09-26-2007, 03:48 AM
Op_Ed in Deccan Chronicle, 25 Spet., 2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->US is losing its Pacific
By Robert D. Kaplan
The ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to hasten the arrival of the Asian Century.
While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and its European allies continue to starve their defence programmes, Asian militaries â in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea â have been quietly modernising and in some cases enlarging. Asian dynamism is now military as well as economic.
The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance. A few years down the road, according to the security analysts at the private policy group Strategic Forecasting, Americans will not to the same extent be the prime deliverers of disaster relief in a place like the Indonesian archipelago, as we were in 2005. Our ships will share the waters (and the prestige) with new "big decks" from Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Then there is China, whose production and acquisition of submarines is now five times that of Americaâs. Many military analysts feel it is mounting a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode our qualitative one. Yet the Chinese have been buying smart rather than across the board.
In addition to submarines, Beijing has focused on naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving objects at sea and technology that blocks GPS satellites. The goal is "sea denial": dissuading American carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever we like. Such dissuasion is the subtle, high-tech end of military asymmetry, as opposed to the crude, low-tech end that weâve seen with homemade bombs in Iraq. Whether or not China ever has a motive to challenge America, it will increasingly have the capacity to do so. Certainly, the billions of dollars spent on Iraq (a war I supported) would not have gone for the expensive new air, naval and space systems necessary to retain our relative edge against a future peer competitor like China. But some of it would have.
Chinaâs military expansion, with a defence budget growing by double digits for the 19th consecutive year, is part of a broader, regional trend. Russia â a Pacific as well as a European nation, we should remember â is right behind the United States and China as the worldâs biggest military spender. Japan, with 119 warships, including 20 diesel-electric submarines, boasts a naval force nearly three times larger than Britainâs. (It is soon to be four times larger: 13 to 19 of Britainâs 44 remaining large ships are set to be mothballed by the Labour government.) Indiaâs Navy could be the third-largest in the world in a few years as it becomes more active throughout the Indian Ocean, from the Mozambique Channel to the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. South Korea, Singapore and Pakistan all spend higher percentages of their gross domestic products on defence than do Britain and France â which are by far Europeâs most serious military-minded nations.
The twin trends of a rising Asia and a politically crumbling West Asia will most likely lead to a naval emphasis on the Indian Ocean and its surrounding seas, the sites of the "brown water" choke points of world commerce â the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the Bab el Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea, and Malacca. These narrow bodies of water will become increasingly susceptible to terrorism, even as they become more and more clogged with tankers bringing West Asian oil to the growing middle classes of India and China. The surrounding seas will then become home territory to Indian and Chinese warships, protecting their own tanker routes.
To wit, China is giving Pakistan $200 million to build a deep-water port at Gwadar, just 390 nautical miles from the Strait of Hormuz.
Beijing is also trying to work with the military junta in Burma to create another deep-water port on the Bay of Bengal. It has even hinted at financing a canal across the 30-mile Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that would open a new connection between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Oddly enough, the Pacific, as an organising principle in world military affairs, will also encroach upon Africa. Itâs no secret that a major reason for the Pentagonâs decision to establish its new Africa Command is to contain and keep an eye on Chinaâs growing web of development projects across the sub-Saharan regions.
Still, measuring budgets, deployments, and sea and air "platforms" does not quite indicate just how much the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Military power rests substantially on the willingness to use it: perhaps less so in war than in peacetime as a means of leverage and coercion.
That, in turn, requires a vigorous nationalism â something that is far more noticeable right now in Asia than in parts of an increasingly post-national West. As the Yale political scientist Paul Bracken notes in his book Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age, the Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese have great pride in possessing nuclear weapons, unlike the western powers that seem almost ashamed of needing them. Likewise, the right to produce nuclear arms is something that unites Iranians, regardless of their views of the clerical regime.
Mending relations with Europe is only a partial answer to Americaâs problems in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, since Europe itself continues to turn away from military power. This trend was quickened by the Iraq war, which has helped legitimise nascent European pacifism. People in countries like Germany, Italy and Spain see their own militaries not so much as soldiers but as civil servants in uniform: there for soft peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
Meanwhile, Asia is marked by rivalries that encourage traditional arms races. Despite warming economic ties between Japan and China, and between Japan and South Korea, the Japanese and Chinese have fought wars of words over possession of the Senkaku (or, as the Chinese have it, Diaoyutai) Islands in the East China Sea; just as Japanese and South Koreans have over possession of the Takeshima Islands (Tokdo Islands to the Koreans) in the Sea of Japan. These are classic territorial disputes, stirring deep emotions of the sorts that often led to war in early modern Europe.
