China Seeks Regional Influence While Avoiding Costly Military Commitments

China’s Indo-Pacific strategy contains a tension: it seeks control over contested territory and greater influence over regional security, yet its leaders place a high value on sovereignty and have not built the overseas military network that might appear necessary to protect China’s expanding interests. For Isaac Kardon, these ambitions fit together less as a plan for global intervention than as an effort to secure China’s room to maneuver while limiting the risks of acting abroad.

Kardon describes three connected security ambitions. First is restoring what Beijing considers Chinese sovereignty over contested territories. Taiwan is the central case; South and East China Sea islands and territories disputed with India are secondary. This priority, he says, is “by a mile.” China has been willing to take costly actions and pursue gradual campaigns to create conditions for control, even when it has not moved to seize territory militarily.

Second, he says, is weakening the US military position and alliance network in the region—from the first island chain to the Pacific Islands and Australasia. Kardon sees US alliances as a principal geostrategic obstacle to China’s territorial ambitions nearby. Opposition to US-led security arrangements is therefore not only a general preference for regional autonomy. It is also tied to how much room China has to pursue its claims.

The third ambition is less explicit and, Kardon says, requires more inference. China wants the ability to sustain its military, economy and society through a severe international crisis, when it could not assume that energy, minerals or agricultural products would continue arriving, or that overseas markets would remain open. He describes the underlying goal as gaining “a measure of control over their own destiny.” That includes securing trade routes through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, and developing greater control over the movement and processing of important resources.

Kardon does not describe this as a fully realized turn toward economic self-sufficiency. Rather, he sees an effort to build the capacity to keep essential flows moving if the economic system China has relied on stops serving it. Shipping, trade, and the mining, refining, processing and transport of minerals are among the practical components. In his account, the ability to sustain those flows through a prolonged crisis would help keep the country functioning and the Party in power.

These ambitions reinforce one another. A stronger position over territory and maritime space could support China’s regional standing; weakening the US military presence could reduce an obstacle to that position; and more secure supply routes could help China withstand a prolonged confrontation. But the means of achieving these goals need not all be military. That distinction becomes important in Kardon’s account of China’s limited overseas basing—and of the difference between preparing for a crisis and choosing to start one.

Kardon argues that China opposes international conflict in principle but does little to prevent it in practice. He calls this “hyper-sovereigntist” behavior: a foreign-policy outlook that prizes state sovereignty so highly that China is reluctant to take meaningful risks over what another government does within its own borders, or to intervene in conflicts that do not directly threaten Chinese sovereignty.

The distinction, for Kardon, is between diplomatic language and costly action. China points to its role as the second-largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping, contributing on the order of a few hundred million dollars, and to its peacekeeping personnel. He does not dismiss those contributions. But he considers them a thin basis for claiming a consequential role in preventing or arresting the conflicts now underway. Peacekeeping is marginal, he argues, compared with the scale of the wars and crises in which China might otherwise use its economic or diplomatic leverage.

He illustrates the gap with several examples. In Ukraine, he says, China trades with both sides and sells drone components, while providing Russia with economic support that helps it continue the war. Beijing has periodically offered diplomatic proposals, including a 12-point plan early in the conflict and later proposals with fewer points. Kardon characterizes these as low-probability efforts whose central message is not to use nuclear weapons. He calls that message important, but not a meaningful intervention in the conflict.

On Gaza, he sees strong public condemnation but little effort to halt the fighting, alongside continued trade with Israel. In the conflict involving Iran, he says, China has met with both Americans and Iranians and made mild appeals about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but has not taken significant risks. Kardon’s test is whether China has been willing to use its economic power or accept substantial costs to change what is happening.

Kardon says the pattern is not limited to these conflicts. He points to China’s approach to crises in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Georgia, Sudan and Somalia, while cautioning that he is not minimizing those conflicts; he is emphasizing how little China has done to affect them. He sees the posture as persistent across changes in China’s relative power. In his account, leaders regard another state’s sovereign decision as its own business—even when that decision involves Russia invading a neighbor or Syria gassing its own people—provided China’s sovereignty is not directly implicated. The result is often what he calls cheap talk: high-minded language about peaceful coexistence without a willingness to assume significant risk.

