Asia's Cauldron (28 page)

ASEAN will likely never be as cohesive as the EU was at the height of its harmony and power projection capabilities in the first two decades after the Cold War. But neither will the United States-China relationship be as tense and fraught with ideological animosity as that between the United States and the Soviet Union. China and the United States have starkly different strategic orientations, obviously. And the fact that China still seems to be a rising power militarily can make it particularly ruthless. Still, we can hope that maritime Asia, and the South China Sea in particular, in the twenty-first century will evince a far more nuanced balance of power arrangement than continental Europe in the twentieth. And because, I repeat, with the exception of diminishing American ground troop contingents in Japan and South Korea, the theater of operations will be on the water rather than on dry land, the chances of conflict will be somewhat diminished.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that increased force posture by area navies means more activities at sea, increasing the risk of incidents that can lead to war.

The United States and ASEAN will not constitute the only hedges against a rising China: so, too, will a new webwork of relationships emerging bilaterally among the Asian countries themselves, along the navigable rimland of Asia in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans. At least nineteen new defense agreements were signed between 2009 and 2011 in this region. Vietnam, in particular, became the locus of a whole new set of partnerships that linked Hanoi with India, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia.
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And many of these countries have made a similar set of arrangements with each other. The further that this development goes, the lighter will be the burden on the United States to provide for the region's common security.

However, Washington should be under no illusions. All of these states, with the exceptions of South Korea, Japan, and Australia, lack the operational capacity to mount a serious challenge to a growing and improving Chinese military. And even these three militaries evince nowhere near the capability of the American one, while only Australia and Vietnam have usable combat experience in recent decades.
Moreover, as China's military capacity in the air, sea, and cyber domains increases, it will seek to “enforce more fully” its ostensible rights against neighboring states in the maritime domain.
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Thus, the idea that the United States can reduce its commitment to the Western Pacific, while sitting back and letting the indigenous states themselves bear more of the burden, may be feasible in the long run, but not in the short run. In the short run, a weaker American commitment to the region might result in the states on China's periphery losing heart and bandwagoning instead with China. Because this would be an insidious development, rather than a clear-cut and demonstrable one, it is particularly dangerous, and not worth risking. And given that not only liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, but also traditional realists such as offshore balancers, believe it is important for the United States to maintain a balance of power in the Eastern hemisphere, accepting an imperium over much of the hemisphere run by Beijing would be irresponsible.

And there is another thing. Assuming that China itself does not implode or even partially implode from an internal economic crisis, the serious reduction of American air and sea power—with its stabilizing effect on the region—would cause countries such as China and India, and China and Russia, to become far more aggressive toward each other. This would occur even as countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam bandwagon with China: altogether a perilous situation, that, even if it did not lead to hostilities outright, would have a negative impact on world financial markets. In this scenario,
the world America made
, to steal a phrase from the scholar Robert Kagan, would go a long way to being undone.
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In fact, as Kagan would wish, the opposite is still the case. Roughly half of America's dozen or so aircraft carrier strike groups are nominally assigned to the Pacific, even if two of them have been doing regular duty in the Persian Gulf recently. And U.S. naval domination of China remains immense. Just consider: against America's six nominal aircraft carrier strike groups in the Pacific, China has maybe one. The United States deploys twelve guided missile cruisers in the region, China has none. The United States has twenty-nine guided missile
destroyers there; China has eight advanced ones. But as I've indicated earlier in this book, China is catching up. By the latter half of the next decade it will have more warships than the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific. And it is catching up where it counts: in subsurface warfare, increasingly the future of naval activity. China's eventual parity with the United States in terms of the size of its submarine fleet has two aspects. First, it will take the Chinese at least another generation to operate underwater platforms with the skill required to challenge American crews. Second, countering this, is China's “familiarity” with the very shallow waters of the South China and East China seas. Writes Jonathan Holslag, a Brussels-based expert on the subject: “Complex thermal layers, tide noise and the influx of water from rivers make it very difficult to detect pre-positioned submarines. Conventional diesel-electric submarines,” of the kind China has, he goes on, “are ideal for navigating in such environments, and apart from the new
Virginia
-class, older U.S. or Japanese types lack the sophisticated detection capacities that are needed to operate in these areas.” Moreover, China is likely to deploy its submarines in conjunction with large-scale use of sea mines, complicating U.S. Navy efforts.
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(This is all in addition to China's civilian fleet, which, in fact, acts as an adjunct to its military one. For example, Beijing will have added thirty-six new vessels to its maritime surveillance service in 2013 alone.
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China's ultimate tactical goal is to dissuade the U.S. Navy from entering the Taiwan Strait in times of war, thus compromising America's ability to defend Taiwan. This will be accomplished by deploying silent conventional submarines in the shallow waters near Taiwan, as well as a large fleet of small surface combatants.
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The question to ask is not, Will China ever be able to defeat the United States in an air-sea war? For the answer to that is clearly no, for the foreseeable future. Rather, the question is, Will China ever be able to deploy air-sea power asymmetrically to undermine the aura of U.S. dominance in the Western Pacific? And the answer to that is, very possibly.

