The South China Sea (35 page)

Clinton's emphasis on alliances gives us our second phrase. The pivot has introduced a new geographical area to the world: the ‘Indo-Pacific’. Although anthropologists and zoologists have used the term for years, supporters of the ‘rebalancing’ have given it new meaning – a loose alignment of countries concerned about the rise of China. The Indo-Pacific is now a strategic region, just as ‘Southeast Asia’ was during the Second World War and the Cold War. It forms a giant quadrilateral stretching from India to the United States, via Japan and Australia, the country where beaches are washed by both the Indian and Pacific oceans and where the phrase first surfaced. Australia, Japan and the US have had a ‘Trilateral Security Dialogue’ since 2005. In 2006 the then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed inviting India to join a ‘Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’ but the idea was extinguished by the ambivalence of the then Australian
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. In the wake of that episode, Rudd's predecessor as Labor Party leader, Kim Beazley, introduced the ‘Indo-Pacific’ to the public in a November 2009 article warning of future rivalry between China and the US.
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Rory Medcalf of the Sydney-based Lowy Institute for International Policy pushed the concept along until Hillary Clinton gave it an American stamp of approval in an October 2010 speech in Hawaii. The political centre of the Indo-Pacific quadrilateral is the South China Sea.

The phrase describes a strategic vision – to ‘bring in’ India to the region previously known as the Asia-Pacific. In her pivot article Clinton declared: ‘the United States is making a strategic bet on India's future, that India's greater role on the world stage will enhance peace and security’. In Kurt Campbell's words, ‘India is the linchpin of this system, and will have a large and important role in East Asia’.
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India has long shunned any role in American-led military alignments, but in the face of China's rise (and developments in Pakistan and Afghanistan) it agreed to a regular ‘India–US Strategic Dialogue’ in 2009. Since then India has bought about $13 billion worth of American military equipment, including helicopters, transport aircraft and artillery, much of it intended to support new mountain units defending the country's Himalayan frontier with China.

Australia has been working hard to further embed the ‘Indo’ into the ‘Pacific’. The two countries agreed a ‘Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation’ in 2009 and talks in June 2013 produced agreements on joint naval exercises and regular consultations about regional security issues.
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India is developing other relationships too: a ‘strategic partnership’ with Vietnam, a ‘Defence Policy Dialogue’ with Japan, and a ‘trilateral dialogue’ with Japan and South Korea. It has provided Vietnam with $100 million in cheap loans to buy patrol boats to protect Indian-operated oilfields off the Vietnamese coast and holds joint exercises with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Japan.
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However, Indian political culture still espouses ‘strategic autonomy’ and the country is unlikely to join any formal alliance with the US.

Inside the quadrilateral, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand have had defence treaties or agreements with the US for decades. More recently, seven ASEAN members have agreed some form of military partnership with Washington (the exceptions are
Myanmar, Vietnam and land-locked Laos – and the first two are moving cautiously towards some kind of engagement). China's list of military friends, on the other hand, is more limited: North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. None can be described as allies and all except North Korea like to play their suitors off against one another. Myanmar is currently opening to the West mainly because it wants to be less reliant on China. Laos balances China against Vietnam, Cambodia plays everyone off against each other and Sri Lanka does the same. If there is to be a strategic competition between the two powers, the United States starts with an overwhelming advantage. The question in Southeast Asia is whether it can sustain that position.

In 2013, American spending on intelligence alone was over $50 billion – more than the total military spending of all the members of ASEAN combined.
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That was in addition to the official military budget set at $625 billion for 2014.
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Defence makes up over a fifth of US federal government spending – 22 per cent in 2014. With the national debt standing at $17 trillion at the time of writing,
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cuts will have to be made. Worries about how long the US can remain committed to the region are encouraging countries to hedge their bets and build up their relations with China, creating a vicious circle for the US: having to increase spending to counteract this impression; coming under renewed budgetary pressure at home; thereby increasing the likelihood that it really will have to draw down its military presence; thus giving countries inside the quadrilateral even more reason to toe Beijing's line. This is a narrative that Beijing has been keen to amplify – the more it looks like the US is struggling to support its Asian commitments, the more likely Asian states are to look elsewhere for support.

