The South China Sea: Reposts

What is the Australian “hyperventilation” about? Is it something real, or an attempt to distract the Australian public from examining the corruption and incompetence of their current government (as per usual)?

In the last year, however, China has become much more economically powerful and much more significant as a naval power, and the steady decline of U.S. influence in the Pacific Rim has accelerated (and will accelerate further with the collapse of its Korean policy). So it’s hard to see why any of this needs to be taken seriously on a factual or logical basis.

Australia is in a difficult international position these days. We are a military client state of the USA and an economic client state of China. More conventionally, Australia might be termed a military ally of the USA and a trading partner of China. However, I think the power and trade imbalances move the relationships to towards the client state end of the spectrum.

China is now a serious geostrategic competitor with the USA. Economic power is the basis of all power in the modern world system. China’s GDP surpassed that of the USA in 2016 based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). On the PPP measure China is now about 25% of the world economy. On other measures, China will overall the USA between now and about 2028.

The Thucydides Trap thesis is advanced by Graham Allison in his book “Destined for War”. When one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result. Allison presents this as a high probability not a certainty. Of course, with the nuclear MAD (mutual assured destruction) issue, one would think that rational actors would avoid outright war.

China approaches geostrategy in different manner compared to the West. One should add this is simply China still approaching geostrategy in its traditional way. The West’s historical approach to geostrategy from the opening of the Age of Imperialism (Spain in the Americas) has been expeditionary. The nation goes abroad to conquer and loot resources. This approach in historical context made power sense though it was not moral in any sense. Europe was relatively undeveloped and backward in 1492, at least compared to China. In 1492, China’s economy was about 25% of the world economy just as it is again today.

The expeditionary-imperial approach to wealth accumulation makes power sense in a world not well integrated and with large, relatively backward continents (and a sub-continent) open to piecemeal conquests, with the pieces being joined up later. Grasping middle powers (middle with respect to China at the time) and with serviceable navies, such as Spain, Portugal, England, Netherlands and others considered this potential route to geostrategic power to be workable. In the long run, it worked fully only for England and then Britain. Two very costly world wars, a relatively small homeland and quite possibly the strategic decline of naval power as pointed out by J.Q. (missiles are greater than navies) put paid to the British Empire.

“From the middle of the 15th century, China stopped sending naval and “treasure” fleets abroad; thereafter its trade policy varied, but was officially far less open, even autarkic.” – The Economist – “1492 and all that.” China took this official stance perhaps partly due to its large continental base as a nation and perhaps partly due to Chinese Imperial Court and even Confucian arrogance and insularity. There may have been an element of realpolitik to it. The nation was more controllable if kept autarkic and its resources were diverse and sufficient to makes autarky quite feasible even if not the best path to total national wealth. There may have been another element. China was so vast and advanced, relatively speaking, that it needed few resources and less manufactures from abroad.

The silver trade across the Pacific become the exception when the Spaniards discovered the mountain of silver near Potosi in what is now Bolivia. The mountain, Cerro Rico, produced an estimated 60% of all silver mined in the world during the second half of the 16th century. China had experienced recurrent problems with managing money supply, trying various iterations of brass, copper and iron coins monies and also paper money. Eventually silver as commodity money was settled upon as it made its way into China through smugglers and warlords in Fujian province. Chinese junks met Spanish silver galleons in a bay near modern Manila.

But in a lot of ways, the Chinese elites felt self-sufficient and China pursued what really was its age-old policy of incremental expansion around its borders rather than expeditionary conquest and imperialism. The Chinese mindset to this day is one of incremental expansion and consolidation before another round of incremental expansion. This is how and why they took Tibet. We can see this happening today in the South China Sea where it has a military defensive rationale and a economic defensive rationale. It wants to push out the aggressively postured US-Japanese-Nato containment line.

China’s age-old incremental expansion policy is more suited to this new modern age. Expeditionary imperialism of the type of the USA in the Middle East now costs far in blood and treasure than it returns. It’s a losing proposition. China strategically sits back and watches the USA bleed itself dry in the wrong places while it (China) incrementally expands homeland borders and immediate power only so far as it needs to give itself more wriggle room.

With MAD, total war or even any war between superpowers, except proxy wars, is off the table for all rational planners. This makes economic competition and differential growth (or degrowth) of more strategic weight in the geostrategic struggle. Walk quietly and grow the biggest economy while making a MAD stick just big enough to dissuade total war. The current geostrategic situation suits China’s deepest strategic habits and the patient instincts of an old civilization. The USA by comparison is a brash, new and impatient civilization and it is now making a lot of strategically incorrect moves.

The strategic situation could change again. I assess that China is more vulnerable to limits to growth in general and especially climate change and sea level rise. That, as I say these days, is another post.

You know, if you unilaterally declare victory in an argument, and act like those that bring it up are pre-refuted, what’s the point of others engaging? Or of you bringing the conversation up again?