Elizabeth Braw, of the Atlantic Council, in her Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, wondered why the People’s Republic of China would want to undermine global shipping.

Undermining the global maritime order seems an odd strategy for a country that owes its rapid economic rise to the oceans.

It’s not an odd strategy at all. The PRC has observed the economic, political, and military power that has accrued to the United States since WWII by our nation’s control of the seas and protection of global shipping. The aggressively acquisitive PRC (South China Sea; East China Sea; naval bases around the world, including Atlantic Ocean coastal Africa and Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean coastal South America) is now sailing a formidable combat navy and a very large dual use merchant marine fleet. The PRC also has publicly stated its goal of supplanting the US as the global hegemon.

The PRC, with that globally capable navy and merchant marine, now believes it can achieve that.

The straight and simply stated answer to Braw’s question is that the PRC doesn’t want to undermine global shipping at all. It wants to be the power that controls it, with all of that economic, political, and military power redounding to it and with the parallel result of a reduction of the US by the same magnitude.

Sometimes political science isn’t rocket science.