A landmark deal to share U.S. and British nuclear-powered submarine technology with Australia could play a key role in a hypothetical crisis with China over Taiwan, the State Department’s second-highest-ranking official projected on Wednesday.
“AUKUS has the potential to have submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordnance from long distances,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said, referring to the acronym for the military alliance. “Those have enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances.”
Campbell’s remark, made at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., suggests that Chinese forces would have to account for not only American forces but also the capabilities of Australia or the United Kingdom if Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping sought to subjugate Taiwan. And their potential involvement in such a crisis is just one aspect of a wider effort to harness the combined capabilities of U.S. allies and partners to deter China in hot spots throughout the Indo-Pacific.
“What we’re confronting now are challenges that require a much deeper engagement with allies and partners,” Campbell said. “That balance, that additional capacity, will help strengthen deterrence more generally.”
The long-term fate of Taiwan has emerged as one of the most consequential factors in U.S.-China relations. Chinese communist authorities have claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since taking power in Beijing in 1949, but the island, which provided a last refuge for the nationalist regime overthrown in the Chinese Civil War, has developed into a center-left democracy and the key provider of advanced semiconductor microchips for the advanced economies around the world.
“What we’re seeing today is the increased engagement of a variety of countries in Europe in the Indo-Pacific that are speaking out about their and our collective desire to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Campbell said. “And so, I actually believe that some of those steps actually assist in deterrence; the idea that there is a commonality of spirit with respect to the need to send clear messages on conduct — with respect to either the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait — I think is, in fact, encouraging.”
China’s various sovereignty claims extend across the Indo-Pacific, the expansiveness of which is perhaps most vividly on display in the South China Sea, a vast body of water vital to global commerce that links several Pacific nations. China has laid claim to most of that sea, in defiance of an international tribunal that faulted Beijing for trying to trample over the rights of the Philippines, a former U.S. colony that is still linked to Washington through a mutual defense treaty.
“What China has been doing in recent years is to fundamentally force the American-led alliance system to change the nature of the alliance system from exclusively bilateral alliance to gradually a multilateral collective defense system, the like of which obviously is NATO,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Miles Yu, who served as China policy adviser during Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s tenure, told the Washington Examiner. “So right now, because there is a common threat from China felt by all of these treaty allies … they’re trying to change that framework.”
Yu offered that assessment in connection to President Joe Biden’s plan to host a trilateral summit with Japanese President Fumio Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. next week. And Campbell cited this summit as an example of U.S. allies coordinating on security issues.
“It is fair to say that you will see commitments on all three nations that involve closer coordination and engagement in the South China Sea and elsewhere,” he said.
Yu has argued elsewhere that “there is an emerging international alliance, forged in the face of today’s greatest global threat to freedom and democracy,” which he envisions will link NATO and the U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific.
“Obviously, [the U.S.-Japan-Philippines summit is] a very important move toward that eventuality,” he suggested.
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Campbell stopped short of echoing such rhetoric, but he acknowledged that “the idea really is the linking, strategically, of these two critical geographic vectors of the Indo-Pacific and Europe,” particularly in light of China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“It used to be that we had sort of this hub-and-spoke set of relationships between the United States and allies and partners,” he said. “Now, we’re creating … the lattice-fence arrangement where [there are] lots of intertwined, overlapping, interlocking engagements.”