Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Of course, the importance of hydrocarbons in the South China Sea should not be overestimated. South China Sea reserves are unlikely to affect the continuing divergence between demand and domestic production in China: nor would they allow Taiwan to become a net exporter. Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines will remain energy importers no matter how much oil and natural gas they are able to extract from the seabed. Brunei, for that matter, is already a large net exporter of oil. So in terms of the larger dynamics of energy in the region, little is likely to change. The South China Sea will grow in importance less because of the hydrocarbon resources it holds than because of the increased amounts of imported oil and natural gas passing through its sea lanes.13

  But it isn’t just oil and natural gas that matter. South China Sea fish stocks may account for as much as one tenth of the global landed catch.14 Chinese fishing boats operating in disputed waters are accompanied by vessels from China’s Bureau of Fisheries Administration, in order to assert Chinese jurisdiction in the South China Sea.15

  Nevertheless, despite all of these complications and provocations, the legal situation of these waters can be simplified, at least somewhat: stare at the map long enough and some basic facts stand out.

  The heart of the drama revolves around historic claims to three archipelagoes: the Pratas in the north, the Paracels in the northwest, and the Spratlys in the southeast. The Pratas are claimed by China but controlled by Taiwan. In any case, there is little argument that these are Chinese islands. China and Taiwan actually agree to a significant extent on the South China Sea, except that China does not consider Taiwan a party to the claims because in Beijing’s eyes Taiwan is not a state: so the argument has really to do less with the South China Sea than with the future of de facto Taiwanese independence vis-à-vis China.

  The Vietnamese have a strong claim to the Paracels, but the western part of this archipelago has been occupied by China since Beijing took control of it from a failing Saigon government in 1974, near the end of the Vietnam War. The Chinese and Vietnamese have, in fact, solved their disputes in the Gulf of Tonkin: a tribute partly to solidarity between the two countries’ communist parties and their pragmatism. But the dispute over the Paracels and other places makes the contest between China and Vietnam the centerpiece of the South China Sea conflict zone.

  Then there are the Spratlys, which have been claimed by the Philippines only since the 1950s, within a polygon-shaped line known as the Kalayaan Island Group. Nearby is Reed Bank, completely submerged, but vociferously claimed by the Filipinos, who are confident of large deposits of oil and gas in the area. Unlike the Vietnamese claims to the Paracels, which the Chinese privately respect and worry about, the Chinese don’t respect Philippine designs on the Spratlys. Whereas Vietnam is a tough and battle-hardened warrior state, the Philippines, to repeat, constitutes a semi-failed entity with weak institutions and an extremely weak military—and the Chinese know all this. Even so, China has to keep its aggression against the Philippines in check because the Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States.

  Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei all, too, claim features in the Spratlys, though Malaysia only issued its maps in 1979. Up until 2009, the drama was all about who owned the islands. Then Vietnam and Malaysia made a joint submission to international bodies basing their claims beyond their exclusive economic zones, or EEZs, which according to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea extended two hundred miles straight out from their coasts. For the Law of the Sea treaty is actually about land, not water, since your claim under the treaty is based on the location of your coastline. The land dominates the sea—that is the Law of the Sea’s underlying principle. Your coastline gets you two hundred miles into the ocean plus extra if there is a continental shelf involved, but a claim based on ownership of an island gets you only twelve miles out. Brunei, for example, with a coastline on northwestern Borneo less than fifty miles long, claims Louisa Reef and Rifleman Bank almost midway across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Vietnam and Malaysia also made claims based on the Law of the Sea and guess what: China was cut out of the Spratlys, which come within Vietnam’s and Malaysia’s EEZs; not to mention the EEZs of the Philippines and Brunei. The Law of the Sea only gets China to the Pratas and the Paracels, not to the Spratlys, where the largest energy deposits are thought to be. And as far as the Paracels are concerned, China could be doomed there to a twilight struggle with a truculent Vietnam, which may have the stronger legal claim.

  In other words, once the Law of the Sea came into play, China’s cow’s tongue—or historic nine-dashed line—suddenly had little legal meaning or rationale. Because of the geographical configuration of the littoral states, everyone else’s EEZs get them possession of shallow archipelagic areas near coasts thought to contain energy deposits, whereas China’s EEZ extending southward from its coastline gets it comparatively little beyond deep blue water, with exceptions including Pratas Island, Macclesfield Bank, and Scarborough Shoal.

