China is a serious, long term threat to American strategic interests.

(It also seems that the Andale Mono font looks better, so I'll use that from now on). Firstly, I fully agree with and concede his assertion that the international system is anarchic and that states have survival as their fundamental goal. I also mostly agree with his descriptions of US power. However, I want to clarify Pro's first claim: that the US has "permanent occupying forces" all over the world. What I infer that Pro means is that the United States has military and intelligence rights in those countries and exercises them. The word "occupy" is generally assumed to mean provisional control over a foreign area (similar to Britain in India, or China in Tibet), which is a highly misleading term when applied to modern American dominion. While Britain or Turkey could theoretically choose to expell the US forces and the US would be politically unable to conquer them or reassert control another way, it would not be in their interests whatsoever and thus would be entirely irrational. The US's "occupation" should be understood as diplomatic and political authority. Secondly, Pro completely misunderstood my claim of the Chinese coastal region being hostile to the inland region. The conflict I talked about was of a purely economic domain and not the result of territorial or cultural differences. The peasants of central China have fundamentally conflicting interests with the merchants of the coast. My point about Mao Zedong was also misinterpreted. His rise was not the result of the tensions, but he exploited them to his gain. After Mao failed to take control of Shanghai, he took the Long March into the interior, and after winning the support of rural peasants he was able to raise an army with which he eventually conquered the coastal region [1. . http://en.wikipedia.org...].A map for convenience: I shall now address his main points which are various claims about religious and cultural ties between China and its neighboring countries. 1. Pro provides no explanation of how religion or shared value systems would impact foreign relations between two countries. Ethical or spiritual beliefs are reflected in attitudes of the populations of countries and only facilitates economic or social ties if the belief system crosses into those domains (e. g. the survival of the Jews in diaspora was owed in part to social laws in the Talmud; or that the political power of the Pope was cemented by the church being the only stable institutions in people's lives, etc). While this may have been true in the past, religion no longer directly impacts socioeconomic factors in any fundamental way. While it is true that two countries can use cultural similarities to build relationships if their interests are already congruous, political and nationalist motives are the defining factor in modern geopolitics. To apply these interests to non-political things such as the piety or cultural attitude of the populations is entirely out of touch with the reality of today's systems, and as such Pro's idea of a pan-Islamic power combining China and the Middle East is quite unwarranted. The naked assertion that having similar religious customs "strengthens ties" between two nations is not an argument; Pro has the full burden to show precisely how they are doing so.2. I find it difficult to even recall any examples in history in which similarity of religions has really strengthened relations between countries. Going back to the 17th and 18th centuries, Catholic countries such as Spain and France were generally allies and so were Protestant ones like England and the Netherlands. And yet England and the Netherlands were often at each other's throats during that period and England was also allied to Catholic Portugal. In modern times, Israel, the pariah of most of the Islamic world, remained friends with the Muslim nations of Turkey, Azerbaijan and pre-revolutionary Iran for decades. Likewise, the real motivation behind the Arab invasions of Israel and their refusal to legitimize it was not borne out of simple religious fervor but pan-Arabism, the concept of Arab unity in the Middle East (which the region of Palestine was critical to). It seems to me that religious considerations were generally much less important than geopolitical ones in both modern and premodern eras. As promised, I will now do a full analysis of China's military capacity and reach. Chinese Ground Forces. The bulk of the Chinese army is built for occupation and national defense. China, being an unstable empire, designed ground forces not for power projection but rather to ensure domestic stability in parts of the country and as the main line of defense for an invasion of the Chinese homland [2. . http://www.nbr.org...]. These limitations were demonstrated during the Korean War. While the military has become modernized to some extent it could be put to full use only if the United State directly attacked China, which is extremely unlikely. Modern tactics are not about force, they are about the control, organization, and application of force. Thus, the real issue here is China's power projection. Chinese Air Forces. China's air force is tiny compared to that of the United States. The US has over four times more aircraft than China does, and it is far more modernized, as well as deployable from many of the countries surrounding China. Quick comparison: US:[3. . http://en.wikipedia.org...] China:[4. . http://en.wikipedia.org...].Chinese Naval Forces. China's navy has seen substantial improvement in the past few decades, but it is far from being able to challenge the United States (even as the US deploys its navy to other parts of the world). Aircraft carriers are extremely expensive but excellent for power projection. They are, in essence, floating cities. China has one. The only three nations to have more than one are Italy (two), Spain (two) and the United States (ten) [5. . http://www.globalfirepower.com...]. In addition, the United States and Japan have four times more destroyers than China does. [6. . http://www.globalfirepower.com...] In terms of advanced power projection, China cannot compete with this. Keep in mind that China has to train specialized pilots to land on aircraft carriers, and train admirals to command aircraft carriers, and train generals to know how to utilize aircraft carriers over large areas, etc. Human resources are far from limitless, while the United States has had an aircraft carrier navy since WWII and has military traditions and experience in using them. Creating entire navies cannot be accomplished in a few years or even a decade. Assuming China survives that long, the United States and Japan, as inherent thalassocracies, will still have a massive head start on them. This was a brief overview of (what I believe) are the important points of China's military capacity. I now turn the debate over to my opponent.