Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  The recruitment of men for the Dutch East India Company, writes the author Geert Mak, was carried out by so-called zielverkopers (soul merchants), who plucked homeless men off the streets and gave them food and shelter until making it known to them, “amid much drumming and trumpeting,” that it needed hands on deck. The men were then hustled onto the ships, where they died in droves: falling from the masts, swept overboard, murdered by pirates, contracting scurvy, malaria, or dysentery, “or would go down with their ships.” One in ten deckhands died on the outbound journey; of 671,000 men who left Amsterdam, 266,000 never returned.25 Dozens of corpses were thrown overboard every week of delay in the Atlantic doldrums en route to, or returning from, the Cape of Good Hope.26

  Once east of the cape, many captains, who themselves often enjoyed meat and wine on board, cut down on the crew’s rations and pocketed the profit in Batavia. The ships on which they sailed east, called Indiamen, while picturesque on the outside, were dark, cold, dank, and ill ventilated on the inside, with little room to move about, cluttered as the ships were laden with sea chests, buckets of drinking water, and other provisions. Consequently, there was no room either to separate the sick from the healthy. A host of diseases spread fast, particularly as some men did not bother to use the heads and relieved themselves in corners. Dirt and filth abounded. Food was old, full of insects, from the worst cuts of meat. Many became so seasick on the oceanic voyages that they could not even make it to the heads to relieve themselves.

  The voyage from Amsterdam southward around the Cape of Good Hope and eastward along the “roaring forties”—36 to 50 degrees south latitude—to Indonesia’s Sunda Strait often took seven months. From 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck planted the Dutch flag there until the opening of the Suez Canal more than two centuries later, “the Cape was the half-way house between Europe and Asia,” the “ ‘Tavern of the Indian Ocean,’ ” where sailors reprovisioned, got drunk, and rested before another long bout of clositered hell on the high seas.27

  As with the Portuguese, such privations produced cruel men who onshore were inebriated much of the time and mistreated the natives, even as they proclaimed their racial superiority. All cultures contain riffraff, and both the Dutch and the Portuguese sent their worst sorts out to the colonies and outposts. Thus, the natives experienced the bottom social stratum of what these Western nations had to offer.* The strengths and weaknesses of the various imperialisms are determined by who exactly provides the face of it to the indigenous inhabitants. With the British in India, by and large, it was less the worst sorts than simply their mediocrities whom they sent out to the colonies. Because the United States has had no real colonies, but mainly military outposts, it has been highly trained and, in most cases, well-disciplined, working-class troops who have provided the face of great power projection in recent years. (It cannot be denied the invasion of Iraq produced massive cruelties, but these were a result of grand policies emanating from Washington rather than from the behavior of individual troops, exceptions like Abu Ghraib notwithstanding.) As a result, British and American imperialism (such as the latter actually exists) have been generally more benign than the Portuguese and Dutch varieties. Exceptions to this rule include the accommodating behavior with which the Dutch treated the inhabitants of Japan, Formosa, and Persia, whose powerful leaders, whether a shogun or shah, they were bent on cultivating.

  Overall, the Dutch left less of a cultural mark on their colonies than the Portuguese did. The Portuguese went native to a degree that the Dutch did not, settling for the rest of their lives in places the Dutch could not wait to leave once their years of service were up. Moreover, the Roman Catholicism of the Portuguese was a gaudy spectacle that transfixed the inhabitants of far-off Indian Ocean lands, and was in some ways quite similar to—with its gorgeous use of rosaries, the cult of saints, and so forth—the religion of the Hindus and, in some cases, Buddhists. Dutch Calvinism, with its cold logic and austere ceremonies, simply could not compete. Furthermore, whereas Portuguese priests were celibates who stayed in one place for many years and consequently developed strong ties with the local community, Dutch ministers were married, had families to care for, and were frequently moved from place to place. The Calvinists also sent out few missionaries compared to the Roman Catholics, preoccupied as they were with religious disputes within Europe. Calvinism simply made little impression on the peoples of the East once the support of the East India Company was dropped. All these factors helped to make Portuguese the lingua franca of coastal Asia for centuries, whereas the only place Dutch, or at least a form of it, took root was in South Africa.

  But this was not what ultimately defeated the Dutch empire. As with so many empires, its demise was gradual, and the culprit was imperial overstretch, in the words of the Yale historian Paul Kennedy.28 It was not per se that the Dutch had too many colonies and outposts in the Indian Ocean and its tributary waters, as well as in the West Indies. It was that the upkeep of all these places, combined with the effort and costs of military adventures in Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula, in which the Dutch were also involved, proved too much. The Dutch navy simply could not keep up with the demand for so much global policing. Of all the United Provinces, only the Amsterdam admiralty found the money to build a sufficient number of warships (thirty-three between 1723 and 1741), compared with seven for Rotterdam, four for Zeeland, one for Friesland, and none for the landlocked provinces.

