In the book ASIA’S CAULDRON, Robert Kaplan lays out why the period of stability in the Pacific Ocean is coming to an end.
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Originally published on June 1st, 2014
1. China and Vietnam Are (Again) At Each Other’s Throats
2. The South China Sea is the World’s Key Choke Point
3. The Monroe Doctrine and China’s Caribbean
4. China Believes it is Laying its Historical Claim
5. Asia’s Arms Race
6. Vietnam is China’s Thorn
7. What Vietnam Can Give America
8. A South China Sea Conflict Doesn’t Have to be Catastrophic
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Robert Kaplan’s book Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of the Stable Pacific lays out the case for why the South China Sea could be ground zero for the next great global conflict.
While the economic, social and military battle for the South China Sea primarily concerns America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific in the face of China’s rise, Vietnam is revealed to have a significant role itself.
1. China and Vietnam Are (Again) At Each Other’s Throats
Over the past few months, tensions have been rising between China and Vietnam.
Below is a brief chronology.
- May 1st, 2014: China deploys an oil rig along with a flotilla of military and non-military support vessels in a contested area of the South China Sea.
- May 7th, 2014: Chinese ships water cannon and ram into Vietnamese vessels trying to prevent deployment of the Chinese oil rig.
- May 10th – 17th, 2014: The Vietnamese government (atypically) allows protesters to line the streets against Chinese naval aggression. Protests escalate to arson and property damage as participants target multiple Taiwanese and Chinese factories leading to at least two deaths and hundreds injured.
- May 18th, 2014: The Vietnamese government reins in anti-China protests while the Chinese government evacuates more than 3000 of its citizens.
As a stark reminder, the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I is later this month. A century ago, it was an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo that ignited a powder keg of competing national interests into global war.
It is hyperbolic to equate the maritime conflict between Vietnam and China in recent weeks as the start of another global war. However, the rising tensions over South China Sea territorial claims could indeed foreshadow “something much larger”.
China’s deployment of the oil rig just a few days after US President Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” visit to the region is perhaps Beijing’s most aggressive territorial claim in the much contested region to date.
2. The South China Sea is the World’s Key Choke Point
Before further diving into the country-level specifics, let’s lay out the geopolitical and economic significance of the South China Sea.
Much of the talk surrounding China’s recent actions concerns the massive South China Sea oil and natural gas deposits lying beneath the surface.
It is estimated that these waters hold 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 130+ billion barrels of oil; the latter would be the largest reserve in the world outside of Saudi Arabia.
These figures are certainly impressive but the true strategic value of the South China Sea actually derives from its crucial shipping lanes; the Mallaca, Sunda, Lombok and Makassar straits connect the Indian and West Pacific Oceans along with the 3.4+ billion people living in China, Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.
Half of the global shipping tonnage and a third of maritime traffic flows through these straits. In terms of energy transport, a significant amount of crude travels to South Korea (66% of imported oil), Japan (60%), Taiwan (60%) and China (80%) through the South China Sea.
In a world where 90% of goods are transported by sea, it is not an understatement to call this region the world’s most important choke point.
Control — or significant influence — over the South China Sea goes hand in hand with a leading position in global trade and commerce.
For decades, the US Navy and Air Force has exercised such control.
Recently, Chinese willingness to throw its economic and military might in the region threatens the status quo.
3. The Monroe Doctrine and China’s Caribbean
The specific point of tension between China and its regional neighbors draws from China’s claims to a few key islands (eg. Spratlys, Paracel) and the accompanying maritime rights over the South China Sea waters.
China – with opposition from Japan, Taiwan, Brunei, the Phillipnes, Vietnam and Malaysia – asserts its claim using the much-contested nine-dotted demarcation lines (aka Cow’s tongue).
While China says this territory was claimed in the year following WW II, no international body has recognized it.
As Kaplan illustrates in Asia’s Cauldron, there is a very relevant precedent for a continental power aggressively pursuing maritime dominance in its own backyard.
In the early 1800s, US President James Monroe (1817-1825) crafted a national policy in the form of a doctrine which, according to Wikipedia, “stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention”.
As applied to the Caribbean Sea bordering the south of the US, the Monroe Doctrine guided US foreign policy at the turn of the 20th century.
