Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers from around the world for their diverse perspectives on U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. James R. Holmes – the inaugural JC Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the US Navy War College and co-author of “The Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Security» (2026) – is the 510th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Identify key indicators of the long-term strategic competition currently taking place in maritime Asia.
Well, you can always look at the obvious things that can be counted, like economic numbers and military force structures, the latter being the number of ships, planes, missiles, soldiers, etc. But as physicist Albert Einstein pointed out, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. We must monitor the intangibles. They matter.
One way to assess the state of strategic competition in subjective terms is to examine how confident U.S. allies, partners, and friends in the region are about their cooperation with the United States. If they begin to lose confidence in the United States’ commitment to honor its commitments to them, they could make common cause among themselves to counter China, they could try to make the most favorable deal possible with Beijing, or they could strike out on their own. This is why the current position of our leaders towards our allies is worrying: it broadcasts messages about American firmness in other theaters.
A slowdown in regional alliances would suggest that China has the upper hand in the competition, either because the United States has played its card poorly, because China has played its card well, or both. Strategy is a competitive interaction between competitors determined to succeed. We would expect the competition to exhibit a see-saw character as competitors attempt to compete through a variety of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic stratagems.
Examine the main features of the economic and strategic geography of China’s maritime power.
Access to the oceans is crucial. We view anti-access as a Chinese thing, but it works both ways. Allies can and should develop their own anti-access strategy. We believe that the First Island Chain is the foundation of China’s economic and strategic well-being. It surrounds 100 percent of China’s continental ridge; no Chinese seaport, including the port infrastructure essential to Chinese prosperity, overflows it, and its people are democratic, well-armed, and friendly toward the United States.
Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote that a navy capable of commanding the sea could cut off a seafaring rival from maritime commerce, not to mention geopolitical activities dependent on sea power. We are seeing this happening in real time with the US blockade of Iranian seaports. If the allies position anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons along the island chain, they can block the strait from Chinese maritime movements. – squeeze Chinese prosperity while denying the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) access to the vast maneuvering space that is the Western Pacific. They are powerful deterrents against aggression.
Compare and contrast the Mahanian and post-Mahanian mental world of the American, Chinese, and Asian navies.
Our friend Geoff Till likes to argue that China and other Asian navies inhabit a Mahanian world, in the sense that they assume their primary goal is to prepare for battles for maritime command, while the United States inhabits a post-Mahanian world more concerned with policing challenges such as counter-proliferation and counter-proliferation. We agree with this.
Indeed, we have pointed out that, in effect, our maritime services almost literally declared the end of maritime history, around the same time that Francis Fukuyama declared the end of political history, after the Cold War. The service chiefs asserted that there was no longer a maritime threat with the disappearance of the Soviet Navy and firmly stated that there would be no future threat. Thus, they asked the services to reinvent themselves as “fundamentally different” services, with little need to prepare for battle against a peer enemy. The services more or less lay down their arms.
This call was disastrous and we are still dealing with a cultural hangover. We are trying to move from a post-Mahanian world to a Mahanian world. But it’s not so easy to transform a culture once leaders have transformed themselves through such powerful messages. – and after the new culture has been in place for decades.
Explain the role of the PLA Navy (PLAN) in realizing General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream.
This is essential to the Chinese dream for a variety of reasons. Mahan described the Navy as the facilitator of commercial and diplomatic access to regions where the nation wishes to trade, as well as the guardian of the merchant fleet during its voyages and in its home port. It is also the long arm of geopolitics, helping the nation radiate its power to important peripheral regions and protect the national interest as seen by political leaders. This is the functional dimension: the PLA Navy helps China enrich itself so that it can afford to do things that leaders deem useful to help realize the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation and banish bad memories of the century of humiliation.
Then, there is of course the symbolic dimension. As with other emerging maritime powers of the past, notably Imperial Germany, the navy is a center of national dignity and honor. It indicates that the nation is a force to be reckoned with and thus arouses enthusiasm among the population, government and military while inspiring fear and terror in other maritime nations.
Thus, to use a common phrase in our field, the navy enhances China’s diplomatic stature, enhances Beijing’s information prospects through messaging and branding to influential publics at home and abroad, performs the military functions that constitute the navies’ primary purpose, and exercises management of China’s export- and import-dependent economy. The PLA Navy does not represent the entirety of the Chinese dream, but it is an essential catalyst for it.
Assess Washington and Tokyo’s strategic calculus for mitigating risks from China’s maritime ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.
The allies have clearly adopted the island chain logic mentioned in question #2. Broadly, their strategic calculus has three elements, all designed to deny China access to the broader nautical world and thus deter it from actions that Washington and Tokyo deem unacceptable. Again, two can play the access denial game.
Japanese and American forces can endanger China’s vital interests simply by defending the First Island Chain and the waters surrounding it, particularly the straits. We took to by adopting an island chain defense strategy in 2012 if not before. But it should be noted that this is not a new strategy manual. The United States and its Asian allies formulated it early in the Cold War to hinder communist access to the Western Pacific, and it worked quite well. We’ve dusted off the Cold War playbook, and influential figures like U.S. Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and former U.S. Marine Commandant David Berger have incorporated it into authoritative guidelines like U.S. National Defense Strategy 2026 and the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 initiative, whose China component focuses on denial.
The three components are alliance politics, geography and military power. If we keep our alliances strong, exploit strategic maritime geography and deploy powerful military hardware – We think of the new Japanese hypersonics, as well as the Typhon and Dark Eagle anti-ship missile systems of the American army. – we are then quite satisfied with our ability to deter China and avoid fighting. And that’s what it’s all about.
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