Isegoria

Having spent four thousand turbulent years consolidating its landmass, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), China is now building a blue-water navy:

A green-water navy patrols its maritime borders, a blue-water navy patrols the oceans. It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen — the US Navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals in the seas; and how those bumps are managed — especially the Sino-American ones — will define great power politics in this century.

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As some of the richer Arab nations came to realize, you cannot buy an efficient military off the shelf.

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Gradually the Chinese will put more and more vessels into the seas off their coast and into the Pacific. Each time one is launched there will be less space for the Americans in the China seas. The Americans know this, and know the Chinese are working toward a land-based antiship missile system to double the reasons why the US Navy, or any of its allies, might one day want to think hard about sailing through the South China Sea. Or indeed, any other “China sea.” China’s increasing long distance-shore-to ship artillery firepower will free up its growing navy to venture farther from its coastline because the navy will be become less vital for defense. There was hint of this in September 2015 when the Chinese (lawfully) sailed five vessels through American territorial waters off the coast of Alaska. That this took place just before President Xi’s visit to the United States was not a coincidence. The Bering Strait is the quickest way for Chinese vessels to reach the Arctic Ocean. We will see more of them off the Alaskan coast in the coming years. And all the while, the developing Chinese space project will be watching every move the Americans make, and those of its allies.

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Under the water China is playing catch-up in submarine warfare. It may be able to surface a sub next to a US carrier group, but its underwater fleet is too noisy to hunt enemy submarines. While it works on this problem it is deploying anti-submarine ships and is busy installing a network of underwater sensors in the East and South China Seas.

Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that Beijing calls the “first island chain.” There is also the “nine-dash line,” more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than two hundred tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbors. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime it could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

Free access to the Pacific is first hindered by Japan. Chinese vessels emerging from the Yellow Sea and rounding the Korean Peninsula would have to go through the Sea of Japan and up through La Perouse Strait above Hokkaido and into the Pacific. Much of this is Japanese or Russian territorial waters, and at a time of great tension, or even hostilities, would be inaccessible to China. Even if they made it they would still have to navigate through the Kuril Islands northeast of Hokkaido, which are controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan.

Japan is also in dispute with China over the uninhabited island chain it calls Senkaku and the Chinese know as Diaoyu, northeast of Taiwan. This is the most contentious of all territorial claims between the two countries. If instead Chinese ships pass through, or indeed set off from, the East China Sea off Shanghai and go in a straight line toward the Pacific, they must pass the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa—upon which there is not only a huge American military base, but also as many shore-to-ship missiles as the Japanese can pile at the tip of the island. The message from Tokyo is: “We know you’re going out there, but don’t mess with us on the way out.”

Another potential flare-up with Japan centers on the East China Sea’s gas deposits. Beijing has declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” over most of the sea, requiring prior notice before anyone else flies through it. The Americans and Japanese are trying to ignore it, but it will become a hot issue at a time of their choosing or due to an accident that is mismanaged.

Below Okinawa is Taiwan, which sits off the Chinese coast and separates the East China Sea from the South China Sea. China claims Taiwan as its twenty-third province, but it is currently an American ally with a navy and air force armed to the teeth by Washington. It came under Chinese control in the seventeenth century but has only been ruled by China for five years in the last century (from 1945 to 1949).

Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC) to differentiate it from the People’s Republic of China, although the ROC claims it should govern both territories. This is a name Beijing can live with, as it does not state that Taiwan is a separate state. America is committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. However, if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the United States is not to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.

The two governments vie for recognition for themselves and nonrecognition of the other in every single country in the world, and in most cases Beijing wins. When you can offer a potential market of 1.4 billion people as opposed to 23 million, most countries don’t need long to consider. However, there are twenty-two countries (mostly developing states; for example, Swaziland, Burkina Faso, and the island nation of São Tomé and Principe) that do opt for Taiwan and that are usually handsomely rewarded.

The Chinese are determined to have Taiwan but are nowhere near being able to challenge for it militarily. Instead they are using soft power by increasing trade and tourism between the two states. China wants to woo Taiwan back into its arms. During the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong, one of the reasons the authorities did not quickly batter them off the streets — as they would have done in, for example, Ürümqi — was that the world’s cameras were there and would have captured the violence. In China much of this footage would be blocked, but in Taiwan people would see what the rest of the world saw and ask themselves how close a relationship they wanted with such a power. Beijing hesitated; it is playing the long game.

