In December 2018 Chinese admiral Lou Yuan, deputy chief of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, did propose - in a public setting - using hypersonic missiles to sink two U.S. aircraft carriers as China’s strategy for solving tensions over the South China Sea.

And, notwithstanding the debate among U.S. naval officers and specialists in weaponry and naval architecture and wargame designers, the missiles do appear to work, the Chinese having successfully test fired them somewhere in the South China Sea in November 2019.

The admiral’s reasoning for this sneak attack a la Pearl Harbor may not be completely unsound either. As for his statement in support of the plan - that America is too weak to fight, the Japanese held the same belief in 1941. Enough said.

But, his analysis that America has no strategy to thwart China’s unlawful presence and activities in the South China Sea and its designs to gain military concessions from Southeast Asian nations, is largely correct.

The Chinese have been testing America for a reaction to their military ambitions in the region since the Obama presidency when they seized the disputed Scarborough Shoal from America’s treaty ally, the Philippines. Today, they intimidate other South China Sea claimants from pursuit of navigation, fishing and oil exploration activities.

Perhaps more concerning than his proposal is the objective the admiral shares with Chinese President Xi Jinping: Resurrecting the traditional hierarchical Asian paradigm in which China acted as the center of a tributary system of levy-paying vassals whose relative power was starkly inferior to China’s.