Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (47 page)

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 the 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.)

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 Chinese 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.