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STRATEGIC AFFAIRS
The United States Must Come Out of the Mahanian Trap Atul Bhardwaj
T
he Thucydides and Kindleberger Traps are the “traps” in vogue that explain the likely outbreak of hostilities between a rising China and a sliding United States (US). While the Thucydides Trap highlights the inevitability of war between the two powers due to their growing misunderstandings, the Kindleberger Trap pertains to how war between the two can be averted by the rising power’s greater involvement in “supply of public goods that the power in eclipse is no longer able to provide” (Kuo 2017). The Thucydides Trap is more popular in American strategic circles because it helps instil an element of fear in China. It makes China divert its attention and resources away from economics and towards security. The Kindleberger Trap has not gained much traction among hawks or doves in the US foreign policy establishment because it provides leeway to Beijing to expand its investment drive under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Washington and its allies often “sneer” or “blithely cheer” at the BRI, hardly willing to acknowledge the Chinese investments under the “public good” category (Kuo 2017). The American realists, threatened by the prospect of the re-emergence of Eurasian transportation links and their impact on the maritime order, have launched a relentless campaign against Chinese investments in South Asia, Africa, and Central Asia along the BRI route. Marxist terminology—debt trap, predatory, imperial, comprador—is being liberally thrown around to describe Chinese investments. China is spending almost $1 trillion to revive and renew the overland and maritime trade links between China, Europe, West Asia, and East Africa through construction of modern ports linked to high-speed road and rail corridors. On 10
the other hand, according to a Brown University study, the US has spent $5.9 trillion on the war on terror between 2001 and 2019. An article published in the American military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, suggests that the Trump administration is planning to draw $13.9 billion from the unused portion of the Army Corps of Engineers budget to construct a more than 200-mile-long wall along the US–Mexico border (Werner et al 2019). Walls and wars continue to consume the US’s annual military budget of roughly $650 billion, and to devour its imperial might. Till recently, the decimation of Soviet communism was considered the ultimate victory of American strategy. However, one is no longer sanguine about the robustness of American strategic thought, because, in the three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington’s position as a pre-eminent global power is precariously balanced. It is finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain the primacy of the dollar in international financial markets as well as that of its navy in the maritime domain. Blinkered American Strategy After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US had the goodwill as well as the power to build a more inclusive and democratic global governance architecture. However, led by the military– industrial complex (MIC), it created utter chaos in West Asia and South Asia through illegal wars and unnecessary interventions. It promoted unabashed unilateralism, undermining international rules at will. Besides the Thucydides and Kindleberger Traps, the third trap that the Americans are oblivious to is the Mahanian trap, which has held the American strategy hostage for more than a century. In 1890, Alfred Thayer
Mahan—the fin-de-siècle American naval captain—published his famous work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890). Ever since, the US has consolidated into a hardcore maritime power (Westcott 1999), almost neglecting Halford Mackinder’s theory of geopolitics that had predicted the rise of the Eurasian heartland in relation to the maritime powers due to better rail communications and the concomitant industrialisation. Adhering to the principles of sea power propounded by Mahan, Washington continued to feed its 800-odd military bases across the globe to assert its maritime dominance. China spotted the gaping hole in the US’s approach, and is attempting to strike a fine balance between its maritime and continental ambitions by launching the BRI, which has the potential to boost international trade, instead of strife. One would have expected seasoned American think tanks to come up with a more innovative strategy in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But, somehow, the US strategic community only imagined military bases as symbolic of a continental power. The American obsession with the sea lines of communication (SLOCs) prevented the US from imagining that the land lines of communication (LLOCs) could also be built to augment global supply chains. It is often argued that the LLOCs cannot compete with the SLOCs. The railways cannot replace shipping as the primary mode of international trade because the number of containers that a ship can carry is far more than the quantity of goods plying in trains and trucks across continents. It is true that currently the Trans-Asian rail network between China and Europe through Central Asia is not as mature as the shipping networks to handle international freight services. But, it is also a fact that railways can transport goods in less than half the time taken by ships. It is primarily the speed element that is attracting the perishable food industry and computer hardware firms to use the Eurasian rail networks to transport their goods to different countries.
