Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
polarity ebbs, with the relative decline in size of the U.S. Navy, and with the concomitant
rise of the Chinese economy and military (even at slower rates than before), multipolarity
becomes increasingly a feature of Asian power relationships. The Chinese are building un-
derground submarine pens on Hainan Island and developing antiship missiles. The Amer-
icans are providing Taiwan with 114 Patriot air defense missiles and dozens of advanced
military communications systems. The Japanese and South Koreans are engaged in across-
the-board modernization of their fleets—with a particular emphasis on submarines. And
India is building a great navy. These are all crude forms of seeking to adjust the balance
of power in one's favor. There is an arms race going on, and it is occurring in Asia. This
is the world that awaits the United States when it completes its withdrawal from both Iraq
and Afghanistan. While no one state in Asia has any incentive to go to war, the risks of
incidents at sea and fatal miscalculations about the balance of power—which everyone is
seeking to constantly adjust—will have a tendency to increase with time and with the deep-
ening complexity of the military standoff.
Tensions at sea will be abetted by those on land, because as we have seen, China is filling
vacuums that will in due course bring it into uneasy contact with Russia and India. Empty
spaces on the map are becoming crowded with more people, strategic roads and pipelines,
and ships in the water, to say nothing of overlapping concentric circles of missiles. Asia is
becoming a closed geography, with a coming crisis of “room,” as Paul Bracken wrote back
in 1999. That process has only continued, and it means increasing friction.
So how might the United States stay militarily engaged while working to preserve the
stability of Asia? How does the United States protect its allies, limit the borders of Great-
er China, and at the same time avoid a conflict with China? For China, if its economy
can keep growing, could constitute more embryonic power than any adversary the United
States faced during the twentieth century. Being an offshore balancer as some suggest may
not be completely sufficient. Major allies like Japan, India, South Korea, and Singapore
require the U.S. Navy and Air Force to be in “concert” with their own forces, as one high-
ranking Indian told me: an integral part of the landscape and seascape, rather than merely
lurking over some distant horizon.
But what exactly does a concert of powers look like on the high seas and Spykmanesque
Rimland of Eurasia? A plan that made the rounds in the Pentagon in 2010 sketches out an
American naval cartography of the twenty-first century that seeks to “counter Chinese stra-
tegic power … without direct military confrontation.” It does so while envisioning a U.S.
Navy down from the current 280 ships to 250, and a cut in defense spending by 15 percent.
Drawn up by a retired Marine colonel, Pat Garrett, the plan is worth describing because it
introduces into the Eurasian Rimland equation the strategic significance of Oceania, just
at a time when the American military footprint is growing dramatically on the island of
Guam.
