Center Stage for the Twenty-first Century: Power Plays in the Indian Ocean

Author(s): Robert D. Kaplan

Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 2 (March/April 2009), pp. 16-29, 31-32
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
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 Center for the
Stage

Twenty-first Century

Power Plays inthe IndianOcean

Robert D. Kaplan

For better or worse,

phrases such "the Cold War" and "the clash
of civilizations" matter. In a similar way, so do maps. The rightmap
can stimulateforesightby providing a spatialview of critical trends
inworld politics.Understanding themap ofEurope was essential to
recent
understanding the twentieth century.Although technological
advances and economic integration have encouraged global thinking,
some to count more than others. And in some of those,
places continue
such as Iraq and Pakistan, two countries with inherently artificial
contours, politics is still at themercy of geography.
So inwhat quarter of the earth today can one best glimpse the future?
Because of their own geographic circumstances, Americans, in par
ticular, continue to concentrate on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
World War II and theColdWar shaped thisoutlook:Nazi Germany,
were all
imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and communist China
oriented toward one of these two oceans. The bias is even embedded
in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the
Western Hemisphere in themiddle of themap, splittingthe Indian

Robert D. Kaplan, a National for The Atlantic and

Correspondent
a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American
Security, in
Washing
ton, D.C., is a book on the Indian Ocean. He recently was the
writing
Class of i960 Distinguished Visiting Professor inNational at
Security
theU.S. Naval Academy.

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 CenterStage
for theTwenty-firstCentury
Ocean at itsfar edges.And yet, as the pirate activityoff the coast
carnage inMumbai lastfall suggest,the
of Somalia and the terrorist
Indian Ocean?the world s third-largest body ofwater?already forms
center stage for the of the twenty-first century.
challenges
The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam,
fromthe SaharaDesert to the Indonesian archipelago.
Although the
Arabs and the Persians are known to
Westerners primarily
as desert peo
In the
ples, theyhave alsobeen greatseafarers. Middle Ages, theysailed
from to
Arabia China; proselytizing along theway, theyspreadtheirfaith
commerce. western reaches of the Indian
through sea-based Today, the
Ocean include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan?
a networkofdynamictradeaswell as a networkofglobal ter
constituting
Hundreds ofmillionsofMuslims?
piracy,and drug smuggling.
rorism,
the legacy of those medieval conversions?live along the Indian Oceans
eastern
edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The IndianOcean isdominatedby two immensebays, theArabian
Sea and theBay of Bengal, near the top ofwhich are two of the least sta
ble countries in theworld: Pakistan andMyanmar (also known as Burma).
State collapseor regimechange inPakistanwould affectitsneighbors
by empoweringBaluchi and Sindhi separatistsseekingcloser linksto
India and Iran. Likewise, the collapse of the junta inMyanmar?where
over energy and natural resources between China and India
competition
looms?would threaten economies nearby and require amassive seaborne
humanitarian intervention.On the other hand, the advent of amore Ub
erai regime inMyanmar would undermine China s dominant position
there,boost Indian influence, and quicken regional economic integration.
In other words, more than just a geographic feature, the Indian
Ocean is also an idea. It combines the centrality of Islam with global
energypoliticsand theriseof India andChina to revealamultilayered,
multipolar world. The dramatic economic growth of India and China
has been duly noted, but the equally dramatic military ramifications
of this development have not. India's and Chinas great-power aspi
rations, aswell as their quests for energy security,have compelled the
two countries "to redirect their gazes from land to the seas,"
according
to James Holmes andToshi Yoshihara, associate of strategy
professors
at theU.S. NavalWar College. And theveryfactthattheyarefocusing
on their sea power indicates how much more self-confident they feel

