When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Whether the United States defines China as a global threat or a predominantly regional one will have pervasive implications for U.S. alliance and deterrence strategy in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The second Trump and Biden administrations agree on a key fact: China constitutes the most serious and systemic challenge to U.S. power and interests. Yet, they seem to disagree on how to characterize the nature and scale of that challenge. Whereas the Biden administration construed China as a global challenge, the Trump administration regularly emphasizes the centrality of the China threat in the Indo-Pacific.

Against this backdrop, President Donald Trump’s insistence on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine to focus on China has reignited debates about the opportunity costs of supporting versus not supporting Kyiv, and how that may impinge on America’s overall strategic position vis-à-vis Beijing. Three alternative visions for deterrence could help make sense of these dilemmas and their implications for U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific: bifurcation, cooperation, and integration.

Trade-offs Versus Payoffs

Those arguing that Washington should cut Ukraine loose have emphasized the importance of strategic trade-offs. According to this logic, the fact that a dollar spent in Ukraine is a dollar not spent on deterring China means supporting Ukraine is a strategic distraction — one that weakens America’s position in the Indo-Pacific.

Those in the “support Ukraine” camp have argued that standing by Ukraine can actually generate strategic payoffs in the context of competition with China. Payoff-related arguments come in different shapes and forms. Some argue that standing up for norms of acceptable state behavior whenever and wherever they are challenged sends a powerful deterrent signal to Beijing in relation to Taiwan. Others speak of strategic sequencing, and argue that degrading Russian military power in Europe today can set the foundations for prioritizing the China threat in the Indo-Pacific tomorrow. Others have viewed the war in Ukraine as a useful learning experience or an opportunity to revitalize America’s alliances and defense industrial base.

All the above points are valid, but they are also questionable. Research in international security shows that a great power’s reputation for upholding certain norms or commitments must be assessed in the context of each specific case, and not treated as a global or abstract commodity. Concretely, whether and how the United States decides (not) to react to Chinese aggression against Taiwan will be determined by the relative value Washington assigns to Taiwan, and not by whether or how Washington may have responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Relatedly, the war in Ukraine may indeed have given the United States an opportunity to revitalize its alliances — by both strengthening NATO and fostering greater cooperation between its Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific allies — and its industrial base. However, a similar reasoning can be applied to China. The war has led to a significant strengthening of the Sino-Russian partnership as well as a series of interlocking partnerships linking those two countries with North Korea and Iran. Moreover, enabling Russia’s defense-industrial and operational effort through the export of dual-use goods and technologies has further stimulated China’s pace of industrial production, which remains higher than that of the United States. The question, therefore, is not so much whether America’s alliances or industrial base can benefit or are benefitting from supporting Ukraine, but rather whether they are benefitting more than China’s.

At the heart of this trade-offs-versus-payoffs debate lie a series of questions around the nature and scale of the Chinese challenge, which are in many ways reminiscent of Cold War-era debates about the nature of Soviet challenge:

Should China be seen as a regional (i.e. Indo-Pacific) threat or a global one? How much effort should be devoted to countering China in the Indo-Pacific versus countering China elsewhere? How important is it to counter Chinese influence in Europe vis-à-vis other regions? How much energy should be devoted to countering a low-cost Chinese effort to create instability in regions like Europe or the Middle East? And how deep does Sino-Russian strategic cooperation run?

Regional Versus Global

Ranking threats and regions — and figuring out how the two intersect — is central to strategy. There is a vibrant scholarly debate about the relationship between the regional and global “levels of analysis” in international security.  Are regions subject to their own rules, actors, and dynamics, and thus relatively autonomous from broader, global geopolitical dynamics? Or do global or “systemic” geopolitical dynamics supersede or even determine regional outcomes?

Because threats travel more easily at short distances, the degree of security interdependence is more intense within regions than across them. That logic is enshrined in balance of threat theory, which associates balancing and alliance formation not only with “raw power” but with geographical proximity, the local distribution of capabilities and intentions, and dismisses discussions on system polarity as too abstract and indeterminate.

However, exogenous forces can impinge on a region’s security dynamics, sometimes decisively. Global powers are in fact characterized by their ability to “see through” regions, so much so that their decision to engage or not engage in a particular region is often driven by broader strategic considerations. That characteristic is particularly salient in the case of “seapowers” like the United States, who think about space and geography in more expansive terms than “landpowers.” As famously argued by Nicholas J. Spykman, while land powers think “in terms of continuous surfaces surrounding a central point of control,” seapowers think “in terms of points and connecting lines dominating an immense territory.”

