Introduction
Military coercion has already changed the Asia-Pacific region.
With so much attention being devoted to maritime security competition in Asia, including in the South China and East China seas, it is easy to forget how peaceful the region has been for several decades. In East Asia, no major power has been involved in so much as a limited inter-state war since China’s brief armed conflict with Vietnam in 1979. Peace among South Asian states has been broken more often, but mainly by circumscribed armed conflicts between India and Pakistan, including their most recent and very limited Kargil War in 1999.
This is an impressive record for a region that was riven by major wars in the middle of the twentieth century. But it does not mean that the making of military preparations has been abandoned in Asia. The region’s growing powers are devoting significant resources to their armed forces. Asian countries now spend $100 billion a year more on defence than all of the European members of NATO combined. Of particular note, China has emerged as the second-largest defence spender in the world after the United States. Beijing’s 2015 military budget was more than three times that of India’s, Asia’s second-largest defence spender, and almost four times as large as the combined defence spending of the 11 Southeast Asian states.
It is only right for scholars to wonder about the impact of China’s rapidly modernising military forces on US–China crisis stability, and to ask whether the economic interdependence between the United States and China really rules out an armed conflict between them. It is also important to consider what an Asian war might look like if it were to occur, and how it might be avoided in the first place. Uncertainty over quite how the Trump administration’s approach to Asia’s security will evolve increases the importance of this consideration. But there is another, more urgent strategic consideration for Asian countries as the locus of global power shifts in their direction. Strategic interactions that fall between complete non-violence and largescale combat are now ubiquitous in Asia. These events constitute a pattern of coercion involving the exploitation of potential violence to signal intent, influence behaviour, and change or uphold the status quo.
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