Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is putting “insufficient” resources towards its lofty goal for a “rebalance” to the Pacific, according to a congressionally mandated report on the region conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The 270 page report, released Tuesday, warned that “at the current rate of U.S. capability development, the balance of military power in the region is shifting against the United States” and called for “robust funding” to maintain the US strategic dominance of the Pacific.
The study was ordered under the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, and is a follow-up to a 2012 congressionally mandated report studying the same issues. That study, also conducted by CSIS, made a series of recommendations; however, the authors write, the “international security environment has become significantly more complicated” in the region since then.
Unsurprisingly, the authors identified China as the primary threat to American power in the region, warning: “If China’s economic, military, and geopolitical influence continues to rise at even a modest pace during this period, the world will witness the largest shift in the global distribution of power since the rise of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
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