JANUARY 26, 2019
vol lIV no 4
EPW
Economic & Political Weekly
STRATEGIC AFFAIRS
While the strategist working in the realm of strategic and security affairs sees a hidden agenda in Chinese investments—a plan to export the Chinese model of development and expand its political influence to distant areas—the economist views the BRI as a positive addition to global commerce and transportation infrastructure. For example, a World Bank research paper on the impact of the BRI on shipping time and trade costs concludes that the BRI projects will lead to an average reduction in the shipment time ranging between 1.2 and 2.5 percent, leading to reduction of aggregate trade costs between 1.1 and 2.2 percent. For Belt and Road economies, the change in shipment times and trade costs will range between 1.7 and 3.2 percent and 1.5 and 2.8 percent, respectively. (De Soyres et al 2018)
According to Joanna Konings (2018), a senior economist at the International Trade Analysis, Amsterdam, when trade costs fall bet ween BRI countries, the trade between them increases and “the resulting impacts on world trade range from a 4% increase in the scenario involving the New Eurasian Land Bridge countries to 12% when trade costs fall between all countries involved in the BRI.” Even a Rand Corporation study suggests that the construction of new transport infrastructure will be “a winwin scenario in terms of the impact on trade” as it will “improve total exports by 2.8 per cent in the BRI region, including the wider region” (Lu et al 2018). According to a Boston University research report, The China Development Bank and the ExportImport Bank of China now provide as much financing to developing countries as the World Bank does … China has negotiated close to $170 billion in bilateral and regional development funds across the world—such as the China-Africa Development Fund, which just received a Chinese pledge of another $60 billion. China also helped create the New Development Bank with Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with nearly 80 countries in Asia and beyond. (Gallagher 2018)
imagining itself as a continental power? Why cannot the US imagine investing in achieving trans-continental linkages through sustained investments in landbased transportation links? The hard reality is that the perpetually paranoid “ugly American” is bent on erecting a monovalent empire that is easily controlled from the seas. It relies on the policy of regime change rather than investments to forge links with the developing and the underdeveloped world. American strategic thought, tethered to the profitability of its MIC, did not allow the US to imagine spending a few trillion dollars on building land bridges across Eurasia and Africa—something akin to the Chinese BRI—to emerge as a complete power. Perhaps, the problem lies with American intellectuals, the adherents of “applied history” and realism, who want to manage the world by once again engineering a Sino–Soviet split and encouraging proxy and limited wars between countries with coterminous borders. The American strategic culture needs an overhaul in times of the fourth industrial revolution. It cannot continue to place Mahan and Mackinder in two separate camps and play the great game to keep land powers divided and involved in border conflicts. Even if China stumbles, the march towards development of trans-continental commercial corridors is not likely to halt because the emerging transportation technologies—autonomous electric trucks and bullet trains— are favouring land transportation networks over shipping. Online markets demand faster logistics that fast trains running across continents will fulfil
Economic & Political Weekly
EPW
JANUARY 26, 2019
Atul Bhardwaj ([email protected]) is honorary research fellow, Department of International Politics, City, University of London.
References De Soyres, Francois, Alen Mulabdic, Siobhan Murray, Nadia Rocha and Michele Ruta (2018): “How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative Reduce Trade Costs,” World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 8614, October, viewed on 13 January 2019, https://openknowledge. worldbank.org/handle/10986/30582. Gallagher, Kevin P (2018): “China’s Role as the World’s Development Bank Cannot Be Ignored,” NPR, 11 October, viewed on 10 December 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646421776/ opinion-chinas-role-as-the-world-s-development-bank-cannot-be-ignored?live=1. Konings, Joanna (2018): “Trade Impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative,” Think, 6 June, viewed on 15 January 2019, https://think.ing.com/uploads/ reports/Tradebelt_final2.pdf. Kuo, Kaiser (2017): “America Should Stop Sneering at China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” SupChina Sinica, 26 May, viewed on 10 January 2019, https://supchina.com/2017/05/26/kaiser-kuoamerica-stop-sneering-chinas-belt-road-initiative. Lu, Hui, Charlene Rohr, Marco Hafner and Anna Knack (2018): “China Belt and Road Initiative: Measuring the Impact of Improving Transportation Connectivity on Trade in the Region,” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, https:// www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2625. html. Werner, Erica, Josh Dawsey, Mike Debonis and Seung Min Kim (2019): “Trump Eyes Army for Building Wall as He Mulls Emergency Declaration,” Stars and Stripes, https://www.stripes. com/news/us/trump-eyes-army-for-buildingwall-as-he-mulls-emergency-declaration-1.563988. Westcott, Allan (ed) (1999): “Introduction,” Mahan and Naval Warfare, Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred T Mahan, New York: Dover Publications.
