Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, writing in National Review, warns about the “dire state of America’s Navy relative to China’s.” America’s shipbuilding deficit and the “declining trajectory” of the U.S. fleet “endangers our national security.” China has more warships than the United States does. “On a tonnage basis,” he explains, “China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than ours.” O’Brien characterizes this as a “national security crisis” because the “future of a free and open Indo-Pacific is at stake.” What is ultimately at stake is who shall be “mistress of the seas.” The problem, writes retired Army Colonel M. Thomas Davis in Real Clear Defense , is America’s diminished defense industrial base that originated with the so-called post-Cold War “peace dividend.” Since then, Davis notes, “the American shipbuilding industry . . . is largely gone, replaced by Asian shipyards.” China’s navy is already the world’s largest, and its relative lead in shipbuilding places it in a position to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading naval power should current trends continue. But China doesn’t need to replace America as the world’s leading naval power to take Taiwan, dominate the South China Sea, and change the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific region, Robert Kaplan noted in Asia’s Cauldron , is a “seascape . . . where the spaces between the principal nodes of population are overwhelmingly maritime.” Kaplan described the South China Sea as the “throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean” and the “heart of Eurasia’s navigable rimland.” The geography of East Asia and the western Pacific invites a naval arms race, but the problem is only one side (China) is racing. It is as if Great Britain in the first decade of the 20 th century stood-by as the Kaiser’s navy expanded in […]
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