The True Aims of China’s Nuclear Buildup
Beijing’s Growing Arsenal Is Meant to Dissolve America’s Alliance System in Asia
Kyle Balzer and Dan Blumenthal
Foreign Affairs, November 21, 2024
Since 2018, American defense analysts have repeatedly identified China as the greatest threat to U.S. national security. They have variously described Beijing as a “systemic challenge,” a “pacing threat,” and even a “peer adversary,” owing to China’s massive military buildup, belligerent behavior in the Asia-Pacific, and global campaign of economic coercion. These vague, buzzy phrases point to a growing consensus: that China’s ambitions greatly imperil American national interests. There is no consensus, however, on the intention behind China’s strategic moves, chief among them its rapid buildup of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. defense community has largely viewed this buildup in a narrow military framework concerned with weapons capabilities and arms-race balance. A recent essay in Foreign Affairs by the researcher Tong Zhao has broadened the analysis by describing China’s nuclear arsenal not as a coercive tool to achieve well-defined military objectives but as a symbol of national strength by which Beijing can earn Washington’s respect as a major player in world affairs. But any understanding of this nuclear expansion must also account for Beijing’s revisionist intentions.
China holds grand ambitions to remake the world in its image. It intends to do so by first dominating the western Pacific and then pulling much of Eurasia—a region that stretches from China’s immediate neighborhood through Central Asia and southeastern Europe—as well as Africa into its orbit. But Beijing has a geographic predicament of which it’s acutely aware: a number of states off its coastline that have signed on to U.S.-led coalitions devoted to the regional status quo, and which are galvanized by China’s own actions. If China escalates by launching a large-scale attack along its maritime periphery, it risks a devastating and coordinated response that jeopardizes its global designs.
The United States should view China’s nuclear buildup as a tool that can help Beijing resolve its continental isolation. China has initiated a short-of-war coercion campaign to dissolve the U.S. alliance system in the Pacific, and its increasingly sophisticated nuclear arsenal gives it more leverage to achieve this objective without igniting a catastrophic great-power war. If Washington fails to address this dimension of China’s nuclear breakout, it could risk its forward position in the western Pacific, through which it defends a free, open, and prosperous environment favorable to American interests.
Washington should be alive to the danger. It must recognize the geopolitical designs China has for its expanding nuclear arsenal and act to preserve the regional balance. As Beijing’s coercion campaign threatens U.S. allies, Washington must implement a countervailing strategy that arrays the United States’ competitive advantages against China’s distinct vulnerabilities. China may have already started wielding its nuclear power as an initial foray in its larger worldmaking project, but the United States still has an opportunity to nip these global ambitions in the bud.
MAKING WAVES
Chinese President Xi Jinping believes he is leading his country into a new era of Chinese-dominated geopolitics. He believes a struggle between Chinese socialism and Western democratic capitalism is already underway and cites his country’s growing prosperity and influence as evidence that it is ready to supplant the United States and remold the world. Such an international order would more closely reflect China’s internal system than the liberal values that have shaped much of the world for decades. Xi is particularly confident that structural trends—as evidenced by the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of populist movements in the West—favor China’s ascendancy.
But China’s geography complicates Xi’s vision. Like Napoleonic France in the nineteenth century and Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, Beijing considers itself hemmed in by hostile coastal states that are backed by a global naval power. Also like its antecedents, China’s continental position—straddling a type of land-sea boundary that the twentieth-century Dutch American strategist Nicholas Spykman dubbed the Eurasian “rimland”—raises the possibility that a poorly executed Chinese strategy could ignite a cataclysmic war with the United States and its Asian allies.
For Chinese strategists, these past examples are instructive. The modern revisionists all failed to resolve threats on their seaward flanks and suffered for it. Neither France nor Germany was naturally inclined to the sea and were ruined at the hands of rimland coalitions led by global naval powers. Imperial Japan provoked a two-front war, fighting Chinese armies on the Asian mainland and American expeditionary forces at sea, which proved too much to bear. And the Soviet Union ultimately could not overcome its rimland Cold War opponent, composed of coastal states and spearheaded by U.S. air and sea forces. Beijing has thus determined that before it can pull a vast swath of Eurasia into its orbit, it must first achieve primacy on its exposed maritime periphery.
Beijing protests that its maritime flank is surrounded by two concentric, crescent-shaped island chains littered with U.S. allies and military bases. The first, closer to China, runs southward from Alaska’s Aleutian archipelago through Japan and Taiwan and down past the Philippines. The second, farther east, runs from Japan through the U.S. military hub on Guam and to the northern reaches of Australia. The United States is bound by defense treaties to Australia, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as to South Korea, which sits inside this rimland perimeter.
This U.S.-backed barrier has frustrated China since the early days of the Cold War, when a “hub and spokes” network of bilateral alliances between the United States and a number of western Pacific states thwarted Beijing’s regional ambitions. In the 1950s, the United States, in defense of its allies, even threatened China with nuclear attack. In 1996, during the third Taiwan Strait crisis, Washington humiliated Beijing when it dispatched two carrier strike groups to support Taipei. Today, the United States is promoting trilateral cooperation with Japan and South Korea to strengthen regional defenses against ballistic missiles. As Xi watches this, the searing experiences of the past are never far from his mind. And China now has in spades something it once lacked: striking power, both nuclear and conventional, of the kind that can split Washington from its Asia-Pacific allies.
