A Geographical Breakdown of What’s Going on in the World
Dean Cheng joins us to discuss China. Like a flourless brownie, this podcast is dense and delicious. We hit China’s goals and perspectives: From the Chinese “status quo”, to the South China Sea, to India, to the use of crises as policy tools. If you want to see behind the headlines, this is your podcast.
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On June 26th, one of the world’s largest and most significant naval exercises began in and around Hawaii. Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) is a biannual event led by the United States Navy and usually involves maritime forces from more than n Pacific countries, including Canada. Although the exercises have been held consistently since 1971, this year’s edition promises to have an unprecedented impact on military and strategic affairs in the Asia-Pacific region.
Of particular note, 2014 marks the first time China participates in RIMPAC. Previous editions have involved regional neighbours, like Japan and South Korea, but curiously excluded the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Early this year, as planning was underway for the upcoming edition of RIMPAC, the US extended an invitation to China for the first time. However, the fallout from the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 31-June 1 left considerable doubt that China would accept the invitation. It therefore came as a surprise when China formally accepted the invitation one week after the heated debate in Singapore. In a move that could help reduce regional tensions, four PLAN vessels have participated in the exercise, serving alongside ships from other participating countries, like Japan, the Philippines, and Canada.
This is also the first RIMPAC exercise for the small Southeast Asian state of Brunei. The Royal Brunei Navy is a rather small force, especially in comparison to the impressive naval might of nearby Singapore, but it has contributed two off-shore patrol vessels. These smaller ships, the KDB Darussalam and KDB Darulaman, are also Brunei’s newest acquisitions and so RIMPAC is viewed as an opportunity to test out their capabilities in simulations of large-scale maritime combat operations.
With Brunei, participation in RIMPAC increases among Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members to six out of ten, indicating a willingness by the bloc to become more actively involved in Pacific security. The four member states not participating in 2014 either lack the capacity to participate, such as landlocked Laos, or they were not invited to participate, such as the despotic regime in Burma.
While China and Brunei are in this year, Russia is out. In 2012, Russian maritime forces joined RIMPAC for the first time. Three vessels took part, led by the destroyer RFS Panteleyev, which had previously served alongside NATO forces as part of Operation Ocean Shield. But with tensions rising over Russia’s actions in Ukraine, no invitation was extended to join RIMPAC in 2014.
In May 2014, Russia and China held a large-scale joint naval exercise of their own in the East China Sea, but Russia has otherwise been left isolated in Pacific military affairs since the Crimean crisis. Aside from supplying Vietnam with new submarines and other vessels, Russia has scant opportunities to build security ties with the countries of Southeast Asia, stalling any effort by Vladimir Putin to pivot eastward. This suggests that any ‘soft power’ influence Russia may have had is now in severe decline, with many governments in the region reluctant to trust or engage with Putin.
RIMPAC 2014 is also a significant opportunity for Canada to demonstrate its capacity to become a major player in the Pacific. This has clearly not been lost on Canadian defence officials as there is a considerably increased contribution from Canada as compared to 2012, despite the fact that many Royal Canadian Navy vessels are either undergoing repairs or are being retrofitted. This time, Canada’s fleet is led by the HMCS Calgary, a Halifax-class frigate, joined by a Victoria-class submarine and two Kingston-class patrol vessels. As RIMPAC is a combined arms exercise, Canada has also sent an infantry company from the Third Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry to act as marines, while a Royal Canadian Air Force component will be deployed that includes eight CF-18 Hornets.
By involving all three elements of the Canadian Forces, it will be possible to demonstrate Canada’s ability to participate meaningfully in a multilateral intervention in the Pacific. As tensions between countries in the Asia-Pacific region are enflamed, discussion surrounding the potential for a Pacific equivalent to NATO occasionally surfaces. By showing leadership through RIMPAC and developing interoperability with countries ranging from Brunei to China, Canada secures a place at the table for itself in case those discussions ever turn serious.
Paul Pryce is a Research Analyst at the NATO Council of Canada and CIMSEC’s Director of Social Media. With degrees in political science from universities in both Canada and Estonia, he has previously worked as a Research Fellow at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and an Associate Fellow at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs. His research interests are diverse and include maritime security, NATO affairs, and African regional integration.
Disclaimer:
Any views or opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and the news agencies and do not necessarily represent those of the NATO Council of Canada. This article is published for information purposes only.
This post appeared at the NATO Council of Canada in its original form and was cross-posted by permission.
