China’s military modernization has been a source of great concern for the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific region. Submarines, unsurprisingly, can be expected to play a significant role in Chinese asymmetric A2/AD strategies.The United States must invest to maintain the superiority of its undersea forces and to relearn and redevelop the core ASW capabilities it lost following the end of the Cold War.
Western democracies must accept China as an equal partner in managing the global order, an order that has until recently borne the distinctive imprint of Western interests. The task of accommodating China will form the defining challenge of the 21st century.
Friedberg’s thesis is two-fold. First, he argues the United States and China are locked in a quiet but increasingly intense struggle for power and influence in Asia and across the globe, which will only become more acute as China continues to accumulate more power. Second, the emerging rivalry is not the result of easily erased misperceptions, but driven by power politics and differing ideologies
Much has been made recently in multiple publications about the possible escalatory nature of fighting Chinese anti-access tactics with a concept of “Air/Sea Battle”. Very little exact information about the plan is known to the public, yet speculation has remained rampant. The concept at its core is attempting to create synergy between armed forces in combining their offensive capabilities as seamlessly as possible. This is not a new idea.
In ‘The Future of Power’, Joseph S. Nye outlines a synthesis of his more than two decades of scholarship on the future of world power politics. Nye explains how power works and how it is changing under the conditions of a burgeoning revolution in information technology, globalization, and the return of Asia in the 21st century.
When making sense of the weird things currently happening in the northern hemisphere, such as the London riots, one trend should not escape our notice: a deepening crisis caused by bankers’ greed is beginning to rip the guts out of democracy. Four years into the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, governments of vital parts of the capitalist world are running on empty.
In the coming weeks as the Libya drama comes to a climax and as the debate on Afghanistan sharpens on what happens next, the European nations will have to make a decision on what kind of transatlantic relationship they want, or need, or value. The option of grumbling dependency is over, an era of shared responsibility and mutual contribution is about to dawn.
Washington’s emphasis on multilateral diplomacy underlines the point that ASEAN as a whole as well as other states have significant interests in the Sea that go beyond the territorial disputes between five states and China.
Considering China’s unease with a large foreign military presence on its borders, one would expect the U.S. drawdown of military forces in Afghanistan to be welcomed in Beijing and result in greater U.S.-China cooperation on Afghanistan. However, the U.S. and China have different goals and timetables regarding this conflict, which pose challenges to their bilateral relationship.
The most outstanding aspect of ‘America’s Allies and War’ is the systematic and even-handed manner in which it demolishes popular notions of alliance politics, such as the depiction of European NATO allies as free-riding pacifists, whilst making an important theoretical contribution to the burden-sharing literature and International Relations scholarship in general.
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