National Interest

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to supplant the United States as the global preeminent power. In doing so, the communist regime would use various forms of coercion to force other nations to conform to its likeness rather than respect the national borders of other nations in the region and in many cases their forms of democratic expression. If the CCP successfully transforms the Indo-Pacific into a Beijing-centric and Beijing-controlled region, then it will establish that the United States is no longer able or willing to defend its primary interests or make good on its security commitments to allies. This poses an unacceptable risk to U.S. critical allies in the region and threatens American sovereignty and our ability to engage freely and safely with sovereign democratic nations in a massively important region of the world.

Undergirding China’s increasingly bold malfeasance, which has become more prominent during the coronavirus pandemic, is its military strength. The priority for the U.S. military is to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region and to have the right weapon systems and strategies in place to win the war if deterrence fails.

The U.S. military seeks to prevent a military confrontation by bolstering a credible deterrent. An effective deterrence strategy seeks to prevent China from acting aggressively by causing Beijing to calculate that an act of aggression against the United States and our core interests would not be worth the cost. The United States can establish deterrence by punishment, which threatens offensive retaliation. And it can establish deterrence by denial, which requires creating as many dilemmas for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as possible so that they constantly conclude that they have an insufficient degree of certainty that whatever act of aggression they are considering would be ultimately successful.

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