... Colby advocates what he calls a “strategy of denial” (the title of his much-discussed, if crushingly dry, 2021 book on the topic). “My argument is that what matters for denying China regional hegemony over Asia, to get right down to it, is the military balance in Asia.”
Sanctions, as the war in Ukraine has amply demonstrated, don’t work. Blockades have also proved insufficient to stop a capable state bent on conquest: “If China’s gonna take Taiwan, and break up our anti-hegemonic coalition, they’ll be able to rinse and repeat after Taiwan with places like the Philippines, and so on. Not with the goal of territorial expansion necessarily beyond Taiwan, but with the goal of breaking up that [US-led] coalition.” Colby’s strategy is about “trying to deny China that secure geo-economic sphere”.
What does denial mean? “It means if we can defeat an invasion of an ally in the Western Pacific along the first island chain, we’ll probably be fine.”
