Fire In the East

The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age

Paul Bracken

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780062012821
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

InFire in the East, Paul Bracken details how emboldened Asian countries have stepped up their pursuit of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and the vehicles necessary to carry them far beyond their borders. With the Western hegemony of advanced weapons technology over, America is for the first time vulnerable and stands to see its role in international politics diminished from assertive global leader to a reactive, defensive one. Bracken's arguments are provo`cative and compelling, tapping into a deep, cultural fear that has lain largely dormant since the end of the cold war.

1 NO ROOM ON THE CHESSBOARD

The world is moving at warp speed. A button pushed at a trading desk in New York affects prices around the world in seconds and ripples through the world’s economy in a matter of days or weeks. Transfixed by twenty-four-hour news broadcasts and by real-time financial data around the clock and the mountains of information flickering continuously across the Internet, Western leaders in the 1990s have devoted themselves to detecting and responding to short-term phenomena.

But the world is also moving at slow speed. Slow-motion change is barely perceived. When India and Pakistan tested their atomic bombs in 1998, Western leaders were transfixed by a stock market collapse in Indonesia. The twin bomb programs had been under way for fifteen years, but Western leaders, and certainly the media, were absorbed in the breaking story—a financial panic! hurried conferences of central bankers aimed at restoring confidence! statements! leaks! denials!—right up until the video of the blasts showed up on CNN. Only then did the nuclear arming of South Asia, overlooked for years, commandeer the world’s attention.

In Slowness, the novelist Milan Kundera draws a connectionbetween change and forgetfulness. We are caught up in the spiral of events, lost in its energy, blind to the accumulation of slow changes remaking our world. Without our noticing, the political and military map of Asia—one-third of the earth’s landmass, with almost two-thirds of the world’s population—is being redrawn. The Asia of the cold war, a disjointed collection of subregions and military theaters, no longer exists, not even notionally. Instead, the West must adopt a new paradigm, a geography of strategic interactions, in which the old barriers of distance and terrain have lost their meaning. These are some of the factors shaping it:

• Europe, called the cockpit of the world because it has been the locus of so many major wars, is now more secure than it has been in ages. As a result, European armed forces have been cut back to the point where Europe is no longer a serious military power. The British navy takes to the seas with centuries of proud tradition behind it, but with fewer submarines than India has. The French armed forces are so technically backward that they are virtually irrelevant except for low-intensity peacekeeping missions. European armed forces are hopelessly unprepared when it comes to the kind of modern fighting the United States engaged in during the Gulf War. Between nuclear retaliation and peacekeeping, they have few capacities.
• An unbroken belt of countries from Israel to North Korea (including Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, and China) has assembled either nuclear or chemical arsenals and is developing ballistic missiles. A multipolar balance of terror stretches over a 6,000-mile arc, comprising some of the most unstable countries on earth, with no Western allies in the sense in which the term is used within the Atlantic alliance.
• This arc of terror cuts across the military and political theaters into which the West conveniently divided Asia, essentially forthe purposes of fighting the cold war: the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia. The ballistic missile, once launched, does not turn back at the line that separates the territory of one State Department desk from another. Thus, the Gulf War brought the troubles of the Persian Gulf to Israel, linking theaters that had once been considered separate. Israel, for its part, sends up satellites to spy on Pakistan, 2,000 miles away, spooking Islamabad into seeing an Indian-Israel squeeze play against it. Chinese and Indian military establishments plot against each other, making East and South Asia one military space.
• The great interior of Asia is in play again. What used to be called “inner Asia” was stable for most of the century in the iron grip of two Communist giants. But in the face of Russia’s decline, China, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey are all vying for influence among the Central Asian countries that emerged from the Soviet breakup. These are countries that even most educated and well-traveled Americans know virtually nothing about: Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan.
• The world energy map is being redrawn as China, India, South Korea, and Southeast Asia industrialize. New oil and gas fields in the trans-Caspian, in Central Asia, and beneath the Asian continental shelf will radically change the direction of flows of oil and gas around the globe.

