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 Soviet Navy and strongly implied there would be no future threat. So, they instructed the services to reinvent themselves as “fundamentally different” services with little need to prepare for battle against a peer foe. The services more or less lay down arms.
This was a disastrous call, and we are still dealing with the cultural hangover. We are trying to make the transition from a post-Mahanian to a Mahanian world. But it is not that easy to transform a culture after the leadership transforms through such forceful messaging – and after the new culture has been in place for decades.
Explain the role of the PLA Navy (PLAN) in fulfilling General Secretary Xi Jinping’s China Dream.
It’s essential to the China Dream for a variety of reasons. Mahan described the navy as the facilitator of commercial and diplomatic access to regions where the nation would like to trade, as well as the guardian of the mercantile fleet on its voyages and in home port. It is also the long arm of geopolitics, helping the nation radiate power into important rimlands and protect the national interest as political leaders see it. That’s the functional dimension: the PLA Navy helps China enrich itself so it can afford to do things the leadership deems worthwhile to help fulfill the China Dream of national rejuvenation and banish bad memories from the century of humiliation.
Then of course there is the symbolic dimension. As with other rising sea powers of the past, notably imperial Germany, the navy is a focus of national dignity and honor. It telegraphs that the nation is a force to be reckoned with, and thus fires enthusiasm among the populace, government, and military while inspiring awe and dread in fellow seafaring nations.
So, to use a formula common in our field, the navy burnishes China’s diplomatic stature, enhances Beijing’s informational prospects through messaging and branding vis-a-vis influential audiences at home and abroad, performs the military functions that constitute the chief purpose of navies, and exercises stewardship over China’s export- and import-dependent economy. The PLA Navy is not all of the China Dream, but it is an indispensable enabler for it.
Assess the strategic calculus of Washington and Tokyo in mitigating the risks of China’s maritime ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.
The allies have clearly embraced the island-chain logic alluded to in question #2. Roughly stated, there are three components of their strategic calculus, all designed to deny China’s access to the wider nautical world and thus deter it from actions Washington and Tokyo deem unacceptable. Again, two can play at the game of access denial.
Japanese and U.S. forces can hold vital Chinese interests at risk simply by defending the First Island Chain and the waters around it, the straits in particular. We took to espousing an island-chain defense strategy back in 2012 if not before. But we should note that this is not a new playbook. The United States and its Asian allies formulated it during the early Cold War to hamper communist access to the Western Pacific, and it worked quite well. We dusted off the Cold War playbook, and influential people like U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and former U.S. Marine Commandant David Berger have taken it mainstream in such authoritative directives such as the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy and the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 initiative, whose China component is about denial.
The three components are alliance politics, geography, and military power. If we keep our alliances strong, leverage strategic maritime geography, and field powerful military hardware – Japan’s new hypersonics come to mind, as do the U.S. Army’s Typhon and Dark Eagle antiship missile systems – then we feel fairly good about our ability to deter China and avoid fighting. And that’s what it’s all about.
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