Red alert.

• Author: Deal, Jacqueline Newmyer
• Position: The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China - and How America Can Win, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific - Book review

Geoff Dyer, The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China--and How America Can Win (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 320 pp., $26.95.

Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2014), 256 pp., $26.00.

Fears of China's rise are growing. Only a decade ago, most experts insisted that the Chinese Communist Party's overseas ambitions were limited to Taiwan. Now that Beijing has begun to adopt a more assertive posture abroad, the conventional wisdom has changed from dismissing the China threat to accepting it fatalistically. But must Washington and its Asian allies defer to Chinese expansionism? Can we really have jumped from one world to another so quickly?

Not a chance. Two new books provide a corrective to the lately fashionable gloom-and-doom analysis. Each is by a crack journalist. The first, Geoff Dyer's The Contest of the Century, addresses the U.S.-Chinese relationship through the prism of China's military, political, diplomatic and economic development. The second, Robert Kaplan's Asia's Cauldron, focuses on the competition between China and the states around the South China Sea--the central route for shipping between the Middle East and East Asia, and the site of disputed claims to resource-rich maritime territory.

Certainly the fresh attention to China's aspirations is a good thing. As late as 2006 the defense correspondent Fred Kaplan (no relation to Robert) was belittling the Pentagon's attention to Chinese military modernization in its annual congressionally mandated report on the subject. In an article called "The China Syndrome," Kaplan wrote:

"At present," the report states, "Chinas concept for sea-denial appears limited to sea-control in water surrounding Taiwan and its immediate periphery. If China were to shift to a broader sea-control' strategy"--in other words, if it were seeking a military presence farther away from its shores--"the principal indicators would include development of an aircraft carrier, development of robust, deep-water antisubmarine-warfare capabilities, development of a true area anti-aircraft warfare capability, acquisition of large numbers of nuclear attack submarines," etc., etc. The point is: The Chinese aren't doing--they're not even close to doing--any of those things [Kaplan's italics].

Just eight years later, the Chinese have made substantial progress on all of these fronts, and Beijing has embarked on a path of military-backed assertiveness across the region that has already provoked shifts in U.S. military operations. In January 2013, the U.S. chief of naval operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, admitted that China's new capabilities have caused the U.S. Navy to change its deployment patterns "inside the first island chain" (China's term for the major archipelagoes from Japan and Taiwan to the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia that form the outer boundary of the East and South China Seas). Last November, China tried to unilaterally impose an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) covering airspace over Japanese and South Korean territory just before an East Asia tour by Vice President Joe Biden. Before Biden departed, the United States defied the ADIZ with an unannounced transit of two unarmed B-52S, and while the vice president was on his first stop in Tokyo he assured his hosts that the United States would go further and directly confront Beijing on the issue. During his subsequent stop in Beijing, however, Biden failed even to mention the ADIZ in public. We need to confront Chinese assertiveness with a stalwart refusal to bend, but we are in danger of conceding too much and disheartening our allies. Our lack of firmness may convince Beijing that it can get away with pressing even harder.

While there's plenty of room for debate about the scope of China's blue-water ambition, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has now completed sea trials of, and deployed, its first aircraft carrier, with an estimated four to six additional hulls under construction, as Robert Kaplan notes. He stresses that in addition to focusing on its surface navy, China has been expanding its fleet of nuclear ballistic missile and attack submarines capable of deploying into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Dyer and Kaplan both point to China's construction of a new submarine base in the South China Sea, and Kaplan also highlights Chinas investment in aerial refueling to enable the projection of air power toward that sea's southern reaches. He might also have mentioned China's deployment of new Type 052D destroyers with state-of-the-art radars and a vertical launch system capable of firing advanced surface-to-air missiles against enemy aircraft, including anti-submarine-warfare aircraft, enabling the destroyers to defend other PLAN surface ships and submarines.

Dyer lucidly sets out the context in which these developments have been occurring. He traces the rise of the PLAN to China's obsession with the late nineteenth-century American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan saw sea power in general, and the ability to exert control over commercial sea-lanes in particular, as essential to the well-being of trading states. "Neglected at home," Dyer writes, "Mahan has become deeply fashionable over the last decade in Chinese intellectual circles, including translations of his books, academic articles on their importance, and conferences on his ideas."

If the PLAN's new aircraft carriers and destroyers are suited for engaging in Mahanian sea-control missions, this would be a step beyond the impressive suite of largely land- and air-based forces that China has acquired to keep adversaries from entering or operating within its near abroad. More than the carrier, these "anti-access/area-denial" (A2AD) capabilities (e.g., precise ballistic and cruise missiles, along with the complex of sensors and guidance technologies that allow them to find and prosecute moving targets) have implications for the U.S. position in the Asia-Pacific region because they raise doubts about our ability to protect our allies. Since the late 1940s, the United States has played a key role in tamping down potential conflicts between regional actors. In Dyer's words, "America has defined its vital interest as preventing any one power from dominating the other main regions of the world and turning them into a private sphere of influence."

For more than half a century the United States has guaranteed Taiwan's independence, and our security commitment to Japan has made it possible for successive generations of Japanese leaders to maintain relatively modest defense...