The basis for a more effective response to China’s use of grey zone coercion to alter the regional order, as I argue here, can be found by identifying the assumptions that have made grey zone tactics attractive to Beijing, and then acting to erode confidence in these assumptions within China’s leadership. Policy thinking in the US and elsewhere, in other words, needs to begin focusing on how to make the cost benefit calculations informing China’s coercive behaviour over the last decade far more difficult and uncertain than they have been to date.
Two key areas where Chinese policy makers are likely most comfortable in their strategic assumptions and expectations are in i) their perceptions of risk tolerance among the US and its allies; and ii) their belief that alliance commitment and confidence are weakening within the US hub and spokes alliance system.
Ambiguity, Asymmetry, and Incrementalism: Defining Grey Zone Coercion
Grey zone tactics are inherently coercive and are primarily employed by revisionist actors aiming to alter the status quo to their advantage. In the context of inter-state relations, revisionist states employ grey zone tactics not only because they recognise an asymmetrical disadvantage in their conventional military capabilities, but also because they believe the threshold among status quo states for open conflict (i.e., their intolerance of inter-state conflict risk) to be high. As Green, Hicks, et al., observe, “… gray zone coercion is most likely when a potential challenger is dissatisfied but the dominant power retains escalation dominance.”
States employing grey zone tactics thus seek to incrementally exploit ambiguity and uncertainty in order to ensure their provocations can be sufficiently disguised (or hidden in the case of cyber coercion) so as to remain below (what they believe to be) their opponents’ threshold for military conflict, creating a dynamic in which escalation dominance on the part of the target states is both recognised but also neutralised.
The asymmetries that drive grey zone coercion and make it attractive to those with revisionist ambition, however, are more diverse and subtle than only the fear of escalation to conventional military conflict. Asymmetrical disadvantage in one domain, for example, may be offset by asymmetrical advantage in another. China, for example, still trails the US in terms of its conventional and nuclear capabilities (a gap that is, however, closing), but it has a significant advantage over the US and its allies in terms of its ability to deploy maritime law enforcement (MLE) and militia-type assets in East Asian waters. China’s numerically superior Coast Guard fleet and ability to flood targeted areas with fishing vessels and other non-military craft thus provides precisely the kind of asymmetric advantage grey zone tactics are intended to exploit.
In addition to capability asymmetries providing both potential costs and benefits, issue asymmetries similarly offer important advantage to those seeking change by clouding the cost-benefit calculations of status quo states, which can in turn dilute the willingness of the targeted states and their allies to act while also enhancing abandonment and entrapment fears between alliance partners. Opponents of directly confronting China over its occupation of disputed features in the South China Sea, for example, ask why their countries should risk war over a bunch of distant rocks.
Tactical Options for Complicating Chinese Strategic Thinking
There are a number of ways status quo states can combine deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment tactics to significantly complicate some of the core assumptions Chinese strategists appear to rely on in their implementation of grey zone coercion. Tailoring a mix of both approaches to meet specific challenges would remove much of the advantage offered by low level grey zone coercion and harassment activities, in addition to countering some of the asymmetric advantage China currently enjoys as a resident great power with numerically superior MLE and para-military assets. Several idealised options for making China’s leaders less comfortable and less risk tolerant in their assumptions are briefly outlined below.
1) While still credible, US extended deterrence has been ineffective against China’s grey zone coercion, which over time also is undermining US deterrence credibility by allowing China both strategic positional advantage and significant time to increase its own deterrence and denial capability. The US and its allies and partners must maintain escalation dominance by continuing to build both military/political capability and their collective capacity to impose coercive diplomacy measures (see below).
2) US allies and partners must become more risk tolerant in their willingness to impose deterrence costs and threats (i.e., both denial and punishment) and this willingness must be clearly conveyed to Beijing. Realistic red lines, therefore, must be clearly announced, but the resolve to act should they be crossed must also be clear. In short, the threshold for adopting a military response to further incursions and territorial expansion attempts must be significantly lowered.
3) The US as the dominant alliance power must also, therefore, allay abandonment fears by clearly conveying to its allies and partners the reliability of its alliance commitments and willingness to provide support in response to continued grey zone coercion by China as per discussions on the red lines to be set and the responses agreed to.
4) China’s existing gains in the South China Sea cannot be wound back short of military action, which would play into Beijing’s hands. The prospects for deterrence by denial in the South China Sea thus are limited to denying China the territorial and EEZ rights it hopes to gain. The other possibility here perhaps is to deny Chinese claims to Scarborough Shoal and Benham Rise. However, the prospects for the Philippines asserting its sovereignty over these features under the Duterte administration are poor.
That said, denial of China’s attempt to extend its maritime rights could be combined with steps to punish Beijing by imposing current and future costs on China’s gains so far.
Doing so effectively would require at a minimum regular Australian, Indian, and Japanese participation, and preferably also the involvement of at least some ASEAN states, in joint FONOPs with the US. These operations would need not only to occur within the territorial waters claimed by China, but also involve actions that clearly distinguish them from “innocent passage” (e.g., exercises, surveying, launching aircraft, helicopters/small water craft).
China’s grey zone coercion-based gains also can be politically punished by reasserting the authority of the Permanent Court of Arbitration Tribunal’s 2016 decision against China’s actions and claims as grounds for the confiscation of Chinese fishing boats and arresting crews for illegal fishing (as Indonesia has done in response to Chinese incursions around the Natuna Islands). Diplomatic pressure also should be brought to bear on China over the extensive environmental damage (thus also threatening fish stocks) its island building has caused.
5) In the East China Sea, Japan, given the political will, could adopt a much more effective “deterrence by denial” approach by militarising the Senkaku Islands, as China has in the South China Sea, and deploying its maritime Self-Defense Forces in support of Coast Guard interdictions. But, as indicated above, an effective denial strategy must credibly convey a willingness to lower the threshold for conflict. The US, moreover, would need to unequivocally assure Japan of its support, both politically and militarily, for Japan in any confrontation and clearly signal this assurance also to Beijing.
