Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN

  Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts:

  The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground

  Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

  Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese

  Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

  Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

  The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War

  An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future

  The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia

  The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

  Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

  Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan

  Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea

  Copyright © 2010 by Robert D. Kaplan

  Maps copyright © 2010 by David Lindroth, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Angel Books, London, for permission to reprint the poem that appears on this page from Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice (London: Angel Books, 2001). Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kaplan, Robert D.

  Monsoon : the Indian Ocean and the future of American power / Robert D. Kaplan.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60405-1

  1. United States—Foreign relations—Indian Ocean Region.

  2. Indian Ocean Region—Foreign relations—United States.

  3. Indian Ocean Region—Strategic aspects. 4. National security—United States.

  5. National security—Indian Ocean Region. I. Title.

  DS341.3.U6K374 2010

  327.730182′4—dc22 2009049752

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To

  Grenville Byford

  Gradual, inexorable, and fundamental changes … are … occurring in the balances of power among civilizations, and the power of the West relative to that of other civilizations will continue to decline.

  —SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON

  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)

  PREFACE

  THE RIMLAND OF EURASIA

  The map of Europe defined the twentieth century: from Flanders Fields to Omaha Beach to the Berlin Wall to the burned villages of Kosovo; from the Long European War, lasting from 1914 to 1989, to its bloody aftershocks, Europe was the center of world history. Momentous trends and events happened elsewhere, to be sure. But great power politics, from the collapse of Old World empires to the bipolar struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, had more to do with Europe than anywhere else.

  It is my contention that the Greater Indian Ocean, stretching eastward from the Horn of Africa past the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian plateau, and the Indian Subcontinent, all the way to the Indonesian archipelago and beyond, may comprise a map as iconic to the new century as Europe was to the last one. Hopefully, the twenty-first century will not be as violent as the twentieth, but, to a similar degree, it could have a recognizable geography. In this rimland of Eurasia—the maritime oikoumene of the medieval Muslim world that was never far from China’s gaze—we can locate the tense dialogue between Western and Islamic civilizations, the ganglia of global energy routes, and the quiet, seemingly inexorable rise of India and China over land and sea. For the sum-total effect of U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan has been to fast-forward the arrival of the Asian Century, not only in the economic terms that we all know about, but in military terms as well.

  Recently, messy land wars have obscured for us the importance of seas and coastlines, across which most trade is conducted and along which most of humanity lives, and where, consequently, future military and economic activity is likely to take place as in the past. It is in the littorals where global issues such as population growth, climate change, sea level rises, shortages of fresh water, and extremist politics—the last of which is affected by all the other factors—acquire a vivid geographical face. What the late British historian C. R. Boxer called Monsoon Asia, at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific, will demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty-first-century world.1

  Half a millennium ago, Vasco da Gama braved storm and scurvy to round Africa and cross the Indian Ocean to the Subcontinent. Writes the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luiz Vaz de Camões about that signal moment:

  This is the land you have been seeking,

  This is India rising before you.…2

  Da Gama’s arrival in India initiated the rise of the West in Asia. Portuguese seaborne dominance eventually gave way to that of other Western powers—Holland, France, Great Britain, and the United States, in their turn. Now, as China and India compete for ports and access routes along the southern Eurasian rimland, and with the future strength of the U.S. Navy uncertain, because of America’s own economic travails and the diversionary cost of its land wars, it is possible that the five-hundred-year chapter of Western preponderance is slowly beginning to close.

  This gradual power shift could not come at a more turbulent time for the lands bordering the Indian Ocean’s two halves, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal: at the top of the Arabian Sea is Pakistan; at the top of the Bay of Bengal is Burma, both highly volatile and populous pivot states. Analysts normally don’t put those two countries in the same category, but they should. Then, of course, there is the whole political future of the Islamic world from Somalia to Indonesia to consider. Besides their proximity to the Indian Ocean, so many of these places are characterized by weak institutions, tottering infrastructures, and young and restive populations tempted by extremism. Yet they are the future, much more than the graying populations of the West.

  As the late Belgian scholar Charles Verlinden once noted, the Indian Ocean “is surrounded by not less than thirty-seven countries representing a third of the world’s population,” and extends for more than 80 degrees in latitude and more than 100 degrees in longitude.3 I can only visit a few points along the Indian Ocean’s seaboard and see what is currently going on—so as to further illuminate a wider canvas, and to show what a world without a superpower looks like on the ground.

