Pax Americana along the South China Sea

ROBERT KAPLAN, fellow at the Center for a New American Security states that the China's advantageous hub-like geography abutting Central Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia has been mostly overlooked in any analysis of Chinese economic dynamism or strategic assertiveness and although its seaboard was as extensive as its continental interior, it faced a far tougher proposition at sea. In an op-ed in The New York Times, "The Geography of Chinese Power", he opines that a Chinese absorption of Taiwan would be considered a failure of U.S. power by the states in the Pacific and a strengthened U.S. air and sea presence in Oceania presented a compromise between resisting a Greater China at all costs and assenting to a future in which the Chinese Navy policed the first island chain.