Despite these tensions, the United States should also be concerned about the alternative possibility of a China-Japan entente. Some of Chinaâs recent diplomatic approaches to Japan have been couched in a new tone of respect and camaraderie, as it attempts to tame Japanâs push toward rearmament and thus to reduce the regional influence of the United States.
Asiaâs military-economic vigour is the product of united political, economic and military elites. In Asia, politics often does stop at the waterâs edge. In a post-Bush America, if we do not find a way to agree on basic precepts, Iraq may indeed turn out to have been the event that signalled our military decline. Preventing that will require continued high military expenditures combined with an unrelenting multilateralism of a sort we have not pursued since the Nineties. In the vast oceanic spaces bordering the Pacific and Indian Oceans, air, sea and space power will be paramount both as means of deterrence and of guarding the sea lanes. A global power at peace still requires a navy and an air force deployed as far forward as possible. That costs money. Even with the gargantuan cost of Iraq, our defence budget is still under five per cent of our gross domestic product, low by historical standards.
Furthermore, the very vitality of nation-states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans will take us back to an older world of traditional statecraft, in which we will need to tirelessly leverage allies and seek cooperation from competitors. Thus we should take advantage of the rising risk of terrorism and piracy in order to draw the Chinese and Indian Navies into joint patrols of choke points and tanker routes.
Still, we should be careful about leveraging Japan and India too overtly against China.
The Japanese continue to be distrusted throughout Asia, particularly in the Korean Peninsula, because of the horrors of World War II. As for India, as a number of policy experts leaders there told me on a recent visit: India will remain nonaligned, with a tilt toward the United States. But any official alliance would compromise Indiaâs own shaky relationship with China. Subtlety must be a keystone to our policy. We have to draw China in, not gang up against it. Because we remain the only major player in the Pacific and Indian Oceans without territorial ambitions or disputes with its neighbours, indispensability, rather than dominance, must be our goal.
That, continuing deep into the 21st century, would be a stirring achievement.
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts:
The American Military in the Air, at Sea and on the Ground
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->US is losing its Pacific
By Robert D. Kaplan
The ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to hasten the arrival of the Asian Century.
While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and its European allies continue to starve their defence programmes, Asian militaries â in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea â have been quietly modernising and in some cases enlarging. Asian dynamism is now military as well as economic.
The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance. A few years down the road, according to the security analysts at the private policy group Strategic Forecasting, Americans will not to the same extent be the prime deliverers of disaster relief in a place like the Indonesian archipelago, as we were in 2005. Our ships will share the waters (and the prestige) with new "big decks" from Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Then there is China, whose production and acquisition of submarines is now five times that of Americaâs. Many military analysts feel it is mounting a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode our qualitative one. Yet the Chinese have been buying smart rather than across the board.
In addition to submarines, Beijing has focused on naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving objects at sea and technology that blocks GPS satellites. The goal is "sea denial": dissuading American carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever we like. Such dissuasion is the subtle, high-tech end of military asymmetry, as opposed to the crude, low-tech end that weâve seen with homemade bombs in Iraq. Whether or not China ever has a motive to challenge America, it will increasingly have the capacity to do so. Certainly, the billions of dollars spent on Iraq (a war I supported) would not have gone for the expensive new air, naval and space systems necessary to retain our relative edge against a future peer competitor like China. But some of it would have.
Chinaâs military expansion, with a defence budget growing by double digits for the 19th consecutive year, is part of a broader, regional trend. Russia â a Pacific as well as a European nation, we should remember â is right behind the United States and China as the worldâs biggest military spender. Japan, with 119 warships, including 20 diesel-electric submarines, boasts a naval force nearly three times larger than Britainâs. (It is soon to be four times larger: 13 to 19 of Britainâs 44 remaining large ships are set to be mothballed by the Labour government.) Indiaâs Navy could be the third-largest in the world in a few years as it becomes more active throughout the Indian Ocean, from the Mozambique Channel to the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. South Korea, Singapore and Pakistan all spend higher percentages of their gross domestic products on defence than do Britain and France â which are by far Europeâs most serious military-minded nations.
