Think of the Chinese resolution of the Taiwan challenge as having a potential impact similar, at least symbolically, to the last major battle of the Indian Wars, the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. After that dreadful event the “Wild West” having been consolidated, America’s military began in earnest to focus seaward, and a little more than a decade later came the building of the Panama Canal. Though the adjective “multi-polar” is thrown around liberally to describe the global situation, it will be the fusing of Taiwan with the mainland that will mark the real emergence of such a multi-polar world.
China is working assiduously in many ways, principally economic, at changing the dynamic of the American-dominated First Island Chain. Countries like the Philippines and Australia will have China as their number-one trading partner. In the case of the Philippines—an American legacy going back more than a hundred years that has included war, occupation, decades-long political interference, and massive economic aid—China has been doing everything it can to boost bilateral ties, even offering the Philippines a defense pact some years back that included an intelligence-sharing agreement. Therefore, one cannot help considering a future with a rearmed Japan, a nationalist Greater Korea, a Taiwan functionally united with the mainland, and a Philippines and Australia that, while nominally pro-American, have been neutralized by trade and other realities related to China’s continued economic and military rise. The result would be a far less stable western Pacific in tandem with the diminution of American power, and the breakout of China on all naval fronts.
To the east, in such a scenario, China begins to have designs on what its strategists call the Second Island Chain, dominated by U.S. territories like Guam and the Mariana Islands. Indeed, Oceania in its entirety is a region where China is fast developing interests, even as it broadly strengthens diplomatic and economic ties with many of these small and seemingly obscure island nations.
But it is to the south—where the Indian and Pacific oceans join—in the complex maritime region of the South China and Java seas, dominated by Singapore, peninsular Malaysia, and the many thousands of islands of the southern Philippines and especially of the Indonesia archipelago, where China’s naval interests are most pronounced; and where its sea lines of communication to the oil-rich Middle East and Africa are most at risk. Here we have radical Islam, piracy, and the naval rise of India, coupled with the heavily congested geographic bottlenecks of the various Indonesian straits, through which a large proportion of China’s oil tankers and merchant fleets must pass. There are also significant deposits of oil that China hopes to exploit, making the South China Sea a “second Persian Gulf” in some estimations.5 The combination of all these factors, and the opportunities, problems, and nightmares they represent for Chinese planners, make this region at the Indian Ocean’s eastern gateway among the most critical seascapes of the coming decades. Just as the U.S. Navy moved a century ago to control the Caribbean basin, so must the Chinese navy move, if not to control, then at least to become as dominant as the Americans in these seas, for the Malacca Strait can be thought of as akin to the Panama Canal, an outlet to the wider world.6
The mid-twentieth-century Dutch-American scholar of geopolitics Nicholas J. Spykman notes that throughout history states have engaged in “circumferential and transmarine expansion” to gain control of adjacent seas: Greece sought to control the Aegean, Rome the Mediterranean, the U.S. the Caribbean, and now, according to this logic, China the South China Sea.7
Imagine what it must be like for the Chinese to see U.S. Navy carrier and expeditionary strike groups sailing at will throughout their vital backyard. The Indian Ocean tsunami relief effort mounted off Indonesia by the U.S. Navy was for the Chinese a demonstration of their own impotence in their maritime sphere, as they had no aircraft carriers to send to help. The rescue effort further inflamed an ongoing debate in Chinese power circles about whether or not they should acquire a carrier or two of their own, rather than continue concentrating on purely warmaking platforms such as submarines, which have little utility in aid efforts. Future naval dominance of these waters is, in the eyes of the Chinese, a natural right. The tsunami relief effort only intensified their determination in this regard.
When considering maritime Southeast Asia, what immediately impresses one is the danger of radical Islam in the partly ungovernable archipelago of the southern Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. For the Chinese, radical Islam is bad because it brings the U.S. military closer to their shores in the hunt for terrorists. I witnessed this firsthand while covering Operation Enduring Freedom in the Philippines in 2003 and again in 2006. In the hunt for the al-Qaeda–and Jemaah Islamiya–affiliated terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, American Special Operations Forces established a base in Mindanao, to help Filipino soldiers and marines conduct anti-terror operations in the embattled Sulu Archipelago to the south. The effect was to bring the American military back to the Philippines for the first time since the closure of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station in 1992, and to deploy American forces south of the main Filipino island of Luzon for the first time since World War II. This was all disheartening news to Chinese strategists. Some Americans I interviewed were very open about the geopolitical implications of their presence, telling me that today the problem was radical Islam, but that such deployments better positioned their military for a future competition with China.
Then there is piracy, which bothers the Chinese for obvious reasons. It potentially threatens China’s maritime lifeline to the mainland in these crowded and constricted archipelagic waters. In recent years, cooperation among the navies of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia has reduced piracy greatly, so it is no longer the scourge that it is in the Gulf of Aden, at the opposite end of the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, given the consequences of a return of piracy to Southeast Asia, where it has been a common feature of sea warfare for many centuries, Chinese admirals cannot afford to be complacent.