FOREIGN A F FA 1RS?March/April200?
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 Robert D. Kaplan

on land. And so a map of the Indian Ocean exposes the contours of

power politics in the twenty-first century.
Yet this is stillan environmentinwhich theUnited Stateswill have
to keep thepeace and help guard theglobal commons?interdicting
terrorists, pirates, and smugglers; providing humanitarian assistance;
managing the competitionbetween India andChina. Itwill have to
do so not, as inAfghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face
meddler, leaningon far-flungarmydivisionsat riskofgettingcaught
a sea-based balancer over
up in sectarian conflict, but as lurking just
the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land
power: as the clich? goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade.
a to get to awar zone, allowing towork
Ships take long time diplomacy
itsmagic. And as theU.S. response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian
Ocean showed, with most sailors and marines returning to their ships
each night, navies can exert great influence on shore while leaving a
small footprint. The more the United States becomes a maritime
as to a land-based one, the less threatening itwill
hegem?n, opposed
seem to others.
are
Moreover, precisely because India and China emphasizing
their sea power, the job ofmanaging theirpeaceful risewill fall on
to a extent. There will
the U.S. Navy significant surely be tensions
between the three navies, especially as the gaps in their relative
even if the comparative size of theU.S.
strength begin to close. But
remain
Navy decreases in the decades ahead, the United States will
the one great power from outside the Indian Ocean a
region with
major presence there?a unique position thatwill give it the leverage
to act as a broker between India and China in their own backyard.
To understand this dynamic, one must look at the region from a
maritime perspective.

sea changes

to the monsoon winds, the countries

Thanks predictability of the
on the Indian Ocean were connected well before the age of steam

power. Trade in frankincense, spices, precious stones, and textiles

broughttogetherthepeoples flungalong itslong shorelineduring the

Middle sea routes have mattered more
Ages. Throughout history,

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 than land routes, writes the historian Felipe Fern?ndez-Armesto,
because they carrymore goods more economically. "Whoever is lord of
Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice/' went one saying during
the late fifteenth century, alluding to the city's extensive commerce
with Asia; if theworld were an egg, Hormuz would be its yolk, went
another. Even today, in the jet and information age, 90 percent of global
commerce and about 65
percent of all oil travel by sea. Globalization
has beenmade possible by the cheap and easy shippingof containers
on tankers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for
fully half theworld's
container traffic.
Moreover, 70 percent of the total trafficof petroleum
on itsway from theMiddle
products passes through the Indian Ocean,
East to the Pacific. As these goods travel that route, they pass
through
theworld's principaloil shippinglanes, includingtheGulfs ofAden
and Oman?as well as some ofworld commerce's main chokepoints:

FOREIGN A F FA 1RS? March /April 200?

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 Robert D.
Kaplan
Bab elMandeb and theStraitsofHormuz andMalacca. Fortypercent
ofworld tradepasses throughthe StraitofMalacca; 40 percentof all
traded crude oil passes through the Strait ofHormuz.
s
Already theworld preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway,
the Indian Ocean will matter even more in the future.Global energy
needs are expected to rise by 45 percent between 2006 and 2030, and
almosthalfof thegrowth indemandwill come fromIndia andChina.
China sdemand forcrudeoil doubled between 1995and 2005 andwill
double again in the coming 15yearsor so;by 2020,China is expected
to import7.3million barrelsof crudeper day?half of SaudiArabia's
planned output.More than 85 percent of the oil and oil products
bound forChina cross the IndianOcean and pass throughtheStrait
ofMalacca.
India?soon to become theworld's fourth-largest energy consumer,
aftertheUnited States,China, and Japan?is dependent on oil for
roughly33percentof itsenergyneeds, 65percentofwhich it imports.
And 90 percentof itsoil importscould soon come fromthePersian
Gulf. Indiamust satisfya population thatwill, by 2030,be the largest
of any country in theworld. Its coal imports from far-oifMozambique
are set to increase to the coal that India
substantially, adding already
from other Indian Ocean countries, such as South Africa,
imports
Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also
be carryingincreasinglylargequantitiesof liquefiednaturalgas (lng)
across the seas from southern Africa, even as it continues
importing
lng from Qatar, and Indonesia.
Malaysia,
As the whole Indian Ocean seaboard, including Africa's eastern
shores, becomes a vast web of energy trade, India is seeking to increase
its influence from the Plateau of Iran to the Gulf ofThailand?an
west and east meantto span the zone of influence of the
expansion
Raj's viceroys. India's trade with the Arab countries of the Persian
Gulf and Iran,withwhich India has longenjoyedclose economic and
culturalties, isbooming.Approximately 3.5million Indianswork in
the sixArab statesof theGulf Cooperation Council and sendhome
$4 billion in remittances annually. As India's economy continues to
grow, sowill its trade with Iran and, once the country recovers, Iraq.
Iran, like Afghanistan, has become a strategic rear base for India
to become an
against Pakistan, and it ispoised important energy partner.

