Kaplan made a comparison between the Caribbean’s status vis-a-vis the United States and the South China Sea’s status vis-a-vis China. China, already a major power, hopes, by controlling this crucial waterway, to ascend further, and to cement its status as a major world power:
China’s position vis-à-vis the South China Sea is akin to America’s position vis-à-vis the Caribbean Sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The United States recognized the presence and claims of European powers in the Caribbean, but sought to dominate the region, nevertheless. It was the Spanish-American War of 1898, fought primarily over Cuba, as well as the digging of the Panama Canal from 1904 to 1914, that signaled the arrival of the United States as a world power. This development, not coincidentally, occurred following the closure of the American frontier, with the last major battle of the Indian Wars fought in 1890. Moreover, it was domination of the Greater Caribbean Basin that gave the United States effective control of the Western Hemisphere, which, in turn, allowed it to affect the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere. Perhaps likewise with China in the twenty-first century.
Since Kaplan wrote those words in 2014, China has become, economically, much more of a world power. Politically and militarily, it has gained greater status, but its political and military growth has trailed its economic growth. Having a major influence on global trade, it hopes to make itself felt as a military and diplomatic power as well. In 2025, Nur Rachmat Yuliantoro wrote:
China’s political clout and economic strength have enabled the nation to take on a more significant role in addressing international crises. China’s involvement in two notable conflicts — the Saudi-Iran tensions and the Russia-Ukraine war — illustrates this change. China’s mediation efforts in these circumstances highlight its increasing influence and evolving foreign policy.
In sum, China wants to be the new Henry Kissinger, but not for altruistic reasons.
At the same time, China wants to continue to increase, and flex, its military muscles. In 2026, Chris Buckley wrote:
China has begun operating a new air force base in Laos, marking another step in Beijing’s efforts to establish military footholds abroad and project power into Southeast Asia.
China’s military presence in and around the South China Sea has grown. In 2014, Kaplan had written:
China, by way of its 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles focused on Taiwan and its 270 commercial flights a week to Taiwan, will be able to do an end run around Taiwanese sovereignty without needing to subdue it through a naval invasion. As with the closing of the American frontier, China’s effective capture of Taiwan in the years to come will allow Chinese naval planners the ability to finally concentrate their energies on the wider South China Sea, an antechamber to the Indian Ocean in which China also desires a naval presence, in order to protect its Middle Eastern energy supplies. Were China to ever replace the U.S. Navy as the dominant power in the South China Sea — or even reach parity with it — this would open up geostrategic possibilities for China comparable to what America achieved upon its dominance of the Caribbean.
China would certainly rather gain control by extortion — by the threat of force. It would rather not use direct military attacks; yet it is willing to use such direct attacks if extortion fails. It will use whichever methods seem most effective at attaining its goal, as Patricia Cohen wrote about the Chinese threat in 2026:
The threat is raising questions about open access to the world’s waterways, something that has been taken for granted since the end of World War II. The United States has essentially been the enforcer of free navigation, but its willingness to stay in that role has waned while other powers have been emboldened to challenge it.China continues to flex its muscle in the waters off Taiwan, sending out patrols to assert its claims to the seas around the island.
What Robert Kaplan wrote in 2014 is still true in 2026:
To be sure, the South China Sea is no Caribbean. In fact, it is more important. The Caribbean was far from the main sea lines of communication, while the South China Sea is at the heart of them.
In 2026, coauthors Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger, writing about China, accurately noted “the rapid growth of its nuclear weapons program” and “its territorial declarations in the South China Sea.” China continues to keep military aggression as an option.
Kaplan himself agrees: fourteen years after writing Asia’s Cauldron, he depicts China’s belligerency as having intensified:
The ultimate geopolitical catastrophe would be a military conflict over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Avoiding such a conflict is not merely a matter of reducing military tensions. As the Yale Sinologist Odd Arne Westad points out, it was Germany’s assumption that Britain might not come to the aid of its allies in 1914 that helped set off World War I. If China assumes the United States might not come to the aid of Taiwan, that might likewise increase the chances of war.
In 2014, it was still imaginable that China might not come to control the South China Sea. In 2026, it’s still possible, but a lot more difficult to imagine. China made no effort to hide or excuse its unprovoked aggression against a Philippine ship in July 2026. Edward Wong narrates:
It was the worst clash in years between China and the Philippines at a long-simmering flashpoint in the South China Sea.For decades, the Philippines has claimed a small reef in disputed waters and signaled its control of the territory by rotating troops to a World War II-era ship grounded there. An international tribunal ruling a decade ago supports the Philippines’ claim.
But last month, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel began circling the ship, which is named the Sierra Madre. It was the latest in a long series of encounters between the two governments at the site, which is called the Second Thomas Shoal.
At one point, the Chinese Coast Guard used small boats to move in on Filipino service members and beat one of the men with a wooden baton, inflicting head injuries, according to Philippine and U.S. officials. China blamed the Philippines for provoking the clash.
The American ambassador expressed outrage and declared that the United States stood with the Philippines, the oldest U.S. treaty ally in Southeast Asia.
Yet no one expects China to curb its expansionist activities in the region anytime soon. And there are growing doubts among Asian nations over what the United States would be willing to do to deter China.
Unless and until the United States shows that it has the capability and the will to confront Chinese aggression in direct military conflict, a Chinese attack on the smaller nations around the South China Sea seems likely and perhaps even inevitable. The irony of great-power dynamics remains: to avoid a destructive massive war, a state must convince the world that it is willing to engage in a destructive massive war.
The South China Sea is both commercially and militarily valuable. China has made no secret about its desire to claim the area, having made spurious legal claims to large parts of it. Over the last two decades, it has steadily increased its military presence in the area.
China’s craving for this sea is an obsession and a fixation. In 2014, Robert Kaplan explained why:
Because the South China Sea is where the sea lines of communication between the Horn of Africa and the Sea of Japan join together, the state that dominates the South China Sea will be a long way toward dominating the navigable rimland of the Eastern Hemisphere. Of course, the opposite is more likely to be the case: no one state will dominate the South China Sea. Another reason why the South China Sea is so important is that it is on the way to becoming the most contested body of water in the world.
From Kaplan’s publication in 2014 until today, China has spent the last decade increasing its ability to militarily threaten the nation-states around the South China Sea. It has already engaged in unprovoked military actions. It is deploying weapons systems which are not defensive and are aggressive. China’s lust for, and preoccupation with, the conquest of this area has not weakened and is perhaps stronger. China’s calculus is that the less committed the United States is to defending its allies in the region, the more likely China is to increase the number and size of its attacks, up to and including outright war.
Can Chinese bellicosity be blamed on a weak U.S. diplomatic posture? In part, but not in whole. Even the strongest U.S. posture would still leave the world with an aggressive China. But a stronger U.S. tone would have moderated China’s aggression at least somewhat.
Who is to blame for a less-than-optimal U.S. stance? No one individual. American weakness has become systemic, spanning the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
But it is a mere distraction to focus on the American failure to present a powerful deterrent to Chinese aggression. Even the history of how the U.S. political class came to see China as anything other than an illegitimate thug state is a distraction.
The foundational reality, on which any understanding of the situation in the western Pacific must be based, is the nature of the Chinese leadership class and the nature of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Such an understanding includes Chinese expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism. It includes the Chinese desire to own — if not outright, then through spheres of influence — a list of both pieces of land and bodies of water. It includes the Chinese desire to dominate and control, politically, militarily and economically. This is what China is.
China has not always been this, and need not be this in the future.
The rest of the world can only begin to formulate a response after it has fully digested the essence of what the CCP’s vision and goals are.
