ABSTRACT
While the United States retains its status as the pre-eminent military power on the planet, it is being challenged increasingly by potential rival state actors such as China and Russia, and by terrorist groups and other non-state actors that seek to undermine global U.S. military dominance through asymmetric means. The paramount position of the U.S. military in recent decades has relied on its dominance of the “global commons”, referring to those regions of the Earth, including the oceans and near outer space, that are not on the immediate periphery of any single country. Many observers conclude that the prior unipolar global power structure (“1<th>+<th>X”) is gradually giving way to a more complex configuration that still has the United States as the sole superpower, but with China and Russia also rising to a significant degree (“1<th>+<th>Y<th>+<th>X”). The rising strength of China is felt primarily in the Indo-Pacific region, where its relative proximity and growing economic sway lend it an asymmetric advantage that partially compensates for the technological, material, and other advantages that the United States may retain. Because of this geographic asymmetry, China’s presumed military strategy is one of “anti-access; area denial” (A2/AD). Three “hot spots” that U.S. military planners focus on with respect to potential military conflict with China are North-east Asia, the South China Sea, and Taiwan. Over time, the absolute advantage that the U.S. military held in each of these cases of potential conflict is gradually eroding, as China’s military capacity increases in parallel with its growing economic stature. If China were to become an overt military aggressor in any of these regions, however, those affected countries could in turn deploy A2/AD strategies to counter China. This underlines the importance for the United States of maintaining strong alliances within the region.