The 3rd World Congress of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs ) was held in Marseilles and Ajaccio in October 2013 and the Government of New Caledonia reacted quickly by officially opening in April 2014 the Natural Park of the Coral Sea.
This is an important issue for France, which has the second largest maritime space behind the United States [Which recently drastically increased the size of its Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument]. Indeed, the New Caledonian park occupies its entire exclusive economic zone, nearly 1.3 million km².
What are the issues and the objectives of this park? Which obstacles the government of New Caledonia will have to face?
A Beautiful Project
Harold Martin, the President of the Government of New Caledonia, announced the creation of the park in August 2012 at the annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum. He relied on a strategic analysis of the maritime space planning, conducted in 2012 with technical support from the Agency of Marine Protected Areas.
Five parks were recently created in France. However, only two are operational (Iroise and Mayotte) and have a management plan and a team ready for action.
Olivier Laroussini, director of the Agency for Marine Protected Areas, considers that “France’s oversea territories are larger and less populated; they can help revitalize the creation of protected areas.”
The natural park of the Coral Sea is today one of the largest protected marine areas in the world: 1.3 million km², which represents 95% of waters on which New Caledonia is sovereign. This also amounts to 12.7% of the entire French maritime space.
The need for a natural park
The decree creating the park was adopted on 23rd April. This new space contributes to strengthening the French network of marine protected areas. France announced its intention to classify 20% of its maritime territory into marine protected areas by 2020.
Indeed, only 3% of waters are protected worldwide, while the target set by the Convention on Biological Diversity signed in Nagoya in 2010 and reiterated in Ajaccio last October was of 10%. It is necessary to protect the marine environment since 40% of the world’s oceans are permanently affected by human activities, in particular by overfishing, pollution and acidification linked to global warming.
The objectives of the Natural Park of Coral Sea
Anthony Lecren member of the Government of New Caledonia with the portfolio of sustainable development, presented the objectives of the park: this area is meant to protect the biodiversity, while contributing to the sustainable development of maritime activities and allowing New Caledonia to become a motor in regional dynamics in this field.
Challenges
Jean-Paul Michel, director of Global Ocean Legacy France recalls that “this park is very ambitious: its wide surface will allow the ecosystem to regenerate well. But for now on, this is an empty shell: we must assign resources and choose the areas to be particularly protected.”
Indeed, the main challenge is to generate a genuine shared management. For this, a management committee will be established soon. It will include local actors (institutions, civil society, traditional and scientific representatives) and it will be chaired by the High Commissioner of the Republic, representing the French state (equivalent to governor) and the President of the Government of New Caledonia. Within three years, it will develop a management plan that will define conservation areas, reserves of ecosystems and those suitable for fishing and tourism. Those proposals will then be sent to the government of New Caledonia for adoption. The latter is indeed competent in managing the resources of the maritime space while the French government retains the power to maintain sovereignty over these waters.
It is the government of New Caledonia that will support the financing of the management (many funds have yet to be raised), while the French state will be responsible for ensuring the functions of surveillance and law enforcement. Jean-Michel Paul reminds us that “We should also ensure that the next government, which [was] named after the provincial election on May 11, allocates the resources necessary for the proper management of the park.” And indeed, the uncertainty rules in the camp of local actors.
In addition, this new park should be submitted to the Oceania 21 conference to be held in late June in Noumea. This event will bring together heads of state from 15 countries and recognized experts, including Nicolas Hulot , the Special Envoy of the President of the French Republic for the preservation of the planet and Jean-Michel Cousteau , grand-son of the Commander Jean-Jacques Cousteau and founder of the “Ocean Futures Society” association, based in Santa Barbara, USA.
Unfortunately, delays have occurred at the administrative level that augured that it will be difficult to make this conference a summary of actions already underway.
In New Caledonia, it is feared that many use conflicts emerge, especially when the park will cover areas where the native population, the Kanaks, are accustomed to fish.
Another issue is the completion of the Extraplac program which suffers significant budgetary problems which seriously hamper its deployment, and beyond, the implementation of an ambitious maritime policy.
In addition, France has taken a considerable delay in filing extension requests to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, in the case of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the French Polynesia and Clipperton.
Negotiations with neighboring States relating to the boundaries of sovereignty have also led to freeze requests on New Caledonia, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and the Kerguelen Islands.
Alix is a writer, researcher, and correspondent on the Asia-Pacific region for Marine Renewable Energy LTD. She previously served as a maritime policy advisor to the New Zealand Consul General in New Caledonia and as the French Navy’s Deputy Bureau Chief for State Action at Sea, New Caledonia Maritime Zone.