Kardon draws on the work of China foreign-policy scholar Iain Johnston, whose term “hyper-sovereigntist” he borrows. He says Johnston is not known for exaggerating China’s international behavior and has written against some received wisdom about it. For Kardon, the term helps explain why China’s conduct on international law and the law of the sea places such weight on sovereignty and non-interference.

The exception Economy raises is China’s role in the Saudi-Iran agreement. Kardon acknowledges it, but says the subsequent conflict involving Saudi Arabia and an Iranian proxy—and Iran’s attacks on Saudi sites—does not make the agreement a strong advertisement for China’s capacity as a peacemaker.

Elizabeth Economy asks whether this posture risks damaging China’s credibility with countries that expect more from its security partnerships. Kardon doubts that the credibility cost is large. China uses expansive language about peace, security and a “community of common destiny,” but he questions whether other governments interpret that rhetoric as a promise that Beijing will take costly action to defend global peace. China may not be presenting itself to those audiences as a heavyweight in conflict prevention in the first place.

The repeated reliance on China’s UN peacekeeping contributions is revealing in Kardon’s view: it is often the first example offered in support of a larger international role, and may be the only one. The contribution matters, but he does not think it establishes the case that China is prepared to intervene meaningfully in conflicts.

The Gulf offers a pointed example of the bargain. Economy suggests that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates might expect China to use its influence with Iran, given Beijing’s ties with Gulf states and the importance of future economic relations there. Kardon responds that those governments have long known China supports Iran’s ballistic-missile program and buys its oil and gas. They have nonetheless continued to pursue economic relations with China. In his view, Beijing has chosen to make money on both sides rather than accept the costs of pressing one.

China’s dependence on overseas trade creates a reason to operate farther from home. That raises a question about military bases: if China needs to protect overseas interests and keep resources moving, why has it not built a larger network? Economy recalls that China’s first military logistics base was established in Djibouti in 2017, and that she had heard predictions of many additional bases, including claims that China wanted a network as large as the United States’. Since Djibouti, Kardon says, no further formal PLA bases have been established.

He notes more limited, base-like arrangements or facilities in China’s immediate periphery, including Cambodia, Tajikistan and Laos. He says an airfield in Laos apparently has a number of PLA Air Force aircraft. These examples mean there is activity beyond Djibouti, but Kardon describes the sites as modest and geographically close to China. He also refers to reported overtures to countries in the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and West Africa, but says these have not produced another formal base. His assessment is therefore not that China has no overseas military-related activity, but that it has not built the broad network that some earlier predictions anticipated.

Kardon says the idea of overseas interests and protecting them became prominent during the 2010s. In his conversations with Chinese interlocutors, he says, this shift brought a period when advocates could openly call for many bases. From a naval operational perspective, the need seemed straightforward: if protecting overseas interests was a stated PLA task, forces would need some way to operate abroad. Economy emphasizes the practical logic as well: refueling and other support could matter if China wanted to rely on military forces across the region.

Kardon agrees that this exposes a real tension. A strategy focused on staying close to home sits uneasily alongside an economy dependent on overseas resources and markets. But he questions whether protecting those flows requires a military network that resembles the US system. Ports, airfields and telecommunications infrastructure can provide dual-use advantages at lower economic and diplomatic cost than formal bases, and without drawing the same scrutiny as an overtly expansive military presence. He sees these as next-best substitutes, not proof that formal bases would have no value.

He also distinguishes the operational needs of protecting commerce from those of fighting a major war far from home. Kardon has difficulty identifying a contingency in which China would commit a large combat force anywhere but the Western Pacific. Keeping resources moving, or encouraging neutral countries to continue trading, may not require the same forces as a major distant combat operation. In some circumstances, economic investment and inducements could matter more than military deployment.

