Asia's Cauldron (9 page)

The sugar revolution holds the key to Caribbean history, bringing an increase in trade in goods and slaves. By 1770, every piece of the Caribbean was the colonial possession of some European state. But
with the waning of the slave trade and the shift toward an interest in the temperate lands of North and South America, European enthusiasm for the Caribbean dissipated, too. It was this period that saw the emergence of the United States as an imperial force. The spread of the United States across temperate zone North America was as “rapacious” as anything, for example, the Chinese engaged in while fulfilling their own continental destiny.
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Indeed, when the United States was in an earlier phase of its modern development than China is presently—especially in terms of the political consolidation of its home continent—the United States was already seeking to dominate the Greater Caribbean, which it naturally saw as falling within its geopolitical sphere of interest. That is what the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was primarily about. By the early nineteenth century, Latin America had largely become free of European rule, and President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams were dead set against European power returning in the form of client states. They wanted, in the words of Naval War College professor James R. Holmes, “to freeze the status quo.” Domination of the Greater Caribbean by America meant neither isolationism, nor the subjugation of local peoples, nor the abjuration of international cooperation. Indeed, while the Monroe Doctrine was being promulgated, the U.S. Navy was working with Great Britain's Royal Navy to police the Caribbean, in a joint effort to end the slave trade.
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Rather than seek to keep European navies out of the Caribbean altogether, President Monroe sought only to keep them from reestablishing footholds on land in the region. The Monroe Doctrine was far more subtle than commonly supposed.

The key geographical fact about the Caribbean is that it is close to America and was far from the great European powers of the age, just as the South China Sea is close to China but far from America and other Western powers. Of all the European powers, the British, with the world's greatest navy and bases in Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, British Honduras, and the Lesser Antilles, were, like the U.S. Navy today in the South China Sea, best positioned to challenge the United States in the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century.
But the British did not challenge the Americans, because they knew the latter would fight hard to defend the maritime extension of their own North American continent. (For the same reason, the United States must now be careful of openly challenging China in the South China Sea.) Moreover, while the British were a key economic and military factor in the Caribbean, by 1917, U.S. economic influence over the Caribbean, born of geographical proximity and a burgeoning American economy, surpassed that of Britain—just as China has come to surpass the influence of the United States in Asia. “The American Mediterranean,” is what the Caribbean came to be called.
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At the turn of the twentieth century, writes historian Richard H. Collin, “the complex confluence of what we generally call modernism—transportation, communication, and industrial technology—transformed the world.”
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And modernism led to all forms of gunboat diplomacy to protect new economic interests, just as postmodernism leads today to an air, naval, and electronic and cyber-warfare buildup in Asia. Modernism also led to the American desire to build an isthmian canal athwart Central America, to link the Greater Caribbean with the Pacific Ocean.

The modern age began in full force in the Western Hemisphere with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 in Spanish-held Cuba, which led, in succession, to the American defeat of the Spanish in the Philippines in the South China Sea. The historian Collin writes: “The United States demonstrated to itself and to Europe that it could fight and win a foreign war. With former Confederates fighting side by side with Union soldiers, military unification cemented the political and economic reunion that had already given the post-Civil War United States its awesome” power.
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The Spanish-American War, which arose partly out of the need to control the Caribbean sea lanes, also meant the death of America's nonhegemonic exceptionalism, as it, too, acquired an empire of sorts. Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1898 led his Rough Riders in a charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, would a decade later, as a retiring president, be the ruler of Spain's former colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the builder of the Panama Canal, the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for settling a
war between Russia and Japan, and the commander of a twenty-two-battleship navy. Likewise, if China's benign and nonhegemonic view of itself becomes increasingly untenable, it would only be following in America's footsteps. Collin writes, “Eliminating Europe from the New World was the cornerstone of Roosevelt's foreign policy.”
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So will China, according to Mearsheimer, have as a goal of grand, long-term strategy the elimination of America from Asia?

The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1904, stated that the United States “would interfere with them [the peoples of the Greater Caribbean] only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” Roosevelt's secretary of war, Elihu Root, specifically rejected the policy of the Grover Cleveland administration that the United States was “practically sovereign” in the Greater Caribbean. Root said, “we arrogate to ourselves not sovereignty … but only the right to protect.” Root had in mind crises in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, where bankrupt and outlaw regimes were threatened with intervention by European creditors, who might then convert customs houses into naval bases. Roosevelt, much as he bristled at the irresponsibility of those regimes, was not about to let Europeans take advantage of the situation. Coups and breakdowns also led to American small-scale and large-scale interventions in Panama and Cuba, even as political crises dominated Colombia and the Central American states: many, to varying extents, threatening to invite European interference. Moreover, Roosevelt wanted to prevent “a strong Germany from replacing a weak Spain” in the Caribbean, as Kaiser Wilhelm II built up his naval force in the decade prior to World War I.
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Just as the Caribbean was the natural maritime extension of the continental United States, it was also the part of America's security environment most vulnerable to European attack. Finally, it was necessary to shape the political environment for the digging of the Panama Canal.

