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Prisoners of GeographyTim Marshall
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to all those who freely gave of their time, advice, and encouragement. I would like to thank my wife, Joanna, for her patience and natural spell-check abilities; Pippa Crane and Jennie Condell at Elliott and Thompson for giving shape and direction to my geographic wanderings; and Ollie Dewis for her encouragement and ideas. I am grateful to the following for casting their experienced eyes over sections of the book and would like to reiterate that any errors contained therein are my doing and responsibility: James Richards (former official Chinese interpreter to the UK government, chairman of China Association), Professor James D. Boys (Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King's College London), David Slinn (former UK ambassador to North Korea), Joel Richards MA (South American specialist), Kelvin O'Shea (Sky News), Tim Miller (Sky News), Jaksa Scekic (Reuters, Belgrade), and Aleksander Vasca (Reuters, Belgrade). Thanks to Scribner editor Colin Harrison for guidance and reminding me that the US and UK are two countries separated by a common language, and to Katrina Diaz at Scribner, whose lines of communication bridged the Atlantic Ocean. Also, thanks to those serving members of governments and the civil service who kindly gave me their expertise, but preferred it to be used without attribution. ALSO BY TIM MARSHALL "Dirty Northern B*st*rds!" and Other Tales from the Terraces: The Story of Britain's Football Chants Shadowplay: The Inside Story of the Overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic ABOUT THE AUTHOR [image: Images] © JOLLY THOMPSON Tim Marshall is a former foreign correspondent for Britain's Sky News television. He is a leading authority on foreign affairs and has reported from thirty countries, including the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. More recently, he covered what he considers to be the misnamed "Arab Spring," reporting from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. After twenty-five years of frontline reporting, he now edits the website thewhatandthewhy.com and lives in London. BIBLIOGRAPHY General References Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Dodds, Klaus. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ikenberry, G. John. "The Illusion of Geopolitics." Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (May/June 2014), 80–90. Keegan, John. Atlas of World War Two. London: Harper Collins, 2006. Mackinder, Halford John. "The Geographical Pivot of History." Geographical Society 23, no. 4 (April 1904), 421–37. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Democratic_Ideals_and_Reality:_A_Study_in_the_Politics_of_Reconstruction. Mackinder, Halford John. Democratic Ideals and Reality. London: Constable and Company Limited, 1919. Mead, Walter Russell. "The Return of Geopolitics." Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (May/June 2014), 69–79. Monmonier, M. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Parry, Chris. Super Highway: Sea Power in the 21st Century. London: Elliott & Thompson, 2014. Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004. Roberts, S., A. Secor, and M. Sparke. "Neoliberal Geopolitics." Antipode 35, no. 5 (November 2003), 886–97. Times Atlas of World History, The. London: Times Books, 2000. Times Universal Atlas of the World, The. London: Times Books, 2008. Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973. Russia Eberstadt, Nicholas. "Russia's Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions, Causes, Implications." National Bureau of Asian Research, 2010. Kennan, George F. "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Foreign Affairs (July 1947). http://www.academia.edu/6987967/_The_Long_Telegram_and_Sources_of_Soviet_Conduct_George_F._Kennan_Father_of_the_Cold_War_. "Russia's Accusations—Setting the Record Straight." NATO Fact Sheet, April 2014. China Beardson, Timothy. Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China's Future. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Boehm, Dana Carver. "China's Failed War on Terror: Fanning the Flames of Uighur Separatist Violence." Berkley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law 2, no. 1:3, 2009. De Crespigny, Rafe. China This Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kaplan, Robert D. The Revenge of Geography. London: Random House, 2012. Lewis, Martin. "East Asia." Stanford University Global Geopolitics Lectures, East Asia, January 15, 2008. Shaughnessy, Edward L., ed. China: Empire and Civilization. London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2005. Theroux, Paul. Riding the Iron Rooster. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988. United States Commager, S. Documents of American History Volume 1: to 1898 (10th Edition). New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988. Kagan, Robert. Dangerous Nation: America and the World, 1600–1898. London: Atlantic Books, 2006. Pei, Minxin. "How America and China See Each Other." Foreign Affairs (March/April 2014). https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/how-china-and-america-see-each-other. "The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire." Stratfor.com, July 4, 2014. https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire. "Rise to World Power, 1867–1913," A Short History of the Department of State, US Department of State website. history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history-worldpower. Western Europe Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power. New York: Random House, 2003. Ottens, Nick. "Too Big for Europe: The Recurring German Problem." Atlantic Sentinel, April 28, 2014. Simon, Luis, and James Rogers. "The Return of European Geopolitics? All Roads Run Through London." RUSI Journal 155, no. 3 (2010), 57–63. Speck, Ulrich. "Power and Purpose: German Foreign Policy at a Crossroads." CarnegieEurope.eu, November 3, 2014. Turchin, Peter. War and Peace and War. London: Plume Books, 2007. Africa Bloom, David E., and Jeffrey D. Sachs. "Geography, Demography, and Economic Growth in Africa." Harvard Institute for International Development, Harvard University, October 1998. Chaves, Isaias, Stanley L. Engerman, and James A. Robinson. "Reinventing the Wheel: The Economic Benefits of Wheeled Transportation in Early Colonial British West Africa." February 2012. http://scholar.harvard.edu/jrobinson/publications/reinventing-Wheel-Economic-Benefits-Wheeled-Transportation-Early-Colonial-0. Kasperson, Roger E., and Julian V. Minghi. The Structure of Political Geography. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011. The Middle East Fisher, Max. "40 Maps Which Explain the Middle East." Vox.com, May 5, 2014. http://www.vox.com/a/maps-explain-the-middle-east. Iraq: A Geography United States Military Academy West Point. 2004. India/Pakistan French, Patrick. India: A Portrait. London: Allen Lane, 2011. "Geography of India." MapsofIndia.com, November 12, 2014. http://www.mapsofindia.com/geography/. Kreft, Dr. Heinrich. "The Geopolitical Importance of Pakistan." Institut für Strategie- Politik- Sicherheits- und Wirtschaftsberatung (ISPSW), February 15, 2008. http://www.ispsw.com/en/publications. Musharraf, Pervez. In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. New York: Free Press, 2008. "Pakistan and Afghanistan." Institute for the Study of War, 2009. http://www.understandingwar.org/pakistan-and-afghan. Korea/Japan Chang, Gordon G. Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World. London: Hutchinson, 2006. Oberdorfer, Don. The Two Koreas. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Latin America Keen, Benjamin, and Keith Haynes. A History of Latin America, Volume 1. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012. Sorrell, Martin. "Latin America's Decade" (lecture, World Economic Forum on Latin America, Rio de Janeiro, April 27–29, 2011. http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-latin-america-2011. Zovatto, Daniel. "Elections in the Southern Cone: Citizens Chose Continuity." Brookings, October 30, 2014. http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/10/30-democracy-alternation-latin-america-zovatto. The Arctic Bjarnason, Björn. "Climate Change and Iceland's Role in North Atlantic Security," speech. Belfer Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, November 26, 2007. Conant, Eve. "Breaking the Ice: Russian Nuclear-Powered Ice-Breakers." Scientific American blog, September 8, 2012. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/08/breaking-the-ice/. Grydehøj, Anne, Adam Grydehøj, and Maria Akrén. "The Globalization of the Arctic: Negotiating Sovereignty and Building Communities in Svalbard, Norway." Island Studies Journal 7, no. 1 (2012), 99–119. United Nations Convention of Law of the Sea, Part V: Exclusive Economic Zone, UNCLOS Treaty. http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part5.htm. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, The Arctic: Exploration Timeline, Polar Discovery, 2009. http://polardiscovery.whoi.edu/arctic/330.html. 1 RUSSIA Vast, vaster, vastest (adj): of very great area or extent; immense Russia is vast. It is the vastest. Immense. It is six-million-square-miles vast, eleven time zones vast; it is the largest country in the world. Its forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppe, taiga, and mountains are all vast. This size has long seeped into our collective conscious. Wherever we are, there is Russia, perhaps to our east, or west, to our north or south—but there is the Russian Bear. It is no coincidence that the bear is the symbol of this immense size. There it sits, sometimes hibernating, sometimes growling, majestic, but ferocious. Bear is a Russian word, but the Russians are also wary of calling this animal by its name, fearful of conjuring up its darker side. They call it medved, "the one who likes honey." At least 120,000 of these medveds live in a country that bestrides Europe and Asia. To the west of the Ural Mountains is European Russia. To their east is Siberia, stretching all the way to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Even in the twenty-first century, to cross it by train takes six days. Russia's leaders must look across these distances, and differences, and formulate policy accordingly; for several centuries now they have looked in all directions, but concentrated mostly westward. When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill's famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends "but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, "I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness." He could have been talking about the current Russian leadership, which despite being now wrapped in the cloak of democracy, remains authoritarian in its nature with national interest still at its core. When Vladimir Putin isn't thinking about God, and mountains, he's thinking about pizza. In particular, the shape of a slice of pizza—a wedge. The thin end of this wedge is Poland. Here, the vast North European Plain stretching from France to the Urals (which extend a thousand miles south to north, forming a natural boundary between Europe and Asia) is only three hundred miles wide. It runs from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. The North European Plain encompasses all of western and northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and nearly all of Poland. From a Russian perspective this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing toward Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia's borders it is more than two thousand miles wide, and is flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941. Likewise, in the Russian Far East it is geography that protects Russia. It is difficult to move an army from Asia up into Asian Russia; there's not much to attack except for snow and you could get only as far as the Urals. You would then end up holding a massive piece of territory, in difficult conditions, with long supply lines and the ever-present risk of a counterattack. You might think that no one is intent on invading Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past five hundred years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans—twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon's invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–56 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied the territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR, as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian empire. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defense of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe—under Russian leadership—formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defense and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight, by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust. President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as a "major geopolitical disaster of the century." Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; and Albania in 2009. NATO says no such assurances were given. Russia, like all great powers, is thinking in terms of the next one hundred years and understands that in that time anything could happen. A century ago, who could have guessed that American armed forces would be stationed a few hundred miles from Moscow in Poland and the Baltic States? By 2004, just fifteen years after 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia was in NATO or the European Union. The Moscow administration's mind has been concentrated by that, and by Russia's history. Russia as a concept dates back to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus, which was based in Kiev and other towns along the Dnieper River, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols, expanding their empire, continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the thirteenth century. The fledgling Russia then relocated northeast in and around the city of Moscow. This early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Muscovy, was indefensible. There were no mountains, no deserts, and few rivers. In all directions lay flatland, and across the steppe to the south and east were the Mongols. The invader could advance at a place of his choosing, and there were few natural defensive positions to occupy. Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defense—i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outward. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history. Without his character, of both utter ruthlessness and vision, Russian history would be different. The fledgling Russia had begun a moderate expansion under Ivan's grandfather, Ivan the Great, but that expansion accelerated after he came to power in 1533. It encroached east on the Urals, south to the Caspian Sea, and north toward the Arctic Circle. It gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between it and the Mongols. A military base was built in Chechnya to deter any would-be attacker, be they the Mongol Golden Horde, the Ottoman Empire, or the Persians. There were setbacks, but over the next century Russia would push past the Urals and edge into Siberia, eventually incorporating all the land to the Pacific coast far to the east. Now the Russians had a partial buffer zone and a hinterland—strategic depth—somewhere to fall back to in the case of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor fight their way over the Urals to get to them. Their land was becoming what we now know as Russia, and to get to it from the south or southeast you had to have a huge army and a very long supply line and you had to fight your way past defensive positions. In the eighteenth century, Russia, under Peter the Great—who founded the Russian Empire in 1721—and then Empress Catherine the Great, looked westward, expanding the empire to become one of the great powers of Europe, driven chiefly by trade and nationalism. A more secure and powerful Russia was now able to occupy Ukraine and reach the Carpathian Mountains. It took over most of what we now know as the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Thus it was protected from any incursion via land that way, or from the Baltic Sea. Now there was a huge ring around Moscow that was the heart of the country. Starting at the Arctic, it came down through the Baltic region, across Ukraine, then the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Caspian, swinging back around to the Urals, which stretched up to the Arctic Circle. In the twentieth century, Communist Russia created the Soviet Union. Behind the rhetoric of "Workers of the World Unite" the USSR was simply the Russian Empire writ large. After the Second World War it stretched from the Pacific to Berlin, from the Arctic to the borders of Afghanistan—a superpower economically, politically, and militarily, rivaled only by the United States. How big is the biggest country in the world? Russia is twice the size of the United States or China, five times the size of India, twenty-five times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population (144 million), fewer people than Nigeria or Pakistan. Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones that Moscow governs. Russia, up to the Urals, is a European power insofar as it borders the European landmass, but it is not an Asian power despite bordering Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and North Korea, and having maritime borders with several countries, including Japan and the United States. Former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was mocked when she was reported as saying "You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska," a line which morphed in media coverage to "You can see Russia from my house." What she really said was "You can see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." She was right. A Russian island in the Bering Strait is two and a half miles from an American island in the Strait, Little Diomede Island, and can be seen with the naked eye. You can indeed see Russia from America. High up in the Urals there is a cross marking the place where Europe stops and Asia starts. When the skies are clear, it is a beautiful spot and you can see through the fir trees for miles toward the east. In winter it is snow-covered, as is the Siberian Plain you see below you stretching toward the city of Yekaterinburg. Tourists like to visit to put one foot in Europe and one in Asia. It is a reminder of just how big Russia is when you realize that the cross is placed merely a quarter of the way into the country. You may have traveled 1,500 miles from Saint Petersburg, through western Russia, to get to the Urals, but you still have another 4,500 miles to go before reaching the Bering Strait, and a possible sighting of Mrs. Palin, across from Alaska in the United States. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was in the Urals, at the point where Europe becomes Asia, accompanied by a Russian camera crew. The cameraman was a taciturn, stoic, grizzled veteran of filming, and was the son of the Red Army's cameraman who had filmed a great deal of footage during the German siege of Stalingrad. I asked him, "So, are you European or are you Asian?" He reflected on this for a few seconds then replied, "Neither—I am Russian." Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia's "treasure chest," containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east—the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so. China may well eventually control parts of Siberia in the long run, but this would be through Russia's declining birthrate and Chinese immigration moving north. Already as far west as the swampy West Siberian Plain, between the Urals in the west and the Yenisei River one thousand miles to the east, you can see Chinese restaurants in most of the towns and cities. Many different businesses are coming. The empty depopulating spaces of Russia's Far East are even more likely to come under Chinese cultural, and eventually political, control. When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow, which results in an aggressive security system similar to the one in Soviet days. During that era, Russia was effectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation—for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus—still feel this way. Late in the last century overstretch, spending more money than was available, the economics of the madhouse in a land not designed for people, and defeat in the mountains of Afghanistan led to the fall of the USSR and saw the Russian Empire shrink back to the shape of more or less the pre–Communist era with its European borders ending at Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled that space in order to prevent anyone else from doing so. Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to "wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean," in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world's major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes. However, the "warm-water open sea-lanes" dream has seeped away from Moscow, further now perhaps than for two hundred years. The Afghan experience is sometimes called "Russia's Vietnam," but it was more than that; the plains of Kandahar and the mountains of the Hindu Kush proved the rule that Afghanistan is the "Graveyard of Empires." This lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia's Achilles' heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder, in his will of 1725, that Peter the Great advised his descendants to "approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia. . . . Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India." When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fifteen countries. Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets, and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one where mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas delineate where people live, how they are separated from each other and, thus, how they developed different languages and customs. The exception to this rule are the "stans," such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin so as to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states. If you take the long view of history—and most diplomats and military planners do—then there is still everything to play for in each of the states that formerly made up the USSR, plus some of those previously in the Warsaw Pact military alliance. They can be divided three ways: those that are neutral, the pro-Western group, and the pro-Russian camp. The neutral countries—Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan—are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West. This is because all three produce their own energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade. In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine's economy is (another reason for the rebellion there). The largest of these, Kazakhstan, leans toward Russia diplomatically and its large Russian-minority population is well integrated. Of the five, Kazakhstan and Belarus have joined Russia in the new Eurasian Union (a sort of poor man's EU) and all are in a military alliance with Russia called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO suffers from not having a name you can boil down to one word, and from being a watered-down Warsaw Bloc. Russia maintains a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia. Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states that suffered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, who would all like to join both organizations but are being held at arm's length because of their geographic proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil. NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war. All of the above explains why, in 2013, as the political battle for the direction of Ukraine heated up, Moscow concentrated hard. As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating. But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances and that threw into doubt Russia's access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host a NATO naval base? That could not stand. President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides. He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow—thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw. For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests that were eventually to overthrow him. The Germans and Americans had backed the opposition parties, with Berlin in particular seeing former world boxing champion turned politician Vitali Klitschko as their man. The West was pulling Ukraine intellectually and economically toward it while helping pro-Western Ukrainians push it westward by training and funding some of the democratic opposition groups. Street fighting erupted in Kiev and demonstrations across the country grew. In the east, crowds came out in support of the president. In the west of the country, in cities such as L'viv, which used to be in Poland, they were busy trying to rid themselves of any pro-Russian influence. By mid-February 2014, L'viv, and other urban areas, were no longer controlled by the government. Then on February 22, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the president, fearing for his life, fled. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice—he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but most important the port of Sevastopol. Sevastopol is Russia's only true major warm-water port. However, access out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is restricted by the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey—now a NATO member—control of the Bosporus. Russian naval ships do transit the strait, but in limited numbers, and this would not be permitted in the event of conflict. Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean, and would still have either to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to gain access to the Atlantic Ocean, or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean. The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria's Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when fighting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited-supply and replenishment base, not a major force. Another strategic problem is that in the event of war the Russian navy cannot get out of the Baltic Sea, either, due to the Skagerrak Strait, which connects to the North Sea. The narrow strait is controlled by NATO members Denmark and Norway; and even if the ships made it, the route to the Atlantic goes through what is known as the GIUK (Greenland/Iceland/UK) gap in the North Sea—which we will see more of when we look at Western Europe. Having annexed Crimea, the Russians are wasting no time. They are building up the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol and constructing a new naval port in the Russian city of Novorossiysk, which, although it does not have a natural deep harbor, will give the Russians extra capacity. Eighty new ships are being commissioned as well as several submarines. The fleet will still not be strong enough to break out of the Black Sea during wartime, but its capacity is increasing. In July 2015, Russia published its new naval doctrine and, there, right at the top of the list of threats to Russian interests, was NATO. It called NATO's positioning of troops and hardware closer to its borders "inadmissible," which was just short of fighting talk. To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the United States encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its fleet in the Black Sea while relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus. Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being granted to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by President Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow forever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, nor even pro-Russian—Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn't, then they were unaware of rule A, lesson one, in "Diplomacy for Beginners": When faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin's annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence. A generous view is that the United States and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law and that there wasn't much Moscow could do about it. That is a view that does not take into account the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century and that Russia does not play by the rule of law. Flushed with victory, the new interim Ukrainian government had immediately made some foolish statements, not least of which was the intention to abolish Russian as the official second language in various regions. Given that these regions were those with the most Russian speakers and pro-Russian sentiment, and indeed included Crimea, this was bound to spark a backlash. It also gave President Putin the propaganda he needed to make the case that ethnic Russians inside Ukraine needed to be protected. The Kremlin has a law that compels the government to protect "ethnic Russians." A definition of that term is, by design, hard to come by because it will be defined as Russia chooses in each of the potential crises that may erupt in the former Soviet Union. When it suits the Kremlin they will be defined simply as people who speak Russian as their first language. At other times the new citizenship law will be used, which states that if your grandparents lived in Russia, and Russian is your native language, you can take Russian citizenship. Given that, as the crises arise, people will be inclined to accept Russian passports to hedge their bets, this will be a lever for Russian entry into a conflict. Approximately 60 percent of Crimea's population is "ethnically Russian," so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he "had" to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again de facto a part of Russia. You could make the argument that President Putin did have a choice: he could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But, given that he was dealing with the geographic hand God has dealt Russia, this was never really an option. He would not be the man who "lost Crimea" and with it the only proper warm-water port his country had access to. No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbors knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, and Washington, DC, is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, but the West could. The EU imposed limited sanctions—limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and off. Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years, and the concept of "ethnic Russians" will be used to justify whatever moves Russia makes. In a speech in 2014, President Putin briefly referred to "Novorossiya" or "New Russia." The Kremlin watchers took a deep breath. He had revived the geographic title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. Catherine went on to settle Russians in these regions and demanded that Russian be the first language. Novorossiya was ceded to the newly formed Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic only in 1922. "Why?" asked Putin rhetorically. "Let God judge them." In his speech he listed the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odessa before saying, "Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained." Several million ethnic Russians still remain inside what was the USSR but outside Russia. It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring. It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev's infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO. Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more important, doesn't want concrete proof in case he or she has to do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, "Thank goodness Ukraine isn't in NATO or we would have had to act." The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its "near abroad." It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene and Crimea was "doable." It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula. Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor elsewhere. Unless it feels threatened, Russia will probably not send its troops all the way into the Baltic States, or any farther forward than it already is in Georgia; but it will push its power in Georgia, and in this volatile period further military action cannot be ruled out. However, just as Russia's actions in its war with Georgia in 2008 were a warning to NATO to come no closer, so NATO's message to Russia in the summer of 2014 was "This far west and no farther." A handful of NATO warplanes were flown to the Baltic States, military exercises were announced in Poland, and the Americans began planning to "pre-position" extra hardware as close to Russia as possible. At the same time there was a flurry of diplomatic visits by defense and foreign ministers to the Baltic States, Georgia, and Moldova to reassure them of support. Some commentators poured scorn on the reaction, arguing that six RAF Eurofighter Typhoon jets flying over Baltic airspace were hardly going to deter the Russian hordes. But the reaction was about diplomatic signaling, and the signal was clear—NATO is prepared to fight. Indeed it would have to, because if it failed to react to an attack on a member state, it would instantly be obsolete. The Americans—who are already edging toward a new foreign policy in which they feel less constrained by existing structures and are prepared to forge new ones as they perceive the need arises—are deeply unimpressed with the European countries' commitment to defense spending. In the case of the three Baltic States, NATO's position is clear. As they are all members of the alliance, armed aggression against any of them by Russia would trigger Article 5 of NATO's founding charter, which states: "An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all," and goes on to say NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan. President Putin is a student of history. He appears to have learned the lessons of the Soviet years, in which Russia overstretched itself and was forced to contract. An overt assault on the Baltic States would likewise be overstretching and is unlikely, especially if NATO and its political masters ensure that Putin understands their signals. Russia does not have to send an armored division into Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia to influence events there, but if it ever does, it would justify the action by claiming that the large Russian communities there are being discriminated against. In both Estonia and Latvia, approximately one in four people are ethnically Russian and in Lithuania it is 5.8 percent. In Estonia, the Russian speakers say they are underrepresented in government and thousands do not have any form of citizenship. This does not mean they want to be part of Russia, but they are one of the levers Russia can pull to influence events. The Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics can be stirred up to making life difficult. There are existing, fully formed political parties already representing many of them. Russia also controls the central heating in the homes of the Baltic people. It can set the price people pay for their heating bills each month, and, if it chooses, simply turn the heating off. Russia will continue to push its interests in the Baltic States. They are one of the weak links in its defense since the collapse of the USSR, another breach in the wall they would prefer to see forming an arc from the Baltic Sea, south, then southeast, connecting to the Urals. This brings us to another gap in the wall and another region Moscow views as a potential buffer state. Firmly in the Kremlin's sights is Moldova. [image: Images] A number of countries that were once members of the Soviet Union aspire to closer ties with Europe, but with certain regions, such as Transnistria in Moldova, remaining heavily pro-Russian, there is potential for future conflict. Moldova presents a different problem for all sides. An attack on the country by Russia would necessitate crossing through Ukraine, over the Dnieper River, and then over another sovereign border into Moldova. It could be done—at the cost of significant loss of life and by using Odessa as a staging post—but there would no deniability. Although it might not trigger war with NATO (Moldova is not a member), it would provoke sanctions against Moscow at a level hitherto unseen, and confirm what this writer believes to already be the case; that the cooling relationship between Russia and the West is already the New Cold War. Why would the Russians want Moldova? Because as the Carpathian Mountains curve around southwest to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the southeast is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also be thought of as a flat corridor into Russia, and just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea—also known as Moldova—in the region formerly known as Bessarabia. After the Crimean War (fought between Russia and Western European allies to protect Ottoman Turkey from Russia), the 1856 Treaty of Paris returned parts of Bessarabia to Moldova, thus cutting Russia off from the Danube River. It took Russia almost a century to regain access to it, but with the collapse of the USSR, once more Russia had to retreat eastward. However, in effect, the Russians do already control part of Moldova—a region called Transnistria, part of Moldova east of the Dniester River that borders Ukraine. Stalin, in his wisdom, settled large numbers of Russians there, just as he had in Crimea after deporting much of the Tatar population. Modern Transnistria is now at least 50 percent Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking, and that part of the population is pro-Russian. When Moldova became independent in 1991 the Russian-speaking population rebelled and, after a brief period of fighting, declared a breakaway Republic of Transnistria. It helped that Russia had soldiers stationed there, and it retains a force of two thousand troops to this day. A Russian military advance in Moldova is unlikely, but the Kremlin can and does use its economic muscle and the volatile situation in Transnistria to try to influence the Moldovan government not to join the EU or NATO. Moldova is reliant on Russia for its energy needs, its crops go eastward, and Russian imports of the excellent Moldovan wine tend to rise or fall according to the state of the relationship between the two countries. Across the Black Sea from Moldova lies another wine-producing nation: Georgia. It is not