|
Any Atlantic
Monthly subscribers out there who can provide the rest of this article for us? How We Would Fight China: The Middle East is just a blip. The American military
contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And
China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was by Robert D. Kaplan,
The Atlantic Monthly, June 2005 For
some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our
only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla
insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out
into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy
and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland.
It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War,
with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific
atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War
II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game
with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but
also of its rear base—stretching far back into Central Asia—from which it may
eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific. In
any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States,
even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one
thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition,
and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that
demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill
security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such
disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama
Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming
masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and
diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing
with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others
in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal
conventional threat to America's liberal imperium. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200506/kaplan |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
