Mark Helprin is concerned about the trajectories and intersection of trends in the U.S. and in China -- trends that the U.S. ignores at its peril.
With its new economic resources China has embarked upon a military traverse from reliance upon mass to devotion to quality, with stress upon war in space, the oceans, and the ether--three areas of unquestioned American superiority. China is establishing its own space- based assets and developing the means to counter others. It would neutralize American strategic superiority as the aging U.S. arsenal is reduced and it augments its own. Its submarine program is directed to the deployment of its strategic force and denial of successively greater bands of the Pacific--eventually reaching far out into blue water--to the safe transit of American fleets. It sees America's advantage in informational warfare both as something to be copied and as a weak link that, by countermeasure, can be shattered. In short, it harbors major ambitions.... [N]o country, ever, has had both the mass and income at the margin that the United States has now, but rather than anticipate, meet, and discourage China's military development, as it easily could, the U.S. has chosen to ignore it. America's métiers are the sea, the air, and space, and with one exception our major allies in Asia are island nations. These factors could be combined to keep China on the straight and narrow for generations longer than otherwise, but America's vision has been knocked out of focus by its ideals, and when China does develop the powerful expeditionary forces that it will need to protect its far- flung interests, the U.S. will probably have successfully completed transforming its military into a force designed mainly to fight terrorism and insurgencies.
Though the dangers of epidemics and terrorist nuclear attacks are now obviously pre-eminent, rising behind them is a newer world yet. This century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade. It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its center, and challenges in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America's equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare for what lies beyond the rim.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Alan at December 13, 2004 06:16 AM