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

Asian Mediterranean
, since
it will be at the heart of political geography in coming decades.
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China may
seek to dominate the South China Sea in a similar way that the Americans
dominated the Caribbean, while America, playing by different rules now, will
seek along with allies like Vietnam and the Philippines to keep it a full-fledged
international waterway. It is fear of China—not love of America—that is driving
Hanoi into Washington’s arms. Given the history of the Vietnam War, it may
seem disorienting to witness this emerging relationship between two erstwhile
enemies; but consider the fact that precisely by defeating America in a war
means Vietnam is a confident country with no chip on its shoulder, and thus
psychologically free to enter into an undeclared alliance with the United States.
China is using all forms of its national power—political, diplomatic, economic,
commercial, military, and demographic—to expand virtually beyond its legal
land and sea borders in order to encompass the borders of imperial China at its
historical high points. Yet there is a contradiction here. Let me explain.
As I’ve indicated, China is intent on access denial in its coastal seas. In fact,
scholars Andrew Erickson and David Yang suggest “the possibility that China
may be closer than ever to mastering” the ability to hit a moving target at sea,
such as a U.S. carrier, with a land-based missile, and may plan a “strategically
publicized test sometime in the future.”
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 But access denial without the ability to
protect its own sea lines of communication makes an attack on an American
surface combatant (let alone a naval war with the United States) futile, since the
U.S. Navy would maintain the ability to cut off Chinese energy supplies by
interdicting Chinese ships in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Of course, the
Chinese seek to influence American behavior, rather than ever fight the United
States outright. Still, why even bother with access denial if you never intend to
carry it out? Jacqueline Newmyer, who heads a Cambridge, Massachusetts,

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defense consultancy, explains that Beijing has “the aim of creating a disposition
of power so favorable to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] that it will not
actually have to use force to secure its interests.”
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Therefore, just as Taiwan
builds up its defenses without the intention of clashing with China, China does
likewise with respect to the United States. All parties are seeking to alter the
behavior of other parties while avoiding war. The very demonstrations of new
weapons systems (if Erickson and Yang are right), let alone the building of port
facilities and listening posts in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as well as the large
amounts of military aid that Beijing is providing to littoral states that come
between Chinese territory and the Indian Ocean, are all displays of power that by
their very nature are not secret. Still, there is a hard, nasty edge to some of this:
for example, the Chinese are constructing a major naval base on the southern tip
of Hainan Island, smack in the heart of the South China Sea, featuring
underground facilities for up to twenty nuclear and diesel-electric submarines.
Such activity goes beyond influencing the other party’s behavior to being an
assertion in its own right of Monroe Doctrine–style sovereignty over the
surrounding waters. It would seem that the Chinese are constructing Greater
China first, at the heart of which will be the South China Sea and Southeast
Asia, even while they have a longer-term plan for a blue-water force, with which
will come the ability to protect their own sea lines of communication to the
Middle East across the Indian Ocean, and thus make a military conflict with the
United States less unreasonable to contemplate from a Chinese perspective.
(China has no motive to go to war with the United States. But motives can
change over the years and decades, thus it is prudent to track air and naval
capabilities instead.) In the meantime, as Taiwan slips closer into China’s
embrace, the more likely it is that the Chinese military can divert its attention to
the Indian Ocean and the protection of hemispheric sea lanes. The Chinese have
more and more raw material equities to protect in sub-Saharan Africa at the
Indian Ocean’s opposite end: oil markets in Sudan, Angola, and Nigeria; iron ore
mines in Zambia and Gabon; and copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, all to be connected by Chinese-built roads and railways,
in turn linked to Atlantic and Indian ocean ports.
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 To be sure, control and access
to sea lines of communication are more important now than during Mahan’s
years, and American preponderance over such routes may not be destined to
continue forever.
This all means that America’s commitment to prolong the de facto
independence of Taiwan has implications that go far beyond the defense of the
island itself. For the future of Taiwan and North Korea constitute the hinges on

