If only I had a heartland…

It is no secret that Russia’s military forces, particularly the land forces, are reorienting themselves towards the “southern” front of the Caucasus and Central Asia. While so much discussion of these factors is couched in the language of neo-Soviet imperium and concern with Russian expansion, it bears remembering that the security dynamics of Central Asia are far less about a Manichean struggle of Russia versus the West than the US and commentators often choose to view it.

As Joshua Kucera points out at EurasiaNet’s Bug Pit:

Is Russia Training Kazakhstan’s Military To Protect American Oil From Iranian Attack?

That’s the provocative conclusion reached by the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, which seems to have gotten a hold of a document discussing the scenario of the Tsentr-2011 military exercises between Russia and several Central Asian countries that wrapped up today. The newspaper printed a map, purportedly related to the exercise, which envisages a joint Russian-Kazakhstan force in the Caspian Sea repelling an attack from the south — from the southeast, “up to 70 F-4s and F-5s” and from the southwest, “up to 30 F-4s, F-5s and Su-25s.” Well, a quick look around the militaries of the southern part of the Caspian Sea that have those sorts of aircraft brings one to only one conclusion: it’s Iran. (You can see scans of the documents, in Russian, here.)

Now, this does not mean that the entire world is interested in joining the US in a crusade against Iran – far from it – but it does demonstrate that the calculations of Russia and CSTO countries in determining their security agendas is complex and contingent on the array of forces and threats within the region.

Unfortunately, it is easy for our preconceived assumptions to function as blinders in foreign policy.

Naval nationalism and East Eurasia

Continuing on my thoughts yesterday about Robert Kaplan’s latest piece on the South China Sea and the broad contours of future geopolitics, I’d like to address the particularly important issue of naval nationalism and its role in great power interactions. One of the more problematic assertions of Kaplan’s article is the assumption of a sort of hyper-rational treatment of naval affairs, one which leaves nationalism running relatively cold-blooded and renders great power politics “austere.”

When the Deutscher Flottenverein, or German Navy League, formed in 1898, it was hardly to become the symbol of austere nationalism or a stabilizing force in international relations. There was, to oversimplify, a significant division in German conceptions of geopolitics in the late 19th century. On the one hand, there were the Bismarckian realists who above all, sought to maintain the stability of Europe for German interests. They saw no need to risk Germany’s only recently-won unity by antagonizing the United Kingdom over frivolous colonies nor had they any interest in sacrificing stability with Russia to fight for Austrian interests in Bulgaria or some other obscure Balkan region.  On the other, there were more staunch German nationalists, Kaiser Wilhelm II foremost among them, who saw a fleet as a necessary element of German national pride and prestige, and the culmination of German sea power, in the essential combination of ports (in this case, colonies), fleets, and commerce as the key to fulfilling German national aims. So, even among the two camps ofmachtpolitik, there was a significant division between the advocates of local, status quo realpolitik, whose prime goals were French isolation and eastern stability, and the advocates of global, revisionist weltpolitik, who sought to match or supersede at sea a declining Britain, and preemptively undermine or subjugate a rising Russia on land.

Maritime realism and the geopolitics of the “Middle Sea”

Robert Kaplan has a new piece out in Foreign Policy today about the South China Sea, the West Pacific generally, and the return of naval power and realist thought to the center stage of international politics. It’s a worth a read if only because Kaplan is unfortunately one of the few public intellectual types who has attempted to engage the question of maritime power. The crux of the argument is that the 21st century’s geopolitical stage will be much more maritime than continental, as was the case in the past, and one in which the US must increasingly submit to the exigencies of a realist few of great power politics. I broadly agree with these two sentiments. The devil, and the critical takeaways, however, are in the details.

East Asia, or more precisely the Western Pacific, which is quickly becoming the world’s new center of naval activity, presages a fundamentally different dynamic. It will likely produce relatively few moral dilemmas of the kind we have been used to in the 20th and early 21st centuries, with the remote possibility of land warfare on the Korean Peninsula as the striking exception. The Western Pacific will return military affairs to the narrow realm of defense experts. This is not merely because we are dealing with a naval realm, in which civilians are not present. It is also because of the nature of the states themselves in East Asia, which, like China, may be strongly authoritarian but in most cases are not tyrannical or deeply inhumane.

There is an important relationship here between geography, military technology and capability, and international morality, that I have attempted to address in previous posts. To summarize simply, the arbiter of the moral and normative activity within a state rests with its governing political power. The arbiter of power control is, in Wylie’s phrase, the “man on the scene with the gun.” The ability of an offshore state to put men on the scene with guns is power projection. The ability to project power is dependent on maritime-aerial superiority, which for an offshore power is fundamentally naval superiority.

However, Kaplan has perhaps an unduly sanitized and rationalized vision of naval warfare means for the broader political context. While the naval realm is more purely military, since humans are creature of the land, not the sea. Yet naval power has always been a combination of civilian – especially commercial – and military power. Mahan acknowledged as much in his triad of sea power as the combination of not just fleets, but friendly ports and maritime commerce.  This inter-linking is obvious today. The growth of the Chinese shipbuilding industry has played a vital role in advocating for the expansion of the PLAN, and Chinese attempts to extend influence beyond the South China Sea into the Indian are coming as civilian ports such as Gwadar and Hambantoa, whose militarization is a possibility but not an inevitability. I’ll speak more of this unheeded connection between the domestic and naval sphere later.

