Robert Kaplan on Fareed Zakaria GPS
CNAS Author: Robert Kaplan
Original Post: Fareed Zakaria GPS
Type: Interview
August 29, 2010 —
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
Today we are devoting the show to ideas today. New ideas, big ideas. I have always been fascinated by ideas, which is, I suppose, the ability to think creatively about the world, to see new patterns, to make new connections, invent new concepts. There are many people who love to read biographies. Others people love novels. I love idea books, books that make me think about the world.
I would make the case that this kind of thinking is actually very important for a society, especially an advanced industrial society like the United States. After all, everyone agrees that America needs, above all, to be able to innovate. And innovation is really about the creation and generation of ideas, all kinds of ideas in all kinds of fields.
Others will be great at manufacturing, at execution, at agriculture, but America has to be great at, well, thinking, creating, innovating.
So we want to invent the iPod, create Facebook, come up with the new electric car.
This actually applies not simply in the economic realm, but even in foreign policy. The United States will have to tackle a fast-changing world without the traditional dominance it has had in the past, which has been about arms, about money, about hard power. It will have to earn its leadership, try to set the global agenda with the quality of its ideas, not the quantity of brute force, persuade other countries to come along because they see a win-win for themselves, not because they cower in fear at Washington. So the skills of diplomacy, conceptualizing and operationalizing ideas, now become supremely important.
On the program, on our big ideas program, we start with big ideas on foreign policy with a great strategist, Robert Kaplan, who will explain to us the new geopolitics of the most important spot on the earth -- East Asia. He will talk to us about the geography of Chinese power.
Let's get started.
ZAKARIA: This big idea is about China. We have talked countless times on this show about China's rise, mostly about its economic rise.
But China has also embarked on a big push to strengthen its military, to increase its political reach both on land and by sea. So the question is, to what end? Does China want to be a real superpower, a military superpower? And whom does it bump up against in Asia? What is the geography of Chinese power?
That's what Robert Kaplan is here to talk about. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He's also the author of a new book called "Monsoon." Welcome.
ROBERT KAPLAN, AUTHOR, "MONSOON": It's a pleasure to be here, Fareed.
ZAKARIA: So, you talk about a lot of this in a really brilliant foreign affairs article. One of the things you talk about that I was struck by is there is this great geostrategist from about a hundred years ago, Halford Mackinder, who says that while Russia would never be a true geographic world dominator, China would if it got it ever act its act together economically.
KAPLAN: Yes.
ZAKARIA: Explain why.
KAPLAN: All right. Just look at the map. Here is Russia, north of the temperate zone, bumping up against Arctic ice. It has a long sea coast which is off the map, but it's all ice-bound. But here is China, right in the temperate zone. Northern China is the same latitude as Maine. Southern is the same latitude as New Orleans. It occupies the same latitudes as the United States, so it's blessed by climate and geography. Also, it reaches deep into Central Asia with all of its mineral wealth and strategic importance. And unlike Russia, it has a 9,000-kilometer sea coast, with a lot of good natural harbors in the temperate and subtropical zones.
So, as you said, if China got its act together, China is in a position to dominate Eurasia to the degree that no other Eurasian power is. But let me say this -- that China is not a missionary power like us. It doesn't seek to export a system like we did or the Soviet Union did. But it's not a status quo power. It's in a strong hunt for hydrocarbons, minerals, and strategic metals in order to lift the living standard dramatically of a fifth of humanity. The fact that China now is at the apex of its reach on land gives it unprecedented opportunity to reach beyond in this age of globalization.
ZAKARIA: So China's sea power now has begun to expand in the building of ports, the building of the navy. Tell us about China's sea power.
KAPLAN: First of all, what is the biggest news development in the past 10 years in my opinion that hasn't been covered? I would say the rise of China as a sea power. And why is China rising as a sea power? Because it has the luxury to do so, and it has the luxury to do so because it settled most of its land borders. As I said, it's at the high point of its land ascendancy. The fact that it's becoming a sea power across all this area -- and India, too, is rising and becoming a sea power -- brings China and India into competition for the first time in their histories. Now, here comes the interesting part.
If China dominates East Asia, the marginal seas like the South China Sea and the East Sea, that makes it a great regional power. But once China has a presence in the Indian Ocean, it becomes a great power. And China is busy building ports in Chittagong, in Bangladesh, in Hambantota and Sri Lanka and Pakistan, in Kayukpu, in Kyaukpyu, in Burma here. Why are they doing this? To have military bases? No. The Chinese are far more subtle than that.
They want throughput, warehouse access for their goods, so that they can at some point have their own sea lines of communication between the hydrocarbon-rich Persian Gulf area and China itself. So, for China to protect its own shipments of energy and its commercial goods between the Middle East and Asia requires a presence, not a domination, on the Indian Ocean.
ZAKARIA: This reminds me of the way the British Empire came into being, which is with sea lanes, with coaling stations that were then built so you could in those days -- the ships required coal. And so that, then, of course, meant you had an interest in the stability of the country in which you had the coaling stations. And so, similarly, if you look at what you are describing, it's here, here, here. You can imagine a Chinese zone of influence -- and this is from your foreign affairs article -- which extends this way.
KAPLAN: Yes. And particularly interesting is that while Pakistan is sort of the Balkans of Asia, in danger of dismemberment, Burma, Myanmar, on the map, is sort of the pre-World War I Belgium, because it's where India and Chinese influence terrifically overlap. Just north of where China is building a port, in Situai (ph), 50 miles north, the Indians are building a deepwater port. What's here?