  The Indian Ocean region is more than just a stimulating geography. It is an idea because it provides an insightful visual impression of Islam, and combines the centrality of Islam with global energy politics and the importance of world navies, in order to show us a multi-layered, multi-polar world above and beyond the headlines in Iraq and Afghanistan; it is also an idea because it allows us to see the world whole, within a very new and yet very old framework, complete with its own traditions and characteristics, without having to drift into bland nostrums about globalization.

  The book begins with a broad strategic overview of the region. Then I move on to individual locations along this great seaboard. Oman is my principal reference point, where I consider the ocean’s medieval history, as well as the legacy of the first Western power, the Portuguese; there, too, I ponder the perennial relationship between the sea and the desert, and how each leads to d
ifferent political paths. Then I focus on massive Chinese harbor projects smack in the heart of zones of regional separatism in the case of Pakistan, and of ethnic rivalry in the case of Sri Lanka. In Bangladesh, I write about the interrelationship of climate change, extreme poverty, and Islamic radicalism. In India, I focus on Hindu extremism, which is being overcome by economic and social dynamism. In Burma, I report on the collision between India and China over a devastated and resource-rich landscape, and the challenges it presents for Western powers like the United States. In Indonesia, I explore the relationship between democracy and a vibrant, syncretic Islam, so different from that in Pakistan and Bangladesh: for Islam, as I learned in many of these places, is more intelligently considered against the backdrop of a specific landscape and history. Finally, I consider Chinese naval expansion originating in the eastern end of the Greater Indian Ocean, and at the western end take a peek at African renewal through the prism of Zanzibar. Everywhere I attempt to describe the ceaseless currents of historical change as they shape the contours of the new century. It is the intermingling of challenges in each place—religious, economic, political, environmental—rather than each challenge in isolation, that creates such drama.

  The “monsoon” of which I speak is more than just a storm system (which it sometimes comes across as in the English-language lexicon); it is, too, a life-affirming and beneficial climatic phenomenon, so necessary over the centuries for trade, globalization, unity, and progress. The monsoon is nature writ large, a spectacle of turbulence that suggests the effect of the environment on humankind living in increasingly crowded and fragile conditions in places like Bangladesh and Indonesia. In a densely interconnected world, America’s ability to grasp what, in a larger sense, the monsoon represents and to recognize its manifold implications will help determine America’s own destiny and that of the West as a whole. Thus, the Indian Ocean may be the essential place to contemplate the future of U.S. power.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface: The Rimland of Eurasia

  PART I

  1. China Expands Vertically, India Horizontally

  PART II

  2. Oman Is Everywhere

  3. Curzon’s Frontiers

  4. “Lands of India”

  5. Baluchistan and Sindh

  6. The Troubled Rise of Gujarat

  7. The View from Delhi

  8. Bangladesh: The Existential Challenge

  9. Kolkata: The Next Global City

  10. Of Strategy and Beauty

  11. Sri Lanka: The New Geopolitics

  12. Burma: Where India and China Collide

  13. Indonesia’s Tropical Islam

  14. The Heart of Maritime Asia

  PART III

  15. China’s Two-Ocean Strategy?

  16. Unity and Anarchy

  17. Zanzibar: The Last Frontier

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Notes

  About the Author

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHINA EXPANDS VERTICALLY, INDIA HORIZONTALLY

  Al Bahr al Hindi is what the Arabs called the ocean in their old navigational treatises. The Indian Ocean and its tributary waters bear the imprint of that great, proselytizing wave of Islam that spread from its Red Sea base across the longitudes to India and as far as Indonesia and Malaysia, so a map of these seas is central to a historical understanding of the faith. This is a geography that encompasses, going from west to east, the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and Java and South China seas. Here, in our day, are located the violence- and famine-plagued nations of the Horn of Africa, the geopolitical challenges of Iraq and Iran, the fissuring fundamentalist cauldron of Pakistan, economically rising India and its teetering neighbors Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, despotic Burma (over which a contest looms between China and India), and Thailand, through which the Chinese and Japanese, too, may help finance a canal sometime in this century that will affect the Asian balance of power in their favor. Indeed, the canal is just one of several projects on the drawing board, including land bridges and pipelines, that aim to unite the Indian Ocean with the western Pacific.

  On the Indian Ocean’s western shores, we have the emerging and volatile democracies of East Africa, as well as anarchic Somalia; almost four thousand miles away on its eastern shores the evolving, post-fundamentalist face of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world. No image epitomizes the spirit of our borderless world, with its civilizational competition on one hand and intense, inarticulate yearning for unity on the other, as much as an Indian Ocean map.