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To go westward toward the energy-producing states of the Gulf they must pass Vietnam, which as we have noted has recently been making overtures to the Americans. They must go near the Philippines, a US ally, before trying to get through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, all of which are diplomatically and militarily linked to the United States. The strait is approximately five hundred miles long and at its narrowest point is less than two miles wide. It has always been a choke point—and the Chinese remain vulnerable to being choked, which is why by the fall of 2016 the Chinese were nearing the completion of extending the capacity of the port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and linking it by highway to China. All of the states along the strait, and near its approaches, are anxious about Chinese dominance and most have territorial disputes with Beijing.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, and the energy supplies believed to be beneath it, as its own. However, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei also have territorial claims against China and one another. For example, the Philippines and China argue bitterly over the Mischief Islands, a large reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which one day could live up to their name. Every one of the hundreds of disputed atolls, and sometimes just rocks poking out of the water, could be turned into a diplomatic crisis, as surrounding each rock is a potential dispute about fishing zones, exploration rights, and sovereignty.

To further these aims, China, using dredging and land reclamations methods, has embarked on turning a series of reefs and atolls in disputed territory into islands. For example, one, whose name, Fiery Cross Reef, described what it was, has been turned into an island complete with port and runway in the Spratly Islands. Another has had artillery units stationed on it. The runway could host fighter jets giving China far more control of the skies over the region than it currently has.

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It cannot afford to be blockaded. Diplomacy is one solution; the ever-growing navy is another; but the best guarantees are pipelines, roads, and ports.

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The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Americans, having consolidated their landmass, had become a two-ocean power (Atlantic and Pacific), and then moved to control the seas around them, pushing the Spanish out of Cuba.

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Its lease on the new deep-water port at Gwadar in Pakistan will (if the Pakistan region of Baluchistan is stable enough) be key to creating an alternative land route up to China. From Burma’s west coastline, China has built natural gas and oil pipelines linking the Bay of Bengal up into southwest China — China’s way of reducing its nervous reliance on the Strait of Malacca, through which almost 80 percent of its energy supplies pass. This partially explains why, when the Burmese junta began to slowly open up to the outside world in 2010, it wasn’t just the Chinese who beat a path to their door. The Americans and Japanese were quick to establish better relations, with both President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan going to pay their respects in person.

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The Chinese are also building ports in Kenya, railroad lines in Angola, and a hydroelectric dam in Ethiopia. They are scouring the length and breadth of the whole of Africa for minerals and precious metals.

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China will not leave the sea-lanes in its neighborhood to be policed by the Americans.

Within the space of a year, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had made peace with Austria, Naples, Turkey, Russia, Britain and the émigrés — and now that the Atlantic Ocean was safe to cross, France was going to send an expedition of 12,000 men from Rochefort and Brest ‘to re-establish order on Saint-Domingue’ (present-day Haiti).

In the early 1790s the produce of this former slave colony of 8,000 plantations was greater than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies combined, providing 40 per cent of Europe’s consumption of sugar and 60 per cent of its coffee, and accounting for 40 per cent of all of France’s overseas trade. By 1801, however, because of the slave revolt led over the course of the previous six years by Toussaint l’Ouverture, sugar exports were a mere 13 per cent of their 1789 total and cotton 15 per cent.

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The Jacobins who had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794 were either dead, in disgrace or in prison. Napoleon was keen to return to the days when Saint-Domingue produced 180 million francs per annum for the French treasury, gave employment to 1,640 ships and thousands of seamen, and kept the French Atlantic ports thriving. He hoped it might even provide a strategic springboard for a new French empire in the western hemisphere, especially now that France had exchanged Tuscany for Louisiana.

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He ordered Leclerc to follow a three-stage plan: first, to promise the blacks anything and everything while he occupied the key strategic positions on the island, secondly, to arrest and deport all potential opponents, and only then to embark on the reintroduction of slavery.

The charismatic and ruthless Toussaint l’Ouverture, a black freeman who had himself owned slaves, had imposed a constitution on Saint-Domingue in May 1801 that made him dictator for life, ostensibly in the name of the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality. He had also created an army of 20,000 former slaves and taken over the whole island, expelling the Spanish from the eastern half (the present-day Dominican Republic).

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His plan to defeat the French was to destroy any resources they might find on the coast and then to retreat into the mountainous jungle interior to conduct guerrilla warfare.

Leclerc had failed to take into account the horrific ravages that malaria and yellow fever would wreak on his army. Once a shortage of supplies and the outbreak of those diseases struck he faced impossible odds.

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‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’

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The fighting on Saint-Domingue was brutal. Plantations were torched, massacres and torture were common, towns were razed; there were mass drownings; corkscrews were used to draw out the eyes of French prisoners, and the French even constructed a makeshift gas chamber (étouffier) on board a ship in which volcanic sulphur was used to asphyxiate four hundred prisoners, before the ship was scuttled.

Toussaint l’Ouverture finally surrendered on May 1 on terms whereby the freedom of Saint-Domingue’s blacks was officially guaranteed, black officers were accepted into the French army, and l’Ouverture himself and his staff were allowed to retire to one of his several plantations.

