The Pentagon Is Too Fixated on China

It’s unclear where the instinct to focus on China at the expense of the rest of the world comes from. Perhaps it’s a nostalgia for the Cold War, when every global conflict, crisis, and hot spot could be understood through the prism of the Soviet–American competition (even though that interpretation was often misleading and led to catastrophic misunderstandings and policy mistakes). Perhaps it’s a reaction to a sense of American power weakening—in which case it’s a prescription that will only acc