Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Singapore has agreed to allow the temporary stationing at its port of four of the U.S. Navy’s newest close-in fighting craft, the so-called littoral combat ships. These vessels (small, stealthy, fast, lightly armed), with helicopters and room for small detachments of marines, are specifically designed to deal with the kind of area-denial abilities that the Chinese are developing nearby. They are believed to be the best answer to the new realities of the South China Sea, and the agreement to station them in Singapore is ideal, now that Subic Bay has been denied to America since 1991.

  (Except that Subic may now not be entirely denied. Since the beginning of 2013, the Philippine government has agreed in principle to let some limited numbers of American ships use the facilities at Subic, facilities that have been somewhat refurbished in the years since the Pinatubo eruption. What remains there today is decidedly a Philippine base; but under intense diplomatic pressure, and on the payment of substantial sums of money, Manila has recently agreed to play its own part in the American Pacific pivot. Some ships will be allowed to operate, if only on probation, from this elderly but once again crucial naval headquarters.)

  So the list of enhancements goes on. More American attack submarines are to be based in the far west of the ocean. More SSBNs (super-secret ballistic missile subs) are being sent on deep-water patrols in the Pacific.11 A marine amphibious-ready group will be brought from the Atlantic into the Pacific. New protective missiles, such as the Patriot and THAAD systems, will provide umbrellas for forces in Okinawa and Guam. Talks have begun—and the irony is inescapable—with the government of Vietnam, to see if America might once again use the wartime facilities it built long ago at Cam Ranh Bay.

  And within the area, there is an additional proposal for an even newer balance, for a pivot within the pivot. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is often (but not invariably) in lockstep with seer employees such as Andrew Marshall, and tries to provide coherent and measured advice for the Pentagon on such matters, declared in August 2012: “Current U.S. force posture is heavily tilted toward Northeast Asia, to Korea and Japan, where it focuses properly on deterring the threats of major conflicts on the Korean peninsula, off Japan, and in the Taiwan Strait. However, as evidenced by recent Chinese activities in the South China Sea and throughout the Pacific islands, the stakes are growing fastest in South and Southeast Asia. To be successful, U.S. strategic rebalancing needs to do more in those areas” (my italics). Hence Singapore. Hence Vietnam. Hence Australia. And hence its most critical base, now being reclaimed from the volcanic ashes, the Republic of the Philippines.

  Hence the American relegation of the Northeast Asian problems (specifically those relating to North Korea and to the Chinese-Japanese arguments over the Senkaku Islands) almost to the status of sideshows. Many academics still consider the North Korean problem to be the greatest threat posed in the western Pacific. These same specialists also consider the possibility of a war between Japan and China, and over disputed island territory, to be similarly exacting. Both these possibilities are seen as alarming in Dubuque and Oshkosh, and Baton Rouge and New York, simply because America is treaty-bound to become involved. Because of this, both stories have lately occupied American newsmagazines; television news producers who are obsessed with the Orwellian imagery of goose-stepping soldiers and stone-faced dictators devote much airtime to the nightmare possibilities. And to be sure, both problems are real—they may well become acute, they may well flare up, they may well result in an abundance of casualties.

  But more cautious planners believe that, in the greater scheme of things, such possibilities are no more than distractions from the core of the region’s present-day challenges. And that core is undeniably now represented by China. The more than 1.3 billion people of China—together with their nation of such formidable antiquity, equipped as it is with a deep understanding of the history and the context and the cycles of human time—are now central to understanding the Pacific’s future. What makes China so vital now are of course the familiar and visible things: the country’s new-made wealth, its relentless expansion, its very real power, its fast-growing and subtly directed influence, its sense of pride and self-esteem, its disdain for those outside and beyond its pale, and its stated need for a just measure of Pacific lebensraum.

  Most dangerous of all, as Washington sees things, is China’s rising philosophical challenge to the current notion that America, and America only, is the nation that best deserves, most needs, and most firmly demands to run the business of the Pacific Ocean, as it has done for the century past.

