Mercy A. Kuo
The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Joel Wuthnow ̶ senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs within the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University (NDU) and co-author with Philip C.
Saunders of “China’s Quest for Military Supremacy” (Polity 2025) – is the 471st in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.” This interview represents only Wuthnow’s views and not those of NDU or the Department of Defense.
Explain this statement in your book: China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “has become a global actor, but it is not yet a global power.”
The PLA has become more actively involved beyond China’s immediate periphery, but usually in very modest ways. Examples include counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, participation in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Africa and the Middle East,
and a single overseas base in Djibouti. These are all non-combat-focused missions that involve no more than a few thousand troops. There are also strong constraints on the PLA’s ability to deploy larger contingents abroad, including the lack of a global command structure and limited global logistics infrastructure.
This means that while the PLA can project influence and shape the security environment, it cannot conduct the same range of combat missions that the U.S. military can based on our forward presence of hundreds of thousands of troops in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. China has avoided a larger commitment because it has opted to focus on priorities closer to home, and because it tries not to get too enmeshed in foreign conflicts.
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