THE FUTURE OF SEA POWER

The Great Game Goes to Sea | 29
in their predictions, the United States is in the midst of relative decline in power, by
virtue of the changing world order. 31 At its simplest, there has been an increasingly frank
acknowledgement of the fact that the United States cannot be powerful in all places at all
times. This reality is captured in the title of the US Navy’s latest vision of naval power, A
Cooperative Strategy for 21 st Century Seapower. Indeed, if one were to trace the evolution
of such documents since the Maritime Strategy of 1986, one would see the way in which
the US Navy has been increasingly obliged to engage friends and allies in cooperative
efforts to bring peace and good order to the ocean commons. 32
China, by way of comparison, represents a bewildering array of paradoxes. It is also
a powerful state, but one that is profoundly poor. It is simultaneously triumphalist
(presuming that it is witnessing the inexorable decline of the United States), and
deeply insecure at the same time; in fact, Russia and China share much in common in
this regard. China is an emerging great power but is almost friendless. 33 It is eager to
promote its soft power but seeks to stifle the leading modes of soft power expression.
It is a communist state driven by a hybrid capitalist economy. It is the principal
beneficiary of US-induced stability in the Indo-Pacific, but it is intent on challenging
the very order that has underwritten and safeguarded its prosperity. 34 China’s foreign
policy is increasingly counterproductive, particularly in the South China Sea, where it
has driven littoral nations closer to the United States, but it remains colossally tone deaf
to its shortcomings.
If we want to understand the formulation of Chinese policies, we need to look inside the
Middle Kingdom. China is at a crossroads: it has reached a point where the fundamental
contradiction between the evolution of its economy and the prevailing political model
must be resolved. Xi is like Louis XVI: to survive economically, he must contemplate
political suicide. At stake is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) continued monopoly
of political power. 35 A highly secretive political machine is being driven inexorably
to be more transparent and accountable, and the Chinese elite perceive this to be a
deeply threatening state of affairs. Unnerved by the ‘colour’ revolutions and the Arab
Spring, phenomena that revealed just how fragile authoritarian regimes could be, the
one thing that the CCP fears more than anything else is the inadvertent re-enactment
of the Gorbachev experience. Hence the efforts to silence critics and ensure the vitality
of the Party. What is particularly worrisome is the way in which appeals to nationalism
are being made in an effort to buttress the CCP’s legitimacy. Nationalism and insecurity
are productive of a degree of ultra-sensitivity and prickliness that make inter-state
negotiations with China much more challenging and unpredictable. 36
Whatever the case, it appears that the Chinese can no longer defy the laws of economic
gravity. The ‘rise’ of China was truly without parallel historically. China rose from being
the 17th-largest economy on Earth to being the second in 30 years, and China’s naval
capacity rose commensurately. Indeed, the Chinese would maintain that the growth of
the PLAN, and the greater and greater emphasis on power projection - as illustrated by
China’s latest Defence White Paper - is entirely justified; after all, in Mahanian terms,