American military deployments were accompanied by economic
hegemony: the guaranteeing of loans known as “dollar diplomacy,” and the regulation of the region's currencies by pushing as many countries as possible to adopt the gold standard and make their money readily convertible with the dollar.
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Later on, the full-scale production of oil in Trinidad and Cuba would add another motivation to American involvement.
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In the end, the years of the Roosevelt administration marked the culmination of American domination of the Greater Caribbean, which would continue for decades with more American military and economic interventions, notably the nineteen-year American occupation of Haiti that began with a Marine landing in 1915. Theodore Roosevelt accomplished three goals relevant to what China may yearn for today in the South China Sea: he ejected Europe from the Caribbean, even as he moved closer to Europe politically, all the while tempering American power with a deeper understanding of the sensitivities of the peoples of Latin America.
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Borrowing from Roosevelt, Chinese grand strategists should want to weaken American involvement in the South China Sea sufficiently so as to exercise de facto hegemony over their own Asian Mediterranean, while they maintain cordial political and economic relations with Washington and temper their own power through a greater appreciation of the problems and peoples of Southeast Asia.

Obviously, there are great differences between the American and Asian Mediterraneans. The Caribbean states and statelets of the turn of the twentieth century were rickety, unstable, and volatile affairs; not so the formidable entities around the South China Sea, which, with the exception of the Philippines and Indonesia, are strong states, and in the case of Vietnam, a potential middle-level power if it can get its economy in order. And even the Philippines and Indonesia (the latter on the outskirts of the South China Sea) are demographically massive polities whose political and economic structures, as weak as they are compared to neighboring states, are still far more developed than those of the early-twentieth-century Caribbean. The constant mayhem with its consequent interventions that was a feature of Greater Caribbean political life is barely a factor in the South China Sea.

And yet there is a glaringly obvious similarity. They are both marginal
seas that are extensions of continent-sized nations: the United States and China. The United States, according to the mid-twentieth-century Dutch-American geostrategist Nicholas J. Spykman, became a world power when it took unquestioned control over the Greater Caribbean. For the basic geographical truth of the Western Hemisphere, he says, is that the division within it is not between North America and South America, but between the area north of the equatorial jungle dominated by the Amazon and the area south of it. Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the Guianas, although they are on the northern coast of South America, are functionally part of North America and the American Mediterranean. Once it came to dominate the American Mediterranean, that is, the Greater Caribbean, and separated as it is from the Southern Cone of South America by yawning distance and a wide belt of tropical forest, the United States has had few challengers in its own hemisphere. Thus the domination of the Greater Caribbean, observed Spykman, gave America domination of the Western Hemisphere, with power to spare for influencing the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere. First the Greater Caribbean, next the world.

Likewise with China in the Asian Mediterranean. Domination of the South China Sea would certainly clear the way for pivotal Chinese air and naval influence throughout the navigable rimland of Eurasia—the Indian and Pacific oceans both. And thus China would become the virtual hegemon of the Indo-Pacific. That would still not make China as dominant in the Eastern Hemisphere as the United States has been in the Western Hemisphere, but, in and of itself, it would go a long way toward making China more than merely the first among equals of Eastern Hemispheric powers, with political and economic energy to spare for influencing states in the Western Hemisphere to a greater extent than it already has, especially in the Southern Cone, but also in the Caribbean. The South China Sea, in other words, is now a principal node of global power politics, critical to the preservation of the worldwide balance of power. While control of it may not quite unlock the world for China as control of the Greater Caribbean unlocked the world for America, the Caribbean, remember—even with the Panama
Canal—has never lain astride the great maritime routes of commerce and energy to the degree that the South China Sea presently does.

So here we have a more prosperous and militarizing Asia, the very essence of capitalistic dynamism, with the Asian Mediterranean as its focal point. In the race for armaments in the South China Sea, China is increasing the distance between it and its neighbors, and so over time may come close to replicating America's achievement in the Greater Caribbean. But such realizations represent only the sharp outlines of the South China Sea region's political, economic, and cultural cartography. To fill in the map with richly painted brushstrokes requires dropping down from thirty thousand feet to ground level in the individual countries themselves.

The effect of Hanoi is cerebral: what the Vietnamese capital catches in freeze frame is the process of history itself. I do not mean history merely as some fatalistic, geographically determined drum roll of successive dynasties and depredations, but also history as the summation of brave individual acts and nerve-racking calculations. The maps, dioramas, and massive gray stelae in the History Museum commemorate anxious Vietnamese resistances against the Chinese Song, Ming, and Qing empires in the eleventh, fifteenth, and eighteenth centuries: for although Vietnam was integrated into China until the tenth century, its separate political identity from the Middle Kingdom ever since has been something of a miracle that no theory of the past can adequately explain.

More stelae, erected in the late fifteenth century in the Temple of Literature, poignantly rescue the names and contributions of eighty-two medieval scholars from oblivion. In fact, there is a particular intensity
about the Vietnamese historical imagination. The depth and clutter of the Ngoc Son Temple (which commemorates the defeat of the thirteenth century Yuan Chinese), with its copper-faced Buddha embraced by incense, gold leaf, and crimson wood, and surrounded, in turn, by a leafy pea-soup lake, constitutes spiritual preparation for the more austere mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh himself. Ho, one of the great minor men of the twentieth century, and one of history's great pragmatists, fused Marxism, Confucianism, and nationalism into a weapon against the Chinese, the French, and the Americans, laying the groundwork for Vietnam's successful resistances against three world empires. Buddha-like gilded statues of Ho punctuate many an official meeting room in this capital. His mausoleum gives out onto distempered, century-old European buildings and churches, once the political nerve center of French Indochina, an iffy enterprise that Paris had bravely, tenaciously tried to prolong following World War II, forcing a war against the Vietnamese that culminated in that signal humiliation for the French: the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu.