In January, U.S. congressional leaders reached a tentative agreement to appropriate $886 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Energy Department. The central justification for this spending—among the country’s highest since World War II—is China, which the Pentagon routinely refers to as the “pacing threat” driving U.S. strategy.
Assessing the potential military threat from China is an art, not a science. Information regarding the details—how much the Chinese are spending, how the funds are being spent, whether the technologies they are investing in will work as advertised, how long it will take to get from the research stage to workable systems, and how military spending will trend over the next 10 to 15 years—is hard to come by due to both a lack of transparency and the inherent difficulties involved in predicting the pace of technological development.
But there is ample evidence to suggest that China hawks in the Pentagon and Congress are overstating China’s military capabilities while underplaying the value of dialogue and diplomacy in addressing the challenges that Beijing
