The Future is Now
Andrew S. Erickson, “The Future is Now,” The Diplomat, 24 April 2012.
The U.S. military has lots of options to stop the PLA from paralyzing its forces. But business as usual won’t do.
The U.S. isn’t “returning” to the Asia-Pacific, it never left in the first place. Here, in the world’s most strategically and economically dynamic region, China is already demonstrating great potential to undermine American strategic interests and the efficacy of the global system – and is doing so in practice. Though Beijing and Washington have considerable shared interests and potential for cooperation, the most difficult period for them to achieve “competitive coexistence” may already have begun. Assuming that high-intensity kinetic conflict can be avoided – fortunately, a highly likely prospect – China’s greatest challenge to U.S. interests and the global system might thus be the already unfolding strategic competition, friction, pressuring, and occasional crises in the three “Near Seas” (the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas). …
