China’s Port Power

Over the past several years, U.S. national security officials have been intensely focused on China’s growing military power. Having not faced such a powerful challenger since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington now describes Beijing, as the U.S. Annual Threat Assessment put it in February, as a “near-peer competitor.” For the U.S. military, China has also become the “pacing challenge,” the benchmark for just how fast and how far it must adjust to provide effective defense in a more competitive international system.

Yet U.S. defense strategy appears poorly calibrated to the central challenges that