BREAKING GROUND
The debate in the United States over the meaning of China’s nuclear buildup has long played out in narrow military terms, divorced from geopolitics. American analysts have fixated primarily on whether Beijing is engaging in an arms race, whether it’s countering what it perceives as an increased U.S. nuclear threat, or whether its stated policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons is genuine. But China’s breakout can only be fully appreciated in the context of its geopolitical ambitions. Focusing on how this expansion represents a means to its broader political ends underscores why China has little interest in the American understanding of “strategic stability,” or the idea that rivals will not try to exploit military developments to their advantage. Put simply, China’s nuclear geopolitics is about destabilizing the maritime barrier now set up against it.
China’s nuclear expansion will affect how U.S. allies perceive the regional military balance. As they make their assessments, they are taking into account the stunning nature, in both quantity and quality, of China’s nuclear breakout. The United States has an active arsenal of some 3,700 nuclear warheads, though less than half of these are deployed. Beijing is quickly closing the gap, having increased its warhead inventory from about 200 to 500 between 2020 and 2023. The Pentagon has forecast that China will boast more than 1,000 warheads by 2030 and upward of 1,500 by 2035. And China already has a formidable capacity to employ such weapons in highly accurate strikes: it has more land-based intercontinental and intermediate-range missile launchers than the United States does. What’s more, Washington retired its only regional nuclear option—a submarine-launched cruise missile—in 2013, meaning in a potential crisis it would have no regionally based nuclear capability to reassure its allies of its security guarantee.
The United States’ partners in the Asia-Pacific are understandably alarmed. According to a recent study by the National Bureau of Asian Research, China’s quantitative advantages have raised anxiety on the first island chain, particularly in Japan. Tokyo worries that Washington will grow risk averse along the rimland as China’s capacity to conduct precision strikes against the continental United States continues to increase, allowing Beijing to dial up the pressure without drawing an American response.
China’s nuclear geopolitics is about destabilizing the maritime barrier now set up against it.
China’s defense establishment is also exhibiting an increasing interest in coercive nuclear strategies. Chinese military theorists now routinely refer to the country’s modernized nuclear weapons as a “trump card” that can impede external intervention in regional affairs. And many Chinese defense analysts have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear coercion in the course of Russia’s war in Ukraine has prevented NATO from deeper intervention in that conflict, suggesting that Beijing could use its arsenal to achieve similar ends.
The Chinese conception of deterrence comprises the Western notion of dissuading adversaries from taking a particular course of action, but it also includes a more expansive goal: compelling adversaries to change their behavior. Training manuals for the branch of the Chinese army that controls the country’s land-based missiles have long advised that simply setting nuclear weapons at higher levels of readiness will “create a great shock in the enemy psyche” and shape the enemy’s actions. And now that China has a robust missile force to conduct coercive nuclear attacks, such tactics will have more credibility in the eyes of America’s regional partners. Beijing’s improved strike capabilities could thus encourage it to publicly abandon its no-first-use nuclear policy to drive a wedge between Washington and its allies.
As the United States’ Pacific partners increasingly see or experience Chinese efforts to use nuclear-backed coercion, their view of the regional balance could shift. And seeing inaction or insufficient action from Washington in the face of this intimidation would give them justifiable cause for further alarm. Crafting an effective response to China’s overall coercive power and the nuclear buildup itself will be key to maintaining U.S. credibility in the region.
SIMMERING POINT
China aims to use its nuclear breakout to pierce the rimland barrier without igniting a great-power war. Xi’s ability to dominate the conflict spectrum—from low-intensity political pressure to potential nuclear warfare—has likely emboldened him to sharpen the pressure in this region in recent months.
But China has been honing its capacity to pursue this coercive campaign for well over a decade. In 2012, Beijing seized from the Philippines control of the Scarborough Shoal, an important fishery in the South China Sea, using both low-intensity military force and economic pressure, including boycotts of some Philippine exports. The United States had protested China’s de facto annexation of the shoal, but Beijing’s escalation against the Philippines forced Washington to back off. Last summer, Beijing again initiated clashes in the South China Sea when Chinese maritime vessels rammed into Philippine ships within Manila’s exclusive economic zone. China faced no serious consequences.
Japan, too, has been subject to Chinese coercion since the dawn of the twenty-first century—and the pressure is rising with China’s nuclear buildup. Today, China is engaged in a persistent effort to unilaterally change the status quo of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands) just north of Taiwan; almost daily, the Chinese navy operates in their vicinity to enforce China’s “domestic maritime law.” Chinese military forces also routinely enter or surround Japanese territory. In August, for example, the Chinese navy and air force violated Japan’s territorial waters and airspace—an escalation that was eclipsed, just weeks later, when China sailed an aircraft carrier through Japanese waters for the first time. This persistent pressure is designed to wear Tokyo down, weaken the U.S.-Japanese alliance, and normalize China’s behavior to create a new bar by which to measure future aggression.
