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In retrospect, it might be that we will view the December 2004–January 2005 relief effort mounted by the U.S. military off the coast of Sumatra, on behalf of the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, as one of the climaxes of American naval power in Asia. The sight of both carrier and expeditionary strike groups, with their attendant cruisers, destroyers, and frigates—helicopters lifting off decks in ship-to-shore circuits, assisted further by rescue swimmers and medical corpsmen—created a rousing aura of dominance and virtue, two attributes that rarely mix. Although the aim of Operation Unified Assistance was humanitarian, the skills employed—getting a vast array of warships and aircraft across hundreds of miles of ocean at “best speed” on a moment’s notice—were those essential to war. The true message of the rescue effort: Behold the power of the United States Navy!
Yet the truth that is now hiding in plain sight is the gradual loss of the Indian and western Pacific oceans as veritable American military lakes after more than sixty years of near-total dominion following World War II. A few years down the road, according to the security analysts at the private policy group Strategic Forecasting, Americans will not be the prime deliverers of disaster assistance in South and Southeast Asian seas to the same extent. In the next emergency our ships will share the waters (and the glory) with new “big decks” from Australia, Japan, South Korea, India, and perhaps China. This occurs at the same time that China’s production and acquisition of submarines is several times that of America’s. Indeed, China is in the midst of a shipbuilding and acquisition craze that will result sometime in the next decade in the People’s Liberation Army Navy having more ships than the U.S. Navy. Of course, as we will see, numbers tell only a small part of the story, but they do matter.
Undeniably, over the decades the U.S. Navy has been shrinking. At the end of World War II the United States had 6700 ships. Throughout the Cold War it had around 600 ships. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it had more than 350. Now it is down to fewer than 280. Though the navy has plans to increase that number to more than 310, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service, cost overruns of 34 percent, in addition to other factors, mean that such plans may be overly optimistic. Over the next decade and beyond, if the navy continues to build only seven ships per year with a fleet whose life expectancy is thirty years, the total number of its ships could conceivably dwindle to the low two hundreds. Given America’s economic recession, the Pentagon’s budget will possibly be reduced further, and ship development, which is a very expensive capital item, will pay a price.
This does not mean that the U.S. Navy will cede its preeminent position in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific anytime soon. The figures cited indicate slow-moving trends that are subject to reversal. But it does mean that, closing in on seven decades after World War II, other naval powers all indigenous to the region, as well as non-state actors like pirates, are finally starting to crowd the picture. America’s unipolar moment in the world’s oceans is starting to fade. And as indicated, this is happening as China—America’s most likely peer competitor in the twenty-first century—increasingly translates its economic clout into sea power.
It bears repeating that there is nothing illegitimate about the rise of the Chinese military. China’s ascendancy can fairly be compared with that of the United States following its own consolidation of land-based power in the aftermath of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West, which culminated at the turn of the twentieth century with the construction of the Panama Canal. Under the stewardship of some of its most forgettable presidents—Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and so on—the American economy chugged quietly along with high annual growth rates. Consequently, as it traded more with the outside world, it developed for the first time complex economic and strategic interests in far-flung places that led to navy and marine landings in South America and the Pacific, among other military actions. Why should we expect China to follow a radically different path? For China’s society is every bit as dynamic now as America’s was a century ago.
In 1890 the American military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, which argues that a state’s power to protect its merchant fleets has been the determining factor in world history. Mahan has always been a favorite of those seeking naval dominance, and both Chinese and Indian strategists read him avidly nowadays. But it is too facile to suggest that China is acquiring naval power strictly as a means to the end of regional or perhaps global hegemony. Empires are often not sought consciously. Rather, as states become stronger, they develop needs and—counterintuitively—a whole new set of insecurities that lead them to expand overseas in an organic fashion.
China is not Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is not threatening to destroy any country, and it has an intensely developed diplomatic and economic relationship with the United States. The global recession has tied American and Chinese interests even closer together, as the U.S. depends on China for affordable goods and to prop up its currency with trillions of dollars of Chinese deposits, and China depends on the U.S. as its principal consumer market. Strong American-Chinese bilateral relations going forward is not only plausible, but might be the best-case scenario for the global system in the twenty-first century, allowing for true world governance to take shape.
China may not be democratic in a formal sense, but its system admits to intense, vibrant debates over policy and the direction of the society. There is even the possibility that China will face some sort of internal upheaval that will result in splits in the leadership, and delay by years or longer China’s march to great power status. Just as Kremlinologists of the 1970s got the Soviet Union wrong in projecting the Cold War lasting several more decades, I among others may be getting China wrong by even assuming in the first place China’s continued economic growth. Yet, given current trends, such continued growth must be taken as a serious possibility.
Therefore, the most likely scenario in my mind for relations with China is something quite nuanced: the United States will both compete and cooperate with China. The American-Chinese rivalry of the future could give new meaning to the word “subtlety,” especially in its economic and diplomatic arrangements. Yet, if this relationship has its hard edges, I expect one of those will be where the two countries’ navies interact: in the Greater Indian Ocean and western Pacific.