The goal was to limit European influence in the region.
In the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US successfully ousted Spain from Cuba and the Carribean. According to Kaplan, this victory along with the building of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) secured America’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
During this period, the Monroe Doctrine was buttressed by US President Theodore Roosevelt’s (1901-1909) “Roosevelt Corollary”, which asserted America’s right to intervene in Latin America nations under certain political conditions.
By securing its own backyard, America was able to project power onto the rest of the world.
A key point in Asia’s Cauldron is that China’s current position in the South China Sea parallels America’s position in the Caribbean in the early 1900s.
Instead of minimizing European influence, though, China’s aim is to minimize America’s influence in the region.
Much like the continental-sized US before it, continental-sized China wants to secure its own backyard thus allowing the Middle Kingdom freedom to better project power abroad.
Kaplan believes that a road map for China to follow is that of Theodore Roosevelt’s.
“[Roosevelt] accomplished three goals relevant to what China may yearn for today in the South China Sea. He ejected Europe from Caribbean even as he moved closer to Europe politically, all the while tempering American power with a deeper understanding of the sensitivities of the people of Latin America. Borrowing from Roosevelt, Chinese grand strategists should want to weaken American involvement in the South China Sea sufficiently so as to exercise de facto hegemony over their Asian [Caribbean], while they maintain cordial political relations with Washington and temper their own power through a greater appreciation of the problems and peoples of Southeast Asia.”
4. China Believes it is Laying its Historical Claim
Considering America’s own history, Chinese ambition in the region echoes a historical precedent. China’s claims in the South China Sea are further understood by examining the country’s previous 160 year history.
In the 19th century, China lost “southern tributaries of Nepal and Burma to Great Britain, Indochina to France, Taiwan and tributaries to Korea and Sakhalin to Japan and Mongolia, Amuria and Ussuria to Russia.”
The 20th century saw further foreign abuses in the form of Treaty Ports and the humiliation of Japanese invasion and partial occupation during World War II.
Presently constituted, China’s sovereign land mass matches the peak of the Ming and Qing dynasties between 1500 and 1700; having regained this territory, China is determined to secure it and project power abroad.
However, Kaplan points out a key difference between the South China Sea and the Caribbean. The nations involved in the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century were much weaker than those China currently faces.
Vietnam is particularly antagonistic to its northern neighbor and Japan will not willingly accept a second tier seat in the Western Pacific to China. Nor is the US prepared to concede naval preeminence in the region.
5. Asia’s Arms Race
With so many competing interests, a Chinese replay of America’s experience in the Caribbean is unlikely to occur.
Instead, Kaplan forsees a 20th century European style balance-of-power ballet taking place between the US, India, Japan, South Korea, China and the Southeast Asian nations.
Necessarily, a regional balance-of-power concert entails many military considerations.
A decade of war in the Middle East combined with spending cuts have stretched America’s military resources. The US still dwarfs second-place China in military spending (~$500bn to $132bn) and outspends the next six countries combined.
China is closing the gap, though, as defense spending rapidly increases year on year while the US military budget is projected to recede in coming years.
Most all of the countries bordering the South China Sea depend on the US defense umbrella and even the perception of a weaker military will diminish American influence.
Playing in its own backyard, China is able to project its power without having to completely match America’s “blue water navy”. The Chinese have adopted a strategy of an Anti-Access/Anti-Denial (A2/AD) against the US.
With the advantage of operating near its land borders, China’s defensive strategy relies on submarines, cyber-warfare and missile technology to deter the US.
China’s growing naval power has not been lost to the other Southeast Asian countries. Growing concern over America’s potentially diminishing role has led to a virtual arms race. According to Kaplan:
Arms imports to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia have gone up 84%, 146% and 722% respectively since 2000. The spending is on naval and air platforms: surface warships, submarines, advanced missile systems and long-range fighter jets.
Further, Vietnam has committed $3bn to purchase Russian subs and jet fighters. To Kaplan, this “arms race may be one of the most underreported stories in the elite media in decades.”
Clearly, something is cooking.
