E-Notes

Robert Kaplan on the New Balance of Power

April 2008

Trudy Kuehner, reporter

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. His most recent book is Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (September 2007). His writings have been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications. 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.

Europe

Europe is more complicated, he noted. Few if any places have a worse civil-military defense relationship than Europe. Europeans see their own militaries as suited for peacekeeping and other non-combat related duties. And yet because of its economic power, Europe will continue to be a military power in the future. This is where NATO comes in. NATO is no longer the all-for-one, one-for-all organization that faced down a Soviet threat in the heart of Europe. NATO now includes many more countries (26), it is gradually spreading eastward, and it is dealing with a multiplicity of challenges, whether Afghanistan or peacekeeping, where each deployment is going to see different NATO countries involved.

NATO is not the same all-powerful alliance that it was for us during the Cold War, but neither is it irrelevant, Kaplan said. It remains relevant precisely because we are entering an Asian century. If the U.S. is going to be in strategic competition with China and is going to quietly, subtly leverage countries like India and Japan, or South Korea and Australia, against China, the U.S. will continue to need a partnership with Europe.

NATO may not be able to do everything the U.S. hoped it would, Kaplan acknowledged, but it is still the better option than the U.S. going it alone. The October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was, in purely military terms, carried out brilliantly. The U.S. leveraged 21st-century technology with 19th-century techniques-Special Forces on horseback calling in horseback calling in air strikes with mobile transmitters on specific targets. But from a political, strategic point of view, it made a mistake. By going it alone, without a full-fledged NATO presence, it did not give our NATO allies a stake in the outcome. Because they did not have a stake in the outcome from the beginning, it is increasingly hard to keep them involved as time goes on.

Naval Threats

If Afghanistan has taught that it might not be wise to go it alone, notwithstanding the quick initial results one can achieve that way, Kaplan said; and if Iraq has shown the U.S. the crude, low-tech end of asymmetry with IEDs and other devices, then the Chinese competition is going to show the U.S. the very sophisticated, subtle, high-tech end of asymmetry in the naval and other realms. The Chinese are not competing with the U.S. across the board; they are concentrating on three things: (1) submarines, (2) missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, and (3) the ability to knock out satellites in space, all of which put together constitute an asymmetric threat against the U.S. navy. That asymmetric threat is not designed to get into a war with the U.S., but to deny the U.S. access whenever and wherever it wants, from the Asian mainland to the Chinese coast, to make it think twice before entering a zone where its carriers could be hit by a missile. This will dissuade U.S. movements and affect U.S. strategy. And ultimately, Kaplan noted, power is the ability to affect your competitors’ mode of operations.

Kaplan emphasized navies because right now the U.S. is obsessed with low-tech land wars, even though 70-80 percent of all goods and commercial items in this globalized age travel by sea. About 80 percent of humanity lives close to the sea. Navies have advantages that armies do not. Navies can forward deploy to within a few miles of a combat zone without a debate in Congress, something that armies cannot. When the U.S. sent two aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait in 1996, there was no debate in Congress. Nor was there debate when two carrier strike groups were sent to within the Iranian coast. Had the Army tried to do the equivalent, it would have been front page news worldwide. In fact, much of 2007 was taken up with a debate about the U.S. army deploying against Iran.

New Geopolitics

Kaplan feels that we tend to divide the world up artificially into old Cold War classifications of the Middle East, the South Asian Indian subcontinent, and the Pacific Rim of East Asia. These divisions were forced on the U.S. by the Cold War, in which the country had a whole world to patrol, in a way. And so Washington broke it up into academic specialties in order to get a better grip on things. But increasingly, as China, North Korea, Japan, and India do more and more trade with Iran and Syria, and the Indian and Chinese navies are increasingly in the Persian Gulf, these boundaries are breaking apart. A holistic map of Eurasia is reasserting itself. Any conflict with Iran would involve India and China in some way, because of all the trade they do there. The Persian Gulf is about to become much more clogged with oil supertankers than it ever was. That is because among a number of big phenomena going on in the world today, Kaplan said, one is the growth of the Chinese and Indian middle classes.

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.

Africa

Kaplan recalled his years of writing about anarchy in Africa since the 1990s. Africa is usually seen as a disaster story, he said, one of the latest of which is Kenya, a place of tribal rebellions and ethnic clashes. But Africa is slowly changing, too. Increasingly the ethnic conflicts there are going to be part of the wages of success rather than the wages of failure. Africa represents the last untapped global food market in the world, because commodity prices are going to gradually go up, too, for basic foodstuffs, again because of the growth of the middle class in the developing world. And so we have China investing in Africa more and more. Africa, Kaplan noted, had higher GDP growth rates the last few years than all of Asia, taking India and China out of the equation. Africa is finally starting to catch up, ironically, not because of aid from the West, but because of trade and investment from other parts of the former third world, from sovereign wealth funds in Dubai and China. We’re going to be faced with competition for resources in Africa with the Chinese, whether it’s oil in the Gulf of Guinea or coal in Mozambique and other parts of southern Africa.

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.

All this is occurring as central power in the Middle East continues to erode, Kaplan reported. Whether it is dictatorships in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or legitimate pro-Western monarchies like in Morocco or Jordan; whether it is more in-between regimes like in Tunisia, Algeria; semi-democratic ones like in South Yemen; or family corporate-style enterprises like along the Arabian Gulf, leaders, even dictators, increasingly have to listen to their own people and consult with their own people in order to take decisions. So dictatorship is weakening throughout the Middle East, as is democracy, which is not a success almost anywhere in the Middle East. Central power is weakening as fewer countries have a three- or four-man elite that determines history in these countries. There is now a whole class of people, 100-200 people who make up an increasingly modernizing elite.

There are some interesting exceptions, Kaplan noted. In Oman, the ruler has absolute power and runs a medieval-style dynasty that is very pro-Western, pro-American. The country has numerous daycare and women’s clinics, everything you would consider progressive. All this is being done through an absolute feudal, medieval dictatorship. Kaplan noted this to illustrate that the situation on the ground worldwide does not always comport with debates in Washington on what systems work and which don’t.

When Kaplan spent two weeks in Oman two months ago, he reported, Omanis were full of questions about the freedom Americans tell them they do not have. They thought life was good and said they didn’t want "freedom" like that in Iraq or elsewhere. Of course, Iraq is an unfair example, Kaplan conceded. One could point to other places where a more open system has led to development. But democracy is not the last word in human political development. There will be all kinds of variations and systems to deal with. America is increasingly going to have to share power with countries in Asia, and doing business with the Middle East is going to get harder and harder because there are more and more people who will have to be consulted and convinced in each of these countries.

U.S. Military

The last war, the one in which we’re presently engaged, is never a good indicator of wars of the future, Kaplan said. The 1870 Franco-Prussian War gave no indication of what World War I would be like, Korea gave no indication of what Vietnam would be like, WWII gave no indication of Korea, and Gulf War I gave no indication of the current Iraq War. So the U.S. may master the arts of land-based counterinsurgency just as that recedes over the horizon and is irrelevant for future challenges and conflicts.

Counterinsurgency will certainly play a part in America’s future, he said, but probably only a part. The U.S.will increasingly depend on its air force and navy to patrol large spaces around the world, while the army and marine corps experiment at the unconventional edges of conflict. The air force and navy are going to have no choice but to utilize coalition-building and alliances with other air forces and navies around the world.

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.

Conclusion

Kaplan concluded that going forward, the U.S. will have to build bridges with China even as it strengthens India and Japan and continues working hard to keep NATO relevant and inclusive. It will have to work on a lot of fronts, and the main theme is that if you go it alone, you can often get to a point faster than if you do it in a coalition, but if you want to get to the next point and the point after that and the point after that, you’ve ultimately got to do it with a coalition. So it’s better to go slow at the beginning and achieve some long-term ends afterwards. Kaplan emphasized that he was not speaking about the weakening of American power, but about other countries catching up and finding ways to neutralize the U.S. over time.

He did note that the U.S. is struggling with something it brought about in the first place. After WWII, with Asia and Europe devastated, the U.S. came to dominate the Pacific Ocean as its own private American lake for the next 50-60 years. Those days are ending, because the rest of the world finally caught up. They rebuilt after WWII, which took some decades, and they developed their economies. A lot of poor countries are now developing and becoming more free and open, and as they do so, their nationalism is growing, too. This is because nationalism tends to grow in the first generation or two of middle classes, when you have an influential group of literate people who understand their country’s history for the first time in collective memory. So the world playing field is more equal than ever, precisely because we tried to change the world and succeeded. The old stereotype of India being poor and downtrodden no longer holds. True, it has 700 million people who live on $1-2 a day. But Delhi and Mombai are also becoming modern cities. Calcutta is becoming a high-tech center and a gateway to Southeast Asia.

So borders within Asia are crumbling. These countries are increasingly interconnected, and new economic prowess is leading to strengthened militaries. The U.S. military’s goal in the future, Kaplan concluded, is going to be a combination of having sea-basing and other capabilities that will allow the U.S. to be unencumbered by alliances, on one hand, even as we try to strengthen alliances wherever we can, on the other hand. It is a matter of being as flexible as possible. Kaplan predicts that whoever is elected the next U.S. president, whether Republican or Democrat, will evolve sooner or later into something very Nixonian in terms of foreign policy. After the first year, whoever is elected is going to be a power balancer.

We’re entering a world of 19th-century balance of power on several different levels, Kaplan ended. All Metternich had to worry about was Europe; today we have to show the same adroitness at balancing across the whole world.

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