China's Emergence as a Superpower (till 2014)

[carl]

It's been a long time since we were seriously worried about anybody's navy.

That is the whole point.

I think we were worried about the Russian Navy during the Cold War, judging by the ink spilled writing about it, the steel fabricated and the oil burned in various exercises conducted. And it takes a long time to build up a big proficient navy with all the things that go with it, to the point where it can can fight another big proficient navy. All kinds of things can affect that so it just doesn't happen very often in history.

Is anyone, anywhere, trying to "penetrate our perimeter"? For that matter, what is our perimeter?

The Chinese may be. That is what worries people.

I already said what appears to be driving much of our definition of the perimeter: making sure that no potentially hostile nation has free access to the oceans. So if China were to become seriously hostile, the perimeter might be South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, then the Malaysian peninsula and the Indonesian islands.

Possibly that was the intention, but American economic hegemony has substantially declined since that time. Economic hegemony is seldom a product of conscious choice or intent: it emerges from superior economic performance.

Economic hegemony also has to do with history. Everybody but us was thoroughly wrecked by WWII. All that destructive fighting was well away from our shores and we tried hard to keep it over there.