Despite these profound changes, the United States continues to see Eurasia as a chessboard, where the object of the game is to prevent the rise of any country that could challenge Western military superiority. The West’s dual strategy is to pursue its own technological superiority at all costs while trying to keep any other playerfrom amassing advanced armaments. The United States and the Soviet Union, even as they competed in the cold war, essentially ran things so that no third country could upset the Asian balance. That was easy when Asian military capability was limited. But year by year the playing surface is shrinking and the game is changing as the pieces on the board become more powerful. The ballistic missile has empowered pawns to check the dominant powers; countries that were once pawns now have the reach of knights and bishops.

In the early 1990s the United States pretty much ran things by itself. But in the face of increasing Asian missile power and weapons of mass destruction, it has tried to include China as a possible partner in imposing political and military order on the continent. The Indians, not caring for this arrangement, made their views known with five nuclear shots. Much more than a military test, the 1998 Indian exercise was a signal from one of the pawns about how the game was going to be played from now on. Players on the Eurasian chessboard are running out of room. The maneuver space is becoming more tightly coupled. When a move is made in one area—U.S. partnership with China—it reverberates almost at once in another—India testing nuclear bombs to signal disapproval. New rules will have to be written, and new strategies developed, to replace the “arrangement politics” that prevailed when one or two major pieces dominated a board filled with pawns.

ASIA’S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

The chessboard is also a map, and looking at it this way is useful: it forces us to think through in concrete terms how physical units—armies, ships, satellites, missiles—can be deployed in space and time, and how political power grows from them.

It was European sea power that defined Asia as a political and economic entity in the first place. Before the European maritime age of the sixteenth century, Asia was not a unitary concept. For the West and its map makers, it was a fabulous region of exotic spices, fabrics, customs, and mythic monsters, but in one sense they understood the continent better than their successors did: just as we do today, they grasped the immense diversity of the place, the incongruity of grouping together lands as disparate as the Arabian peninsula and the Korean.

But in the sixteenth century European nations developed the technology of ocean navigation, using heavy ships guided by the compass, and one after another they were able to build empires far from home. Asia thus took on a politico-economic unity in the Western mind: it was a place for colonies and for trade. This great paradigm shift in turn made new demands on European sea power. Ships had to be built to withstand the rigors of the long voyage around the African Cape. Fleets were sized according to the colonial ambitions of the throne. A new kind of political structure evolved, the overseas maritime empire; lasting until the middle of the twentieth century, it created a pattern of international politics that endures down to the present time. For Asia that pattern has enabled outside Western powers to draw the maps and write the rules of the game—in setting economic policy, setting the rules for joining the Western club, and in trying to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

Western powers backed their decisions with military authority. In the colonial era Europe and Russia were the dominant powers; after World War II it was the United States and the Soviet Union. In all cases the dominant power was a Western country, extending its power across vast distances of sea and land. The Europeans used galleons and battleships; Russia employed railroads. The United States has deployed aircraft carriers, land-based bombers, satellites, and cruise missiles. But the spread of missiles and weapons of massdestruction to Asian nations signals the end of even American dominance.

There is no accepted term or field of study to describe how changes in military technology lead to such changes in geographic influence, but perhaps military geography will do. The term is not restricted to the way terrain affects army movements. As used here, military geography also refers to the way developments in weapons, communications, and transportation affect larger political arrangements—like empires, the cold war, the “Pacific Basin,” and a U.S.-Chinese understanding about the future of Asia. All of these are political constructs that have changed slowly, until the technological conditions that gave rise to them changed, to the advantage or disadvantage of different actors. Military geography is not the same thing as geopolitics—the strategic management of geography for political purposes.

When the United States guarantees the security of South Korea and Japan, it is using geography for political purposes. The U.S. goal is to prevent another power from taking over these allies, either by direct occupation or by intimidation. A country that succeeded would control such a large population, GNP, and technology base that it could endanger the security of the United States.

Looked at geopolitically from the U.S. perspective, Asia is a vast continent full of strategic management challenges. In Southwest Asia, the world’s largest supply of petroleum sits near countries that would like to control more of it—thus Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait—or that would use it to finance their war against Israel. In the Far East, two U.S. allies, Japan and South Korea, face a threat from an erratic state, North Korea, and the rising influence of China. These two fronts, in Southwest and Northeast Asia, have consumed most of the military and diplomatic attention paid to the continent by the United States since the end of the cold war.