It can be lonely at the top. For the U.S., it’s lonelier than we might have expected.
In a recent piece for The National Interest, Paul Pillar recently argued for a more nuanced approach to the question of U.S. credibility and alliances. Pillar points out something that sometimes needs to be pointed out: the U.S., like any nation, makes alliances when it makes sense for its interests to do so, and does not (or at any rate, for its own sake, should not) pursue alliances when they serve no such interest. “An alliance,” Pillar writes, “does not do the United States any good merely by easing an ally’s worries. The United States is no one’s mother or therapist.”
Indeed it is not. Unfortunately, it does not matter. Easing an ally’s worries may, in fact, be a necessity, if not a benefit.
The U.S.’ relative military and economic power are waning relative to a rising China. Indeed, at least in the short run (over the long run China has troubles of its own that may check its geopolitical rise), the U.S. is going to have to contend with a China that is more assertive, more widely influential, and more powerful than before. The same now applies to Russia as well. In view of all this, and in particular in view of the U.S.’ fecklessness in the face of Russia’s ongoing takeover of Ukraine, U.S. allies have legitimate cause to question the U.S.’ relevance to them, at a time when the U.S. will need to retain its influence over them.
Historically, the way for a global hegemon to deal with a rising challenger was to build a coalition. The problem is that in the nuclear era, this is not really an option anymore – at least, not in the same way. There are at least three reasons for this.
1. We don’t want anyone else to have the power. In the first place, great power war is now something that has to be avoided at nearly any cost, because of the fear of a civilization-destroying nuclear war. As we saw in Ukraine, this means that whichever nuclear state moves to take territory first tends to get to keep it. But an even bigger problem is that, because nuclear weapons are seen as too dangerous to be allowed to proliferate horizontally and wind up in multiple hands, it is not really possible anymore to ask allies to do more. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the eastern European states, Saudi Arabia, and other states currently protected by U.S. alliances, guarantees, or soft assurances are all quite capable of defending themselves. Forced to do so, many of these states would choose to build nuclear arsenals; indeed, this is one of the few ways in which a state can meet a nuclear rival on equal terms and deter it. And the threat of a global nuclear arms race keeps the U.S. from telling these states to fend for themselves.
The U.S. historically had to persuade South Korea to abandon a nascent nuclear program; it also (famously, in the past few months) persuaded Ukraine in 1994 to give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for now-worthless security assurances. More recently, claims by Saudi Arabia that it might have the means to acquire a nuclear arsenal were seen as a ploy to enlist more U.S. aid and reassurance in the wake of the initial nuclear agreements between the U.S. and Iran.
As I have argued, the U.S. really does not protect allies anymore because they cannot protect themselves and cannot be allowed to fall into foreign hands. As often as not, it protects them because they cannot be allowed to protect themselves.
2. Everybody wants something for free. The problem is compounded by another feature of modern life, which is the sorry state of prosperous nations’ finances. The developed world – and this now includes China, ironically – is heir to a number of economic and socioeconomic realities that make it very difficult for it to wage a conventional war, and therefore for modern states – particularly small modern states – to defend themselves.
The states of the developed world have low birthrates, most of them below replacement levels. The geopolitical forecaster George Friedman notes in his book, The Next Hundred Years, that in developed and even developing economies, children are no longer a form of productive investment – having more children does not make one richer, and one might also note that in developed countries, where economic growth is subject to diminishing returns, providing a better future for one’s children requires more and more inputs the richer one already is. As Edward Luttwak has remarked, this makes military conscription a tough political sell and makes even professional militaries casualty-averse.
The developed states are also mired in debt of various kinds – national debts have reached critical levels, private household debt has exploded (in the U.S., it went up from 70 percent of GDP to almost 100 percent between 2001 and 2008 and has fallen back only to 80 percent since), and with aging populations (which will continue over a generation given the aforementioned low birthrates), these states also have soft obligations in the form of pensions, retirement benefits, and even just the moral obligations of private citizens to look after their parents. Most of these states already have, by historic standards, very high levels of taxation and government spending, and despite this (for all of the reasons just discussed) prefer to spend very little money on their militaries; there is therefore not a lot of slack capacity in the system.
The need to ameliorate the effects of the recent recessions, and prevent future ones, has caused governments across the developed world to suppress interest rates, further penalizing saving and investment that could drive future growth. Moreover, as Tyler Cowen has argued in his book The Great Stagnation, once an economy reaches a certain state, within certain constraints, growth slows down in any event as there are fewer available ways to increase inputs – slow growth may be the new normal. The will to build weapons and fight is not what it used to be.
