Category Archives: China and the Pacific

Strife on the Global Commons

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 This article is a summary of a presentation made by the author at the National Defence College (India) on 20 June 2014.  It was first published in the author’s monthly column on the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies website on 14 July 2014 

By

Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar

Keywords: Global Commons, Mare Liberum, Mahan, UNCLOS, China’s Comprehensive Power, South and East China Sea

The run up to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) was marked by a  debate held in Sparta amongst the Peloponnesian allies to  determine whether war against the aggressive seapower Athens and the maritime Delian League was to be waged. Leadership of the warlike alliance lay with the powerful yet reluctant Spartan king Archidamus, a man of both intelligence and moderation. He questioned “What sort of a war, then, are we going to fight? If we can neither defeat them at sea nor control the resources on which their navy depends, we shall do ourselves more harm than good.” To Archidamus, clearly, the inability to access and control the Global Commons of his era presaged defeat.

Global Commons is a term typically used to describe international, supranational, and global common pool resource domains. Global Commons include the earth’s shared resources, such as the oceans, the atmosphere, outer space and the Polar Regions. Cyberspace also meets the definition, but for our examination we shall focus on the hydrosphere. The parameters for enquiry necessarily include physical tangibles of Height, Width, Depth and the awkward intangible of human history.

Mahan in “The Influence of Seapower upon History” underscored three prescient perspectives relating to the Commons. First, competition for materials and markets is intrinsic to an ever trussed global system. Second, the collaborative nature of commerce on the one hand deters war, while on the other engenders friction. Third, the Global Commons require to be secured against disruption and rapacious exploitation.

Our understanding of the Commons must not suffer from any delusions that explicit and recognized conventions have evolved over the centuries. On the contrary, till the middle of the last century what passed for a principle was Hugo Grotius’ 1609 notion of Mare Liberum, freedom of the seas.The concept that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it. The free-for-all state of the Commons becomes evident in the fact of the seaward limit of national sovereignty being defined by the cannon-shot decree which would suggest that it was the ability to control that defined dominion. By the middle of the twentieth century the collapse of colonial empires and the birth of new nations set into motion a dynamic that demanded a change from cannon-shot rules and lawlessnessto equitability and responsibilities in the Commons along with demarcation of territorial and economic zones. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I, II & III) met 1954 to 1982 to hammer out and define rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world’s oceans. The deliberations concluded in 1982 in and became functional in 1994. Recognizing that that the sea bed is the repository of vast and unguaged quantities of minerals, the Convention provided for a regime relating to minerals on the seabed outside any state’s territorial waters or Exclusive Economic Zone. It established an International Seabed Authority to regulate seabed mining and control distribution of royalties. To date it has been ratified by 165 nations. Significantly, the US Senate has snubbed the UNCLOS. What critically mars the compact is its imprecision, its illusory demand for the supranational and the absence of a structure to securethe Global Commons against disruption and rapacious exploitation.

The current distressed state of the Commons is discernable by the impact that globalization has had; strains of multi-polarity, anarchy of expectations and the increasing tensions between the demands for economic integration and the stresses of fractured politicaldivisions are symptoms. Nations are persistently confronted by the need to reconcile internal pressures with intrusive external impulses at a time when the efficacy of Power to bring on political outcomes is in question. While most nations have sought resolution and correctives within the framework of the existing international order, China emerges as an irony that has angled for and conspired to re-write the rule book.

China’s rising comprehensive power has generated an internal impulse to military growth and unilateral intervention in its immediate neighbourhood in the South and East China Sea and its extended regions of economic interests. It has developed and put in place strategies that target the Commons to assure a favourable consequence to what it perceives to be a strategic competition for resources and control of the seaways that enable movement. The consequences of China activizing artifices such as the Anti-Access and Area Denial strategy and geo-political manoeuvres to establish the String of Pearls in the Indian Ocean Region evokes increasing shared anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic milieu. Particularly at a time when the North Eastern Passage through the Arctic is emerging as receding ice cuts the Asia-Europe route via the Suez by half (from 23000 kms to 11500 kms) and technology opens the Antarctic to economic exploitation. The paradoxical effects of China’s contrivances are to undermine its own strategic standing, hasten counter balancing alignments and urging a global logic of cooperative politics over imperious strategies.

The Perils of Strategic Narcissism: China

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By

Vice Admiral (retd.) Vijay Shankar

China’s rise has powered an impulse to military growth and unilateral intervention which in turn evokes anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic milieu. The paradoxical effect is to undermine its own strategic standing.

