Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Western penetration of the Indian and western Pacific oceans began bloodily with the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. The supplanting of the Portuguese by the Dutch, and the Dutch by the English, came also with its fair share of blood.* Then there was the supplanting of the English by the Americans in the high seas of Asia, which came via the bloodshed of World War II. Therefore, a peaceful transition away from American unipolarity at sea toward an American-Indian-Chinese condominium of sorts would be the first of its kind. Rather than an abdication of responsibility, such a transition would leave the Greater Indian Ocean in the free and accountable hands of indigenous Asian nations for the first time in five hundred years. The shores of the twenty-first century’s most important body of water lack a superpower, and that is, in the final analysis, the central fact of its geography. China’s two-ocean strategy, should it ever be realized, will not occur in a vacuum, but will be constrained by the navies of other nations, and that will make all the difference.

  * My thinking about this maritime world depends substantially on a group of scholars at the U.S. Naval War College whose work on China’s maritime strategy has been exhaustive, creative, and very moderate in tone. They are Gabriel B. Collins, Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, James R. Holmes, William S. Murray, and Toshi Yoshihara. In particular, I am heavily indebted to four publications for statistics and many insights: James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan (New York: Routledge, 2008); Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, “Command of the Sea with Chinese Characteristics,” Orbis, Fall 2005; Gabriel B. Collins et al., eds., China’s Energy Strategy: The Impact on Beijing’s Maritime Policies (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008); and Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins, “Beijing’s Energy Security Strategy: The Significance of a Chinese State-Owned Tanker Fleet,” Orbis, Fall 2007.

  * One should not forget the French, whose role, particularly in the islands of the southwestern Indian Ocean, is covered expertly by Richard Hall in Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London: HarperCollins, 1996).

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  UNITY AND ANARCHY

  China is renewing its historical links with Arab and Persian civilizations, and as India never really severed them, the Indian Ocean world—the universal joint of the Eastern Hemisphere—is hurtling toward unity. “The rise of China’s economy is an accelerant for the Arab world,” writes Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland. “Its demand for oil has helped fuel the Arab economies. Its factories churn out consumer goods to fill Dubai’s and Riyadh’s air-conditioned malls.”1 For the Arabs, the rise of China offers an alternative strategic partner to the West. Before the tide turned in the Allies’ favor in World War II, strategists such as Nicholas Spykman concerned themselves with Africa and Eurasia achieving unity through the domination of fascist powers.2 That unity may be upon us in coming years and decades, not through military domination, but through the resurrection of a trading system, like that established by the medieval Muslims, and perpetuated by the Portuguese.

  And in this increasingly taut web of economic activity, Africa, at the Indian Ocean’s western extremity, is not being left out. Africa’s renewal, however slow and fitful, is being impelled in large measure by investment from the Middle East and Asia. The third world, as it used to be known, is disappearing gradually, as the parts of it that have developed are now concentrating their energies on building up those that have not.

  Indeed, globalization is not merely a phenomenon happening between the so-called West and the rest, but between the rest itself. Thus, Africa is becoming the beneficiary of a resurgent China and also of an India that is becoming ever more dynamic, as it rises above the confines of Hindu nationalism and Islamic extremism.

  China’s focus on Africa grows from its ever increasing energy needs. So as not to be too dependent on oil deposits inside the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz, China is hunting Africa for oil. It now gets more than a third of its oil imports from Africa, and President Hu Jintao has made three trips to Africa in three years. In return for equity stakes in African oil fields, China has granted $19 billion in aid and concessionary financing to African governments.3 China has supplied technical assistance to Africa in the areas of tea planting, soil analysis, irrigation, and rice growing. In return for capitalizing on the natural resources of African nations—Ivorian chocolate, Zambian copper, Zimbabwean iron and steel—China will help modernize African railroads and build highways, power stations, and dams.4

