Grandmasters of the Great Game
Washington’s moves, whether in Asia, the Greater Middle East, Europe, or for that matter space, and its attempts to control what Sir Halford Mackinder once called the “world island” represent something old and familiar in the history of empires, even if on a previously unimaginable scale. By contrast, the rise of China as the world’s largest economy, inconceivable a century ago, represents something new and threatens to overturn a geopolitical balance that has shaped the world for the past five hundred years. Indeed in 2012, the National Intelligence Council, Washington’s supreme analytic body, summarized this infinitely complex historical process in a single succinct chart. From 1820 to 1870, Britain increased its share of global gross domestic product by 1 percent per decade; the United States raised its share by 2 percent during its half-century ascent, 1900 to 1950; at a parallel pace, Japan’s grew about 1.5 percent during its postwar resurgence, from 1950 to 1980. China, however, raised its slice of the world pie by an extraordinary 5 percent from 2000 to 2010 and is on course to do so again in the decade ending in 2020, with India not far behind. Even if China’s growth slows by the 2020s, US economic leadership is expected to be decisively “overtaken by China.”1
The impact of this economic juggernaut has been profound. As China’s exports surged, its foreign exchange reserves soared from $100 billion in 1996 to $4 trillion in 2014, many times more than any other nation.2 Once China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it soon became the largest US trading partner, with $500 billion in exports in 2015 alone. China’s low-cost products devastated labor-intensive industries across America, destroying ten thousand apparel jobs in the South, shutting down paper mills in the country’s midsection, and putting pressure on steel production nationwide.3
Instead of focusing purely on building a blue-water navy like the British or a global aerospace armada akin to America’s, China is using its cash reserves to reach deep within the world island to the heart of Eurasia in an attempt to thoroughly reshape the geopolitical fundamentals of global power, using a subtle strategy that has so far eluded Washington’s power elites. Following Hannah Arendt’s dictum that there are two types of imperial expansion, overland like Russia’s or overseas like Britain’s, China is clearly of the landed variety, as it has attempted to expand its dominion into adjacent territories—first Tibet and now Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the South China Sea.4
After decades of quiet preparation, Beijing has recently revealed its grand strategy for global power, move by careful move. Its two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental infrastructure for the economic integration of the three continents that comprise the world island, while mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through Washington’s encircling containment.
The initial step has involved a breathtaking project to put in place a costly infrastructure for Eurasia’s economic integration. By laying down an elaborate and enormously expensive mesh of high-speed, high-volume railroads and petrochemical pipelines across the continent’s vast, empty interior, China may realize Mackinder’s vision, even if in a new way. For the first time in history, the rapid transcontinental movement of critical cargo—oil, minerals, and manufactured goods—will be possible on a massive scale, thereby potentially unifying that sprawling landmass into a single economic zone stretching 6,500 miles from Shanghai to Madrid. In this way, the leadership in Beijing hopes to shift the locus of geopolitical power away from the maritime periphery and deep into the continent’s heartland.
“Trans-continental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land power,” Mackinder told an attentive London audience back in January 1904 as the “precarious” single track of the Trans-Siberian Railway, then the world’s longest, was reaching across the continent for 5,700 miles from Moscow toward Vladivostok—making Eurasia a meaningful entity for the first time in human history. “But the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways,” he added. “The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in … fuel and metals so incalculably great that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.”5
Mackinder was a bit premature in his prediction. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese revolution of 1949, and the subsequent forty years of the Cold War slowed much actual development for decades. In this way, the Euro-Asian heartland was denied economic growth and integration, thanks in part to artificial ideological barriers—the Iron Curtain and then the Sino-Soviet split—that stalled infrastructure construction across it. No longer.
Only a few years after the Cold War ended, former president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, by then a contrarian sharply critical of both Republican and Democratic political elites, began raising warning flags about Washington’s inept style of geopolitics. “Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago,” he wrote in 1998, essentially paraphrasing Mackinder, “Eurasia has been the center of world power. A power that dominates ‘Eurasia’ would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions … rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent.” With a global hegemony that was both wide and shallow, Washington faced enormous challenges in controlling Eurasia, which was “too large, too populous, culturally too varied … to be compliant.” Yet, wrote Brzezinski, “America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” With 75 percent of the world’s population, 75 percent of known energy reserves, and 60 percent of its productivity, Eurasia was “geopolitically axial” in ways that render the other continents “geopolitically peripheral.”6
This Eurasian heartland is so vast, so empty that its development represents a daunting challenge too difficult to grasp by a mere glance at the map. For nearly a thousand years, the sheer scale of these steppes and deserts has served to separate what is in fact a unitary landmass into two continents, Europe and Asia. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, the endless distances alone challenged any traveler who tried to cross them, rendering Eurasia’s actual geographical unity, in human terms, meaningless. Leaving Venice in about 1270, Marco Polo became one of the first Europeans to travel overland to China, surviving bandits, sandstorms, and wilderness to complete the trek in three years. Some six hundred years later in 1907, another Italian aristocrat, Prince Scipione Borghese, won the first Peking to Paris auto race, driving his forty-horsepower Itala motorcar for sixty days to cover a distance of nine thousand miles and capture the prize fit for a prince—a magnum of Mumm’s champagne.7
When the auto race was commemorated a century later, my wife’s uncle, a retired schoolteacher from Iowa, drove his lovingly restored 1938 Ford Coupe in a fleet of 130 antique automobiles on a journey that still took thirty-six days. Somewhere in the Gobi Desert, he became separated from the pack. As he steered across the trackless terrain for hours without roads, signs, or landmarks, desperately scanning the horizon, his concern slowly turned to anxiety. Uncle David and his navigator were utterly alone in an endless emptiness that stretched to the sky in every direction. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he spotted a faint cloud of dust on a distant horizon. Flooring the accelerator, he pushed every one of that V-8 engine’s ninety horsepower hard to catch up.8
Just about the time Uncle David cleared that wasteland and was safely on his way across Russia on an actual road to Paris, the Chinese leadership in Beijing was making investment decisions that would change that landscape forever in ways that represent a challenge to US dominion. Starting around 2007, China launched the world’s largest burst of infrastructure investment, already a trillion dollars’ worth and counting, since Washington began building its interstate highway system in the 1950s. Under its disarmingly named “Silk Road Strategy,” the numbers for the rails and pipelines Beijing has been building are mind-numbing. The sum of these massive investments represents nothing less than a transcontinental engineering project of sufficient scale to realize Mackinder’s original vision of harnessing the Eurasian heartland as an engine to drive the ascent of a new world power.
