The United States is facing the most serious challenge to its national interest and the “rules-based international order” from China, the top U.S. commander for the Indo-Pacific region warned Congress Tuesday.
“China represents our greatest long-term strategic threat to a free and open Indo-Pacific and to the United States,” Adm. Philip Davidson said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“Those who believe this is reflective of an intensifying competition between an established power in the United States and a rising power in China are not seeing the whole picture,” Davidson said. “Rather, I believe we are facing something even more serious: a fundamental divergence in values that leads to two incompatible visions of the future through fear and coercion.”
Davidson, who heads the oldest and largest combatant command, the newly renamed U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said Chinese President Xi Jinping is working to expand his form of communist ideology in order “to bend or break and replace the existing rules-based international order.”
“Beijing seeks to create a new order, one with Chinese characteristics led by China, an outcome that displaces the stability and peace of the Indo-Pacific that has endured for over 70 years,” Davidson said.
