The Island-Chain Allies

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“Whether minilateral arrangements can accumulate to a point that triggers desperation in Beijing depends, in my view, primarily on Chinese perception and only secondarily on the depth of the partnerships themselves,” says Ryosuke Hanada at Macquarie University in Australia. “The decisive variable is whether Beijing interprets a given measure as crossing red lines — itself a function of Chinese strategic culture, leadership psychology and the broader political moment.” At the heart of this dilemma is the notion that rising powers lash out when they fear that their enemies are pushing them into a corner from which it will be hard, if not impossible, to escape. Hanada points to the cycle of escalation between Imperial Japan and the U.S. in 1940 and 1941, in which “each step that Washington or Tokyo considered calibrated and below the threshold of provocation was perceived in the other capital as aggressive beyond what was intended.” Japan’s expansion into northern Indochina in 1940, for example, prompted the Roosevelt administration’s first round of export restrictions. Then Tokyo’s move into southern Indochina in July 1941 prompted an asset freeze and a full oil and gasoline embargo. The resulting strategic suffocation, many historians believe, inspired Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and other U.S. territories. “The general lesson — that measures intended to deter can instead accelerate a spiral toward war — seems to me a robust one,” Hanada said. “Whether it transposes cleanly onto twenty-first-century China is a question I genuinely cannot answer, particularly given the additional variable introduced by U.S. conduct in Venezuela and Iran, which has presumably reshaped Beijing’s reading of U.S. resolve and risk tolerance.”