Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
even bother with access denial if you never intend to carry it out? Jacqueline Newmy-
er, who heads a Cambridge, Massachusetts, defense consultancy, explains that Beijing has
“the aim of creating a disposition of power so favorable to the PRC [People's Republic
of China] that it will not actually have to use force to secure its interests.” 55 Therefore,
just as Taiwan builds up its defenses without the intention of clashing with China, China
does likewise with respect to the United States. All parties are seeking to alter the behavior
of other parties while avoiding war. The very demonstrations of new weapons systems (if
Erickson and Yang are right), let alone the building of port facilities and listening posts in
the Pacific and Indian oceans, as well as the large amounts of military aid that Beijing is
providing to littoral states that come between Chinese territory and the Indian Ocean, are
all displays of power that by their very nature are not secret. Still, there is a hard, nasty
edge to some of this: for example, the Chinese are constructing a major naval base on the
southern tip of Hainan Island, smack in the heart of the South China Sea, featuring un-
derground facilities for up to twenty nuclear and diesel-electric submarines. Such activity
goes beyond influencing the other party's behavior to being an assertion in its own right
of Monroe Doctrine-style sovereignty over the surrounding waters. It would seem that the
Chinese are constructing Greater China first, at the heart of which will be the South China
Sea and Southeast Asia, even while they have a longer-term plan for a blue-water force,
with which will come the ability to protect their own sea lines of communication to the
Middle East across the Indian Ocean, and thus make a military conflict with the United
States less unreasonable to contemplate from a Chinese perspective. (China has no motive
to go to war with the United States. But motives can change over the years and decades,
thus it is prudent to track air and naval capabilities instead.) In the meantime, as Taiwan
slips closer into China's embrace, the more likely it is that the Chinese military can divert
its attention to the Indian Ocean and the protection of hemispheric sea lanes. The Chinese
have more and more raw material equities to protect in sub-Saharan Africa at the Indian
Ocean's opposite end: oil markets in Sudan, Angola, and Nigeria; iron ore mines in Zambia
and Gabon; and copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all to be
connected by Chinese-built roads and railways, in turn linked to Atlantic and Indian ocean
ports. 56 To be sure, control and access to sea lines of communication are more important
now than during Mahan's years, and American preponderance over such routes may not be
destined to continue forever.
This all means that America's commitment to prolong the de facto independence of
Taiwan has implications that go far beyond the defense of the island itself. For the future
of Taiwan and North Korea constitute the hinges on which the balance of power in much
of Eurasia rests.
The current security situation in Asia is fundamentally more complicated and, therefore,
more unstable than the one that existed in the decades after World War II. As American uni-
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