Fixed bases have costs of their own. Kardon says a large, fixed installation can be a “big fat target,” vulnerable even to relatively inexpensive munitions. In a Western Pacific conflict, missiles could damage airfields, block harbors and threaten ships. He argues that US planners starting from scratch would be unlikely to choose large bases inside a weapons engagement zone where China could saturate them with missiles. Recent wars, he says, have sharpened questions about the usefulness of fixed bases under attack.

That does not mean China has abandoned the ambition. Kardon suggests that Chinese leaders may have judged that building bases attracts too much attention, pointing to US concern over a possible Chinese facility in the United Arab Emirates. He says China may have had different expectations when it established Djibouti, but he does not claim that Beijing made a definitive decision against further bases. His broader point is that formal bases are only one option, and may not be the preferred one when dual-use infrastructure and other forms of access are available.

Asked whether China’s objectives have changed since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, Kardon sees greater ambition, more assertive behavior and bolder rhetoric than under Hu Jintao. But he cautions against treating Xi’s arrival as a controlled experiment. China has also become more powerful economically, militarily, diplomatically and technologically. Those changes make it difficult to separate the leader’s personal preferences from the country’s broader rise.

Kardon’s sharper claim is that Xi’s domestic priorities have had major consequences for foreign policy. Xi’s effort to concentrate authority around himself, alongside the Communist Party, has placed domestic, regime and political security at the center of his rule. Kardon sees that inward focus as a driving force in China’s foreign security policy, and as a significant departure from what he believes would have been the priorities of other leaders.

Economy offers a complementary account of change. She points to Xi’s reorganization of the PLA, anti-corruption campaigns in the military and party, and efforts to align state-owned and private firms with state goals through technology policy and military-civil fusion. She sees significant change in both domestic and foreign policy, while acknowledging that the debate remains open: did Xi create an inflection point, or accelerate ambitions already present? Kardon agrees that other changes in China’s power and circumstances make the question difficult to settle.

Kardon also sees a more organized effort to promote an Asian security model. Ideas of a new or Asian security concept have appeared in Chinese foreign policy for decades, he says, with precedents reaching back to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. But Xi’s more recent treatment of the subject—as a work program for diplomats—signals greater ambition. It suggests Beijing believes its regional diplomatic presence and economic weight can help it shape the terms of security in Asia, especially at a time when Chinese officials may perceive the United States as less invested.

Kardon is cautious about claiming that the model has a precise or settled content. Its basic orientation, he suggests, is that regional order should not be determined by the United States and its allies. It is also consistent with China’s insistence on sovereignty and non-interference. But that principle collides with the breadth of China’s own territorial claims, including its claims around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Economy emphasizes that a substantial part of that sea is also at issue. What China presents as respect for sovereignty, Kardon argues, can therefore become a source of friction with its neighbors.

The idea has sometimes been summarized as “Asia for Asians,” though Kardon says Xi did not use that exact phrase in the 2014 speech commonly associated with it. The summary nevertheless captures the strategic implication: a regional order less shaped by Washington and more shaped by China, whose size gives it an overwhelming advantage over its neighbors. Kardon adds that he sees less public promotion of the concept now, while allowing that it may figure more prominently in bilateral discussions than in messaging aimed at a broad regional audience. He also says its appeal may be reinforced by a perception—whether warranted or not—that the United States is less committed to the region.

China’s efforts to diminish the US alliance network can produce the opposite effect, Kardon argues. The more Beijing pressures its neighbors, the more it signals why they may need US ties and one another. China’s capabilities and stated intentions, as well as its actions, can give regional partners a reason to cooperate and make alliances more operationally significant.

Kardon points to closer exercises and coordination among the United States and regional partners, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, as well as significant weapons systems brought into the region. He sees this as a kind of dialectic: pressure intended to weaken alliances can help supply the rationale for their continued development. He notes that assessments of growing cooperation have become more complicated since the early years of Russia’s war in Ukraine, when observers discussed the possibility of an “Asian NATO” or “global NATO,” but says the underlying dynamic remains.