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 CenterStagefor theTwenty-first
Century
In 2005,India and IransignedamultibilKon-dollar
deal underwhich Iran
will supplyIndiawith 7.5million tons of lng annuallyfor 25years,
beginning in2009.There has been talkofbuilding a gas pipeline from
Iran to India throughPakistan, a project thatwould join theMiddle
East and SouthAsia at thehip (and in theprocess could go a long
way toward stabilizing Indian-Pakistani relations). In another sign that
Indian-Iranian relations are growing more intimate, India has been

helping Iran develop theport ofChah Bahar, on theGulf ofOman,

which will also serve as a forward base for the Iranian navy.
India has also been expanding itsmilitary and economic tieswith
Myanmar, to the east. Democratic India does not have the luxury
of spurning Myanmar s
junta because Myanmar is rich in natural
resources?oil, natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, uranium, timber, and
inwhich theChinese are also
hydropower?resources heavily invested.
India hopes that a network of east-west roads and energy
pipelines
will eventually allow it to be connected to Iran, Pakistan, and
Myanmar.
India is enlargingitsnavy in the same spirit.
With its155
warships,
the Indian navy is already one of theworlds largest, and it expects to
add three nuclear-powered submarines and three aircraft carriers
to its arsenal by 2015.One major impetusfor the buildup was the
to evacuate Indian citizens from
humiliating inability of its navy Iraq
and Kuwait during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Another iswhat
Mohan Malik, a scholarat theAsia-PacificCenter forSecurityStudies,
inHawaii, has called Indias "Hormuz dilemma," its dependence on

importspassing throughthe strait,close to the shoresof Pakistan's

Makran coast, where the Chinese are
helping the Pakistanis develop
deep-water ports.
Indeed, as India extends its influence east andwest, on land and at sea,
it is bumping into China, which, also concerned about
protecting its
interests throughout the region, is expanding itsreach southward. Chinese
President Hu Jintao has bemoaned Chinas "Malacca dilemma."The
Chinese governmenthopes to eventuallybe able topartlybypass that
straitby transportingoil and other energyproducts via roads and
pipelines fromports on the IndianOcean into the heart ofChina.
One reason that wants to into
Beijing desperately integrate Taiwan
its dominion is so that it can redirect its naval
energies away from the
Taiwan Strait and toward the Indian Ocean.

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 Robert D.
Kaplan
The Chinese government has already adopted a "string of pearls"
strategy for the Indian Ocean, which consists of setting up a series
of ports in friendly countries along the oceans northern seaboard.
It isbuildinga largenavalbase and listeningpost inGwadar, Pakistan,
(fromwhich itmay alreadybe monitoring ship trafficthroughthe
StraitofHormuz); a port inPasni, Pakistan, 75miles east ofGwadar,
which is tobe joined to theGwadar facility
by a new highway;a fueling
station on the southern coast of Sri Lanka; and a container
facility
with extensive naval and commercial access inChittagong, Bangladesh.

