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“Over the course of the last decade,” writes Admiral Holsey, “the United States has focused predominantly on the Indo-Pacific, while China has taken a global approach.” By going global, China has emplaced Latin America and the Caribbean “on the front lines of a decisive and urgent contest to define the future of our world.” The SOUTHCOM chief sees Beijing’s gambits in the Western Hemisphere as part of a globe-spanning strategic offensive: “China is assailing U.S. interests from all directions, in all domains, and increasingly in the Caribbean archipelago—a potential offensive island chain.”

We're dealing with levels of projection that have never been seen before on this planet. And the worst part is that I know they don't actually believe that China is fucking funnelling guns and fortifications into the Caribbean or whatever, they're just writing this drivel to prod Trump into devoting more resources to the region + Latin America.

[...] By securing commercial and diplomatic access to seaports spanning the globe, then, China has been laying the groundwork for a network of Mahanian-style bases for many years. What would Holsey’s offensive island chain look like? For one thing, it would not be an island chain occupied entirely by authoritarian societies friendly to China and hostile to the United States. That’s a marked difference from Asia’s first island chain, inhabited solely by U.S. allies, partners, or friends closely spaced from one another on the map and wary of the mainland.

Nor would an offensive Caribbean island chain completely sever U.S. access to the Atlantic and Pacific, the way the first island chain—which encloses 100 percent of China’s continental crest—obstructs access to the Western Pacific and points beyond.

All of that being the case, it is doubtful in the extreme that China will negotiate military access throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the loose line of islands that forms the northerly and easterly rim of the Caribbean Sea. The PLA Navy will be unable to make the Antilles into an impassable barrier, the way the United States and its Asian allies and partners can by stationing military implements along the first island chain.

But the Chinese navy could cause serious trouble anyway. Think about plausible candidates for PLA Navy bases in the Caribbean. Two stand out: Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba is a fraternal communist country, and perpetually impoverished. Thus, both out of ideological solidarity and in order to boost its economy, it might well prove receptive to CCP entreaties to host Chinese warships. Venezuela is ruled by a leftist regime and might likewise prove a convivial host for China’s navy.

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That Havana or Caracas would go so far as to host such a system is doubtful: the United States does remain the regional hegemon by far, and the last attempt by an external great power to station its missiles on Cuba nearly led to thermonuclear war. But either of these countries might take the lesser step of admitting PLA Navy flotillas on a rotating or permanent basis without that shore fire support. Even smaller-scale arrangements would let Beijing threaten to stage what Mahan’s contemporary Julian S. Corbett called a “war by contingent.” Corbett recalls that a modest contingent of British Army forces supported by the Royal Navy landed in Iberia during the Napoleonic Wars. The army fought alongside Portuguese and Spanish partisans, bogging down French forces sorely needed for the main fighting front to France’s east.

In short, Britain extracted disproportionate gain from the amphibious expedition. The Iberian theater was so distracting, and devoured so many martial resources, that the little emperor wryly called it his “Spanish Ulcer.”

Think about what responses a Chinese naval presence—a Caribbean Ulcer—would likely elicit from Washington. It would beckon U.S. leaders’ strategic gaze to home waters, long regarded as a safe sanctuary. Tending to that zone of neglect would reduce the policy energy available for theaters like East Asia. It would stretch U.S. naval and military forces that are already under strain trying to manage security commitments all around the Eurasian perimeter. It would probably compel the U.S. Navy to station a squadron of combatant ships at one or more Gulf Coast seaports for the first time since the Navy vacated them after the Cold War. That would impose a new, old theater on the U.S. Navy—amplifying the demands on a too-lean fighting force. And on and on.

First, the US Navy doesn't need any help to fall apart given the war they waged to unblock the Red Sea - and lost. Second, this is all under the assumption that China will indeed want to militarily challenge the US for hegemony, when there's no indication of that at all. They don't even want to economically challenge the US for hegemony right now, much to our disappointment. I think it's infinitely more likely that China will eventually gain Taiwan back by some method or another (probably after a couple US aircraft carriers crash into each other and their satrapies in South Asia collapse due to lack of funding and/or internal unrest), then just basically chill. There's no reason for China to get involved in a second Cold War when they know perfectly well how the first one ended for the USSR. They see how well the whole "world empire into which all goods flow and which produces nothing of productive value" thing is going for the US (increasingly badly) and rightfully see no reason to aspire to that position, when peaceful co-operation does genuinely seem more effective, efficient, and less likely to lead to catastrophic (and potentially nuclear) wars.