Between 2007 and 2014, China crisscrossed its own countryside with 9,000 miles of new high-speed rail, more than the rest of the world combined. That network now carries 2.5 million passengers daily at top speeds of 240 miles per hour.9 By the time the system is complete in 2030, 16,000 miles of high-speed track at a cost of $300 billion will link all of China’s major cities.10
Simultaneously, Beijing’s leadership began collaborating with surrounding states on a massive project to integrate the country’s national rail network into a transcontinental grid. Starting in 2008, the Germans and Russians joined with the Chinese in launching the “Eurasian Land Bridge.” Two east–west routes, the old Trans-Siberian Railroad in the north and a new southern route along the ancient Silk Road through Kazakhstan, were meant to bind Eurasia together. On the quicker southern route, containers of high-value manufactured goods, like computers and auto parts, could travel 6,700 miles from Leipzig, Germany, to Chongqing, China, in just twenty days, far faster than the thirty-five days via ship.11
In 2013, Deutsche Bahn AG (German Rail) began preparing a third route between Hamburg and Zhengzhou that was expected to cut travel time to just fifteen days. Within a year, three trains a week with up to fifty containers each were covering the 6,800 miles between Chongqing, China, and Duisburg, Germany, via Kazakh Rail, in just sixteen days.12 In October 2014, China announced plans for the construction of the world’s longest high-speed rail line at a cost of $230 billion. According to plans, bullet trains will someday shoot across the 4,300 miles between Beijing and Moscow in just two days.13
In addition, China is building two major new railroads running south toward the world island’s maritime “marginal.” In April 2015, President Xi Jinping signed an agreement with Pakistan to spend $46 billion on a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Rail links, pipelines, and a highway will stretch nearly two thousand miles from Kashgar in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, to a joint port facility at Gwadar, Pakistan, opened back in 2007. There, China had already invested more than $200 billion to transform a sleepy fishing village into a strategic megaport on the Arabian Sea, just 370 miles from the Persian Gulf.14 Starting in 2011, China extended its rail lines through Laos into Southeast Asia at an initial cost of $6.2 billion. When completed, a high-speed train is expected to shoot passengers and goods south from Kunming, China, all the way to Singapore in just ten hours.15
In this same dynamic decade, China has constructed a comprehensive network of transcontinental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from the whole of Eurasia for its swelling population centers. In 2009, after a decade of construction, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) opened the final stage of the Kazakhstan–China oil pipeline. It stretches 1,400 miles from the Caspian Sea to Xinjiang, where it feeds into domestic pipelines that flow eastward into the heart of central China.16 Simultaneously in 2008, CNPC collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, a complex that will eventually extend more than four thousand miles. To give an idea of this project’s scale, one Uzbek branch pipeline completed in late 2014 and covering just three hundred miles had an annual capacity of twenty-five billion cubic meters of gas and cost $2 billion to build.17
To bypass the Straits of Malacca controlled by the US Navy, CNPC opened the Sino-Myanmar pipeline in 2013 to carry both Middle East oil and Burmese natural gas for 1,500 miles from the Bay of Bengal to China’s remote southwest region inhabited by a hundred million people.18 To power the country’s densely populated Northeast, the Chinese oil giant opened a 650-mile spur that tapped into Russia’s 3,000-mile Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean oil pipeline, bringing fifteen million tons annually into its enormous refinery at Daqing. By 2016, Russia had become China’s second largest source of crude oil and rising demand sparked plans to double shipments via an additional spur line, scheduled for opening within two years.19 In May 2014, CNPC also signed a $400 billion, thirty-year deal with the privatized Russian energy company Gazprom to deliver thirty-eight billion cubic meters of natural gas annually by 2018 via a still-to-be-completed northern network of pipelines across Siberia and into Manchuria.20
Though massive, these projects are just part of an ongoing construction boom that has woven a cat’s cradle of oil and gas lines across Central Asia and south into Iran and Pakistan. The result will soon be an integrated inland energy infrastructure, including Russia’s own vast network of pipelines, extending across the whole of Eurasia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea.
To capitalize such costly development plans, in October 2014 Beijing announced the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China’s leadership sees this institution as a future Eurasian alternative to the US-dominated World Bank. Despite pressure from Washington not to join, fifty-seven countries—including close American allies such as Germany, Great Britain, Australia, and South Korea—signed on, contributing $100 billion in capital, which made the new institution half the size of the World Bank on its opening day in January 2016. Simultaneously, China began building long-term trade relations with resource-rich areas of Africa, with Australia, and with Southeast Asia. After a decade of such sustained development, in May 2017 China’s president, Xi Jinping, convened an historic conference of sixty nations that make up the “world island” to proclaim Beijing’s new trillion-dollar commitment to building the infrastructure—ports, pipelines, power plants, and rails—for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Despite reservations from India and the European Union, President Xi himself hailed it as the “project of the century” that would “add splendor to human civilization,” while the Los Angeles Times headlined it as the “groundwork for a new global order.”21
Finally, Beijing has begun to reveal the key components of its strategy for neutralizing the military forces Washington has long arrayed around the continent’s perimeter. In mid-2015, Beijing escalated its claim to exclusive control over the South China Sea—expanding Longpo Naval Base on Hainan Island so that it could become the region’s only nuclear submarine facility,22 accelerating its creation of seven artificial atolls further south in the disputed islands that will undoubtedly someday become military airfields,23 and formally warning off US Navy overflights.24 Complementing its massive highway-rail-pipeline corridor to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, Beijing began building, in 2016, a major base at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, creating the basis for permanent Chinese naval deployments in the energy-rich Arabian Sea. With its naval bases spanning 5,000 miles across the Arabian and South China Seas while its submarines range as far as San Diego, China is forging a future capacity to strategically curtail America’s military containment.25
Military Situation in the South China Sea, 2016
In response to China’s challenge, the Pentagon issued stern warnings about freedom of the seas and sent a succession of naval patrols through the South China Sea, a strategic waterway for $5.3 trillion in maritime trade, 30 percent of world total. But nothing could slow China’s armada of dredges steadily churning the seabed to build permanent bases on those seven shoals. In January 2016, its first aircraft landed on a new 3,000-meter airstrip on Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratlys, prompting a formal protest from Vietnam.26 A month later, China moved toward militarizing even more atolls by basing batteries of HQ-9 antiaircraft missiles on Woody Island in the Paracels—and did so just a day after Obama’s summit with Southeast Asian leaders had issued a call for freedom of navigation in those disputed waters.27 By installing a nominally defensive weapon rather than jet fighters, China quietly asserted its claim to control of the airspace in this part of the South China Sea with a minimum of diplomatic disruption.
In March 2016, however, US intelligence chief James Clapper told Congress that China had installed a powerful military radar system on the Spratlys’ southernmost atoll, Cuarteron Reef, giving China’s DF-21D carrier-killer missile batteries on the mainland the ability to strike American ships in the South China Sea. Washington responded by sending a carrier group headed by the USS John Stennis on a patrol across those waters while Chinese naval vessels cruised nearby in a “wary standoff.”28
Continuing its stealth escalation, Beijing built hardened hangers for its largest military jets on three reefs—Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief—but did not throw down the gauntlet by actually deploying any fighters. Then in December 2016, China took decisive steps toward an exclusive zone by installing antiaircraft weapons on all seven of its artificial islands and, just days later, snatching a US “ocean glider” drone from waters near Scarborough Shoal—exploiting the unwritten rules that left drones “in a gray zone, just under the threshold of actual hostilities.”29 Simultaneously, a Pentagon study warned that, by 2030, China will have built so many aircraft carriers that one will always be close to these “contested waters,” making them “virtually a Chinese lake.” As if to corroborate that prediction, China’s navy pronounced its refitted Soviet carrier the Liaoning “combat ready” in November and also laid the keel in its own Dalian dockyard for a second carrier, with sophisticated electromagnetic catapults to launch its complement of a dozen advanced J-15 Flying Shark fighters.30
Concealed in this strategic confrontation is China’s determination to exploit the South China Sea’s fishing grounds as a critical source of protein. With the world’s population heading for nine billion by 2050, competition among rival powers will likely shift from the classic imperial issues of minerals and markets to elements more fundamental for human survival—energy, grains, fresh water, and fishing grounds. With its shallow continental shelf and circumferential breeding areas of mangrove deltas, the South China Sea ranks fourth among the planet’s nineteen major fishing grounds, producing a full fifth of world maritime harvest in 2010 and providing critical nutrition for two billion people in the twelve surrounding nations.31 After tripling its fish consumption to thirty kilograms per capita in just two decades, China will likely consume 38 percent of the world’s fish catch by 2030.32 To sustain that growth, its commercial fleet of 92,000 vessels in the South China Sea was pushing southward beyond their depleted home grounds into disputed waters near Malaysia and the Philippines.33
At the same time, Beijing is developing plans to challenge Washington’s dominion over space and cyberspace. It expects, for instance, to complete its own global satellite system by 2020, offering the first real challenge to Washington’s dominion over space.34 Simultaneously, Beijing is forging a formidable capacity for cyberwarfare.35 In a decade or two, China will have consolidated its control over the rich resources of Central Asia and also be ready, should the need arise, to slice through Washington’s continental encirclement at a few strategic points in the Arabian and South China Seas.
