Francis P. Sempa
In 1900, the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) wrote a series of articles that were later collected into a book titled The Problem of Asia. In Mahan’s time, the problem of Asia was the growing power of Russia and the unstable “debatable and debated ground” which stretched from the islands offshore of East Asia to the Middle East—roughly between 30degrees and 40 degrees north latitude.This broader central Asian belt today includes the South China Sea, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, all of China, much of India, Pakistan, the Bay of Bengal, Afghanistan, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, