This Week at War: China Rules the Waves

Learning to share the oceans with China

On Sept. 22, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a report, China's Arrival: A Strategic Framework for a Global Relationship. Journalist and CNAS senior fellow Robert Kaplan, wrote a chapter in the report called "China's Two-Ocean Strategy" (see page 45).

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Kaplan asserts, "China is in the midst of a shipbuilding and acquisition craze that will result in the People's Liberation Army Navy having more ships than the U.S. Navy sometime in the next decade." Since 1945, U.S. diplomatic and political strategies in Asia have been predicated on U.S. naval domination in the western Pacific and Indian oceans. The U.S. Navy's control of seagoing lines of commerce from the Middle East to all points in Asia has been a major component of America's alliance system in the region and its relations with potential adversaries. Kaplan's essay reminds us that over the next decade or so, the rise of China's naval power will scrap the assumptions underlying the United States' Asian diplomacy.

According to Kaplan, the collapse of the Soviet Army in the 1990s removed China's most significant land-based threat. With its territorial security established, China's leaders could afford to spend money on naval forces. This shift coincided with the massive expansion of China's international trade. Kaplan reminds us that China's energy imports from the Middle East -- which travel across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca, and up the western Pacific -- will double over the next decade or two. China's ocean-going commerce currently receives protection from the U.S. Navy and its allies in the region. But as an arriving global power, China's leaders are not likely to tolerate this vulnerability to potential U.S. leverage. China's naval shipbuilding program indicates China's response.

According to Kaplan, by 2015 China will surpass South Korea and Japan to become the world's most prolific shipbuilder. China will achieve this position because its growing shipbuilding expertise will combine with its labor and capital cost advantages to make it the preferred shipbuilding vendor. China's cost advantages in "metal-bending" industries will compare very favorably against U.S. naval shipbuilders who are best known for gross cost overruns, long delays, and problem-ridden deliveries. U.S. military acquisition officials have hoped that U.S. technological advantages will offset an adversary's numbers. But such a focus on technology might be part of the problem, rather than the solution. Looking out over the next two decades, military shipbuilding trends do not favor the United States.

The solution is expanded diplomacy. Kaplan discusses how the United States and China will find common interests protecting shipping from piracy, terrorism, and natural disasters. In addition, China and the United States share an interest in keeping open the ocean's lines of communication -- both countries are highly dependent on trade and energy imports from the Middle East. With many common interests, China's arrival as a naval power need not result in conflict.

But will the United States be able to maintain its Asian alliance system if its naval hegemony comes under challenge? Will America's friends in Asia drift into China's orbit if the U.S. military cannot maintain its investment in naval power? This decade's land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have absorbed huge sums that might have otherwise gone into naval recapitalization. The looming fragility in America's position in the western Pacific might be the best reason for it to wind up its affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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