Lacking the geopolitical vision of Mackinder and his generation of British imperialists, much of America’s leadership in these years has generally failed to grasp the significance of the radical geopolitical change being worked inside the Eurasian landmass. If China succeeds in linking its rising industries to the vast natural resources of the Eurasian heartland, then quite possibly, as Sir Halford Mackinder predicted on that cold London night back in 1904, “the empire of the world would be in sight.”36
In ways that eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President Barack Obama deployed a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if adopted by his successors, just might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. After six years of sometimes-secret preparations, the Obama White House, in its last months, unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum was nothing less than a tricontinental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves unfolded worldwide, Obama revealed himself as one of those rare grandmasters with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play the Great Game of Geopolitics.
From the time he first took office in 2009, Obama faced an unremitting chorus of criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign, dismissing him as hapless, even hopeless. “He’s a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,” said Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chávez, just months after Obama’s inauguration.37 “I think he has projected a position of weakness and … a lack of leadership,” claimed Republican senator John McCain in 2012.38 “After six years,” opined a commentator from the conservative Heritage Foundation in April 2015, “he still displays a troubling misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in the international system.”39 Even former Democratic president Jimmy Carter has dismissed Obama’s foreign policy achievements as “minimal.”40 Voicing the views of many Americans, Donald Trump derided Obama’s global vision this way: “We have a president who doesn’t have a clue.”41
But let’s give credit where it’s due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy like “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered, sometimes deftly, sometimes less so, to rebuild America’s fading global influence.
“I want a president who has the sense that you can’t fix everything,” a reflective Obama told the Atlantic magazine during his last months in office. “The world is ever-shrinking. Withdrawal is untenable … I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery. We have to choose where we can make a real impact.” Yet, he added in an affirmation of America’s primacy, “If we don’t set the agenda, it doesn’t happen. The fact is, there is not a summit I’ve attended since I’ve been president where we are not setting the agenda, where we are not responsible for the key results. That’s true whether you’re talking about nuclear security, whether you’re talking about saving the world financial system, whether you’re talking about climate.” In exercising this leadership, America cannot, in his view, act unilaterally as a sole superpower. “One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris.”42 Yet there was much more to Obama’s foreign policy than he admitted even in these disarmingly frank statements.
Viewed historically, Obama set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that could be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of foreign policy options, he slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action, toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security—all in search of a new version of American supremacy.
Obama first had to deal with the disasters of the post-9/11 years. Looking through history’s rearview mirror, the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney imagined the Middle East as the on-ramp to greater world power and burned through several trillion dollars and much US prestige in a misbegotten attempt to make that illusion a reality. Since the first day of his presidency, Obama tried to pull back from or ameliorate the resulting miasmas in Afghanistan and Iraq (though with only modest success), while resisting constant Republican pressure to reengage fully in the permanent, pointless Middle Eastern war that they consider their own.
Instead of Bush’s endless occupations with 170,000 troops in Iraq43 and 50,000 in Afghanistan,44 Obama adopted a more mobile footprint of advisers, air strikes, drones, and special operations squads across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa. Rejecting the established “playbook” of Washington’s foreign policy elites stipulating that the United States was the perpetual guardian of the Middle East, duty bound to intervene in every crisis, Obama refused, in 2013, to commit air or ground forces to the project of regime change in Syria. “When you have a professional army,” he told the Atlantic in 2016, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“the notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.” Instead of bombing to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons, Obama negotiated with Russian president Vladimir Putin to force the removal of Syria’s chemical arsenal.45 On other matters, however, Obama has acted far more boldly.
Throughout his two terms, Obama’s diplomats pursued reconciliation with three “rogue” states—Burma, Iran, and Cuba—whose seemingly implacable opposition to the United States sprang from some of the most disastrous CIA covert interventions of the Cold War. “We have history,” Obama explained in 2016. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”46
In 1951, as the Cold War gripped the globe, Democratic president Harry Truman ordered the CIA to arm some twelve thousand Nationalist Chinese soldiers who had been driven out of their country by communist forces and taken refuge in northern Burma. The result: three disastrous attempts to invade their former homeland. After being slapped back across the Chinese border by mere provincial militia forces, the Nationalist troops, again with covert CIA support, occupied Burma’s Northeast, prompting Rangoon to lodge a formal complaint at the UN and the US ambassador to Burma to resign in protest.
Not only was this operation one of the great disasters in a tangled history of such CIA interventions, forcing a major shake-up inside the agency, but it also produced a lasting breach in bilateral relations with Burma (now Myanmar), contributing to that country’s sense of isolation from the international community. Even at the Cold War’s close forty years later, Burma’s military junta persisted in its international isolation while retaining a close dependency relationship with China, thereby giving Beijing special claim to its rich resources and strategic access to the Indian Ocean.
During his first term, Obama made a concerted effort to heal this strategic breach in Washington’s encirclement of the Eurasian landmass. He sent Hillary Clinton on the first formal mission to Burma by a secretary of state in more than fifty years; appointed the first ambassador in twenty-two years; and, in November 2012, became the first president to visit what he called, in an address to students at the University of Yangon, the “crossroads of East and South Asia” that borders on “the most populated nations on the planet.”47
Washington’s Cold War blunders were genuinely bipartisan. Among the 170 CIA covert operations that President Dwight Eisenhower authorized, two must rank as major debacles, inflicting especially lasting damage on America’s global standing.48 In 1953, after Iran’s populist prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq challenged Britain’s imperial monopoly over his country’s oil industry, Eisenhower authorized a covert regime change operation by the CIA and British intelligence. Though the agency came perilously close to failure, it did finally succeed in installing the young, untested shah in power. The agency then helped him consolidate his autocratic rule by training a secret police, the notorious Savak, in torture and surveillance techniques. While Beltway insiders toasted the delicious brilliance of this secret-agent derring-do, Iranians seethed until 1979 when demonstrators ousted the shah and students stormed the US embassy, producing a thirty-five-year breach in relations that weakened Washington’s strategic position in the region.
In September 2013, spurning neoconservative calls for a military solution to the “Iranian problem,” Obama dramatically announced his brief phone conversation with President Hassan Rouhani, the first direct contact with any leader of that country since 1979. In this way, he launched two years of sustained diplomacy that culminated in a historic agreement halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program.49 From a geopolitical perspective, this entente, or at least truce, avoided the sort of military action Republicans have been regularly calling for that would have mired Washington in yet another Middle Eastern war. Such a conflict would also have voided any chance for what Secretary of State Clinton first termed in 2011 “a pivot to new global realities.” She was, of course, speaking about “our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific,”50 a policy that in a 2014 Beijing press conference Obama would brand “our pivot to Asia.”51
During his last months in office in 1960, President Eisenhower also authorized a disastrous CIA invasion of Cuba, confident that a thousand ragtag Cuban exiles backed by US airpower could somehow overthrow Fidel Castro’s entrenched revolutionary regime. Inheriting this operation and sensing disaster, President John F. Kennedy forced the CIA to scale back its plans and yet did not stop the agency from proceeding. So it dumped those exiles on a remote beach fifty impassable miles of trackless, tangled swamp from the mountain refuge that had been planned for them and then sat back as Castro’s air force bombed them into surrender.
