Stalled Chinese defense budgets would reinvigorate a Pax Americana from the Sea of Japan to the Persian Gulf, despite the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and despite the U.S. military budget crunch. The U.S. Navy would own the seas as though World War II had just ended. Japan, which continues to modernize its air force and navy (the latter is several times larger than the British Royal Navy), would emerge as an enhanced air and sea power in Asia. The same goes for a future reunified Korea governed from Seoul, which, in the event of a weakened China, would face Japan as a principal rival, with the United States keeping the peace between the two states.
Turmoil in China would slow the economic integration of Taiwan with the mainland. With so many ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland and so many commercial flights per week between the two Chinas, U.S. military aid to Taipei is less and less designed to defend Taiwan than to postpone an inevitable unification of sorts. But the inevitable unification of sorts might not happen in the event of a prolonged economic and political crisis in Beijing. A likelier scenario in this case would be for different regional Chinas, democratic to greater or lesser extents, more loosely tied to Beijing, to begin to emerge. This, too, translates into a renewed Pax Americana, as long as U.S. defense cuts don’t go too far.
And what if China’s economic crisis does not seriously affect its defense acquisitions? Then the South China Sea would be where the effects of gradual American decline, in a geopolitical sense, are most keenly felt. China’s geographical centrality, its economic heft, and its burgeoning air and naval forces would translate into some measure of Finlandization for Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore in the event of large-scale U.S. defense cuts. But internal disarray in China, combined with modest U.S. defense cuts that do not fundamentally affect America’s Pacific forces, could unleash the opposite effect. Emboldened by a continued American presence and a less than dominant Chinese military, countries such as Singapore and Australia, who already spend mightily on arms relative to the size of their populations, could emerge as little Israels in Asia. Vietnam, meanwhile, with a larger population than Turkey or Iran, and dominating the South China Sea’s western seaboard, could become a full-fledged middle-level power in its own right were Beijing’s regional grip to loosen and Vietnam able to get its economic house in order.
India, like Vietnam and Taiwan, would gain most from a profound economic and political crisis inside China of the kind that unleashes China’s ethnic minorities. Suddenly China would be more vulnerable to ethnic unrest on the Tibetan plateau, abutting the Indian Subcontinent. This would alleviate the Chinese threat on India’s northern borderlands, even as it gives India greater diplomatic leverage in its bilateral relations with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Burma, all of which have been venues for India’s quiet great game that it has been playing with China. Burma has historically been where Indian and Chinese cultural and political influence overlap. Though China has been the dominant outside economic influence in Burma in recent decades, prior to World War II Indian economic middlemen were a major force in the capital of Rangoon. Look for the Indian role in Burma to dramatically ramp up in the event of a partial Chinese political meltdown. Given Burma’s massive stores of natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, precious stones, timber, and hydropower, this would not be an insignificant geopolitical development. It would ease India’s naval entry into the South China Sea. The glory days of Vietnam’s Indianized Champa civilization would find an echo in a twenty-first-century strategic reality.
This is all theoretically possible, were China to experience a form of economic meltdown. However, now I must return to the situation as it is at the time of my writing.
Thucydides writes that the “real cause” of the Peloponnesian War was the rise of Athenian sea power and “the alarm which this inspired in Sparta.”29 Indeed, wars often start over seemingly inconsequential matters—uninhabited islands, for instance—even as their underlying causes are anything but inconsequential. Thus, the rise of Chinese sea power should not be taken lightly. Athens may have been democratic, even as China may have no motives for conquest. Yet the very disturbance of the status quo caused by the ascendancy of a new power has throughout history raised the risk of hostilities. The fact that China’s military rise is wholly legitimate (China is not a rogue state like clerical Iran) makes little difference, given that China’s air and naval acquisitions are altering the regional balance of power, something which in and of itself is destabilizing. Of course, the status quo is not sacrosanct. History as we know is dynamic. And the status quo can be unfair and deserving of change. But it is a fact that war often breaks out when there has been a significant change in the status quo.