Beijing operates surveillancefacilitieson islandsdeep in theBay of

Bengal. InMyanmar, whose junta gets billions of dollars inmilitary
assistancefromBeijing, theChinese are constructing(orupgrading)
commercial and naval bases and building roads, waterways, and
pipelines inorder to linktheBay ofBengal to the southernChinese
province of Yunnan. Some of these facilities are closer to cities in
central and western China than those cities are to Beijing and

Shanghai, and so building road and rail linksfrom these facilities

intoChina will help spur the economies of Chinas landlocked
provinces. The Chinese government is also a canal
envisioning
across the Isthmus ofKra, inThailand, to link the IndianOcean to
Chinas Pacific coast?a on the scale of the Panama Canal
project
and one that could furthertipAsia's balance of power inChinas
favorby givingChina s burgeoning navy and commercialmaritime
fleet easy access to a vast oceanic continuum stretching all the way
from East Africa to Japan and the Korean Peninsula.
All of these activities are unnerving the Indian government. With
China building deep-water ports to itswest and east and a preponderance
of Chinese arms sales going to Indian Ocean states, India fears being
encircledbyChina unless itexpands itsown sphereof influence.
The
two countries' are
overlapping commercial and political interests
even more so in the naval realm than on
fostering competition, and
land.Zhao Nanqi, former directorof theGeneral LogisticsDepartment
of the People's Liberation Army, proclaimed in 1993, "We can no
as an ocean
longer accept the Indian Ocean only of the Indians."
India has responded toChina's building of a naval base inGwadar by
furtherdeveloping one of its own, that inKarwar, India, south ofGoa.
a Chinese naval
Meanwhile, Zhang Ming, analyst, has warned that

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 CenterStage
for theTwenty-first
Century
the 244 islands thatformIndiasAndaman andNicobar archipelago
could be used like a "metal chain" to block thewestern entrance to the
StraitofMalacca, onwhich China so desperatelydepends. "India is
most realistic has written.
perhaps Chinas strategic adversary," Zhang
"Once India commands theIndianOcean, itwill notbe satisfied with
itsposition andwill continuouslyseek to extend its influence,and its
eastward strategywill have a particular impact on China." These may
sound likethewords of a professional
worrierfromChina s own theory
class, but these worries are revealing: Beijing already considers New
Delhi to be a major sea power.
As thecompetitionbetween India andChina suggests,the Indian
will playout inthetwenty-first
Ocean iswhere global struggles century.
The old bordersof theColdWar map are crumblingfast,andAsia is
becoming amore integrated unit,fromthe Middle East to thePacific.
SouthAsia has been an indivisiblepartof thegreaterIslamicMiddle
Middle Ages: itwas the
East sincethe Muslim Ghaznavids of eastern
Afghanistan who launched raids on Indias northwestern coast in
the earlyeleventhcentury;Indian civilization itselfis a fusionof the
indigenous Hindu cultureand theculturalimprintleftby these inva
sions. Although it took the seaborne terrorist attacks inMumbai last
November for most Westerners to locate India inside the greater
East, the Indian Ocean s entire coast has
Middle always constituted
one vast interconnected expanse.
What is different now is the extent of these connections. On a
maritime-centric map of southern Eurasia, artificial land divisions
even landlocked Central Asia is related to the Indian
disappear;
Ocean. Natural gas from Turkmenistan may one day flow through
en route to Pakistani and Indian cities and
Afghanistan, for example,
ports, one of several possible energy links between Central Asia and
the Indian subcontinent. Both the Chinese port inGwadar, Pakistan,
and the Indian port inChah Bahar, Iran,may eventually be connected
to oil- and
natural-gas-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan,
and other former Soviet republics. S. Frederick Starr, a Central Asia
expertat theJohns
Hopkins School ofAdvanced International
Studies,
said at a conference in
Washington last year that access to the Indian
Ocean "willhelp defineCentralAsian politics in thefuture."
Others
have called ports in India and Pakistan "evacuation points" forCaspian

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 Robert D.
Kaplan
Sea oil. The destinies of countries even 1,200 miles from the Indian
Ocean are connected with it.