For the next forty years, the resulting rupture in diplomatic relations and a US embargo of Cuba weakened Washington’s position in the Cold War, Latin America, and even southern Africa. After decades of diplomatic isolation and economic embargo failed to change the communist regime, President Obama initiated a thaw in relations, culminating in the July 2015 reopening of the American embassy in Havana, closed for nearly fifty-five years.52 Defying entrenched congressional opposition, in March 2016 Obama made a historic state visit to Havana where he declared an end to the “last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas” and called upon the Cuban people to embrace a democratic future. That diplomatic initiative signaled Washington’s shift away from its domineering posture of past years, removing “a region-wide stumbling block” to marked improvement in relations with Latin America, one of Obama’s prime objectives.53
Moving from repair to revival, from past to future, President Obama also used America’s status as the planet’s number one consumer nation to create a new version of dollar diplomacy. While he saw the Middle East as “a region to be avoided—one that, thanks to America’s energy revolution, will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy,” he was “fixated on turning America’s attention to Asia” and thereby meeting the challenge posed by China. As his defense secretary Ashton Carter put it, Obama believed Asia to be “the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future.” As Obama himself put it, the Middle East has “countries that have very few civic traditions” roiled by all “the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity,” while Southeast Asia “is filled with striving, ambitious people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses.… The contrast is pretty stark.”54
His strategic pivot was aimed at drawing China’s Eurasian trading partners back into Washington’s orbit. While Beijing was maneuvering to transform parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified “world island” with China at its economic epicenter, Obama countered with a bold geopolitical vision meant to trisect that vast landmass by redirecting its trade toward the United States.55
During the post-9/11 decade when Washington was spilling its blood and treasure onto desert sands, Beijing was investing its trillions of surplus dollars from trade with the United States in the economic integration of the Eurasian landmass. As an index of its influence, China as of 2015 accounted for 79 percent of all foreign investment in Afghanistan, 70 percent in Sierra Leone, and 83 percent in Zimbabwe.56 Beijing managed to double its annual trade with Africa over just four years to $222 billion, three times America’s $73 billion, thanks to a massive infusion of capital that is expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025.57 As China’s economy grew, its defense budget, constant at 2 percent of GDP, increased fourfold from $52 billion in 2001 to $214 billion in 2015, second only to Washington’s, allowing for a rapid modernization of the country’s military.58
In his second term, however, Obama unleashed a countervailing strategy, seeking to split the world island economically along its continental divide at the Ural Mountains through two trade agreements that aimed to capture nothing less than “the central global pole position” for “almost two-thirds of world GDP and nearly three-quarters of world trade.”59 By negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Washington hoped to redirect much of the vast trade in the Asian half of Eurasia toward North America. Simultaneously, Washington also tried to reorient the European Union’s portion of Eurasia—which still has the world’s largest single economy60 and another 16 percent of world trade61—toward the United States through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Finally, in a stroke of personal diplomacy that much of the US media misconstrued as a sentimental journey, Obama was aggressive in his diplomatic courtship of Africa—that third continental component of China’s would-be world island—convening a White House summit for more than fifty of the continent’s leaders in 2014 and making a state visit to East Africa in July 2015.62 With its usual barbed insight, Beijing’s Global Times accurately identified the real aim of Obama’s Africa diplomacy as “off-setting China’s growing influence and recovering past U.S. leverage.”63
When grandmasters like Obama play the Great Game of Geopolitics, there is, almost axiomatically a certain sangfroid to their moves as well as an indifference to any resulting collateral damage at home or abroad. Should some version of these two treaties or successor agreements, so central to Obama’s geopolitical strategy, ever be adopted, they will bring in their wake both diplomatic gains and high social costs. Think of it in blunt terms as the choice between maintaining the empire abroad and sustaining democracy at home.
In his first six years in office, Obama invested his diplomatic and political capital in advancing the TPP, a prospective treaty that carefully excluded China from membership. Surpassing any other economic alliance except the European Union, this treaty would have integrated the US economy with those of eleven nations around the Pacific Basin—including Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and Vietnam—that represent $28 trillion in combined GDP or 40 percent of gross world product and a third of all global trade. By sweeping up areas like agriculture, data flows, and service industries, this treaty aspired to an unparalleled Pacific economic integration. In the process, it would decisively secure these highly productive nations in America’s orbit.64
Not surprisingly, Obama faced ferocious opposition from progressive leaders within his own party, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who were sharply critical of the highly secretive nature of the negotiations for the pact and the way it was likely to degrade American labor and environmental laws.65 The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated that the TTP would eliminate 370,000 jobs in the industrial heartland of the upper Midwest.66 So scathing was this critique that, in June 2015, the president needed Republican votes to win Senate approval for “fast track” authority just to complete the final round of negotiations on the treaty.67
Obama also aggressively pursued negotiations for the TTIP with the European Union to similarly secure its $18 trillion economy.68 The treaty sought fuller economic integration between Europe and the United States by meshing government regulations on matters such as auto safety in ways that might add some $270 billion to their annual trade.69
According to a coalition of 170 European civil society groups, the TTIP, like its Pacific counterpart, would damage democracy in participating countries by transferring control over consumer safety, the environment, and labor to closed, pro-business arbitration tribunals. Whatever one thinks about the ultimate impact of such trade pacts, the TTP treaty, propelled by Obama’s singular determination, had moved at light speed compared to the laggard Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations that had reached year twelve of inconclusive talks with no end in sight. And then, of course, Donald Trump formally quit the Trans-Pacific Partnership during his first week in office, sweeping all of Obama’s trade plans into the dumpster of history.70
Grandmasters of Geopolitics
Nevertheless, in his pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama revealed himself as one of the very few US leaders, in the century-plus since America’s rise to world power, who could imagine how to play the Great Game of Geopolitics with the requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness. Forget everyone’s nominee for master diplomat, Henry Kissinger, who was as inept as he was ruthless—extending the Vietnam War by seven bloody years to mask his diplomatic failure, turning East Timor over to Indonesia for decades of slaughter until its inevitable independence, cratering US credibility in Latin America by backing a murderous military dictatorship in Chile, and mismanaging Moscow in ways that helped extend the Cold War by fifteen years. Kissinger’s career, as international law specialist Richard Falk observed, has been marked by “his extraordinary capacity to be repeatedly wrong about almost every major foreign policy decision made by the U.S. Government over the course of the last half-century.”71
Once we subject other American leaders to a similar calculus of costs and benefits, we are, surprisingly enough, left with just three grandmasters of geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Carter who shattered the Soviet Empire and made Washington the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who tried to defend that status by offering an imperial blueprint for how to check China’s rise. In each case, their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough to generally elude both contemporary observers and later historians.
Many American presidents—think Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton—have been capable diplomats, skilled at negotiating treaties or persuading allies to do their bidding. But surprisingly few world leaders, American or otherwise, have had an intuitive feel for the cultural, economic, and military forces whose sum is geopolitics. Fewer still grasped both the temporal and spatial dimensions of global power—that is, the connections between present actions and often-distant results.
To borrow Brzezinski’s favorite metaphor, most American presidents have been competent at moving pieces on the global chessboard. But a geopolitical grandmaster does not simply move a pawn or rook a few squares to counter an enemy’s gambit; he breaks the “board” apart into coherent blocs of land, peoples, and resources that can be manipulated to effect major change. In the hands of skilled strategists, geopolitics involves the exercise of concerted coercion to turn that interface of land and society into manipulable counters whose maneuver can change the global balance of power—either deftly through diplomacy or crudely by force of arms. Thus, Root deployed Latin America diplomatically to intrude into Europe’s power politics; Brzezinski covertly penetrated Central Asia to free Eastern Europe three thousand miles to the west; and Obama tried to split Eurasia economically at the Urals to contain China.
If they did not rise to the stature of Hegel’s “world historical men,” latter-day Napoleons capable of manipulating the dialectics of change to become the “heroes of an epoch,” both Root and Brzezinski nonetheless manipulated their moments sufficiently to advance American interests while altering, often fundamentally, the future balance of global power.72 Though little noticed in the avalanche of criticism that has all but buried his accomplishments in the Oval Office, Obama followed in their footsteps.
Elihu Root, Architect of American Power
All but forgotten today, Elihu Root, not Theodore Roosevelt, was the true architect of America’s transformation from an insular continental nation into a major player on the world stage.73 About the time Sir Halford Mackinder was imagining his new model for studying global power back in 1904, Root was actually building an institutional infrastructure at home and abroad for the exercise of that same power.
In the first thirty years of his career Root achieved fame, some would say infamy, as a New York corporate lawyer representing the richest of robber barons, the most venal of trusts, and the most corrupt of big city bosses, notably New York’s notorious William “Boss” Tweed. This legal legerdemain let the “infamous” Havemeyer Sugar Trust increase its monopoly over the nation’s market from 78 to 98 percent and facilitated the “financial abuses” of New York City’s Whitney traction syndicate.74 Yet after several decades of enriching the rich—and himself in the bargain—Root turned his talents to selflessly serving the nation.
After his appointment as secretary of war in 1899, he would devote the rest of his long life to modernizing the American state, and continue to do so in later years as secretary of war, secretary of state, senator, and finally envoy extraordinaire. Not only did he shape the conduct of foreign policy for the century to come, but he also played an outsized role, particularly for a cabinet secretary of a then-peripheral power, in influencing the character of an emerging international community.75 By degrees, Root moved the United States and the world with it beyond the crude colonialism of military conquest and gunboat diplomacy to a new global system of sovereign states resolving disputes through international law.
As a prominent attorney, Root understood that the Constitution’s protection of individual liberties and states’ rights had created an inherently weak federal bureaucracy ill suited for the concerted projection of imperial power beyond the country’s borders. To transform this “patchwork” state and its divided society—still traumatized by the Civil War—into a world power,76 he spent a quarter century in the determined pursuit of three intertwined objectives: fashioning the fragmentary federal government into a potent apparatus for overseas expansion, building a consensus among the country’s elites for such an activist foreign policy, and creating new forms of global governance open to Washington’s influence.
As secretary of war from 1899 to 1904, he reformed the army’s antiquated structure, creating a centralized general staff, establishing a modern war college, and expanding professional training for officers. In effect, he transformed the army from a small force focused on coastal defense into an agile apparatus for foreign intervention—in China, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and ultimately Europe. To resolve the knotty contradiction of a republic running an empire, he quickly established colonial regimes for Puerto Rico and the Philippines, while dictating the constitution for a nominally independent Cuba that conceded the United States a navy base on the island and the right to intervene whenever it chose. With his eye firmly fixed on America’s ascent, he also covered up atrocities that accompanied the army’s extraordinarily brutal pacification of the Philippines.77
As secretary of state from 1907 to 1909, senator from 1909 to 1915, and special envoy to Russia in 1917, Root then led a sustained diplomatic effort to make America a real presence in the community of nations. As the first secretary of state to take a grand diplomatic tour, he launched an unprecedented circumnavigation of Latin America in 1906 as step one in a bold geopolitical strategy to open a central place for Washington, still peripheral to a world politics centered on Europe, into the great game of international leadership. Steaming south aboard the cruiser USS Charleston, Secretary Root made a “triumphal visit” to Rio for the Inter-American Conference and then circled the continent, stopping at half a dozen capitals, greeted by wildly cheering crowds at every port. A year later at the Second Hague Peace Conference, Washington, with the backing of the seventeen Latin republics among the fourty-four nations present, had sufficient geopolitical clout to conclude the first broad international legal agreement on the laws of war. To house the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the world’s first ongoing institution for global governance, Root’s good friend and steel baron Andrew Carnegie spent $1.5 million, a vast sum at the time, to build a lavish Peace Palace at The Hague in 1913. A year later Root helped establish the Academy of International Law, housed within that same palace.78
Simultaneously, he cemented a close alliance with Britain by promoting treaties to resolve territorial disputes that had roiled relations with the world’s preeminent power for the better part of a century. That effort won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Even in retirement in his seventies, he served on a League of Nations committee that established the Permanent Court of International Justice and lobbied hard for Congress to approve it in 1926, realizing his long-held vision of an international community governed by the rule of law.79
Throughout these decades Root was careful, even methodical, in building social networks that joined New York financiers, Washington politicians, and their academic experts in a distinctively American apparatus for foreign policy formation. Through his “affectionate friendship” with Carnegie, he presided over the investment of a significant part of that tycoon’s vast fortune, then the world’s largest, in building an institutional architecture for America’s unique way of engaging the world. In the process, he personally organized and chaired both the Carnegie Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
As the culmination of this effort, in 1921 Root led a group of financiers, industrialists, and corporate lawyers in establishing the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, which soon became the country’s most influential forum for promoting an expansive foreign policy. He also cultivated academic specialists at leading universities, using their expertise to shape and support his foreign policy ideas. In sum, Root recast key elements of American society to form a layered nexus of money, influence, and intellect, creating a foreign policy establishment that would define the country’s diplomatic priorities for the century to come.80
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Destroyer of Empire
After a long period of indifferent international leadership, foreign policy came under the charge of an underestimated figure, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter during the late 1970s. An émigré Polish aristocrat, professor of international relations, and autodidact when it came to geopolitics, Brzezinski was above all an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder. Through both action and analysis, he embraced Mackinder’s conception of Eurasia as the “world island” and its vast interior heartland as the “pivot” of global power. He would prove particularly adept at applying Sir Halford’s famous dictum: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world.”81
Wielding a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation like a sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam from Afghanistan deep into the “heartland” of Soviet Central Asia, drawing Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan war that weakened Russia sufficiently for Eastern Europe to finally break free from the Soviet Empire. With a calculus that could not have been more coldblooded, he understood and rationalized the untold misery and unimaginable human suffering his strategy inflicted through ravaged landscapes, millions of refugees uprooted from ancestral villages, and countless Afghan dead and wounded. Asked about this operation’s legacy when it came to creating a militant Islam hostile to the United States, Brzezinski was coolly unapologetic. “What is most important to the history of the world?” he asked in 1998. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”82
Even as the long-term damage from those “stirred-up Moslems” came to include the devastating Afghan civil war that followed the Red Army’s withdrawal from the country and the rise of al-Qaeda, none of it added up to a hill of beans, as he saw it, compared to the importance of striking directly into that Eurasian heartland to free Eastern Europe, half a continent away, and shatter the Soviet Empire.83 Under the strategy he launched, Afghanistan became, for over a decade, a training ground for global jihad, drawing in young recruits from across the Muslim world and sending them home hardened militants. Even as the toll rose to include the 9/11 attacks, America’s second Afghan War, and the unsettling of the Greater Middle East, Brzezinski seemed stubbornly oblivious to the longer-term costs of his hour as a grandmaster on the world stage.
Twenty years after his geopolitical strike against the Soviet Union, Brzezinski resumed his study of Mackinder’s theory in retirement, this time doing a better job with it as an armchair analyst than he had as presidential adviser. Although Washington was still basking in the pre-9/11 glow of being the world’s sole superpower, Brzezinski used geopolitical analysis in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard to warn of challenges to America’s continuing global hegemony. The United States might appear a colossus bestriding the world, but Eurasia still remained, he said, “the globe’s most important playing field … with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.”
That Eurasian “megacontinent,” Brzezinski observed, has “too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.” Washington, he hypothesized, could continue its half-century dominion over the “oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok” only as long as three critical conditions remained. First, the United States must preserve its unchallenged “perch on the Western periphery” in Europe. Second and most significantly, the vast “middle space” of Eurasia cannot become “an assertive single entity.” Finally, the eastern end of this vast landmass in Asia should not unify itself in a way that might lead to “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases.” Should any of these critical conditions change, then, Brzezinski predicted presciently, “a potential rival to America might at some point arise.”84
Barack Obama, Defender of Global Hegemony
Less than a decade after Brzezinski specified these conditions, China emerged to challenge America’s control of Eurasia and, much as he predicted, threaten Washington’s standing as the globe’s great hegemon. While the US military was mired in the Middle East, Beijing quietly began working to unify that vast “middle space” of Eurasia and preparing to neutralize America’s “offshore bases.”
