Thank you for the excellent question.
I want to give a shout-out to my two co-authors, who are former students. Dr. Lackenbauer in particular and I have a disagreement in terms of how to understand the direction of the Chinese threat. Whitney is much more focused on the understanding that the Chinese will be focusing most of their geopolitical effort onto issues that are geographically central to them—that's Taiwan and the South China Sea—and that this, in fact, means that the interest in the Arctic, particularly from a strategic perspective, probably will not be nearly as dangerous as what I have highlighted.
I see the Chinese in the longer term being very interested in being able to interject themselves into the Arctic because that is then going to allow them to challenge the Americans, and it's going to allow them to challenge the Russians in the even longer term. Where we have a disagreement is trying to determine what we can interpret in terms of future force development that will either accentuate his argumentation, which would mean that their aerospace and maritime force composition is going to be strictly blue-water, or my argumentation that we have to be looking at more white-water capability. That means basically the submarine capabilities.
The reality is that we don't know at this point, but it is a very vigorous debate that we and other members of the community have been trying to address. My position, I will be very frank, is that in the long term we can expect the Chinese to be a major strategic player within the context of the Arctic.