The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  But while our position has been eroding, the internal positions of Eurasia’s two principal hinge states, Russia and China, have been eroding further. They have ethnic, political, and economic challenges of a fundamental, structural kind compared to which ours pale in significance. Their very future stability and existence as unitary states can be questioned, whereas ours cannot. And the world I have been describing in Eurasia, defined by nonstop crises and political stagnation and weakness—a world where chaos and wealth creation go hand in hand—is one that will help keep our competitors preoccupied. State capacity in Eurasia is declining. Meanwhile, energy rich and self-sufficient, bordered by oceans and the Canadian Arctic, we have breathing room that the Eurasian powers do not, even if we will not be able to influence the power balance on the supercontinent in the way that we used to. The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.

  Here it is wise to review why we have had so much influence in the Asia-Pacific region, even as we are located half a world away, and even in the face of a rising China, which constitutes East Asia’s geographic and economic core. It isn’t only our naval presence that buys us so much influence there. It is our naval presence merged with the realization among all Pacific nations that—precisely because we are only a distant geographical satellite of Eurasia—we have no territorial ambitions in their region. To repeat, North America’s very distance from East Asia means our influence there cannot be overbearing, and thus we are trusted. We are the reputational power and honest broker, defending a system of free trade upon which every regional economy depends.

  Therefore, it is time now to extend the concept of the Asia pivot to encompass the entire navigable rimland of Eurasia, including not only the Western Pacific but the Indian Ocean as well, with our influence following exactly the path of Marco Polo’s return by sea, from China to Venice. Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land. Here is where the ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan meet those of Halford Mackinder.

  Sea power does not mean domination at sea. It does not necessarily mean a significant expansion of our navy. It means conceptually merging our presence in the Persian Gulf region with that in the South and East China seas. It means leveraging the growing naval presence of India, a de facto American ally, in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. More specifically, we will require the twenty-first-century equivalent of coaling stations in rimland locations whose stability is defensible, where we can pre-position locations and conduct long-range strikes off ships: Oman, Diego Garcia, India, and Singapore come to mind.

  Our land strategy should be secondary, and should follow from our air and naval strategy, not the other way around. A land strategy that is paramount defines an imperial military more than does an air and sea strategy, since land forces are synonymous with occupation. We must move away from domain control to domain denial, since our only motive to be on the ground in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia is for smackdown or disruption purposes. (In retrospect, that is how we should have handled Afghanistan after 9/11.) As we learned to our horror at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, as well as in the 1960s in Vietnam, and again in the last decade in Iraq, to invade is to govern. Once you decide to send in ground forces in significant numbers, it becomes your job to administer the territory you’ve just conquered—or to identify someone immediately who can. That’s why, particularly since the end of the military occupation of Japan in 1952, we have been both more comfortable and better off as a status quo power, accepting regimes as they are, democratic or not.

  The geopolitical situation I have outlined in the vast space between Europe and China is such that America should use every opportunity to stay militarily disengaged, unless an overwhelming national interest forces our hand. (And that may happen from time to time in a world of cyberattacks and nuclear proliferation.) Still, the instability and complexity that we see now will only intensify in inner Asia. Thus, there will not be more but actually fewer opportunities to intervene successfully on a grand scale, even as the temptation to do so may grow.

  Our interests in terms of the bar for military intervention are mainly negative: to prevent a nonstate actor—or a state actor working in sync with a nonstate one—from planning or launching an attack on ourselves or our allies; and to prevent a Silk Road trading network from creating a demonstrably hostile Eurasian superpower or alliance-of-sorts, with the same level of influence in the Eastern Hemisphere that the United States enjoys in the Western Hemisphere. Britain’s historic effort to prevent any one power from gaining dominance over the European mainland is similar to ours now in Eurasia. But our Western Pacific and Indian Ocean sea power can work to restrain that, without the need for large-scale ground force intervention. To be sure, China’s island reclamations in the South China Sea and its port development projects in the Indian Ocean all work to push our navy away from the Eurasian mainland. This is where the Iranian-Indian alliance to develop the Char Bahar port in Iranian Baluchistan, to undermine the Chinese-Pakistani port project in Pakistani Baluchistan, actually works in our favor.

