The Revenge of Geography (34 page)

Guam, Palau, and the Northern Mariana, Solomon, Marshall, and Caroline island groups are all either U.S. territories, commonwealths with defense agreements with the United States, or independent states that because of their poverty may well be open to such agreements. The U.S. position in Oceania exists courtesy of the spoils of the 1898 Spanish-American War and the blood of Marines in World War II, who liberated these islands from the Japanese. Oceania will grow in importance because it is sufficiently proximate to East Asia, while lying just outside the anti-access bubble in the process of being expanded by China’s DF-21 and more advanced antiship missiles. Future bases in Oceania are not unduly provocative, unlike bases on the “guard towers” of Japan, South Korea, and (until the 1990s) the Philippines. Guam is only four hours flying time from North Korea and only a two-day sail from Taiwan. Most significantly, as outright U.S. possessions, or functionally dependent on the United States for their local economies, the United States can make enormous defense investments in some of these places without fear of being evicted.

Already, Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is the most commanding platform in the world for the projection of U.S. hard power. With 100,000 bombs and missiles and 66 million gallons of jet fuel at any one time, it is the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go anywhere. Its runways are filled with long lines of C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and the like. Guam is also home to an American submarine squadron and an expanding naval base. Guam and the nearby Northern
Mariana Islands, U.S. possessions both, are almost equidistant between Japan and the Strait of Malacca.

Then there is the strategic potential of the southwestern tip of Oceania, signified by the offshore anchorages of the Australian-owned Ashmore and Cartier Islands, and the adjacent seaboard of western Australia itself, from Darwin to Perth: all looking out from below the Indonesian archipelago to the Indian Ocean, which is emerging as the vascular center of the world economy, with oil and natural gas transported across its width from the Middle East to the burgeoning middle classes of East Asia. The U.S. Navy and Air Force, according to Garrett’s plan, would take advantage of Oceania’s geography in order to constitute a “regional presence in being” located “just over the horizon” from the virtual borders of Greater China and the main shipping lanes of Eurasia.
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A “regional presence in being” is a variant of the British naval strategist Julian Corbett’s “fleet in being” of a hundred years ago, a dispersed collection of ships that can quickly coalesce into a unified fleet when necessary; whereas “just over the horizon” reflects a confluence of offshore balancing and participation in a concert of powers.
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The concept of strengthening the U.S. air and sea presence on Oceania reflects a compromise between resisting Greater China at all costs and acceding somewhat to a future Chinese navy role in policing the First Island Chain, while at the same time making China pay a steep price for military aggression on Taiwan. Without ever saying so, this vision allows one to contemplate a world in which American “legacy” bases would be scaled back somewhat on the First Island Chain, even as American ships and planes continue to patrol it, in and out of China’s anti-access bubble. Meanwhile, the plan envisages a dramatic expansion of American naval activity in the Indian Ocean. To achieve this, the United States would not have hardened bases, but rather austere “operating locations” and defense agreements in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia; and on island nations scattered about the Indian Ocean, such as the Comoros, Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, Maldives, and Andamans, a number of which are managed directly or indirectly by France and India, both U.S. allies. This sustains
the freedom of navigation in Eurasia along with unimpeded energy flows. The plan deemphasizes existing American bases in Japan and South Korea, and diversifies the U.S. footprint around Oceania to replace the overwhelming stress on Guam, thus moving away from easily targeted “master” bases. For in an age of prickly sovereignty, defended by volatile mass medias, hardening foreign bases make them politically indigestible to local populations. Guam, as a U.S. territory, is the exception that proves the rule. The United States experienced such difficulty with the use of its bases in Turkey prior to the Iraq War in 2003, and for a short time with the use of bases in Japan in 2010. The American Army presence in South Korea is now less embattled mainly because the number of troops stationed there has dropped from 38,000 to 25,000 in recent years, while downtown Seoul has largely been abandoned by the U.S. military.

In any case, the American hold on the First Island Chain is beginning to be pried loose. Local populations are less agreeable to foreign bases, even as a rising China serves as both an intimidator and attractor that can complicate America’s bilateral relations with its Pacific allies. It is about time that this is happening. To wit, the 2009–2010 crisis in American-Japanese relations, with an inexperienced new Japanese government wanting to rewrite the rules of the bilateral relationship in Tokyo’s favor, even as it talked of developing deeper ties with China, should have occurred years before. The paramount American position in the Pacific is an outdated legacy of World War II, which left China, Japan, and the Philippines devastated: nor can the division of Korea, a product of fighting that ended six decades ago, and left the U.S. military with a dominant position on the peninsula, last forever.