Hence the third key phrase, ‘burden-sharing’, which overlaps with the pivot's emphasis on regional multilateral institutions. Washington is actively encouraging ‘China-concerned’ countries to build their own ‘peer-to-peer’ military links. Japan is providing the Philippines with ten coastguard vessels, each worth about $11 million, and training Vietnamese coastguards. South Korea has donated a warship to the Philippines and Australia is providing equipment and training. Australia also signed a Defence Cooperation Arrangement with its neighbour Indonesia in 2012. Australia has also started working together more closely with Japan – for
example with Exercise Nichi Gou Trident in June 2012.
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The ‘Five Power Defence Arrangements’, agreed in 1971, still link Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and the UK.

But does all this activity add up to anything more than a sea of beans? Korea and Japan are still at odds over disputed islands and Vietnam is unlikely to join any American-led defence arrangement without some mortal threat from China. The rest of ASEAN is happy to shelter under an American military umbrella – and indeed use it to keep a lid on some of the intra-ASEAN disputes – but has no interest in trying to resurrect anything like SEATO. This is not an alliance, a coalition or even a partnership. One description that might come close could be borrowed from physics. It's a ‘flux’ – a series of particles and forces in constant realignment. But that, according to the former Pentagon official we heard from before, is not necessarily a bad thing. ‘In a diplomatic sense, our biggest advantage over the Chinese isn't ships and planes and stuff that can go boom. It's that the Chinese still haven't worked out how to play a multilateral game. We know how to do it. And as we get weaker we're going to have to do it better which, luckily, we know how to do. We're just rediscovering stuff we used to do a long time ago – pre-Second World War. A lot of countries there, I can tell you as a fact, want us there. Not in force, not assertively, but at the tactical level.’
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So how can these particles be persuaded to align themselves along Washington's axis? In short, through the fourth line of action: expanding trade and investment. The key phrase here is the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’. One of the major motivations behind the pivot was the fear that the US was being squeezed out of its markets in eastern Asia. In 2004 the US was ASEAN's largest trading partner. By 2010 it was the fourth largest, after China, Japan and the EU. The China–ASEAN Free Trade Area came into force that year and China was pushing for a wider East Asian Free Trade Area to include Japan and South Korea in which it could wield considerable influence over Northeast and Southeast Asia. According to Ernie Bower, ‘there was a real question about Asian economic integration and the Chinese running away with the store. They had started to dominate the “ASEAN Plus Three” structure in the sense that they were the ones setting the agenda. If you talked to the Japanese and the Koreans there was real worry and the Australians and the Kiwis were apoplectic because
Asian integration was starting to roll on without them. So there were a lot of warnings to the Americans.’

In January 2008, while George W. Bush was still president, his administration adopted an obscure group of four oddly matched countries – Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore – calling themselves the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’ (TPP) and pushed it to the front of American economic planning for Asia. The Obama administration was initially less keen. When Obama boarded Air Force One to make his first official trip to Asia in November 2009 he had no plans to make any announcements on trade. But during the flight, after conversations with Hillary Clinton and Kurt Campbell, he was persuaded and, to the surprise of everyone, announced in Japan that the US would join the TPP process. In the years since, the TPP has grown to comprise 12 countries, including two more members of ASEAN (Vietnam and Malaysia) and Japan. South Korea may join too. Ultimately Washington would like to see the TPP expand to become a ‘Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific’ but there's widespread scepticism about whether the TPP can even reach its first objectives. These include stipulations on labour rights, environmental protection, intellectual property and government contracts – rich-country issues that are way down the agenda in Asia.