  Water, unlike land, bears no trace of history, no message really, but the very act of crossing and recrossing it makes this ocean, in the words of Harvard professor of history Sugata Bose, a “symbol of universal humanity.”1 There are Indian and Chinese, Arab and Persian trading arrangements creating a grand network of cross-oceanic communal ties, brought even closer over the centuries by the monsoon winds and, in the case of the Arabs, Persians, and other Muslims, by the haj pilgrimage.2 This is truly a global ocean, its shores home to an agglomeration of peoples of the fast-developing former “third world,” but not to any superpower: unlike the Atlantic and Pacific.3 Here is the most useful quarter of the earth to contemplate, pace Fareed Zakaria, a “post-American” world in the wake of the Cold War and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.4 Rudyard Kipling’s turn of phrase “east of Suez”—from the 1890 poem “Mandalay,” which begins in Moulmein in Burma, on the Bay of Bengal—applies more than ever, though few may realize it.

  Cold War military maps highlighted the Arctic, owing to the geography of the Soviet Union and its principal ports. Former president George W. Bush’s so-called war on terrorism underscored the Greater Middle East. But the geopolitical map of the world keeps evolving. The arc of crisis is everywhere: a warming Arctic could even become a zone of contention. Because the entire globe is simply too general an instrument to focus on, thus it helps to have a specific cartographic image in mind that includes the majority of world trouble spots, while at the same time focusing on the nexus of terrorism, energy flows, and environmental emergencies such as the 2004 tsunami. Just as phrases matter for good or for bad—“the Cold War,” “the clash of civilizations”—so do maps. The right map provides a spatial view of world politics that can deduce future trends. Although developments in finance and technology encourage global thinking, we are still at the mercy of geography, as the artificiality of Iraq and Pakistan attest.

  Americans, in particular, are barely aware of the Indian Ocean, concentrated as they are, because of their own geography, on the Atlantic and the Pacific. World War II and the Cold War confirmed this bias, with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Korea, and Communist China all with Atlantic or Pacific orientations. This bias is embedded in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the Western Hemisphere in the middle, so the Indian Ocean is often split up at the far edges of the map. Yet, it is this ocean to which Marco Polo devoted almost an entire book of his travels near the end of the thirteenth century, from Java and Sumatra to Aden and Dhofar. Herein lies the entire arc of Islam, from the eastern fringe of the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago; thus it follows that the struggle against terrorism and anarchy (which includes piracy) focuses broadly on these tropical waters, between the Suez Canal and Southeast Asia. The Indian Ocean littoral, which takes in Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, constitutes a veritable networking map of al-Qaeda, as well as one of disparate groups smuggling hashish and other contraband. Indeed, Iran has supplied Hamas by a sea route from the Persian Gulf to Sudan, and then overland through Egypt.

  Here, too, are the principal oil shipping lanes, as well as the main navigational choke points of world commerce—the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Hormuz, and Malacca. Forty percent of seaborne crude oil passes t
hrough the Strait of Hormuz at one end of the ocean, and 50 percent of the world’s merchant fleet capacity is hosted at the Strait of Malacca, at the other end, making the Indian Ocean the globe’s busiest and most important interstate.

  Throughout history, sea routes have been more important than land ones, writes Tufts University scholar Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, because they carry more goods more economically.5 The sea silk route from Venice to Japan across the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern centuries was as important as the silk route proper across Central Asia. “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice,” went the saying.6 Another proverb had it that if the world were an egg, Hormuz was its yoke.7

  Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea. Globalization relies ultimately on shipping containers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for one half of all the world’s container traffic. Moreover, the Indian Ocean rimland from the Middle East to the Pacific accounts for 70 percent of the traffic of petroleum products for the entire world.8 Indian Ocean tanker routes between the Persian Gulf and South and East Asia are becoming clogged, as hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese join the global middle class, necessitating vast consumption of oil. The world’s energy needs will rise by 50 percent by 2030, and almost half of that consumption will come from India and China.9 India—soon to become the world’s fourth largest energy consumer after the United States, China, and Japan—is dependent on oil for more than 90 percent of its energy needs, and 90 percent of that oil will soon come from the Persian Gulf by way of the Arabian Sea.* Indeed, before 2025, India will overtake Japan as the world’s third largest net importer of oil after the United States and China.10 And as India must satisfy a population that will be the most populous in the world before the middle of this century, its coal imports from Mozambique, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, are set to increase dramatically, adding to the coal that India already imports from Indian Ocean countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also be carrying enormous quantities of liquefied natural gas across the western half of the Indian Ocean from southern Africa, even as it continues to import gas from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This is how African poverty may be partially assuaged: less by Western foreign aid than by robust trade with the richer areas of the former third world.