Interviews | Security | East Asia

China’s Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Security

Insights from James R. Holmes.

Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States, conducted a Maritime Cooperative Activity (MCA), April 7, 2024.

The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. James R. Holmes – inaugural holder of the J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Navy War College and co-author of “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 the key indicators of long-term strategic competition currently unfolding in maritime Asia.

Well, you can always look at the obvious things that can be counted, like economic figures and military force structures, the latter being numbers of ships, planes, missiles, soldiers, and so forth. But as the physicist Albert Einstein noted, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. You have to watch the intangibles. They count. 

One way to gauge the state of the strategic competition in subjective terms is by examining how confident U.S. allies, partners, and friends in the region are about cooperating with the United States. If they start to lose confidence in the U.S. commitment to honoring its pledges to them, they may make common cause among themselves to counter China, they might try to fashion the most favorable arrangement possible with Beijing or otherwise look to their own devices. This is why our current leadership’s stance toward allies is worrisome: it broadcasts messages about American steadfastness in other theaters. 

A downturn in regional alliances would suggest China has the upper hand in the competition, either because the United States has played its hand badly, China has played its hand well, or both. Strategy is a competitive interaction between contenders determined to get their way. We would expect the competition to exhibit a seesaw character as the competitors try to one up each other through a variety of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic stratagems.

Examine the key characteristics of the economic and strategic geography of China’s sea power. 

Access to the oceans is pivotal. We think of anti-access as a Chinese thing, but it works both ways. The allies can mount an anti-access strategy of their own and should. We think the First Island Chain is the basic fact of China’s economic and strategic well-being. It encloses 100 percent of China’s continental crest; no Chinese seaport, including the port infrastructure essential to Chinese prosperity, outflanks it, and its inhabitants are democratic, well-armed, and friendly to the United States. 

Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote that the navy able to command the sea could cut a seafaring rival off from maritime trade, not to mention geopolitical pursuits dependent on sea power. We are seeing that play out in real time with the U.S. blockade of Iranian seaports. If the allies position anti-ship and anti-air weaponry along the island chain, they can bar the straits to Chinese maritime movement – pinching Chinese prosperity while denying the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) access to the vast maneuver space that is the Western Pacific. These are potent deterrents to aggression.

Compare and contrast the Mahanian and post-Mahanian mental world of American, Chinese, and Asian navies.

Our friend Geoff Till likes to claim that China and other Asian navies inhabit a Mahanian world, in the sense that they assume their prime purpose is to prepare for battles for maritime command, while American inhabits a post-Mahanian world concerned more with constabulary challenges such as counterproliferation and counterproliferation. We agree with this. 

That’s because we have pointed out that, in effect, our sea services almost literally declared an end to maritime history, around the same time Francis Fukuyama declared an end to political history, after the Cold War. The service chiefs claimed there was no more seaborne threat with the demise of the........

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