By the time Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009, the first signs of a serious geopolitical challenge were already stirring in Asia, though only the president and his closest advisers seemed to recognize them. The media’s obsession with Obama’s African heritage blocked any focus on his formative mid-Pacific identity—birth and childhood in Hawaii, elementary schooling in Jakarta, and his mother’s long academic career in Southeast Asia. Unlike the country’s northeast political elites, wedded myopically to a mid-Atlantic view of the world, Obama came into office carrying vivid memories of “the trembling blue plane of the Pacific” with “thunderous waves, crumbling as if in a slow motion reel” pounding upon the shores of his tiny island, Oahu. His strongest childhood experiences were a pastiche of Pacific experience. Eating “poi and roast pig” with Hawaiians; watching old Filipino men play checkers while they “spat up betel-nut juice as if it were blood”; divers spearfishing in the “inky black waters” of Kailua Bay; and poverty that “twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta.”85
Growing up on a speck of earth tossed by a sea that covered half the planet’s surface, Obama seemed to acquire an intuitive feel for the shape of the globe. If his generation of world leaders had anything akin to a geopolitical grandmaster, then it would likely be him.
In a speech to the Australian parliament in November 2011, he announced his pivot to Asia. “Let there be no doubt,” he said, “in the Asia Pacific in the twenty-first century, the United States of America is all in.” After two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region … the world’s fastest-growing region—and home to more than half the global economy.”86
In geopolitical terms, Obama was intent on withdrawing American troops from an endless, exorbitant war in the Middle East—a region Brzezinski had dubbed Eurasia’s “central zone of instability”—while simultaneously deploying naval forces at “offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral to secure Washington’s axial position for control of that continent. In a deft exercise of imperial management, this military pivot complemented Obama’s focus on Asian trade. With North America’s increasing energy independence via natural gas and alternative sources, Washington could, for the first time in fifty years, regard the “economic prize” of the Middle East’s “enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves” as a marginal matter, no longer worth a massive price in blood and treasure.87 Simultaneously, the economic significance of East and Southeast Asia’s booming manufactures for the country’s new economy of information and consumer goods made freedom of the seas for trans-Pacific commerce a critical strategic priority.
In the aftermath of that commitment to Asia, Obama’s initial deployment of just 2,500 US troops to Australia seemed a slender down payment on his “strategic decision” to become his country’s first “Pacific president,” producing a great deal of premature criticism and derision.88 Four years later, one CNN commentator would still be calling this “Obama’s pivot to nowhere.”89 In early 2015, even seasoned foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria would ask, “Whatever happened to the pivot to Asia?” Answering his own question, Zakaria argued that the president was still mired in the Middle East and that the centerpiece of any true future pivot, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, seemed to face certain defeat in Congress.90
In March 2014, however, the Obama administration deployed a full battalion of marines at Darwin on the Timor Sea, an Australian base well positioned to access the strategic Lombok and Sunda straits.91 Five months later, the two powers signed a US-Australia Force Posture agreement allowing for both the pre-positioning of equipment and the basing of US warships at Darwin. Just in time for Obama’s April 2014 visit to Manila, the American ambassador there signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with a Philippine government angry at China over its recent seizure of Scarborough Shoal, a fishing ground the country claimed in the South China Sea. This bilateral accord paved the way for the future stationing of American forces and the pre-positioning of their equipment in the country. After the Philippine Supreme Court finally affirmed the legality of the agreement in 2016, Manila lifted a twenty-five-year ban on any permanent US presence, allowing the United States to build facilities inside five Philippine military bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.92
Through eight major air and naval bastions in Japan, the construction of a joint naval facility on Jeju Island in South Korea, and access to host-country naval bases in Australia, Singapore, and the Philippines, Washington had, by the end of Obama’s second term, rebuilt its chain of military enclaves along the Asian littoral, positioning its forces to challenge China’s navy in the East China and South China Seas.93 To operate these installations, the Pentagon announced plans to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020” along with a similar percentage of air force fighters and bombers, as well as “space and cyber capabilities.”94 As Obama himself observed in 2016, “If you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea, we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.”95
US Navy Positions in the Pacific, 2016
By coordinating the economic and military components of his grand strategy, Obama sought to achieve a potential for geopolitical synergy. While his trade initiatives, embodied in that Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed to direct the flow of commerce from Pacific littoral nations toward America, his chain of maritime bastions and naval patrols aspired, in coordination with Asia-Pacific allies, to secure the free movement of that same transoceanic trade. Yet Obama’s grand strategy, like those of the grandmasters who preceded him, soon suffered from unforeseen complications.
These grandmasters saw the possibilities of geopolitical change, but they also seemed to suffer from their singular focus, a form of tunnel vision that blinded them to the pitfalls of their bold maneuvers. Their strategies, so dazzling in the historical present, have often led remarkably quickly to unanticipated, even dismal outcomes over the longer term.
For all his skill in fostering Washington’s ascent to global power and forging a complementary world order, Elihu Root, cosseted among wealthy elites, could not imagine the nativist reaction that would follow World War I, when Congress rejected the League of Nations proposed by his intellectual successor Woodrow Wilson and Root’s antithesis Warren G. Harding led the country in an isolationist retreat from the international community. Half a century later, Zbigniew Brzezinski, obsessed with the liberation of Eastern Europe, proved deft in his mobilization of Islamic jihadists to break up the Soviet Union, but was myopic when it came to grasping the long-term threat that such Muslim militants might pose to America’s position in the volatile Middle East. Similarly, Obama, determined to reestablish America as the dominant Asia-Pacific power, underestimated the difficulties of military withdrawal from the Middle East and the populist hostility to the trade treaties that were the centerpiece of his strategy. Just as early internationalists Root and Wilson prompted a nativist retreat led by Harding, whose insularity and cronyism mocked their idealism, so it has been Obama’s fate to precipitate a populist reaction to globalization led by Donald Trump.
For all the boldness of his geopolitical vision, Obama faltered in its implementation as events, domestic and international, intervened decisively. The two trade pacts, TTP and TTIP, that promised to redirect Eurasia’s economies toward America soon encountered formidable domestic political opposition on both continents from both left and right. Despite volumes of economic studies to the contrary, just 19 percent of Americans polled in July 2016 believed that trade creates more jobs, and an earlier survey of public opinion in forty-four countries found only 26 percent of respondents felt trade lowers prices. Between 1999 and 2011, Chinese imports eliminated 2.4 million American jobs, closing plants for furniture in North Carolina, glass in Ohio, and auto parts and steel across the Midwest.96 After a half century of accelerating globalization, displaced or disadvantaged workers began mobilizing politically to oppose an economic order that privileged corporations and economic elites. As nations worldwide imposed a combined 2,100 restrictions on imports, world trade started slowing and actually fell during the second quarter of 2016 for the first time during a period of economic growth since World War II.97
As the most transcendent of these trade treaties, designed to supersede the sovereign authority of courts and legislatures, the TTP and TTIP became symbols of a globalization gone too far. Obama’s promotion of these treaties coincided with a growing nativist reaction to globalization. Across Europe an increasing number of voters supported hyper-nationalist parties that included the Danish People’s Party, the French National Front, the Alternative for Germany, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Sweden Democrats, and the UK Independence Party. Simultaneously, a generation of populist demagogues gained popularity or power in nominally democratic nations around the world—notably, Norbert Hofer (Austria), Marine Le Pen (France), Viktor Orban (Hungary), Geert Wilders (Netherlands), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Narendra Modi (India), Prabowo Subianto (Indonesia), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Recep Erdoğan (Turkey), and Donald Trump (United States). In June 2016, the British public voted to quit the European Union, eliminating its most forceful advocate for the TTIP, and two months later Germany’s economy minister announced that these trade talks with Washington had failed.98
During the American election campaign that fall, Donald Trump was famously vociferous in his opposition to the TTP and, under the pressure from the progressive candidacy of Bernie Sanders, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton soon followed suit.99 Only days after Trump’s unexpected win in November, the Obama White House conceded the deal was dead—a blow to US prestige that opened the way for Beijing to push its own Asian trade pact, the sixteen-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, that excludes the United States.100
Moreover, Obama’s long-heralded military pivot to Asia was slowed by competing American commitments in the Middle East, many of them of his own making, and adverse trends in Asia. With Syria’s civil war destabilizing the region via millions of refugees, ISIS resilient in a struggling Iraq, and an open-ended commitment to keeping ground troops and airpower in Afghanistan, Washington’s redeployment of its forces to military bases along the Pacific littoral slowed, sometimes drastically so. Despite announced long-term plans, the Pentagon’s projected commitment of actual assets to Asia in 2015–16 was still exceedingly modest—those 2,500 marines to Australia, an extra army battalion to South Korea, two destroyers to Japan, and four littoral combat ships to Singapore.101 Such relatively minor deployments were unlikely to provide a serious counterbalance to China’s preponderance of fighters, frigates, and submarines in the region. In Obama’s last months, a RAND Corporation study, War with China, warned that Beijing’s improved capabilities now meant a US victory was no longer certain in a conflict that “could involve inconclusive fighting with steep losses on both sides.”102
In Obama’s second term, Washington’s strategic position in Asia was buffeted by partisan shifts among its allies that revealed some underlying weakness in both its regional position and its system of world power. For nearly seventy years, US hegemony had rested in large part on its control over the axial points at both ends of the strategic Eurasian continent. At the western axis, NATO has long provided a strong multilateral anchor that transcended any sudden shifts in parties or personalities among the twenty-eight European member states. By contrast, the eastern end along the Pacific littoral has never had a regional defense agreement and thus rested on separate bilateral ententes with just four nations—Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. In Obama’s last years, Washington’s position was strengthened by the ascent of pro-American conservatives in South Korea and Japan, but weakened, perhaps seriously, by the election of a fiery populist in the Philippines sympathetic to China.
