Similarly, when US BMD/NMD deployments threatened to neuter China’s modest strategic offensive arsenal’s deterrent efficacy, the PLA began considering more cost-effective countermeasures (these have been listed in some details by analysts such as Dingli Shen from Fudan University, Shanghai) than simply building up its ICBM arsenal to overwhelm the US BMD shield. However, given the latter’s current limited scale and scope and the modeesty of the 2nd Artillery’s strategic arsenal, this latter option should not prove beyond Chinese means should Beijing choose that path. The PLA’s January 2007 ASAT test, and the much more recent ABM launch, suggest that one party’s apparent advance will be countered by the other with defensive countermeasure. So, where does that leave the analyst community?

Well, underneath the layer of the visible, the processes generating the current strategic systemic fluidity merit some attention. As the leaders of America’s closest strategic Asian allies -Japan, Australia and India, have noted in recent months, they believe the USA will remain the pre-eminent global and regional power for several decades, but its primacy, its ability to shape the security architecture and lead the power order, will be eroded in relative terms by ‘the rise of the others,’ to quote Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani. As the 2009 Australian defence white paper makes clear, with the US’s marginal productivity advantage over China shrinking, China’s larger workforce will eventually trump America’s technological edge. Niches aside, it will not make sense for analysts to consider the USA and China in simply and starkly competitive terms, although some in both countries – and elsewhere – will continue to do so. Even strongly pro-US commentators outside China increasingly acknowledge that an intervention against what Beijing considers its core interests could be faced with measures which would impose costs that would eventually be considered not worth America’s while. So, perhaps over the next couple of decades, America’s margin of military adavntage would slowly erode to the point that by 2035, the PLAN and the US Pacific Fleet would come round, tacitly, to a division of labour which Admiral Timothy Keating, then Commander PACOM, confirmed (to me on the sidelines of the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on 31st May 2008) had been suggested to him by Admiral Wu Shingli, Commander, PLAN, during Keating’s visit to China in May 2007.

The ‘rise’ of several secondary powers to a status of growing autonomy – China, Japan, india and Russia in particular – appears inevitable and not amenable to containment fallacies. The challenges such rise faces are more internal to the respective states’ endomorphic dynamics than external impositions. So, America’s primacy is very likely to erode into a pre-eminence within a more multi-polar order. This transition is potentially turbulent, but judging by what the US National Defense University has been saying about systemic fluidity and America’s strategic future, there is much to hope about the wisdom of America’s intellectual (and not just ‘hard power’) leadership in managing this transition. Comopetition need not degenerate into bloody conflict; ASBMs need not engage CVBGs, and lives need not be lost to limited gains.

So, looking at some of the processes underway at the systemic level, my inherent anxiety is moderated somewhat with a leavening of faith in the ability of the human intellect to adapt to changing circumstances.