Sameeksha Trust Books
Social Policy Edited by JEAN DRÈZE The reach of social policy in India has expanded significantly in recent years. Reaching larger numbers of people than before, some benefits now take the form of enforceable legal entitlements. Yet the performance of social programmes is far from ideal, with still a long way to go in directly addressing the interests, demands and rights of the unprivileged. This collection of essays is clustered around six major themes: health, education, food security, employment guarantee, pensions and cash transfers, and inequality and social exclusion.
Pp xiv + 478 | Rs 795 ISBN978-81-250-6284-4 2016
Orient Blackswan Pvt Ltd
Restoring Land–Sea Equilibrium The question is, if China, a continental power, can aspire to be a maritime power, then what prevents the US from
more efficiently than container ships. Strategists need to work harder on restoring the land–sea equilibrium, instead of allowing maritime powers to stall the construction of railway lines as was done during World War I with the Berlin–Baghdad rail line.
www.orientblackswan.com Mumbai • Chennai • New Delhi • Kolkata • Bangalore • Bhubaneshwar • Ernakulam • Guwahati • Jaipur • Lucknow • Patna • Chandigarh • Hyderabad Contact: [email protected] vol lIV no 4
11
The United States Must Come Out of the Mahanian Trap Atul Bhardwaj
T
he Thucydides and Kindleberger Traps are the “traps” in vogue that explain the likely outbreak of hostilities between a rising China and a sliding United States (US). While the Thucydides Trap highlights the inevitability of war between the two powers due to their growing misunderstandings, the Kindleberger Trap pertains to how war between the two can be averted by the rising power’s greater involvement in “supply of public goods that the power in eclipse is no longer able to provide” (Kuo 2017). The Thucydides Trap is more popular in American strategic circles because it helps instil an element of fear in China. It makes China divert its attention and resources away from economics and towards security. The Kindleberger Trap has not gained much traction among hawks or doves in the US foreign policy establishment because it provides leeway to Beijing to expand its investment drive under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Washington and its allies often “sneer” or “blithely cheer” at the BRI, hardly willing to acknowledge the Chinese investments under the “public good” category (Kuo 2017). The American realists, threatened by the prospect of the re-emergence of Eurasian transportation links and their impact on the maritime order, have launched a relentless campaign against Chinese investments in South Asia, Africa, and Central Asia along the BRI route. Marxist terminology—debt trap, predatory, imperial, comprador—is being liberally thrown around to describe Chinese investments. China is spending almost $1 trillion to revive and renew the overland and maritime trade links between China, Europe, West Asia, and East Africa through construction of modern ports linked to high-speed road and rail corridors. On 10
the other hand, according to a Brown University study, the US has spent $5.9 trillion on the war on terror between 2001 and 2019. An article published in the American military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, suggests that the Trump administration is planning to draw $13.9 billion from the unused portion of the Army Corps of Engineers budget to construct a more than 200-mile-long wall along the US–Mexico border (Werner et al 2019). Walls and wars continue to consume the US’s annual military budget of roughly $650 billion, and to devour its imperial might. Till recently, the decimation of Soviet communism was considered the ultimate victory of American strategy. However, one is no longer sanguine about the robustness of American strategic thought, because, in the three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington’s position as a pre-eminent global power is precariously balanced. It is finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain the primacy of the dollar in international financial markets as well as that of its navy in the maritime domain. Blinkered American Strategy After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US had the goodwill as well as the power to build a more inclusive and democratic global governance architecture. However, led by the military– industrial complex (MIC), it created utter chaos in West Asia and South Asia through illegal wars and unnecessary interventions. It promoted unabashed unilateralism, undermining international rules at will. Besides the Thucydides and Kindleberger Traps, the third trap that the Americans are oblivious to is the Mahanian trap, which has held the American strategy hostage for more than a century. In 1890, Alfred Thayer
Mahan—the fin-de-siècle American naval captain—published his famous work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890). Ever since, the US has consolidated into a hardcore maritime power (Westcott 1999), almost neglecting Halford Mackinder’s theory of geopolitics that had predicted the rise of the Eurasian heartland in relation to the maritime powers due to better rail communications and the concomitant industrialisation. Adhering to the principles of sea power propounded by Mahan, Washington continued to feed its 800-odd military bases across the globe to assert its maritime dominance. China spotted the gaping hole in the US’s approach, and is attempting to strike a fine balance between its maritime and continental ambitions by launching the BRI, which has the potential to boost international trade, instead of strife. One would have expected seasoned American think tanks to come up with a more innovative strategy in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But, somehow, the US strategic community only imagined military bases as symbolic of a continental power. The American obsession with the sea lines of communication (SLOCs) prevented the US from imagining that the land lines of communication (LLOCs) could also be built to augment global supply chains. It is often argued that the LLOCs cannot compete with the SLOCs. The railways cannot replace shipping as the primary mode of international trade because the number of containers that a ship can carry is far more than the quantity of goods plying in trains and trucks across continents. It is true that currently the Trans-Asian rail network between China and Europe through Central Asia is not as mature as the shipping networks to handle international freight services. But, it is also a fact that railways can transport goods in less than half the time taken by ships. It is primarily the speed element that is attracting the perishable food industry and computer hardware firms to use the Eurasian rail networks to transport their goods to different countries.
JANUARY 26, 2019
vol lIV no 4
EPW
Economic & Political Weekly
STRATEGIC AFFAIRS
While the strategist working in the realm of strategic and security affairs sees a hidden agenda in Chinese investments—a plan to export the Chinese model of development and expand its political influence to distant areas—the economist views the BRI as a positive addition to global commerce and transportation infrastructure. For example, a World Bank research paper on the impact of the BRI on shipping time and trade costs concludes that the BRI projects will lead to an average reduction in the shipment time ranging between 1.2 and 2.5 percent, leading to reduction of aggregate trade costs between 1.1 and 2.2 percent. For Belt and Road economies, the change in shipment times and trade costs will range between 1.7 and 3.2 percent and 1.5 and 2.8 percent, respectively. (De Soyres et al 2018)
According to Joanna Konings (2018), a senior economist at the International Trade Analysis, Amsterdam, when trade costs fall bet ween BRI countries, the trade between them increases and “the resulting impacts on world trade range from a 4% increase in the scenario involving the New Eurasian Land Bridge countries to 12% when trade costs fall between all countries involved in the BRI.” Even a Rand Corporation study suggests that the construction of new transport infrastructure will be “a winwin scenario in terms of the impact on trade” as it will “improve total exports by 2.8 per cent in the BRI region, including the wider region” (Lu et al 2018). According to a Boston University research report, The China Development Bank and the ExportImport Bank of China now provide as much financing to developing countries as the World Bank does … China has negotiated close to $170 billion in bilateral and regional development funds across the world—such as the China-Africa Development Fund, which just received a Chinese pledge of another $60 billion. China also helped create the New Development Bank with Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with nearly 80 countries in Asia and beyond. (Gallagher 2018)
imagining itself as a continental power? Why cannot the US imagine investing in achieving trans-continental linkages through sustained investments in landbased transportation links? The hard reality is that the perpetually paranoid “ugly American” is bent on erecting a monovalent empire that is easily controlled from the seas. It relies on the policy of regime change rather than investments to forge links with the developing and the underdeveloped world. American strategic thought, tethered to the profitability of its MIC, did not allow the US to imagine spending a few trillion dollars on building land bridges across Eurasia and Africa—something akin to the Chinese BRI—to emerge as a complete power. Perhaps, the problem lies with American intellectuals, the adherents of “applied history” and realism, who want to manage the world by once again engineering a Sino–Soviet split and encouraging proxy and limited wars between countries with coterminous borders. The American strategic culture needs an overhaul in times of the fourth industrial revolution. It cannot continue to place Mahan and Mackinder in two separate camps and play the great game to keep land powers divided and involved in border conflicts. Even if China stumbles, the march towards development of trans-continental commercial corridors is not likely to halt because the emerging transportation technologies—autonomous electric trucks and bullet trains— are favouring land transportation networks over shipping. Online markets demand faster logistics that fast trains running across continents will fulfil
Economic & Political Weekly
EPW
JANUARY 26, 2019
Atul Bhardwaj ([email protected]) is honorary research fellow, Department of International Politics, City, University of London.