The May 2016 elections elevating Rodrigo Duterte from tough-talking mayor of Davao, the country’s most violent city, to the Philippine presidency brought a sudden chill to once-close relations.103 At the ASEAN conference in Laos that September, Duterte reacted profanely to Obama’s oblique criticism of the thousands of extrajudicial killings under his ongoing drug war, saying, “Who does he think he is? I am no American puppet. I am the president of a sovereign country and I am not answerable to anyone except the Filipino people. Putang ina mo [Your mother’s a whore], I will swear at you.”104 Obama reacted with his characteristic cool by calling Duterte “a colorful guy.” But he also took the uncommon step of canceling their bilateral meeting, opening a breach between the leaders that resisted repair.105
A month later as US and Filipino marines landed on a rain-swept Luzon beach in one of twenty-eight joint military maneuvers held every year, Duterte stated: “This year would be the last. For as long as I am there, do not treat us like a doormat because you’ll be sorry for it. I will not speak with you. I can always go to China.” Within days, Philippine defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana announced that joint naval exercises in the South China Sea were henceforth suspended and the hundred Americans operating drones against Muslim rebels on southern Mindanao Island would leave once the Philippines acquired comparable capacity.106
The truly critical blow, however, came in late October during Duterte’s state visit to China. To a burst of applause from an audience of officials in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the symbolic seat of China’s ruling Communist Party, he said, “Your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States … both in military, but economics also.” At a Philippine-Chinese trade forum that same day, Duterte asked, “What is really wrong with an American character?” Americans are, he continued, “loud, sometimes rowdy, and they have this volume of their voice … not adjusted to civility.… They are the more forward commanding voice befitting obedience.” Evoking some deep Filipino racialist tropes, Duterte then mocked a flat, nasal American accent and rued the time he was questioned at Los Angeles Airport by a “black” officer with “black” uniform, “black” shoes, and “black” gun. Moving from rhetoric to substance, Duterte quietly capitulated to Beijing’s relentless pressure for bilateral talks to settle their competing claims in the South China Sea, virtually abrogating Manila’s recent slam-dunk win on that issue before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.107
China reciprocated. After Beijing’s usual rituals—smiling girls with flowers and marching soldiers with bayonets—President Xi Jinping proclaimed, “China and the Philippines are neighbors across the sea and the two peoples are blood brothers.” Sealing that bond with cash, Beijing signed deals giving Manila US $22.5 billion in trade and low-interest loans.108
The breach in the seventy-year Philippine-US alliance was both breathtaking and confusing. More than 30 percent of remittances from overseas workers, the country’s largest source of foreign exchange totaling nearly US $30 billion in 2015, comes from Filipinos in the United States.109 Unlike many peoples around the globe, Filipinos have an abiding affection for America, with 92 percent expressing approval of their former colonial power in a 2015 Pew poll—by far the highest figure for any country in the world, including the United States itself.110
Yet Filipino admiration coexists with layer upon layer of resentment over being a distinctly subordinate partner in a long imperial alliance. Colonial pacification during the Philippine-American War ravaged the countryside and killed at least two hundred thousand in a population of just seven million, leaving a “postmemory”—that is, a “trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge”—marked by strong nationalism inflected with resentments ready to surface at any slight.111 As America’s bastion in the Western Pacific on the eve of World War II, the Philippines became a twice-fought battleground, suffering the utter devastation of its capital Manila and a million deaths in a population of just sixteen million.112 During the Cold War, the presence of massive US bases led to incidents between American soldiers and Filipinos, shootings and sexual assaults that highlighted the country’s sense of compromised sovereignty.113 As de facto dictator from 1972 to 1986, Ferdinand Marcos used Washington’s need for those installations to mute its criticism of his abysmal human rights record, angering the democratic opposition who concluded the bases only served American interests.114 Ten years after the Philippine Senate canceled the bases agreement in 1991, both nations cooperated closely during the war on terror, but that ended badly in 2015 when that spectacularly bungled CIA operation left forty-four Filipino troops dead in a firefight with Muslim militias.115
Although a simple clash of executive egos sparked the diplomatic rupture between Duterte and Obama, the geopolitical consequences are potentially profound. Along the four thousand miles of the Pacific littoral, the Philippines alone sits astride the South China Sea, providing the optimal strategic position to check China’s claim to those international waters. President Duterte lacks the authority, and probably even the ambition, to completely abrogate the strong ties built so painstakingly and painfully over the past 120 years. Indeed, after tilting dramatically toward Beijing, Duterte leaned back toward Washington after the November 2016 elections, quickly congratulating Trump on his victory and appointing the developer of Manila’s Trump Tower as his special envoy to Washington. Struggling to contain North Korea’s nuclear threat, President Trump reciprocated, telephoning Duterte in April 2017 to praise his “unbelievable job on the drug problem” and dismiss Obama’s concerns about the thousands killed. As talk turned to Kim Jong-un’s missile tests, the transcript reveals Trump flexing his nuclear muscles in a vain effort to shake Duterte’s reliance on China.
Duterte: As long as those rockets and warheads are in the hands of Kim Jong-un we will never be safe…He is not stable, Mr. President…He has even gone against China, which is the last country he should rebuke…
Trump: Well, he has got the powder but he doesn’t have the delivery system. All his rockets are crashing…
Duterte: At the end of the day, the last card, the ace has to be with China…
Trump: We have a lot of firepower over there. We have two submarines—the best in the world—we have two nuclear submarines…
Duterte: I will try to make a call to President Xi Jinping … to tell him that if we will remain…peaceful, China has the card. The other option is a nuclear blast…
Trump: We can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let [sic] on the loose like that. We have a lot of firepower, more than he has times 20, but we don’t want to use it. You will be in good shape…
Duterte: I will try to make a call tomorrow to China.116
Duterte had clearly decided China’s power, not America’s military might, was the key to his country’s security. Even if his successor aligns again with Washington, a six-year hiatus in the alliance would allow Beijing to consolidate its military position in the region’s waters and make its claim to them an undeniable reality.
