kaplan i think has written good stuff for the atlantic. anyway, this seems fairly interesting. china is the big threat to everyone.
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From: Ram
Robert Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where he is working on a book on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean. In a keynote address delivered last week at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Kaplan discusses issues that should provide ample food for thought to the foreign policy establishments of the US and India.
Reporter Trudy Kuehner has summarized his address.
EXCERPTS:
**Mr. Kaplan began by offering observations based on his recent trip to India, from which he had just returned. While there, he met with the chiefs of the army and navy, the foreign and finance ministers, and numerous other officials, along with leading intellectuals and journalists. India is focused on and obsessed with China, he said. It used to be compared with Pakistan, and India's elite used to be obsessed with the threat from Pakistan. That has changed. They are now obsessed with the competition with China, and India is one major place where President Bush enjoys popularity, even among the intellectuals, the writers, journalists. That is because Bush, following on from the second Clinton administration, has been very pro-India.The U.S has sold the USS Trenton, a former amphibious ship, to the Indian navy; it has sold the Indians F-18 Super Hornets, it has replaced all their P-3 surveillance planes with P-8s, and there are constant bilateral military exercises between the U.S. Air Force and Navy and the Indian Air Force and Navy.
**This strong defense relationship is all about Asian balance-of-power politics. India and China, which share a long land border and therefore have to maintain stable relations, are inexorably coming into competition with each other. India's sphere of influence extends to the borders of the old British India, from the Iranian plateau to the Gulf of Thailand, encompassing Burma, where it is involved in a quiet war of influence with China. It is extending east and west. During the days of the British viceroys in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Persian Gulf, Middle East, and Southeast Asia empire was not run from London, but from the viceroy's headquarters in Calcutta. India is now assuming those dimensions.
**Meanwhile, China is pushing southward. The Chinese are building warm-water ports in Gwadar in Pakistan and in Mawlamyaing in Burma; they are going to start at Chittagong in Bangladesh. All these places are closer to cities in western and southwestern China than those cities are to Beijing and Shanghai. That is, developing warm-water ports in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, both part of the larger Indian Ocean, is a way for much of China's landmass to break out of being landlocked.
**India now has the world's fourth largest navy; it is about to have the third largest. It will soon take delivery of its first nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine. Meanwhile, China's navy is growing to be in asymmetric terms a peer competitor of the U.S., the Japanese Navy is now three times, soon to be four times, the size of Britain's Royal Navy. All this is happening not just while the U.S. is deeply involved in two countries in the greater Middle East, but also as European defense budgets are starved at 2 percent or less of their GDPs.
**Asian militaries are becoming real civilian-military postindustrial complexes. The fact that the Chinese or Indian armies are so large was for decades meaningless, because they were poorly trained and badly equipped, more useful for defending long land borders and bringing in crops than for actual deployment, maneuverability, and fighting. That is changing rapidly. The Indians are using the Israelis to develop a new space satellite technology tied in with their own military. India and China's software prowess is increasingly having military dimensions.
**If the U.S. is going to be in strategic competition with China and is going to quietly, subtly leverage countries like India and Japan, or South Korea and Australia, against China, the U.S. will continue to need a partnership with Europe.
**The Chinese are not competing with the U.S. across the board; they are concentrating on three things: (1) submarines, (2) missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, and (3) the ability to knock out satellites in space, all of which put together constitute an asymmetric threat against the U.S. navy. That asymmetric threat is not designed to get into a war with the U.S., but to deny the U.S. access whenever and wherever it wants, from the Asian mainland to the Chinese coast, to make it think twice before entering a zone where its carriers could be hit by a missile. This will dissuade U.S. movements and affect U.S. strategy. And ultimately, Kaplan noted, power is the ability to affect your competitors' mode of operations.
** The Persian Gulf is about to become much more clogged with oil supertankers than it ever was. That is because among a number of big phenomena going on in the world today, Kaplan said, one is the growth of the Chinese and Indian middle classes. India's middle class is growing from 200 million to a predicted 350 million. China has similar statistics. Middle classes are acquisitive. They buy things and consume a lot of energy. And so the growth of these middle classes means tremendous energy consumption, much of which is going to have to be solved by oil. Ninety percent of India's energy requirements are going to be filled by oil in the Persian Gulf within a few years, as opposed to 65 percent today. China's statistics are similar. We are about to see a major energy highway from the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean to the strait of Malacca to China and Japan and across the Persian Gulf to the west coast of India. Energy politics are going to tie China and India much more closely to the Arab and Persian world than they ever were before.
**This is why the U.S. position now in the Middle East is untenable. The U.S. has to find a way gradually, with carrots and sticks, to open up Iran and have some sort of normalized relationship with that country. The rest of the world is not going to wait the U.S. out, but is moving closer to Iran and Russia, because crude oil petroleum prices are going to continue to go up over the long run because of the growth of middle classes around the world.
**Africa represents the last untapped global food market in the world, because commodity prices are going to gradually go up, too, for basic foodstuffs, again because of the growth of the middle class in the developing world. The Chinese are all over the African continent now. We're going to be faced with competition for resources in Africa with the Chinese, whether it's oil in the Gulf of Guinea or coal in Mozambique and other parts of southern Africa.
**The Indian navy and air force would like to dominate the Indian Ocean from Mozambique all the way to Indonesia. But they cannot do that except as part of an alliance with the U.S. navy and air force. One major military development of the past year was an exercise off the coast of India in which India and the U.S. and also the navies and air forces of Japan and Australia took part, sort of the Malabar exercises of democracy. The Chinese took umbrage at this, seeing it for what it was: a group of countries balancing against them. But America cannot assume that it can crudely lever two democracies, India and Japan, against China, because China is the largest trading partner for both those countries.
**Going forward, the U.S. will have to build bridges with China even as it strengthens India and Japan and continues working hard to keep NATO relevant and inclusive. It will have to work on a lot of fronts, and the main theme is that if you go it alone, you can often get to a point faster than if you do it in a coalition, but if you want to get to the next point and the point after that and the point after that, you've ultimately got to do it with a coalition. So it's better to go slow at the beginning and achieve some long-term ends afterwards. Kaplan emphasized that he was not speaking about the weakening of American power, but about other countries catching up and finding ways to neutralize the U.S. over time.
**Borders within Asia are crumbling. These countries are increasingly interconnected, and new economic prowess is leading to strengthened militaries. The U.S. military's goal in the future, Kaplan concluded, is going to be a combination of having sea-basing and other capabilities that will allow the U.S. to be unencumbered by alliances, on one hand, even as we try to strengthen alliances wherever we can, on the other hand. It is a matter of being as flexible as possible. Kaplan predicts that whoever is elected the next U.S. president, whether Republican or Democrat, will evolve sooner or later into something very Nixonian in terms of foreign policy. After the first year, whoever is elected is going to be a power balancer.
**We're entering a world of 19th-century balance of power on several different levels, Kaplan ended. All Metternich had to worry about was Europe; today we have to show the same adroitness at balancing across the whole world.
For the complete text of reporter Trudy Kuehner's summary of Robert Kaplan's keynote address, please click:
http://www.fpri.org/enotes/200804.kuehner.kaplannewbalanceofpower.html
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