 Keywords: Franco-German War of 1870, Globalization and China, State Controlled Capitalism, China as a Revisionist Power, New Strategic Alliances in Asia, Cooperative Security Strategies, Third Island Security Chain

Historical Similitude

            The Franco-German War of 1870 forms a watershed in strategic thought. After the annexation of the North German Confederacy in 1866, Bismarck sought the Southern German States.[1] He deceived the French into believing that a Prussian Prince would rule from the throne of Spain as a larger strategy of encirclement. By July 1870, France[2] was conned into a seemingly ‘inevitable’ war. Germany through superior military craft and technology inflicted a crushing defeat on the host. In the process the balance of power in Europe was upset.[3] The War, from deception, to alliances, provocation of crisis and defeat of the enemy forcing a one-sided negotiation could well have been scripted by Kautilya[4] or, more significant to our narrative, Sun Tzu.[5]

German victory ushered a strategic orientation to compete with the principal imperial power, Britain.[6] Three strategic objectives swayed the rivalry: military dominance over land and sea; global economic and technological ascendancy in tandem with unimpeded access to primary resources; and thirdly, diplomatic and political pre-eminence. By 1890, Germany had established continental military dominance and a warship-build programme that would challenge British command of the seas. Economically, Germany had already overtaken Britain in heavy industries and innovation, capturing global markets and amassing capital. This in turn muscled influence and superiority in one sector after another.

A thirty-year projection in 1890, suggested that Germany, home to the most advanced industries having unimpeded access to resources of the earth, best universities, richest banks and a balanced society would achieve her strategic goals and primacy. Yet precisely thirty years later, Germany lay in ruins, her economy in shambles, her people impoverished and her society fragmented. By 1920, her great power aspirations lay shamed between the pages of the Treaty of Versailles. The real lesson was that Germany’s quest for comprehensive power brought about a transformation amongst the status-quo powers to align against, despite traditional hostility (Britain and France; Britain and Russia), to contain and defeat a rising Germany that sought to upset the existing global order.

China in Perspective

Historical analogies are notorious in their inability to stage encores, yet they serve as means to understand the present. Contemporary fears of nations are driven by four vital traumas: perpetuation of the State; impact of internal and external stresses; reconciliation with the international system; lastly the conundrum of whether military power produces political outcomes. The paradigm of the day is ‘uncertainty’ with the tensions of multi-polarity, tyranny of economics, anarchy of expectations and polarisation along religio-cultural [7] lines all compacted by globalization [8].

If globalization is a leveller to the rest of the world, to China, globalization is about State capitalism, central supremacy, controlled markets, managed currency and hegemony. The military was to resolve fundamental contradictions that threatened the Chinese State. Significantly globalization provided the opportunity to alter the status-quo.[9] Against this backdrop, is the politics of competitive resource access and denial, which rationalized the use of force.[10]

China’s dazzling growth is set to overtake the USA. Its rise has been accompanied by ambitions of global leadership. This has in turn spurred an unparalleled military growth. In this circumstance the race to garner resources by other major economies is fraught. But the real alarm is, China seeks to dominate international institutions without bringing about a change of her own morphology. China’s claims on the South and East China Sea; handling of internal dissent; proliferatory carousing with North Korea and Pakistan are cases in point.

The emergence of China from its defensive maritime perimeters into the Indian Ocean is seen as the coming ‘Third Security Chain’. Gone is Deng’s ‘power bashfulness’, in its place is the conviction that the-world-needs-China-more-than-China-the-world.Its insistence on a bi-lateral policy to settle disputes even denies the natural impulse of threatened states to seek power balance in collective security. 

The Sense in Cooperative Security Strategies

            The standpoint that provocation and intimidation can benefit China by persuading the victim to negotiate outstanding issues from a conciliatory position is a strategically mistaken one. India, Japan, Vietnam and the South China Sea Littorals have demonstrated so. Far from acquiescing they have chosen to resist, adopting (in trend) a cooperative security strategy. This includes deliberate negative response to favour Chinese economic monopoly even when the benefits are obvious. While individual action may be insignificant, the aggregate of combined action may impede China’s growth which in turn question’s strategic stability of dispensation.

The parallels with the rise and fall of Germany is complete when we note that China’s Defence White Paper of April 2013 underscores the will to expand offensive military capability in pace with economic growth. Internationally this can only be viewed as acutely threatening. The delusion that menaced States will not align to contend and defy China’s grand design is a strategically misleading notion.

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End Notes

[1] Séguin, Philippe. Louis Napoléon Le Grand, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990, Pg 390-394.

[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated December 2013, Franco-German War, retrieved 30 May 2014.

[3] Lowe, John. The Great Powers, Imperialism and the German Problem 1865-1925. Taylor and Francis, Routledge, London, New York 1994. Pgs 13, 26, 34.

[4] Kautilya. The Arthashastra, translation by Rangarajan LN, Penguin Classics New Delhi 1990, Part IX pg 498 to Part XI pgs 625-644, 676-679 & 727.

[5]Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Griffith, Samuel B. Oxford University Press, London 1963. Chapter V, pg 39-44.

[6] Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Vintage Books, New York 1987, Chapter 5 pgs 194-274, deals with the crisis of the rise of ‘Middle Powers’ such as Germany (1885-1918).

[7]Fukuayama Francis. “The End of History.” The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), pp 4, 18.

[8]Huntington. Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of  World Order, Penguin Books, India 1997, pp 30-39.

[9] The World at War http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/index.html.The United Nations defines “major wars” as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. Between 1989 and 2010, forty nine wars erupted. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen “lesser” conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.

[10] Security analysts  have examined China’s efforts to develop weapons systems that can retard or even stop a potential adversary from entering an area of interest. Dubbed “access-denial,” the aim of such a strategy is to use weapons that deter and should the need arise challenge or indeed prevent inimical forces from operating in conflict zones or oceanic areas of interest . The teeth of this strategy is an anti-ship missile. Such a missile, fired from land, sea, underwater or air can cause tremendous damage to an enemy surface vessel. While such technology isn’t new, the effective ranges of such weapons have increased tremendously, along with their accuracy, speed of delivery and precision. Defending against such systems is therefore a major problem for planners.

 

The Chilling Prospects of Nuclear Devices at Large

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By

Vice Admiral (Retd.) Vijay Shankar

Keywords: US and USSR Nuclear Stockpiles, China, Nuclear Safeguards, Nuclear Proliferation, WMD technology and delivery systems, Nuclear Financial Conduits

This article was first published in the author’s monthly column on the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies website on 12 May 2014

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union produced over one thousand tons of weapon grade Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium. By 1986 its stockpile numbered 45,000 warheads[i]; it was poorly inventoried; spread across the Republics with fissionable material salted away as reserve in shoddily secured warehouses (remembering that it was the nation that was secured). The post break-up Russian governments of Yeltsin and Putin through the nineties and into the new millennium managed to locate and harvest close to 99.9 percent of the stash leaving 0.1 percent unaccounted for, which translates to one thousand kilograms of weapon-grade fissile matter somewhere in limbo[ii]; adequate material to put together over one hundred, 20 kiloton yield explosive devices. It is not entirely clear what magnitude of unaccounted weapon-grade fissile matter is adrift from the US and NATO stockpile for at the height of the Cold War, they too had amassed a stockpile of over 30,000[iii] warheads and an indefinite number of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) deployed on the European front; and they are not telling. After all in the sample year of 1957 three US nuclear weapons were lost in the North Atlantic Ocean whilst ferrying them across in transport Aircrafts and remain so to date[iv].

In the meantime, China’s Premier Deng Xiaoping through the 1980s into the 1990s promoted and executed an aggressive policy of direct transfer, of nuclear weapon technology and launch vectors to reprobate States (Pakistan, North Korea, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia) using North Korea as a clearing house for the deals. The policy has been continued by his successors unrelentingly[v].

The reasons for this profligate orientation are a matter of conjecture and may have originally reflected balance of power logic in the sub continental context; to offset and contain Indian comprehensive superiority. While in North Korea’s case to keep the USA and the Pacific allies embroiled in a snare of insecurities. In the Islamic world the motivations have a far more sinister purpose and perilous fallout.

Radical Islamic terrorists see the possession of a nuclear weapon not just as a symbol of power and an instrument of deterrence but as a means to destroy and dislocate an order that has so willfully kept the faithful under political, economic and spiritual subjugation. In this frame of reference, nations that have been singled out for retribution are the USA, India and Israel. It is here in these countries that the iniquitous probability of a nuclear device being detonated by radical Islamists looms large. Such an event gives to the non-state perpetuators an amorphous form that can neither be destroyed in armed retaliation nor their credo obliterated from the world of beliefs. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq stand in stark testimony to how rooted dogmas have a conviction of their own that deny change through force of arms. Rhetoric such as ‘rogue states’, ‘war on terror’ and ‘failed states’ raise more problems than provide solutions, for any rational interpretation of the terms will invariably indict the very nations that seek to drag out and drub.

Inquiry exposes the real enemy to be states and non-state actors that proliferate nuclear technologies with no other predisposition than to put the status-quo in disarray or driven by avarice. Global double standards and persistent tendentious views that exist on the subject has already brought selective legitimacy of such transactions and taken the world another step closer to a maverick nuclear detonation. Not only do current policies and attitudes to proliferation generate exceptionably high risks of a nuclear attack but there is an inevitability that is emerging if fissionable materials are globally not secured, retrieved and accounted.

