From Overseas Press
Farewell to America's China station
(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-05-19 16:20
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The Chinese government "is poised to project ever greater power in the Pacific and the US doesn't appear up to the challenge", Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute said in the Wall Street Journal on May 17.
Mr. Helprin revealed that "far sooner than once anticipated, China will achieve effective military parity in Asia, general conventional parity, and nuclear parity."
He unveiled that China is excellent in technologies of "conventional satellites and swarms of miniature satellites". China's advanced "networked surface, undersea and aerial cuing" can provide "real-time terminal guidance to direct its 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles to the five or six US aircraft carriers dispatched to defend Taiwan. Besides, "antiship weapons launched from surface vessels, submarines and aircraft" will "keep carrier battle groups beyond effective range".
So that the US will not be able to send fight planes to Taiwan if "its airfields are destroyed by Chinese mainland's missiles, against which the States have no adequate defense".
Meanwhile, the lack of US naval and air forces in the Western Pacific may cause its alliances collapse, especially Taiwan, which will accept the mainland's dominion because of the war threat, said the article. Even Australasia will "strike a bargain" with China to "avoid pro forma vassalage" when the latter's "power projection forces mature". And these places will move off US military bases to contribute to the "new arrangement".
China has strived to build its navy for a long time and once it dominates its extended home waters, it will move to the center and then the east of the Pacific to acquire bases in South and Central America, said Helprin, "the US used to have the China Station, but finally China will have the Americas Station, for this is how nations behave in the international system."
Helprin declared that "if the US doesn't wake now, it may face devastating future."