high on Russia's list of places to control for two reasons. First, the Georgia–Russian war of 2008 left large parts of the country occupied by Russian troops, who now fully control the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Second, it lies south of the Caucasus Mountains and Russia also has troops stationed in neighboring Armenia. Moscow would prefer an extra layer to their buffer zone, but can live without taking the rest of Georgia. That situation could potentially change if Georgia looked close to becoming a NATO member. This is precisely why it has so far been rebuffed by the NATO governments, which are keen to avoid the inevitable conflict with Russia. A majority of the population in Georgia would like closer ties with the EU countries, but the shock of the 2008 war, when then president Mikheil Saakashvili naively thought the Americans might ride to his rescue after he provoked the Russians, has caused many to consider that hedging their bets may be safer. In 2013 they elected a government and president, Giorgi Margvelashvili, far more conciliatory to Moscow. As in Ukraine, people instinctively know the truism everyone in the neighborhood recognizes: that Washington is far away, and Moscow is near. Russia's most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the United States as the world's biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe's energy needs that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports. On average, 25 percent of Europe's gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country's foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; and Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent. About half of Germany's gas supply comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticize the Kremlin for aggressive behavior than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 percent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months' supply. There are several major pipeline routes running east to west out of Russia, some for oil and some for gas. It is the gas lines that are the most important. In the north, via the Baltic Sea, is the Nord Stream route, which connects directly to Germany. Below that, cutting through Belarus, is the Yamal pipeline, which feeds Poland and Germany. In the south is the Blue Stream, taking gas to Turkey via the Black Sea. Until early 2015 there was a planned project called South Stream, which was due to use the same route but branch off to Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Italy. South Stream was Russia's attempt to ensure that even during disputes with Ukraine it would still have a major route to large markets in Western Europe and the Balkans. Several EU countries put pressure on their neighbors to reject the plan, and Bulgaria effectively pulled the plug on the project by saying the pipelines would not come across its territory. President Putin reacted by reaching out to Turkey with a new proposal, sometimes known as Turk Stream. Russia's South Stream and Turk Stream projects to circumvent Ukraine followed the price disputes between the two states of 2005–10, which at various times cut the gas supply to eighteen countries. European nations that stood to benefit from South Stream were markedly more restrained in their criticism of Russia during the Crimea crisis of 2014. Enter the Americans, with a win-win strategy for the United States and Europe. Noting that Europe wants gas, and not wanting to be seen to be weak in the face of Russian foreign policy, the Americans believe they have the answer. The massive boom in shale gas production in the United States is not only enabling it to be self-sufficient in energy, but also to sell its surplus to one of the great energy consumers—Europe. To do this, the gas needs to be liquefied and shipped across the Atlantic. This in turn requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and ports to be built along the European coastlines to receive the cargo and turn it back into gas. Washington is already approving licenses for export facilities, and Europe is beginning a long-term project to build more LNG terminals. Poland and Lithuania are constructing LNG terminals; other countries such as the Czech Republic want to build pipelines connecting to those terminals, knowing they could then benefit not just from American liquefied gas, but also supplies from North Africa and the Middle East. The Kremlin would no longer be able to turn the taps off. The Russians, seeing the long-term danger, point out that piped gas is cheaper than LNG, and President Putin, with a What did I ever do wrong? expression on his face, says that Europe already has a reliable and cheaper source of gas coming from his country. LNG is unlikely to completely replace Russian gas, but it will strengthen what is a weak European hand in both price negotiation and foreign policy. To prepare for a potential reduction in revenue, Russia is planning pipelines heading southeast and hopes to increase sales to China. This is an economic battle based on geography and one of the modern examples where technology is being utilized in an attempt to beat the geographic restraints of earlier eras. Too much was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel. Russia loses about $2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price and the Russian economy duly took the hit, bringing great hardship to many ordinary people, but predictions of the collapse of the state were wide of the mark. Russia will struggle to fund its huge increase in military spending, but despite the difficulties the World Bank predicts that in the second half of this decade the economy will grow slightly. If the new discoveries of vast amounts of oil in the Arctic's Kara Sea can be brought to shore, that growth will be healthier. Away from the heartland Russia does have a global political reach and uses its influence, notably in Latin America, where it buddies up to whichever South American country has the least friendly relationship with the United States, for example, Venezuela. It tries to check American moves in the Middle East, or at least ensure it has a say in matters, it is spending massively on its Arctic military forces, and it consistently takes an interest in Greenland to maintain its territorial claims. Since the fall of Communism it has focused less on Africa, but maintains what influence it can there, albeit in a losing battle with China. Competitors they may be, but the two giants also cooperate on various levels. Moscow, knowing that the Europeans have a long-term ambition to wean themselves off dependency on Russian energy, is looking to China as an alternative customer. China has the upper hand in what is a buyers' market, but the lines of communication are cordial and well used. From 2018 Russia will supply China with 38 billion cubic meters of gas a year in a $400 billion thirty-year deal. The days when Russia was considered a military threat to China have passed and the idea of Russian troops occupying Manchuria, as they did in 1945, is inconceivable, although they do keep a wary eye on each other in places in which each would like to be the dominant power, such as Kazakhstan. However, they are not in competition for the ideological leadership of global Communism and this has freed each side to cooperate at a military level where their interests coincide. What seems like an odd example came in May 2015 when they conducted joint military live fire exercises in the Mediterranean. Beijing's push into a sea 9,000 miles from home was part of its attempt to extend its naval reach around the globe. Moscow has designs on the gas fields found in the Mediterranean, is courting Greece, and wants to protect its small naval port on the Syrian coast. In addition, both sides are quite happy to annoy the NATO powers in the region, including the American 6th Fleet based in Naples. At home it is facing many challenges, not least of which is demographic. The sharp decline in population growth may have been arrested, but it remains a problem. The average life span for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world's 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea). From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn't matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat. Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day. [image: Images] 2 CHINA China is a civilization pretending to be a nation. —Lucian Pye, political scientist 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. Until now China has never been a naval power—with its large landmass, multiple borders, and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive. Its merchants have long sailed the oceans to trade goods, but its navy did not seek territory beyond its region, and the difficulty of patrolling the great sea-lanes of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans was not worth the effort. It was always a land power, with a lot of land and a lot of people—now nearly 1.4 billion. The concept of China as an inhabited entity began almost four thousand years ago. The birthplace of Chinese civilization is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain. A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River and down past the Yangtze River, which both run east to west. It is now one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The Yellow River basin is subject to frequent and devastating floods, earning the river the unenviable sobriquet "scourge of the Sons of Han." The industrialization of the region began in earnest in the 1950s and has been rapidly accelerating in the last three decades. The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea. Nevertheless, the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt—the cradle of its civilization, where its people learned to farm, and to make paper and gunpowder. To the north of this proto-China were the harsh lands of the Gobi Desert in what is now Mongolia. To the west the land gradually rises until it becomes the Tibetan Plateau, reaching to the Himalayas. To the southeast and the south lies the sea. The heartland, as the North China Plain is known, was and is a large, fertile plain with two main rivers and a climate that allows rice and soybeans to be harvested twice a season (double-cropping), which encouraged rapid population growth. By 1500 BCE in this heartland, out of hundreds of mini city-states, many warring with each other, emerged the earliest version of a Chinese state—the Shang dynasty. This is where what became known as the Han people emerged, protecting the heartland and creating a buffer zone around them. The Han now make up more than 90 percent of China's population and they dominate Chinese politics and business. They are differentiated by Mandarin, Cantonese, and many other regional languages, but united by ethnicity and at a political level by the geopolitical impulsion to protect the heartland. Mandarin, which originated in the northern part of the region, is by far the dominant language and is the medium of government, national state television, and education. Mandarin is similar to Cantonese and many other languages when written, but very different when spoken. The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and—crucially—the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions that surrounded them, especially Mongolia, with its nomadic bands of violent warriors. China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that—if the Han could reach them and establish control—would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago. By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilized China and the "barbarous" regions that surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people. By 200 BCE, China had expanded toward, but not reached, Tibet in the southwest, north to the grasslands of central Asia, and south all the way down to the South China Sea. The Great Wall (known as the Long Wall in China) had been first built by the Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE), and on the map China was beginning to take on what we now recognize as its modern form. It would be more than two thousand years before today's borders were fixed, however. Between 605 and 609 CE, the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world's longest man-made waterway, was extended and finally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze. The Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) had harnessed the vast numbers of workers under its control and used them to connect existing natural tributaries into a navigable waterway between the two great rivers. This tied the northern and southern Han to each other more closely than ever before. It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved—but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding. The Han still warred with each other, but increasingly less so, and by the early eleventh century CE they were forced to concentrate their attention on the waves of Mongols pouring down from the north. The Mongols defeated whichever dynasty, north or south, they came up against, and by 1279 their leader, Kublai Khan, became the first foreigner to rule all of the country as emperor of the Mongol dynasty. It was almost ninety years before the Han would take charge of their own affairs with the establishment of the Ming dynasty. By now there was increasing contact with traders and emissaries from the emerging nation states of Europe, such as Spain and Portugal. The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive influx of people into urban areas and accentuated regional differences. In the eighteenth century, China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the northwest was conquered, becoming the country's biggest province. An area of rugged mountains and vast desert basins, Xinjiang is 642,820 square miles, twice the size of Texas—or, to put it another way, you could fit the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium into it and still have room for Luxembourg. And Lichtenstein. But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han, the buffer was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate that befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans. The imperial powers arrived, the British among them, and carved the country up into spheres of influence. It was, and is, the greatest humiliation the Chinese suffered since the Mongol invasions. This is a narrative the Communist Party uses frequently; it is in part true, but it is also useful in covering up the party's own failures and repressive policies. Later, the Japanese—expanding their territory as an emerging world power—invaded, attacking first in 1932 and then again in 1937, after which they occupied most of the heartland as well as Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. Japan's unconditional surrender to the Americans at the end of the Second World War in 1945 led to the withdrawal of Japanese troops, although in Manchuria they were replaced by the advancing Soviet army, which then withdrew in 1946. A few outside observers thought the postwar years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent Arab Spring, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics, and geography of the region. Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Chairman Mao battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year, Radio Beijing announced: "The People's Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan, and Taiwan." Mao centralized power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing's influence into Mongolia. In 1951, China annexed Tibet (another vast non-Han territory) and by then Chinese school textbook maps began to depict China as stretching even into the central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified. Mao's successors tried to turn his Long March to victory into an economic march toward prosperity. In the early 1980s, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping coined the term "socialism with Chinese Characteristics," which appears to translate as "total control for the Communist Party in a capitalist economy." China was becoming a major trading power and a rising military giant. By the end of the 1990s it had recovered from the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, regained Hong Kong and Macau from the British and Portuguese, respectively, and could look around its borders, assess its security, and plan for its great move out into the world. If we look at China's modern borders we see a great power now confident that it is secured by its geographical features, which lend themselves to effective defense and trade. In China, the points of the compass are always listed in the order east-south-west-north, but let's start in the north and move clockwise. In the north we see the 2,906-mile-long border with Mongolia. Straddling this border is the Gobi Desert. Nomadic warriors from ancient times might have been able to attack south across it, but a modern army would be spotted amassing there weeks before it was ready to advance, and it would have incredibly long supply lines running across inhospitable terrain before it got into Inner Mongolia (part of China) and toward the heartland. There are few roads fit to move heavy armor, and few habitable areas. The Gobi Desert is a massive early warning system–cum–defensive line. Any Chinese expansion northward will come not via the military but from trade deals as China attempts to sweep up Mongolia's natural resources, primarily minerals. This will bring with it increased migration of the Han into Mongolia. Next door, to the east, is China's border with Russia, which runs all the way to the Pacific Ocean—or at least the Sea of Japan subdivision of it. Above this is the mountainous Russian Far East, a huge, inhospitable territory with a tiny population. Below it is Manchuria, which the Russians would have to push through if they wanted to reach the Chinese heartland. The population of Manchuria is 100 million and growing; in contrast, the Russian Far East has only seven million people and no indications of population growth. Large-scale migration south to north can be expected, which will in turn give China more leverage in its relations with Russia. From a military perspective the best place to cross would be near the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok, but there are few reasons, and no current intentions, to do so. Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms that help keep Russia afloat, but are favorable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship. Below the Russian Far East, along the coast, are China's Yellow, East China, and South China Seas, which lead to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, have many good harbors, and have always been used for trade. But across the waves lie several island-size problems—one shaped like Japan, which we shall come to shortly. Continuing clockwise, we come to the next land borders: Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory and, unfortunately for both, this is the one area to the south that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979. However, as China's military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cozy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing. That both countries are nominally ideologically Communist has little to do with the state of their relationship: it is their shared geography that has defined relations. Viewed from Beijing, Vietnam is only a minor threat and a problem that can be managed. The border with Laos is hilly jungle terrain, difficult for traders to cross—and even more complicated for the military. As they move clockwise to Burma, the jungle hills become mountains until at the western extreme they are approaching twenty thousand feet and begin to merge into the Himalayas. This brings us to Tibet and its importance to China. The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature's version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi's side—the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically. They have their disputes: China claims the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, India says China is occupying Aksai Chin; but despite pointing their artillery at each other high up on this natural wall, both sides have better things to do than reignite the shooting match that broke out in 1962, when a series of violent border disputes culminated in vicious large-scale mountain fighting. Nevertheless, the tension is ever present and each side needs to handle the situation with care. Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course, the border is really the Tibetan-Indian border—and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China's great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as "China's Water Tower." China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut off China's river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen. The actor Richard Gere and the Free Tibet movement will continue to speak out against the injustices of the occupation, and now settlement, of Tibet by Han Chinese; but in a battle between the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan independence movement, Hollywood stars, and the Chinese Communist Party—which rules the world's second-largest economy—there is going to be only one winner. When Westerners, be they Mr. Gere or President Obama, talk about Tibet, the Chinese find it deeply irritating. Not dangerous, not subversive—just irritating. They see it not through the prism of human rights, but that of geopolitical security, and can only believe that the Westerners are trying to undermine their security. However, Chinese security has not been undermined and it will not be, even if there are further uprisings against the Han. Demographics and geopolitics oppose Tibetan independence. The Chinese are building "facts on the ground" on the "roof of the world." In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army began building roads into Tibet, and since then they have helped to bring the modern world to the ancient kingdom; but the roads, and now railways, also bring the Han. It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains, and the valleys of Tibet. Europe's best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. As late as 1988 the travel writer Paul Theroux wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster: "The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa." The Kunlun separated Xinjiang province from Tibet, for which Theroux gave thanks: "That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more." But the Chinese built it. Which, perhaps, only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese president Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day. They bring with them many things, such as consumer goods from across China, computers, color televisions, and cell phones. They bring tourists who support the local economy, they bring modernity to an ancient and impoverished land, a huge improvement in living standards and health care, and they bring the potential to carry Tibetan goods out to the wider world. But they have also brought several million Han Chinese settlers. The true figures are hard to come by: the Free Tibet movement claims that in the wider cultural Tibetan region Tibetans are now a minority, but the Chinese government says that in the official Tibet Autonomous Region more than 90 percent of people are Tibetan. Both sides are exaggerating, but the evidence suggests the government is the one with the greater degree of exaggeration. Its figures do not include Han migrants, who are not registered as residents, but the casual observer can see that Han neighborhoods now dominate the Tibetan urban areas. Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet. This means that resentment of the Han will continue to manifest itself in rioting such as that of 2008, when anti-Chinese Tibetan protesters in Lhasa burned and looted Han properties, twenty-one people died, and hundreds were injured. The authorities' crackdown will continue, the Free Tibet movement will continue, monks will continue to set themselves on fire to bring the plight of the Tibetans to the world's attention—and the Han will keep coming. China's massive population, mostly crammed into the heartland, is looking for ways to expand. Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans. Finally, the clock hand moves around past the borders with Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan (all mountainous) before reaching the border with Kazakhstan, which leads back around north to Mongolia. This is the ancient Silk Route, the land trade bridge from the middle kingdom to the world. Theoretically it's a weak spot in China's defense, a gap between the mountains and desert, but it is far from the heartland, the Kazakhs are in no position to threaten China, and Russia is several hundred miles distant. Southeast of this Kazakh border is the restive "semiautonomous" Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish. Xinjiang borders eight countries: Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. There was, is, and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of "East Turkestan," in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbors in the stans becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China. Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China's nuclear weapons testing sites. Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in the new factories in which the central government invests. A classic example is the city of Shihezi, eighty-five miles northwest of the capital, Ürümqi. Of its population of 650,000, it is thought that at least 620,000 are Han. Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 percent Han, at a conservative estimate—and even Ürümqi itself may now be majority Han, although official figures are difficult to obtain and not always reliable due to their political sensitivity. There is a World Uyghur Congress based in Germany, and the East Turkestan Liberation Organization set up in Turkey; but Uighur separatists lack a Dalai Lama–type figure upon whom foreign media can fix, and their cause is almost unknown around the world. China tries to keep it that way, ensuring it stays on good terms with as many border countries as possible in order to prevent any organized independence movement from having supply lines or somewhere to which it could fall back. Beijing also paints separatists as Islamist terrorists. Al-Qaeda and other groups, which have a foothold in places like Tajikistan, are indeed attempting to forge links with the Uighur separatists, but the movement is nationalist first, Islamic second. However, gun, bomb, and knife attacks in the region against state and/or Han targets over the past few years do look as if they will continue and could escalate into a full-blown uprising. China will not cede this territory and, as in Tibet, the window for independence is closing. Both are buffer zones, one is a major land trade route, and—crucially—both offer markets (albeit with a limited income) for an economy that must keep producing and selling goods if China is to continue to grow and to prevent mass unemployment. Failure to do so would likely lead to widespread civil disorder, threatening the control of the Communist Party and the unity of China. There are similar reasons for the party's resistance to democracy and individual rights. If the population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict. That in turn would embolden the people of the buffer zones, further weakening China. It is only a century since the most recent humiliation of the rape of China by foreign powers; for Beijing, unity and economic progress are priorities well ahead of democratic principles. The Chinese look at society very differently from the West. Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual. What the West thinks of as the rights of man, the Chinese leadership thinks of as dangerous theories endangering the majority, and much of the population accepts, at the least, that the extended family comes before the individual. I once took a Chinese ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope he would repeat Prime Minister Chou En-lai's much quoted answer to President Richard Nixon's question "What is the impact of the French Revolution?" to which the prime minister replied, "It's too soon to tell." Sadly, this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of "what you call human rights" in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, "Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don't understand?" The deal between the party leaders and the people has been, for a generation now, "We'll make you better off—you will follow our orders." So long as the economy keeps growing, that grand bargain may last. If it stops, or goes into reverse, the deal is off. The current level of demonstrations and anger against corruption and inefficiency are testament to what would happen if the deal breaks. Another growing problem for the party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40 percent of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture. China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrializing as it modernizes and raises standards of living, but that very process threatens food production. If it cannot solve this problem there will be unrest. There are now around five hundred mostly peaceful protests a day across China over a variety of issues. If you introduce mass unemployment, or mass hunger, that tally will explode in both number and the degree of force used by both sides. So, on the economic side, China now also has a grand bargain with the world—"We'll make the stuff for cheap—you buy it for cheap." Leave to one side the fact that already labor costs are rising in China and it is being rivaled by Thailand and Indonesia, for price if not volume. What would happen if the resources required to make the stuff dried up, if someone else got them first, or if there was a naval blockade of your goods—in and out? Well, for that, you'd need a navy. The Chinese were great sea voyagers, especially in the fifteenth century, when they roamed the Indian Ocean; Admiral Zheng He's expedition ventured as far as Kenya. But these were moneymaking exercises, not power projections, and they were not designed to create forward bases that could be used to support military operations. Having spent four thousand turbulent years consolidating its landmass, 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. The young seamen now training on the secondhand aircraft carrier that China salvaged from a Ukrainian junkyard will be the ones who, if they make it to the rank of admiral, may have learned enough to know how to take a twelve-ship carrier group across the world and back—and if necessary fight a war along the way. As some of the richer Arab nations came to realize, you cannot buy an efficient military off the shelf. 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." And all the while, the developing Chinese space project will be watching every move the Americans make, and those of its allies. So, having gone clockwise around the land borders, we now look east, south, and southwest toward the sea. 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. [image: Images] The South China Sea is a hotly contested area between China and its neighbors that leads to disputes over ownership of islands, natural resources, and control of the seas and shipping lanes. 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. The soft-power approach is to persuade the people of Taiwan they have nothing to fear in rejoining the "motherland." The Air Defense Identification Zone, the surfacing near US ships, and the buildup of a navy are part of a long-term plan to weaken American resolve to defend an island 140 miles off the coast of mainland China, but 6,400 miles from the West Coast of the United States. From the South China Sea, Chinese ships would still have problems, whether they headed toward the Pacific or the Indian Ocean—which is the world's waterway for the gas and oil without which China would collapse. 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. 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. Speaking in the summer of 2015, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said, "Turning an underwater rock into an airfield simply does not afford the rights of sovereignty or permit restrictions on international air or maritime transit." This was shortly after China announced it was switching its military posture in the region from defense to both offense and defense. The move underlines China's intention to be the rule maker in the region and for that it will both court and threaten its neighbors. China must secure these routes, both for its goods to get to market and for the items required to make those goods—oil, gas, and precious metals among them—to get into China. 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. Diplomatically they will attempt to pull the Southeast Asian nations away from the United States using both carrot and stick. Too much stick and the countries will tie themselves ever closer into defense treaties with Washington; too much carrot and they may not bend to Beijing's will. At the moment they still look across the Pacific for protection. The maps of the region that the Chinese now print show almost the whole of the South China Sea as theirs. This is a statement of intent, backed by aggressive naval patrols and official statements. Beijing intends to change its neighbors' ways of thinking and to change America's way of thinking and behaving—pushing and pushing an agenda until its competitors back off. At stake here is the concept of international waters and free passage in peacetime; it is not something that will easily be given up by the other powers. 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. China also intends to become a two-ocean power (Pacific and Indian). To achieve this, China is investing in deep-water ports in Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—an investment that buys it good relations, the potential for its future navy to have friendly bases to visit or reside in, and trade links back home. The Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal ports are part of an even bigger plan to secure China's future. 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 Abe of Japan going to pay their respects in person. If they can influence Burma, they can help keep China in check. So far, the Chinese are winning this particular game on the global chessboard, but the Americans may be able to outmuscle them as long as the Burmese government is confident Washington will stand by it. 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. Chinese companies and workers are spread out across the world; slowly, China's military will follow. With great power comes great responsibility. China will not leave the sea-lanes in its neighborhood to be policed by the Americans. There will be events that require the Chinese to act out of region. A natural disaster or a terrorist/hostage incident involving large numbers of Chinese workers would require China to take action, and that entails forward bases, or at least agreements from states that China could pass through their territory. There are now tens of millions of Chinese around the world, in some cases housed in huge complexes for workers in parts of Africa. China will struggle to become agile over the next decade. It could barely maneuver the People's Army's equipment to help in the aftermath of the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. It mobilized the army, but not their matériel; moving abroad at speed would be an even greater challenge. This will change. China is not weighed down or motivated diplomatically or economically by human rights in its dealings with the world. It is secure in its borders, straining against the bonds of the first island chain, and now moving around the globe with confidence. If it can avoid a serious conflict with Japan or the United States, then the only real danger to China is itself. There are 1.4 billion reasons why China may succeed, and 1.4 billion reasons why it may not surpass America as the greatest power in the world. A great depression such as in the 1930s could set it back decades. China has locked itself into the global economy. If we don't buy, they don't make. And if they don't make, there will be mass unemployment. If there is mass and long-term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be—like everything else in modern China—on a scale hitherto unseen. [image: Images] 3 UNITED STATES Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. —Mark Twain, 1897 Location, location, location. If you won the lottery, and were looking to buy a country to live in, the first one the real estate agent would show you would be the United States of America. Twain was referring to the erroneous reporting of his death, but he could have been talking about the overreporting of the demise of the United States. It's in a wonderful neighborhood, the views are marvelous, and there are some terrific water features, the transport links are excellent, and the neighbors? The neighbors are great, no trouble at all. If you broke this living space up into numerous sections it would considerably lower its value, especially if the tenants did not all speak the same language and paid the rent in different currencies, but as one home, for one family—it can't be bettered. There are fifty American states, but they add up to one nation in a way the twenty-eight sovereign states of the European Union never can. Most of the EU states have a national identity far stronger, more defined, than any American state. It is easy to find a French person who is French first, European second, or one who pays little allegiance to the idea of Europe, but an American identifies with their Union in a way few Europeans do theirs. This is explained by the geography, and the history of the unification of the United States. Painting this vast country in bold, broad brushstrokes from east to west, you can divide it into three. First, there is the East Coast Plain leading to the Appalachian Mountains, an area well watered by short but navigable rivers and with fertile soil. Then, heading farther west, you have the Great Plains stretching all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and within this section lies the Mississippi basin with its network of huge, navigable rivers flowing into the Mississippi River all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, which is sheltered by the peninsula of Florida and several islands. Once over