China Could Build an “Island Chain” Around America

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Mounting a standing presence in America’s backyard could pay handsome returns on a modest Chinese investment.

Turnabout is fair play—in geopolitics as in private life. When I was applying to return to Newport and the Naval War College back in 2006, I remember someone on the hiring committee asking what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would do once it consummated its rise to maritime eminence and settled affairs in East Asia to party magnates’ liking. I said it would seek out naval basing rights in the Atlantic Ocean and in the United States’ nautical anteroom, the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. By forward-deploying forces to the Western Hemisphere, it would siphon U.S. military resources homeward—thinning out the U.S. presence at China’s door while complicating life for America in waters it habitually regards as its natural preserve.

Staging an Atlantic or Caribbean presence would be a choice bit of mischief-making to boot.

We may be watching that prophecy come true. A couple of weeks back, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who oversees the U.S. Southern Command, submitted written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee warning that China may seek out military redoubts around the Caribbean rim. (Hat tip: Inside Defense.) “Over the course of the last decade,” writes Admiral Holsey, “the United States has focused predominantly on the Indo-Pacific, while China has taken a global approach.” By going global, China has emplaced Latin America and the Caribbean “on the front lines of a decisive and urgent contest to define the future of our world.” The SOUTHCOM chief sees Beijing’s gambits in the Western Hemisphere as part of a globe-spanning strategic offensive: “China is assailing U.S. interests from all directions, in all domains, and increasingly in the Caribbean archipelago—a potential offensive island chain.”

And such a move would make sense through Chinese Communist eyes. U.S. forces have been firmly ensconced along Asia’s first island chain for nearly eight decades now, placing a potential antagonist athwart China’s access to the Western Pacific. Policies and strategies that promise to enfeeble the American presence in East Asia—and ease China’s access conundrum—beguile party leaders. But the CCP leadership has approached its maritime project sagely since launching into it three decades ago. Its approach mirrors that of the godfather of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan—a historian and theorist avidly read and discussed in China.

China’s Patient Naval Strategy

China commenced its seaborne enterprise by pursuing commerce facilitated by diplomacy. More than four decades ago, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping set out to reform and open the Chinese economy to the world. To make itself prosperous, Beijing cast what Mahan called the “chain” of sea power. It developed industrial production at home, making itself the world’s factory floor. It amassed unrivaled shipbuilding capacity. And it sought out access to foreign trading ports.

Production, shipping, overseas bases—those are the “links” in the sea-power “chain.”

Meanwhile, China was riveting together a great navy, but for a long time party and naval leaders contented themselves with a leisurely approach to naval development. They experimented with new ship classes at length, building a few copies apiece of several variants of, say, a next-generation guided-missile destroyer. People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) crews then took their tin cans out to sea to find out what their strong and weak spots were. Shipwrights discarded the worst features from each variant and kludged the best into a final design for mass production. And then shipyards built them. A lot of them.

This shipbuilding philosophy served China well.

It sounds counterintuitive, considering the snarling across the Pacific in recent years, but the PLA Navy could afford to take an unhurried approach, owing to U.S. maritime supremacy. Since World War II, the U.S. Navy has supplied the international public good of maritime security for all seagoing peoples, including China. So long as American ships of war watched over the sea lanes, Chinese merchantmen had little reason to fear interference from hostile states or nonstate malefactors while traversing the world’s oceans and seas. In other words, Beijing had the luxury of postponing deployment of the military component of Mahanian sea power—namely a navy of its own, able to safeguard Chinese commerce and provide a backstop guaranteeing mercantile and diplomatic access to distant harbors.

Only now, consequently, is Chinese sea power taking on a martial tinge in extra-regional waters. The PLA Navy is now the world’s largest, measured by numbers of hulls. It is backed up by an imposing array of shore-based aircraft and missiles while cruising the China seas and Western Pacific. As anti-access defenses extend their precision firing range farther and farther seaward, the PLA Navy surface fleet can be increasingly footloose; naval commanders can dispatch task forces to remote expanses without undue fear of forfeiting China’s strategic position close to home.

Add this all up. No longer does the Chinese Communist Party feel the need to entrust China’s maritime destiny—its “dream” of national rejuvenation and grandeur following a “century of humiliation”—to the uncertain goodwill of a prospective future foe.

To be sure, China has not yet solved dilemmas close to home, in waterways such as the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea. Nevertheless, party leaders are increasingly comfortable looking beyond these imbroglios. That’s the strategic option burgeoning military capability affords. As Holsey hinted to the Senate Armed Services Committee, China’s navy is taking on an increasingly expeditionary bent. And if Beijing can parley commercial and diplomatic access to faraway seaports into military access, it will have completed forging the Mahanian sea-power chain. It will have set in motion the virtuous cycle among commerce, diplomacy, and naval power that Mahan espied, in which trading enriches a seafaring state and national leaders invest part of the resulting wealth in a naval guardian to protect the supply chain that enriches the state.

China’s overseas presence will have staying power.