Whether the global level of analysis projects more or less prominently onto the regional one is always contingent on a variety of factors. Two can be highlighted here: first, the nature and intensity of global power competition, and second, the importance assigned by global powers to different world regions.

To be sure, while a global approach to strategic planning can elude a much-needed reflection on trade-offs and priorities, a region-centric approach has its shortcomings too. Thus, for instance, during the Cold War, the United States and its allies recognized both that competition with the Soviet Union was global in scope but also that its center of gravity laid in Europe.

Focusing on the China threat at large versus the China threat in the Indo-Pacific has different implications for grand strategy and for defense strategy. Therefore, a key practical question for the United States — and its allies — is how to reconcile the assumption that the Indo-Pacific region constitutes the center of gravity of the China threat with the imperative that China’s moves in other regions ought to be monitored — and often countered — too.

The notion that everything matters in competition with China cannot obscure the reality that not everything matters to the same extent. Chinese presence or influence in sub-Saharan Africa will not be perceived as threatening to U.S. interests as Chinese presence in regions that are geographically closer to the United States or have a higher economic or strategic value, like Central America or Europe. Accordingly, U.S. efforts to counter Chinese influence in one region must be proportional to the effort devoted by China to gaining influence therein. In that sense, the costs or efforts China may incur to destabilize a certain region may be lower than the ones the United States may incur to stabilize it. That means the United States should probably be ready to let some things go. As argued by President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor Mac Bundy, “if we guard our toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, we will lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds.”

Three Alternative Approaches to Deterrence

How, then, should the United States and its allies think about deterrence in an era of simultaneous threats in Europe and Asia? To make sense of this question, I outline three distinct, ideal-type approaches to deterrence and alliance-management in Europe and the Indo-Pacific: bifurcation, cooperation, and integration.

Bifurcation

Bifurcation entails treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as separate and distinct theaters, shaped by different strategic geographies, actors, and dynamics, and thus maintaining a regional approach to defense strategy and force planning tailored to the nature and needs of each theater and competitor.

Bifurcation allows to establish a sharp distinction between the China and Russia threats and how to approach them. It suggests that the United States should focus on the bigger threat and deprioritize — or even accommodate — the lesser threat, even if growing Sino-Russian coordination represents a persistent obstacle to bifurcation. Because bifurcation entails a strict separation between the two regions and alliance ecosystems, it allows for a much more tailored competitive strategy against China (the decisive threat), one that takes into account China’s specific capabilities and proclivities as well as the geography of the Western Pacific.

This approach assumes the acceptance of a higher degree of risk to U.S. alliances and interests in Europe. But it’s a calculated risk. The fact that America’s defensive perimeter in Europe enjoys comparatively much more geostrategic depth than in East Asia, and that European allies are — both collectively and individually — in a comparatively stronger position vis-à-vis Russia than Indo-Pacific allies vis-à-vis China means the U.S. can trade space (in Europe) for time (in the Indo-Pacific). Taking such strategic realities as a point of departure, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby has alluded to Winston Churchill’s famous dictum “if we win the big battle in the decisive theater, we can put everything straight afterwards.” Bifurcation thus assumes that if the United States gets things right in the primary theater, everything else will eventually sort itself out.

A bifurcation framework emphasizes the salience of trade-offs in U.S. defense planning and resources, the need to establish clear priorities, and underscores the fact that U.S. allies in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific are competing for U.S. attention and resources. It also entails strengthening U.S.-led alliances in the Indo-Pacific and keeping cross-regional links between U.S.-led alliances to a minimum.

Cooperation

Cooperation, in turn, is premised on the need to reconcile the notion that security threats are primarily regional with the recognition that strategic dynamics in Europe and the Indo-Pacific theaters are somewhat intertwined. Cooperation calls for a “cross-” or “inter-” theater approach to deterrence and alliance management, as opposed to a two-theater or one-theater framework.

This approach assumes that the United States can “slice its force” and can, at a minimum, leave a layer of strategic enablers in the secondary theater — command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, nuclear deterrence, ballistic missile defense, intermediate- and long-range conventional missiles or advanced electronic warfare capabilities — even as it focuses the bulk of its energy in the primary theater.  This means that America’s European allies can focus on developing front-line, denial-centric forces and building a force structure that can do the heavy-lifting by plugging into America’s superstructure of enablers.

Under a cooperation framework, fostering collaboration between U.S. allies in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific allies might make sense but only as long as it is clear that the allies’ main focus should be on their respective regions.  The emphasis would therefore be more on cross-theater collaboration in defense-industrial and technological matters and less on military and operational cooperation.