  At least along Marco Polo’s route we always should seek to occupy the territory between neo-isolationism and imperial-style interventionism. That means more drones, more precision-guided missiles, more cyber capabilities, and more special operations forces for various missions, not fewer. We must be comfortable operating at levels smaller than that of a brigade, in other words. This is how we guard our negative interests and shape the battlespace to the degree that we can, while lessening the risk of outright occupation anywhere. Foreign Internal Defense—the low-key training of local forces that compete with forces hostile to U.S. interests—is the way we will forge outcomes, where such a possibility even exists. To this end, we will need to strengthen our Foreign Area Officer program with first-tier recruits, not second- and third-tier ones as we often do now. The decline of states in general in inner Asia means a future of more refugees. We will have to become expert at using refugee camps for intelligence gathering, at a time in history when our adversaries try to weaponize refugees. Obviously, diplomacy will be altogether crucial in many of these efforts, in which there will be no victory parades, even as the Westphalian system of modern states weakens and calcifies.

  Of course, we must maintain robust land forces for the sake of unpredictable contingencies, as well as to demonstrate clearly that we always reserve the right to intervene—even if we don’t, or shouldn’t. The fact is, a robust land force in and of itself affects the power calculations of our adversaries to our advantage. This may seem like a prohibitively expensive insurance policy, but the cost of not maintaining deployable land forces would be far greater in terms of the temptations offered to expansionist, autocratic states such as Russia, China, and Iran, especially as they internally weaken and consequently employ nationalism as a solidifying force.

  Yet, despite the threats of Russian and Chinese expansionism, particularly in the Baltic, Black, and South China seas, the more important underlying dynamic will be the crises of central control inside Russia and China themselves as their authoritarian systems degenerate. This will happen alongside decaying Turkish and Iranian imperial structures, even while Europe itself becomes more fractured and less trustworthy—and besieged as the years go on with refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the Middle East. Alas, as I’ve indicated, modernism with its neatly defined bureaucratic states and borders is receding in the rearview mirror across Eurasia. The current bout of populist nationalism that we see is merely its swan song.

  To recap: At a more profound and yet less obvious level, there is, as the French philosopher Pierre Manent intimates, a growing emphasis on city-states and the half-hidden traditions of empire, even while the problems of modern states increase.*43 We may be back to what Manent calls the age-old political formulations of city, empire,
and tribe, or ethnos. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, the state itself—that more recent invention—suffers. Thus, the map increasingly will be defined by a new medievalism, as the Westphalian model, with which the United States has traditionally been comfortable intervening and interacting, becomes increasingly less relevant. Europe will form the crucible of this age of comparative anarchy—the place that millions from these weakening states desperately want to get into. But an America that consciously seeks to keep its powder dry and maintains a degree of sea control in the Eastern Hemisphere will be, at least in geopolitical terms, relatively safe.

  The Peloponnesian War?

  But can America keep its powder dry? As I write, Washington elites are busy demonizing the rulers of Russia and China, and are obsessed with going toe-to-toe with those two autocratic powers in the Baltic, Black, and South China and East China seas. There may be grounds for arguing, as I and others have, for a more robust response to Russian and Chinese probing operations in these areas. After all, an altogether weak response to probing tempts the other side to miscalculate its strength—a common cause of wars. But given just how many scenarios exist for an outbreak of hostilities in these increasingly fraught conflict zones, the question nobody asks, and that is utterly absent from the policy debate, is: Once violent hostilities begin, how do you end a war with Russia or China?

  Like the nations involved in World War I, the United States, Russia, and China in the twenty-first century will have the capacity to keep on fighting even if one or the other loses a major clash or missile exchange. This has far-reaching implications. For the problem is, both Russia and China are dictatorships, not democracies. Therefore, losing face for them would be much more catastrophic than it would be for an American president. Politically speaking, they may be unable to give up the fight. And so we, too, might have to fight on, until there is some form of a regime change, or a substantial reduction in Moscow’s or Beijing’s military capacity. The world would not be the same after. We imagine a war in the Baltic Sea basin or the South China Sea as short, intense, and contained. But who knows what it might unleash? Washington has done almost no thinking about that. After World War I, after Iraq even, we never should imagine war as easy, or surgically confined to one place.

