I mentioned yesterday that I was reluctant to play patty-cake with Barnett on Asia – certainly more reluctant than I was with respect to his Middle East trend analyis – not least because, when it comes down to it, I just don’t know.
Change is the one true constant, and nothing on this side of the veil lasts forever, so I am willing to entertain the possibility that Barnett is correct and that the current, strange status of the US as a global “hyperpower” is a historical anomaly, even as I’m philosophically committed to forestalling any climb down from that status as long as I might. (If you want to know why, take a look at the Melian Dialogue and ask who you’d rather be: The elders of Melos, or the emmissaries from Athens.) Having said that, I am not so certain as Barnett is that China’s rise is inevitable, and there are in fact demographers who predict that China will become old before it becomes wealthy.
Nor do I take it as necessary, stipulating for argument’s sake that some time in the near or distant future the sun will rise in the west, that an emerging center of superpower gravity in Asia would be the least bit interested in letting our theoretically declining star get hitched to their ascendant wagon. While bandwaggoning with American military and economic power might have worked for Great Britain as she watched the sun set on the Empire, the historical, cultural and linguistic ties between our two countries, our two peoples could not have been more far reaching and profound. We were one people, one culture – a family who had a nasty argument a couple of hundred years ago, parted company to blows and eventually re-built a fraternal understanding based on our foundational similarities.
In the case of China, nothing could be further from the truth: Theirs is an ancient, alien culture as well as one with an opaque political system which makes their deliberative processes difficult to understand, with the result that their policy actions are difficult to predict. The fact that they have up to this point focused their efforts on economic reform and internal growth does not necessarily mean that this enabling function points us to the end product which they are targeting. Is it growth as a good in its own right, for the social benefits it accrues to the Chinese people? Or is it growth to underwrite the development of a new econmic and military hyperpower? The fact is that we just don’t know, which uncertainty helps to explain the maddening duality of our apparently schizophrenic foreign policy towards China, our Strategic Partner/Competitor.
Certainly China could have a significant impact on the subject of North Korea. As Skippy-san points out, a re-united Korea may well not be in the best interest of either China or South Korea, since the former will have an even worse refugee problem on their doorstep once the police state collapses, while the latter will have to underwrite an East German-style reintegration of the North into modernity at an even more appalling cost than came with German unification.
North Korea is the last truly rotten egg in the Asian basket, so if the Korean problem was solved without offering up Taiwan in exchange – and there’s as blood-chilling bit of old school Realpolitik as ever I’ve heard – China might lost a bit of geo-political importance. Keeping things at a simmer but not allowing them to boil over might be just what the doctor ordered, from the Chinese perspective.
Finally, although the idea of India and China providing the bodies for SysAdmin while the US retains Leviathan sounds attractive to us, I don’t see that it brings much in the way of advantage to them. Chinese ad hoc nation-building in places like Sudan might be one thing, but cleaning up the American mess in the kinds of places that we end up making them?
Not so much.
Still, it was a though provoking lecture, as you can probably tell.
CAPT., does Mr. Barnett say why India is investing so much treasure in it’s Navy and military?
“…why India is investing so much treasure in it?
“…why India is investing so much treasure in it’s Navy and military?”
My guess is they want to solve the Kashmir issue once and for all.
Regional dominance, I suppose. What I do know is that when a US Navy strike group transits the Indian Ocean, either an Indian warship or patrol plane will inevitably come out to surveil the force shortly after they leave the Straits of Malacca/Andaman Sea.
And when they hail us on the radio? They say, “Welcome to our ocean.”
Lex, what’s the benefit to India to build a large modern battle force, both land and sea? Pakistan is a stalemate (nukes both sides, null solution both), nothing but rocks and a couple billion Chinese to the north, and not a hell of a lot to the east.
Kick it around, I’ll chip in what I think later.
With China there is also the ever present potential for massive anarchic violence, c.f. the Taiping Rebellion of 1845 – 64. Modernization is creating massive social pressure in a political structure with few safety valves.
My .02 on India’s Navy:
1) Having a large Navy with CV’s and SSN’s buys them a seat at the adult table of nations. Same way having a large fleet of battleships back in the 30s’. Same goes for their Air Force.
2) Desire to be self sufficient and remain “non-aligned”
3) Be prepared to counter the US Navy if the Pakistanis “call in their marker” for support of GWOT. Remeber the US “Tilt” in favor of Pakistan in 1971?
I don’t have much time, so I’ll offer considered opinions in the form of ipse dixit. Please humor my conceit that I’ve been thinking about the below points a little bit:
–India would like to be a regional military power, much like we are pretty much everywhere else. Their higher Navy folks and public gov’t statements (some, not all) say that’s the direction they desire to go. This is at least since the late nineties, but only after 9/11 and a couple of Malabars and China’s military buildup post-1998 Taiwan Straits wakeup call did India really get cracking on figuring out how to be a regional power. One key indicator was when they started assisting us in escorting Malaca Strait traffic.
–I just spent two days in the company of very smart Sudan experts. China isn’t nation building in Sudan. They’re getting resources. The fields are populated with Chinese, not Sudanese, workers. The pipeline and roads to the fields are the only things built. The oil money the not-slightly-Islamist Khartoum government doles out for infrastructure, when they’re not buying luxury mansions in expensive exotic locales, goes to projects in the North and mainly around Khartoum. I’ve been encouraged to think of China’s involvement in places like Sudan and Guayana and such as more like Western countries in the industrial age. Which makes sense seeing as China’s sort of at that point in certain aspects.
India has a navy because of geography and economics. India is a giant peninsula sticking out into an ocean through which most of the world’s oil and a great deal of its trade passes. India’s overseas trade is also increasing in importance. All trading nations need sea power, but those occupying central positions along maritime trade routes need it even more.
ob. India and her view of the IO (from an extensive interview given back in Dec ’06 by the Indian Navy CoS):
AOR: “As I said earlier, we need to develop a much larger and a better surveillance capability, because our area of operations has enlarged. Today, we are operating all the way from the Horn of Africa and Persian Gulf in the West to the South China Sea in the East. Given such a large area of operation, first and foremost we need surveillance for what I call Maritime Domain Awareness. This would require a lot of aerial and even some space-based sensors. Therefore, the priority will be to develop a good surveillance capability and to network it into our system so that the picture is available in real-time right across our area of operations. Complementary to this, our units at sea would require longer legs with sustained endurance.
Rest of the interview is pretty interesting – discussion about procuring Goshawk for training/CQ of MiG-29K pilots, possible procurement of E-2s (but shore basing them), building a “capabilities-based” navy, etc. If interested in the full inteview (partial only is up on the ‘net), drop me a note offline (steeljawscribe@gmail.com) and I will forward via email.
- SJS