  Competition with China is pushing India to deepen its engagement with the African continent. India is courting Africa with soft loans, development aid, and political support to win lucrative oil projects. The first India-Africa summit, between India and fourteen African nations, was held in New Delhi in April 2008. India has extended $2 billion worth of credits to African countries. Oil from Nigeria accounts for 10 percent of India’s global imports; India now gets a fifth of its energy imports from Africa. Trade between India and Africa has grown from $3.39 billion in 2000 to $30 billion in 2007. In particular, Indian and South African trade has been growing at 30 percent annually. South Africa exports gold, and India polishes South Africa’s diamonds. To take another example, India is the single largest offshore investor in Mauritius.5 Such figures may not be impressive in the larger scheme of things, but they do indicate a trend.

  In addition, petrodollars from the Gulf have been flowing into East Africa, from $11 billion in 2000 to more than $50 billion in recent years. Gulf sheikhdoms have been investing in African telecommunications, tourism, mining, real estate, and finance. Half of their developing assistance is targeted for sub-Saharan Africa.

  There is little altruistic about what is going on. These Eurasian dynamos are hunting Africa for resources. Their interest in democracy is next to zero, and some of the deals they are making smack more of old-fashioned colonialism than of post–Cold War, Western-style foreign aid. As access to arable land becomes an increasing source of tension in a world where absolute growth in population continues at a significant rate, Africa, which still awaits a green revolution, looms as the final battleground for food resources. In particular, there are arrangements for South Korea to grow grain and palm oil in Madagascar, for Saudi Arabia to grow rice and barley in Ethiopia, for China to grow palm for biofuel in the Congo, and for South Korea, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates to grow wheat in the Sudan. Unlike traditional agricultural investment schemes, these focus less on cash crops than on staple food items that the country itself may lack, even as the investor countries seek to export the entire production back home.6 As Africa gets swept into the mainstream of Greater Indian Ocean trade, there will be a fine line between productive investment and exploitation.

  All of this Indian Ocean–centric activity occurs within the context of an Africa that has been itself showing steady and impressive economic growth during the first decade of the twenty-first century: 6.5 percent annually since 2003. This is a momentous change from the early 1990s, when economic growth of below one percent meant that sub-Saharan African economies were declining substantially relative to their populations. With these economic advances have come political ones. According to Freedom House, a U.S.-based group, the number of African countries with multi-party governance, civil rights, and a free media has risen to eleven from three in 1977, whereas the number of nations ranked not free at all has fallen from twenty-five to fourteen. Another factor in the opening of these societies has been technology, in which, for example, the development of mobile phone networks has allowed Africa to leapfrog over the lack of hard-wired infrastructure.7

  Technology, along with monetary inflows from the former third world in the Middle East and Asia, is finally allowing Africa to escape from its geographic isolation, which has always been a principal culprit behind its poverty. Though Africa is the second largest continent, with an area five times that of Europe, its coastline south of the Sahara is lit
tle more than a quarter as long. Moreover, this coastline lacks many good natural harbors, with the East African ports that traded vigorously with Arabia and India constituting the exception. Few of tropical Africa’s rivers are navigable from the sea, dropping as they do from interior tableland to coastal plains by a series of falls and rapids. The Sahara Desert hindered human contact from the north for too many centuries, so Africa was little exposed to the great Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity and afterwards.8

  In 1993, when I traveled through West Africa, I saw nothing but trouble ahead, specifically for countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire.9 Indeed, in the late 1990s trouble did come to those places in the form of bloody wars and separatist rebellions, even as those years were in development terms a generally bleak decade for the continent. But a new economic and political cycle has been sporadically emerging. The late French anthropologist Germaine Tillion writes “events must run their course before becoming history, so that all true history exists only by virtue of its conclusion.”10 After some decades of violence and turmoil, the conclusion of sub-Saharan Africa’s post-colonial saga might be integration into a global and specifically Indian Ocean system.

