October 10, 2021
Don't Overhype the Threat Posed By Chinese Naval Expansion
Taking a confrontational approach to China brings risks.
by Lyle J. Goldstein
Here's What You Need to Remember: If the United States has about eight hundred military bases outside its borders and China has one (Djibouti), then Beijing would seem to have a very long way to go (799 more overseas bases to build) in honing the coercive tools of global military parity—let alone seeking for “global hegemony.”
American strategists seem to agree on little these days, except to say that America is in grave danger. Some maintain that Iran is the root of all evil and believe that a final showdown in the Middle East is now inevitable since the Obama-era nuclear accord has been abrogated. Still more are anxious that a major war with North Korea is just around the corner, because after all the probability of the Singapore talks succeeding is rather low. Journalists have begun to fret about an old question—once quite theoretical—concerning whether the U.S. military could “handle” medium-sized wars against both Iran and North Korea simultaneously. Lest we forget, one side of the DC establishment is completely dedicated to demonstrating that Russia is actually the most dangerous threat and there is that “insider threat” from gullible Americans apparently duped by some Russian Facebook advertisements. However, each of these groupings of American strategists can at least coalesce around the “fact” that China forms the preeminent challenge at present for U.S. national security, not least because of its economic might (now ranked by the CIA as more than 15 percent larger than that of the United States) that in some respects make it an enabler of all the other three candidate threats named above. Terrorism, however, is now apparently just an afterthought again in a world dominated by “great power competition,” even though this author would still rank it first among U.S. national-security threats.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/dont-overhype-threat-posed-chinese-naval-expansion-194832
