вЂњThe defense establishment,вЂќ Zikusoka said, вЂњneeds to start thinking about how it would fight a Second battle of Midway to ensure it never has to fight at all.вЂќ America, he argued, has learned вЂњhow to fight away games,вЂќ whereas the PRC has not, or at least not yet. In the Pacific, as David Zikusoka of the Center for a New American Security wrote, the United StatesвЂ™ best hope may be to draw the PRC into a complex struggle on many fronts far from home. In these circumstances, as Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary for defense and the lead author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, has argued, Washington must prepare to win a war with China-one which it cannot afford to lose-precisely in order to prevent that war from happening. It is more likely to inflict a surprise defeat in the narrow waters of the South China Sea. Second, the PRC is unlikely to oblige the United States by walking into a trap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as the Japanese did at Midway. The fighting navy, as Seth Cropsey, the director of the Center for American Seapower, lamented, is now only 297 ships strong, fewer than half the number during the Reagan administration, and is tasked with deterring not only the PRC but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Navy is, as former Navy Secretary John Lehman has written, вЂњstretched too thin and woefully underfunded.вЂќ Its ship and dockyards are in crisis. There are two principal reasons to be concerned. If we donвЂ™t deal with them, or prepare to counter them, then we may suffer another Pearl Harbor-but there is no guarantee that we have done the necessary preparation to earn another Midway.

Whatever one thinks of these claims and demands, they are not simply to be mocked or disregarded. Like Imperial Japan, the PRCвЂ™s leaders believe that the current order in the region is illegitimate and stacked against their interests. In fact, the PeopleвЂ™s Republic of China poses some of the same problems for the United States as Imperial Japan did in World War II, but on a much larger scale. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter As for the PRC, leader Xi Jinping has warned advisers to вЂњprepare for warвЂќ in the South China Sea. In February 2016, Admiral Harry Harris, chief of US Pacific Command, warned Congress that he believed that вЂњChina seeks hegemony in East Asia.вЂќ In April last year, the Australian secretary for home affairs, Michael Pezzullo, announced that the вЂњdrums of warвЂќ were beating in the Pacific and that the nation needed to prepare accordingly. Over the past few years, the United States and the rest of the Western world generally have slowly been waking up to this reality. Beyond this, BeijingвЂ™s вЂњ Belt and Road Initiative,вЂќ which seeks to transform the whole of Eurasia, and the maritime вЂњString of PearlsвЂќ concept, which attempts something similar in the Indo-Pacific, shows the PRCвЂ™s vaulting ambition. Department of Defense report in 2020, the PRC now boasts вЂњthe largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships.вЂќ It menaces Taiwan directly and has established a massive military presence in the contested South China Sea. It has built a large oceangoing navy with a growing carrier capability the first domestically built aircraft carrier is expected to enter service in 2023. The PeopleвЂ™s Republic of China-a communist dictatorship-poses both an ideological threat and a strategic one. For the first time since World War II, the West faces a serious naval challenge in the Pacific. Today, the order that these men helped to create is once again under threat, and it is not clear that the U.S.

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