China’s master plan: A global military threat

I wrote a column recently about how a longstanding assumption of America’s China policy — that economic integration between the two countries is an unalloyed good — has now been overtaken by events. But this isn’t the only area in which China’s rise is forcing a re-evaluation of old beliefs.

Now, as the first in a series of columns on this phenomenon that Bloomberg Opinion will publish in the coming days, I’ll delve into another issue with enormous implications for U.S.-China relations and American interests: the rise of China as a more globally oriented military power.

For years, most experts believed that China’s military challenge to the U.S. was regional in nature — that it was confined to the Western Pacific. After decades of tacitly free-riding on America’s global power-projection capabilities, however, Beijing now is seeking the capabilities that will allow it to project its own military power well outside its regional neighborhood.