Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Following the Vietnam War, the Cold War with its attendant Soviet threat kept the United States engaged in the world. But now the threat is far more ambiguous. Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,” writes the Cambridge University historian Piers Brendon, “the Chinese are not necessarily prisoners of their past and they have overwhelming economic reasons to seek a political modus vivendi with America.”17 But the issue is not as simple as that. The best rebuttal to Brendon is provided by John Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, who explains that because the international system is anarchic, with no one in charge—no night watchman—to enforce the rules, there are actually few status quo powers: for the aim of each great state—democratic or not, its internal character makes no difference—“is to maximize its share of world power,” and therefore “especially powerful states usually pursue regional hegemony.”18 The implication is that China will pursue regional hegemony as a matter of course, regardless of whether or not its political system becomes more open. A faltering economy may make it only more nationalistic.

  In fact, both Brendon and Mearsheimer can be right. China is likely to seek a political modus vivendi with America, even as it seeks regional hegemony. China will continue to build an oceanic navy, with accompanying air and missile capabilities. The geographical focus of these assets will be on the South China Sea, control of which allows regional hegemony to be realized. At the same time, Beijing will work tirelessly in its pursuit of good economic and political relations with Washington. Washington, for its part, will resist the moves of Beijing toward regional hegemony, even as it works with Beijing on as many issues as it can. The South China Sea, as much as the East China Sea and the Korean Peninsula, will provide the center stage for this tense and contradictory relationship. For the path to Chinese hegemony in the Korean Peninsula—because of the uncertainties surrounding North Korea’s future—is less clear and fraught with much more difficulty than is the path to Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea, where China only faces an assortment of comparatively weak and divided states, of which Vietnam is the strongest. Thus, the South China Sea, more than any other part of the world, best illustrates, once again, what would be the cost of a U.S. decline, or even of a partial U.S. withdrawal from its forward military bases. As such, the South China Sea shows what exactly the United States provides the world that is now at risk, and concomitantly, what the bad things are that could happen were the world, in an air and naval sense, to become truly multipolar.

  Because the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere, and has power to spare to affect the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere, the U.S. not only keeps the peace (aside from small wars that erupt here and there), it guards the global commons, that is, the sea lines of communication that allow for international trade. Without the U.S. Navy and Air Force, globalization as we know it would be impossible. The fact that Russia is still constrained in its attempts to seriously undermine the sovereignty of states in Eastern and Central Europe; the fact that the Middle East has so far at least avoided an interstate Holocaust of sorts; the fact that India and Pakistan have not engaged in a full-scale war in decades, and have never used their nuclear weapons; the fact that North Korea merely threatens South Korea and Japan with large-scale military aggression rather than actually carrying it out, is all in large measure because of a U.S. global security umbrella. The fact that small and embattled nations, be it Israel or Georgia, can even exist is because of what ultimately the U.S. military provides. Indeed, it is the deployment of American air and naval platforms worldwide that gives American diplomacy much of its signal heft, which it then uses to support democracy and freer societies everywhere. Substantially reduce that American military presence, and the world—and the South China Sea, in particular—looks like a very different place.

  The United States keeps China honest: limiting China’s aggression mainly to its maps, so that China’s diplomats and navy act within reason. That is not to say that the United States is pure in its actions and China automatically the villain. For example, the United States conducts classified reconnaissance activities on a regular basis against China in the Western Pacific that it would have difficulty tolerating were they directed at its own nearby waters by a rival great power.19 What the United States provides to the nations of the South China Sea region is less the fact of its democratic virtue than the fact of its raw power, which counters that of China. It is the balance of power between the United States and China that ultimately keeps Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore free, able to play one great power off against the other. And within that space of freedom, regionalism, in the form of ASEAN, can emerge as a power in its own right. Yet such freedom cannot be taken for granted. For the tense, ongoing standoff between the United States and China—in which a stalemate ensues on a plethora of complex issues ranging from cyber-war to trade to currency reform to surveillance of each other’s military capabilities—might yet shift in China’s favor because of the sheer absolute growth of the Chinese economy (even as the rate of that growth declines), coupled with China’s geographic centrality to East Asia and the Western Pacific.