As mentioned, there is speculation that in the foreseeable future the Chinese will help finance a canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that will provide another link between the Indian and Pacific oceans—an engineering project on the scale of the Panama Canal and slated to cost $20 billion. It was across the Kra isthmus that the Chinese portaged goods in antiquity to get to the Indian Ocean side and back.8 For China, a Kra canal might be as significant as the Grand Canal that in late antiquity connected Hangzhou in central China with Beijing in the north. A Kra canal would offer China new port facilities and oil refineries, warehousing for transshipments, and, in general, a platform from which to expand Beijing’s influence in Southeast Asia. Not that far from the Isthmus of Kra is Hainan Island in the South China Sea, where China is increasingly able to project air and sea power from its military base there, which features underground berths for its submarines.9
Meanwhile, as you may recall, Dubai Ports World is conducting a feasibility study to construct a nearby land bridge, with ports on either side of the Isthmus of Kra, connected by rails and highways. And the Malaysian government is interested in an east-west pipeline network that will link up ports in the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. For some time now the strategic heart of the maritime world has not been the North Atlantic but the western Pacific and Greater Indian Ocean region. Yet that trend may accelerate with the eventual building of at least one or two, if not all three, of these projects, which, in turn, will have an equally dramatic effect on naval deployment patterns. The twin trends of an economically rising Asia and a politically crumbling Middle East will lead to a naval warfare emphasis on the Indian Ocean and surrounding seas, whose choke points are increasingly susceptible to terrorism and piracy.
China will gain immeasurably from all these projects. The potential threats signified by piracy and the rise of the Indian navy dissipate once these Southeast Asian waters become less constricted and less focused on one strait. There is, too, the worry about congestion, pollution, and hazardous cargoes that also will be alleviated. More importantly, the Chin
ese navy would obviously prefer to be not a one-ocean but a two-ocean power, with multiple access routes between the Indian Ocean and western Pacific to ease the so-called Malacca dilemma. A one-ocean navy in the western Pacific makes China a regional power; a two-ocean navy in both the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean makes China a great power, able to project force around the whole navigable Eurasian rimland.
China’s Malacca challenge has two long-range solutions. The first is the simple one of providing alternative sea routes from one ocean to the other. The second is to get more of China’s energy supplies overland to China from the Middle East and Central Asia, so that less hydrocarbons have to transit from the Indian to Pacific Ocean in the first place. As we have seen, that might include using Indian Ocean ports to eventually transport oil and other energy products via roads and pipelines northward into the heart of China. In fact, it was striking how China leapt at the chance to deploy two destroyers and a supply ship to the Gulf of Aden to protect Chinese vessels against pirates. In addition to getting its sailors hands-on, out-of-area long-voyage experience, it furthered China’s claim to the Indian Ocean as a legitimate venue for naval operations.
Here it is worthwhile revisiting the era of great Chinese sea power in the Indian Ocean during the Song and early Ming dynasties, from the late tenth to the early fifteenth century, which culminated in the celebrated voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He. These expeditions saw Chinese commercial and political influence extend as far away as East Africa, and featured Chinese landings in such places as Bengal, Ceylon, Hormuz, and Mogadishu. In particular, Zheng He’s voyages from 1405 to 1433, which encompassed hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men, were not merely an extravagant oddity designed to show the Chinese flag in South Asian and Middle Eastern harbors. They were also designed to safeguard the flow of vital goods against pirates, and were in other ways, too, a demonstration of soft, benevolent power. Interestingly, the Chinese navy of the Song and early Ming eras did not seek to establish bases or maintain permanent presences in Indian Ocean ports the way the European powers did later; rather, they sought access through the building of alliances in the form of a tribute system.10 This more subtle display of power seems to be exactly what the Chinese intend for the future. Take Pakistan as a model: the Chinese have maintained a security and trade relationship with Pakistan, constructing the Karakoram Highway that connects Pakistan with China, as well as a deepwater port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. This helps develop the access China desires, even as the Gwadar harbor itself will be run by the Singaporeans. Indeed, full-fledged Chinese naval bases in places like Gwadar and Hambantota would be so provocative to the Indians that it is frankly hard to foresee such an eventuality. “Access” is the key word, not “bases.”
The Ming emperors eventually ended their forays into the Indian Ocean, but this happened only after they were pressured by the Mongols on land and thus had to turn their attention to China’s northern border. No such difficulties threaten China now. To the contrary, China is making significant progress in stabilizing its land frontiers and has even demographically laid claim to parts of Russian Siberia with Chinese migrants. Thus, the way is clear for China to turn its attention to the sea.
Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in mind that we are talking here of only a likely future. For the present, Chinese officials are focused on Taiwan and the First Island Chain, with the Indian Ocean a comparatively secondary concern. Thus, in the years and decades hence, the Indian Ocean, in addition to everything else, will register the degree to which China becomes a great military power, following in the footsteps of the Portuguese, Dutch, and others. What is China’s grand strategy? The Indian Ocean will help show us.
