In the contemporary past, states involved in serious international crises or wars have used military power and undertaken coercive strategies to punish people to deter or force other governments to do their bidding. As the policy recurrently led to “coercive failures,” they contemplated on the effectiveness of the military and non-military sanctions as instruments of coercion.
The debate on adopting coercive strategies resurfaced in America during the 1990s. A study, at the US Department of Defense (DOD) website offered strategic coercion (a military strategy encompassing the “art of coercion”, intimidation and deterrence) as a solution to quandary of avoiding the “cyclical” dangers of brute force.
It underlined strategic coercion might require a fusion of both coercive apparatuses: Denial (compel target nation to concede to “coercer demands”) and Second Order Change (“impose the threat” of high order costs on target nation). A subsequent paper would further the discussion of how best to exploit the military as a coercive tool and inserted “coercive diplomacy” to an “effective national coercion.”
Yet the effort to change the behavior of a target state or group through the threat or limited use of force in the coming years failed more often than not. Diplomacy may be anything but non-coercive to reach a solution by peaceful means; the US policymakers value it only on coercive footing, using such measures to impose sanctions and military overuse.
Coercive diplomacy is part and parcel of the US foreign policy in a modern era. Jake Sullivan and William Burns, now National Security Adviser and Director Central Intelligence Agency in the Biden administration, in May 2019 called Donald Trump’s strategy “all coercion and no diplomacy”; they stressed on careful synchronization of both elements of the approach: coercion and diplomacy.
Of late, the US has turned to practicing coercion in the guise of deterrence. Through its 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), America changed course from terrorism to long-term strategic competition to compete, deter and win in an increasingly complex security environment by “seamless integration” of all dimensions of national power, attributing coercion to China.
Labeling China as the US strategic competitor, the NDS accused Beijing of “leveraging” military modernization, influence operations and predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors and seek Indo-Pacific hegemony. Still, the Pentagon insisted it wasn’t a strategy of confrontation instead something that recognized the reality of competition.
A congressional mandated commission to examine the NDS used the two terms interchangeably and found the deterrent or “coercive value” of the DOD's unpredictability and creativity as limited. It nevertheless supported the priority NDS placed on preparing for “major-power competition and conflict,” recalling the cold war era when the US possessed greater military power than “any rival or group of rivals.” The 2018 NDS shared similar concerns as the country emerged from "strategic atrophy" and believed its military edge was eroding.
The 2022 NDS primary focus is again China and great power competition continues to be the “defining feature” of the China-US relationship for the Biden administration. The new doctrine describes Beijing as Washington’s “most consequential strategic competitor” and the DOD’s “pacing challenge” for the Chinese economy and defense is quickly expanding and modernizing in every aspect and threatens to “offset” the US advantages.
America’s officials do understand what coercion or deterrence is and that two concepts are different in nature. They deliberately muddle them to describe their coercive actions as a deterrent to avoid the world looking at these measures as coercion. In the new NDS, the DOD astutely aims to achieve its objectives through integrated deterrence: a “coordinated, multifaceted” approach, “backstopped” by a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent. Guam contributes to the “overall integrity” of integrated deterrence and builds a bedrock for the US intervention in Asia-Pacific and Taiwan.
Integrated (across conventional, nuclear, cyber, space and informational domains and allies and partners) and deterrence (deny the “rapid fait accompli scenarios” that has been at the heart of the US defense policy since the cold war) is the cornerstone of the 2022 NDS. The US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called it a new way of approaching deterrence whose implementation required nuclear weapons to play a unique role in the Pentagon's defense strategy.
One of the NDS’ major concerns is the “scope and pace” of China’s nuclear expansion. Washington seems not to believe Beijing’s “solemn” commitment of no preemptive nuclear strike but the problem is the key Indo-Pacific states don’t see the US nuclear submarine cooperation with Australia and the UK (AUKUS) positively, fearing it could trigger an arms race in the region. Remember, America is the only country that has the history of dropping nuclear bombs and erasing two Japanese cities using nuclear bombs
What blows the whistle for the Indo-Pacific states is the NDS chooses their region as a cold war theater by alleging Beijing for trying to leverage its economic influence and military strength to “refashion” the Indo-Pacific and describing China as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge” to the US national security. Indonesia, the leading regional economy, deciphered the veiled nod and refused to be a “pawn” in the new cold war.
The NDS reasoning about China fares poorly after the US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s recent comments. In a press briefing alongside Austin, he unfolded America’s ambitions to contain China for its emergence as the only country – which because of its large population and growth in the areas of economy, technology and information – had the power and potential to challenge the US globally.
A Pentagon official of late reached out to some European countries to promote the NDS concept of China as a “pacing challenge” and discussed their “key role” in the NDS. Milley’s statement and the visit may raise concerns in the Indo-Pacific about the US intent to play up the China threat for advancing its policy goals.
The DOD sees integrated deterrence as a novel vision; it is an outdated US grand strategy of coercion that on several instances in the last three decades hasn’t come off. This overarching focus of the Biden administration on great power competition draws resources as well as the attention away from climate change, which the DOD itself characterized as a national security risk.
According to an estimate by the US National Intelligence Council, climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to America’s national security interests. At that instant, the DOD Climate Risk Analysis (DCRA) also committed to “integrate” climate considerations into strategic, planning and other documents as well as engagements with allies by working within the whole-of-government and in concert with partners.
Both White House and the DCRA acknowledged climate change was “reshaping” the world and the “geostrategic, operational and tactical environment” with some major security implications for the US national security and defense. The NDS too frames climate change as a threat to the homeland and a transboundary challenge but doesn’t analyze the DOD own contributions to increasing temperature, changing precipitation patterns, rising sea levels and unpredictable extreme weather conditions.
The status of the US military as the single-largest consumer of energy in the US and the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum is a worst-kept secret. Citing this fact, a couple of the US Congressmen in January 2021 urged the US President Joe Biden to uphold his climate goals by requiring the DOD to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Since 2001, the military has accounted for 77 to 80 percent of federal energy use. According to the White House’s December 2021 Federal Sustainability Plan, 56 percent of federal government emissions come from the DOD,” they wrote.
Even as Austin called climate change an “existential threat,” experts contest the initiatives are too late and it’s hard to align military expansion with climate goals. That’s because the US military over the decades has inherited an acrimonious legacy of harming the environment as a US federal agency discovered at least one million civilian and military staff and their families were exposed to the contaminated drinking water at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune military base since 1982.
Neta Crawford, a professor at the University of Oxford and co-director of Brown University’s Cost of War Project, in his latest groundbreaking book “The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War” delved into the human-caused climate change and found the US economy and military together had created a “deep and long-term cycle of economic growth, fossil fuel and dependency.” Accusing the Pentagon of resisting reporting its own greenhouse gas emissions, she concluded America faced more risk from climate change than military conflicts and saw a “lack of urgency and agency” from an institution, which believed it could do “almost anything.”
Roughly every US president has boasted about America’s economic and military primacy over the world. The desire for “number one” comes with a responsibility: play an integrated role to bring peace and stability in the world and protect Americans and poor countries from serious fallouts of climate change. The US interagency instruments such as economic sanctions, export controls and diplomatic measures are neither the purview of the DOD nor a right way to secure Americans, expand “economic prosperity” and defend the homeland.
Integrated deterrence, the “centerpiece” of the 2022 NDS, is even more dangerous for international peace considering threats to the US national security spring from climate change rather than the potential foes. Countries including American allies may not endorse such a lousy idea that bears resemblance to the US post-world war coercion and instills a new cold war approach.
*My opinion piece (unedited), first appeared in "The Express Tribune."