elegant decline

The United States faces threerelatedgeopolitical challenges in

Asia: the strategicnightmareof thegreater
Middle East, the struggle
for influence over the southern tier of the former Soviet Union, and
thegrowingpresence of India and China in the IndianOcean. The
last seems to be themost benign of the three. China is not an enemy
of theUnited States, like Iran,but a legitimatepeer competitor,and
India is a budding ally.And the riseof the Indian navy,soon tobe the
thirdlargestin theworld afterthoseof theUnited States andChina,
will function as an antidote to Chinese military expansion.
be toquietly leveragethe
The taskof theU.S. Navy will therefore
sea power of its closest allies?India in the Indian Ocean and Japan
in the western Pacific?to set limits on Chinas
expansion. But it
will have to do so at the same time as it seizes every opportunity to

incorporate Chinas navy into international alliances; aU.S.-Chinese

understandingat sea is crucialfor the stabilizationofworld politics
in the twenty-first century. After all, the Indian Ocean is a seaway
forboth energyand hashish and is in drastic need of policing.To
U.S. militaryplannerswill have to invokechal
manage iteffectively,
as terrorism, to
lenges such piracy, and smuggling bring together
states in sea
India, China, and other joint patrols. The goal of the
United States must be to forge a global maritime system that can
minimize the risks of interstate conflict while lessening the burden
of policing for the U.S. Navy.

Keeping thepeace in the IndianOcean will be evenmore crucial

once the seas and thecoastsfromtheGulf ofAden to theSea ofJapan
are connected.
Shipping options between the Indian Ocean and the
Pacific Ocean will increase substantially in the future.The port operator
Dubai PortsWorld is conductinga feasibilitystudyon constructing
a landbridgenear the canal thattheChinese hopewill be dug across
theIsthmusofKra,with portson eithersideof the isthmusconnected
by rails and highways. The Malaysian government is interested in a
would linkup portsintheBay ofBengalwith those
pipelinenetworkthat
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 CenterStage
for theTwenty-first
Century
in the South China Sea. To be sure, as sea power grows in
importance,
the crowded hub aroundMalaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia will
formthemaritime heart ofAsia: in the comingdecades, itwill be as
strategically as theFulda Gap, a possible invasionroutefor
significant
Soviet tanksinto
West Germany duringtheColdWar. The protective
oversightof theU.S. Navy therewill be especially important.As the
only truly substantial blue-water force without territorial ambitions
on theAsian mainland, theU.S.
Navy may in the futurebe able to
Asian countries,suchas India andChina, better
workwith individual
than they can with one another. Rather than
ensure itsdominance, theU.S. Navy
simply
needs tomake itself continually useful. Indispensability
Ithas alreadybegun tomake thenecessary rather than dominance,
shifts.Owing to the debilitatingU.S.-led milStbethe
wars inAfghanistan and Iraq, headlines in jo ? ? ?
u u a - au a- United States in
recent years l
nave been dominated discus- 0
by
goal
sionsabout landforcesand counterinsurgency.the Indian Ocean.
Butwith 75percentof theearthspopulation
within 200miles of the sea, theworld smilitaryfuture
living maywell
be dominated by naval (and air) forcesoperatingover vast regions.
And to a greater extent than the other armed services, navies exist to

protect economic interests and the system inwhich these interests

operate. Aware of how much the international economy on
depends
sea traffic,
U.S. admiralsare thinkingbeyond thefightingandwinning
ofwars to responsibilities such as a
policing global trading arrangement.
are also attuned to the effects that aU.S.
They military strike against
Iran would have on maritime commerce and the price of oil.With
such concerns inmind, theU.S. Navy has for decades been
helping
to secure vital in the Indian often
chokepoints Ocean, operating from
a base on theBritish atoll ofDiego Garcia, a thousandmiles southof
India and close tomajor sea-lanes. And inOctober 2007, it
implied
that itwas seeking a sustained forward presence in the Indian Ocean
and thewestern Pacific but no longer in theAtlantic?a momentous
shift in overall U.S. maritime strategy.The document Marine
Corps
Visionand Strategy2025also concluded thatthe IndianOcean and its
a central theater of
adjacent waters will be global conflict and
com

petition this century.