  Yet within this overall positive trend there are, and will be, a daunting order of challenges. Just consider: in Kenya, East Africa’s wealthiest economy, the average woman has almost five children; in rich countries the average is 1.6 children. In next-door Ethiopia, 70 percent of young adults are jobless.11 And looming large amid the continent’s dilemmas is the failed state of Somalia, bordering both Kenya and Ethiopia at the Horn of Africa, and jutting out into the Indian Ocean with mainland Africa’s longest coastline. This vast ungovernable space has allowed for one of the Indian Ocean’s principal problems in our era, that of Africa-based piracy.

  In the Indian Ocean, writes Alan Villiers, “the profession of piracy is as old as seafaring itself. The first man who ever straddled a drifting log probably knocked the second man from another log. So piracy began. It has been going on ever since.” The Malacca Strait and the Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf, the Makran coast, the Gulf of Kutch—the whole Arabian Sea in fact—has been crawling with pirates since time immemorial.12 Ibn Battuta, who was the victim of pirates off the western coast of India, informs us that ships in the Indian Ocean in the fourteenth century traveled in armed convoys as a defense.13 Ming China’s withdrawal from the Indian and Pacific oceans in the second half of the fifteenth century, after the last voyage of Zheng He, led to the seas filling up with many thousands of pirates of various nationalities.14 In a slightly earlier time frame Marco Polo describes many dozens of pirate vessels off the coast of Gujarat, where the pirates spent the whole summer at sea with their women and children, as they plundered merchant vessels. They formed cordons of twenty or thirty ships at intervals of five or six miles, signaling to one another by fire or smoke. “In the midst of all these troubles,” writes the historian George Hourani, “mariner and merchant called readily upon God for help, and the narratives of the sea are full of His name.” For as one medieval Arab source lamented, “Man at sea is an insect on a splinter.”15

  Fernand Braudel calls piracy the “secondary form of war” that tends to erupt in the interregnum of conflict between great states. This form of war was “usually instigated by a city acting on its own authority or at any rate only marginally attached to a large state.”16 The scholar Richard J. Norton calls such pirate bases “feral cities”: to be sure, the Somalia of our own time.17

  As can be seen, historically piracy has been endemic to the Indian Ocean, from Aden to Malacca, particularly so after the Western intrusion into these waters beginning with the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. Pirate groups, sometimes known as sea gypsies, tended to escalate in number and audacity with the burgeoning of trade, so piracy itself has often been a sign of prosperity.18 “As parasites,” pirates “do best when trade is flourishing as then hosts are readily available,” writes the Australian scholar Michael Pearson.19 At the height of Roman commercial expansion, the Emperor Trajan dispatched a retaliatory expedition against pirates that were plaguing the Persian Gulf.20 In the European view, piracy was central to the eighteenth-century Islamic world of the Sulu sultanate in Southeast Asia, writes Sugata Bose, but from the sultanate’s own viewpoint, it was a legitimate response to monopolistic European trading practices. The area around Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates was once so unsafe it was referred to as the Pirate Coast.21 Until the coming of the British, the coast of East Africa from Somalia south to Mozambique was “pirate country,” where Arab dhows came raiding, kidnapping, looting, and taking slaves.22 Piracy challenged conventional and highly formal notions of sovereignty, proclaimed by the Europeans, that extended to the high seas: one man’s pirate was another man’s patriot. Not accepting this, the Dutch, English, and French in the days of high empire manned anti-piracy patrols exactly where Somali pirates now threaten shipping.23 So, the piratical waters of today confirm that the Indian Ocean is reflective of an earlier world, one feature of which was the chaos of petty chieftaincies centered around natural harbors: in places where the state was weak or nonexistent, or subscribed to the notion that ships flying the flags of established nations were fair game.