As China’s naval position in the Western Pacific grows, increasingly altering the status quo, “a grand and protracted bargaining process” between the United States and China will go on for the geopolitical fate of the Western Pacific and the adjacent Indian Ocean, writes Swarthmore College political scientist James Kurth. “In the end, there might be constructed an explicit and effective system of mutual deterrence, based upon such concepts as red-lines, salient thresholds, and tit-for-tat actions and reactions.”30
We can see the beginning of this process in recent years. In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared a “pivot” to Asia. At the same time, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared that Pentagon budget cuts would not come at the expense of U.S. force posture in the Pacific. These were both strong messages indicating U.S. resolve to maintain and perhaps strengthen U.S. air and sea forces in the face of China’s military rise. Meanwhile, President Obama’s announcement, also in 2011, that the United States would begin rotating 2,500 marines through bases in northern and western Australia, near the confluence of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—coupled with the stationing of new littoral combat ships in nearby Singapore—demonstrated an American desire to distribute forces across two oceans rather than across one: so that the maritime security systems of the Greater Middle East and East Asia would begin to merge into one grand geography uniting the southern Eurasian rimland. The more immediate result of this would be to bring South Asia into the same conflict system of which the South China Sea is the center. Remember, the advancing technology of war compresses distance. Henceforth, the term Indo-Pacific would be used more and more. The scholar Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute writes, “Conceptually, this new strategic arrangement can be thought of as a set of ‘concentric triangles,’ based on rough geographic coverage. The outer triangle links Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia; the inner triangle connects Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam.”31 Meanwhile, an emerging Asian power web designed to balance against China links countries like India and Vietnam in a “robust strategic partnership.”32
So now let us look at the larger map. In 2050, close to seven out of nine billion people in the world will live generally in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa. The maritime organizing principle of this global demographic heartland is the Greater Indian Ocean, along with the Western Pacific. It is a map that unites Eurasia by sea, assuming that the northern Eurasia coastline, comprised mainly of Russia, remains ice-blocked or partially ice-blocked for significant portions of the year. From the Horn of Africa across the Indian Ocean, bending around archipelagic Indonesia, up to the Sea of Japan, constitutes one world in this vision. And whereas the Indian Subcontinent, Japan, and Australia are the outer points of this map, the countries of the South China Sea constitute the inner points, or strategic core of it. The South China Sea is the Mitteleuropa of the twenty-first century.
The South China Sea, whether in peace or in war, allows one to imagine the world as it is, and as it is to become. It is a nervous world, crowded with warships and oil tankers, one of incessant war games without necessarily leading to actual combat: a world in which actions taken by a country such as Vietnam, the political bellwether of the South China Sea region, can affect the highest
decisions of state in Beijing and Washington. It is a world where sea denial is cheaper and easier to accomplish than sea control, so that lesser sea powers like China and India may be able to check the ambitions of a greater power like the United States, and submarines and mines and land-based missiles may combine to inhibit the use of aircraft carriers and other large surface warships.33 It is a world in which it is just not good enough for American officials to plan for continued dominance in these waters. For they must be prepared to allow, in some measure, for a rising Chinese navy to assume its rightful position, as the representative of the region’s largest indigenous power. True, America must safeguard a maritime system of international legal norms, buttressed by a favorable balance of power regimen. But the age of simple American dominance, as it existed through all of the Cold War decades and immediately beyond, will likely have to pass. A more anxious, complicated world awaits us.