ASEAN has pushed ahead with its own acronym: RCEP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. It's a framework with much lower standards, primarily focused on unifying ASEAN members’ existing Free Trade Areas, including with China. There has been much talk of rivalry between the American-backed TPP and the China-inclusive RCEP but it's worth noting that ASEAN deliberately chose to push RCEP (and not the East Asian Free Trade Area) because it included India, Australia and New Zealand along with Japan and South Korea – making it much less China-focused. But all the same ASEAN is voting with its feet, integrating with its most significant markets.

Aside from a programme to help ASEAN states work towards the standards of the TPP (the Expanded Economic Engagement initiative), however, Washington has offered little in the way of official economic incentives to pull the Indo-Pacific in its direction. This reflects the power of domestic lobbies more worried about unfair competition from Asian manufacturers than about America's strategic position in Asia. Instead, the
private sector has been told to get on with it. In 2012 the US–ASEAN Business Council and the US Chambers of Commerce organised a US–ASEAN Business Forum in Cambodia at the same time as the ASEAN foreign ministers were haggling over their communiqué but this wasn't repeated in 2013. The pivot still seems much more focused on guns than on butter.

But what kind of guns? Chinese officials have proposed interpretations of international law that would potentially close the South China Sea to the US Navy. China is simultaneously developing weapons with the capacity to ‘deny’ the Sea to American fleets. Washington sees those developments as fundamental threats, not just to its navy but also to its global position. The fifth element of the pivot announced by Hillary Clinton is ‘a broad-based military presence’ but, as we will see in the next chapter, it's become associated with the phrase ‘air-sea battle’. Could there be a war? There certainly doesn't have to be. The US Navy has made room for an emerging power in the past and could do so again. In the decades after 1962, the Soviet Union developed a ‘blue water’ navy and its Far Eastern fleet sailed far and wide from Vladivostok. But back then, both powers were disciples of Hugo Grotius. It suited them to be able to sail through the South China Sea, and everywhere else, at will. What is different now is Beijing's apparent desire to overturn centuries of convention and deny that right to military vessels.

The final strand of the pivot was ‘advancing democracy and human rights’ under the rubric of ‘universal values’. This is its least-developed element. Successes have been trumpeted in Myanmar, where Derek Mitchell is, at the time of writing, US ambassador, but disagreements over human rights have slowed down the development of relations with Vietnam. Ultimately they are what defines the difference between the US and China, with the Beijing leadership convinced that the promotion of individual rights will undermine its political system and lead to another round of imperialist domination. It's likely that human rights considerations will play a relatively minor role in the unfolding strategic contest.

Two strategic imperatives and many regional interests collide in the South China Sea. The dispute is so dangerous because it crystallises two nations’ ideas of who they are. Both the United States of America and the People's Republic of China are founded upon, and their elites are
imbued with, a mighty sense of purpose. For China's Communist Party rulers, legitimacy comes from a history of anti-imperialist struggle and an ongoing campaign to recover territories hacked from the national corpus by colonists and traitors. However historically mistaken the belief, those territories include the Sea. The United States’ elite has an implicit belief in its manifest destiny too: America as an ‘exceptional country’, the world's ‘last best hope’, an ‘indispensable power’, an upholder of the norms and rules of the international system. The South China Sea is the first place where those norms and rules are being challenged. If the United States loses access to those waters it loses its global role and becomes just another power. The shock would be profound and the consequences for American identity, prosperity and security devastating. It could be something worth fighting for. And, as we shall see, plans are already being made.

CHAPTER 8

Shaping the Battlefield

Military Matters

I
T LOOKS LIKE
a giant grey box, its top speed is just 10 knots and like most good spies it hides behind a dull job title. As an ‘ocean surveillance ship’ the USNS
Impeccable
usually keeps out of the spotlight. It works alone, far out to sea and right at the edge of international law. Although owned by the US government and controlled by the Department of Defense it's operated by a private company, the more glamorously named ‘Special Mission Division’ of the shipping giant Maersk. The
Impeccable
’s job, and the reason for its boxy shape, is to tow expensive cables through stormy seas. Its ‘special mission’ is to hunt Chinese submarines with the 1,500-metre-long Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS) it pulls in its wake.