America is stronger than China. But China only needs to be stronger than America and our available allies at the point and moment of attack in order to inflict a defeat on us:
China can fulfill its goals by pitting its entire military against a fraction of the U.S. military supplemented by America’s Asian allies. If it can make itself stronger at the decisive place on the map at the decisive time, it stands a good chance of winning, of disheartening the United States, or of imposing costs too heavy for a halfhearted United States to bear. Putatively weaker combatants can prevail. They often have across the sweep of history. That’s why Mearsheimer’s article prompted eye-rolling when I circulated the weblink among my Japanese hosts last week. Geography confronts them, and Taiwan, and Southeast Asian societies with the prospect of local Chinese supremacy every day.
It's actually even worse than this. China can fulfill one of its goals by pitting its entire military against one of America's Asian allies and just delaying American military intervention until it is too late to affect the outcome of that military conflict. China can inflict a defeat on us without engaging our forces at all.
The only way our overall military superiority matters is if we decide to reverse whatever gain China makes and decide we will do that regardless of the time and cost needed to win.
I find it odd that some believe we should draw comfort from our chances in an all-out, fight-to-the-death general war with China rather than judging our odds in lesser conflicts.
Yes, we did that when Japan struck us in December 1941. But recall that our GDP was perhaps ten times the size of Japan's at the time and it still took us nearly four years and two atomic bombs to end that war. China watchers are already trying to predict when China's economy will be larger than ours. And China has nuclear weapons, too.
There are limits to conclusions drawn from gross balance of power calculations.