However, on June 7, on his own initiative, Leclerc suddenly reneged on the deal, kidnapped l’Ouverture and sent him to prison in France. The guerrilla war continued, and on October 7 Leclerc wrote to Napoleon: ‘We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, only keep children under twelve years old, destroy half the ones of the plains, and so not leave in the colony one coloured man who wears the epaulette.’

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Twenty generals, 30,000 Frenchmen and possibly as many as 350,000 Saint-Dominguans (of both races) had died. Toussaint l’Ouverture, ‘the Black Spartacus’, died of pneumonia on April 7, 1803 in a large cold cell that can be visited today in the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains.

‘The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’ One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’

I’ve been slowly working my way through Tom Clancy’s works in publication order — I commented on Patriot Games and the next few novels a few years ago — and I just got around to listening to the audiobook version of Debt of Honor, which I enjoyed as a period piece from its publication date of 1994, right at the tail end of Japan’s rise to power. I remember reading a paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s similarly themed Rising Sun around this time.

Oddly, this novel about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands is best remembered for presaging the 9/11 attacks, because the whole complicated story ends with a bit of an afterthought:

With the crisis over, President Durling nominates Ryan as vice president for successfully handling the crisis. However, an embittered Japan Air Lines pilot, driven mad by the deaths of his son and brother during the conflict, flies his Boeing 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol during a special joint session of Congress. The president, as well as nearly the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, and many other members of the federal government, are all killed in the attack. Ryan, who was on his way to be sworn as vice president after being confirmed, narrowly escapes the explosion. He becomes the President of the United States and takes his oath of office before a district judge in the CNN studios in Washington.

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In later years, the novel was noted for its similarity to the circumstances surrounding United Airlines Flight 93, especially regarding its climax, where an embittered Japanese pilot crashes his 747 on a joint session of Congress in the Capitol. While researching for the novel’s ending, Clancy consulted an Air Force officer and described his reaction: “I ran this idea past him and all of a sudden this guy’s eyeballing me rather closely and I said, ‘Come on General, I know you must have looked at this before, you’ve got to have a plan for it.’ And the guy goes, ‘Mr. Clancy, to the best of my knowledge, if we had a plan to deal with this, it would be secret, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about it, but to the best of my knowledge we’ve never looked at this possibility before.’”

In April 1995, United States senator Sam Nunn outlined a scenario similar to the novel’s ending, in which terrorists attack the Capitol on the night of a State of the Union address by crashing a radio-controlled airplane filled with chemical weapons into it. Nunn concluded that the scenario is “not far-fetched” and that the required technology is readily available. However, the 9/11 Commission Report revealed that national security officials did not consider the possibility: “[Counterterror official] Richard Clarke told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community.”

In the aftermath of the attacks, Clancy was called into CNN and commented on the similarity between a plane crash depicted in the novel and the crash of United Flight 93. CNN anchor Judy Woodruff later remarked: “People in our newsroom have been saying today that what is happening is like right out of a Tom Clancy novel.”

The assassination of Tsar Paul I on March 23 came as a blow to Napoleon, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life):

He suspected British spies were behind the murder, although the actual perpetrators were a group of Russian nobles and the Hanoverian General Levin von Bennigsen. Paul was mentally unstable, although not certifiably insane like George III of Britain, Christian VII of Denmark and Maria ‘the Mad’ of Portugal, who all occupied European thrones at the time, albeit with regencies exercising actual control. Paul’s policies supporting the middle classes had been seen as threatening the Russian nobility. His twenty-three-year-old son and heir Alexander, who was in the palace at the time of the assassination, may have had an intimation that the nobles were going to demand his father’s abdication (which they did indeed secure, before they stabbed, strangled and kicked the Tsar to death). Alexander was crowned tsar later that year. Although he theoretically had absolute power, he knew that he had to work with the nobility if he were to escape his father’s fate.

Alexander I was a riddle. Reared in the Enlightenment atmosphere of his grandmother Catherine the Great’s court, and taught Rousseauian principles at a young age by his Swiss tutor Frédéric de La Harpe, he was nonetheless capable of telling his justice minister, ‘You always want to instruct me, but I am the autocratic emperor, and I will this and nothing else!’ He has been described as combining a theoretical love of mankind with a practical contempt for men. Well-meaning, impressionable and egotistical, he was so good at playing a part that Napoleon later dubbed him ‘the Talma of the North’, and on another occasion ‘a shifty Byzantine’. He claimed that he would happily abolish serfdom if only civilization were more advanced, but never genuinely came close to doing so, any more than he ever carried through the codification of Russian law that he promised in 1801 or ratified the liberal constitution he had asked his advisor Count Mikhail Speranski to draw up a few years later.