On the US side, however, Kardon sees the Trump administration’s second term as damaging to regional confidence. He uses a metaphor: during Trump’s first term, the United States broke its allies’ leg; the Biden administration arrived with flowers and balloons; then Trump’s second term returned with a baseball bat and hit the same leg again. His point is that sharp swings in US treatment make long-term commitments harder to trust. He says the administration also damaged the relationship with India, complicating an Indo-Pacific strategy designed to balance China.

Kardon argues that the result looks contradictory to governments in Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra and Singapore: the United States describes China as a major strategic competitor, yet also signals that it may want a truce and could leave the rest of the region to manage China’s power. It will take a long period of rebuilding to repair the resulting credibility problem, he says. At the same time, China’s own behavior can produce “self-harm”: its pressure may sharpen Japanese concern about the consequences of a Taiwan crisis, for example.

Economy offers a more mixed reading. During a visit to Taiwan and Japan in September, she heard that the military relationship with the United States was as strong as ever, while political signals and other aspects of the relationship remained confusing and concerning. She sees competitive US strategies in security and technology alongside rhetoric that makes the broader political relationship difficult to interpret.

That distinction matters to her: military and technology cooperation can remain active even while partners are uncertain about the political relationship. Kardon accepts that these strands coexist, but asks whether military cooperation addresses what regional partners most want or what best serves US interests. The central problem, as he sees it, is not only that US policy sends different signals across different areas. It is that the country’s objectives are unclear: is the aim to prepare for a war, or to preserve economic access and regional stability?

Economy agrees that it is difficult for partners to assemble the different strands into a coherent strategy. She describes her own reading as an effort to see the glass as half full, but does not dispute the problem of coherence. Their difference is one of emphasis, not a disagreement that military cooperation can coexist with political uncertainty. For Kardon, the military relationship cannot by itself resolve questions about what the United States intends to protect or how consistently it will act.

Kardon rejects treating a Taiwan contingency as a single test of whether the PLA is “ready.” The phrase can refer to anything from cyber operations to a blockade to a full invasion, and each has different military and political requirements. The most extreme option, a major amphibious landing, strikes him as exceptionally risky and therefore unlikely absent particular political conditions.

An invasion would be among the most difficult amphibious operations in history, Kardon says, given Taiwan’s geography and the forces that could oppose a landing over time. He also cautions against dismissing it with the idea that China lacks the ships or aircraft to get across the strait. Commercial capacity could matter if the PLA first established a beachhead and suppressed Taiwanese and US air power, including by attacking regional bases. The challenge is not that the operation is literally impossible; it is that the PLA cannot infer success simply from counting missiles, boats and personnel. A capability benchmark, including the much-discussed 2027 target, does not itself mean that an invasion would be feasible or that Beijing would choose to attempt one.

Other options may be more plausible. Kardon says a crippling cyberattack is conceivable, while noting that outsiders cannot know every vulnerability or exploit. He also points to the extent of covert influence and other forms of access in Taiwan as reasons such an operation cannot be dismissed.

A high-end blockade is within the range of operations he considers the PLA capable of conducting. Taiwan’s lack of land borders could make it more exposed to being cut off than Iran, and Kardon says China’s military is likely studying the US blockade of Iran. But a blockade would not necessarily be a limited or contained action. Kardon describes Chinese blockade doctrine as highly kinetic, likely involving missile strikes. Attacks on commercial shipping could escalate quickly, making a blockade both a serious military option and a possible route to a larger conflict.

Economy also asks whether US operations in the Middle East have weakened its ability to respond in the Indo-Pacific. Kardon says the effect on readiness is significant: munitions stocks are down, forces have rotated out, a carrier strike group was absent for a period before its replacement arrived, Marine Expeditionary Units were no longer in the region, and missile-defense systems such as THAAD were drawn down. He notes that South Korea paid a substantial cost in hosting THAAD. Other air, naval and missile-defense capabilities, including interceptors, are also no longer in place.

Kardon says the near-term impact on readiness is real, but is less certain that it makes a Taiwan conflict more likely. The relevant question is whether US forces stationed in the region are the factor preventing Beijing from acting. If the United States decided that a conflict was unacceptable, forces might arrive later; given China’s missile capabilities, it might even be safer for some forces to leave the area and fight their way back in than to remain exposed.