  And here China’s long-term wish runs precisely counter to America’s long-held strategic objective in the Pacific, which is, to quote officially, “to maintain a balance of power that prevents the rise of any hegemonic state from within the region that could threaten U.S. interests by seeking to obstruct American access or dominate the maritime domain.”

  The unyielding American belief is that its dominance of the maritime domain has been central to the success of the various economies of the region. Naval officers at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii are keen to show off slides of the glittering skylines of Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul—and yes, of Shanghai and Guangzhou, too—and then to assert that only by dint of the U.S. Navy’s keeping the trade routes free and the sea-lanes open has such prosperity become achievable.

  American protection of trade, American suppression of menace, American export of its values—these are key, they say, to the recent wild success of Asia’s tiger economies. Abandon America’s sovereign care of the Pacific, the message continues—dare to surrender the care of the ocean to another hegemonic state, to a state capable of such excesses as the events of Tiananmen Square, and you risk allowing Asia to sink, deflate, decline, decay, and die.

  This kind of assumption, though, is these days being questioned, as the Pacific, now a test bed of such new political and geostrategic ideas, breaks free of what an Australian writer, Coral Bell, recently called “the Vasco da Gama era.” For five hundred years, since this one Portuguese adventurer left India and the Malay Peninsula, the East as a whole has existed under the influence of an omnium-gatherum of Western powers—of the Spanish and the Portuguese at first; then the Dutch, the French, the British; and finally, today, the apparently unassailable power of the United States.

  These days the planet is witnessing a sudden and wholesale redistribution of world power, one that is unprecedented in its speed. It is experiencing a shift in emphasis that suggests that this Western dominance, especially in the regions where such was both unquestioned and unquestionable, may now, and quite rapidly, be coming to an end.

  Old assumptions that were once calmly made are being cast aside, wholesale. As recently as the middle of the last century, for example, it was thought entirely appropriate for American ships to operate for a thousand miles up the Yangtze River inside China. To repeat an age-old question: Can anyone imagine the Chinese navy one day thinking it appropriate to run its new corvettes along the Mississippi, up to Hannibal, past Des Moines, to dock, without asking, in St. Louis? And then to insist that any of its sailors, after a drunken brawl, be subject not to American laws, but only to those back home in China?

  The answer is nowadays, and in America, an unequivocal no. But can one imagine the Chinese navy exercising its ships, firing its missiles, testing its submarines, patrolling the shipping lanes, not just off the Philippines, or off Guam, Palau, or Vanuatu, but off Hawaii, say? Or off the coast of California, within sight of the skyscrapers of San Diego or San Jose? Quite possibly, one has to suppose. Even, given the rate of expansion of China’s navy, quite probably.

  And would that necessarily be a bad thing? Would the Chinese navy have a lesser interest in protecting the sea-lanes than the Americans do today? Further, might not a policy of Asia for the Asians—with all local differences eventually set aside, enabling all in Asia to focus more directly on the competing hegemonies of the non-Asian world—offer greater stability
for the region and beyond? We in the West surely do not doubt the competence of those who inhabit the East, so why not allow them to have their turn, to direct the future of the ocean where East and West so obviously meet? Do we somehow not trust them to run it as well? Do we feel offended that our power is not as keenly wanted now as we once believed it to be? Is it envy, or a simple stubborn clinging to the accumulated assumptions of empire, of power, and, dare one say it, of racial supremacy?

  To suggest such a thing may be a little short of heresy.

  And yet it would have been an equal heresy in 1991 for anyone to suggest that Mount Pinatubo would ever explode, and unimaginable that the consequences of its doing so would have so profound an effect on the region’s politics. But in history, just as in geology, the unthinkable and the unimaginable tend to have a way of their own. The same can be said in China, the Philippines, or America. Or, for that matter, anywhere in the immensity of the oceanic Pacific lying in between.