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which the balance of power in much of Eurasia rests.
The current security situation in Asia is fundamentally more complicated and,
therefore, more unstable than the one that existed in the decades after World War
II. As American unipolarity ebbs, with the relative decline in size of the U.S.
Navy, and with the concomitant rise of the Chinese economy and military (even
at slower rates than before), multipolarity becomes increasingly a feature of
Asian power relationships. The Chinese are building underground submarine
pens on Hainan Island and developing antiship missiles. The Americans are
providing Taiwan with 114 Patriot air defense missiles and dozens of advanced
military communications systems. The Japanese and South Koreans are engaged
in across-the-board modernization of their fleets—with a particular emphasis on
submarines. And India is building a great navy. These are all crude forms of
seeking to adjust the balance of power in one’s favor. There is an arms race
going on, and it is occurring in Asia. This is the world that awaits the United
States when it completes its withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan. While
no one state in Asia has any incentive to go to war, the risks of incidents at sea
and fatal miscalculations about the balance of power—which everyone is
seeking to constantly adjust—will have a tendency to increase with time and
with the deepening complexity of the military standoff.
Tensions at sea will be abetted by those on land, because as we have seen,
China is filling vacuums that will in due course bring it into uneasy contact with
Russia and India. Empty spaces on the map are becoming crowded with more
people, strategic roads and pipelines, and ships in the water, to say nothing of
overlapping concentric circles of missiles. Asia is becoming a closed geography,
with a coming crisis of “room,” as Paul Bracken wrote back in 1999. That
process has only continued, and it means increasing friction.
So how might the United States stay militarily engaged while working to
preserve the stability of Asia? How does the United States protect its allies, limit
the borders of Greater China, and at the same time avoid a conflict with China?
For China, if its economy can keep growing, could constitute more embryonic
power than any adversary the United States faced during the twentieth century.
Being an offshore balancer as some suggest may not be completely sufficient.
Major allies like Japan, India, South Korea, and Singapore require the U.S. Navy
and Air Force to be in “concert” with their own forces, as one high-ranking
Indian told me: an integral part of the landscape and seascape, rather than merely
lurking over some distant horizon.
But what exactly does a concert of powers look like on the high seas and
Spykmanesque Rimland of Eurasia? A plan that made the rounds in the Pentagon
in 2010 sketches out an American naval cartography of the twenty-first century

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that seeks to “counter Chinese strategic power … without direct military
confrontation.” It does so while envisioning a U.S. Navy down from the current
280 ships to 250, and a cut in defense spending by 15 percent. Drawn up by a
retired Marine colonel, Pat Garrett, the plan is worth describing because it
introduces into the Eurasian Rimland equation the strategic significance of
Oceania, just at a time when the American military footprint is growing
dramatically on the island of Guam.
Guam, Palau, and the Northern Mariana, Solomon, Marshall, and Caroline
island groups are all either U.S. territories, commonwealths with defense
agreements with the United States, or independent states that because of their
poverty may well be open to such agreements. The U.S. position in Oceania
exists courtesy of the spoils of the 1898 Spanish-American War and the blood of
Marines in World War II, who liberated these islands from the Japanese. Oceania
will grow in importance because it is sufficiently proximate to East Asia, while
lying just outside the anti-access bubble in the process of being expanded by
China’s DF-21 and more advanced antiship missiles. Future bases in Oceania are
not unduly provocative, unlike bases on the “guard towers” of Japan, South
Korea, and (until the 1990s) the Philippines. Guam is only four hours flying time
from North Korea and only a two-day sail from Taiwan. Most significantly, as
outright U.S. possessions, or functionally dependent on the United States for
their local economies, the United States can make enormous defense investments
in some of these places without fear of being evicted.
Already, Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is the most commanding platform
in the world for the projection of U.S. hard power. With 100,000 bombs and
missiles and 66 million gallons of jet fuel at any one time, it is the Air Force’s
biggest strategic gas-and-go anywhere. Its runways are filled with long lines of
C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and the like. Guam is also home to an
American submarine squadron and an expanding naval base. Guam and the
nearby Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. possessions both, are almost equidistant
between Japan and the Strait of Malacca.
Then there is the strategic potential of the southwestern tip of Oceania,
signified by the offshore anchorages of the Australian-owned Ashmore and
Cartier Islands, and the adjacent seaboard of western Australia itself, from
Darwin to Perth: all looking out from below the Indonesian archipelago to the
Indian Ocean, which is emerging as the vascular center of the world economy,
with oil and natural gas transported across its width from the Middle East to the
burgeoning middle classes of East Asia. The U.S. Navy and Air Force, according
to Garrett’s plan, would take advantage of Oceania’s geography in order to
constitute a “regional presence in being” located “just over the horizon” from the

