U.S.: China looking beyond Taiwan

WASHINGTON (AP) -- China cannot be certain that its military, while steadily strengthening, is capable of conquering Taiwan, the Pentagon said Tuesday in a new report on Chinese military power and strategy.
Over the longer term, however, an increasingly modernizing Chinese military could pose a threat to U.S. and other forces in the Asia-Pacific region, it said.
"Some of China's military planners are surveying the strategic landscape beyond Taiwan," the report said.
Among a number of such developments, it noted improvements in Chinese intercontinental-range missiles "capable of striking targets across the globe, including the United States."

It "clearly points up the reason that the president and the United States government have been urging the EU to not lift the arms embargo on the People's Republic of China," Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.