Is China really a threat to the U.S.?

To the east, Japan’s government is responding to Chinese expansion by boosting its own defense spending to record levels, proposing to change its pacifist constitution to allow greater military flexibility, and making a renewed push to resolve the long-standing Kuril Islands dispute with Russia. If Prime Minister Shinzo Abe finally succeeds in making peace with Russia, that would leave China and its ally North Korea as the sole focus for Japan’s entire military capacity. Japan is a rich, technologically advanced country of 127 million people. It can look after itself.

For very different reasons, China poses little threat to South Korea. China increasingly views North Korea more as a burden than as an advance column for an attack on the South. And China has recently been courting South Korean technology investment in order to reduce its dependence on Japan.

Political relations across the Taiwan Strait are inevitably dominated by questions over the status of Taiwan. Every election in Taiwan sparks talk about and fears of Chinese invasion. But no country in the world has staged a large-scale amphibious assault since the U.S. landings at Incheon, South Korea in 1950. For more than half a century, even American adventures abroad have been small-scale (Grenada) or launched from land bases (Iraq).

The Chinese military will never have the capacity to invade Taiwan against armed resistance — not now, not later, not ever. It just can’t be done in the contemporary military context in which a single cruise missile can sink a transport ship carrying thousands of troops. It makes no sense to worry about something that is not technically possible.