FOREIGN A F FA 1RS? March

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 Robert D.
Kaplan
Yet as the challengesfortheUnited States on thehigh seasmulti
naval dominance will last.At
ply, it is unclear how much longer U.S.
the end of theColdWar, theU.S. Navy boasted about 600warships;
it is now down to 279.That numbermight rise to 313 in the coming
yearswith theadditionof thenew "littoralcombat ships,"but itcould
also drop to the low 200s given cost overruns of 34 percent and the slow
pace of shipbuilding.Although the revolution in precision-guided
weapons means that existing ships pack better firepower than those
of theColdWar fleetdid, sincea shipcannotbe in twoplaces at once,
thefewerthevessels, the riskiereverydecision todeploy them.There
comes a atwhich insufficient quantity hurts quality.
point
next decade, Chinas
Meanwhile, by sometime in the navy will
have more warships than the United States'. China is producing
and acquiring submarines five times as fast as is the United States.
In addition to submarines, the Chinese have wisely focused on buy
can hit at sea,
ing naval mines, ballistic missiles that moving targets
and technologythatblocks signalsfromgps satellites,onwhich the
to at least one air
U.S. Navy depends. (They also have plans acquire
craftcarrier;not having one hindered theirattempts to help with
the tsunamireliefeffortin 2004-5.) The goal of theChinese is "sea
denial," or dissuading U.S. carrier strike groups from closing in on
theAsian mainland wherever andwhenever Washington would like.The
are also more
Chinese aggressive thanU.S. military planners.Whereas
the prospect of ethnic warfare has scared away U.S. admirals from
a base in Sri Lanka, which is at the
considering strategically located
confluence of theArabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, theChinese are
a
constructing refueling station for theirwarships there.
There is nothing illegitimateabout the rise ofChinas navy.As
the country's economic interests expand dramatically, somust China
its navy, to guard these interests.
expand itsmilitary, and particularly
The United Kingdom did just that in thenineteenthcentury,and so
did theUnited Stateswhen itemergedas a greatpower between the
American CivilWar andWorld War I. In 1890,theAmerican military
AlfredThayerMahan published The InfluenceofSea Power
theorist
that the power to protect
Upon History, 1660-1783, which argued
merchant fleets had been the determining factor in world history.
Both Chinese and Indian naval strategists read him avidly nowadays.

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Chinas quest for amajor presence
in the Indian Ocean was also
evinced in 2005 by thebeginning
The only Center dedicated to applying
of an extensive commemoration
the lessons of history to current
ofZheng He, theMing dynasty Presidential and Congressional

explorer and admiral who plied challenges and opportunities.

the seas between China and In
donesia, Sri Lanka, the Persian
The only Center convening the best
Gulf, and theHorn ofAfrica in minds to perform a Comprehensive
the earlydecades of thefifteenth Assessment for the next President and

century?a celebration that sig Congress.

nals China s belief that these seas

have always been part of its zone The only Center that Congress asked to
|
of influence. create a Foundation for International
Understanding.
Just as at the end of the nine
teenth century the British Royal
The only Center that publishes
Navy began to reduce its pres Presidential Studies Quarterly, now in its
ence worldwide |
by leveraging the 40th year.
sea power of its naval
growing
allies (Japan and the United The Center for the Study of the
States), at the beginning of the Presidency is pleased to change its name|
to encompass its full cause:
twenty-first century, the United
States is beginning an
elegant
decline by leveragingthegrowing
The Centerfor the
sea power of allies such as India StucCy\
and Japan to balance against China. of theTresicCency
What better way to scale back and Congress
than to give more responsibilities
to like-minded states,
especially
allies that, unlike those in Eu
rope, stillcherishmilitarypower?
www.thepresidency.org

1020 19th Street, NW, Suite 250

India, for one, is more than
Washington, DC 20036
to never
willing help. "India has T: 202.872.9800
waited forAmerican permission F: 202.872.9811

to balance the
[against] China,"
Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan
wrote in 2006,
adding that India

