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military presence, and the world—and the South China Sea, in particular—looks like a very different place.
    The United States keeps China honest: limiting China’s aggression mainly to its maps, so that China’s diplomats and navy act within reason. That is not to say that the United States is pure in its actions and China automatically the villain. For example, the United States conducts classified reconnaissance activities on a regular basis against China in the Western Pacific that it would have difficulty tolerating were they directed at its own nearby waters by a rival great power. 19 What the United States provides to the nations of the South China Sea region is less the fact of its democratic virtue than the fact of its raw power, which counters that of China. It is the balance of powerbetween the United States and China that ultimately keeps Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore free, able to play one great power off against the other. And within that space of freedom, regionalism, in the form of ASEAN, can emerge as a power in its own right. Yet such freedom cannot be taken for granted. For the tense, ongoing standoff between the United States and China—in which a stalemate ensues on a plethora of complex issues ranging from cyber-war to trade to currency reform to surveillance of each other’s military capabilities—might yet shift in China’s favor because of the sheer absolute growth of the Chinese economy (even as the rate of that growth declines), coupled with China’s geographic centrality to East Asia and the Western Pacific.
    Andrew F. Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, believes that the nations of the Western Pacific are slowly being “Finlandized” by China, meaning that they will maintain nominal independence but in the end abide by foreign policy rules set by Beijing. He points out that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks—“which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide ‘smart bombs’ and more”—as its “Achilles’ heel.” The Chinese, he goes on, have tested an antisatellite missile in 2007, have reportedly used lasers to temporarily blind U.S. satellites, and have been conducting cyber-attacks on the U.S. military for years. This is in addition to the large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles and other anti-access/area-denial weaponry that the Chinese have been fielding to undermine U.S. forward bases in Asia. 20 According to Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute in California, “China is on the cusp” of being able to use conventional satellites and swarms of miniature ones, as well as “networked surface, undersea, and aerial cuing for real-time terminal guidance with which to direct its 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles,” in order to hit U.S. aircraft carriers. 21 The aim is not to go to war, but to adjust the disposition of forces so that, as in the case of Taiwan, but writ large across the Western Pacific, the U.S. military increasingly loses credibility as to what it can accomplish. And with that loss of credibilitywould come the weakening of America’s Pacific alliances. Indeed, the Finlandization of Southeast Asia may indicate the dark side of a multipolar military world.
    True military multipolarity benefits the state that is most geographically central to the region in question: namely China in East Asia. This is because the military situation being equal, geography and demography provide the edge. In other words, a multipolar Asia in military terms would be a Chinese-dominated Asia. And Chinese dominance in Asia would be very different from American dominance. Because China is not half a world away from the region, but in fact constitutes the region’s geographic, demographic, and