Just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, December 24, 1800, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon and Josephine took separate carriages to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation:

At the corner of Place du Carrousel and rue Saint-Niçaise, gunpowder had been placed in a water-barrel on a seed-merchant’s cart, drawn by a small dray horse, by Joseph Picot de Limoelan, a Chouan who had arrived from London just over a month earlier. The fuse was lit by a former naval officer, Robinault de Saint-Régant, an accomplice of the Chouan leader Georges Cadoudal, who gave the horse’s reins to a young girl to hold as he made off. A combination of the fuse being slightly too long and the speed with which Napoleon’s coachman César was driving, swerving past the cart in the street, saved Napoleon’s life.

‘Napoleon escaped by a singular chance,’ recorded his aide-de-camp Jean Rapp, who was in the following coach with Josephine at the time. ‘A grenadier of the escort had unwittingly driven one of the assassins away from standing in the middle of the rue Niçaise with the flat of his sabre and the cart was turned round from its intended position.’

Josephine’s carriage was far enough behind for all its occupants to survive the massive explosion too, although Hortense was lightly cut on her wrist by the flying glass of the carriage windows. The machine infernale, as it was dubbed, killed five people (including the young girl holding the horse) and injured twenty-six. It could have been far more, since no fewer than forty-six houses were damaged.

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When Josephine was told that her husband was unharmed, and indeed insisted on continuing to the Opéra, she bravely followed and found ‘Napoleon was seated in his box, calm and composed, and looking at the audience through his opera-glass.’ ‘Josephine, those rascals wanted to blow me up,’ he said as she entered the box, and he asked for the oratorio’s programme.

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On October 24 a dozen more people were arrested for a plot which involved throwing oeufs rouges (hand grenades) into Napoleon’s carriage on his way to Malmaison.

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Two weeks after that, on November 7, the royalist Chevalier was finally arrested and a multi-firing gun was seized, along with plans for fireworks to frighten Napoleon’s horses and for iron spikes to be laid across the street to prevent the Consular Guard from coming to the rescue. A week later yet another plot, involving the blocking of a street down which Napoleon was to pass, was discovered by a hardworking Fouché. In an official report he listed no fewer than ten separate conspiracies against Napoleon’s life since he had come to power, including by accomplices of Chevalier who were still at large.

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Of all these plots, the machine infernale came closest to success. Some excellent forensic work by Fouché’s detectives reassembled the horseshoes, harness and cart, and a grain merchant identified the man to whom he had sold it. As the net tightened, Limoelan escaped, perhaps to become a priest in America. Although everything pointed to the Chouan royalists, the incident was too good an opportunity for Napoleon to waste politically and he told the Conseil that he wanted to act against ‘the Terrorists’ — that is, the Jacobins who had supported the Terror and opposed Brumaire. Six years after his imprisonment in 1794 for his Jacobin loyalties Napoleon now believed them to be enemies of the state even more dangerous than the Chouan assassins, because of their ideology, familiarity with power and superior organization. ‘With one company of grenadiers I could send the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain flying,’ he said at this time of the royalist salons found there, ‘but the Jacobins are made of sterner stuff, they are not beaten so easily.’

When Fouché ventured to blame British-backed royalists such as Cadoudal, Napoleon demurred, referring to the September Massacres of 1792: ‘They are men of September [Septembriseurs], wretches stained with blood, ever conspiring in solid phalanx against every successive government. We must find a means of prompt redress,’ and adding that ‘France will be tranquil about the existence of its Government only when it’s freed from these scroundrels.’

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On January 8, 130 Jacobins were arrested and deported — mainly to Guiana — by means of a sénatus-consulte passed three days earlier. (Although the sénatus-consulte was originally intended to be used only to alter the constitution, Napoleon found it increasingly useful as a way of bypassing the Legislative Body and Tribunate.) Guiana was nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’ because its climate was almost as lethal as a death sentence.

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In a bid to foil future plots, he never let it be publicly known where he meant to go until five minutes before his departure.

Tim Marshall opens his chapter on China (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with this anecdote:

In October 2006, a US Naval Super Carrier Group led by the thousand-foot USS Kitty Hawk was confidently sailing through the East China Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group.

An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power, but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn’t noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative, especially as the sub was within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk itself. They protested, perhaps too much, and the Chinese said: “Oh! What a coincidence, us surfacing in the middle of your battle group that is off our coast, we had no idea.”

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy; whereas the British used to heave a man-of-war off the coast of some minor power to signal intent, the Chinese heaved into view off their own coast with a clear message: “We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea.” It has taken four thousand years, but the Chinese are coming to a port — and a shipping lane — near you.