But it won't just be a matter of subtle, high-tech asymmetry at sea, but also of a more conventional ambition for an oceanic, blue-water
navy. To wit, on six occasions by the end of 2010, the Chinese navy passed the First Island Chain off the Asian mainland and entered the Pacific Ocean proper.
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Indeed, in 2001, when University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer published
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
, in which he asserted that China would pursue great power status in political and military ways much as rising powers have done throughout history, China's air and naval capacity was only a fraction of what it has now become. Again, it seems that only major economic (and therefore, social) upheaval inside China itself—of the kind that stops increases in defense spending—can now contradict Mearsheimer's vision.
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Nevertheless, this need not lead to war. As M. Taylor Fravel, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains: The very buildup of military power by China means that paradoxically China can wait and not use force.
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For as each year passes, China's naval position strengthens. Beijing's goal is not war—but an adjustment in the correlation of forces that enhances its geopolitical power and prestige.

But what if a severe economic crisis does ignite a downward trend in Chinese military procurements, or at least a less steep growth curve? This is also something to seriously consider!

Indeed, in order to assuage public anger at continued poverty and lack of jobs, China's leaders might, for the sake of a political effect, ask the military to make sacrifices of its own. Over time, this could shake the foundations of the Eurasian maritime order, though not nearly as much as the collapse of the Berlin Wall shook the foundations of the European continental order.

Stalled Chinese defense budgets would reinvigorate a Pax Americana from the Sea of Japan to the Persian Gulf, despite the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and despite the U.S. military budget crunch. The U.S. Navy would own the seas as though World War II had just ended. Japan, which continues to modernize its air force and navy (the latter is several times larger than the British Royal Navy),
would emerge as an enhanced air and sea power in Asia. The same goes for a future reunified Korea governed from Seoul, which, in the event of a weakened China, would face Japan as a principal rival, with the United States keeping the peace between the two states.

Turmoil in China would slow the economic integration of Taiwan with the mainland. With so many ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland and so many commercial flights per week between the two Chinas, U.S. military aid to Taipei is less and less designed to defend Taiwan than to postpone an inevitable unification of sorts. But the inevitable unification of sorts might not happen in the event of a prolonged economic and political crisis in Beijing. A likelier scenario in this case would be for different regional Chinas, democratic to greater or lesser extents, more loosely tied to Beijing, to begin to emerge. This, too, translates into a renewed Pax Americana, as long as U.S. defense cuts don't go too far.

And what if China's economic crisis does not seriously affect its defense acquisitions? Then the South China Sea would be where the effects of gradual American decline, in a geopolitical sense, are most keenly felt. China's geographical centrality, its economic heft, and its burgeoning air and naval forces would translate into some measure of Finlandization for Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore in the event of large-scale U.S. defense cuts. But internal disarray in China, combined with modest U.S. defense cuts that do not fundamentally affect America's Pacific forces, could unleash the opposite effect. Emboldened by a continued American presence and a less than dominant Chinese military, countries such as Singapore and Australia, who already spend mightily on arms relative to the size of their populations, could emerge as little Israels in Asia. Vietnam, meanwhile, with a larger population than Turkey or Iran, and dominating the South China Sea's western seaboard, could become a full-fledged middle-level power in its own right were Beijing's regional grip to loosen and Vietnam able to get its economic house in order.

India, like Vietnam and Taiwan, would gain most from a profound economic and political crisis inside China of the kind that unleashes
China's ethnic minorities. Suddenly China would be more vulnerable to ethnic unrest on the Tibetan plateau, abutting the Indian Subcontinent. This would alleviate the Chinese threat on India's northern borderlands, even as it gives India greater diplomatic leverage in its bilateral relations with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Burma, all of which have been venues for India's quiet great game that it has been playing with China. Burma has historically been where Indian and Chinese cultural and political influence overlap. Though China has been the dominant outside economic influence in Burma in recent decades, prior to World War II Indian economic middlemen were a major force in the capital of Rangoon. Look for the Indian role in Burma to dramatically ramp up in the event of a partial Chinese political meltdown. Given Burma's massive stores of natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, precious stones, timber, and hydropower, this would not be an insignificant geopolitical development. It would ease India's naval entry into the South China Sea. The glory days of Vietnam's Indianized Champa civilization would find an echo in a twenty-first-century strategic reality.

This is all theoretically possible, were China to experience a form of economic meltdown. However, now I must return to the situation as it is at the time of my writing.

Thucydides writes that the “real cause” of the Peloponnesian War was the rise of Athenian sea power and “the alarm which this inspired in Sparta.”
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Indeed, wars often start over seemingly inconsequential matters—uninhabited islands, for instance—even as their underlying causes are anything but inconsequential. Thus, the rise of Chinese sea power should not be taken lightly. Athens may have been democratic, even as China may have no motives for conquest. Yet the very disturbance of the status quo caused by the ascendancy of a new power has throughout history raised the risk of hostilities. The fact that China's military rise is wholly legitimate (China is not a rogue state like clerical Iran) makes little difference, given that China's air and naval acquisitions are altering the regional balance of power,
something which in and of itself is destabilizing. Of course, the status quo is not sacrosanct. History as we know is dynamic. And the status quo can be unfair and deserving of change. But it is a fact that war often breaks out when there has been a significant change in the status quo.

As China's naval position in the Western Pacific grows, increasingly altering the status quo, “a grand and protracted bargaining process” between the United States and China will go on for the geopolitical fate of the Western Pacific and the adjacent Indian Ocean, writes Swarthmore College political scientist James Kurth. “In the end, there might be constructed an explicit and effective system of mutual deterrence, based upon such concepts as red-lines, salient thresholds, and tit-for-tat actions and reactions.”
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