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

  Then there is China, whose demand for crude oil doubled between 1995 and 2005, and will double again in the coming decade or two, as it imports 7.3 million barrels of crude daily by 2020—half of Saudi Arabia’s planned output.† More than 85 percent of that China-bound oil will pass across the span of the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Malacca: the reason China is desperate for alternative energy routes to the Pacific, as well as overland ones into China from Central Asia, Pakistan, and Burma.11 The combined appetites of China, Japan, and South Korea for Persian Gulf oil already make the Strait of Malacca home to half of world oil flows and close to a quarter of global trade.12

  “No ocean is in need of strategic stability more than the Indian Ocean, which is arguably the most nuclearized of the seven seas,” notes the defense analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett. “Among the nuclear powers whose navies ply this ocean are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel.”13

  The Indian Ocean is where the rivalry between the United States and China in the Pacific interlocks with the regional rivalry between China and India, and also with America’s fight against Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, which includes America’s attempt to contain Iran. Whenever U.S. Navy warships have bombed Iraq or Afghanistan, they have often done so from the Indian Ocean. The U.S. Air Force guards Iraq and Afghanistan from bases in the Persian Gulf, and from the island of Diego Garcia, smack in the center of the Indian Ocean. Any American strike against Iran—and its aftershocks, regarding the flow of oil—will have an Indian Ocean address. The same with responses to any upheaval in Saudi Arabia; or in the teeming, water-starved tinderbox of Yemen, home to twenty-two million people and eighty million firearms.

  The U.S. Navy’s new maritime strategy, unveiled in October 2007 at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, both states and implies that the navy will henceforth seek a sustained, forward presence in the Indian Ocean and adjacent western Pacific, but less so in the Atlantic. The U.S. Marine Corps “Vision and Strategy” statement, unveiled in June 2008, covering the years to 2025, also concludes in so many words that the Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters will be a central theater of conflict and competition. Along with its continued dominance in the Pacific, the U.S. clearly seeks to be the preeminent South Asian power. This signals a momentous historical shift away from the North Atlantic and Europe. The United States may not control events inside the “big sandbox” of the Middle East, but, as the military analyst Ralph Peters suggests, it will compensate by trying to dominate the doors in and out of the sandbox—the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb: choke points where the naval presence of India and China will be expanding alongside America’s own.

  India’s and China’s aspirations for great-power status, as well as their quest for energy security, have compelled them “to redirect their gazes from land to the seas,” write James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, associate professors at the U.S. Naval War College. Meanwhile, as Holmes and Yoshihara also note, there are “lingering questions over the sustainability of American primacy on the high seas,” something that has guaranteed commercial maritime stability for decades, and has, therefore, been taken for granted, even as globalization itself has depended upon it.14 If we are entering a phase of history in which several nations will share dominance of the high seas, rather than one as in the recent past, then the Indian Ocean will play center stage to this more dynamic and unstable configuration.

  While China seeks to expand its influence vertically, that is, reaching southward down to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, India seeks to expand its influence horizontally, reaching eastward and westward to the borders of Victorian age British India, parallel to the Indian Ocean. Chinese president Hu Jintao, according to one report, has bemoaned China’s sea-lane vulnerability, referring to it as his country’s “Malacca dilemma,” a dependence on the narrow and vulnerable Strait of Malacca for oil imports from which China must somehow escape.15 It is an old fear, for Ming China’s world was disrupted in 1511 when the Portuguese conquered Malacca. In the twenty-first century an escape from the Malacca dilemma means, among other things, eventually using Indian Ocean ports to transport oil and other energy products via roads and pipelines northward into the heart of China, so that tankers do not all have to sail through the Strait of Malacca to reach their destination. This is just one reason why China wants desperately to integrate Taiwan into its dominion, so that it can redirect its naval energies to the Indian Ocean.16

  The Chinese military’s so-called string-of-pearls strategy for the Indian Ocean features the construction of a large port and listening post at the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, where the Chinese could monitor ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. There could be another Chinese-utilized port in Pakistan, at Pasni, seventy-five miles east of Gwadar and joined to it by a new highway. At Hambantota, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, the Chinese seem to be building the oil-age equivalent of a coaling station for their ships. At the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal, Chinese companies have been active in developing the container port facility, where China might also be seeking naval access. In Burma, where the Chinese have given billions of dollars in military assistance to the ruling junta, Beijing is building and upgrading commercial and naval bases; constructing road, waterway, and pipeline links from the Bay of Bengal to China’s Yunnan Province; and operating surveillance facilities on the Coco Islands deep in the Bay of Bengal.17 A number of these ports are closer to cities in central and western China than those cities are to Beijing and Shanghai. Such Indian Ocean ports, with north-south road and rail links, would help economically liberate landlocked inner China. China is reaching southward and westward, evinced by a seemingly improbable railway it hopes to construct linking its westernmost provinces—across some of the highest terrain in the world—to a copper-producing region of Afghanistan south of Kabul.

