Kaplan is right to highlight the growing militarization of Asia. But he’s too hasty in arguing that the continent will, therefore, dominate the 21st century. If anything, Asian militarism probably will be the reason that historians will call this era “the Second American Century.” In the twentieth century it took two all-encompassing wars and one decades-long struggle to resolve the most pressing matters in Europe. In Asia, Japan and Russia have yet to settle their differences resulting from World War II, and the Korean War still has not been concluded by peace treaty. More important, the animosity among the great powers of Asia-China and India, India and Pakistan, and China and Japan, just to mention the most prominent of them-continues to flare. And then there is always Taiwan, essentially the unfinished Chinese civil war. Kaplan does note a few of today’s territorial disputes, but he ignores the more important ones, and fails to convey the intensity of any of them. Moreover, he does not refer to the military clashes and confrontations that have threatened peace this decade. Asia is an area of rising giants, failing states, and unresolved disputes, some of which have gone on for centuries. In this context, it’s unlikely that the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and South Koreans will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new ships and not use them in another monumental clash. We can probably look forward to decades of Asian turbulence. In many respects, Asia today is the Europe of a hundred years ago. For this and other reasons, Asians will not dominate this century.
My own two cents: Kaplan worries that China’s increased military spending may result in “a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode our qualitative one.” This seems unlikely as the U.S. Navy still maintains an enormous quantitative advantage over its competitors, including China. The United States Navy has more ships than the next 17 navies combined. During Pax Britannica, the British Navy understood supremacy to mean a fleet larger than the next two navies combined. And our qualitative advantage is similarly impressive–despite cutting the number of ships from 592 at the end of the Cold War to less than 300 now, the current Navy is a far more lethal force than it was before. There’s no doubt that China’s ever-growing submarine fleet represents a real challenge, but that is in the littorals. So I’m deeply skeptical that in just “a few years” we will see “the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance.” But Kaplan’s a smart guy.
