Sahil Yar Muhammad
In an age defined by artificial intelligence, long-range missiles, naval modernization, and other advancements, geography may seem like an outdated constraint, a relic conquered by modern technology and global ambition. There are many who assume so. However, the reality is different for many states whose geography remains an overarching shadow over their policies; ever-present in the minds of the men who navigate the ship of state. Nowhere is this more painfully evident than in China’s maritime ambitions.
Despite unprecedented economic and strategic rise, the seas remain stubbornly resistant to domination. What we’re witnessing is the slow return of a geopolitical truth long articulated by Robert D. Kaplan: that geography still defines the outer limits of strategic ambition. This idea, which I call “Kaplan’s Revenge,” captures the resurgence of geographic significance in contemporary power politics. Despite all the technological prowess and assertive foreign policy it has brought to bear in its near abroad, China will not find it easy to escape its geography.
Its efforts to reshape the maritime order face resistance not just from the United States and its allies, but from natural chokepoints, other regional states, and the physical realities of the Indo-Pacific region. China’s maritime flank is hemmed in by a chain of islands which are also referred to by Chinese policymakers as the ‘first island chain,’ many of them occupied or backed by US allies Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These unsinkable aircraft carriers, to use General Douglas MacArthur’s term for Taiwan, sit like fixed sentries across China’s maritime exit routes.
Even with advanced anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities the PLA Navy operates in the region, the geography inherently constrains open-ocean maneuvers. The South China Sea, long touted as Beijing’s natural sphere of influence, is shallow, crowded, and politically explosive. It is what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Roman Empire and what the Caribbean Sea is to the U.S. However unlike the other two, this one has a great power presence already established, not to mention other regional states. And breaking out of this straitjacket will mean confrontation with not only the states that have a claim to the sea but also the great power that supports them.
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