  Of course, one must be extremely careful in judging China’s actions in this region. What the Chinese actually plan for the Indian Ocean is still far from clear and open to debate. Some in Washington are skeptical of the whole notion of a string-of-pearls strategy. Overt bases do not conform with China’s nonhegemonic, benign view of itself. The Chinese are rarely seeking outright control, standing by, as in the case of Gwadar, as the Port of Singapore Authority prepares to run the facility for decades to come. (Though, as one Singaporean official told me, his country is tiny and thus no threat to China at Gwadar.) Many pipeline routes originating in these ports go through what are presently politically unstable areas, so China is in no rush to go forward with some of these plans. Indeed, partly out of security concerns, the Chinese have shelved a multibillion-dollar coastal oil refinery at Gwadar. Nevertheless, given the dictates of geography and China’s historical ties to the Indian Ocean region, about which I will elaborate, something is clearly going on. It isn’t the port projects per se that are critical, because all of them are motivated by local development realities and only secondarily concerned with China. Rather, what is interesting and bears watching is China’s desire for access to modern deepwater ports in friendly countries along the southern Eurasian rimland, where it has invested considerably in economic aid and diplomatic outreach, thus giving Beijing a greater presence along Indian Ocean sea lines of communication. Guarding these lines makes for a major bureaucratic sales argument in Chinese power circles for a blue-water oceanic force.18 The real lesson here is the subtlety of the world we are entering, of which the Indian Ocean provides a salient demonstration. Instead of the hardened military bases of the Cold War and earlier epochs, there will be dual-use civilian-military facilities where basing arrangements will be implicit rather than explicit, and completely dependent on the health of the bilateral relationship in question.

  China’s long-term quest for a presence in the Indian Ocean in order to project power and protect its merchant and energy fleets is evinced by its well-heeled, very public commemoration of the historical figure of Zheng H
e, the fifteenth-century Ming dynasty explorer and admiral who plied the seas between China and the East Indies, Ceylon, the Persian Gulf, and the Horn of Africa. A Muslim eunuch of Mongolian origin who was captured and castrated as a little boy for service in the Forbidden City and rose up through the ranks, Zheng He took his treasure fleet of hundreds of ships with as many as thirty thousand men—including doctors, interpreters, and astrologers—to Middle Eastern shores to trade, exact tribute, and show the flag.19 China’s much renewed emphasis on this Indian Ocean explorer and his life story says, in effect, that these seas have always been part of its zone of influence.

  At the same time that China is asserting itself, India is looking to increase its regional influence from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. The first foreign visit of Admiral Sureesh Mehta, formerly chief of the Indian naval staff, was to the Gulf countries to the west, where trade with India is burgeoning. And as India booms, so also will its trade with Iran and a recovering Iraq. Take India and Iran, two littoral states, one dominating South Asia and the other the Middle East. Americans are not accustomed to seeing them in the same category but on a crucial level they are. Iran, like Afghanistan, has become a strategic rear base for India against Pakistan, as well as a future energy partner. In 2005, India and Iran signed a multibillion-dollar deal under which Iran will supply India with 7.5 million tons of liquefied natural gas annually for twenty-five years.20 Though never fully ratified, the deal has been pending, and it likely will move forward at some foreseeable time. Likewise, there has been talk of an energy pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India, a project that would go a long way toward stabilizing Indian-Pakistani relations, as well as joining the Middle East and South Asia at the hip. India has also been helping Iran develop the Chah Bahar port on the Arabian Sea. This is one more reason the U.S. attempt to isolate Iran is untenable. In the past, American power depended on divisions within Eurasia, so many a country needed to go through Washington to get its interests served. But the long-term trend here is of greater integration, thus freezing out the United States to some extent.

  It is often forgotten that for hundreds of years, India has enjoyed close economic and cultural ties with both Persian and Arabian shores of the Gulf. Approximately 3.5 million Indians work in Gulf Cooperation Council countries and send home $4 billion annually in remittances. A major impetus for India’s current maritime buildup in the Indian Ocean was the humiliating inability of its navy to evacuate its citizens from Iraq and Kuwait during the 1990–91 Gulf crisis.21

  Concomitantly, India is expanding its military and economic ties with Burma to the east. Democratic India does not have the luxury of spurning authoritarian Burma, because its neighbor is rich in natural resources and threatens to be completely taken over by China if India stands aloof and does nothing. In fact, India hopes a nexus of east-west roads and energy pipelines will ultimately give it soft power dominance over the former territorial India of the Raj, which encompassed Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma.

  Yet competition between India and China, caused by their spreading and overlapping layers of commercial and political influence, will play out less on land than in a naval realm. Zhao Nanqi, when he was the director of the general staff logistics department in the Chinese navy, proclaimed: “We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean only of the Indians.”22 This attitude applies particularly to the Bay of Bengal, where both nations will have considerable maritime presences, owing to the closeness of Burma as well as the Andaman and Nicobar islands, possessed by India near the entrance of the Strait of Malacca. Conversely, India’s and China’s mutual dependence on the same sea lanes could also lead to an alliance between them that, in some circumstances, might be implicitly hostile to the United States. In other words, the Indian Ocean will be where global power dynamics will be revealed. Together with the contiguous Near East and Central Asia, it constitutes the new Great Game in geopolitics.