Beijing Will Find Allies Abroad

By securing commercial and diplomatic access to seaports spanning the globe, then, China has been laying the groundwork for a network of Mahanian-style bases for many years. What would Holsey’s offensive island chain look like? For one thing, it would not be an island chain occupied entirely by authoritarian societies friendly to China and hostile to the United States. That’s a marked difference from Asia’s first island chain, inhabited solely by U.S. allies, partners, or friends closely spaced from one another on the map and wary of the mainland.

Nor would an offensive Caribbean island chain completely sever U.S. access to the Atlantic and Pacific, the way the first island chain—which encloses 100 percent of China’s continental crest—obstructs access to the Western Pacific and points beyond.

All of that being the case, it is doubtful in the extreme that China will negotiate military access throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the loose line of islands that forms the northerly and easterly rim of the Caribbean Sea. The PLA Navy will be unable to make the Antilles into an impassable barrier, the way the United States and its Asian allies and partners can by stationing military implements along the first island chain.

But the Chinese navy could cause serious trouble anyway. Think about plausible candidates for PLA Navy bases in the Caribbean. Two stand out: Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba is a fraternal communist country, and perpetually impoverished. Thus, both out of ideological solidarity and in order to boost its economy, it might well prove receptive to CCP entreaties to host Chinese warships. Venezuela is ruled by a leftist regime and might likewise prove a convivial host for China’s navy. As a thought experiment, let’s project the implications should Beijing win military access to one or both Caribbean countries.

Ask Captain Mahan. He did his homework. Decades before the Panama Canal opened, Mahan began pondering where the U.S. Navy needed to entrench itself in the Caribbean basin in order to control sea routes that would lead to and from the new artificial waterway. In an article titled “Strategic Features of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,” he consulted the map to determine which islands furnished the best sites from which warships could regulate access to the Isthmus. He charted the most trafficked sea routes from ports such as New Orleans, New York, and European ports of call. He concluded that Jamaica was prime real estate because it overshadowed all important sea lanes. But that island belonged to Great Britain and thus was not an option for the U.S. Navy.

But second best in the Mahanian calculus was . . . Cuba! Not only did it occupy an enviable strategic position, it was a mini-continent verdant with resources. It could support a naval station, supplying what a fleet would need, and it was spacious enough that occupants of the island could maneuver within the interior to outflank a hostile naval blockade.

Now as then, Cuba could play host to naval forces intent on influencing shipping lanes bound to or from the Pacific. And think about other implements of Chinese sea power, not just the fleet. In the extreme case, Havana might permit Beijing to forward-deploy ground-based weaponry such as the DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile, a truck-launched munition that boasts an effective firing range estimated at over 2,000 nautical miles—enough reach to span the entire Caribbean and Gulf. From Cuba, China could cast a long shadow across the Caribbean and Gulf, not to mention menacing ports up and down the U.S. east coast and much of the deep continental interior.

Similar logic would apply to Venezuela, which resides close to Panama. Mahan’s chosen sea lanes converge nearby and, from Beijing’s standpoint, would make another ideal strategic position. And if Caracas allowed DF-26 batteries on Venezuelan soil, Chinese military might would cover not just the Caribbean approaches to the canal, but the Pacific approaches as well.

A “Caribbean Ulcer” for America

That Havana or Caracas would go so far as to host such a system is doubtful: the United States does remain the regional hegemon by far, and the last attempt by an external great power to station its missiles on Cuba nearly led to thermonuclear war. But either of these countries might take the lesser step of admitting PLA Navy flotillas on a rotating or permanent basis without that shore fire support. Even smaller-scale arrangements would let Beijing threaten to stage what Mahan’s contemporary Julian S. Corbett called a “war by contingent.” Corbett recalls that a modest contingent of British Army forces supported by the Royal Navy landed in Iberia during the Napoleonic Wars. The army fought alongside Portuguese and Spanish partisans, bogging down French forces sorely needed for the main fighting front to France’s east.

In short, Britain extracted disproportionate gain from the amphibious expedition. The Iberian theater was so distracting, and devoured so many martial resources, that the little emperor wryly called it his “Spanish Ulcer.”

Think about what responses a Chinese naval presence—a Caribbean Ulcer—would likely elicit from Washington. It would beckon U.S. leaders’ strategic gaze to home waters, long regarded as a safe sanctuary. Tending to that zone of neglect would reduce the policy energy available for theaters like East Asia. It would stretch U.S. naval and military forces that are already under strain trying to manage security commitments all around the Eurasian perimeter. It would probably compel the U.S. Navy to station a squadron of combatant ships at one or more Gulf Coast seaports for the first time since the Navy vacated them after the Cold War. That would impose a new, old theater on the U.S. Navy—amplifying the demands on a too-lean fighting force.

And on and on.

In short, mounting a standing presence in America’s backyard could pay handsome returns on a modest Chinese investment. And make Admiral Holsey’s nightmare come true. Congress and the Trump administration should heed the alarm bells pealing at SOUTHCOM.

Corbett and Mahan would concur, and so do I: payback is hell.

About the Author: James Holmes

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. A third edition of his book Red Star over the Pacific just went into production at the Naval Institute Press for a 2026 release. The views voiced here are his alone.

Image: Shutterstock.

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