  Andrew F. Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, believes that the nations of the Western Pacific are slowly being “Finlandized” by China, meaning that they will maintain nominal independence but in the end abide by foreign policy rules set by Beijing. He points out that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks—“which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide ‘smart bombs’ and more”—as its “Achilles’ heel.” The Chinese, he goes on, have tested an antisatellite missile in 2007, have reportedly used lasers to temporarily blind U.S. satellites, and have been conducting cyber-attacks on the U.S. military for years. This is in addition to the large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles and other anti-access/area-denial weaponry that the Chinese have been fielding to undermine U.S. forward bases in Asia.20 According to Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute in California, “China is on the cusp” of being able to use conventional satellites and swarms of miniature ones, as well as “networked surface, undersea, and aerial cuing for real-time terminal guidance with which to direct its 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles,” in order to hit U.S. aircraft carriers.21 The aim is not to go to war, but to adjust the disposition of forces so that, as in the case of Taiwan, but writ large across the Western Pacific, the U.S. military increasingly loses credibility as to what it can accomplish. And with that loss of credibility would come the weakening of America’s Pacific alliances. Indeed, the Finlandization of Southeast Asia may indicate the dark side of a multipolar military world.

  True military multipolarity benefits the state that is most geographically central to the region in question: namely China in East Asia. This is because the military situation being equal, geography and demography provide the edge. In other words, a multipolar Asia in military terms would be a Chinese-dominated Asia. And Chinese dominance in Asia would be very different from American dominance. Because China is not half a world away from the region, but in fact constitutes the region’s geographic, demographic, and economic organizing principle, Chinese dominance would naturally be more overwhelming than the American variety. This is to say nothing about China’s own authoritarian system, which even though not harsh as many dictatorships go—and far more competent than most—is still less benign than the American model of government, which, in turn, partly determines the American style of empire.

  But do not confuse military multipolarity with the balance of power. For the balance of power in Asia requires American military superiority, in order to offset China’s geographic, demographic, and economic advantage. One does not necessarily mean the crushing American superiori
ty of recent decades. In fact, the American military position in Asia can afford to weaken measurably, to take into account future budget cuts, so long as the American military retains a clear-cut advantage in key areas over the Chinese military. It is that edge which will preserve the balance of power.

  Multipolarity is fine in a diplomatic and economic sense. Clearly, the U.S. position in Asia will ultimately rest to a significant extent on its willingness to enter into new free trade relationships and to join “wholeheartedly” into the region’s multilateral economic arrangements, as East Asia remains a main area of growth in the global economy.22 It is only by enmeshing itself further into the region’s trade that the United States will remain self-interested enough to continue to guard the sea lines of communications in the Western Pacific. But complete multipolarity in all spheres would lead to the South China Sea becoming China’s Caribbean, and that, in turn, would put China in a position to dominate both the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. In a Eurasian trading system that is principally maritime, it is fine for China to be the first among equals, provided again that the U.S. Navy is there as a balancing power.

  The most comprehensive summation of the new Asian geopolitical landscape has come not from Washington or Beijing, but from Canberra. In a seventy-one-page article, “Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing,” Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and a former Australian government intelligence analyst, describes his country as the quintessential “status quo” power: one that desperately wants the situation in Asia to remain exactly as it is, with China continuing to grow so that Australia can do more and more trade with it, and America to remain “the strongest power in Asia,” so as to be Australia’s “ultimate protector.” But as White says, the problem is that both these things cannot continue to happen. Asia cannot continue to change economically without changing politically and strategically. Namely, if China keeps growing economically as it probably will (though at a significantly slower pace), it will overtake America as the world’s wealthiest country (though not on a per capita basis), and naturally will not be content with American military primacy in Asia.23

  White notes that what has accounted for Asia’s decades-long happy situation, which we have all taken for granted, was actually a “remarkable piece of strategic diplomacy” engineered by President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Nixon and Kissinger went to Beijing in 1972 and cut a deal with Chinese leader Mao Zedong, whereby “America would stop pretending that the nationalist regime in Taiwan was the government of China.… In return, China would stop contesting America’s position in Asia and stop supporting communist insurgencies around the region [at least to the same extent].” China also got protection from America against the Soviet Union, as well as insurance against an economically resurgent Japan. This would a few short years later provide China with the security to liberalize its economy to the great benefit of the entire region. Peace was at hand, and now “left to themselves” the countries of Southeast Asia would consequently boom.24

  It was China’s repudiation of Marxist economics begun under Deng Xiaoping in 1979 that allowed it to finally join the global economy, a century later than countries in the West. Once it did so, the immensity of its population has assured China of becoming among the most powerful economies in the world, thus leading to a security situation in Asia different from the peaceful one that Nixon and Kissinger had wrought.25

