The US says that China is the real threat and not Russia

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Russia is a distraction.

The real threat to America's global supremacy is

.

And, to face this challenge, Washington is going to strengthen its conventional defense, including its atomic weapons systems, and it is going to extend its network of alliances in the critical theater of global power in the 21st century: the Pacific and Indian oceans.

It is not an assessment.

They are, almost verbatim, the words of the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in the United States National Defense Strategy, the document that sets out the general lines of the position of the US Armed Forces.

In its 20 pages - which is the version open to the public, since there is another secret one -

.

If in the 2018 Strategy, drawn up under the presidency of Donald Trump, that country was described as a "strategic competitor that uses the economy in a predatory way to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing elements of the South China Sea", this time refers to him five times as

in which the United States "focuses", because it will be "our most relevant competitor in the coming decades".

Two other documents also issued on Thursday, the 'Nuclear Posture Review' and the 'Missile Defense Review', use those same expressions to refer to Beijing.

The words that the Department of Defense dedicates to Beijing

.

In his introductory message, Austin accuses the People's Republic of China of taking "increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to better suit its authoritarian preferences," and expresses concern about the massive modernization program of the Chinese Armed Forces, which

-close to a thousand, by the end of the decade- carried out by any country for five decades.

Beijing, unlike Russia,

, something that the United States has asked it to carry out permanently for several years.

All this makes up a situation in which, as Austin explains, expressly quoting Joe Biden, "we saw a decisive decade and we faced formidable challenges."

And, to face this threat, the United States resorts to a Cold War strategy,

, new ones -among them the AUKUS, with Great Britain and Australia- and the hope that India will formalize its defense agreements with Washington, despite the reluctance of the other great Asian demographic power to enter into formal international agreements that could limit its freedom of action.

In the face of this reaffirmation of the importance of China,

, which presents "serious dangers in critical areas", but whose strategy of challenging NATO "has turned against it in a dramatic way", and that, in addition, "it has suffered a considerable reduction" in its military capacity

and the international sanctions that have been imposed on it and that are especially harsh for a country that practically has no technology of its own.

On the podium of threats to the United States,

, behind China and Russia.

Terrorism, which for more than a decade marked Washington's security strategy, is relegated to the bottom of the concerns, on the same level as climate change.

Global warming worries the Pentagon for two reasons.

One, because extreme weather events and rising temperatures

.

The other, because the Arctic ice is melting, thus opening an entire ocean to maritime traffic, trade, and mining between just seven countries, including the US.

When Donald Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark in 2019, he was making an atrocious proposal, because territories have not been sold and bought for more than a hundred years (Spain was one of the last countries to sell populated colonies, in 1900), but he obeyed to the growing importance of the Arctic in world geopolitics.

In reality, the Strategy, and its 'little brothers', on atomic weapons and anti-missile shields,

.

And his doctrine, in turn, is that of Barack Obama, who was the one who in 2011 coined the idea of ​​the 'turn to the Pacific', which consisted of removing from Europe and the Middle East the primacy as a theater in US defense to give it to the Pacific.

The arrival of the Islamic State and the indecision of the then White House tenant put a stop to those plans,

.

The only change in this strategy has been a greater focus on Russia, especially after the invasion of Ukraine.

But, on the other hand, Moscow's failure in that war has convinced the United States that the rival is China.

In fact, the Strategy plays down the importance of the alliance between Moscow and Beijing due to its tremendous imbalance, given that Russia does not have an economic, technological and military power even remotely comparable to China's.

The Strategy also definitively demolishes the conspiracy theory that the United States was interested in the Ukraine war.

On the contrary.

The conflict is a distraction and a complication for Washington, because it makes it difficult to turn to the Pacific.

In fact,

.

First, he lifted, against the criteria of the Senate, Trump's veto of the entry into service of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline. Later, he conveyed the idea - even at the June 2021 "summit" between Biden and Putin in Geneva - that Washington he was not going to pursue a hostile policy against Moscow, just three months after his first encounter with China had ended in little more than a barroom brawl.

Finally, the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan in August 2021

.

In reality, that withdrawal was part of the turn to the Pacific and the progressive US disengagement from the Middle East.

It is a strategy that, as the documents published on Thursday explain, continues despite the war in Ukraine.

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