The Revenge of Geography (33 page)

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 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.
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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 professors Andrew Erickson and Lyle Goldstein.
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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.
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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.
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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
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, 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 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 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.