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 Robert D.
Kaplan
has been balancing againstChina since theday theChinese invaded
Tibet. Threatened by Chinas rise, India has expanded its naval
presence from as far west as the
Mozambique Channel to as far
east as the South China Sea. It has been establishingnaval staging
on the island nations ofMadagascar,
posts and listening stations
Mauritius, and theSeychelles, aswell asmilitary relationshipswith
them, precisely in order to counter China s own very active military
states.With a Chinese-Pakistani
cooperation with these alliance

taking shape,
most
visibly in the construction of theGwadar port, near
theStraitofHormuz, and an Indian naval buildup on theAndaman
and Nicobar Islands, near the Strait ofMalacca, the Indian-Chinese

rivalryis takingon thedimensions of amaritimeGreat Game. This

isa reasonfortheUnited States toquietlyencourage India tobalance
even as the United States seeks greater cooperation
against China,
with China. During theCold War, thePacific and Indian oceans
were veritableU.S. lakes.But suchhegemonywill not last,and the
United States must seek to replace itwith a subtle balance-of

power arrangement.

coalition builder supreme

So how exactlydoes theUnited Statesplay theroleof a constructive,

distant,and slowlydeclining hegem?n and keep peace on the high
seas inwhat Fareed Zakaria, the editor ofNewsweek International,
has called "the post-American world"? Several years ago, Admiral
Michael Mullen, then the chief of naval operations (and now chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), said the answer was a "thousand-ship
navy... comprised of all freedom-loving nations?standing watch over
the seas, standing watch with each other." The term
"thousand-ship
navy"has sincebeen dropped for sounding too domineering,but the
idea behind it remains: ratherthan going it alone, theU.S. Navy
should be a coalition builder supreme,workingwith any navy that
agrees to patrol the seas and share information with it.

Already,Combined Task Force 150 (cTF-150),a naval forcebased

inDjibouti and comprising roughly 15 vessels from theUnited
States, four European countries, Canada, and Pakistan, conducts

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 CenterStage
for theTwenty-first
Century
antipiracypatrols around the troubledGulf ofAden. In 2008, about
a hundred shipswere attackedby pirates in the region,and over 35
vessels,with billions ofdollarsworth of cargo,were seized. (As of the
end of 2008, more than a dozen, including
oil tankers, cargo vessels, and other ships, Rather thangoing it
over 300 crew members, were
along with
still being held.) Ransom demands rou alone, theU.S. Navy
tinelyexceed $1million per ship,and in the should be a coalition
recent case of one Saudi oil tanker, pirates
builder supreme, ready
demanded $25million. Last fall, after the
capture of aUkrainian vessel carrying tanks towork with anynavy
and other military equipment,warships that
agrees to cooperate
from the United States, Kenya, and
with it.
Malaysia steamedtowardtheGulf ofAden
to assist CTF-150, followed two Chinese
by
warships a fewweeks later.
The force,which is to be beefed up and
rechristened CTF-151, is likely to become a
permanent fixture: piracy
is themaritime rippleeffectof land-based anarchy,and foras long as
Somalia is in the throesof chaos, pirates operatingat thebehest of
warlords will infest thewaters far down Africas eastern coast.
The task-forcemodel could also be applied to the Strait of
Malacca and other waters surrounding the Indonesian archipelago.
With help from theU.S. Navy, the navies and coast guards of
to
Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia have already combined forces
reduce piracy in that area in recent years. And with the U.S. Navy
as both amediator and an enforcer of standard
functioning procedures,
coalitions of this kind could bring together rival countries, such as
India and Pakistan or India and China, under a single umbrella: these
would have no difficulty
states'governments to theirpublics
justifying
at transnational threats over which
participating in task forces aimed
no to unite rival
they have disagreements. Piracy has the potential
states
along the Indian Ocean coastline.
Packed with states with weak governments and tottering infra
structure, the shores of the Indian Ocean make it necessary for the
United States and other countries to transform theirmilitaries. This
area represents an unconventional world, a world inwhich theU.S.
to to a range of
military, for one, will have respond, expeditionary style,

