9780812994322 excerpt Kaplan / ASIA''S CAULDRON Chapter I The Humanist Dilemma Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. The most contested areas of the globe in the last century lay on dry land in Europe, particularly in the flat expanse that rendered the eastern and western borders of Germany artificial, and thus exposed to the intensive to-­ing and fro-­ing of armies. But starting in the last phase of the Cold War the demographic, economic, and military axis of the earth has measurably shifted to the opposite end of Eurasia, where the spaces between the principal nodes of population are overwhelmingly maritime. By maritime I mean sea, air, and outer space: for ever since the emergence of aircraft carriers in the early decades of the twentieth century, sea and air battle formations have become increasingly inextricable, with outer space now added to the mix because of navigational and other assistance to ships and planes from satellites. Hence naval has become shorthand for several dimensions of military activity. And make no mistake, naval is the operative word. Because of the way that geography illuminates and sets priorities, the physical contours of East Asia argue for a naval century, with the remote possibility of land warfare on the Korean Peninsula being the striking exception.

East Asia is a vast, yawning expanse, stretching from Arctic to Antarctic reaches--­from the Kuril Islands southward to New Zealand--­and characterized by a shattered array of coastlines and archipelagoes, themselves separated by great seas and distances. Even accounting for the fact of how technology has compressed distance, with missiles and fighter jets--­the latter easily refueled in the air--­rendering any geography closed and claustrophobic, the sea acts as a barrier to aggression, at least to the degree that dry land does not. The sea, unlike land, creates clearly defined borders, and thus has the potential to reduce conflict. Then there is speed to consider. Even the fastest warships travel comparatively slowly, 35 knots, say, reducing the chance of miscalculations and thus giving diplomats more hours--­and days even--­to reconsider decisions. Moreover, navies and air forces simply do not occupy territory the way armies do. It is because of the seas around East Asia that the twenty-­first century has a better chance than the twentieth of avoiding great military conflagrations. Of course, East Asia has seen great military conflagrations in the twentieth century that the seas did not prevent: the Russo-­Japanese War (1904-­1905); almost a half century of civil war in China that followed the collapse of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty; the conquests of Imperial Japan and World War II in the Pacific, which followed from them; the Korean War (1950-­1953); the wars in Cambodia, Laos, and two in Vietnam involving the French and the Americans from the 1950s through the 1970s.

What unites all of these conflicts is that each was organic to the formation of a state or empire, or similarly to the process of decolonization. A number of these conflicts were internal, contested by both conventional and unconventional ground forces, where navies played extremely limited roles. The fact that the grand geography of East Asia is primarily maritime had little impact on these essentially domestic wars. (I include Korea in this category: for the conflict between the North and the South was mainly fought on land, and was integral to the formation of separate states following the long Japanese occupation of 1910 to 1945.) But now the age of national consolidation throughout East Asia lies behind us. East Asian militaries, rather than focusing inward with low-­tech armies, are focusing outward with high-­tech navies and air forces. Yet as I will explain, they are not likely to reenact in terms of scale the naval conflicts of the Russo-­Japanese War and World War II in the Pacific. The Russo-­Japanese War and the Pacific Theater in World War II were the upshots in significant measure of Japanese militarism, for which the seas offered no defense; in fact, the seas were fundamental to the expansion of an island nation that required large stores of oil from distant shores for its rampaging armed forces.

But China, now the rising military power in the Pacific, demonstrates far less aggression than did Imperial Japan following the Meiji Restoration: even as China''s military (particularly its navy) expands, fascism as in Japan is almost surely not on the horizon in the Middle Kingdom. As for the comparison between China and Imperial Germany prior to World War I that many make, whereas Germany was primarily a land power, owing to the geography of Europe, China will be primarily a naval power, owing to the geography of East Asia. It is this geography, I repeat, that will foster the growth of navies, which, while a worrisome trend in its own right, is still not as worrisome as the growth of armies in continental Europe at the beginning of the last century. Truly, military power is moving to Asia, but the worst of the twentieth century might be avoided, thanks generally to what the University of Chicago political scientist John J. Mearsheimer calls the "stopping power of water."1 Water, Mearsheimer explains, is an impediment to invasion because while a state can build a naval force and transport an army across the sea with it, such a state will find it much more difficult to land an army on a hostile shore, and then move it inland to subdue permanently a hostile population. For example, the Taiwan Strait is only a hundred miles wide, making it one of the narrower waterways in the Western Pacific, but it is still almost four times wider than the English Channel, across which came the Allied invasion. China may in a decade or so be able to defeat Taiwan in a war, U.

S. assistance to Taiwan notwithstanding. But occupying Taiwan would be far more difficult, and thus will likely never be attempted. This would not be the case if Taiwan were not an island with one hundred miles of water between it and the mainland. So it goes with the maritime distances between Japan and Korea, between South Korea and China, Japan''s Ryuku Islands and China, China''s Hainan Island and Vietnam, and so on. With postcolonial wars obviously no longer on the horizon, China however truculent is no Imperial Japan, and East Asia''s maritime geography argues in favor of naval competition but militates against amphibious landings in heavily populated areas. What will this purely naval competition look like? To find out we must examine more closely the geography of East Asia. East Asia can be divided into two general areas: Northeast Asia dominated by the Korean Peninsula, and Southeast Asia dominated by the South China Sea.

Northeast Asia pivots on the destiny of North Korea, a totalitarian and hermitic state that combines communism with national fascism. Such a state has dim prospects in a world governed by rampant capitalism and electronic communication. Were North Korea to collapse, Chinese, American, and South Korean ground forces might meet up in the peninsula''s northern half in the mother of all humanitarian interventions, even as they carve out territory for themselves in the course of feeding the hungry. Naval issues would be distinctly secondary. But an eventual reunification of Korea would bring naval issues to the fore, with a Greater Korea, China, and Japan in delicate equipoise separated by the Sea of Japan and the Yellow and Bohai seas. In sum, because North Korea still exists, the Cold War phase of Northeast Asian history is not over, and thus land power will come to dominate the headlines in the area before sea power will. Contrarily, Southeast Asia is already deep into a post-­Cold War phase of history. That is what makes it so critical.

Vietnam dominates the western shore of the South China Sea. Once the preeminent foreign symbol of domestic turmoil inside America, Vietnam has been--­until recent years at least--­a capitalist dynamo seeking closer military ties to the United States, in order to balance against China. China, consolidated as a dynastic state by Mao Zedong after decades of chaos, and made into the world''s most dynamic economy by the liberalizations of Deng Xiaoping, is now pressing outward with its navy to the First Island Chain in the Western Pacific. Then there is the demographic Muslim behemoth of Indonesia, which, having sustained endless decades of left-­ and right-­wing authoritarian rule during the Cold War, could possibly emerge as a second "India," that is, a vigorous and stable democracy that has the potential to project power through its growing economy. Singapore and Malaysia, meanwhile, move forward economically in devotion to the city-­state-­cum-­trading-­state model, through varying blends of democracy and authoritarianism. Therefore, the composite picture is of a cluster of states that, with problems of domestic legitimacy and state building mostly behind them, are ready to advance their perceived territorial rights beyond their own shores. This outward collective push is located in the demographic cockpit of the globe: it is here in Southeast Asia, with its nearly 600 million people, where China''s 1.3 billion people converge with the Indian Subcontinent''s 1.

5 billion people. And the geographical meeting place of all these states is maritime: the South China Sea. The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans--­the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia''s navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world''s annual merchant fleet to.