No priorities without geography

In the midst of all the writing about necessary retrenchment, it is important that retrenchment is only useful when it serves to free up resources for more critical interests. Unfortunately, the words “vital” and “critical” appear so frequently in foreign policy writing that it is hard to take them seriously. I can understand why Stephen Walt, then, is feeling exasperated when he sees the Hudson Institute apply these words to Kyrgyzstan. However, as Daniel Nexon points out, he dismisses Kyrgyzstan as a non-interest for the wrong reasons. This is a niggling point, but it gets to the heart of a problem the broadly realist community has when it goes around touting interests, priorities, and the like. What are America’s vital interests? The criteria Walt throws up are less than adequate.

Yes, I know that the air base at Manas is a critical transit point for logistics flowing into Afghanistan, but otherwise Kyrgyzstan is an impoverished country of about 5 million people without significant strategic resources, and I daresay few Americans could find it on a map (or have any reason to want to).

Yes, Kyrgyzstan is poor, bereft of resources important to the US, and relatively unknown to a geographically ignorant mass public. All true, and all pretty much irrelevant. As Nexon mentions, we are at war with Afghanistan, whether Walt wants us to be or not, and ignoring Kyrgyzstan is not going to do anybody any good. Kyrgyzstan will be vital even to the process of withdrawing the enormous American military presence there.

Nexon’s general point about Walt’s flawed criteria is more important, though:

Beyond that it is simply irrelevant if country of interest is impoverished, if the average American can’t find it on the map, or it doesn’t contain strategic resources other than its geographical position. Imperial Britain didn’t prioritize the disposition of South Africa because of its diamonds, Egypt because of its cotton, or Gibraltar because of its sunny Mediterranean coast. They mattered because of their location.

There is an important degree of relativity in creating sound strategy. It does not make sense to simply look at countries through a check list of characteristics and determine whether or not they meet the criteria of a country we really care about. Part of the problem with much of the criticism of America’s universal grand strategy is that there is very little articulation of what America’s alternative interests abroad are and what places do matter, and then an attempt to prioritize.

For example, if America were to follow a grand strategy with an emphasis on the maritime network and the global commons, certain areas that are relatively wealthy and have large amounts of resources become relatively unimportant. After all, the strength of maritime powers and maritime-led blocs is that they are economically flexible – if a center of “strategic resources” falls, the maritime bloc usually retains the means to access it from some other location. Whether the commodity is oil, minerals, food, or something else, chances are that the preservation of the maritime system which connects the world’s economy is more important than any given country. This highlights the importance of certain countries, as Nexon pointed out, for their routes along sea lines of communications.

Somalia is poor, barren, and unfamiliar to most Americans aside from what they have seen in Black Hawk Down, but because it is in the Horn of Africa, and located close to major shipping routes in the Indian Ocean, it is a higher strategic concern than resource rich, wealthy, and rising South Africa. Similarly, Scandinavia has a good deal of natural resources (although they are less important now than in the days of WWII), and is extremely wealthy, but figures far less in US strategic planning than Panama or the Philippines – and with good reason.

Unfortunately, too much of the push back against hyperactive foreign policies leaves itself vulnerable to the cries of isolationism and ignorance it finds so aggravating. When IR experts talk about how Kyrgyzstan isn’t important, they contribute to furthering US ignorance about a region that is actually extremely important to the calculations of other major powers. Obviously, the US does not need to have some kind of permanent major security presence in Kyrgyzstan, but the fact that Americans can’t find Kyrgyzstan on a map is a downright awful reason not to care about it. It’s precisely because we do not understand the places, peoples, and politics of areas like Central Asia or the Horn of Africa that we find ourselves in the sort of disasters realists bemoan. Quick or limited action fails to produce the desired results and delivers undesired setbacks, leaving an uninformed public (and often uninformed experts and policymakers) scrambling in vain to correct their errors. One has to think that a general American ignorance about where Central Asian countries are on the map is why it has taken Americans 10 years of war in Afghanistan to come up with actual conditions for victory, because we have no idea what is actually possible or desirable, let alone how to go about achieving those results. This leaves the knee jerk calls for some form of escalation, whether it’s more troops or more nation building or literally anything except restraint as the more superficially credible contribution to the foreign policy debate.

So while I am glad to see the motley crew of realists and non-interventionists of all stripes pushing for restraint, I wish there was a little more articulation of what areas did matter and an explanation of why we should care. It would make it a lot harder to paint advocates of retrenchment and restraint as isolationists. Then cases for prioritization could rely less on unnecessarily dismissing countries and regions to cater to simplistic ideas of what makes the rest of the world “important,” which, when they are convincing, tend to just aggravate bad policy whenever the US inevitably does face a crisis in a given area. Coming up with an alternative grand strategy or two, and pushing them, is a lot more helpful than insisting that countries are just unimportant.