Elbridge Colby Featured in RealClear Politics

According to Elbridge Colby, the single most important fact about China today is that it is a great power that seeks regional hegemony in Asia, the globe’s fastest-growing economic region and home to more than half of the world’s population. And the most important fact about the United States, Colby contends, is America’s interest in blocking China from dominating Asia. Because the CCP has identified reunification by 2049 with free and democratic Taiwan—through whatever means necessary—as a central strategic objective and because such a conquest would consolidate Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, Colby’s lucid, painstakingly argued book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” is essential reading. Because Colby does not pursue the implications of the fact that China is an authoritarian great power rooted in Marxism-Leninism and Chinese nationalism while the United States is a great power grounded in freedom and democracy, his analysis must be supplemented by a wider appreciation of the China challenge.

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