After he and his team refurbish America's aging weapon systems, Patrick McLanahan heads to Guam to oversee strategy, which causes the Chinese to take the offensive, launching a preemptive strike on a small American fleet that ignites a battle for the Pacific.

"A provocative and urgent analysis of the U.S.-China rivalry. It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a "superpower marathon" that may last a century. Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint? The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism...