As always, Ronald Dore has written a thought provoking and well considered analysis.
I would like to make a few points about it.

"...it should not be long before China is a very serious competitor in the missile performance and defence competition that was the key to hegemony in the first Cold War. "First strike capacity" will be the name of the game."

I agree that it is wrong, even dangerous, to assume that China continues to lag significantly behind the US in military technology for all the reasons Ronald Dore gives us. There are many signs that China is catching up reasonably quickly, although they do still lag behind. I would beg to differ regarding how we think about the Cold War and nuclear weapons. The Cold War was not an era of hegemony, especially militarily, but rather was one of bipolarity, especially militarily.
The name of the game was not "first strike capability,"
but rather "assured second strike capability," so that neither power could hope to win a nuclear war. Because assured second strike capabilities were robust, which side had the technical edge in missiles or warheads, etc., didn't matter much. The same largely holds true today, deterring the US from launching a preemptive strike on China now, and deterring China from launching a preemptive strike on the US later.

The only thing that could really alter this picture is if nuclear weapons themselves become obsolete. There are some reasons for concern, especially as the US has been developing large precision guided munitions that can be potentially as effective as nuclear weapons in attacking another side's missile silos or decapitating its leadership. In other words, one side could attempt a first strike using conventional warheads.

Effective missile defense could also make a first strike seem like a viable option, even if it isn't.
Beyond the question Of whether missile defense ever really becomes effective (which seems especially unlikely if we expect it to be a zero-failure system), it is unlikely to ever become as cheap as offensive capabilities, meaning that in an arms race between missiles and missile defense missiles will always win through quantity if nothing else.

Overall, I would bet on the retention of robust second strike capabilities by China and the US for many decades to come. Extended US nuclear deterrence should continue to effectively cover Japan, and even deter major Chinese military action against Japan, although China might feel increasingly free to use conventional force a low levels that do not cross the threshold between war and peace, a point alluded to in Japan's 2010 Defense Taiko.

Ironically, the exaggeration of the power of nuclear weapons that John Mueller writes about in Atomic Obsession will help to maintain the peace between the US and China just as it did during the Cold War, even as this same exaggeration may provoke unnecessary and extremely costly war with Iran. Indeed, a war with Iran, like the Iraq war, but even more so, would take US attention away from East Asia and China, and further drain US power. As with the Iraq War, the main beneficiary would be China.

That said, one final point about China: up to now China has, despite a few recent bellicose moves in the East and South China seas, been reasonably restrained, especially in defense spending. According to SIPRI estimates of China's military spending (with CIA GDP figures as the denominator), China today is only spending less than half the share of its GDP on defense as compared with the US (about 2.2% for China versus over 4.4% for the US). Remember that during the Cold War the Soviet Union spent more than twice as much of its GDP on defense as the US did. China's defense spending is not what you would expect of nationalistically driven expansionist power.

Paul Midford