While the United States is unrivaled in projecting military power from 500-plus overseas bases, China’s investments in ports and communication technology globally show Beijing’s footprint approach as a possible means to a similar end, an expert panel said, US Naval Institute reports.
Geoffery Gresh, head of international security studies at the National Defense University, and other panelists at the Brookings Institution event agreed, “competition is not always symmetric” and “not all regions are the same.”
He asked rhetorically how do you project power in the 21st century, “it’s through the internet.” He suggested China’s actions now have historic parallels with the activities of the British and Dutch East India Companies in setting up trading ports in India and what is now Indonesia.
Great Britain and the Netherlands eventually expanded those trading outposts to colonial control.
China is not alone in seeing the value of this approach, Gresh added. Russia’s knowledge that soon 600 undersea fiber-optic cables will be moving data that is the internet’s backbone has them focusing on increasing its submersible capabilities.
Like Beijing’s port projects from Asia to Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Moscow has poured money into dual-use projects – such as sea-floor mapping to support its interests in the Baltic, Black Sea and parts of the Mediterranean.
Gresh added these cables have proven “difficult to patrol.” In the past year, critical cables have been suspiciously cut in the Baltic, Red Sea and off the African coast.
Isaac Kardon, who moderated the Brookings Institution discussion and is co-editor of Great Power Competition and Overseas Basing, said, “bases [like the United States maintains] are big fat targets for precision munitions and not so precision munitions.”
The question Washington, Beijing and Moscow should be asking themselves is “what is the purpose of the base – power projection or intelligence-gathering,” Dawn Murphy, who teaches national security strategy at the National War College, said. She added with the exception of Djibouti and Cambodia, China’s military does not have a “large military footprint overseas.”
Russia does maintain bases similar to the United States’ military presence, but they are largely concentrated in former Soviet republics. It also maintains a naval presence in Syria on the Mediterranean and in sub-Saharan Africa.
Instead of the leasing arrangements Washington employs, Beijing uses “a robust set of tools” such as development funds, the Belt and Road Initiative and investments from Chinese companies into infrastructure projects to gain access economically and politically. It also can gather useful military intelligence from this kind of presence.
“China envisions itself as a leader of the Global South” and uses different means to achieve that goal, she added.
Djibouti, where China maintains a base near the U.S. facility, is an exception. In part, Murphy said, that base was built to show Beijing’s interest in being a responsible power in combating smuggling, piracy and now protecting tankers carrying Middle Eastern oil.
The major exceptions to the small-footprint approach are occurring closer to China’s land borders and its territorial claims, especially in the South China Sea, Andrew Yeo, the book’s co-editor and senior fellow at Brookings, said.
He cited Beijing’s creating artificial islands on sea rock and coral formations, building runways and piers to support military operations in the first island chain (notably threatening Taiwan and the Philippines) and extending its reach to Pacific island nations.
“We do have to think differently [regarding] Southeast Asia and westward to the Indian Ocean,” he added, and what that means in terms of rapid deployment and sustainment if a crisis turns to conflict.
Looking at the current U.S. overseas basing model, Yeo said, “crisis leads to continuity” of military presence as in Japan, especially Okinawa, following World War II and Korea after the armistice in 1953 halted the war on the peninsula.
But even in those two nations, the United States and its allies have altered their basing structure, consolidating facilities and moving others to disperse forces in case of attack.
Over the next decade, U.S. strategy for the first island chain and the Korean peninsula needs clarity on whether its military presence should be “closer to where the fight is or pulling back because of vulnerability to Chinese missiles, North Korean missiles,” Yeo said.
Gresh said 20 years ago Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested the United States should adopt a “lily pad” basing strategy in the Pacific, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq put that idea on the shelf. China’s spreading military presence regionally poses “a significant challenge” that should be causing a re-thinking of strategy.
Looking at Europe and the Chinese, Gresh noted Beijing has significant investments in 10 percent of the continent’s ports. The Chinese shipping company Cosco is the majority stockholder in Piraeus, Greece’s largest port. Gresh said it has become the main maritime entry point for Chinese merchant vessels.
He added its cruise ship facilities can fit a naval vessel.
China could say, “we’re going to bring our ship in for replenishment” and allow its crew shore leave. The U.S. Navy already makes port calls at Piraeus for similar reasons, most recently in late December.
For the first time, Europeans are pulling back from more Chinese investments, saying “we need to take a harder look” at the implication of who owns its ports.