  Well, the Chinese say that they have authentic historic claims, while the Law of the Sea only came into being in 1982, and is therefore only part of the story. (Though China ratified the Law of the Sea treaty in 1996, it does not really adhere to it; whereas the United States adheres to it, but hasn’t ratified it.) In 2009, Chinese officials put out for the first time a map with the nine-dashed line and began interfering with other countries’ survey ships. In 2011, the Chinese made a submission to the United Nations actually making a claim of a full two hundred nautical miles around each of the Spratly Islands.16 Suddenly, such claims, coupled with China’s ongoing military expansion, made everyone fearful of rising Chinese power.

  The United States got involved ostensibly because it sought to protect a legal, rules-based order enshrining freedom of navigation, which the nine-dashed line appeared to threaten. In fact, the real problem that the Americans have had with China was its expanding submarine base at Hainan Island in the northwestern corner of the South China Sea, which is home to both the latest diesel-electric submarines as well as nuclear ballistic missile subs. Largely because of that base, and because China’s deployment of more and more submarines threatened American power projection in the region, the United States pushed back in the guise of strengthening ties to the smaller littoral countries, offering to mediate these nettlesome maritime disputes in 2010. In 2011, the United States announced a “pivot” to the Pacific from the Middle East.17 The American fear wasn’t about China’s naval acquisitions per se, or about China questioning the legal order per se, but about the combination of the two.

  Stepping back a bit, one legal expert in the region told me that it is possible to cut all kinds of deals to ease these disputes, if not completely solve them. For example, China could be granted extensive fishing privileges in the deep-water middle of the South China Sea, in exchange for some leeway on the nine-dashed line and thus on the EEZ claims. The real problem is that all sides, with the partial exception of Malaysia, are guilty of playing domestic politics with their claims. And by energizing the nationalistic elements in each country, reaching a compromise becomes more difficult. If you left the South China Sea issue to the experts and to the elites in the region, the various disputes would have a better chance of being solved than if you involved large populations in a democratic process, compromised as they are by their emotions. Again Aristotle: “law is intellect without appetite.”18 Because the masses have “appetite,” peace is more likely to reign if they are left out of the equation.

  But even with the law, even if China makes its peace with the Law of the Sea convention, and even if the United States were to sign the convention, peace must ultimately be maintained by a balance of power.

  It would be healthier for the American-Chinese relationship—the most important bilateral relationship in the world—if Asian states themselves helped balance against rising Chinese military power, rather than relying overwhelmingly on the United States. The most obvious mechanism for that is a streng
thened Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN is ascending. To be sure, ASEAN is not at the level of integration of the European Union (EU), which is united by a common form of government—democracy—giving it a philosophical, and hence political, raison d’être. Moreover, China maintains the ability to exploit divisions within ASEAN. Nevertheless, ASEAN—its democracies and quasi-democracies both—has been over the course of the decades gradually pulling together because of the challenge of a rising China, and also because the individual member states themselves have been evolving into more capable bureaucratic instruments in their own right, able to project power for the first time in their histories. ASEAN’s 600 million people produce a combined gross domestic product of $1.7 trillion, greater than that of India (which in less than two decades will be the world’s most populous nation).19

  ASEAN will likely never be as cohesive as the EU was at the height of its harmony and power projection capabilities in the first two decades after the Cold War. But neither will the United States-China relationship be as tense and fraught with ideological animosity as that between the United States and the Soviet Union. China and the United States have starkly different strategic orientations, obviously. And the fact that China still seems to be a rising power militarily can make it particularly ruthless. Still, we can hope that maritime Asia, and the South China Sea in particular, in the twenty-first century will evince a far more nuanced balance of power arrangement than continental Europe in the twentieth. And because, I repeat, with the exception of diminishing American ground troop contingents in Japan and South Korea, the theater of operations will be on the water rather than on dry land, the chances of conflict will be somewhat diminished.

  Nevertheless, keep in mind that increased force posture by area navies means more activities at sea, increasing the risk of incidents that can lead to war.

  The United States and ASEAN will not constitute the only hedges against a rising China: so, too, will a new webwork of relationships emerging bilaterally among the Asian countries themselves, along the navigable rimland of Asia in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans. At least nineteen new defense agreements were signed between 2009 and 2011 in this region. Vietnam, in particular, became the locus of a whole new set of partnerships that linked Hanoi with India, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia.20 And many of these countries have made a similar set of arrangements with each other. The further that this development goes, the lighter will be the burden on the United States to provide for the region’s common security.