FOREIGN A F FA 1RS? March /April 2009

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 CenterStage
for theTwenty-first
Century
crises: not just piracy but also terrorist attacks, ethnic conflicts, cy
clones, and floods. For even as theUnited States' armed forces, and
most
particularly its navy,are in relativedecline, they remain the
powerfulconventionalmilitaryon earth,and they will be expectedto
lead such emergency responses. With in climati
population growth
more human beings
callyand seismicallyfragilezones todayplacing
in danger's way than at almost any other time in history, one deploy
ment will quickly follow another.
It is the variety and recurrence of these challenges that make the
centuryvastlydifferent
map of the IndianOcean in the twenty-first
from themap of theNorth Atlantic in the twentiethcentury.
The
latter illustrated both a singular threat and a singular concept: the
SovietUnion. And itgave theUnited States a simplefocus:todefend
Western Europe against theRed Army and keep the Soviet navy
bottled up near the polar icecap. Because the threat was straight
forward, and theUnited States' power was paramount, theU.S.-led
North AtlanticTreatyOrganization arguablybecame history'smost
successful alliance.
One might envision a "nato of the seas" for the Indian Ocean,

composed of SouthAfrica,Oman, Pakistan, India, Singapore, and

Australia,with Pakistan and India bickeringinsidethealliancemuch
asGreece andTurkey have insidenato. But that idea failsto capture
what the Indian Ocean is all about. Owing to the movements
peripatetic
of medieval Arab and Persian sailors and the legacies of Portuguese,
Dutch, and British imperialists,the IndianOcean formsa historical
and cultural unit. Yet in strategic terms, it, like the world at large
no the Persian
today, has single focal point. The Gulf of Aden,
Gulf, the Bay of Bengal?all these areas are burdened by different
threats with different players. Just as
today
nato is a looser al
liance, less singularly focused than itwas during the Cold War, any
coalition centered on the Indian Ocean should be adapted to the
times. Given the ocean's size?it stretches across seven time zones
and almost half of the world's
latitudes?and the comparative
slowness at which ships move, itwould be a challenge for any one
multinational navy to get to a crisis zone in time. The United
Stateswas able to lead the reliefeffortoff the coast of Indonesia
after the 2004 tsunami only because the carrier strike group the

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 Robert D.
Kaplan
US SAbraham Lincoln happened tobe in thevicinityand not in the
Korean Peninsula, where itwas headed.
A betterapproachwould be to relyonmultiple regionaland ide
ological alliances indifferent
parts of the IndianOcean. Some such
effortshave alreadybegun.The navies ofThailand, Singapore, and
Indonesia have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of
Malacca; those of theUnited States, India, Singapore, and Australia
have exercised together off India s southwestern coast?an implicit
rebuke toChinas designs in the region.According toVice Admiral
JohnMorgan, formerdeputy chief ofU.S. naval operations, the
IndianOcean strategicsystemshouldbe like theNew York City taxi
no central
system: driven by market forces and with dispatcher.
Coalitions will naturallyform in areaswhere shipping lanes need
to be as taxis
protected, much gather in the theater district before
and after performances. For one Australian commodore, themodel
should be a network of artificial sea bases supplied by theU.S.
Navy, which would allow for different permutations of alliances:
states could
frigates and destroyers from various "plug and play"
into these sea bases as necessary and spread out from East Africa
to the Indonesian
archipelago.
Like amicrocosm of theworld at large,thegreaterIndianOcean
region is developing into an area of both ferociously guarded sover

eignty(withfast-growingeconomies andmilitaries) and astonishing

interdependence (with its pipelines and land and sea routes). And
for the first time since the Portuguese onslaught in the region in the
s power there is in decline, however
early sixteenth century, theWest
The Indians and theChinese will enter into
subtlyand relatively.
a
dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters, with their shared
economic interests as major trading partners locking them in an un
comfortable embrace. The United States, meanwhile, will serve as
a stabilizing power in this newly complex area. Indispensability,
rather than dominance, must be its goal.?

?
FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume 88No. 2

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