The shape and terrain of the Asian chessboard constrains whatthe United States can do to shape events there. Eurasia—the combination of Europe and Asia—is a vast crescent, bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean and by Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific on the south. To the west lies Europe, and to the east, Japan. The heartland of this immense continent—a rugged topography of mountains, deserts, and frigid wastelands—confines outside actors to the crescent’s rim. No Western power has ever succeeded in operating anywhere but in these coastal states. Today the United States relies on Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia as the base of its military power in Asia. Without them, the distances to project power in Asia are too great, the climate and terrain too extreme. What has been happening is that many of these coastal states—Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India—are no longer open as bases for Western interests, as they were in earlier times. As the United States is pushed to a much thinner rimland from which to operate, we see the West being forced out of Asia.

Thus, U.S. geopolitical strategy in Asia today stands in a long tradition of Westerners using the rim of the continent to block or moderate the influence of larger continental powers. This was the case in the cold war, when South Korea and Vietnam were the venues to block Chinese influence. The weak desert kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf states—also on the periphery of the continent—were the agents for checking Iraq and Iran. And whenever possible, the United States tries to exploit divisions between the Asian powers—notably, by supporting Iraq in its war with Iran.

This is a centuries-old game, one at which Britain excelled for much of the nineteenth century, and the subject of some of the most artful political analysis in the literature of statecraft. But the basic assumption in this approach to geopolitics is that a country’s actions are limited by a fixed and objective geography. Napoleon famously remarked that to know a country’s geography was to know its foreign policy; that was certainly true in his time, and itstill holds in many cases. Germany’s location on the European plain, for instance, provided it with no natural barriers to stop attacks from the Warsaw Pact countries during the cold war.

But the flaw in this conception of geopolitics is that it generalizes across all epochs. It leads to conclusions that, however important, are not universal: sea power is superior to land power; whoever controls the heartland of Asia will control the world; Taiwan is endowed with enduring strategic significance and must be defended at all costs. These generalizations presume that what happened in the past will happen in the future. The north European plain is no longer an invasion corridor. That is what NATO expansion was all about: pushing back Russian armies one thousand miles to the east and creating buffer zones—Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine—to change an invasion corridor into an invasion barrier.

We have been told so many times that the world is shrinking that it’s useful to be reminded once in a while that it is still 25,000 miles around the equator, and 5,500 miles from San Francisco to Beijing. Instantaneous worldwide communication and nonstop jet travel have certainly revolutionized commerce, politics, and even warfare in many ways, but armies don’t travel over the Internet. After the United States defeated Iraq on the other side of the world, the view that geography was irrelevant became especially widespread. Jean Baudrillard, a leading postmodern French philosopher, argued the case in a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. For Baudrillard, the war was fought in cyberspace, not physical space. Its “fronts” were on the evening news as video game replays of American missiles surgically taking out Iraqi targets. The physical movement of troops and vehicles on the ground, in the air, and at sea was overtaken by the imagery of war on a two-dimensional screen. To U.S. military commanders, time and distance were major impediments, but seen on the screen these factors vanished. The ability to edit the video clips gave the war a unity and rhythm different from the one experiencedin the battle zone itself. As edited, the war was made to fit the evening schedules of the television audience.

The view that time and distance no longer matter has had a subtle impact even on the thinking of professional military officers. The former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral David Owen, has argued that “information dominance” is the key to future military success. The side with the ability to see everything on a battlefield, whether it moves at night or under camouflage, whether it is underground or underwater, would seem to have a decisive advantage. If information dominance had been a possibility a half-century ago, there would have been no Pearl Harbor, and also no D-Day.

The danger in this view is the notion that information can substitute for force. The Western fixation on technology pushes in this direction. In the 1930s strategists believed that the airplane would be the decisive weapon in all wars to come. In the 1950s atomic bombs supposedly made obsolete all previous military thinking. Today it is information dominance, in which the United States is said to hold a commanding lead because it has pioneered computers and the networks to link them. Soon military comparisons will enumerate a nation’s computing power along with its tanks, ships, and airplanes. But such assessments tend to blur the difference between war games and war. The most powerful computer in the world is no substitute for a well-armed and well-trained army in the right place at the right time.