References De Soyres, Francois, Alen Mulabdic, Siobhan Murray, Nadia Rocha and Michele Ruta (2018): “How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative Reduce Trade Costs,” World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 8614, October, viewed on 13 January 2019, https://openknowledge. worldbank.org/handle/10986/30582. Gallagher, Kevin P (2018): “China’s Role as the World’s Development Bank Cannot Be Ignored,” NPR, 11 October, viewed on 10 December 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646421776/ opinion-chinas-role-as-the-world-s-development-bank-cannot-be-ignored?live=1. Konings, Joanna (2018): “Trade Impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative,” Think, 6 June, viewed on 15 January 2019, https://think.ing.com/uploads/ reports/Tradebelt_final2.pdf. Kuo, Kaiser (2017): “America Should Stop Sneering at China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” SupChina Sinica, 26 May, viewed on 10 January 2019, https://supchina.com/2017/05/26/kaiser-kuoamerica-stop-sneering-chinas-belt-road-initiative. Lu, Hui, Charlene Rohr, Marco Hafner and Anna Knack (2018): “China Belt and Road Initiative: Measuring the Impact of Improving Transportation Connectivity on Trade in the Region,” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, https:// www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2625. html. Werner, Erica, Josh Dawsey, Mike Debonis and Seung Min Kim (2019): “Trump Eyes Army for Building Wall as He Mulls Emergency Declaration,” Stars and Stripes, https://www.stripes. com/news/us/trump-eyes-army-for-buildingwall-as-he-mulls-emergency-declaration-1.563988. Westcott, Allan (ed) (1999): “Introduction,” Mahan and Naval Warfare, Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred T Mahan, New York: Dover Publications.
Sameeksha Trust Books
Social Policy Edited by JEAN DRÈZE The reach of social policy in India has expanded significantly in recent years. Reaching larger numbers of people than before, some benefits now take the form of enforceable legal entitlements. Yet the performance of social programmes is far from ideal, with still a long way to go in directly addressing the interests, demands and rights of the unprivileged. This collection of essays is clustered around six major themes: health, education, food security, employment guarantee, pensions and cash transfers, and inequality and social exclusion.
Pp xiv + 478 | Rs 795 ISBN978-81-250-6284-4 2016
Orient Blackswan Pvt Ltd
Restoring Land–Sea Equilibrium The question is, if China, a continental power, can aspire to be a maritime power, then what prevents the US from
more efficiently than container ships. Strategists need to work harder on restoring the land–sea equilibrium, instead of allowing maritime powers to stall the construction of railway lines as was done during World War I with the Berlin–Baghdad rail line.
www.orientblackswan.com Mumbai • Chennai • New Delhi • Kolkata • Bangalore • Bhubaneshwar • Ernakulam • Guwahati • Jaipur • Lucknow • Patna • Chandigarh • Hyderabad Contact: [email protected] vol lIV no 4
11
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