Robert D. 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. This essay summarizes his keynote address at FPRI’s Fourth Annual Partners Brunch, held on April 6, 2008, honoring Irvin J. Borowsky.
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. The word “Iraq” never came up in any of the talks, he said. One might expect, given the unpopularity of the U.S. adventure in Iraq, that the subject would come up in a foreign setting, but it did not. 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.
Rising Asia
Kaplan explained that 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, Kaplan noted, 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.
Kaplan observed that this is the world that is being created while the U.S. is focused on messy counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if new powers are quietly rising up. The total result of the Iraq War, to him, is that it has fast-forwarded the arrival of the Asian century. 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.
What interests Kaplan is that, as an indicator of where the future is going, Europe has not been able to take advantage strategically or in many other ways of the U.S. quagmire in Iraq and the growing one in Afghanistan, but the Asian countries have. 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.
India has 1.5 billion people. Its middle class is growing from 200 million to a predicted 350 million. China has similar statistics. Middle classes are acquisitive, Kaplan observed. 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, Kaplan argued. 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.
The Chinese are all over the African continent now, Kaplan observed. The U.S.-China competition over Africa is going to be in a strange way similar to the U.S.-Soviet competition over Africa during the Cold War. But the Chinese will not be like the Soviets. The Chinese are building roads, investing in far more subtle ways than the Soviets did. They’re developing area expertise. The Chinese learned from their mistakes in a way the Soviets never did. As an example, the Soviets never developed a strong noncommissioned officer corps in their military, who were mainly a band of ill-trained thugs. The Chinese are spending a lot of money on upgrading the quality of their enlisted ranks, particularly on submarines, knowing that it is the enlisted ranks much more than the officer corps that determine the character of the military. The Chinese will be flexible, formidable competitors in many ways.
The Indian navy and air force would like to dominate the Indian Ocean from Mozambique all the way to Indonesia, Kaplan pointed out. 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.
Tags: China, Geopolitics, India, Indian Ocean, The United States of America (USA)