  Here there is a superficial resemblance between American military missions around the world, plus the costs of its heavy land-based involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the decline in shipbuilding for the U.S. Navy, which has seen a reduction of warships from six hundred in the early 1990s to under three hundred near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The United States of the early twenty-first century, like the United Provinces of the eighteenth century, can afford outposts the world over, but not necessarily combined with heavy ground force commitments in a few places.

  An awareness of the Dutch empire is the starting point to making sense of Jakarta’s urban jumble. The city grows out of the old port, Sunda Kelapa, on the Java Sea. Here are the long, white seventeenth-century spice warehouses of the VOC with their massive teakwood beams and red-tiled roofs blackened with age, and graced with coconut palms lined up alongside them. Nearby are iron-roofed shacks and garbage-strewn canals, which because of the absence of tall buildings in this part of town allow one to conjure up what the Batavia of old was like. Here was where some of Rembrandt’s clients made their money. The sea, three and a half centuries ago, was much closer than it is now, because of land reclamation in the interim. Yet, I climbed a tower and beheld ferries and fishing boats in the middle distance, stacked one behind the other near the waterline. From here the city has been spreading south, becoming so big that Jakarta is now less a city than a city-state.

  Ever since the Dutch arrived here there has been a large concentration of Chinese. The Chinese did all the middleman trade arising out of the sugar and spice businesses, and to a degree occupied the same position in society as did the Jews in Eastern Europe. As such they were reviled: vital to the economy, while blamed for all the woes. Thousands of Chinese were murdered in riots in 1740, and were henceforth made to live outside the city walls. Anti-Chinese pogroms were a periodic feature of local history as recently as 1998, even as a vibrant Chinatown exists around Sunda Kelapa.

  On the next to last day of Chinese New Year, the Year of the Ox, I visited the Chinese temple in old Jakarta, built in 1650. It was a world of red and gold and fire and smoke. Men were burning fake money to symbolically support their ancestors in heaven. There was a forest of massive candles and stone dragons, around which people were holding batches of burning incense sticks toward the sky.

  Even today Chinese in Indonesia are effectively barred from the army, judiciary, and other professions, so they dominate the business world. Despite this, and despite the riots, the streets leading to the temple were lined with Indonesians taking
part in the New Year’s festivities. In fact, the local attitude toward the Chinese is far more nuanced today than a terrible inter-communal history suggests, and it surely helps influence the way in which China itself is perceived.

  Since 1998 there has been no anti-Chinese violence and Chinese-language media in Indonesia are flourishing. Neither the Chinese in Jakarta nor in Beijing are becoming Indonesia’s enemy. Rather, they signify a growing strategic and economic power that Indonesia must accommodate peacefully, even as Indonesia struggles to find a way to contain it. In 2005, China and Indonesia signed a strategic partnership followed by an agreement in 2007 to collaborate on defense matters. Concomitantly, Indonesia hedges against China by helping to get Australia and New Zealand included in the East Asian summit framework.29 China is on everyone’s mind whenever the discussion turns to the role of the United States and India in Southeast Asia. The more engaged as naval powers Washington and New Delhi become around the Strait of Malacca, the more independent Indonesia remains. Thus, the largest country in the Muslim world secretly welcomes American military might, while at the same time it sees Hindu-dominated India as a fellow, highly nationalistic democracy in the heart of Asia. Top Indonesian officials told me that they hope the U.S. Pacific Command can enmesh China in a Pacific alliance system, thereby effectively neutralizing it.

  In fact, resisting China is proving impossible for Indonesia. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation is the largest offshore oil producer in Indonesia, even as China buys rubber and coal from Kalimantan on Borneo. Indonesia is relying on China for the expansion of its electric power grid. There are port visits from Chinese warships.

  Precisely because of its progress as a democracy, which has featured a scaled-back internal role for its military, Indonesia is now more vulnerable than ever to Chinese great power intrusion, said Connie Rahakundini Bakrie, executive director of Jakarta’s Institute of Defense and Security Studies. As she and others explained it, because of the army’s role in propping up Suharto and its sullied human rights record, the army and the military as a whole are somewhat discredited in Indonesia, and as such the victims of low budgets. Indonesia with 240 million people and a geography as vast as America’s has a smaller defense budget than the tiny city-state of Singapore, and one the same size as Malaysia’s, which has one tenth of Indonesia’s population. Singapore has four submarines, Indonesia two that do not work.

  Noting that democratization ultimately means decentralization, and with much of the country’s coveted natural resources located at its geographic extremes in Aceh and Papua, Rahakundini worries that unless Indonesia can develop some semblance of a world-class, naval-oriented military, “we could be informally broken up, bit by bit, into subtle spheres of outside influence.” The irony is that while the Indonesian military has been discredited at home for its inward-focused involvement in domestic politics, that same military is now desperately needed to focus outward toward potential adversaries. As Indonesia, at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific oceans, becomes more and more strategically important, even as it increasingly becomes a democratic and Muslim success story, the rise of regional navies and fishing fleets—China’s, India’s, Japan’s—means it may be about to gradually lose a semblance of its sovereignty.

  The strategy of the Indonesian military, Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono told me, is one of “patience”: hold the line while a middle class develops further, providing the tax revenue for a larger military, especially a navy; in the meantime, continue to participate in U.N. peacekeeping operations to raise its international stature, and thus be morally defended by the international community.