Our narrative thus far has suggested that global clashes have moved beyond State to State conflict into a realm where the real threat of apocalypse comes from nuclear weapons in the hands of anarchic groups. These amorphous factions are driven by an ideology that seeks the destruction of what it considers antagonistic to its beliefs. The Nation State, on the other hand, is rationally driven by the will to survive. Perpetuation of the State is a national interest that is held supreme even if it means compromises that may cause profound changes. Radical Islam and its insurgents do not operate under such existential constraints; to them it the constancy of an abstract idea, that of their interpretation of the Koran.

The awkward irony is that the militant Islamist is financed by the same ungoverned trade that has made billionaires out of dubious entrepreneurs. The case of the Glencore Uranium Mining Corporation in Kitwe Zambia is a case in point. The sole owners of Glencore are the Marc Rich family now settled in Zug, Switzerland; the same Mr. Rich who was indicted for illicit Uranium trading with Iran, Israel and, one can only speculate, with which other entities. He also received a full and well funded Presidential pardon on Clinton’s last morning in office.[vi] The upshot is that the transfer of illicit wealth whether it is through the drug trade, uncontrolled resource access, sale of prohibited materials and technologies, illegal arms trade or as a deliberate policy eventually, in part, funnels its way to the nurturing of radical organisations. What we today stand witness to is the convergence of a parallel source of wealth and diffusing technologies together in the quest for weapon grade fissile materials. The means to dislocate and put in disarray the evolving world order is at hand.

We have noted that the trio of the USA, India and Israel have been declared by Radical Islam as primary targets for reprisal and therefore it may be inferred for special nuclear treatment. Counter action must, for this reason alone, be spearheaded by the troika. Four concrete measures are suggested:

  • Fissile Material. All fissile material globally must be retrieved, inventoried and secured. This must be an obligatory international effort despite the current situation in the Ukraine. Scientists and technicians involved in nuclear weapon design and fabrication must be profiled and political control by respective nations exercised over there movements and affiliations.
  • Inspection and Safeguards. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970 along with the Additional Protocol, which gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) greater proliferation monitoring powers, was the designated instrument for safeguards. However the treaty has over the years been compromised by the inequities it represented, the discrimination that it promoted and the selective biases that it propagated. What it lacks is teeth to impartially enforce punitive measures against proliferators irrespective of nation. What is suggested is a retooling of the Treaty to make the IAEA the nodal proliferation control agency with mandatory surveillance, intelligence provisions and realistic controls on the production of fissionable material and movement of nuclear weapon technologies.
  • Choking the Money Conduits. Intelligence sharing and coordinated action to shut down ungoverned trade and illicit financial transfers is the key to starving radical organisations. Financial institutions must be obliged to collaborate in the matter.
  • China. As noted earlier, China has been the leading proliferator of nuclear weapon technologies and delivery systems. It has over the years transferred nuclear weapons design, provided testing facilities, passed on ballistic missiles along with production facilities and provided material, intellectual, logistic and doctrinal back up to client state nuclear weapon programmes. To some in Beijing the detonation of a nuclear device by Radical Islamists may even be seen as an effective route to upsetting the status-quo and opening the future to its hegemonic designs.

Thus far, as a global community, we have been blind to the dangers of untrammelled nuclear proliferation particularly by China as it supplies ready-to-use WMD technology along with delivery systems to States that are in the tightening grip of Radical Islamists. The manner in which Pakistan received a nuclear weapon design package and material support to build nuclear weapons which was then conveyed to Iran, Libya and others is suggestive of a pattern that seeks to deliberately provoke a  nuclear incident that can only serve China’s interests. The time is nigh when the trio of USA, India and Israel which have been designated as primary targets of Radical Islam to band together to enforce a Nuclear Non Proliferation regime that reigns in China.

——

End Notes

[i] Wikimedia Commons, US and USSR nuclear stockpiles.

[ii] Reed and Stillman. The Nuclear Express, Zenith Press Minneapolis 2009, pg 320

[iii] Wikimedia Commons, US and USSR nuclear stockpiles.

[iv] The Nuclear Express, 349.

[v] In 1982 Deng’s government began the deliberate direct/proxy proliferation of nuclear and ballistic missile technologies into the Islamic and Marxist worlds. China signed a covert nuclear reactor deal with Algeria; provided to North Korea comprehensive material and technological support to their nuclear weapons programme; sold CSS-2 missiles to Saudi Arabia and gave logistic, material, technological, intellectual assistance and doctrinal sustenance to the Pakistan nuclear weapons programme to ‘redress’ the nuclear imbalance on the sub-continent. See Proliferation: Threat and Response, Office of the US Secretary for Defence January 2001.

[vi] Reed and Stillman, The Nuclear Express, Zenith Press Minneapolis 2009, 310-311.