The problem, therefore, is that even if the U.S. could skirt the nuclear proliferation issue and ask its allies to do more to protect themselves, the allies have an incentive to push the cost right back in the opposite direction.
3. People have other options. The hard truth is that, at least in the short run, for many U.S. allies, when faced with a choice between accepting another great power’s influence and putting up the funds to thwart it, paying for a stronger defense actually looks like the worse option.
Many U.S. allies are in fact ambivalent about belonging to a U.S.-led coalition, the more so now that the ideological conflict of the Cold War is over and there is less reason to pick a side. France historically (ever since De Gaulle) has held reservations regarding its participation in NATO operations in the event of a war, and is not part of NATO’s integrated military command structure. Virtually all of the U.S.’ European allies, each for their own reasons, spend below the 2 percent of GDP required for NATO membership on defense; Germany, most notably, has had to wrestle with post-World War Two war guilt and pacifism, and since World War Two has never been enthusiastic about maintaining, much less deploying, powerful armed forces. Since the Cold War all of the European states have become heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, to the point that trying to suspend gas purchases from Russia over Ukraine (or a few well-placed artillery shells in that conflict) would trigger a global financial crisis. Oddly enough, they seem to prefer it this way; even Poland, close to the front lines in any confrontation between Russia and the West, recently proposed a collective bargaining arrangement among EU states for Russian gas, which, while theoretically a move to strengthen European states as a bloc against Russia, in fact means a conscious choice to maintain an extremely close economic tie. Changing this state of affairs would require an expensive (again) construction effort to build liquefied natural gas facilities, something no one is in any hurry to do. Anyone who wants the EU states to step up to deter future Russian aggression against the Baltics or elsewhere should pay heed.
Nor is Europe the only area where such ambivalence is found. In the Middle East, as Pillar himself notes, Saudi Arabia has been quite happy, while protected by U.S. security assurances, to promulgate a noxious brand of Islam throughout the Islamic world that is widely seen to encourage the kind of extremism the U.S. wishes to suppress. In east Asia, South Korea is in the historically anomalous position of being joined by the U.S. security umbrella to its historic colonizer and enemy, Japan, against China, with which Koreans have a much more complex historical relationship. Taiwan, which has never formally declared independence from China, is now heavily tied economically to the Chinese mainland.
This kind of middle-of-the-road posture is all the easier to sustain now that there is that much less to fight over. The end of the Cold War eliminated a lot of the ideological reasons for remaining in the U.S.’ camp – whatever one thinks of Putin’s Russia or modern China, it is fair to say that the differences between them and the U.S. are quite muted compared to what they were, say, thirty years ago. U.S. allies are therefore in a better position to shop for larger powers with whom to align.
Although it is not fashionable to say so, and although such matters are admittedly complex, one way to look at the U.S. alliance network is that it involves a set of payments by the U.S. to remain in its coalition rather than join a balancing coalition against it. For this reason, it is difficult to ask U.S. allies to do much of anything at all – their contribution is that they do not join a rival team.
Welcome to the post-2008 great power game
Despite Pillar’s assertions to the contrary, with so little at stake ideologically, there is in fact a greater risk now of U.S. allies defecting or acting against U.S. interests than at any point in the past. One might say that in fact such a process may be underway in some places. The lack of interest in Europe in containing Russian expansionism in Ukraine, which would continue even if the U.S. were to alter its own policy, is merely a case in point. If nothing else, U.S. allies have an incentive to demand more and contribute less.
One can argue that this is merely a reversion to the norm, and that the U.S. must make the best of it. The age in which the U.S. had most of the Eurasian landmass in its camp was probably not meant to last forever. And if, as may turn out to be the case, the U.S. is not in a position any longer to retain the support of all of its allies, it might be better for it to focus on the relationships it considers most vital, and pay what is necessary. This requires, in part, a recognition that keeping certain states out of rival camps and out of trouble that could involve the U.S. may be an end in itself.
The world is in the midst of its first post-Cold War power transition. The guidelines for it are simple: there is less to fight over and less disagreement on ideology, the dominant power is still very skittish about allowing new nuclear states to come about, and everyone is broke. The U.S. is in particular going to face some tough choices as it decides how to pay its bills domestically while remaining on top internationally – or decides between them. New coalitions, and new nuclear powers, might well emerge.
Let the games begin.
Martin Skold is currently pursuing his PhD in international relations at the University of St. Andrews, with a dissertation analyzing the political strategies of states engaged in long-term security competition.