  The British geographer Donald B. Freeman explains that the “spatial concentration of commercial shipping” in the narrow waters of the Strait of Malacca, where Indonesian Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula come together, thus forcing ships laden with rich cargoes to move slowly over treacherous shallows, has made those seas a lair for pirates for many centuries. Malay pirate navies in the early nineteenth century were made up of hundreds of praus, light sailing craft rowed by slaves and manned by pirate warriors in “gaudy armor,” armed with spears and krises for close combat. Pirate flotillas from Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines made annual circuits through the Malacca Strait. Opium clippers were a particulary sought-after target.24 It was a problem that even the British, with their great naval strength, were periodically powerless to deal with, until the advent of steam propulsion in the 1830s gave them and the Dutch an advantage over the pirates of the day.25

  The resurgence of piracy in our own era speaks volumes about both the robustness of trade and the inability of states to fully protect it. At present, piracy is a large nuisance that has adversely affected trade routes and led to new international coalitions involving both the Indians and the Pakistanis, and the Chinese and the Americans. Thus, piracy in an oblique way, may have a bright side, for it offers up a common enemy—the very symbol of anarchy, in fact—which rival powers can then come into agreement to jointly oppose. In this way, global governance is strengthened, and the balance-of-power system in the Indian Ocean region is helped to become more stable. It was partly to reduce piracy in the Strait of Malacca that the Anglo-Dutch accommodation of 1824 was reached.

  As for the romantic image of pirates, it derives mainly from the great age of piracy in the seventeenth-century Caribbean: that of a ship flying the Jolly Roger—the skull and crossbones—and manned by cutthroats with black eye patches and sashes around their heads, who preyed upon Spanish ships and cities. The Indian Ocean pirate of the early twenty-first century is different in some ways but quite similar in others. Only through the distance of time can we find anything charming or romantic about Caribbean pirates, who were murderous thugs just like their modern-day Indian Ocean counterparts. Ask Rory Berke, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, who encountered pirates off the Somali coast in January 2006.

  Berke was a naval intelligence officer for the USS Nassau expeditionary strike group on a six-month Indian Ocean deployment, whose very itinerary constituted a grand lesson in geography. The Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship, its accompanying two destroyers, and other ships left Norfolk, Virginia, in November 2005, with twenty-three hundred marines headed for Iraq. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the entire length of the Mediterranean, the strike group sailed through the “ditch”—t
hat is, the Suez Canal. “That’s where the excitement starts, when you really know you’re on deployment,” Lieutenant Commander Berke began. “For weeks you are on the wide open sea in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, where you are invulnerable. Then suddenly you’re among Arabs, with what looks like ten feet of water on each side, and an Egyptian armored personnel convoy following you on land along the canal to prevent attacks on the warships.

  “The excitement builds as you sail down the Red Sea, through the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, and along the southern shore of the Arabian Peninsula. Once through the Strait of Hormuz you know you’re in the game, with Iran on the starboard side.” The Nassau strike group sailed up the Persian Gulf to Kuwait, where it deposited the marines. Along the way the Americans passed Iranian corvettes whose sailors gave them friendly waves. The corvettes signified the regular Islamic Republic of Iran Navy, with which the U.S. Navy had had no problems, unlike the case with the Iranian Republican Guard Corps Navy that is ideologically closer to the Teheran regime.

  From Kuwait the Nassau headed back south, halfway down the Persian Gulf to Bahrain, headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, where it got orders to join an international naval task force in the northwest Indian Ocean, off the coasts of Arabia and the Horn of Africa. The Americans found themselves patrolling the lawless Somali coast in international waters, from the twelve-mile territorial limit to five hundred miles out. Here pirates preyed on all manner of ships, from small dhows, to cruise liners, to liquefied natural gas carriers. Only a few weeks earlier in the region the cruise ship Seaburn Spirit had been attacked unsuccessfully by pirates. Most of the time, though, the victims were Asian fishing boats.

  It was no coincidence that Somalia was a failed African state and that these were the most dangerous waters in the world. Piracy constitutes the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. The job of the international task force, which at the time included ships from the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Pakistan, and Australia, as well as from the United States, was simply to “suppress through presence.”