Stratfor recently wrote that China's economic rise has created for it an imperative to secure key trade routes and to protect its overseas resources and markets from foreign interdiction. This adds to the three imperatives that have historically defined the country's geopolitics: the maintenance of a united Han China, control of the country's buffer regions and the protection of its coastline. Although this new imperative does not dictate China's attitude toward its neighbors or the United States, it introduces an underlying compulsion that in the years to come will reshape the costs and benefits of different courses of action. Because this imperative compels China to be more proactive, and in particular to expand its maritime capabilities and reach, it necessarily creates conflict with the United States, whose own imperatives compel it to contain China's rise.