A phase of acute international tensions in Asia could then ensue. Such tensions could assume dangerous manifestations, particularly in the case of the developing China-India rivalry in South Asia specifically, but also in Asia as a whole more generally. Indian strategists speak openly of a greater India exercising a dominant position in an area ranging from Iran to Thailand. India is also positioning itself to control the Indian Ocean militarily; its naval and air power programs point clearly in that direction—as do politically guided efforts to establish for India strong positions, with geostrategic implications, in adjoining Bangladesh and Burma. India’s involvement in the construction of port facilities in these two states enhances India’s ability eventually to seek control over maritime passage through the Indian Ocean.
MAP 3.1 THE ‘ENCIRCLEMENT’ OF CHINA
China’s strategic relationship with Pakistan as well as its efforts to match India’s presence in Burma and Bangladesh also reflect a larger strategic design as well as an understandable intent to protect its essential maritime access through the Indian Ocean to the Middle East from the whims of a powerful neighbor. The Chinese have been exploring the possibility of building a major facility in Pakistan’s southwestern coast near Iran, at Gwadar, a peninsula jutting into the Indian Ocean, and connecting it by road or pipeline with China. In Burma, where India has been upgrading the port of Sittwe in order to obtain a shortcut to its geographically inaccessible northeast, the Chinese have been investing in the port of Kyauk Phru, from which a pipeline to China could also be built, thereby reducing Chinese dependence on a much longer passage through the Strait of Malacca. Political- military influence in Burma itself has been the larger stake involved in these geopolitically significant undertakings.
China, moreover, has a vital interest in Pakistan remaining a serious military complication for India’s strategic interests and growing aspirations. The Chinese desire to construct a naval facility in Pakistan was thus not only designed to establish a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean but also to signal the importance that China assigns to a viable Pakistan and to a healthy Sino-Pakistan relationship. Though China and India have been careful to avoid a military clash since their brief collision in 1962, China’s engagement with Pakistan, Pakistan’s internal vulnerability, India’s and China’s naval competition in the Indian Ocean, and both nations’ rising global status could trigger a dangerous arms race or, even worse, a real conflict. Fortunately, so far, the leaders of both countries have shown that they recognize that a minor war would resolve nothing while a major war between the two nuclear powers could destroy everything.
Nonetheless, even some border incidents could generate intense Chinese and/or Indian nationalistic passions that would be difficult to control politically. In that respect, India could prove to be more volatile, because its political system is less authoritarian and the Indian public’s understandable fear of Chinese-Pakistani collusion makes it more susceptible to aroused anti-Chinese feelings than is the case with anti-Indian mass sentiments in China. Moreover, the Indian press—reflecting resentment of China’s much more impressive modernization, more productive economy, and higher global standing—has become increasingly explicit in publicizing China’s potential geopolitical threat to India’s security. India’s second-largest English-language daily read by its English-speaking elite thus interpreted for its readers the reciprocal IndianChinese rivalry in South Asia just described above:
China’s calculated and motivated war preparation is for whom? . . . China built Gwadar port in Pakistan’s critically sensitive location to have her footprint in controlling sea-lanes and also watching India. . . . Thus with covert and overt support from Pakistan, China succeeded in neutralizing India through land and sea. Apart from that, violating all international rules, China outright changed Pakistan into a nuclear powered country, to counter India. Moreover, China’s move to build ports, oil pipelines, and highways in Myanmar too, is not less significant. Added to this, the Hambentola port built with Chinese assistance in Sri Lanka, which is physically a detached part of the Indian landmass is a well planned execution of China’s “String of Pearls Strategy” to encircle India across the Indian Ocean.[7]
It would be historically ironic, indeed, if the reemergence of China on the world scene resulted in conflicts to the detriment of Asia’s rising role in world affairs. But China’s rise so far has been impressive in its tangible accomplishments and somewhat reassuring in its calculated international conduct. Top Chinese political leaders appear to realize that China’s long-term ambitions could also be the victim of a global plunge into a post-America scramble.
In any case, irrespective of the calculations of top Chinese leaders and some symptoms of rising nationalistic impatience, it does appear that China’s ascent to global preeminence might encounter considerably more obstacles than was the case with America’s rise, and if pursued with evident impatience it could generate more active opposition than America ever had to confront during its ascendancy. China does not enjoy the advantages of America’s favorable geographical and historical circumstances at its takeoff stage in the early twentieth century. And unlike America’s emergence as the sole global superpower in the last decade of the twentieth century, China’s current rise is taking place in the context not only of rivalry with other regional powers but it is also highly dependent on the continued stability of the existing international economic system. Yet that very system could be in jeopardy if a post-America scramble generates a worldwide inclination toward a short-term but intense assertion of national interests at a time when the need for global cooperation is greater than ever.
2: THE GEOPOLITICALLY MOST ENDANGERED STATES
In the contemporary world, the security of a number of weaker states located geographically next to major regional powers depends (even in the absence of specific US commitments to some of them) on the international status quo reinforced by America’s global preeminence. The states in that vulnerable position are today’s geopolitical equivalents of nature’s “most endangered species.” Some of them have also come to be viewed by their more powerful neighbors as symbols of resented American intrusion into their existing or claimed regional spheres of influence. Accordingly, the temptation to act assertively toward them would rise in proportion to the decline in America’s global status.
While the existing major regional powers may resent that American role, they have a stake in not precipitating a chain reaction that causes the international system itself to break down. It was the possibility of such a chain reaction that constrained Russia in 2008 from crushing Georgia (during the brief Russo-Georgian collision over Ossetia and Abkhazia). Russia realized that its continued military operations could damage East-West relations in general and perhaps lead to some sort of a confrontation with the United States. Given its relative weakness, and the relatively unsatisfactory performance of its conventional forces, it decided to halt what could have become a pyrrhic victory and to settle for a minor territorial success. But an America in serious decline for domestic and/or external reasons would almost automatically reduce such inherent restraint. The cumulative result would be a wide-ranging drift toward an international reality characterized by the survival of the strongest.
A partial listing of the more vulnerable states, with brief comments, now follows (its sequence implies neither level of vulnerability nor geopolitical probability):
An American decline would leave Georgia totally vulnerable to both Russian political intimidation and military aggression. The United States currently supports Georgian sovereignty and endorses Georgia’s quest to join NATO. The United States has also provided Georgia with $3 billion in aid since 1991, with $1 billion of that assistance coming in the aftermath of the 2008 war. The foregoing has been underscored by the official assertion that “the United States does not recognize spheres of influence.”[8]
America’s decline would obviously affect the credibility of such general commitments. The resulting limitations on American capabilities—especially those affecting NATO’s willingness to stand firm—could by itself stir Russian desires to reclaim its old sphere of influence, because of the diminished US presence in Europe, regardless of the state of US-Russian relations. An additional factor motivating the Kremlin would be the intense personal
