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

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. For
looking out from its Pacific coast onto 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 stretching from Japan to 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.
45
China’s solution has been notably aggressive. This may be somewhat
surprising: for in many circumstances, it can be argued that naval power is more
benign than land power. The limiting factor of navies is that despite all of their
precision-guided weapons, they cannot by themselves occupy significant

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territory, and thus it is said are no menace to liberty. Navies have multiple
purposes beyond fighting, such as the protection of commerce. Sea power suits
those nations intolerant of heavy casualties in fighting on land. China, which in
the twenty-first century will project hard power primarily through its navy,
should, therefore, be benevolent in the way of other maritime nations and
empires in history, such as Venice, Great Britain, and the United States: that is, it
should be concerned mainly with the free movement of trade and the
preservation of a peaceful maritime system. But China has not reached that stage
of self-confidence yet. When it comes to the sea, it still thinks territorially, like
an insecure land power, trying to expand in concentric circles in a manner
suggested by Spykman. The very terms it uses, “First Island Chain” and “Second
Island Chain,” are territorial terms, which, in these cases, are seen as
archipelagic extensions of the Chinese landmass. The Chinese have absorbed the
aggressive philosophy of Alfred Thayer Mahan, without having graduated yet to
the blue-water oceanic force that would make it possible for China to apply
Mahanian theory. In November 2006, a Chinese submarine stalked the USS 
Kitty
Hawk
and provocatively surfaced within torpedo firing range. In November
2007, the Chinese refused entry to the 
Kitty Hawk
Carrier Strike Group into
Hong Kong harbor, despite building seas and deteriorating weather (the 
Kitty
Hawk
did make a visit to Hong Kong in early 2010). In March 2009, a handful
of Chinese ships harassed the American surveillance ship the USNS 
Impeccable
while it was openly conducting operations outside China’s twelve-mile territorial
limit in the South China Sea. The Chinese ships blocked passage and pretended
to ram the 
Impeccable
, forcing the 
Impeccable
to respond with fire hoses. These
are not the actions of a great power, serene in its position of dominance and
recognizing a brotherhood of the sea with other world navies, but of a rising and
still immature power, obsessed with the territorial humiliations it suffered in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
China is developing asymmetric and anti-access niche capabilities, designed
to deny the U.S. Navy easy entry to the East China Sea and other coastal waters.
Analysts are divided over the significance of this. Robert S. Ross of Boston
College believes that “until China develops situational awareness capability and
can degrade U.S. counter-surveillance technologies, it possesses only a limited
credible access-denial operations.” Andrew F. Krepinevich of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments believes that whatever technical
difficulties China may momentarily be encountering, it is on the way to
“Finlandizing” East Asia.
46
Thus, while it has modernized its destroyer fleet, and
has plans for an aircraft carrier or two, China is not buying naval platforms
across the board. Rather, China has been building four new classes of nuclear-

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and conventional-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines. According to
Seth Cropsey, former deputy undersecretary of the Navy, China could field a
submarine force larger than the U.S. Navy’s within the foreseeable future. The
Chinese navy, he goes on, plans to use over-the-horizon radars, satellites, seabed
sonar networks, and cyberwarfare in the service of antiship ballistic missiles
with maneuverable reentry vehicles, which, along with its burgeoning submarine
fleet, will be part of its effort to rebuff U.S. naval access to large portions of the
Western Pacific. This is not to mention China’s improving mine warfare
capability, the aquisition of Russian Su-27 and Su-30 fourth-generation jet
fighters, and 1,500 Russian surface-to-air missiles deployed along China’s coast.
Moreover, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and
moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range
—all the while developing an offensive strategy designed to be capable of
striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power: the aircraft carrier.
China will field a fifth-generation fighter between 2018 and 2020, even as the
United States slows or stops production of the F-22.
47
 The strategic geography
of the Western Pacific is changing thanks to Chinese arms purchases.
China likely has no intention of ever attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier. China is
not remotely capable of directly challenging the U.S. militarily. The aim here is
dissuasion: to amass so much offensive and defensive capability along its
seaboard that the U.S. Navy will in the future think twice and three times about
getting between the First Island Chain and the Chinese coast. That, of course, is
the essence of power: to affect your adversary’s behavior. Thus is Greater China
realized in a maritime sense. The Chinese, by their naval, air, and missile
acquisitions, are evincing a clear territoriality. The U.S.-China relationship, I
believe, will not only be determined by such bilateral and global issues as trade,
debt, climate change, and human rights, but more importantly by the specific
geography of China’s potential sphere of influence in maritime Asia.
Pivotal to that sphere of influence is the future of Taiwan. Taiwan illustrates
something basic in world politics: that moral questions are, just beneath the
surface, often questions of power. Taiwan is often discussed 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 Army
general Douglas MacArthur’s words, it is “an unsinkable 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