EPILOGUE
The Slums of Borneo
Oily-green forests slashed by sludgy, curvilinear rivers; tree-lined ridges crouching under rain clouds; a moldy, bottle-green sea offering a confused reflection of the tormented sky above: an entire landscape that signaled confinement. The town of Kota Kinabalu near the northern tip of Borneo—the Jesselton of British colonial days—had, despite the ratty sprawl and overpasses, a carved-out-of-the-jungle feel. Weeds ate up many a sidewalk; stone walls were blackened from decades of rain; the rusted balconies were crammed with water tanks, machine-molded plastic chairs, and sagging clothes lines. After the glittering postmodernism of Kuala Lumpur in peninsular Malaysia, this capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah, with its tacky, concrete pink- and cream-colored facades, had, nevertheless, a faded black-and-white aura. Whereas on the Malay Peninsula, the state of Malaysia with its confection of ethnic groups appeared subtle and dynamic, here in far-off East Malaysia, separated from the peninsula by Indonesian territorial waters, the idea of Malaysia seemed tenuous; more desperate.
I came to the Malaysian state of Sabah to visit a naval base where two Scorpène-class diesel-electric submarines were berthed. The subs were there to announce Malaysia’s intention of defending the southeastern corner of the South China Sea against Chinese, Vietnamese, and Philippine maritime incursions. I was denied permission to visit the base, however.
Instead, with the help of a Malaysian friend, I paid a young man with a small wooden boat and outboard motor the equivalent of forty-five dollars to take me across the bay from Kota Kinabalu to a kampung air, or water village, adjacent to the island of Gaya. The village was a vast slum city on stilts, stretching far out from the island into the rolling sea.
Warrens of shacks and alleyways, built of cheap wood and patches of corrugated iron, rested on twisted tree limbs sunk vertically in the water. Half-naked children were everywhere, as though each was about to fall off the edge of the narrow and corroded planks connecting the houses. A gold-painted mosque dome made of hammered sheet metal punctuated the marine encampment that held thousands. These people were, for the most part, illegal Muslim Filipino migrants from the Sulu archipelago: the southern extremity of the Philippines racked by Islamic insurgencies—insurgencies caused, ultimately, by the failure of a weak and corrupt Roman Catholic power structure in the capital of Manila to properly govern its own far-flung ethnic reaches.
These people made their living as fishermen, construction workers, and at a medley of other jobs that frankly no Malaysians wanted. Typhoons and fires had wiped out this and other, even larger seaborne encampments. But the migrants quickly rebuilt them, and more destitute Filipinos kept coming. Roughly a quarter of Sabah’s population were illegals. Geography was an enabler. It was only seven minutes by motorboat—as a Malaysian coast guard admiral later told me—from the southernmost Philippine island to the northernmost Malaysian one.
The admiral then spoke to me of that other reality of the South China Sea, one in which the water village was a window onto a world of disease, piracy, and smuggling. While the region’s navies were concerned with the twenty-first-century strategic chessboard of strong states and their overlapping blue-water territorial claims, the region’s coast guards dealt with a Back to the Future nineteenth-century world before the modern state had existed—a world where the southern Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia were a unitary, archipelagic mass of Muslim peoples, Malays and Javanese both, to-ing and fro-ing between the former British and Dutch empires of the East Indies. (Because of its ethnic Malay insurgency, southern Thailand, too, is part of this Muslim world.)
Abetted by a convenient geography, global Islam—an undeniable form of globalization—was undoing the nation-state of Malaysia here in northern Borneo, just as peninsular Malaysia with its strong institutions (a product of Mahathir bin Mohamad’s authoritarian rule) was building it up. Of course, Mahathir represented global Islam, too, in its political and ideological form. The question was how would Islam finally be deployed here: as a force for modern state building, or for transnational refugee movements that undermined the modern state?
Sabah was one place in the South China Sea region where no one talked about the Chinese naval threat—but instead about illegals. “They are the mother of all our problems,” said one bumiputra (indigenous) Christian, whose ancestors were baptized by Roman Catholic missionaries, referring to the Muslim kampung air across the bay. This man, a prominent local politician, sat at a long wooden table with some of his colleagues, members of the Kadazan and Dusun tribes all, who, while native to Sabah, now accounted for less of the population than the illegals. Rather than a world of upscale malls and tinted glass, as in peninsular Malaysia and much of the rest of the South China Sea region, here beside me were homely statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary and angry voices set amidst the encroaching jungle. They kept me at the table for hours with their intensity, their obsessive bitterness about the illegal Muslim Filipinos, and the peninsular colonizers who in their minds had merely taken over from the British and made a mess of it.