While America’s ship procurement process has been described as broken, and it struggles to maintain a navy at its current size in the face of reduced GDP growth—amid the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression—China’s defense budget has been increasing by double digits for two decades, even as its own economy, despite the deleterious effects of the global crisis, will expand by roughly 8 or 10 percent annually in coming years. China’s undersea arsenal includes twelve Kilo-class diesel-electric guided-missile attack submarines, armed with wake-homing torpedoes; thirteen Song-class subs similar to the Kilos; two Shang-class nuclear attack submarines, and one Jin-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarine, with three more on the way.
Obviously, this lineup bears no comparison whatsoever to the U.S. Navy’s seventy-four nuclear-powered attack and ballistic-missile submarines now in service. The U.S. boasts twenty-four of the world’s thirty-four aircraft carriers, the Chinese have none (but are developing one and maybe two). Such statistics go on. But, to repeat, numbers do not tell the whole story: rather, the story is about underlying trends, asymmetric capabilities, and the creative combination of naval, economic, and territorial power that can create a sphere of influence throughout Asia.
China is catching up slowly, but fast enough to alert Americans that their time of dominance is not forever. Whereas Iraq showed the United States the crude, low-tech end of asymmetry with roadside bombs, the Chinese, with their development of missile and space programs, will show America the subtle, high-tech end of asymmetry through the art of dissuasion and a
ccess-denial: making it riskier for the U.S. Navy to move its carrier strike groups close to the Asian mainland in the future, whenever and wherever it likes. Finally, it is China’s very geographical centrality to Asia, coupled with its growing navy and burgeoning economic might, that will cause the U.S. to continue to lose influence there.
Therefore, it is crucial to sketch out what may be China’s evolving naval strategy in the Indian and Pacific oceans. But before I do that, it is necessary to say more about why China goes to sea in the first place. What exactly are those complex economic and strategic interests it is developing, vaguely comparable to America’s own more than a century ago?*
Since antiquity China has been preoccupied with land invasions of one sort or another. The Great Wall of China was begun in the third century B.C. to keep out Turkic invaders; in the mid-twentieth century China was anxious about another invasion from the north, from the Soviet Union following the Sino-Soviet split. Thus, under Mao Zedong China concentrated its defense budget on its army and pointedly neglected the seas. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, such worries dissipated. Moreover, Chinese diplomats, in recent years, have been busy settling remaining border disputes with the Central Asian republics and with its other neighbors. In fact, a reverse invasion is now under way, with Chinese migrants in the slow process of demographically taking over parts of Siberia. So China’s pursuit of sea power is, first and foremost, an indication that its land borders are not under threat for the first time in quite a while. Whereas coastal city-states and island nations, big and small, pursue sea power as a matter of course, a continental and historically insular nation like China does so partly as a luxury: the mark of a budding great power. Merely by going to sea in the wide-ranging manner that it has, China demonstrates its dominance on land in the heartland of Asia. To be sure, China is not as secure in its neighborhood as the late-nineteenth-century U.S. was in its own, given America’s status as a veritable island nation. Nevertheless, China is right now more secure on land than it has been throughout most of its history.
Another factor pointing China seaward is the dramatic boom in its economy, which has led to an explosion of trade, and thus to the concomitant explosion of commerce along the country’s coast. In 2007, Shanghai’s ports surpassed Hong Kong as the largest in the world, according to cargo handled. And by 2015, China will become the world’s most prolific shipbuilder, overtaking Japan and South Korea. Sea power is partially determined by merchant shipping, and China will lead the world in this area.
Above all, China’s demand for energy motivates both its foreign policy and national security policy: the need for an increasing, uninterrupted flow of energy to sustain its dramatic economic growth. Despite its increasing emphasis on coal, biomass, nuclear power, and other alternatives, China requires ever more oil and natural gas, and is the world’s second largest consumer of oil after the U.S. Concurrently, Chinese officials see this very need for imported petroleum products as a pressure point that a future adversary might exploit. (The need to diversify its energy sources helps explain why China deals openly with such an odious regime as Sudan’s.) China’s hydrocarbon use has more than doubled in the past two decades, and will double again in the next decade or two, even as domestic oil production has remained stagnant since 1993, when China became a net oil importer. That oil and natural gas come overwhelmingly—as much as 85 percent—from the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Strait en route to China’s Pacific Ocean ports. Importing oil via pipelines from Central Asia will not be enough; nor will the increased use of domestic coal. In particular, as the years roll on, China may become more dependent on Saudi Arabian oil and Iranian liquefied natural gas. Therefore, vital sea lines of communications (SLOCS) around the southern Eurasian rimland must be protected. Given China’s history as a great civilizational power since antiquity, and its relatively recent history as a victim of Western colonialism, why would Chinese leaders want to entrust such a vital defense detail forever to the U.S. Navy, the self-anointed protector of the worldwide maritime commons? If you governed China, with the responsibility of lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese into an energy-ravenous, middle-class lifestyle, you, too, would seek a credible navy in order to protect your merchant fleet across the Indian Ocean and western Pacific.