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periphery, according to Holmes and Yoshihara.
48
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 strait-jacket it
represents would be severed. If China succeeds in consolidating Taiwan, not
only will its navy suddenly be in an advantageous strategic position vis-à-vis the
First Island Chain, but its national energies, especially its military ones, will be
just as dramatically freed up to look outward in terms of power projection, to a
degree that has so far been impossible. Though the adjective “multipolar” is
thrown around liberally to describe the global situation, it will be the virtual
fusing of Taiwan with the mainland that will mark in a military sense the real
emergence of a multipolar world.
According to a 2009 RAND study, the United States will not be able to defend
Taiwan from Chinese attack by 2020. China is ready with cyber-weapons, an air
force replete with new fourth-generation fighter jets, submarine-launched
ballistic missiles, and thousands of missiles on the mainland targeting both
Taiwan and Taiwan’s own fighter jets on the ground. The Chinese, according to
the report, defeat the U.S. with or without F-22s, with or without the use of
Kadena Air Base in Japan, and with or without the use of two carrier strike
groups. The RAND report emphasizes the air battle. The Chinese would still
have to land tens of thousands of troops by sea and would be susceptible to U.S.
submarines. Yet the report, with all its caveats, does highlight a disturbing trend.
China is just a hundred miles away, but the United States must project military
power from half a world away in a Post Cold War environment in which it can
less and less depend on the use of foreign bases. China’s anti-access naval
strategy is not only designed to keep out U.S. forces in a general way, but to ease
the conquest of Taiwan in a specific way. The Chinese military can focus more
intensely on Taiwan than can America’s, given all of America’s global
responsibilities. That is why the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan
have been particularly devastating news for Taiwan.
Even as China envelops Taiwan militarily, it does so economically and
socially. Taiwan does 30 percent of its trade with China, with 40 percent of its
exports going to the mainland. There are 270 commercial flights per week
between Taiwan and the mainland. Two-thirds of Taiwanese companies, some
ten thousand, have made investments in China in the last five years. There are
direct postal links and common crime fighting, with half a million mainland
tourists coming to the island annually, and 750,000 Taiwanese residing in China
for half the year. In all there are five million cross-straits visits each year. There

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will be less and less of a need for an invasion when subtle economic warfare will
achieve the same result. Thus, we have seen the demise of the Taiwan
secessionist movement.
49
But while a future of greater integration appears likely,
the way it develops will be pivotal for great power politics. Were the United
States simply to abandon Taiwan, that could undermine America’s bilateral
relationships with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and other
Pacific allies, let alone with India and even some states in Africa, which will
begin to doubt America’s other bilateral commitments, thus encouraging them to
move closer to China, allowing for a Greater China of truly hemispheric
proportions to emerge. The United States and Taiwan must look at qualitative,
asymmetric ways of their own to counter China militarily. The aim is not to be
able to defeat China in a straits war, but to make a war too costly for China to
seriously contemplate, and thus pry loose functional Taiwanese independence
long enough for China to become a more liberal society, so that the United States
can continue to maintain credibility with its allies. In this way, Taiwan’s layered
missile defense and its three hundred antiaircraft shelters, coupled with a sale of
$6.4 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, announced by the Obama
administration in early 2010, is vital to America’s position in Eurasia overall.
The goal of transforming China domestically is not a pipe dream. Remember
that the millions of Chinese tourists who come to Taiwan watch its spirited
political talk shows and shop in its bookstores with their subversive titles. A
more open China is certainly more of a possibility than a repressive one. But a
more democratic China could be an even more dynamic great power than a
repressive China, in an economic, cultural, and hence in a military sense.
Beneath Taiwan on the map looms the South China Sea, framed by the
demographic cockpit of mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Indonesia,
with Australia further afield. A third of all seaborne commercial goods
worldwide and half of all the energy requirements for Northeast Asia pass
through here. As the gateway to the Indian Ocean—the world’s hydrocarbon
interstate, where China is involved in several port development projects—the
South China Sea must in some future morrow be virtually dominated by the
Chinese navy if Greater China is truly to be realized. Here we have the
challenges of piracy, radical Islam, and the naval rise of India, coupled with the
heavily congested geographic bottlenecks of the various Indonesian straits
(Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Macassar), through which a large proportion of
China’s oil tankers and merchant fleet must pass. There are also significant
deposits of oil and gas that China hopes to exploit, making the South China Sea
a “second Persian Gulf” in some estimations, write Naval War College

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professors Andrew Erickson and Lyle Goldstein.
50
Spykman noted 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 United States the Caribbean, and now,
according to this logic, China the South China Sea.
51
Indeed, the South China
Sea with the Strait of Malacca unlocks the Indian Ocean for China the same way
control over the Caribbean unlocked the Pacific for America at the time of the
building of the Panama Canal.
52
And just as Spykman called the Greater
Caribbean—in 
order 
to 
underscore 
its 
importance—the 
“American
Mediterranean,” we can call the South China Sea the