Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and so on—the American economy chugged quietly along with high annual growth rates
between the end of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Consequently, as
America traded more with the outside world, it developed for the first time complex eco-
nomic and strategic interests in far-flung places that led to, among other military actions,
Navy and Marine landings in South America and the Pacific. This was despite all of Amer-
ica's social ills at the time, which were, in turn, products of this very dynamism. Another
factor that caused America to focus outward was its consolidation of the interior continent.
The last major battle of the Indian Wars was fought in 1890.
China is also consolidating its land borders and beginning to focus outward. Unlike
America, China does not come armed with a missionary approach to world affairs. It has no
ideology or system of government it seeks to spread. Moral progress in international polit-
ics is an American goal, not a Chinese one. And yet China is not a status quo power: for
it is propelled abroad by the need to secure energy, metals, and strategic minerals in order
to support the rising living standard of roughly a fifth of humanity. Indeed, China is able to
feed 23 percent of the world's population from 7 percent of the arable land—“by crowding
some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and flood
similar—that is, provide a middle-class lifestyle for much of its urban population.
To accomplish this task, China has built advantageous power relationships both in con-
tiguous territories and in distant locales rich in the very resources it requires to fuel its
growth. Because what drives China beyond its official borders has to do with a core na-
tional interest—economic survival and growth—China can be defined as an über-realist
power. It seeks to develop an eerie, colonial-like presence throughout the parts of sub-
Saharan Africa that are well endowed with oil and minerals, and wants to secure port
access throughout the South China Sea and adjacent Indian Ocean, which connect the
hydrocarbon-rich Arab-Persian world to the Chinese seaboard. Having little choice in the
matter, Beijing cares little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires
stability, not virtue as the West conceives of it. And because some of these regimes—such
as those in Iran, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—are either benighted or authoritarian, or both, Ch-
ina's worldwide scouring for resources brings it into conflict with the missionary-oriented
United States, as well as with countries like India and Russia, against whose own spheres
of influence China is bumping up. What frequently goes unnoticed is that these countries,
and others in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, are places which came
under the influence of one Chinese dynasty or another in the past. Even Sudan is not far
from the area of the Red Sea visited by the Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He in the early
fifteenth century. China is merely reestablishing, after a fashion, its imperial domain.
China does not pose an existential threat. The possibility of a war between the United
States and China is extremely remote. There is a military threat from China, but as we