  The Cold War forced an artificial dichotomy on area studies in which the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Pacific Rim were separate entities. But as India and China become more integrally connected with both Southeast Asia and the Middle East through trade, energy, and security agreements, the map of Asia is reemerging as a single organic unit, just as it was during earlier epochs in history—manifested now by an Indian Ocean map.

  Such a map, in which artificial regions dissolve, includes even landlocked Central Asia. While the Chinese develop a deepwater port at Gwadar in Pakistani Baluchistan, only a hundred miles farther to the west, inside the Gulf of Oman, the Indians, as I mentioned, along with the Russians and Iranians, are developing the port of Chah Bahar in Iranian Baluchistan, which is already a forward base for the Iranian navy. (The Indians have also encouraged a new road from Chah Bahar to the southwestern Afghan province of Nimruz.) Both Gwadar and Chah Bahar, which lie on major maritime shipping routes close to the Gulf—and might be expected to be in fierce competition with each other—may one day be linked by feeder roads and pipelines to oil- and natural gas–rich Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and other former Soviet republics in the heart of the Eurasian landmass. And by helping to build a highway connecting Afghanistan’s main ring road with Iranian ports, India has potentially ended Afghanistan’s reliance on Pakistan for its outlet to the sea. It is access to the Indian Ocean that will help define future Central Asian politics, according to S. Frederick Starr, a Central Asian area expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. To be sure, part of Iran’s appeal to India is as a viable transit state for Central Asian gas. Moreover, Indian and Pakistani ports have been touted as “evacuation points” for Caspian Sea oil.23 In this way, the destinies of countries as far away from the Indian Ocean as Kazakhstan and Georgia (which either have hydrocarbons or are transit routes for them) are connected with it.

  A particularly critical country in this regard is Afghanistan, through which natural gas from the Dauletabad field in Turkmenistan may one day flow en route to Pakistani and Indian cities and ports. This is in addition to other energy pipeline routes between Central Asia and the Subcontinent of which Afghanistan is right in the middle. Therefore, stabilizing Afghanistan is about much more than just the anti-terrorist war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban; it is about securing the future prosperity of the whole of southern Eurasia; as well as easing India and Pakistan toward peaceful coexistence through the sharing of energy routes.

  The point is, as not only Asian but African populations, too, continue to increase and become more prosperous through the enlargement of middle classes, trade and energy routes will burgeon in all directions, both on land and at sea, leading to a multiplicity of organizations and alliances. That is why in the twenty-first century the Indian Ocean constitutes a vastly different map than the one of Europe and the North Atlantic in the twentieth. The earlier map illustrated both a singular threat and a concept: the Soviet Union. The aim was simple: defend Western Europe against the Red Army and keep the Soviet navy bottled up near the polar ice cap. Because the threat was straightforward, and the United States the paramount power, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became arguably history’s most successful alliance. Of course, one might envision a NATO of the seas for the Indian Ocean, comprising South Africa, Oman, India, Pakistan, Singapore, and Australia, with Pakistan and India bickering inside the alliance much as Greece and Turkey do inside NATO. But such an idea represents an old model that does not quite capture the meaning of what the cartographic image represented by the Indian Ocean is all about.

  While it may form a historical and cultural unit, in strategic terms, the Indian Ocean, like the larger world we are inheriting, does not have a single focal point; it has many. The Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, and so on are all burdened by particular threats with different players in each arena. Then, too, there are the transnational threats of terrorism, natural disasters, nuclear proliferation, and anarchy. Any future Indian Ocean alliance will be like the
present NATO alliance, looser and less singularly focused than during the Cold War years. But given the size of this ocean—stretching across seven time zones and almost half the world’s latitudes—and the comparative slowness at which ships move, it may be very hard for a multinational navy to even get to a crisis zone in adequate time. It is easily forgotten that the principal reason the United States played such a leading role in the tsunami relief effort off the coast of Indonesia in the Bay of Bengal in 2004–2005 was that it happened to have an aircraft carrier strike group in the vicinity. Had that carrier strike group, the Abraham Lincoln, been in the Korean Peninsula, where it was headed, America’s response to the tsunami would have been less adequate. This is why a single alliance system is a backward way of looking at the world.

  It is more productive, instead, to think of a multiplicity of regional and ideological alliances in different parts of the ocean and its littoral states. There is already evidence of it. The navies of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia, with the help of the U.S. Navy, have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of Malacca. The navies of India, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and the United States—democracies all—have exercised together off India’s southwestern Malabar coast, in an implicit rebuke to China’s design on the ocean, even as the armies of India and China have conducted exercises together near the southern Chinese city of Kunming. A combined naval task force, comprised of the Americans, Canadians, French, Dutch, British, Pakistanis, and Australians, patrols permanently off the Horn of Africa in an effort to deter piracy.