Since becoming China’s paramount leader in 2012, Xi Jinping has taken a personal interest in the development of the People’s Liberation Army Navy into a modern fighting force, whose first objective is to defeat the U.S. Navy within the Western Pacific’s first island chain, where the U.S. has long maintained a series of alliances to keep communist powers in check. China’s long-term goal is to field a “world-class military” by the middle of the century, but it doesn’t have to displace America everywhere to cause serious pain—it only needs to keep U.S. interests in Asia further out of reach.
China’s military modernization “is the top focus of U.S. defense planning and budgeting,” experts say. But Washington keeps finding an excuse to let Beijing close the gap on America, the only true global superpower. On Monday, when the European Space Agency’s Earth observation satellites snapped the Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian in the South China Sea, flight-tracking data suggested the USS Theodore Roosevelt was steaming toward the Indian Ocean only a few hundred miles to the east.
The Roosevelt will become the fifth U.S. flattop to deploy to the Middle East during the Iran war—after the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington—and it’s on course to reach the U.S.
Central Command area later this month. The Bush and the Washington remain in the Arabian Sea for now, and together with the Roosevelt will equal the record set this past spring for the largest carrier strike force in the region since the 2003 Iraq war. But for the third time in just over two years, a military crisis in the Middle East has forced the U.S. to confront a multiweek “carrier gap” in the Western Pacific.
The Roosevelt will relieve the Washington, allowing it to return to its forward homeport in Japan, but not before a period of overlap in which President Donald Trump is given additional strike options. Navy amphibious ready group led by the USS Boxer also is in the Indian Ocean, according to a tracker maintained by the U.S. Naval Institute-run USNI News.
The U.S.’s 11 aircraft carriers are symbols of American power and a demonstration of industrial strength and geopolitical ambitions. China now has three of its own and Xi wants at least nine of the floating bases by 2035, according to the Pentagon. The coercive weight of the flattop is one China’s leaders know well.
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