That argument separates two questions that can be blurred together: whether the United States currently has the forces it would want in theater, and whether Chinese leaders believe that an attack would achieve their political aims. Kardon does not say that readiness is irrelevant. He questions whether the immediate presence of a carrier group or a particular number of missiles is the sole factor keeping China from taking the enormous gamble of trying to take Taiwan. The decision is political, and the expected political outcome matters alongside military capability.

The Middle East fighting could still shape Chinese assessments. Kardon says Beijing is watching the United States conduct a blockade, seeing American bases and airfields come under pressure, and observing the use of asymmetric capabilities against a much stronger military. Those examples may give China pause about the costs of conflict, but they also demonstrate that military superiority does not guarantee political success. What the lessons mean for China remains uncertain. The question is not only what the PLA can do, but whether using force would produce the political outcome Xi wants.

Economy asks whether Russia, Iran and North Korea would join China in a Taiwan conflict. Kardon does not see them as a coherent alliance that would automatically enter such a war. China has supported Russia’s ability to continue fighting in Ukraine, he says, and continues to provide Iran with some support, including apparently intelligence and possibly precursors for ballistic-missile fuel. But he does not think China has done enough for either country to assume that they would fight on its behalf. North Korea is formally different, he notes, but he says he would believe in its direct involvement when he sees it.

That does not mean their role would be irrelevant. Russia, Iran and North Korea may be more willing than China to take aggressive actions in their own regions if US attention shifts to the Western Pacific. Iran could provide drones, although Kardon questions whether China needs them given its own capacity. The more likely effect, he says, would be to open another front or otherwise complicate the US response, rather than to supply China with capabilities it lacks.

Economy cautions against overlooking indirect forms of help, including energy and other economic support. Kardon agrees that complications are the more plausible pathway, and notes that North Korea could create problems for South Korea. China itself could be an economic lifeline to partners that need energy or other support, while actions by other governments could force the United States and its allies to divide attention across theaters. These possibilities are different from a formal decision by all four countries to fight together, but could still matter to how a crisis develops.

The connection between regional crises is not merely hypothetical. Kardon recalls that the United States sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait in 1950 after North Korea attacked South Korea. The US decision linked the Korean conflict to the fate of Taiwan, despite the two being distinct issues. A future crisis could produce similar cascade effects: a conflict in one theater could change what the United States does in another. Kardon’s point is not that the sequence would repeat, but that the regional balance can link crises that are not formally part of the same war.

Kardon says one question he most wants answered is what Xi Jinping himself believes about the ideology associated with his name. Is the flood of ideology primarily a way to discipline the party, instill fear and consolidate control, or does it reflect a genuine ideological project? Kardon says outside scholars cannot answer conclusively with the sources available to them. Ideology and personal control can coexist; the unresolved question is which matters most when the stakes are high. He suspects the latter matters more in extremis, but presents that as a judgment rather than a settled conclusion.

The question connects to Kardon’s recommendation of Emily Feng’s Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria’s Civil War. He describes the book as an account of how China’s internal security concerns spill into international affairs. Drawing on Sheena Greitens’s work, Kardon connects the Chinese leadership’s perceptions of Uyghur fighters abroad to its domestic security policies. He says fighters trained and fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and eventually Syria, where some became part of the fight against the Assad regime. For Kardon, the example shows how domestic fears and policies can shape China’s foreign-policy preferences and produce consequences beyond China’s borders.

Asked what he would tell President Trump to do differently, Kardon says the United States should recover a clear view of great-power competition. He says Trump’s first term recognized the importance of competition with China and Russia, but that the United States should now send consistent signals about its intentions. His proposed goal is to maintain a favorable balance of power and a stable, commercially open Indo-Pacific.

That advice follows from his broader concern about the gap between US descriptions of China as a major competitor and signals that Washington may prefer a truce or reduced involvement in the region. Kardon does not frame the prescription as keeping allies happy for its own sake. He calls instead for clarity about what the United States is trying to accomplish—and for conduct that makes that purpose legible to partners and competitors alike.