By George Will
"China will focus on economic growth over the next three to five decades and is content letting America take the weight of this monitor? "
Teachers of the Naval Academy here probably nodded in vigorous agreement with a recent speech made at another military facility located 200 kilometers. Give a lecture at West Point to the military leaders of tomorrow, the Secretary of Defense Gates said that "any future Secretary of Defense to advise the president U.S. to send large detachments Asia or the Middle East or Africa must lie on the couch in the delicate words of General MacArthur. "This underscores the idea that Gates" sophisticated most plausible scenarios for the U.S. military are mostly naval conflicts air, whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf or elsewhere. "
in this institution over 127 years old, which began the American practice of strategic military study in 1887, faculty members are restless professionals, all with what you have to do with Asia, read China. His naval doctrines, its acquisitions and deployments invited to draw conclusions regarding their geopolitical intentions. Teachers found it interesting that when plunged into chaos Libya, China sent a frigate through the Suez Canal in a position to help Chinese residents in danger. This was the first time that the Republic has noted a warship pointer towards a possible evacuation.
From tests as residual teachers here are trying to solve the puzzle that involves dangerous decades-long process of design and construction of ships: How should the U.S. Navy set a world order in which maritime capacity and intentions China's going to be ... what?
These scholars point out that America has not always been well ahead of its next rival. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the troops have said "this is not what we planned." But in the 22 years before Pearl Harbour, strategic review of the war successfully anticipated the nature of the war with Japan since the attacks amphibious vehicles to the capture of atolls that make bases, through the floating docks. Before
strategic review, the course of the American Navy was formed exclusively by ships that would travel to the west and would deliver something like the Battle North Sea, the fray of World War I between the British and Germanic fleets. After the war strategy, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the fleet in the Pacific and U.S. representative on the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri, said that kamikaze attacks were the only major surprise of the Pacific war theater.
The Chinese have also studied the World War II, according to some here in the center, have concluded that Japan's experience should be taken into account in strategic planning in China. Japan was defeated by sea and air crashes combined with the threat of invasion. In the words of someone here, America ensured his victory by controlling the Strait of Luzon, an island of traffic between the Philippines and Taiwan. China
no foreign bases, but has many needs to meet across the ocean, has a voracious appetite for imported raw materials-oil, coal, mining, and economic dynamism based on export. It has enormous national districts, oil refineries, shippers and shipping, among others, totally dependent on the global transport.
Today China is the passenger of a global maritime order built on a network of treaties enforced by the U.S. Navy. The frigate came to China via Suez then entered the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya says no longer control. Does not control enforced at the insistence of President Reagan in 1981 when Gulf waters are international.
The arrival of U.S. ships off the coast of Libya underlines the suitability of the Navy to project force. Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute, notes that "40% of the world's population lives within range of modern naval reach and more than two-thirds distance with fighter cover easily deployed on aircraft carriers."
Regardless of what comes out of China Navy, some smart people will be surprised. What I do here is teaching, not espionage. Devour the flow of Chinese military publications. And experts differ on the more fundamental question, that is, China will focus on economic growth over the next three to five decades, to prosper from the free movement of raw materials, goods and services resulting from globalization, and be content letting America take the weight of this monitor?
The answer is yes, but only if China makes a purely economic calculation. But nations are usually more profound and compelling reasons. This is particularly true in emerging nations with great confidence in his ability and encouraged by old memories of humiliation and powerlessness.
Russia still runs along the ocean full of heads ballistic submarines. But this, as well as the renewed Russian air patrols that replicate the military exercises of the Cold War, probably mostly Russians psychotherapy for leaders anxious to get the respect in the world. China's naval intentions, the subject of a later column, are more interesting and potentially more sinister.
© Washington Post Writers Group
Via libertaddigital.com
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