So it was with my other meetings in Kota Kinabalu. Oh Jesselton, they all seemed to cry out in almost fond memory of the British North Borneo Company, where the Chinese dominated the cities, the Malays and bumiputras dominated the kampungs, and the Indians the plantations. Everyone got along because everyone knew his place under a European flag. And so peace reigned more or less. But now, despite the impressive levels of intermarriage between bumiputras, Malays, Chinese, and Indians, as well as between Christians, Muslims, and animists—creating identities far more subtle than on the peninsula—the threat of political Islamization from peninsular Malaysia and demographic Islamization from the southern Philippines was inviting all sorts of zero-sum ethnic and religious tensions—and thinking.
It turns out that the challenges of the South China Sea are, at least in part, the challenges of postcolonialism, in which newly formed polities emerging out of world empires must now settle which group or faction controls what internally, and which state controls what externally in the waters beyond.
And it isn’t only in the waters beyond, since, for example, the Philippines has a latent claim on Sabah itself, arising out of a dispute about whether the sultan of Sulu in the late nineteenth century had ceded or merely leased northern Borneo to the British. Thus, these sprawling kampungs pockmarking the Sabah coast represented a deeper puzzle than the specific social problems brought by the illegals themselves: they represented the problem—the fear—of Malaysia being not altogether legitimate but, rather, a legalistic contraption inherited from the British part of the Malay archipelago, theoretically always open to challenge. For had Singapore not been brought into the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, upsetting the ethnic balance to the benefit of the Chinese, then Kuala Lumpur would not have needed to include the Malays and other bumiputras of northern Borneo in the federation in the first place. The creation of Malaysia had all been so ad hoc: a product of the complex relationship between Tunku Abdul Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew as much as a product of geography and the territorial boundaries between
Great Britain and the Netherlands on Borneo.
“We are still ethnic groups and races, we are not yet a state composed of citizens,” the tribal politician told me, summing everything up. “Mahathir’s Islamic state on the peninsula oppresses us. The Filipino illegals are convenient to the Muslim power structure in Kuala Lumpur because these illegals from Sulu are altering the demographic balance in the Muslims’ favor. Sabah is responsible for 60 percent of the oil in Malaysia and gets only 5 percent of it back in revenue,” he went on. “It won’t happen in my lifetime, but eventually the Malaysian federation may break up.”
He said this as though it were a hope. For he now spoke of Sabah in the same tone as he spoke about South Sudan or former East Pakistan. While the maritime disputes of newly hardened states in the region dominated the present, and therefore something I have been forced to write about, he seemed to suggest that globalization itself could encourage the emergence of distinct micro-regions in Asia just as it already had in Europe.
So while I had been concentrating on the rise of modern nationalism in the South China Sea, Sabah—like the ruins of Champa in central Vietnam—spoke of the possible reemergence of a medieval world in which nationalism had yet to be invented.
Borneo was indeed a throwback: a place that, like Champa in Vietnam, challenged my theories about the present—about how China was the principal reality; and about how it was all about warships, oil tankers, and modernizing autocrats. For next door in northern Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak there was a chief minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, a member of the minority Melanau tribe of bumiputras, who had been in power since 1981 and governed like a petty despot, in premodern paternalistic fashion, even as he was democratically elected. Here was a world of cronyism and kickbacks governing everything from logging contracts to the control of local newspapers. The chief minister’s thirty-year reign lubricated the wheels of development, yet it also left the indigenous tribes in the interior in a state of poverty and prevented the emergence of real institutions. Sarawak’s somnolent capital of Kuching was dominated by fantasy structures that were the trophies of his rule, such as a $300 million, umbrella-like state assembly building used only sixteen days a year when the legislators were in session.
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