6. Vietnam is China’s Thorn
All of this brings us back to Vietnam, which an un-named top US official tells Kaplan is the lynchpin to the South China Sea:
“If China can break off Vietnam they’ve won the South China Sea. Malaysia is lying low, Brunei has solved its problem with China, Indonesia has no well-defined foreign policy on the subject, the Philippines has few cards to play despite that country’s ingenious boisterousness and incendiary statements, Singapore is capable but lacks size.”
As the 13th most populous country in the world blessed with a 3000km coastline in the world’s key maritime choke point, Vietnam’s role as a buffer against China in the South China Sea is critical.
To put it bluntly, these two nations do not like each other. Vietnam was integrated into China for around a millennia beginning in 111 BC.
From the 10th century on, Vietnam broke free and has successfully fended off its larger neighbor in the 11th century (Song dynasty), 15th century (Ming) and 18th century (Qing).
Kaplan calls it a “miracle” that Vietnam has been able to resists Chinese political dominance. In more recent times, the credit for such political independence is unsurprisingly afforded to Ho Chi Minh:
“Ho, one of the great minor men of the 20th century, and one of history’s great pragmatists fused Marxism, Confucianism and nationalism into a weapon against the Chinese, the French and the Americans, laying the groundwork for Vietnam’s successful resistance against three world empires.”
Kaplan posits that a unified Vietnam from 1975 actually served as a greater thorn in China’s side than the US ever was. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping despised the Vietnamese and sent 100,000 troops south of the border in 1979 to “bleed [Vietnam] white”.
The Soviet Union’s failure to support Vietnam in this conflict left such a bitter taste that, according to Kaplan, Vietnam will “never fully trust a faraway power.”
With that, Vietnam is still more than willing to engage the US in bilateral agreements concerning the South China Sea. Having “won” the war against America, the Vietnamese do not have the same chip on their shoulder that they do against China, which has invaded Vietnam seventeen times.
In Vietnam’s 2500 year history, the US has only factored into a fraction of it while the threat of the Middle Kingdom is a never-ending existential threat.
7. What Vietnam Can Give America
For the Americans, having Vietnam on its side is an important piece to counter China. Vietnam is home to Cam Ranh Bay – one of the best deepwater anchorages in Southeast Asia – and has strong claims to the heavily contested Spratly and Paracel islands.
Vietnam needs America’s military might to protect the seas as the country derives more than 50% of its GDP from the maritime sector.
A strategic alliance with America makes sense on many levels but two important considerations arise.
- Vietnam imports a majority of its goods from China. No matter the antagonistic history between these two countries, Vietnam’s economy depends on carefully managing this relationship.
- American insistence on human rights and personal freedoms is an ideological stumbling block. Right or wrong, Vietnamese leaders value national solidarity and independence over individual rights. As was the case in Burma for many years, America has allowed an Asian nation to fall into the Chinese sphere due to concerns over human rights.
These are difficult issues to address but as Kaplan puts it “the fate of Vietnam, and its ability not to be [pulled into China’s sphere of influence], will say as much about the Americas capacity to project power in the Pacific in the 21st century as Vietnam’s fate did in the 20th century.”
8. A South China Sea Conflict Doesn’t Have to be Catastrophic
After reading Asia’s Cauldron, the importance of the the South China Sea is made utterly clear. While the German borderlands constituted the main points of conflict in the 20th century, the South China Sea waters will constitute the potential powder keg in this century.
Kaplan believes, though, that there are a few mitigating factors that will serve to minimize the damage of any South China Sea conflict:
- Harder to fight on water. There is the so-called “stopping force of water”, which makes it is difficult to land forces from the sea.
- Naval warfare is “slower”. At top speed, naval vessels can move at most 35 knots. The limits to naval speed allows more time for diplomacy as attack times are slower.
- Civilian casualties will be avoided. Since conflict will mostly take place on the sea, civilian causalities and property damage will be limited.
With or without armed conflict, there are still significant costs to trade and commerce if America, China and any of the other South China Sea bordering countries take actions that destabilize the region.
For ideological reasons, America may shun a rising China or turn back a potential ally in Vietnam.
In Kaplan’s final analysis, the South China Sea conflict is inherently amoral and should be treated as such:
“In the Western Pacific in the coming decade, morality may mean giving up some or our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make at least some room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands. For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is the preserver of freedom.”
Kaplan’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in 21st century geopolitics and the economic ramifications of rising tensions in the South China Sea.
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