by SALVATORE BABONES
PHOTO/Wikipedia
China has become the bête noire of U.S. security policy, the new universal enemy to replace the Soviet Union.
Its economic power and rapid military build-up, after all, make it a much more credible long-term threat than Putin’s Russia or the Islamic State. When policy pundits and military men want to spread alarm about the decline of America and beat the drum for increased defense spending, their scary enemy of choice is China.
Take James Jay Carafano, a retired military man and a policy pundit at the right-wing Heritage Foundation who raises the possibility of “a U.S.-China Nuclear War.” He argues at The National Interest that keeping the peace between China and the United States “requires significantly recapitalizing the U.S. armed forces.” This is necessary, he says, to assuage the doubts and insecurities of America’s allies. He argues that Washington “has to close any gap in military power that the Chinese might think could be exploited.”
That’s a lot of gap-closing.
Carafano identifies America’s “key objectives” in the region as “maintaining freedom of the commons (air, sea, space, and cyberspace) and limiting the potential for large-scale regional conflict.”
These certainly are U.S. interests. But are they U.S. responsibilities? And what exactly do these two general principles mean in practice when applied to the Asia-Pacific region?
Foreign Policy in Focus for more