Meanwhile, a Greater China is emerging politically and economically in Central-East Asia and in the Western Pacific, with a significant naval dimension in the East and South China seas, while at the same time Beijing is involved in port-building projects and arms transfers on the Indian Ocean littoral. Only substantial political and economic turmoil inside China could alter this trend. But just outside the borders of this new power realm will likely be a stream of American
warships, perhaps headquartered in many cases in Oceania, and partnered with warships from India, Japan, and other democracies, all of whom cannot resist the Chinese embrace, but at the same time are forced to balance against it. Given time, a Chinese blue-water force could become less territorial as it grows in confidence, and thus be drawn into this very alliance structure. Moreover, as political scientist Robert S. Ross points out in a 1999 article that is as relevant now as it was then, because of the particular geography of East Asia, the struggle between China and the United States will remain more stable than that between the Soviet Union and the United States. That is because American maritime power during the Cold War was not enough to contain the Soviet Union; a significant land force in Europe was also required. But even given a faintly pro-Chinese Greater Korea, no such land force will ever be required around the Rimland of Eurasia, in which the U.S. Navy will be pitted against a weaker Chinese one.
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(The size of the U.S. land force in Japan is diminishing, and is in any case directed not at China, but at North Korea.)

Still, the very fact of Chinese economic power—increasingly accompanied by military power—will lead to a pivotal degree of tension in the years ahead. To paraphrase Mearsheimer’s argument from
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
, the United States, as the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, will seek to prevent China from becoming the regional hegemon over much of the Eastern Hemisphere.
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This could be the signal drama of the age. Mackinder and Spykman would not be surprised.

As the United States and China become great power rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the twenty-first century. India, in other words, looms as the ultimate pivot state. It is, according to Spykman, a Rimland power writ large. Mahan noted that India, located in the center of the Indian Ocean littoral, is critical for the seaward penetration of both the Middle East and China. But even as the Indian political class understands at a very intimate level America’s own historical and geographical situation, the American political class has no such understanding of India’s. Yet if Americans do not come to grasp India’s highly unstable geopolitics, especially as it concerns Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China, they will badly mishandle the relationship. India’s history and geography since early antiquity constitute the genetic code for how the world looks from New Delhi. I begin by placing the Indian Subcontinent in the context of Eurasia in general.

With Russia dominating the landmass of Eurasia, even as it is sparsely populated, the four great centers of population on the super-continent are on its peripheries: Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and China. Chinese and European civilizations, as the geographer James Fairgrieve wrote in 1917, grew outward in organic fashion from the nurseries of the Wei River valley and the Mediterranean.
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Southeast Asia’s civilizational development was more elaborate: with Pyu and Mon peoples, followed by Burmans, Khmers, Siamese, Vietnamese, Malays, and others—in turn, influenced by southward migrations from China—coagulating along river valleys like the Irrawaddy and Mekong, as well as on islands like Java and Sumatra. India is another case entirely. Like China, India is possessed of geographical logic, framed as it is by the Arabian Sea to the west and southwest, by the Bay of Bengal to the east and southeast, by the mountainous Burmese jungles to the east, and by the Himalayas and the knot of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush to the north and northwest. India, also like China, is internally vast. But to a lesser extent than China, India lacks a singular nursery of demographic organization like the Wei valley and lower Yellow River, from which a polity could expand outward in all directions.

Even the Ganges River valley did not provide enough of a platform for the expansion of a unitary Indian state unto the subcontinent’s deep, peninsular south: for the subcontinent’s various river systems besides the Ganges—Brahmaputra, Narmada, Tungabhadra, Kaveri, Godavari, and so on—further divide it. The Kaveri Delta, for example, is the core of Dravidian life, much as the Ganges is of that of the Hindi-speaking peoples.
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Moreover, India has (along with Southeast Asia) the hottest climate and most abundant and luxuriant landscape of all the Eurasian population hubs, and therefore its inhabitants, Fairgrieve tells us, lacked the need to build political structures for the organization of resources, at least on the scale that the temperate zone Chinese and Europeans did. This last point, of course, may seem overly deterministic, and perhaps inherently racist in its
stark simplicity: a feature common to the era in which Fairgrieve wrote. Yet as in the case of Mackinder, who worried about the “yellow peril” that China supposedly represented, Fairgrieve’s larger analysis of India is essentially valid, as well as insightful.

For while obviously constituting its own unique civilization, the Indian Subcontinent, because of the above reasons, has through much of its history lacked the political unity of China, even as it has been open to concentrated invasions from its northwest, the least defined and protected of its frontier regions, where India is dangerously close to both the Central Asian steppe and the Persian-Afghan plateau, with their more “virile,” temperate zone civilizations.
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Motivating these invasions throughout history has been the welcoming fecundity, reinforced by not too excessive rainfall, that characterizes the plain of the Punjab, watered as it is by the Indus River and its tributaries at exactly the point where the Persian-Afghan plateau drops to the floor of the subcontinent. Indeed, it is the thundering invasions and infiltrations from West and Central Asia that have disrupted the quest for unity and stability in the subcontinent well into the modern era. As Mackinder said in one of his lectures: “In the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which warlike preparation must ever be ready. It is the Northwest Frontier of India.”
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