Imagine hence, a Chinese merchant fleet and navy present in some form from the coast of Africa all the way around the two oceans to the Korean Peninsula, covering, in effect, all Asian waters within the temperate and tropical zones, and thus protecting Chinese economic interests and the maritime system within which those interests operate. Imagine, too, India, South Korea, and Japan all adding submarines and other warships to patrol this Afro-Indo-Pacific region. Finally, imagine a United States that is still a hegemon of sorts, still maintaining the world’s largest navy and coast guard, but with a smaller difference between it and other world-class navies. That is the world we are likely headed toward.
To be sure, the United States will recover from the greatest crisis in capitalism since the Great Depression, but the gap between it and Asian giants China and India will shrink gradually, and that will affect the size of navies. Of course, American economic and military decline is not a fatalistic given. No one can know the future, and decline, as a concept, is overrated. The British Royal Navy began its relative decline in the 1890s, even as Great Britain went on to help save the West in two world wars over the next half century.11
Still, a certain pattern has emerged. The United States dominated the world’s economy for the Cold War decades. After all, while the other great powers had suffered major infrastructure damage in their homelands in World War II, the U.S. came out of that war unscathed, and thus with a great development advantage. (China, Japan, and Europe were decimated in the 1930s and 1940s, while India was still under colonial rule.) But that world is long gone, the other nations have caught up, and the remaining question is how does the U.S. respond responsibly to a multi-polarity that probably will become more of a feature of the world system in years to come.
Naval power will be as accurate an indicator of an increasingly complex global power arrangement as anything else. Indeed, China’s naval rise can present the U.S. with great opportunities. Once more, it is fortunate that the Chinese navy is rising in a legitimate manner, to protect economic and rightful security interests as America’s has done, rather than to forge a potentially suicidal insurgency force at sea, as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy appears bent on doing in the Persian Gulf.12 This provides China and the U.S. with several intersection points of cooperation. Piracy, terrorism, and natural disasters are all problem areas where the two navies can work together, because in these fields China’s interests are not dissimilar to America’s. Moreover, China may be cagily open to cooperation with the U.S. on the naval aspects of energy issues: jointly patrolling sea lines of communication, that is. Both China and the U.S. will continue to be dependent on hydrocarbons from the Greater Middle East—China especially so in coming years—so the interests of the two nations in this sphere seem to be converging. Therefore, it is not inevitable that two great powers that harbor no territorial disputes, that both require imported energy in large amounts, that inhabit opposite sides of the globe, and whose philosophical systems of governance, while wide apart, are still not as distant as were those between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, will become adversaries.
Thus, leveraging allies like India and Japan against China is responsible in one sense only: it helps provide a mechanism for the U.S. to gradually and elegantly cede great power responsibilities to like-minded others as their own capacities rise, as part of a studied retreat from a unipolar world. But to follow such a strategy in isolation risks unduly and unnecessarily alienating China. Thus, leveraging allies must be part of a wider military strategy that seeks to draw in China as part of an Asia-centric alliance system, in which militaries cooperate on a multitude of issues.
Indeed, “Where the old ‘Maritime Strategy’ focused on sea control,” Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 2006 (when he was chief of naval operations), “the new one must recognize that the economic tide of all nations rises not when the seas are controlled by one [nation], but rather when they are made safe and free for all.”
Admiral Mullen went on: “I’m after that proverbial 1,000-ship Navy—a fleet-in-being, if you will, comprised of all freedom-loving nations, standing watch over the seas, standing watch over each other.”
As grandiose and platitudinous as Admiral Mullen’s words may sound, it is in fact a realistic resp
onse to America’s own diminished resources. The U.S. will be less and less able to go it alone and so will rely increasingly on coalitions, for national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship of the sea, born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces. Just as a subtle Cold War of the seas is possible between the American and Chinese navies, conversely, the very tendency of navies to cooperate better than armies may also mean that the two navies can be the leading edge of cooperation between the two powers, working toward the establishment of a stable and prosperous multi-polar system. Given America’s civilizational tensions with radical Islam, and its at times quarrelsome relationship with Europe, as well as with a bitter and truculent Russia, the United States must do all that it can to find commonality with China. It cannot take on the whole world by itself.
The United States must eventually see its military not primarily as a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, but as a naval- and air-centric balancer, lurking close by, ready to intervene in tsunami- and Bangladesh-type humanitarian emergencies, and working in concert with both the Chinese and Indian navies as part of a Eurasian maritime system. This will improve America’s image in the former third world. While America must always be ready for war, it must work daily to keep the peace: indispensability, not dominance, should be its goal. Such a strategy will mitigate the possible dangers of China’s rise. Even in elegant decline, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity for Washington, which must be seen in Monsoon Asia as the benevolent outside power.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 35