The twin trends of a rising Asia and a politically crumbling West Asia will most likely lead to a naval emphasis on the Indian Ocean and its surrounding seas, the sites of the "brown water" choke points of world commerce â the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the Bab el Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea, and Malacca. These narrow bodies of water will become increasingly susceptible to terrorism, even as they become more and more clogged with tankers bringing West Asian oil to the growing middle classes of India and China. The surrounding seas will then become home territory to Indian and Chinese warships, protecting their own tanker routes.
To wit, China is giving Pakistan $200 million to build a deep-water port at Gwadar, just 390 nautical miles from the Strait of Hormuz.
Beijing is also trying to work with the military junta in Burma to create another deep-water port on the Bay of Bengal. It has even hinted at financing a canal across the 30-mile Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that would open a new connection between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Oddly enough, the Pacific, as an organising principle in world military affairs, will also encroach upon Africa. Itâs no secret that a major reason for the Pentagonâs decision to establish its new Africa Command is to contain and keep an eye on Chinaâs growing web of development projects across the sub-Saharan regions.
Still, measuring budgets, deployments, and sea and air "platforms" does not quite indicate just how much the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Military power rests substantially on the willingness to use it: perhaps less so in war than in peacetime as a means of leverage and coercion.
That, in turn, requires a vigorous nationalism â something that is far more noticeable right now in Asia than in parts of an increasingly post-national West. As the Yale political scientist Paul Bracken notes in his book Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age, the Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese have great pride in possessing nuclear weapons, unlike the western powers that seem almost ashamed of needing them. Likewise, the right to produce nuclear arms is something that unites Iranians, regardless of their views of the clerical regime.
Mending relations with Europe is only a partial answer to Americaâs problems in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, since Europe itself continues to turn away from military power. This trend was quickened by the Iraq war, which has helped legitimise nascent European pacifism. People in countries like Germany, Italy and Spain see their own militaries not so much as soldiers but as civil servants in uniform: there for soft peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
Meanwhile, Asia is marked by rivalries that encourage traditional arms races. Despite warming economic ties between Japan and China, and between Japan and South Korea, the Japanese and Chinese have fought wars of words over possession of the Senkaku (or, as the Chinese have it, Diaoyutai) Islands in the East China Sea; just as Japanese and South Koreans have over possession of the Takeshima Islands (Tokdo Islands to the Koreans) in the Sea of Japan. These are classic territorial disputes, stirring deep emotions of the sorts that often led to war in early modern Europe.
Despite these tensions, the United States should also be concerned about the alternative possibility of a China-Japan entente. Some of Chinaâs recent diplomatic approaches to Japan have been couched in a new tone of respect and camaraderie, as it attempts to tame Japanâs push toward rearmament and thus to reduce the regional influence of the United States.
Asiaâs military-economic vigour is the product of united political, economic and military elites. In Asia, politics often does stop at the waterâs edge. In a post-Bush America, if we do not find a way to agree on basic precepts, Iraq may indeed turn out to have been the event that signalled our military decline. Preventing that will require continued high military expenditures combined with an unrelenting multilateralism of a sort we have not pursued since the Nineties. In the vast oceanic spaces bordering the Pacific and Indian Oceans, air, sea and space power will be paramount both as means of deterrence and of guarding the sea lanes. A global power at peace still requires a navy and an air force deployed as far forward as possible. That costs money. Even with the gargantuan cost of Iraq, our defence budget is still under five per cent of our gross domestic product, low by historical standards.
Furthermore, the very vitality of nation-states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans will take us back to an older world of traditional statecraft, in which we will need to tirelessly leverage allies and seek cooperation from competitors. Thus we should take advantage of the rising risk of terrorism and piracy in order to draw the Chinese and Indian Navies into joint patrols of choke points and tanker routes.
Still, we should be careful about leveraging Japan and India too overtly against China.
The Japanese continue to be distrusted throughout Asia, particularly in the Korean Peninsula, because of the horrors of World War II. As for India, as a number of policy experts leaders there told me on a recent visit: India will remain nonaligned, with a tilt toward the United States. But any official alliance would compromise Indiaâs own shaky relationship with China. Subtlety must be a keystone to our policy. We have to draw China in, not gang up against it. Because we remain the only major player in the Pacific and Indian Oceans without territorial ambitions or disputes with its neighbours, indispensability, rather than dominance, must be our goal.
That, continuing deep into the 21st century, would be a stirring achievement.
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts:
The American Military in the Air, at Sea and on the Ground
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->