  What does China want now? White posits that the Chinese may desire in Asia the kind of new-style empire that America engineered in the Western Hemisphere, once Washington had secured dominance over the Caribbean Basin (as China believes it should over the South China Sea). This new-style empire in the Western Hemisphere, in White’s words, meant America’s neighbors were “more or less free to run their own countries,” even as Washington insisted that its views were given “full consideration” and took precedence “over anyone from outside the hemisphere.” The problem with this model is Japan, which would probably not accept Chinese hegemony, however soft. That leaves the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe model, in which case China, America, Japan, India, and perhaps one or two others would sit down at the table of Asian power as equals. But now the question becomes, would America accept such a modest role, since it has associated Asian prosperity and stability with its own primacy. White suggests that in the face of rising Chinese power, American dominance might henceforth mean instability for Asia. American dominance is predicated on the notion that because China is authoritarian at home, it will act “unacceptably abroad.” But that may not be so, White argues.26

  In other words, in the future, America, not China, might be the problem. We, especially our intellectual and journalist class, may care too much about the internal nature of the Chinese regime. But China’s regime could very easily act detestable at home and responsible abroad—another reason why the rise of Asia could alienate humanists of all stripes. As I’ve noted, America’s aim should be balance, not dominance. In any case, because the next four decades in Asia will probably be less secure than the previous four, White suggests that Australia may have to “spend much more on defense and build much more capable armed forces.”27 The same is probably true for all the nations of Asia. The seas will become more crowded with armaments.

  What is naval power for? The South China Sea might answer that question for the American public during the first half of the twenty-first century. The U.S. Navy has struggled for some time trying to explain its mission to the American public: to explain why it needs hundreds of billions of dollars for hundreds of warships that the average American never sees—unless he or she lives near a naval base—or even reads about much in the news. To be sure, the last decade saw the headlines dominated by ground forces involved in nasty land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The trials and tribulations of the Army obsessed the media: the Marines, too, which, while a naval force designed for amphibious landings, essentially became another ground force for those two Middle Eastern wars. But that may change as those wars come to an end for the United States, and as the continued rise of China leads to a different and less stable security environment in East Asia. And because Asia is primarily a maritime sphere, that will give the U.S. Navy an attractive mission statement that it has seemingly lacked. But the question is, Will the mission statement arrive in time to keep the states of the South China Sea—the heart of maritime East Asia—from Finlandization? John Morgan, a retired vice admiral in the U.S. Navy, worries that America, with defense cuts on the horizon, may be committing a great “maritime mistake,” by cutting back on its Navy just at the point in history when the world needs it the most to maintain the balance of power, and thus keep countries like Taiwan and Vietnam free. Militarily defending Vietnam may not seem like something the American public has the appetite for, especially given its twentieth-century history with that country. But it is the freedom that a country like Vietnam may yet come to symbolize that will matter much in America’s own future. Again, it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up.

  Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West did nothing; nor did the West do much against the ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus because there, too, was a Russian sphere of influence. In the Western Pacific in the coming decades, morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make at least some room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands? (And barring a social-economic collapse internally, China’s military will keep on expanding.) For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom.
That also will be a lesson of the South China Sea in the twenty-first century—one more that humanists do not want to hear.

  CHAPTER II

  China’s Caribbean

  It is a harsh but true reality: capitalist prosperity leads to military acquisitions. States in the course of rapid development do more trade with the outside world, and consequently develop global interests that require protection by means of hard power. The economic rise of post-Civil War America in the late nineteenth century led to the building of a great navy. The culmination of industrial development in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century was an arms race that helped cause World War I. Europe’s relative decline in military power in our own era is possible only because Europe free rides off secure sea lines of communication provided by the United States Navy and Air Force. Though China and other Asian states similarly free ride off the policing services provided by American sailors and airmen, their situation is radically different than that of the states of early-twenty-first-century Europe. Asian states have conflicting claims of sovereignty, and lack the integrative mechanisms of a NATO and European Union. They are also, in many cases, as we saw in the last chapter, congealing as strong and cohesive polities for the first time in their history, and are consequently feeling their oats, so to speak. Their stability on land for the first time in decades and centuries allows them to make territorial claims at sea. Indeed, they are new to modern nationalism rather than sick and tired of it, like the Europeans in the early decades following World War II. And so power politics reigns in Asia. It is not ideas that Asians fight over, but space on the map.