Asia's Cauldron (5 page)

But can conflict in the South China Sea be properly controlled? After all, thus far this argument presupposes that major warfare will not break out in the area, and instead nations will be content to jockey for position with their warships on the high seas, while making competing claims for natural resources, and perhaps even agreeing through negotiations to a fair distribution of them. But what if China were, against all evidential trends, to invade Taiwan? What if China and Vietnam—whose intense rivalry reaches far back into history—go to war as they did in 1979, with more lethal weaponry this time? For
it isn't just China that is improving its military, so are Southeast Asian countries in general. Their defense budgets have increased by about a third in the past decade, even as European defense budgets have declined. Arms imports to Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia have gone up by 84 percent, 146 percent, and 722 percent respectively since 2000. The spending is on naval and air platforms: surface warships, submarines with advanced missile systems, and long-range fighter jets. Vietnam recently spent $2 billion on six state-of-the-art Kilo-class Russian submarines and $1 billion on Russian fighter jets. Malaysia recently opened a submarine base on the island of Borneo, even as China is developing an underground base for twenty nuclear submarines on Hainan Island on the other side of the South China Sea.
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While the United States has been distracted by land wars in the Greater Middle East, military power has been quietly shifting from Europe to Asia, where authentic civilian-military, postindustrial complexes are being built, with an emphasis on naval forces.

The geopolitics of the South China Sea are simple in at least one respect. This is not a world of complex, shifting, and multipolar imperial alliances to the same extent that Europe was prior to World War I. There is only one so-called indigenous great power threat in these waters: China, which, with its maps, indicates a desire to exert a Caribbean-like control over the region. But China's obsession with territoriality is not unreasonable, given China's own geographical situation and its nineteenth- and twentieth-century history.

The entire northern boundary of the South China Sea is formed by the Chinese mainland. Indeed, China's South China Sea coastline, from the border with Vietnam in the west to the Taiwan Strait in the east, takes in one of China's principal demographic and economic hubs, the province of Guangdong and the megacity of Guangzhou (Canton), near Hong Kong. Then there is China's Hainan Island, which constitutes China's largest special economic zone, and which also dominates the energy-rich Gulf of Tonkin, thus inhibiting northern Vietnam's access to the wider South China Sea.

A map of China shows that a full half of its seaboard is oriented southward toward the South China Sea, with the other half oriented
eastward toward the Bohai, Yellow, and East China seas. Thus, China looks south toward a basin of water formed, in clockwise direction, by Taiwan, the Philippines, the island of Borneo split between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula divided between Malaysia and Thailand, and the long snaking coastline of Vietnam—weak states all compared to China. Like the Caribbean, punctuated as it is by small island states and enveloped by a continent-sized United States, the South China Sea is also an obvious arena for the projection of power by a continent-sized nation, which also to a significant extent envelops it. And just as the South China Sea provides a perfect spatial configuration for Chinese expansion, it is also in objective terms a great area of concern for China, since it is through these waters that the overwhelming share of China's energy imports come from the Middle East by way of the various Indonesian straits. Indeed, by joining the Indian Ocean with the Western Pacific, the South China Sea functions as China's gateway to the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago; the same as the Caribbean Sea provided the east coast of the United States access to the Pacific with the building of the Panama Canal, of which the Malacca Strait is the equivalent. And this gateway is somewhat threatened by piracy and terrorism, linked to the weak states of the Philippines and Indonesia with their sizable Islamic populations. Geography dictates a strong Chinese naval presence in the South China Sea as thoroughly understandable. Functional domination of the South China Sea eases China's path to becoming a truly two-ocean navy: a navy of the Western Pacific
and
of the Indian Ocean. China must focus on Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula only because of challenges of the moment, but the South China Sea beckons as the key to China's geostrategic future.

Yet there is something deeper that propels China forward into the South China Sea and out to the First Island Chain in the Pacific: that is, China's own partial breakup by the Western powers in the relatively recent past, after having been for centuries and millennia a great power and world civilization. One should not gloss over what happened to China in the past 150 years. Unless one is intimately
aware of this Chinese historical experience, one cannot comprehend what motivates China today in the South China Sea.

In the nineteenth century, as the Qing dynasty became the sick man of East Asia, China lost much of its territory—the southern tributaries of Nepal and Burma to Great Britain; Indochina to France; Taiwan and the tributaries of Korea and Sakhalin to Japan; and Mongolia, Amuria, and Ussuria to Russia.
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In the twentieth century came the bloody Japanese takeovers of the Shandong Peninsula and Manchuria in the heart of China. This was all in addition to the humiliations forced on the Chinese by the extraterritoriality agreements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereby Western nations wrested control of parts of Chinese cities—the so-called Treaty Ports. By 1938, as Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence tells us in
The Search for Modern China
, because of these depredations as well as the civil war between the communists and the nationalist Guomindang, “the great expanse of territory that had once been a unified empire under the Qing was fragmented into ten separate units.” There was a latent fear that “China was about to be dismembered, that it would cease to exist as a nation, and that the four thousand years of its recorded history would come to a jolting end.” An attendant horror was that China would return to the situation that had prevailed during the Warring States period of the third century bc; or to the “shifting patterns of authority and alliances that typified China's history” from the third to sixth century ad, and again from the tenth to the thirteenth.
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China, having survived that nightmare, and having reached a zenith of land power and territorial stability not seen since the Ming dynasty of the sixteenth century and the Qing dynasty of the late eighteenth century, is now about to press outward at sea, in order to guard its sea lines of communications to the Middle East and thus secure the economic well-being of its vast population. China's very urge for an expanded strategic space is a declaration that it never again intends to let foreigners take advantage of it, as they did in the previous two centuries.

