The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

The Grand
Chessboard
makes this point vividly.
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Indeed, India and China—with their
immense populations; rich, venerable, and very different cultural experiences;
geographic proximity; and fractious border disputes—are, despite their
complementary trading relationship, destined by geography to be rivals to a
certain degree. And the issue of Tibet only inflames this rivalry, even as it is a
core function of it. India hosts the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile in

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Dharamsala, which enables him to keep the cause of Tibet alive in the court of
global opinion. Dan Twining, a senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall
Fund in Washington, has written that recent Indian-Chinese border tensions
“may be related to worries in Beijing over the Dalai Lama’s succession,” given
the possibility that the next Dalai Lama might be named outside China—in the
Tibetan cultural belt that stretches across northern India, Nepal, and Bhutan.
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This belt includes the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China also
claims, as it is part of the Tibetan plateau and thus outside the lowlands which
geographically define the Indian Subcontinent. China has also been expanding
its military influence into the unstable, Maoist-dominated Himalayan buffer state
of Nepal, which India has countered with an Indian-Nepalese defense
cooperation agreement of its own. China and India will play a Great Game not
only here, but in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, too. China’s pressure on India from
the north, which helped ignite a border war between India and China in 1962,
must continue as a means to help consolidate its hold on Tibet. This assumes that
in an increasingly feverish world media environment the romantic cause of
Tibetan nationalism will not dissipate, and may even intensify.
Of course, one might well argue that borders with so many troubled regions
will constrain Chinese power, and thus geography is a hindrance to Chinese
ambitions. China is virtually surrounded, in other words. But given China’s
economic and demographic expansion in recent decades, and its reasonable
prospects for continued, albeit reduced, economic growth—with serious bumps,
mind you—into the foreseeable future, China’s many land borders can also work
as a force multiplier: for it is China encroaching on these less dynamic and less
populated areas, not the other way around. Some explain that the presence of
failed and semi-failed states on China’s borders—namely Afghanistan and
Pakistan—is a danger to Beijing. I have been to those borders. They are in the
remotest terrain at exceedingly high elevations. Few live there. Pakistan could
completely unravel and it would barely be noticed on the Chinese side of the
border. China’s borders aren’t the problem: the problem is Chinese society,
which, as it becomes more prosperous, and, as China’s economic growth rate
slows, raises the specter of political upheaval of some sort. And serious upheaval
could make China suddenly vulnerable on its ethnic peripheries.
China’s most advantageous outlet for its ambitions is in the direction of the
relatively weak states of Southeast Asia. Here, too, China’s geography is
incomplete. China dominated Vietnam during the first millennium of the modern
era. China’s Yuan Dynasty (of Mongol descent) invaded Burma, Siam, and
Vietnam in the late thirteenth century. Chinese migration to Thailand dates back
many centuries. The lack of a Great Wall in China’s southeast was not only

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because of the rugged forests and steep mountain folds between China and
Burma, but because Chinese expansion along this entire frontier from Burma in
the west to Vietnam in the east was more fluid than in the north of China,
according to Lattimore.
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There are few natural impediments separating China
from parts of Burma, and from Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The likely capital
of a Mekong River prosperity sphere, linking all the countries of Indochina by
road and river traffic, is Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province, whose dams will
provide the electricity consumed by Thais and others in this demographic
cockpit of the world. For it is here in Southeast Asia, with its 568 million people,
where China’s 1.3 billion people converge with the Indian Subcontinent’s 1.5
billion people.
First and foremost among the states of Southeast Asia, with the largest, most
sprawling landmass in the region, is Burma. Burma, too, like Mongolia, the
Russian Far East, and other territories on China’s artificial land borders, is a
feeble state abundant in the very metals, hydrocarbons, and other natural
resources that China desperately requires. The distance is less than five hundred
miles from Burma’s Indian Ocean seaboard—where China and India are
competing for development rights—to China’s Yunnan Province. Again, we are
talking about a future of pipelines, in this case gas from offshore fields in the
Bay of Bengal, that will extend China’s reach beyond its legal borders to its
natural geographical and historical limits. This will occur in a Southeast Asia in
which the formerly strong state of Thailand can less and less play the role of a
regional anchor and inherent balancer against China, owing to deep structural
problems in Thai politics: the royal family, with an ailing king, is increasingly
less of a stabilizing force; the Thai military is roiled by factionalism; and the
citizenry is ideologically split between an urban middle class and an up-and-
coming rural class. China, flush with cash, is developing bilateral military
relationships with Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, even as
America’s own military presence, as exemplified by annual regional exercises
like Cobra Gold, lessen in importance for the United States, ever since
America’s energies have been diverted to its Middle Eastern wars. (Of course,
this is now changing: as the Obama administration vows a pivot toward Asia and
away from the Middle East, in order to confront a militarily more powerful
China.)
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Further afield in Southeast Asia, both Malaysia and Singapore are heading
into challenging democratic transitions of their own, as both of their adept,
nation-building strongmen, Mahathir bin Mohammed and Lee Kuan Yew, pass
from the scene. Because all ethnic Malays are Muslim, Islam is racialized in