  1 The biggest of the century occurred in 1912, on the Aleutian Range on the Alaska Peninsula, when the stratovolcano Novarupta began a five-month series of enormous eruptions that expelled more than three cubic miles of ash into the sky. In human memory, only Krakatoa and Tambora, which erupted in the previous century, were larger.

  2 I climbed it in the 1990s, with a friend and two guides. As we neared the summit, a full gale blew up and the guides ran away in terror. The two of us pressed on, clambering the final few hundred feet to the crater lip on our hands and knees, drenched by rain and pummeled by high winds. We later found our guides huddled in a cave, quite incapacitated by smoking so much marijuana that we were obliged to reverse roles and guide them down to safety.

  3 Some weeks later, when all residual activity had quieted, a photographer and I took a helicopter up from Manila to see the devastation. We brought along kayaks so we could explore the crater lake that now replaced the missing summit. As I made my way toward the lake’s center, the waters became hotter and hotter until, directly above the volcano’s mouth, the water bubbled and boiled, and the plastic of the boat began to soften and to bend under my weight. There were a nasty few moments of furious paddling back out into cool water. The kayak’s owner later complained about the distortion of his craft, though he could never rightly understand how it got that way.

  4 There is an outer group, the Second Island Chain, passing from Japan through Guam and to the western tip of New Guinea, toward which China also entertains ambitions. And in the still longer term, there is on Chinese maps even a Third Island Chain, which passes from the Aleutians to New Zealand and includes the western tip of the array of islands that leads down to Hawaii.

  5 In the late 1990s the British container vessel Cardigan Bay would sweep through the Paracel Islands every few months on routine passage between Singapore and Hong Kong, and the master was invariably asked to take photographs from his bridge of any new structures he saw. On one journey that I made with him in 1995, we were met at the container port by a Royal Navy intelligence officer, who took the film from the captain. “Most helpful,” he said. “Always good to know what our friends up there”—he jerked his thumb back toward the hills of China—“are up to.”

  6 Though China’s systematic expansion began after Pinatubo, a scattering of earlier confrontations had occurred between China and the Vietnamese, most notably on reefs and islets in the western Paracels in 1974 and in the western Spratlys in 1988. In both cases, the Chinese, employing considerable violence, drove the occupying Vietnamese away. The Americans lent some early support to the South Vietnamese, including the loan in 1974 of a CIA officer, who was briefly detained by the Chinese. But once the Vietnam War had been lost, and all Vietnam became Communist, American policy reverted to “a plague on both your houses,” and steered clear of involvement, most notably during the Johnson South Reef Skirmish of 1988, which gave the Chinese their first real foothold on the Spratlys, three years before the Pinatubo eruption.

  7 Right in the middle of the Spratlys is the island of Taiping, occupied since 1956 by the Republic of China and administered as a subdivision of a Taiwanese city. Six hundred officials live there, with power, water, public telephones, and Internet service, and with a cell phone signal inadvertently supplied from a Beijing-occupied reef nearby. Despite its political opposition, Beijing has made no moves to acquire the island, assuming that, as with Taiwan, it will revert naturally in good time. Its existence as an oasis is similar to that of Guantánamo, in Cuba, or of Russia’s Kaliningrad, on the Baltic.

  8 But not all. On August 19, 2014, a Chinese fighter plane came to within twenty feet of a large American Poseidon surveillance aircraft operating in almost exactly the same area. The Pentagon said that the Chinese pilot had even passed the Poseidon’s nose with his plane’s belly in full view, as if to show the weapons he had aboard. Washington made an official complaint.

  9 In one crucial sense Liu was very different from these two: he was the overall commander of forces during the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, and had a reputation for ruthlessness that survives him to this day.

  10 This “RMA” concept stems from the belief that warfare styles evolve in quick bursts that are the direct consequence of the introduction of new technologies (whether chariots or longbows, the blitzkrieg or nuclear weapons, EMDs or drones), each new development prompting a new kind of fighting. Proponents of the theory say that new technologies now available to China have significantly changed the metrics in the western Pacific theater, and that America needs to change in lockstep.

