US NAVY operations chief, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, has presented a strategy for ensuring the South China Sea and western Pacific remain open to international shipping, saying that China might "limit access in the region", reports the Washington Times.
Admiral Greenert spoke a week after President Barack Obama presented his military strategy, which focuses forces on Asia and the Middle East with Mr Obama saying China can affect US security "in a variety of ways".
Said Admiral Greenert: "Over the long term, China will have the greatest potential to affect economic and the security dynamics throughout the region and perhaps the world. Their economic strength has grown. They have great regional capability and capacity and it's growing - and that could limit access in the region."
The admiral also said the US Navy had deployed 100 of its 285 ships, and half are in the western Pacific.
"About half of those are forward deployed naval forces in and around Japan," he said. "That's the most advanced air wing we have, the most advanced cruisers and destroyers, ordnance, anti-submarine warfare. We put our best in the western Pacific."
Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations analyst, said several of China's neighbours, including communist Vietnam, are looking to the US.
"The Chinese navy has become very aggressive in trying to push out the navies of the Philippines, Japan and other local powers to extend Chinese sovereignty beyond what international law would allow," Mr. Boot said. "Everybody would like to see China have a peaceful rise.
"But there are also very strong militarist and nationalist tendencies in China, with a lot of blood-curdling rhetoric coming from the People's Liberation Army about war against the United States."
Mr Boot said he saw the balance of power in the Pacific "tilting against us. And I see a further tilt unless we actually increase our defence spending and expand the size of our navy, in particular, which I think is at a dangerously low level".
