Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific

Haddick, a veteran Washington military security analyst, here presents a jargon-free and crisply organized argument that the United States must develop a new competitive strategy in order to overcome its "archaic military machine" in the Pacific. He argues that whether China will seek to join and uphold the international system that made it rich or whether it will seek to dominate it will depend on a strong American military presence and wise strategy. To shirk this responsibility would lead China's neighbors to build their own scattered military response and fight among themselves. Based on a wide reading in American military policy reports and newspaper accounts (rather than in Chinese sources or scholarship in Chinese foreign relations), Haddick asserts that China is expanding its naval power and missile technology in order to usurp control of its neighboring waters. The American "pivot to Asia," he says, has stumbled.