REMINDER: China Hasn’t Won the Pacific (Unless You Think It Has).
In Australia, for instance, White is hardly alone in publicly questioning his nation’s continuing reliance on the U.S. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has voiced similar ideas. And in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has ostentatiously repositioned his country between Beijing and Washington on the thesis — exaggerated, no doubt, but nonetheless telling — that “America has lost” its strategic duel with China.
It would be foolish, then, for U.S. policymakers to simply dismiss the concerns that are emanating from Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. But it would also be dangerous for U.S. and allied leaders to accept the thesis that China is destined to dominate the region and simply give up on countering Beijing’s ambitions.
China appears imposing today, but it is hardly 10 feet tall. As I discuss in my new book, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump,” Beijing is still no match for the U.S. in aggregate national power: Its military budget is still less than half that of the Pentagon’s, and its per capita gross domestic product remains roughly a quarter of America’s, even as its overall GDP approaches parity.
Moreover, China is almost certain to encounter serious economic and political difficulties in the coming years because of the rapidly approaching limits of its existing growth model and the inherent instability of authoritarian rule. It is a fantasy to believe, as U.S. observers sometimes have, that China will collapse or democratize before it is able to make a serious bid for geopolitical supremacy in the Asia-Pacific. But it is hardly preordained that China will be able to maintain, over a period of decades, the impressive trajectory needed to decisively overtake America as the region’s leading power.
In fact, the U.S. and its allies can make it enormously difficult for China to accomplish that objective.
Read the whole thing.
China’s rise, as a local power with territorial ambitions, should practically require its neighbors to gravitate towards the US, which is a far-off power with no territorial ambitions.
It would take a genuine and sustained effort to screw that up, but we did have eight years of Obama.