  11 Seldom does one see an American ballistic missile submarine—unlike in Russia, where Delta-class strategic nuclear missile subs are plainly on show at the Russians’ North Pacific base in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. I was at Pearl Harbor when an enormous Ohio-class boat arrived, for unexpected repair. A massive security blanket was suddenly imposed; heavily armed sentries were posted all around the dock where the great black craft was moored. Cameras were forbidden, roads were closed, passersby were told to keep moving, nothing to see here . . .

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  EPILOGUE: THE CALL OF THE RUNNING TIDE

  Behold the sea . . . opaline, plentiful and strong, Yet beautiful as the rose or the rainbow, full of food, nourisher of men, purger of the world, creating a sweet climate and in its unchangeable ebb and flow . . . giving a hint of that which changeth not and is perfect.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals, 1856

  The ancient Hawaiian phrase malama honua speaks of humanity’s duty “to care for our island earth.” On a warm Saturday evening in mid-May 2014, a venerable sailing craft charged with spreading this simple message pulled away from her dock on the island of Oahu, her twin sails filling on a steadily gathering breeze. She was bent on a mission that would take her the next three years, making passage out from Polynesia and traveling clear around the world.

  She was the sixty-ton, forty-year-old, twin-hulled deep-sea sailing canoe Hokule‘a, named for the Hawaiian word for Arcturus, the star of gladness, the brightest star in the northern night sky. The boat had been launched in 1975, hand-built to the traditional design of a Polynesian long-distance wa’a. Her planned journey was powerfully traditional also, but in a particularly technical sense.

  Hokule‘a, a traditional Hawaiian wa’a, or sailing canoe, built on Oahu in 1975, was able to show, with a Polynesian crew, that it was possible to cross long reaches of the Pacific without any kind of navigational instruments. In 2014 the craft embarked on an attempt to circumnavigate the world—with neither clock, compass, sextant, nor GPS.* [® Image of Hōkūle‘a used with permission by Polynesian Voyaging Society; © 2014 Polynesian Voyaging Society and ‘Ōiwi TV; photographer: Justyn Ah Chong.]

  That May evening, when the craft was untied from her dock and, with great fanfare and conch blasts and prayers and other sunset celebrations, set to sailing, she embarked on a venture made under unusual conditions: she and her crew of thirty were sailing for forty-seven thousand mil
es across all the world’s oceans without the use of any navigational instruments whatsoever. They were taking no compass. No sextant. No radar. No radio. And certainly no GPS. They would sail alone, unaided, as their predecessors sailed across this very ocean, many centuries before.

  The crew, most of them clear-eyed youngsters from Hawaii, but with weather-beaten old salts aboard to offer counsel, had trained exhaustively for the challenge. They are still sailing as I am writing, their doughty little craft dipping her way steadily westward to the north of Australia, now nine thousand miles from home, and with nearly forty thousand miles left to go before sighting Diamond Head again. They have left the Pacific behind. The crew have now to divine their way across seas—the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea—that are very different from their home waters. They will pass beneath skies and patterns of stars quite strange to them.

  Whether or not they succeed, those aboard all keenly believe that their simple attempt will serve as a powerful reminder of the sea’s singular importance. That is what all on the boat and back in Hawaii believe lies at the heart of their venture. Malama honua: that all should be urged to care for a body of water that nourishes every living thing on earth, that gave it life in the first place, and yet that is now wearily compelled to absorb all the excesses of the humans who live beside and around it.

  Back in 1975, when the Hokule‘a was being built in a beachfront boatyard at Kualoa, on Oahu’s windward side, much uncertainty still lingered about how this area of the central Pacific had first been populated. Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage in his Peruvian balsa raft Kon-Tiki was still fresh in many minds. His theory that the mid-Pacific islands had been populated accidentally, by drifting boats from South America, was beguiling—for how else could the American sweet potato, for instance, have wound its way so firmly into the Polynesian diet?