By
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of “The
Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the
Twenty-first Century.” He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New
American Security and a senior adviser at Eurasia Group.
For years now, China has been at war against the United
States in the South China Sea — only Washington didn’t notice
until the process was well underway. The Chinese way of war, modeled after the
philosopher of middle antiquity, Sun Tzu, is to win
without ever having to fight. Thus, the Chinese have been proceeding by
microsteps: reclaim an island here, build a runway there, install a missile
battery in a third place, deploy an oil exploration rig temporarily in disputed
waters, establish a governorate, and so on. Each step is designed to create a
small fact, but without eliciting a military response from the other side,
since the Chinese know they may be a generation away from matching the U.S.
Navy and Air Force in fighting capability.
The latest chapter in this process occurred earlier this
month, when a Chinese warship dangerously came within 45 yards of the USS Decatur, a guided missile
destroyer, in the vicinity of the Gaven Reefs.
China
is not a rogue state and its policy makes perfect sense, given its legitimate
geopolitical aims. Beijing’s approach to the South China Sea is quite
comparable to the United States’ approach to the Caribbean during the 19th and
early 20th centuries, when it sought to establish strategic dominance over its
adjacent sea. Domination of the Caribbean gave the United States effective
control over the Western Hemisphere and, thus, allowed it to pivotally affect
the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere throughout the 20th century.
Chinese domination of the South China Sea in the 21st century will do no less
for China.
Effective control of the South China Sea will give China
unfettered access to the wider Pacific, allow it to further soften up Taiwan —
the northern boundary of the South China Sea — and, most important, make it a
two-ocean naval power. Indeed, the South China Sea is the gateway to the Indian
Ocean — the 21st century’s most critical body of water, which functions as
the global energy interstate connecting the hydrocarbon fields of the Middle
East with the middle-class conurbations of East Asia. China’s military actions
in the South China Sea are inseparable from its commercial empire-building
across the Indian Ocean to the Suez Canal and the eastern Mediterranean.
From the Chinese viewpoint, though, it is the United States
that is the aggressive hegemon. After all, the U.S. Navy sails its
warships from North America to the faraway South China Sea, which, from China’s
geographical reference point, is its home waters — just as the Caribbean
Sea is to Americans. The very fact that the U.S. Coast Guard clusters ships in
and around the Caribbean demonstrates how the United States, in a very real
psychological sense, takes ownership of it. The Chinese, believing similarly,
have coast guard vessels as well as a fishing fleet in the South China Sea
region.
The
United States must face up to an important fact: the western Pacific is no
longer a unipolar American naval lake, as it was for decades after World War
II. The return of China to the status of great power ensures a more complicated
multipolar situation. The United States must make at least some room for
Chinese air and naval power in the Indo-Pacific region. How much room is the
key question. Remember that the United States’ principal allies bordering the
South China Sea — Vietnam and the Philippines — have no choice but to get along with a much larger,
economically dominant, and more proximate China. They require the United States
as a balancer against China, not as an outright enemy of it. They know the
United States has a robust military presence in Asia ultimately by choice —
making its policies uncertain — whereby China is the region’s central
organizing principle.
President Trump has communicated more uncertainty in the
minds of our Asian allies than any previous U.S. leader of modern times. This
might force them to conclude separate understandings with China. Such a process
will be insidious, rarely admitted and almost never on the front pages. Yet,
one day, we will wake up and realize that Asia has irrevocably changed.
Indeed, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s security strategy in the South China Sea is being
undermined by Trump’s trade policies. Don’t believe for a moment that the
United States can use trade as a lever against China in the South China Sea,
where Beijing has a well-grounded, long-term grand strategy, as opposed to
Trump’s zigzagging whims.
Unless
the United States wants a shooting war in the South China Sea, its only defense
against China’s policy of gradual encroachment is a U.S. system of
free trade and democratic alliance-building that buttresses its military
posture and counters China’s own imperial system. Power is not only military
and economic, but moral. And by moral I do not, in this instance, mean
humanitarian or moralistic. I mean something harder: the constancy of one’s
word so that allies can depend upon you. Only with that will littoral states
such as Vietnam and the Philippines — to say nothing of Taiwan and South
Korea — see it in their own interests to keep a safe distance from China.
In sum, there is a direct contradiction between Trump’s
aggressive economic nationalism and his administration’s commitment to defend
the South China Sea. The South China Sea is not the United States’ home waters;
it is China’s. Geography still matters. And because the United States is so far
away, its only hope is to offer an uplifting regional vision that anchors its
military one.
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