.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And what would concern me is if their thought process was relatively shallow, where some of those normal reactions of the U.S. military were to be employed. And I was, what I’m trying to suggest is that the United States needs to have more things like active defense of foreign deployed forces, rather than relying on robust attacks into the mainland, so that a President would have more realistic and more serious options if push were to come to shove. And I don’t think push needs to come to shove, so I don’t want to come across. But you can’t, this idea that you get peace by avoiding talking about war I think is just, it’s just fantastic and unrealistic. [crosstalk 01:21:57] You have to think through.

Speaker 5:
[crosstalk 01:21:58] You have to think seriously about what the other side is also doing.

Thomas J. Christensen:
Absolutely they are. And, so we have to as well. So, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to lead to war, but you have to think about it. And it’s interesting, my title at Princeton, and maybe I’ll close with this because you want to wrap up right, is William P. Boswell, Professor of World Politics of Peace and War. It’s a very long title. Not as long as my title in the State Department, but it’s very long. The gentleman who donated the money to Princeton, William P. Boswell was an energy, I don’t want to say tycoon. He was a very successful energy business person in Ohio. He had a house that was a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home. He was a very successful Princeton grad. But, before he was a successful Princeton grad, he was a warrior in East Asia who fought in Burma against the Japanese. He got a Bronze Star, and when he came back to Princeton, he finished and he went into business, was very successful and he donated enough money for two chairs in his name.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And he said, “Put the peace before war.” I talked to his son about it all right, but don’t leave [inaudible 01:23:07] peace at. Just put the peace before war because peace is a lot better than war. He’s seen war. So I, this is a good way to close, right? But you have to think about the war piece and you know, the United States has in its history, a period in which it says war is bad. Stay away from it. And there’s a lot of bad things on the campaign trail. This is one of them, on this year’s campaign trail, this idea of war is bad, so stay away from, don’t think about it. Right? And what that does is it leaves regions to fester and to escalate to a point where the United States ends up having to fight its way back in. And that’s the much worse world than the U.S. being present, being strong and moderate at the same time, and keeping the peace, so that those conflicts never happen.

Thomas J. Christensen:
And, I think that’s a good place to close because again, who did a better job of that in Asia for U.S. ideals in places like Korea and keeping the peace during the cold war than Gaston Sigur and I’m tremendously honored to give the annual lecture. Thanks to Bruce and David and everyone else involved in having me here. And thanks to Mike who did a tremendous job with all the logistics. I really appreciate it. And thanks to the family, honoring me with your presence. Thanks so much. [inaudible 00:18:36].

Speaker 6:
[inaudible 01:24:36]

Thomas J. Christensen:
Yeah, I don’t think we should stop [inaudible 01:24:38]. I’ve been here before.