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Malaysia, and the result is intercommunal divides between the Malay, Chinese,
and Indian communities. Creeping Islamization has led to seventy thousand
Chinese leaving Malaysia over the past two decades, even as the country falls
further under the shadow of China economically, with most of Malaysia’s
imports coming from there. Chinese themselves may be unpopular in Malaysia,
but China “the state” is too big to resist. The quiet fear of China is most clearly
revealed by the actions of Singapore, a city-state strategically located near the
narrowest point of the Strait of Malacca. In Singapore, ethnic Chinese dominate
ethnic Malays by a margin of 77 percent to 14 percent. Nevertheless, Singapore
fears becoming a vassal state of China, and has consequently developed a long-
standing military training relationship with Taiwan. Recently retired Minister
Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has publicly urged the United States to stay militarily and
diplomatically engaged in the region. The degree to which Singapore can
maintain its feisty independence will, like developments in Mongolia, be a gauge
of Beijing’s regional clout. Indonesia, for its part, is caught between the need of
a U.S. naval presence to hedge against China and the fear that if it looks too
much like a U.S. ally, it will anger the rest of the Islamic world. The Free Trade
Area inaugurated recently between China and ASEAN (Association of South
East Asian Nations) demonstrates the tributary relationship that is developing
between China and its southern neighbors. China’s divide-and-conquer strategy
has each ASEAN country negotiating separately with China, rather than as a
unit. China uses ASEAN as a market for its high-value manufactured goods,
while it imports low-value agricultural produce from Southeast Asia: a classic
colonial-style relationship.
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This has led to Chinese trade surpluses, even as
ASEAN countries are becoming a dumping ground for industrial goods
produced by China’s relatively cheap urban labor. In fact, the trade gap between
China and ASEAN has widened five-fold in the first decade of the twenty-first
century. Look at recent history: from 1998 to 2001, Malaysian and Indonesian
exports to China “nearly doubled,” as did Philippine exports to China from 2003
to 2004. From 2002 to 2003, combined exports from all of the ASEAN states to
China grew by 51.7 percent, and by 2004 “China had become the region’s
leading trade partner, surpassing the United States.”
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Yet China’s economic
dominance is also benevolent, in that China is serving as an engine of
modernization for all of Southeast Asia. The complicating factor in this scenario
is Vietnam, a historic foe of China with a large army and strategically located
naval bases that might serve as a potential hedge against China, along with India
and Japan. But even Vietnam, with all of its fears regarding its much larger
northern neighbor, has no choice but to get along with it. China may still be in

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the early phases of its continental expansion, so its grasp of the periphery is
nascent. The key story line of the next few decades may be the manner in which
China accomplishes this. And if it can accomplish this, what kind of regional
hegemon will China be?
Mongolia, the Russian Far East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia are all
natural zones of Chinese influence and expansion, even though no political
borders will change. But China is most incomplete on the Korean Peninsula,
where political borders could well shift—if one accepts the argument that in a
world increasingly penetrated by information technology, the hermetic North
Korean regime has few good prospects. This makes North Korea the true pivot
of East Asia, whose unraveling could affect the destiny of the whole region for
decades to come. Jutting out from Manchuria, of which it is a natural
geographical appendage, 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. In antiquity, the kingdom of
Goguryeo covered southern Manchuria and the northern two-thirds of the
Korean Peninsula. Goguryeo paid tribute to China’s Wei Dynasty, even as it later
fought a war with it. Parts of Korea, especially in the north, came under the sway
of the Han Dynasty in antiquity and under the Qing Dynasty in early modern
times. China will never annex any part of Korea, yet it remains frustrated by
Korean sovereignty. China has supported the late Kim Jong-il’s and Kim Jong-
un’s Stalinist regime, but it covets North Korea’s geography—with its additional
outlets to the Pacific close to Russia—far more, and thus has plans for the
peninsula beyond the reign of the deceased “Dear Leader” and his son, who have
caused Beijing no end of headaches. China would like eventually to dispatch its
thousands of North Korean defectors to build a favorable political base for
Beijing’s gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—where China,
North Korea, and the Russian Far East intersect, with good port facilities on the
Pacific fronting Japan. China’s goal for North Korea must be a more modern,
authoritarian, Gorbachevian buffer state between it and the vibrant middle-class
democracy of South Korea.
But not even China is in control of events in North Korea. In other divided
country scenarios of the past decades—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—the forces
of unity have ultimately triumphed. But in none of these cases was unification
achieved through a deliberate process. Rather, it happened in sudden, tumultuous
fashion that did not respect the interests of all the major parties concerned.
Nevertheless, it is more likely than not that China, even though it fears
reunification, will eventually benefit from it. A unified Greater Korean state
could be more or less under Seoul’s control, and China is South Korea’s biggest

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trading partner. A reunified Korea would be a nationalist Korea, with
undercurrents of hostility toward its larger neighbors, China and Japan, that have
historically sought to control and occupy it. But Korea’s enmity toward Japan is
significantly greater, as Japan occupied the peninsula from 1910 to 1945. (There
are still disputes between Seoul and Tokyo over the Tokdo/Takeshima islets in
what Koreans call the East Sea and Japanese the Sea of Japan.) Meanwhile, the
economic pull from China will be stronger than from Japan. A reunified Korea
tilting slightly toward China and away from Japan would be one with little or no
basis for a continued U.S. troop presence, and that, in turn, would fuel Japanese
rearmament. In other words, it is easy to conceive of a Korean future within a
Greater China, even as there are fewer U.S. troops on the ground in Northeast
Asia.
Thus, with China making inroads into Mackinder’s Central Asian Heartland, it
is also likely to have significant influence in Spykman’s Rimland, of which
Southeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula are parts.
China’s land borders at this point in history seem to beckon with more
opportunities than hazards. This brings to mind the University of Chicago’s John
J. Mearsheimer’s comment in