In helping to manage China's rise in Southeast Asia, we would do well to consider the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War has been periodically compared to the Athenians' ill-fated Sicilian Expedition of the late fifth century
BC
, described in the Seventh Book of Thucydides'
Peloponnesian War
. Fourteen years elapsed from Athens's first foray into Sicily to its final disaster there: a similar number of years as between the early forays of the John F. Kennedy administration into Vietnam and President Gerald Ford's final withdrawal. The United States was lured half a world away by its Vietnamese allies, besieged as they were by communist forces, just as Athens was lured into Sicily by its local allies there, which were threatened by other Sicilian city-states loyal to Athens's rival, Syracuse, in turn an ally of Sparta. Just as the Kennedy administration began with the dispatch of limited Special Operations Forces to Vietnam, a commitment that grew under the administration of Lyndon Johnson to over half a million regular troops, the Athenian intervention in Sicily began with twenty ships in support of its anti-Syracusan allies, and quickly grew to one hundred triremes, numerous transport ships, and five thousand hoplites, so that the prestige of Athens's entire maritime empire was seemingly dependent upon a military victory in far-off Sicily. Athens kept pouring in manpower. The Sicilian Expedition ended with the annihilation of forty thousand Athenian troops, of whom six thousand survived to labor in the quarries of Syracuse and be sold into slavery. The American intervention in Vietnam ended with the communist North overrunning the South, with the last Americans fleeing by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

Paralyzed by pessimism and recriminations, it was some time before Athens was willing to resume in earnest the bipolar conflict with Sparta. America, too, suffered a serious crisis of confidence following the debacle in Vietnam, standing by as the Soviet Union and its allies threatened American allies and toppled regimes in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. Now Vietnam looms in America's destiny once again. Once again the Vietnamese are pleading for America's help. This time the pleas are subtle and quiet, and no ground troops are being asked for. This time it is not a war that they
want America to fight: it is only the balance of power that they want America to maintain. They want America as a sturdy air and naval presence in the South China Sea for decades to come. Vietnam and its destiny, either as a quasi-vassal state of China or as a staunch resister of Chinese hegemony, offers a telling illustration of what the United States provides the world that is at risk if the U.S. declines; or if the U.S. should ever retreat into quasi-isolationism or be diverted elsewhere.

China's economy is in trouble, we know. But the possibility of a U.S. decline, or at least a very partial military withdrawal from the world, has to be taken as a possibility, too. The American economy is recovering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the cost of air and naval platforms is becoming prohibitive. The price of a new
Gerald R. Ford
-class aircraft carrier is $12 billion with no aircraft or other equipment on its deck. The price tag according to the latest design of a
Zumwalt
-class destroyer is close to $4 billion. The F-22 Raptor cost $200 million a plane and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter $135 million. In addition to the cost of projecting air and naval power around the world—and particularly in East Asia—there is the very real imperial fatigue felt by the American public, and by some influential sections of the defense and foreign policy elite in Washington, following the ruinous cost in lives, diplomatic prestige, and monetary expense of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iraq War, a far-flung military adventure like Vietnam, though it may not have ended in ignominious defeat or a similar cost in lives, can, too, be compared in some respects to the Sicilian Expedition. Will the United States lose its nerve this time around in Asia, as happened after Vietnam, and as happened to Athens after the misadventure in Sicily?

Following the Vietnam War, the Cold War with its attendant Soviet threat kept the United States engaged in the world. But now the threat is far more ambiguous. Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,” writes the Cambridge University
historian Piers Brendon, “the Chinese are not necessarily prisoners of their past and they have overwhelming economic reasons to seek a political modus vivendi with America.”
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But the issue is not as simple as that. The best rebuttal to Brendon is provided by John Mearsheimer in
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
, who explains that because the international system is anarchic, with no one in charge—no night watchman—to enforce the rules, there are actually few status quo powers: for the aim of each great state—democratic or not, its internal character makes no difference—“is to maximize its share of world power,” and therefore “especially powerful states usually pursue regional hegemony.”
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The implication is that China will pursue regional hegemony as a matter of course, regardless of whether or not its political system becomes more open. A faltering economy may make it only more nationalistic.

In fact, both Brendon and Mearsheimer can be right. China is likely to seek a political modus vivendi with America, even as it seeks regional hegemony. China will continue to build an oceanic navy, with accompanying air and missile capabilities. The geographical focus of these assets will be on the South China Sea, control of which allows regional hegemony to be realized. At the same time, Beijing will work tirelessly in its pursuit of good economic and political relations with Washington. Washington, for its part, will resist the moves of Beijing toward regional hegemony, even as it works with Beijing on as many issues as it can. The South China Sea, as much as the East China Sea and the Korean Peninsula, will provide the center stage for this tense and contradictory relationship. For the path to Chinese hegemony in the Korean Peninsula—because of the uncertainties surrounding North Korea's future—is less clear and fraught with much more difficulty than is the path to Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea, where China only faces an assortment of comparatively weak and divided states, of which Vietnam is the strongest. Thus, the South China Sea, more than any other part of the world, best illustrates, once again, what would be the cost of a U.S. decline, or even of a partial U.S. withdrawal from its forward military bases. As such, the South China Sea shows what exactly the United States provides
the world that is now at risk, and concomitantly, what the bad things are that could happen were the world, in an air and naval sense, to become truly multipolar.