Sea of tomorrow?

On a visit to Australia in the 1980s, the Prime Minister told Tip O’Neill (the Speaker of the House during Ronald Reagan’s presidency), that “…the Mediterranean was the sea of the past, the Atlantic, the sea of the present and the Pacific the sea of tomorrow.”

The prophecy has come true. Pacific Ocean IS the prominent waterway where commercial sea-lanes traverse between the world’s factory, China, and the world’s mall, America.

However, as the bipolar world of the past (US and USSR) has led to the unipolar world (US) presently, a new world-order is taking place in the 21st century. It will be a multipolar world, with competing interests of the US, Russia, China, India and maybe even other countries like Brazil and South Africa.

Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, in a review of a new book by Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon, says “…the twenty-first-century balance of power in the world will rest, more than anywhere else, on the fortunes of China, India, and the United States in the Indian Ocean.”

Mr. Kaplan argues that  “Like the monsoon itself, a cyclical weather system that is both destructive and essential for growth and prosperity, the rise of these countries (including India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania) represents a shift in the global balance that cannot be ignored. The Indian Ocean area will be the true nexus of world power and conflict in the coming years. It is here that the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won, and it is here that American foreign policy must concentrate if America is to remain dominant in an ever-changing world.”

On Fareed Zakaria GPS (aired on 29 August, 2010), Mr. Kaplan summarizes his recent article in Foreign Affairs. The following passages are my reactions mixed in with Mr. Kaplan’s data and analysis:

China is blessed with temperate climate and a vast geography, extending to central Asia westwards, but also has a fifth of humanity to feed and enrich. What has gone unnoticed in the past decade is the rise of China as a seapower. It is coming in competition with India, which is also a rising seapower. China has started to build warm-water ports in Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. This is seen by many to encircle India in a ‘string of pearls‘ around India. The sea-lanes from the Persian Gulf to China cross the Indian Ocean.

A rising Chinese naval power will bump against the present occupant to its east, the US, which has troop presence in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. The US also has presence in the Oceania (Guam, Palau, American Samoa, etc.) which will check Chinese expansion into the Pacific. So, China will aim to extend its influence in the Indian Ocean. Also, the rivalry between China and India, commanding the second and third largest global economies by 2025, will spill into the Indian Ocean.

While we cannot ignore China, and should encourage its cooperation, we must also encourage like minded countries lke Japan and India build their naval powers.

Obama has already shown that he understands this equations; Secretary of State Clinton’s first overseas trip was to Indonesia.

This will be the ‘Great Game’ of the 21st century, much like the one between the British and the Russian Empires in the 19th.