The U.S. Maritime Strategy in the Asia-Pacific in Response to the Rise of a Seafaring China

Abstract

The achievement of a century of ”Mahanism” was the Pax Americana that prevailed by the early 1990s. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States has sought to sustain the Pax Americana by practicing the ”thousand-ship navy” strategy, or ”Mullenism,” and to expand its command of the sea to the rivers, harbors, and shorelines of other coastal states. Once the idea of the ”thousand-ship navy”- now called the Global Maritime Partnership- was embedded at the heart of the 2007 Maritime Strategy (the ”Cooperative Strategy”), Mullenism became more acceptable and persuasive. Faced with the rise of a seafaring China, the United States is now consolidating its maritime strategy. Established to realize the landward push of command of the sea, the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) is the core operational mechanism of the United States Pacific Command (PACOM) programs Pacific Partnership and Pacific Angel, both of which are incarnations of the Cooperative Strategy. The future of the Cooperative Strategy, or Mullenism, is likely to consist of NECC complexes for shaping the security environment in peacetime, and for the complete obliteration of the enemy from the sea in times of crisis. The United States enjoys a big lead over China in terms of hard power and soft power, and ”smart power,” which is a combination of the two, enables the U.S. Navy to dexterously insinuate the NECC into regional coastal states to advance Mullenism and pave the way for AirSea Battle, designed to launch a blinding campaign against the battle networks of the Chinese People`s Liberation Army. This will ensure that the U.S. Navy has operational freedom of maneuver and command of the waters surrounding China. The United States has quietly started engineering a ”NATO at sea” and is confident that it can bring together rival countries such as China, India, and Japan under the single umbrella of a global maritime partnership and maintain peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific. In the future, the United States will continue to adopt a hedging strategy toward China. The Pax Americana may well continue as long as the present incarnation of the Cooperative Strategy or Mullenism stays afloat.