Robert D. Blackwill & Richard Fontaine
From Washington’s Farewell Address to Biden’s national security strategy, the core U.S. national interest, unsurprisingly, has not changed: to ensure the fundamental security of the homeland and its people in freedom. As Alexander Hamilton put it, “Self-preservation is the first duty of a nation.” Vital U.S. interests are all increasingly threatened by China and can be defined as the following:
1) To prevent the use and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and catastrophic conventional terrorist attacks or cyber attacks against the United States, its military forces abroad, or its allies.
China’s burgeoning intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and nuclear capabilities present a threat to the American homeland and its forces abroad. China plans to increase its stockpile of strategic nuclear warheads from an estimated 500 in 2022 to 1,500 by 2035. This rise is accompanied by increased infrastructure-building to produce and separate plutonium. Beijing is reportedly constructing 300 new missile silos in the country’s western desert—a tenfold increase over the number operational in 2022—in addition to its arsenal of an estimated one hundred road-mobile ICBM launchers.
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