Natural gas. They both want natural gas. China wants to build roads and pipelines across Burma into western and central China so they can avoid the bottleneck of Malacca Strait here. So, to take oil and natural gas from the Middle East, all the way to get more natural gas from Burma, and then ship it over land.
ZAKARIA: Do you see Chinese military presence expanding? I mean, they are building more ships.
KAPLAN: Yes.
ZAKARIA: Talk about that.
KAPLAN: Yes. As I said, China is not a status quo power only because it seeks minerals and metals and hydrocarbons. It doesn't have a traditional imperial mindset in that sense. The Chinese are very smart. They are not buying across the board.
They are emphasizing things like attack submarines, the ability to hit moving satellites in space, missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, cyber-warfare.
ZAKARIA: So this is what one would call asymmetrical responses.
They figure they can't match the Americans tank for tank, plane for plane, but they can do things that would disable America's technological dominance.
KAPLAN: Yes. The roadside bombers in Iraq showed us the low side of asymmetry. What China's showing us now is the high end of asymmetry, far more subtle, not designed to get into a war but with the United States, but to deny us access in the South China Sea. And the really hot area in the coming years and decades is going to be the South China Sea.
ZAKARIA: Where -- that's right there.
KAPLAN: That's here. It starts in Taiwan, in the north, and it comes down to Malaysia here. This whole area which gets a third of all world commercial sea traffic and a half of all the energy traffic destined for northeast Asia. You know, South Korea and Japan. Think of the South China Sea as the future Persian Gulf, because you have large deposits of energy here. Just recently, the Chinese declared the South China Sea a core interest, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed back saying that the U.S. would help mediate disputes here.
ZAKARIA: And the Chinese responded very angrily to that.
KAPLAN: Why did they respond so angrily? Here's why. The Chinese look at the South China Sea the way we looked at the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th century. What makes America a great power ultimately? It's our domination of the Western Hemisphere, which means our domination of the Caribbean. There was a time in our history when the Caribbean was contested by many European powers, and the U.S. policy was it's technically an international waterway, but, in fact, we will dominate it. And that's how the Chinese see the South China Sea. In fact, Chinese officials have told me that. They made the comparison with the Caribbean, not me.
ZAKARIA: And we are back talking with the geostrategist Robert Kaplan about whether the United States and China are destined for a great power conflict in Asia. As China expands, what it is bumping up against is the established dominant power in the region, which is the United States. We have bases in Japan, we have bases in the Philippines. We have relations with every country, military relations, in Singapore through Japan, of course. How do they view this? What does it mean for America?
KAPLAN: Actually, I see a great opportunity for the United States if we play this smart. We are entering a militarily naval-wise, multi-polar world in the decades to come. We are not going to have the dominance that we did. Maintaining our bases because of public opinion in Japan is getting harder. One of the only reasons our relations with South Korea are so good is because we have reduced their land presence from about 37,000 troops to 25,000 troops there.
So what's going to happen is that if the U.S. plays it smart, it will put more emphasis on the islands of Oceania outside here, Guam, the Northern Marianas, Palau, et cetera, which are U.S. holdings where we can build up bases, be less provocative towards China, and where we can be, you know, to borrow Madeleine Albright's phrase, the indispensable power. In other words, because we will be the balancing power that has no territorial ambitions in Asia so that all these countries here will need us.
Because on the one hand, they have to accept the Chinese hegemony for trade reasons and distant reasons of distance. But on the other hand, they don't want to be gobbled up by it. They want a hedging power that we can serve. And we can do this with the Navy of our current size or even slightly smaller, factoring in budget cuts.
ZAKARIA: But we would have relations with Japan, with Indonesia, in the Philippines, with Vietnam, with India. Is China going to see that as some kind of encirclement?
KAPLAN: Not if we try to incorporate China into this concert of powers. In other words, reaching out to China at all levels, all the time, at the same moment that we push forward like-minded others like Japan and India, encourage their military development, particularly in the naval and air sphere.
ZAKARIA: So what you are describing is a pretty complex set of geopolitical relationships because you have economics, you have border disputes, you have different political systems. China is not a democracy. Japan is, India is. And all of this is going to have to be managed by China and the United States, principally, very, very shrewdly to avoid some kind of great power conflict.
KAPLAN: It's going to be balance of power flanked with three-dimensional chess essentially. And this brings us back to the great 19th century and even ancient strategists.
ZAKARIA: Very tough. Do you think the Americans are up for it?
KAPLAN: I think increasingly, they are. I think the naming of the special envoys to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel -- Palestine has been criticized a lot. But one thing it's done that hasn't been noted is that it's freed up the secretary of state's time to make more trips to East Asia.
ZAKARIA: And that's where she's going to have to make a lot more trips going forward.
KAPLAN: Yes.
ZAKARIA: Robert Kaplan, a pleasure to have you on.
KAPLAN: My pleasure.
Topic(s): Development and Diplomacy, Regional Security Challenges, Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime, U.S. Military Forces & Operations, U.S. National Security and Defense Policy, WMD and Nuclear Proliferation
Project(s): Asia-Pacific Security , Flashpoints Overview, South China Sea: Cooperation, Conflict, and U.S. Interests
People: Robert Kaplan
