Americans have tended to view international conflict as a matter of differing worldviews: WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Islamic aggression of recent years have all been seen this way. Whether or not such an understanding is correct for those wars, it is, Robert Kaplan argues, not correct for understanding the matters surrounding the South China Sea.
To the contrary, Kaplan asserts, relations between the states in that part of the world are based purely on the calculation of power. Metternich’s power politics and Bismarck’s Realpolitik are at work in the western Pacific.
There are no philosophical questions to ponder in this new and somewhat sterile landscape of the twenty-first century. It is all about power; the balance of power mainly. While the language at Asian summits will be soft, the deployment of warships in disputed seas will be hard. Military engagements on land involve occupation of civilian populations, which lead often to human rights violations, so that foreign policy becomes a branch of Holocaust studies. But the application of sea power is a purely military matter. Unless shelling on shore is involved, the dead are usually all in naval uniform, and thus there are no victims per se. In the early twenty-first century, the South China Sea will continue to be at the heart of geopolitics, reminiscent of Central Europe in the twentieth century. But unlike Central Europe it will not constitute an intellectual or journalistic passion.
While Wilson’s slogan encouraged Americans to view WWI as a moral conflict - Wilson himself probably didn’t believe that - the belligerent nations in WWI were more realistic about their motives. This same dynamic may be at work when Americans view southeast Asia.
The nations bordering the South China Sea do not quarrel about democracy or human rights. They are competing in economic and military matters. This is somewhat difficult for American media to accept. There may not be a profound social or moral issue in which to frame the tensions between China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan.
The separation of geopolitics from human rights issues, which were conjoined in the twentieth century in Europe, plus the degree of abstraction that surrounds the naval domain in any case, will help make the South China Sea the realm of policy and defense analysts, rather than of the intellectuals and the media elite. Realism, which is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world, will therefore triumph. This is how the South China Sea will come to symbolize a humanist dilemma.
The question is whether the United States, and other global powers, will be able to recalibrate its thinking about international conflicts, and be able to frame some of them in terms apart from moral or social issues. A sober Realpolitik practitioner assesses, avoids, or engages in conflict based on a calculation of power, not on an evaluation of worldviews.
While some of the domestic policies of these nations are doubtless classic cases of questions about human rights and natural law - think of Tiananmen Square or North Korea - the foreign diplomacy of these nations, Robert Kaplan argues, is not and cannot be evaluable from a standpoint of humanistic values.
The great exception to this line of argument is the environment. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 took place in the vicinity of the South China Sea and claimed more victims than the Iraq War. Even absent global warming, the normal variations of climate and seismic activity in environmentally fragile areas, combined with continued absolute rises in coastal populations, will virtually guarantee occasional humanitarian disasters around the South China Sea in coming decades. Navies will need to respond. By responding in the grandiose manner that it did to the Indian Ocean tsunami, the U.S. military, led by an aircraft carrier strike group, applied soft power in a way that augmented its hard power. Namely, humanitarian assistance to Indonesia led to resumed ties with the Indonesian military that the United States had not enjoyed for years. The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media’s distorting mirror. The experts will follow naval movements in these waters regularly, while the media will lavish prime-time attention on the region only in cases of natural catastrophe. But even in the midst of such catastrophes, in comparison to twentieth-century Europe, the human rights angle will be muted because while there will be victims, there will be no villains, except of course for Mother Nature. And without villains, moral choice that distinguishes between good and evil cannot operate, meaning that in a philosophical sense there will be comparatively little drama.
The climate of the region, apart from any allegedly anthropogenic influences, always has been, and always will be, such that tsunamis and other natural disasters will strike from time to time. These will give the United States a chance to demonstrate goodwill by using its navy for humanitarian purposes. This is worth doing, because it buys a certain amount of reciprocal goodwill toward the United States. It is also important not to overestimate that amount.
But such natural disasters, and the humanitarian responses to them, do not change the essentially Bismarckian and Machiavellian nature of power politics in the region.
To conduct an amoral foreign policy is not to conduct an immoral foreign policy. An amoral policy in this sense is simply a realization that a situation may not involve moral factors. The choice, e.g., between vanilla ice cream and strawberry ice cream is not a moral one, and is made with reference to non-moral, or amoral, factors.
The lesson of the South China Sea today, and of WWI a century earlier, may be that ideological, moral, ethical, and social considerations are salutary for shaping domestic policy, but, at least in some situations, an amoral Realpolitik is the most practical and most successful method for foreign policy.
