In this episode of SSI Live, Major Brennan Deveraux interviews Dr. John Deni on his ongoing research concerning Europe’s potential involvement in a war in the Pacific. The conversation explores the challenges of coalition management and the unique contributions the United States could request from its European allies.

John Deni

Hello and welcome to SSI Live. You’ve long known the Strategic Studies Institute, or SSI, at the US Army War College, as the go-to location for issues related to national security and military strategy, with an emphasis on geostrategic analysis. SSI conducts strategic research and analysis to support the US Army War College curricula; assist and inform Army, DoD, and US government leadership; and serve as a bridge to the wider strategic community. Now, we are bringing you access to SSI analyses, scholars, and guests, through this, the SSI Live podcast series. Thanks for joining us. 

Brennan Deveraux   

Welcome back to SSI Live. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those are the guests and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I’m Brennan Deveraux, your guest host for the last time. And it’s only fitting that for my final guest, I welcome back the show’s regular host, Dr. John Deni, who just returned from his sabbatical.

Dr. Deni is a research professor of security studies at the US Army War College’s newly established Strategic Research and Assessments Department, formerly the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI). He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a senior fellow at the NATO Defense College, and an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University School of International Service. Previously, John worked for eight years as a political advisor to senior US military commanders in Europe. He is a political scientist who received his doctorate from George Washington University.

For this conversation, will be exploring John’s ongoing work examining Europe’s potential role in a US-China conflict. John, thanks for coming on.

John Deni      

Brennan, my pleasure and thanks for hosting.

Deveraux       

Well, thanks for letting me host for this last year. It’s actually been a really cool experience, I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people. And I appreciate the trust you put in me to do that. So, we’ll go ahead and jump right in. So I had the chance to host for a year because you took a sabbatical. Can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to take a sabbatical, and a little bit of what you worked on while you were off? 

Deni   

Yeah, certainly Brennan. At the US Army War College, as at many, perhaps most, academic institutions, faculty have the ability to request or apply for a sabbatical, which is kind of an intellectual break, if you will, from the day-to-day duties of being a faculty member at whatever institution you’re a part of. And it gives you a chance to, gives a faculty member a chance to sink his or her teeth into a, typically into a larger research project that could unfold.

Let’s say the research could unfold over a period of many months. In contrast to the effort it takes to write a journal article, for example, or an op-ed, or a blog entry, which can typically be done in a much shorter time frame. To write, for example, a book, you usually need months, if not years, and that can be difficult to do for an academic with a standard teaching load.

And so here at the US Army War College, after, I think the regulation states six years of service, a faculty member can apply for.

Deveraux       

And real quick, it’s not just writing the book, not something you can just do on nights and weekends. When you start talking about in your line of work, you’re doing intense research. You’re traveling. There’s a lot more to it than just some listeners might think of finding the time. It’s more than just finding the time

Deni   

You know? Yeah, that is true. The time, though, I must tell you, is kind of a, it’s the focal point. I mean, there’s certainly more to it than just researching and writing. You’re right. There’s, there’s the, a part of the research is the travel, right, necessary to get the information from archives or from interviews or from exercises that you need to write a book in the national security field.

Right. But you know, from the typical faculty members perspective, the issue really is one mostly of time. Having concentrated time to write a book. That is a rare thing in our world. And so, the opportunity to do that came, and I chose to pursue it. Of course, you’ve got to pitch a project. It’s not a right. But you’ve got the potential to have a sabbatical.

You apply for it. And so, I put together an application on this project that we’re going to discuss. And, and I was lucky enough to have the War college bless it. And so I had this academic year, ten months to work on this book project and attempt to complete it in that space of time.

Deveraux       

That’s awesome. That’s a really neat opportunity. I’m excited to see what came out of it. And I did get a chance to see a little teaser article that that’s out and about. But if you could tell us a little bit about your pitch from what you thought the project was going to be, and then kind of how it’s developed over these last ten months?

Deni   

Sure. Well, the project is about Europe’s role in a US China flight, probably over Taiwan, but I include other scenarios as well. And the reason why I chose to tackle that topic was that I saw in the literature on US-Chinese competition, strategic competition, or conflict over Taiwan, most experts in our country, most academics in North America, tend to pay very little attention to allies.

If they do, they address the Japanese, the Australians, allies in the Indo-Pacific. And of course, that makes sense, right? If they devote any attention at all to Europe, and Europe is largely disregarded, if they devote any attention to it, they sort of wave it off in nearly the same breath, because the argument is typically that Europe doesn’t have the capacity or the capability to do much of anything in the Indo-Pacific.

So why would we look at them to help us in what could be a big fight against the Chinese? Right. I just thought that was frankly inaccurate, and it underestimated the scale of the conflict that could be coming. And it’s breadth, right? I think of this as a potential conflict between the US and China as far more than just a military fight.

If something like this happened, it’s very likely to spread into the economic domain. It may even begin their effect. It will include the diplomatic realm, obviously, the information space, cyber, space, etc. multiple domains. Well beyond the question of whether or not Europe can deploy an aircraft carrier into the Indo-Pacific. So that’s why I chose to do it. And I’ve sort of tried to frame the project in, again, the sort of broad context of what could a potential conflict with China look like.

And then what kind of help would the US need in these various domains? And that’s really that’s probably the second half of the book. The first half of the book is more about how would we bring allies on board in this effort. How has the US in the past built coalitions to engage in diplomatic or military initiatives near and far from home?

And so those that’s really the broad framing and then the two specific halves of the book, if you will. And at the very end, I take those two halves of the book and try to kind of marry them. Okay. If this is what we need from Europe for this kind of a scenario, what do we pull from our toolkit of coalition building and coalition maintenance to make it happen so that we can successfully gain the resistance?

Deveraux       

It’s really neat, and I would assume based on especially the comment about the maintenance, but based on your findings, a lot of the recommendations are going to be pre-conflict. What are we doing to try to build the capabilities, build the partnership, and maybe just help others understand that the problem isn’t isolated necessarily just to the Pacific?    

Deni   

Yeah, a lot of it is pre-conflict Brennan. And I think that’s where one of the major recommendations is that we should not, in the US, presume simultaneity. Okay. Simultaneity is this concept very popular right now in political science and national security circles regarding the potential for a simultaneous war between the US and China and between, let’s say, the West, broadly speaking, anchored by the US and Russia.

Okay. And the thinking, the sort of conventional wisdom right now is that simultaneity is likely to occur. But if it doesn’t, we need to plan for that, in any case. It’s a worst-case scenario, right? We should plan for it. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but what it has led to in some cases is from a policymaking perspective, is an effort on the part of some and policymaking circles to essentially tell the Europeans, “Thanks, but no thanks. Even at this pre conflict stage, we don’t want your assistance in the Indo-Pacific. We want you to focus on the Russia challenge. We’ll worry about China. You stay focused on the Russia challenge in Europe.” And we’ve seen this emerge in open-source reporting. In fact, that was a major impetus to the project. When I began to see there was a news article, I want to say last spring or early summer regarding comments made by senior Department of Defense or Department of War officials to the United Kingdom regarding a deployment of an aircraft carrier, a British carrier group, to the Indo-Pacific.

And the opinion was expressed by…