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The Iran War and the Question of Chinese Great Power
The author opens with the proposition that the People’s Republic of China possesses all the economic, technological, and military ingredients required of a great power, but displays lack of ability and risk-averseness in respect of expeditionary warfare at far distances from the homeland. In his view, this has been underscored by Beijing’s stance in the ongoing Iran war, where it has kept a safe military distance and avoided providing any security guarantees to a major ally fighting a war of survival.
While China has been militarily assertive in its immediate neighbourhood in the Western Pacific, Beijing has displayed a reluctance to deploy its military in locations or situations where it could face strong military opposition and suffer losses of men and material.
The author contends that this is so because China, despite boasting of a large and technologically modern military - including the world‘s largest Navy - simply does not have the institutional capability and risk-taking ethos required to deploy and fight in arenas distant from the homeland and its periphery . He believes that with this constraint, China does not meet the threshold to be termed a ‘great power’ in the classical sense.
The author goes on to outline the various historical, geographical and cultural reasons which inhibit Beijing. He underlines that fear of the impact of any military reverse on a brittle authoritarian system, and on the carefully structured image of the apex leadership, is also a major factor in China’s hesitancies.
In the author’s view, this display of cautiousness to commit military forces has not gone unnoticed in the Indo-Pacific. Individually and together, major powers of this vast maritime construct are now strengthening their offensive and defensive military capabilities, predicated on Beijing’s display of military conservatism in the post-Covid era.
The author further contends that due to these very same factors, with the addition of a constricted maritime geography and the potential of strong military opposition west of the Malacca Straits, China is unlikely to be able to dominate the Indian Ocean Region even in the medium term. This is all the more so since its forces could get trapped in the Indian Ocean, which is landlocked to the north, and difficult to ingress and egress to both east and west, during periods of armed hostilities.
The author concludes by highlighting the severe vacuum in the Chinese military leadership on account of continual purges of the PLA, and is optimistic that major powers of the Indo-Pacific should be able to balance and limit Chinese military assertiveness to the Western Pacific in the foreseeable future
To read this DPG Policy Brief Volume XI, Issue 15, please click “The Iran War and the Question of Chinese Great Power”.
