The U.S. and China’s major neighbors will have to live with these realities. No credible options exist for halting China’s steady emergence as at least the second most important military power in the world. There is no reliable way to estimate China’s military spending, but the IISS Military Balance for 2016 is probably conservative in estimating that China spent $145.6 billion on military forces in 2015 – this is only 24% of the $597.5 billion that the U.S. spent, but it is 2.2 times the $65.6 billion the IISS estimates that Russia spent, and 2.6 times the $56.2 billion the U.K. – the largest European power spent.

It is also all too possible that SIPRI is more correct than the IISS in estimating that China’s real spending was $215 billion, not $145.6 billion – and China has far lower personnel costs and only one key region to deal with – Asia – while the U.S. must project power at far longer distances to Europe and the Middle East as well as Asia.

The practical challenge for the U.S. and China’s major neighbors is to find ways that both deter China from exercising its growing power and give it clear incentives to seek cooperation where competition poses the dangers of conflict. It is to make it clear to China that the steady expansion of its military forces will be countered by a credible collective reaction, and that China cannot win any local conflict in ways that will not lead to a continuing military buildup by other states and an arms race it cannot win nor  afford if it is to bring a reasonable level of development and wealth to its people.

This, however, requires forms of U.S. leadership that presently are sadly lacking. The Obama Administration has talked about a “rebalancing to Asia” without shaping or funding any clear path to implementing it. Vague unfunded rhetoric is not a strategy, particularly when China and the world are all too well aware of the near strategic paralysis imposed by having to deal with Russia and the Middle East as well; as the threat imposed by a Congress whose idea of strategy is the Budget Control Act.

It requires the kind of public U.S. debate over options that neither party seems able to even begin to attempt in this election year, in what seems doomed to become both the nastiest and shallowest campaign in modern American history. It requires the U.S. to have longer-term force and modernization plans tied to given strategic requirements rather than vague global goals and a budget cycle that cannot look beyond a one fiscal year future.

It requires a debate over the strategic meaning civil policies like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, rather than focusing on promise of saving jobs that are not really linked to the TPP and cannot be met. It also requires as much focus on options to cooperate with China as to compete with, and deter it – a kind of strategic vision that should be the other half of any coherent U.S. strategy for the region. It also requires the U.S. to think hard about some of its criticism of its allies. Our allies are scarcely without flaws, but no one follows where no one leads.

For a more detailed discussion of China strategy, see Anthony H. Cordesman and Joseph Kendall, Evolving Strategies In The China-U.S. Military Balance, (Being added now) and Chinese Military Organization and Reform, https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinese-military-organization-and-reform.

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS. His current projects include ongoing analysis of the security situation in the Gulf, U.S. strategic competition with Iran, the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, a net assessment of the Indian Ocean region, Chinese military developments and U.S. and Asian assessments of these developments, changes in the nature of modern war, and assessments of U.S. defense strategy, programs, and budgets.

Image: Defense Department