The recent deployment of four Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships to the waters off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands further highlights the growing chessboard of naval operations in the Pacific. The message from China was clear — that they maintain the ability to strategically challenge the United States homeland and that their naval operations are increasingly capable of long-range sustained deployments. We should not, however, assume that this message is meant for the U.S. alone, nor assume that this is only a tit-for-tat in response to U.S. freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. As Elizabeth Buchanan, a lecturer in strategic studies at Deakin University in Australia, told Arctic Today in a recent interview, this may be a signal to Russia as well as the U.S. that Chinese access to the Arctic is not negotiable.
Is China worried about an Arctic choke point? (brookings.edu)
