China Rising

Here's an excellent article, from the National Post, of how China's increasing military strength will lead to confrontation with the US.

But the article fails to mention how the most powerful gun...

will affect the balance of naval power in the future.

CALGARY -It goes without saying that 2001 signalled a dramatic realignment in the global military landscape, but perhaps not entirely for reasons that come naturally to mind. Events in autumn of that year -- the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then the first of this century's Arab wars -- made a convincing case that the future of combat would be on the sands of the Middle East. And yet, what happened in April that year may have been just as, maybe more, portentous. That was when Chinese jet fighters intercepted, collided with and forced the landing on Hainan Island of a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane. For 11 days, the Beijing government held the 24 American crew-members as virtual captives. Chinese intelligence officers inspected the plane rivet by rivet, then cut it into pieces before it was sent back to the U.S., two months later.

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The incident was an embarrassing one for the normally unflappable U.S. military --almost surely the effect the Chinese had planned, suggests Robert D. Kaplan, who was in Calgary last week for the National Post-sponsored Teatro Speakers Series. Mr. Kaplan is a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly magazine and an author of several books on the military and geopolitics, including his latest two: Imperial Grunts and Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts (his 1993 Balkan Ghosts heavily influenced the Clinton administration's policies in Bosnia). But such a description falls miles short of explaining what Mr. Kaplan is, and does, which is traveling the world, from the Horn of Africa to El Salvador to the Arctic, to live amongst American troops for months at a time, in their barracks, their Blackhawks, their Humvees, their destroyers and their submarines. That, and his immersion in military history -- he easily drops references to Thucydides and Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in our conversation -- has given Mr. Kaplan such instinctive understanding of the way militaries think and work that he would surely be as comfortable working at the Pentagon as he is at a monthly mainstream magazine (as a matter of fact, he has been made National Security Chair of the U.S. Naval Academy's political science department). And what top militaries around the world are thinking most deeply about right now, he says, is not Afghanistan or Iraq. Not even Iran. But the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and what he predicts will be a new Cold War between Beijing and Washington, part of the imminent and vast reorganization of world power.

"While we're all focused on the Middle East, in a dirty counter-insurgency war, the world is changing," Mr. Kaplan says. "Military power as well as economic power is moving from Europe to Asia. You're seeing the Indian navy go from the fifth-to third-largest navy in the world. You're seeing an expansion in Russia's Far Eastern fleet. You're seeing the Japanese navy that is soon going to be four times as large as the British Royal Navy."

All of it preparation for the transformation of the post-Soviet unipolar world to a multipolarity, dominated by a remarkably muscular China, one that will increasingly demand more control over the ocean routes of cargo ships and oil tankers to secure supply for the appetites of its burgeoning middle class. It's happened before:

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"For half a century after the Second World War, the U.S. owned the Pacific Ocean," Mr. Kaplan says. "It was our own private lake. The U.S. Navy could go anywhere it wanted, anytime it wanted." That is about to change. Spending by some estimates 4.5% of its GDP on defence (Washington spends 3.9%, though America's GDP is six times larger than the People's Republic of China's) "the Chinese will field more warships around the world than the U.S. in a few years," he says. China covets, and will likely eventually attain, either direct or indirect control of areas outside the U.S. sphere of influence, places like Pyonyang, Moscow and Tehran. Wherever America's influence is weak or absent, Beijing will seek to assert its own. And in some areas where Washington's hand is now strong, the long-term may favour the Middle Kingdom:Mr. Kaplan fully expects the PRC to eventually absorb Taiwan -- which the politburo desires less for ethnic affinities than as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier," key to projecting power into the Pacific -- despite America's determination to prevent exactly that.

Beijing may not truly challenge the overwhelming power and strength of America's total military force anytime soon. But it doesn't have to. The Communist government will focus on three key strategic strengths, Mr. Kaplan predicts: submarine power, to secure coastal shelves and infest blue waters, ballistic missiles and weapons in space. When China surprised the world last year, shooting down one of its own satellites, it "ended the debate about the militarization of space," Mr. Kaplan says. "Of course space is going to be militarized -- just like the oceans were militarized by the Portuguese in the 16th century. It's a new sphere of human activity, so it's going to be militarized."

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