  Meanwhile, Southeast Asia as a whole, as its various political systems show signs of strain, seems to be falling further under the sway of Chinese mercantile domination. Thailand, once the regional anchor, has an electorate increasingly polarized between an upwardly mobile, rural working class and a Bangkok-based middle class, even as its revered king is aging and his son and heir apparent is very unpopular. As democracy becomes more tumultuous, the Thai state is about to weaken. Meanwhile, both Malaysia and Singapore are heading into challenging democratic transitions of their own, as both of their adept, nation-building strongmen, Mahathir bin Mohammed and Lee Kuan Yew, pass from the scene.30

  Indeed, Malaysia is the inverse of Indonesia. Whereas around 85 percent of the Indonesian population is Muslim, only 60 percent of Malaysia’s is, even as Malaysia is a more overt, hard-edged “Islamic state.” Because all ethnic Malays are Muslim, Islam is racialized in Malaysia, and the result is sharp inter-communal divides among the Malay, Chinese, and Indian communities. Creeping Islamization has led to seventy thousand Chinese leaving Malaysia over the past two decades, and those who have remained are sending their children to Chinese-language schools. Political resentments in Malaysia in general are growing as ten thousand Indians rallied in late 2007 against Malay-Islamic political domination. Unsurprisingly, Malaysia, like Indonesia, finds the U.S. naval presence in Southeast Asia a convenient hedge against China, although Kuala Lumpur is courting Beijing with its proposal to build a pipeline across northern Malaysia, which would allow Beijing to be less dependent on the Strait of Malacca for its oil deliveries. In fact, Malaysia is increasingly under the shadow of China, even though its ethnic-Malay Muslim rulers are seen by their Chinese subjects as increasingly chauvinist.31 Translation: the dislike of ethnic Chinese throughout much of Southeast Asia does not necessarily carry over into the foreign policy realm. Beijing is becoming too powerful to be treated with anything but the highest degree of respect. All these countries hope that a continued American naval presence, combined with the rise of the Indian and other navies such as Japan’s and South Korea’s, will serve to balance against Chinese power.

  The quiet fear of China is most clearly revealed by the actions of Singapore, a city-state strategically located near the narrowest point of the Strait of Malacca. In Singapore, the ethnic Chinese dominate the ethnic Malays by a margin of 77 to 14 percent. Nevertheless, Singapore fears becoming a vassal state of China, and consequently has developed a long-standing military training relationship with Taiwan. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has publicly urged the United States to stay engaged in the region militarily and diplomatically.32 The degree to which Singapore can maintain its feisty independence will be a gauge of Beijing’s regional clout.

  This comes at a time when Singapore’s mild version of authoritarianism is coming into question. The legitimacy of the ruling People’s Action Party has always rested on its economic performance, and as the global downturn affects the region, the party may have no choice but to open up the system.33 Though democratization benefits both Malaysia and Singapore in the long run, in the short run the rigors of electoral politics will reveal internal weaknesses that could make them more susceptible to Beijing’s pressure. Unlike the Dutch and the other Western powers in Southeast Asia, which operated far from their home ports, China is close-by and geographically dominant in the region, giving it the opportunity for a degree of control that will be both more subtle and more comprehensive than anything we have seen in the past.

  * In fact, the Dutch ascendancy over the Portuguese was relentless. While the English harried them in the Persian Gulf and the Mughals in Bengal, the Portuguese lost the following bases to Holland: the Spice Islands in 1605, Malacca in 1641, Colombo in 1656, the rest of Ceylon in 1658, and Cochin in 1662. A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 24.

  * Not all those sent out by Portugal and Holland were Portuguese and Dutch. In the case of the Dutch, German, and Walloon mercenaries numbered among them. But they were also of low social standing.

  PART III

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHINA’S TWO-OCEAN STRATEGY?

  The Indian Ocean has constituted a stage set for Western conquest going back more than five hundred years. The University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill associates the “advent
of the modern era” with the Portuguese command of the African-Eurasian sea-lanes that began with Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama.1 Since the Portuguese we have seen the Spanish, Dutch, French, English, and Americans make their mark in significant tracts of the Indian Ocean and its adjacent seas. These Western conquerors came largely for commercial reasons, with the Americans in particular intent on guarding the sea lines of communication to safely import Middle Eastern oil from the western part of the ocean, even as they have guarded the central part from the coral atoll of Diego Garcia, using the British territory as a base to launch air attacks on Iraq in 1991 and on Afghanistan in 2001.

  The Cold War decades saw the United States as the great global maritime power and the Soviet Union as the dominant Eurasian land power. But as the Cold War recedes into the past and China rises economically and politically, taking advantage, in effect, of America’s military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new and more complex order is gradually emerging in the maritime rimland of Eurasia, which includes not only the Indian Ocean but the western Pacific. What follows is an analysis of a U.S. Navy that has already reached the zenith of its dominance, faced with a rising Chinese maritime presence that, along with the rise of India, could over time herald the end of Western control over these waters.