Even if Asia is a predominantly air-sea environment and Europe an air-land one, U.S. allies in these two regions face similar strategic problems, namely how to implement deterrence by denial in maturing anti-access and area denial environments against nuclear armed adversaries, and how to facilitate access and movement for the United States to continue to be able to project overwhelming power and thus retain punishment options. This underscores the potential for synergies.

Thus, moving toward a cross-theater ecosystem of shared operational concepts, doctrines, capabilities, technologies, and standards geared for deterrence (by denial) could simplify standards and reduce the number of systems, platforms and munitions produced by NATO and its so-called Indo-Pacific four partners —  Japan, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand. Such an approach could yield significant gains in terms of efficiency, scale, and speed of delivery.

Integration

Finally, integration would entail treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a single theater, conceiving of China and Russia as a bloc, and developing an integrated approach to deterrence and alliance management across both regions. This does not necessarily mean that European and Indo-Pacific allies should extend mutual defense commitments to each other’s regions or even assign permanent forces to each other’s regions. But it would require much stronger links between both alliance ecosystems in areas like command, control, intelligence, and defense planning.

Integration could, for instance, bring U.S. and allied forces under a single combatant command with responsibility over both the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic. Such an approach would assume that the United States cannot “slice its force” in wartime. Concretely, should a contingency break in Asia, the United States would be compelled to move its entire force (enablers included) to the primary theater, and thus be unable to leave a (meaningful) layer of strategic capabilities in the secondary theater. Since Europe and the Indo-Pacific would both be part of a single combatant command, the trade-offs associated with U.S. prioritization would be transferred from the strategic level to the tactical or theater one, and would be equivalent to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (a U.S. officer) deciding to concede space in NATO’s southeastern flank for the sake of the northeastern one. These would become operational decisions, thus arguably easing dilemmas about trading space in the secondary theater for time in the primary theatre, not least as allies would be plugged into an integrated command, control, and force planning architecture.

The Nuclear Variable

The distinction between bifurcation, cooperation, and integration may become clearer at lower levels of conflict intensity, and blurrier at higher levels. Extended nuclear deterrence is a global capability that provides the ultimate backstop of all U.S. alliances. However, it can be augmented by theater-level nuclear capabilities, as is the case with NATO today. That allows for some degree of bifurcation at the nuclear level as long as conflict above the nuclear threshold stays limited in scope.

The U.S. geographic combatant command structure does in fact already reflect a multi-tiered approach to this conundrum, with Strategic Command responsible for all nuclear threats together and European Command and Indo-Pacific Command focused on their respective regions up to the level of limited nuclear weapon employment. In that regard, extended nuclear deterrence in a bifurcation context requires a non-strategic nuclear posture tailored to the regional nuclear challenge, which at present is different in the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific.

Conclusion

The question of whether bifurcation, cooperation, or integration is best for the United States or its different allies, or which is likely to prevail, hinges on a dynamic geostrategic and political context, including factors like U.S. domestic politics, allied preferences, the intensity of the threat in both regions, and the level of coordination between China and Russia.

That the center of gravity of the China and Russia threats is regional incentivizes U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to concentrate the bulk of their attention and resources in upholding collective security in their respective regions. That is the message coming from the Trump administration, with which U.S. allies seem to broadly agree. This follows a bifurcation logic. However, U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific face a strikingly similar problem: how to implement deterrence by denial in their home regions while relying on a single, distant external security guarantor. This underscores the potential for cooperation. Meanwhile growing Sino-Russian coordination — and the specter of a two- or multi-front war — could eventually push the United States and its allies closer to integration.

Distinguishing between the “downstream” or operational aspects of deterrence and the “upstream” — the generation of the concepts, capabilities, technologies, skillsets or doctrines — can help clarify which approach to pursue. Thus, for instance, focusing upstream could give the United States and its allies flexibility downstream, for example by moving towards a “cross-theater” ecosystem of shared concepts, doctrines, capabilities, technologies, and standards geared for deterrence by denial.  Reducing and standardizing the systems, platforms, and munitions produced within the U.S. alliance ecosystem would generate gains in efficiency, scale, and speed of delivery. This would leave the United States and its allies in a better position to outproduce and outmatch their respective competitors, especially in a context of military and industrial protraction and attrition.

A cross-theater ecosystem upstream offers the versatility to navigate all three ideal-type approaches to deterrence. It would be compatible with bifurcation downstream — U.S. allies could still focus primarily on their respective regions — and premised on cooperation upstream. And it would allow the United States and its allies to dial up towards integration (upstream and/or downstream) according to changes to strategic circumstances, policy preferences, or national interests.

Luis Simón, Ph.D., is director of the Centre for Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and director of the Brussels office of the Elcano Royal Institute.

Image: U.S. Navy via DVIDS