It's the PacRim, Stupid

"Challenge the US?"

Anyone who believes that all Putin is trying to do with his effort to secure naval bases in other countries is challenge us doesn't understand the Russian / Chinese dynamic. A Soviet Russian naval base in Vietnam, in particular, gives the PLAN (People's Liberation Army Navy) a strategic problem bigger than it gives us.

Or that is, it would if the Russian navy was something more than an echo of Rozhestvensky's 1905 model.