South China Sea: Threat or Promise?
“Asia’s Cauldron” By Robert D. Kaplan, Random House, 2014
Nowadays, when we talk about the South China Sea, the conversation quickly moves to China’s overbearing posture about its claims over some islands dotting this huge body of water.
The South China Sea is considered the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce.
“More than half of the world’s annual merchant tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.”
The oil producing and consuming countries depend too on this sea. “Roughly, two thirds of South Korea’s energy supplies, 60 percent of Japan’s and Taiwan’s energy supplies, nearly 80 percent of China’s crude oil imports come through the South China Sea.”
The oil transported through the Malacca Strait from the Indian Ocean, en route to East Asia through the South China Sea, is triple the amount that passes through the Suez Canal and fifteen times the amount that transits the Panama Canal.
The above insights are culled from a newly published book, “Asia’s Cauldron,” which is sub-titled “The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific”—authored by Robert D. Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm. Kaplan was named by Foreign Policy magazine one of the world’s Top 100 Global thinkers.
This book is a timely executive read, following the signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) by both the Philippines and the United States.
A stronger defense of Philippine seas and shorelines has been on top of the Philippines’ agenda considering the aggressiveness of China in pressing its claims over islands that heretofore have been considered part of Philippine territory. When the Philippine government protested the incursions of Chinese ships in these sea territories, everyone knew that the country’s small boats are no match to the naval might of China.
The United States has somehow balanced the equation. It is a case of one bully matched by another bully. In a strategic sense, the Americans’ entry into the scene is viewed, and rightly so, as the calculated moves of the American government consistent with its “rebalance policy” in Southeast Asia.
These contemporary events have suddenly invaded our political consciousness, and we want more information beyond official statements and releases of allies and antagonists. The South China Sea was once a peaceful sea shared by friendly neighboring nations, promising cooperative business ventures in the region and expanding sea routes for burgeoning commerce.
Kaplan’s book brings us back to centuries past to explain the patterns of behavior of China and the United States. Both these continent-sized countries have been exercising hegemony casting a covetous eye on the sea territory.
The author observes that China is doing in East Asia today what in the past United States had done in the Caribbean!
“Like the Caribbean, punctuated as it is by small island states and enveloped by a continent-sized United States, the South China Sea is also an obvious arena for the projection of power by a continent-sized nation (referring to China).”
The book provides answers to why China is behaving as it does today.
“There is something deeper that propels China forward into the South China Sea and out to the First Island Chain in the Pacific: that is, China’s own partial breakup by Western powers in the relatively recent past,” Kaplan reveals.
After all, China had been for centuries and millennia a great power and a world civilization by itself.
The book states that in the 19th century, as the Qing Dynasty became the sick man of East Asia, China lost much of its territory—the southern tributaries of Nepal and Burma to Great Britain; Indochina to France; Taiwan and tributaries of Korea and Sakhalin to Japan; and Mongolia, Amuria and Ussuria to Russia.
Is it a case then of China promising itself that never again will it allow foreigners to take advantage of its “own strategic space”? It really looks like China is primed, not only to protect itself from dismemberment, but to re-claim what it considers its own territories in the past wrested away from China by more powerful hegemonic empires.
So, what does the US, the only superpower in the world, do with these recent developments?
Kaplan does not miss a geopolitical point: “Washington, for its part, will resist the moves of Beijing toward regional hegemony, even as it works with Beijing on as many issues it can. The South China Sea, as much as the East China Sea and the Korean Peninsula, will provide the center stage for this tense and contradictory relationship.”
And Washington is calibrating all its options to maintain a major presence in the South China Sea—including its economic initiatives. Kaplan points out: “Clearly the US position in Asia will ultimately rest to a significant extent on its willingness to enter into new free trade relationships, and to join ‘wholeheartedly’ the region’s multilateral and economic arrangement.”
The book is unequivocal about this fact: “East Asia remains a main area for growth in the global economy.”
The book has devoted each chapter to every member of the Southeast Asian club of states. He singles out Vietnam as a strong state who can be the “principal protagonist” in the South China Sea.
However, Kaplan minces no words in his assessment of the Philippine’s ability to counter China’s offensive. “The very mismatch was poignant, the signature of China’s growing might and the abject failure that was the modern Philippine state, whose lack of naval capacity was an outcome of its own social and economic failure.”
Kaplan traces the persistent malaise of the Philippines to the plunder of a dictatorship—and yet, mercifully so, has reserved positive comments on the current watch of President Aquino, coming as he does, he said, from the tandem of honest and courageous leaders in martyred Ninoy Aquino and former President Cory Aquino.
Early in the introduction, the book gives this historical insight: “Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The most contested areas of the globe in the last century lay on dry land in Europe … while the modern day theater for conflict or peace is “overwhelmingly maritime.”
Considering how geopolitics will play out among protagonists in the South China Sea, the Philippines, whose shoreline is reputedly longer than that of continental America, must independently build its defense capability. Meantime, it must build alliances.
The sea must be one that offers promise—not a threat. As the book puts it in many words, such danger or opportunity depends much on how the continent-sized actors like China and the US, and how the islands play their cards.
This book, therefore, makes an instructive and illuminating read for those who want to know the giants and how these giants play geopolitics—this time in troubled waters. [email protected]