  However, Washington should be under no illusions. All of these states, with the exceptions of South Korea, Japan, and Australia, lack the operational capacity to mount a serious challenge to a growing and improving Chinese military. And even these three militaries evince nowhere near the capability of the American one, while only Australia and Vietnam have usable combat experience in recent decades. Moreover, as China’s military capacity in the air, sea, and cyber domains increases, it will seek to “enforce more fully” its ostensible rights against neighboring states in the maritime domain.21

  Thus, the idea that the United States can reduce its commitment to the Western Pacific, while sitting back and letting the indigenous states themselves bear more of the burden, may be feasible in the long run, but not in the short run. In the short run, a weaker American commitment to the region might result in the states on China’s periphery losing heart and bandwagoning instead with China. Because this would be an insidious development, rather than a clear-cut and demonstrable one, it is particularly dangerous, and not worth risking. And given that not only liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, but also traditional realists such as offshore balancers, believe it is important for the United States to maintain a balance of power in the Eastern hemisphere, accepting an imperium over much of the hemisphere run by Beijing would be irresponsible.

  And there is another thing. Assuming that China itself does not implode or even partially implode from an internal economic crisis, the serious reduction of American air and sea power—with its stabilizing effect on the region—would cause countries such as China and India, and China and Russia, to become far more aggressive toward each other. This would occur even as countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam bandwagon with China: altogether a perilous situation, that, even if it did not lead to hostilities outright, would have a negative impact on world financial markets. In this scenario, the world America made, to steal a phrase from the scholar Robert Kagan, would go a long way to being undone.22

  In fact, as Kagan would wish, the opposite is still the case. Roughly half of America’s dozen or so aircraft carrier strike groups are nominally assigned to the Pacific, even if two of them have been doing regular duty in the Persian Gulf recently. And U.S. naval domination of China remains immense. Just consider: against America’s six nominal aircraft carrier strike groups in the Pacific, China has maybe one. The United States deploys twelve guided missile cruisers in the region, China has none. The United States has twenty-nine guided missile destroyers there; China has eight advanced ones. But as I’ve indicated earlier in this book, China is catching up. By the latter half of the next decade it will have more warships than the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific. And it is catching up where it counts: in subsurface warfare, increasingly the future of naval activity. China’s eventual parity with the United States in terms of the size of its submarine fleet has two aspects. First, it will take the Chinese at least another generation to operate underwater platforms with the skill required to challenge American crews. Second, countering this, is China’s “familiarity” with the very shallow waters of the South China and East China seas. Writes Jonathan Holslag, a Brussels-based expert on the subject: “Complex thermal layers, tide noise and the influx of water from rivers make it very difficult to detect pre-positioned submarines. Conventional diesel-electric submarines,” of the kind China has, he goes on, “are ideal for navigating in such environments, and apart from the new Virginia-class, older U.S. or Japanese types lack the sophisticated detection capacities that are needed to operate in these areas.” Moreover, China is likely to deploy its submarines in conjunction with large-scale use of sea mines, complicating U.S. Navy efforts.23 (This is all in addition to China’s civilian fleet, which, in fact, acts as an adjunct to its military one. For example, Beijing will have added thirty-six new vessels to its maritime surveillance service in 2013 alone.24)

  China’s ultimate tactical goal is to dissuade the U.S. Navy from entering the Taiwan Strait in times of war, thus compromising America’s ability to defend Taiwan. This will be accomplished by deploying silent conventional submarines in the shallow waters near Taiwan, as well as a large fleet of small surface combatants.25 The question to ask is not, Will China ever be able to defeat the United States in an air-sea war? For the answer to that is clearly no, for the foreseeable future. Rather, the question is, Will China ever be able to deploy air-sea power asymmetrically to undermine the aura of U.S. dominance in the Western Pacific? And the answer to that is, very possibly.

  But it won’t just be a matter of subtle, high-tech asymmetry at sea, but also of a more conventional ambition for an oceanic, blue-water navy. To wit, on six occasions by the end of 2010, the Chinese navy passed the First Island Chain off the Asian mainland and entered the Pacific Ocean proper.26 Indeed, in 2001, when University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer published The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, in which he asserted that China would pursue great power status in political and military ways much as rising powers have done throughout history, China’s air and naval capacity was only a fraction of what it has now become. Again, it seems that only major economic (and therefore, social) upheaval inside China itself—of the kind that stops increases in defense spending—can now contradict Mearsheimer’s vision.27

  Nevertheless, this need not lead to war. As M. Taylor Fravel, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains: The very buil
dup of military power by China means that paradoxically China can wait and not use force.28 For as each year passes, China’s naval position strengthens. Beijing’s goal is not war—but an adjustment in the correlation of forces that enhances its geopolitical power and prestige.

  But what if a severe economic crisis does ignite a downward trend in Chinese military procurements, or at least a less steep growth curve? This is also something to seriously consider!

  Indeed, in order to assuage public anger at continued poverty and lack of jobs, China’s leaders might, for the sake of a political effect, ask the military to make sacrifices of its own. Over time, this could shake the foundations of the Eurasian maritime order, though not nearly as much as the collapse of the Berlin Wall shook the foundations of the European continental order.