The “death of distance” argument was taken to another level by the futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book War and Anti-War. They imagined a new age of warfare in which one side’s computers would attack its enemy’s hard drives with viruses, logic bombs, and Trojan horses—crippling electric power grids, banks, and telephones. The constraints of time and distance that have faced every general since Hannibal would be magically overcome. Cyberspace replaces physical space; war is made bloodless, to conform with modern Western sensibilities about casualties and guilt.

But this isn’t a very useful way to think about warfare in the real world. Airplanes don’t fly in cyberspace, and armies don’t travel down the information superhighway. For Western powers to influence events in Asia directly, they have to get there first. It takes twenty days to sail an aircraft carrier from the eastern seaboard of the United States to the Persian Gulf, thirty-five days from the Pacific coast. If the carrier is vulnerable to missile attack or other threats after it arrives in the Gulf, the risks for the United States go up dramatically.

A better example of the “death of distance” came in 1998, when North Korea fired a missile across Japan that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. This event ended Tokyo’s separation from Asian military space. The missile shot turned the Japanese archipelago from a zone of sanctuary into a target zone, ending a halfcentury during which Japan could plan for its defense without taking into account its geographic location off the coast of Asia. No Japanese white paper could have accomplished this. Only the concrete reality of North Korea’s missile could do it.

But it’s not just the military balance that’s changing. Indeed, the interesting consequences are not even military at all. They are political. Redrawing military space redraws the political map as well. Asia’s difficult terrain and, until recently, its relatively primitive transportation and communications networks tended to soften and diffuse political changes. Powerful social forces were dissipated in its vast rural territories, leaving Western outsiders relatively untouched unless they unwisely chose to get involved.

Between 1959 and 1962 Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward threw China into turmoil. This mad scheme to achieve overnight industrialization so upended the economy that it led directly to the death of 30 million Chinese by starvation. Yet this disaster had no effect outside of China. The year 1962 is recalled as a dangerous one,but not because of anything that happened in China. The outside world suffered the staggering deaths there with indifference. What made 1962 dangerous was the arrival in Cuba of Soviet ballistic missiles, which altered the military and political space of North America and nearly triggered a thermonuclear war between the superpowers. These missiles turned an annoyance, Cuba, into a humiliation and a clear and present danger for the United States. It would do well to recall the U.S. reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba when trying to understand how Asian countries feel about the danger that their enemies could obliterate them with the push of a button. Missiles in Cuba could be fired at any time, and this made the danger continuous. There was no advance mobilization or preparation required to use them. As such, they were a constant psychological check on the freedom of the White House. That was what President Kennedy thought, and why he was determined to get rid of them. At the time some observers argued that, since the Soviet Union already possessed nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its home soil, these missiles didn’t change the fundamental military balance. They were wrong, yet exactly the same arguments are made today about Iranian or Pakistani missiles.

In 1962 few outsiders worried about famine in China. Compare this to the world’s reaction in 1997 and 1998 to starvation in North Korea. North Korea’s leaders inflicted this disaster on their own people by their extremism in pursuit of an insane economic program. But this disaster is being noticed in the outside world. The world is no more humane than it was thirty-five years ago, and also no less realistic. But the United States has a nightmare: that North Korea’s internal disaster will explode over Northeast Asia. To prevent that, Washington must sustain a repugnant regime. Food and energy donations now prop up the most repressive government in the world because North Koreas missiles and chemical bombs can reach South Korea and Japan. If North Korea had the limited military reach it hadin 1975, it is difficult to believe that government leaders in the United States and Japan would be rushing to its assistance. Rather, it would be back in the queue with African nations lining up for food aid from the internationa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• MAPS
• 1 NO ROOM ON THE CHESSBOARD
• 2 DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
• 3 RESHAPING THE ASIAN MILITARY
• 4 THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE
• 5 IS THERE AN EASTERN WAY OF WAR?
• 6 ACROSS THE STRATEGIC DIVIDE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Copyright
• About the Publisher