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virtual borders of Greater China and the main shipping lanes of Eurasia.
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A
“regional presence in being” is a variant of the British naval strategist Julian
Corbett’s “fleet in being” of a hundred years ago, a dispersed collection of ships
that can quickly coalesce into a unified fleet when necessary; whereas “just over
the horizon” reflects a confluence of offshore balancing and participation in a
concert of powers.
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The concept of strengthening the U.S. air and sea presence on Oceania reflects
a compromise between resisting Greater China at all costs and acceding
somewhat to a future Chinese navy role in policing the First Island Chain, while
at the same time making China pay a steep price for military aggression on
Taiwan. Without ever saying so, this vision allows one to contemplate a world in
which American “legacy” bases would be scaled back somewhat on the First
Island Chain, even as American ships and planes continue to patrol it, in and out
of China’s anti-access bubble. Meanwhile, the plan envisages a dramatic
expansion of American naval activity in the Indian Ocean. To achieve this, the
United States would not have hardened bases, but rather austere “operating
locations” and defense agreements in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia; and on
island nations scattered about the Indian Ocean, such as the Comoros,
Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, Maldives, and Andamans, a number of which
are managed directly or indirectly by France and India, both U.S. allies. This
sustains the freedom of navigation in Eurasia along with unimpeded energy
flows. The plan deemphasizes existing American bases in Japan and South
Korea, and diversifies the U.S. footprint around Oceania to replace the
overwhelming stress on Guam, thus moving away from easily targeted “master”
bases. For in an age of prickly sovereignty, defended by volatile mass medias,
hardening foreign bases make them politically indigestible to local populations.
Guam, as a U.S. territory, is the exception that proves the rule. The United States
experienced such difficulty with the use of its bases in Turkey prior to the Iraq
War in 2003, and for a short time with the use of bases in Japan in 2010. The
American Army presence in South Korea is now less embattled mainly because
the number of troops stationed there has dropped from 38,000 to 25,000 in
recent years, while downtown Seoul has largely been abandoned by the U.S.
military.
In any case, the American hold on the First Island Chain is beginning to be
pried loose. Local populations are less agreeable to foreign bases, even as a
rising China serves as both an intimidator and attractor that can complicate
America’s bilateral relations with its Pacific allies. It is about time that this is
happening. To wit, the 2009–2010 crisis in American-Japanese relations, with an

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inexperienced new Japanese government wanting to rewrite the rules of the
bilateral relationship in Tokyo’s favor, even as it talked of developing deeper ties
with China, should have occurred years before. The paramount American
position in the Pacific is an outdated legacy of World War II, which left China,
Japan, and the Philippines devastated: nor can the division of Korea, a product of
fighting that ended six decades ago, and left the U.S. military with a dominant
position on the peninsula, last forever.
Meanwhile, a Greater China is emerging politically and economically in
Central-East Asia and in the Western Pacific, with a significant naval dimension
in the East and South China seas, while at the same time Beijing is involved in
port-building projects and arms transfers on the Indian Ocean littoral. Only
substantial political and economic turmoil inside China could alter this trend.
But just outside the borders of this new power realm will likely be a stream of
American warships, perhaps headquartered in many cases in Oceania, and