  We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back more extreme elements. They are bold, but not crazy. The idea that more liberal regimes might replace them is an illusion. Given their decaying authoritarian systems and the buildup both of ethnic tensions and economic problems inside Russia and China, the alternative danger is that rather than another strong ruler or a move toward stable democracy, we will see a partial breakdown of order itself in Moscow and perhaps even in Beijing, upon which, as I have written, the very coherence of Eurasia hinges. Remember the overarching theme of this essay: the tightly wound interconnectedness of weakening states and faded empires across Eurasia. The world of the digital age is like a taut web. Tweak one string and the whole network vibrates. This means a flareup in the Baltic or South China Sea is not only about the Baltic or South China Sea. Nothing is local anymore. Connectivity itself magnifies the effect of military miscalculation. The Peloponnesian War that engulfed all of Greece had its origins in relatively minor conflicts involving Corcyra and Potidaea, which helped drive tensions between Athens and Sparta to the breaking point. Because of the way technology has collapsed distance, Eurasia is now no less a coherent conflict system than were the city-states of ancient Greece. And the basic unit of our world, the state, is itself in decline in too many places. In the interest of thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy, policy makers need to worry about how not to provoke more anarchy than the world has already seen.

  Beginning in the late nineteenth century and leading up to World War I, the “Eastern Question”—what to do about the weakening Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the Middle East—dominated European geopolitics. The Eastern Question has now been replaced by the Eurasian Question: what to do about the weakening of states on the supercontinent, as older imperial legacies move to the forefront.

  *1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (1949; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1972), vol. 1, 171.

  *2 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett (1968; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 390.

  *3 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 74.

  *4 Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, Defense Classic Edition (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1942), 45–49.

  *5 Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (New York: Random House, 2016), 14.

  *6 ASEAN is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

  *7 Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (New York: Random House, 2010), chap. 1.

  *8 Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu (New York: Knopf, 2007), 44, 68.

  *9 Ibid., 27, 94, 152.

  *10 Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Knopf, 2015), 1–6; Touraj Daryaee, The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–4, 6.

  *11 The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition (1903; reprint, New York: Dover, 1993), vol. 1, inset after 144.

  *12 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (1951; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 17.

  *13 Daniel Yergin, “Where Oil Prices Go from Here,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2016.

  *14 Nora Onar, “Neo-Ottomanism, Historical Legacies and Turkish Foreign Policy,” Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, Istanbul, October 2009.

  *15 Graham E. Fuller, The Center of the Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 192–93.

  *16 Ali Vaez, “Iran After the Nuclear Deal,” International Crisis Group, Brussels, December 15, 2015.

  *17 Selena Williams, “Improved Ties Bode Ill for Rival Gas Lines,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2016.

  *18 Interview with Svante Cornell of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, April 21, 2016.

  *19 William T. Wilson, “China’s Huge ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiative Is Sweeping Central Asia,” National Interest, July 27, 2016.

  *20 Zhao Huasheng, “Central Asia in Chinese Strategic Thinking,” in The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform, ed. Thomas Fingar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 182.

  *21 Igor Torbakov, “Managing Imperial Peripheries: Russia and China in Central Asia,” in Fingar, ed., The New Great Game, 245.

  *22 Stephen Blank, “The Intellectual Origins of the Eurasian Union Project,” in Putin’s Grand Strategy: The Eurasian Union and Its Discontents, ed. S. Frederick Starr and Svante E. Cornell (Washington, DC: Central Asia–Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program of the Johns Hopkins University–SAIS, 2014), 15.

  *23 Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh, Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors (Washington, DC, and London: Sage/CQPress, 2012), 13–24.

  *24 George Friedman, “Ukraine, Iraq and a Black Sea Strategy,” Stratfor, September 2, 2014.

  *25 Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (New York: Random House, 2016), 195–97.

  *26 Blank, Putin’s Grand Strategy, 21–22.

  *27 Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011), 17.

  *28 Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), 26, 41–44; Khanna, Connectography, Map 20.


  *29 Michael Clarke, “Beijing’s March West: Opportunities and Challenges for China’s Eurasian Pivot,” Orbis, Spring, 2016; John W. Garver, China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 132; Fingar, The New Great Game, 44.

  *30 Ben Hillman and Gray Tuttle, Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 8, 122, 142, 241–42.

  *31 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 20.

  *32 Garver, China and Iran, 4, 22, 24.

  *33 Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “First Freight Trains from China Arrive in Tehran,” Financial Times, May 9, 2016.

  *34 British policy in the Middle East and the Gulf “emanated more from the British Raj in India than it did from Whitehall.” In fact, geography dictates that India’s geopolitical concerns are the same whether under British colonial or independent Indian administrations in New Delhi. Fuller, The Center of the Universe, 235.

  *35 Bibek Paudel, “The Pan Himalayan Reality That Awaits South Asia,” The Wire, March 4, 2016; Khanna, Connectography, 86.

  *36 Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 472.

  *37 Khanna, Connectography, 242.

  *38 Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 2.

  *39 Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: Norton, 2011), 108.