China is no threat.
Beckley 18 Michael Beckley, International Relations Professor at Tufts University, PhD at Columbia. [Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower, an addition to the series Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, edited by Robert J. Art, Robert Jervis, and Stephen M. Walt, Cornell University Press]
This chapter provides such an assessment. The first half examines each country’s net military resources. The second half assesses how each side would fare in the most likely scenarios for a U.S.-China war. My main finding is that the United States has five to ten times the net military assets of China and maintains a formidable containment barrier against Chinese expansion in East Asia. Defense Spending The United States currently outspends China militarily three to one. Many analysts, however, expect that gap to shrink in the years ahead and some organizations, including The Economist and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, have projected that China’s defense budget will overtake America’s by the 2030s.1 There are many reasons to doubt such projections, not the least of which is that China’s economic growth is slowing dramatically, as shown in the previous chapter. Even if China’s defense spending eventually exceeds America’s, however, it would not necessarily mean that China 63 has more military resources. Defense spending statistics are gross flow measures that ignore accumulated stocks of military spending and fail to deduct welfare or security costs. As a result, such statistics vastly understate the U.S.-China military gap. Below, I elaborate on these points.