Taiwan remains the main target of China’s short-of-war coercion campaign. In addition to its military and political intimidation of the island, Beijing attempts to marginalize Taiwan’s standing on the world stage and erode its coverage within international legal structures. But the threat of escalation is key to subjugating Taiwan without large-scale warfare. Beijing can, for example, exploit the possibility of an amphibious invasion to compel certain segments of the Taiwanese political class and population to give in to Chinese control of the island. Should Beijing decide to take this more extreme course of action, it would likely use the threat of limited nuclear escalation to deter U.S. and Japanese intervention.
Since Beijing initiated its sprawling coercive campaign, few of the countries it has targeted have grown their military capabilities. The Chinese army, on the other hand, has transformed into Asia’s largest military force, in both conventional and nuclear capability. For Xi, however, success is not about winning a head-to-head military clash that provokes U.S. intervention. Instead, success is defined as decoupling the United States from the region entirely by undermining Washington’s credibility there and compelling U.S. allies to shy away from confrontation. As China’s recent behavior suggests, China’s nuclear buildup has emboldened Xi to accept greater risks to achieve these objectives.
LIFTING THE COUNTERVAIL
Beijing’s short-of-war coercion campaign has thrown Washington into a reactive, defensive stance that has unnerved its regional partners. U.S. officials have yet to address the regional strategic implications of China’s nuclear breakout. If these trends continue, China could find itself well positioned to dissolve the bonds that tie the United States to its Asia-Pacific allies.
To blunt China’s momentum and regain the initiative, the United States needs a countervailing strategy that can demonstrate credibility to its regional partners and change Beijing’s calculus. China is simultaneously focused on its internal security, its regional ambitions, and the larger global designs that its regional actions support. Any U.S. strategy should force Xi to make punishing tradeoffs between his goals so that he cannot harbor the illusion of advancing on one front without jeopardizing the others.
China has distinct vulnerabilities. Like all nations, it has finite resources and cannot simply spend its way out of the burden of choice. This is especially true for an emerging, relatively isolated continental power with grand ambitions, a slowing economy, and the insecurity of a Marxist-Leninist regime—namely, a deep, near-obsessive distrust of its own citizens. By contrast, the United States is an established global power with a democratic system that lends itself to far-flung alliances and the creative energies of free societies. Washington’s task, then, is to exploit its favorable military, economic, and political asymmetries to exacerbate Beijing’s continental isolation.
The military prong of a countervailing strategy should emphasize existing U.S. advantages in alliance partnerships, missile defense, and undersea warfare. By embedding Japan and South Korea in a regional missile defense system and linking it to improved U.S. homeland missile defenses, for example, Washington can alleviate its allies’ fears and raise the stakes for Beijing dialing up pressure on any of them. Washington’s redeployment of a submarine-launched nuclear-armed cruise missile, which would give it a prompt, regionally based response option, would further boost allies’ confidence and divert more Chinese resources to missile defense and undersea warfare.
Any U.S. strategy should force Xi to make punishing tradeoffs between his goals.
The economic dimension should make use of allies’ interest in American markets. By deepening trade relations in the western Pacific, Washington would convey to its partners and to Beijing that U.S. economic security is indivisible from the regional status quo. Updated bilateral trade pacts focused on sectors that China dominates—such as critical minerals and pharmaceutical supply chains—would also wean Washington and its partners off the Chinese market and harden them against Beijing’s coercion. Although American domestic politics has made the establishment of trade pacts difficult, there is an appetite in Washington for agreements that counter China’s strategy of creating economic dependencies.
The final prong of the United States’ strategy should center on politics. Beijing has been waging a largely one-sided philosophical struggle against the United States by flooding online outlets with disinformation in an attempt to exploit existing rifts within American society. Washington has hesitated to meet this ideological challenge. But in doing so, it has forfeited the chance to exploit China’s greatest vulnerability: its political system. Beijing devotes enormous resources to controlling its 1.4 billion citizens. The United States can use this fixation to impose steep costs on China, such as by finding ways to circumvent online censorship and disseminate writing by Chinese dissidents about the government’s corruption and economic failings. Beijing has gone to great lengths to silence individual dissidents and stamp out minor protests, suggesting it would spare no expense in countering a broader campaign. The best way to establish guardrails with China is to steer Xi’s attention away from his regional and global designs. The more he is focused at home, the less effort and fewer resources Beijing will devote to power projection.
Without a countervailing strategy that harnesses its competitive advantages, the United States risks its forward position in the western Pacific, which will be further eroded by a narrow military view of China’s nuclear breakout. Washington should exploit its asymmetric strengths and focus on revitalizing its credibility among its allies, exacerbating Beijing’s distinct vulnerabilities, and ultimately tipping the cost-benefit balance for China’s nuclear-backed coercion campaign. Once it appreciates the subtle role that China’s nuclear buildup plays in advancing Beijing’s geopolitical agenda, the United States can shift its own policies to maintain the status quo.
- KYLE BALZER is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
- DAN BLUMENTHAL is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.
