Jonathan Jordan
Chinese and American forces in the Pacific have had a busy year, with the great power rivalry flaring up again recently in the skies off Alaska. Yet this was only the latest episode in a long-running saga of moves and countermoves playing out in warmer seas to the south. The plodding US–PRC checkers game of the past has become a high-stakes chess match of oceanic geopolitics. Beijing and Washington both favor a strategic ambiguity that obscures their plans, objectives, and outcomes as the military escalation builds.
What follows is a list of notable events in the US-China rivalry over the calendar year. Taken together, they illustrate an overall trend of deteriorating bilateral relations and ever more active posturing for worse conflicts to come:
Hostile Bombers Approach Alaska. In a historical first, two nuclear-capable Chinese Xian H-6K bombers and two Russian Tu-95MS Bear bombers crossed into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on July 24. The bombers were rapidly shooed away by American F-16s and F-35s and Canadian CF-18 fighter jets. Yet this single joint flight marked three ominous firsts: all four bombers were nuclear capable, all four took off from the same Russian air base, and together with Russian fighter jets they entered skies a mere 200 miles from the Alaskan coastline. The bold move illustrated Russia and China’s budding new “no limits” friendship declared in 2022, a pact preoccupied with testing US military power in the Pacific. This was the eighth joint Chinese-Russian bomber flight since 2019. Earlier flight paths overflew the Sea of Japan, East China Sea, and Western Pacific, and meandered into both Japanese and South Korean Air Defense Identification Zones. Russian and PRC naval forces have also increased their joint maritime patrols in Indo-Pacific waters.
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