Miles Maochun Yu

The central pillar of America's predominance in world affairs in the past seven decades is the Unites States' ability to maintain and lead a system of alliances. In the Asia-Pacific region, the US-led alliance centered on the Washington-Tokyo-Seoul axis of democracies has been a credible guarantee of peace and stability. With China's rise as a militarized revisionist state bent on changing the status quo, the US-led alliance is facing its gravest challenge since its formation. Yet America's response to the challenge has been anemic and indolent, primarily as a misguided China policy that puts the premium on engagement without confrontation, a policy that has split the unity of the alliance and emboldened China.

A significant portion of our national security establishment, painstakingly built up during the Cold War, has accepted the assumption that when it comes to threats from sovereign states, Russia, not China, is America's leading adversary. We routinely hear our national leaders speak of Vladimir Putin's bad behavior in places such as Ukraine and Syria, which further enhances the notion that the most formidable challenge to the preeminence of the U.S. in a post-Cold War world is Moscow, not Beijing.

Within hours of North Korea's January 6 nuclear test, President Park Geun-hye of South Korea picked up the phone and called President Barack Obama in the White House and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo to discuss a joint response to Pyongyang's latest nuclear gambit. Both leaders gave President Park unequivocal and resolute support for taking retaliatory action. Meanwhile, defense ministers and top foreign affairs officials of the three nations also held urgent telephone conferences to coordinate responses.

President Xi Jinping of China is conducting a far-reaching military reform. Yet, like the proverbial cyclical nature of dynastic changes in China's long imperial past, the Chinese communist armed forces, collectively known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA), has gone through five cycles of similar military reforms since the founding of the communist state in 1949. This cyclical nature can tell us a lot about the current reshuffle.

China’s endeavor to revive a grand “Chinese Dream” of past glory and preeminence in world affairs is the driving force in creating the current geopolitical tensions in the Asia Pacific region. The US Military superiority and American political hostility toward Chinese communism have been able to check and balance China’s age-old ambition of dominance in the region. However, China’s perception of an inexorable US “decline,” and American political and business leaders’ abandonment of hostility toward Chinese political system, plus a few policy miscalculations, have all helped emboldened China to be more militarily aggressive and politically cantankerous.