But the problem is that Chinese leaders are still many years away from having such a navy. Therefore, at the moment, according to the analyst James Mulvenon, they may be content to “free ride” on the “public good” that the U.S. Navy provides.2 Yet, as the Chinese navy is increasingly able to assume more and more responsibilities, such free ridership will become less necessary and the era of U.S.-China naval competition may begin in earnest, especially if America’s own fleet size goes down, bringing the two navies closer together in terms of capabilities.
Keep in mind that increasingly the maritime world from Africa eastward to Indonesia, and then northward to the Korean Peninsula and Japan, will become one sweeping continuum owing to the various canal and land-bridge projects that may provide links in the future between the two oceans, which now are limited to the Malacca, Lombok, and Sunda straits (all in Indonesian waters, the last two being minor passages compared to Malacca). In other words, the geography of maritime Eurasia is destined at some point to become whole and condensed.
One world though it may become, it is still two for the time being, for the Strait of Malacca remains the end of one great oceanic civilization and the beginning of another. And whereas China approaches the Indian Ocean as a landlocked power, seeking port access with littoral countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Burma—thus bringing it into potential conflict with India—China has a long coastline fronting the western Pacific, bringing it into potential conflict with the United States.
So let’s turn just beyond the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific. Here the Chinese navy sees little but trouble and frustration in what Chinese strategists call the First Island Chain, which, going from north to south, comprises Japan and the Ryuku Islands, the “half-island” of the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia.3 All of these places save for Australia are potential flashpoints. Scenarios include the collapse of North Korea or an inter-Korean war, a possible struggle with the U.S. over Taiwan, and acts of piracy or terrorism that conceivably impede China’s merchant fleet access to the Malacca and other Indonesian straits. There are, too, China’s territorial disputes over the likely energy-rich ocean beds in the East and South China seas. In the East China Sea, China and Japan have conflicting claims of sovereignty to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands; in the South China Sea, China has conflicting sovereignty claims with the Philippines and Vietnam to some or all of the Spratly Islands. Particularly in the case of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, the dispute does carry the benefit of providing Beijing with a lever to stoke nationalism, whenever it might need to, but otherwise it is a grim seascape for Chinese naval strategists. Looking out from China’s Pacific coast on to this First Island Chain, they behold a sort of “Great Wall in reverse,” in the words of Naval War College professors James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara: a well-organized line of American allies, with the equivalent of guard towers on Japan, the Ryukus, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia, all potentially blocking China’s access to the larger ocean. Chinese strategists see this map and bristle at its navy being so boxed in.
Take the two Koreas, the unification of which would be, to say the least, geopolitically inconvenient to China. Jutting out far from the Asian mainland, the Korean Peninsula commands all maritime traffic in northeastern China and, more particularly, traps in its armpit the Bohai Sea, home to China’s largest offshore oil reserve. Moreover, a unified Korea would likely be a nationalistic Korea, with distinctly mixed feelings toward its large neighbors, China and Japan, which historically have sought to control and even occupy it. A divided Korea is momentarily useful to China, as North Korea—as many headaches as its hermetic regime gives Beijing—provides a buffer between China and th
e vibrant and successful democracy that is South Korea.
As for Taiwan, it illustrates something basic in world politics: that moral questions are just, beneath the surface, often questions of power. Taiwan is discussed by all sides purely in moral terms, even as its sovereignty or lack thereof carries pivotal geopolitical consequences. China talks about Taiwan in terms of consolidating the national patrimony, unifying China for the good of all ethnic Chinese. America talks about Taiwan in terms of preserving a model democracy. But Taiwan is something else: in the late army general Douglas MacArthur’s words, it is “an un-sinkable aircraft carrier” that dominates the center point of China’s convex seaboard, from which an outside power like the United States can “radiate” power along China’s coastal periphery.4 As such, nothing irritates Chinese naval planners as much as de facto Taiwanese independence. Of all the guard towers along the reverse maritime Great Wall, Taiwan is, metaphorically, the tallest and most centrally located. With Taiwan returned to the bosom of mainland China, suddenly the Great Wall and the maritime straitjacket it represents would be severed.
China yearns for an authentic blue water, or oceanic, navy, just as the United States once did. To create one, America first had to consolidate the temperate zone of the North American continent through westward expansion and settlement. If China succeeds in, in effect, consolidating Taiwan, not only will its navy suddenly be in an advantageous strategic position vis-à-vis the First Island Chain, but also, just as dramatically, its national energies will be freed up to look outward in terms of power projection, to a degree that has so far been impossible. With Taiwan resolved in China’s favor, then, as Holmes and Yoshihara posit, China would be more liberated to pursue a naval grand strategy in both the Indian and Pacific oceans. (And if China could more effectively consolidate ethnic-Han Chinese control over the Muslim Turkic Uighurs in its westernmost province of Xinjiang, that, too, might add an additional spur to its pan-oceanic naval efforts.)
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 34
