The Revolution in Transatlantic Affairs

Eagle1 is linking to the most interesting thing you will almost certainly read this week, a very thought provoking piece listed in todays RealClearPolitics Tuesday roundup. Written by Tony Corn, who wrote the incredible thought provoking and controversial "Clausewitz in Wonderland," an excellent read for those looking to be intellectually challenged, comes a new piece again from the Hoover Institutes Policy Review "The Revolution in Transatlantic Affairs."

Both are very long pieces, (very long) with today's piece going into a number of directions that can't possibly be analyzed by any single blog post. It would take a week for me to hit on the major points. However in reading the piece I was drawn to the maritime aspects, of which there were several, but specifically on the focus of the US Navy today. Tony Corn, a graduate of the US Naval Academy, raises a number of interesting points in his new piece, but he hits on two points that I thought were on target. First his comments on NATO and the 1000-Ship Navy.

In the 1990s, some foreign policy analysts called on the United States to adopt a policy known as "offshore balancing." Succinctly put, "offshore balancing is predicated on the assumption that attempting to maintain U.S. hegemony is self-defeating because it will provoke other states to combine in opposition to the United States, and result in a futile depletion of the United States' relative power, thereby leaving it worse off than if it accommodated multipolarity." 31 Whether such an offshore balancing is still possible or desirable for the U.S. in a post-9/11 environment is highly debatable. But a maritime globalization of NATO could become, for the Alliance itself, the continuation of "offshore balancing" by other means. Its main merit would be to constitute a hedging strategy of sorts against the SCO.

China is emerging as a maritime superpower as quickly as America itself (not to mention the UK) is declining as a naval power, to the point where China could become the leading naval power by 2020. The Russian Navy, which until now was a pale shadow of Gorshkov's navy (since 1991, the number of submarines has declined from 317 to 61 and of surface ships from 967 to 186) has announced plans to build a class of four new aircraft carriers in 2013-14, with initial service to begin in 2017. 32 One would do well to remember that it took hardly more than a decade during the Cold War for Russia, the quintessential land power, to develop a formidable navy. In 20 years, we could realistically see a China/Russia-led SCO that is hegemonic not only on land but at sea. As counterintuitive as it may be at first, NATO would be wise to consider the possibility of making maritime cooperation the centerpiece of NATO-Russia security cooperation.

Maritime operations are of course not foreign to NATO. In the 1990s, Operation Sharp Guard constituted a dress rehearsal of sorts for Operation Active Endeavor after 9/11. In 2003, OAE was expanded functionally and geographically to cover the whole Mediterranean and ended up including some Mediterranean Dialogue countries as well as Russia and Ukraine. Many NATO allies participate in the Container Security Initiative (CSI) and the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), and it is no coincidence that the former head of Joint Forces-Naples, Admiral Mullen (the current chief of naval operations and JCS chairman-designate), is the one who developed the concept of the "Thousand Ship Navy" (TSN), which is today the talk of the U.S. Navy. 33 33 33 33 33

Though globalization has increased the importance of maritime affairs, there has been both a relative and an absolute decline of U.S. seapower, with a U.S. Navy today at its lowest level in the post-World War II era. For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. is in the process of drafting a new maritime strategy, but with a considerably reduced force that went from 600 to fewer than 300 ships, and with new responsibilities in terms of nonmilitary maritime security. Hence the concept of the Thousand Ship Navy, which is meant to create a global maritime partnership with foreign navies.

TSN is much more than an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. The Thousand Ship Navy -- the "Great White Fleet" of the twenty-first century -- represents a revolution in military affairs in that the concept raises the "network-centric" paradigm established by Admiral Cebrowsky from the domain of strategy (Network-Centric Warfare) to that of security (Global Maritime Partnership). In the process, it brings back a much-needed balance between techno-centric and culture-centric skills as components of success. Just as important, the TSN concept also represents a revolution in diplomatic affairs, in that a global maritime partnership would go beyond the traditional military-to-military contacts and, as Admiral Mullen points out, would unite "maritime forces, port operators, commercial shippers, and international, governmental and nongovernmental agencies to address mutual concerns."

As the Proliferation Security Initiative in Asia shows, though, this twenty-first- century naval diplomacy presents formidable challenges in terms of redefinitions of "sovereignty." Though the TSN concept is still a work in progress, it is worth noting that naval representatives from 72 countries have already taken part in the first symposium on the subject. NATO would do well to examine if the indirect approach of "going global" through a Thousand Ship Navy path is not also the best way to avoid making self-defeating waves in Asia.

Strategic considerations aside, there is an additional reason for Global NATO to get associated with the Thousand Ship Navy. Hard as it is to remember today, there was a time when NATO captured the imagination of Western audiences: Until the mid-sixties, in fact, the prospect of an Atlantic Union was seen in Europe as the wave of the future, while the idea of a European Union was associated mainly with coal, steel, and the standardization of electric plugs. 34 34 34 Today, hard as they try, the 700 million people of the West can't really bring themselves to get exited when the "deliverables" of NATO Summits amount to -- the purchase of three C-17s? If that is NATO's level of ambition these days, no wonder that even the EU is beginning to look good. NATO will require nothing less than a Thousand Ship Navy if it is to recapture the imagination of public opinion.

I added links to his citations, because they matter.

Is SCO a legitimate NATO competitor? You decide:

In the past hundred years, the instrumentalization of Islam has been a recurrent temptation on the part of every rising power, be it Wilhemine Germany or Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, not to mention America itself. As the latest rising power, China itself would not be immune to that temptation even if it were energy self-sufficient. The fact that China's energy needs are huge guarantees that the constitution of a Sino-Islamic axis is for Beijing not just a tactical option, but a strategic necessity.12

While the pivotal states of this strategy appear to be Pakistan, Iran, and (more recently) Saudi Arabia, the geopolitical situation of Iran puts it in a class by itself, as the most precious proxy in China's "indirect approach" against American primacy. It is therefore no surprise to learn that China is using Iran as a conduit for the delivery of arms to both Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, and providing Iran itself the kind of small boats needed to conduct attacks against commercial shipping or the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf.13

If the instrumentalization of Islam constitutes the geographical axis of China's grand strategy, the functional axis is -- or ought to be -- of equal interest to NATO, since it consists in the artful combination of space power, sea power, and soft power.

Space power. While lending support to Russia's ludicrous posturing on NATO missile defense, China is experimenting with antisatellite weapons -- a disturbing trend given the reliance of modern military (especially navies) on space power.

Sea power. A hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt sent his Great While Fleet around the world to signal the emergence of a new great power, China is rediscovering the writings of Admiral Mahan on the importance of sea power in history and dreaming of a Great White Fleet of its own. Against the backdrop of an ever-shrinking U.S. Navy (more on that later), China is transforming itself as a maritime superpower at such high speed that Western analysts estimate it could become the world's leading naval power by 2020.

Last but not least, soft power. On the military side, China is focusing on developing security cooperation within the ASEAN Regional Forum framework with the intent of marginalizing America. On the civilian side, China is peddling "Asian values" from Africa to Eurasia and from Latin America to Southeast Asia. For the past six years, China has been promoting autocracy through soft power while America has been promoting democracy through hard power, and the verdict is in: China today has a more positive image worldwide than America.

No analysis necessary here, the rest of the paper is a more important read than anything I can say. Welcome to the geopolitics of the 21st century, where policy is the new substitute for strategy, and strategy is MIA in US, EU, and/or NATO policy.