Ironically for a liberal like Obama, his Asia policy fared best among conservative allies cast in a Cold War mode. And irony upon irony, the fulcrum for Washington’s pivot to Asia was none other than Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe, the unapologetic nationalist leading his country’s military resurgence. After returning to office in 2012, Abe spent the next four years confronting China over competing claims to the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, courting Southeast Asian allies with arms and aid as part of an expansive foreign policy, and asserting the “vital significance” of the Japan-US alliance in securing Asia’s “safety and prosperity.”117 Complementing a five-year expansion of Japan’s military budget, already the world’s fifth largest, Abe unilaterally undermined Japan’s pacifist constitution in 2014 via what he dubbed the doctrine of “collective self-defense,” and quickly won Washington’s approval for revisions to the mutual security treaty that would allow Japan to project force regionally, far beyond its borders.118 Abe was also a strong supporter of Obama’s pivot to Asia, embracing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and welcoming increased US troop deployments.119 Seventy years after the cataclysmic end to their bloody Pacific War, Japan was host to 47,000 American troops who occupied eighty-seven installations, including the Yokosuka naval base that is home port for the Seventh Fleet and airfields at Misawa, Yokota, and Kadena that house 130 air force fighters.120 In sum, Japan remained the firm axial anchor in America’s continuing bid to control Eurasia.
With his once-bold geopolitical pivot to Asia stalled, Obama left a legacy of contradictory half-measures: insufficient attention to the Middle East to restore some semblance of stability and woefully inadequate commitment of forces for Asia to contain rather than provoke China. Bilateral interactions with Beijing remained troubled, as the Chinese leadership pressed for what one foreign policy analyst called a “new model of great power relations” that conceded it a “sphere of influence and military advantage in Asia in return for Chinese support of Washington’s key global issues.”121
To meet China’s military challenge, Obama had struggled to shore up America’s waning hegemony through a final diplomatic surge with mixed results. The nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another major war in the Middle East held firm, but ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq slowed the long-term shift in strategic forces to Asia. With the exception of the Philippines, Obama maintained good relations with key Asian allies, although the failure of his signature trade pact would eventually weaken bilateral alliances along the Pacific littoral. By the end of his term, Obama, like the other grandmasters before him, found his bold geopolitical vision, so enticing in the abstract, had been compromised by political complexities at home and abroad.
In the transition to the Trump administration, the fragility of these relations with key Asian allies was immediately apparent. Right after the stunning upset in the November 2016 elections, Japan’s Abe broke with the subordinate role of prime ministers past by moving quickly to repair the damage from Trump’s unsettling campaign rhetoric, particularly his demands for full payment of the cost of basing troops in Japan and his call for the country to build its own nuclear weapons. Only twenty-four hours after polls closed in America, Abe was on the phone telling Trump that “a strong U.S.-Japan alliance … supports peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.” Abe was also a vocal defender of the TPP, saying its failure would assure the success of Beijing’s sixteen-nation regional partnership that excludes America, “leaving China the economy with the largest gross domestic product.” A week later, he became the first foreign leader to meet the president-elect, emerging from a ninety-minute sit-down in New York’s gilded Trump Tower to announce, “Trump is a leader who can be trusted.” While Trump’s views of Japan were badly outdated, almost a flashback to the 1980s, one of his top advisers now admitted, “Frankly, the prime minister has been more assertive and forthright in trying to make … changes to Japan’s global posture.”122 In a striking inversion of past patterns within this strategic alliance, Abe was the seasoned master and Trump the raw apprentice.
Just as Obama’s personal clash with Duterte was unprecedented in the seventy-year history of their nations’ alliance, so President Trump’s contretemps with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was equally extraordinary. During the round of introductory phone calls every new president makes to close allies, Trump bridled at Turnbull’s insistent reminder about a US commitment to take 1,250 refugees and cut short the call. “China and those wishing to weaken the strongest alliance in the Pacific will see opportunity in this moment,” commented the head of Canberra’s National Security College. Indeed, reflecting the country’s growing economic dependence on mineral exports to China, public opinion had shifted dramatically in recent years, with 45 percent of those polled in 2016 saying Australia should distance itself from America. While he was still patching up this contretemps with Australia, President Trump also roiled the once rock-solid alliance with South Korea by calling its free-trade agreement “horrible,” insisting that it pay for the antimissile system the United States installed to block North Korean attacks, and, to top it all off, insulting the country’s history by asserting incorrectly that it was once “a part of China.” Reeling from Trump’s gratuitous blasts, Seoul’s leading newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, published an editorial in May 2017 expressing the “shock, betrayal and anger many South Koreans have felt.” In presidential elections that month, liberal leader Moon Jae-in scored a solid win after campaigning for the country to “learn to say no” to America.123
Along the entire Pacific littoral, these shifts in the tenor of strategic alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines reveal a little-noticed yet central aspect in the waning of US power—the loss of control over a global network of presidents and prime ministers who long served as Washington’s loyal subordinate elites. During the Cold War, obeisance was the order of the day and those who harbored nationalist, anti-American sentiments often became the target of CIA-sponsored coups, electoral manipulation, or, when required, assassination plots.124 But now America’s hegemony has proved, like Britain’s before it, to be a “self-liquidating concern,” as bipolar power becomes multipolar and developing nations develop, allowing once subordinate elites like Abe, Duterte, Moon, and Turnbull to become unimaginably more insubordinate, weakening one of Washington’s key means of control on the Pacific littoral and beyond.125
While Washington’s ties to its Asian allies waxed and waned, the pressure of Beijing’s military expansion was relentless. By building the infrastructure for military bases in the Arabian and South China Seas, along with a complementary blue-water navy of carriers and jet fighters, China is forging a future capacity to surgically and strategically impair American military containment, someday breaching that encircling armada of carriers, cruisers, drones, fighters, and submarines, and so sparing it a future confrontation with the full global might of the US military. At the same time, Beijing is contesting Washington’s dominion over space and cyberspace.
Simultaneously, Washington has been building a triple-tier architecture for continued global hegemony with a strength, scope, and sophistication unprecedented in the history of world empires. Beneath the earth and seas, the NSA has penetrated the fiber-optic networks of global telecommunications to monitor both national leaders and their restive millions, creating a surveillance apparatus unequaled in both breadth of geographical reach and depth of social penetration. On the surface of the earth, the Pentagon has revived the classical imperial array of naval bastions and battleships, though now in the form of “lily-pad” bases, aircraft carriers, and littoral combat ships.
From sky to space, the Pentagon has launched thousands of drones—light and lumbering, hand-held and carrier-based, lethal and experimental—to command both terrestrial battlespace and that “ultimate strategic high ground.” Washington has ringed Eurasia with dozens of drone bases for surveillance and extrajudicial killing, while weaponizing space with stratospheric drones, upgraded satellites, and a space surveillance network of sensors and telescopes. In theory at least, this vast technological apparatus should preserve Washington’s grip on the world island and extend its dominion over the destiny of the entire planet.
In short, the world’s two most powerful nations, China and the United States, seem to have developed rival geopolitical strategies to guide their struggle for global power. Whether Beijing can succeed in unifying Asia, Africa, and Europe into that world island or Washington can maintain its control of the Eurasian continent from its axial positions on the Pacific littoral and in Western Europe will not become clear for another decade or two.
There is as well a larger, darker question looming over this twenty-first century edition of superpower politics. We still cannot say whether the outcome of this latter-day Great Game will be decided through an intense but peaceable commercial competition or a more violent denouement akin to history’s last comparable imperial transition over two hundred years ago—that is, the protracted warfare, at the start of the nineteenth century, between Napoleon’s “continental system” and Britain’s maritime strategy.126 Now at the start of a new century, we cannot predict with any certainty whether history will favor Eurasia’s emerging land power or the established global hegemon, the would-be master of air, sea, and space. But it does seem certain that we are starting to see the broad parameters of an epochal geopolitical contest likely to shape the world’s destiny in the coming decades of this still nascent twenty-first century.
