China remains at the centre of US strategic thinking, a fact made clear in the recent National Security Strategy, which notes that Beijing is using its growing wealth and power to gain strategic advantage over the United States. It also highlights that the US must successfully compete in the Indo-Pacific, where China’s rise becomes a major challenge, in order to thrive at home.
China is the only country in the world with the economic might to challenge US dominance, and the gap in military capability between the two is expected to narrow significantly in the coming years. With its current pace of nuclearisation, China is expected to have at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, and it has developed advanced nuclear delivery systems such as hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment systems. It already has the world’s largest navy, and its shipbuilding capacity is currently 230 times greater than that of the United States.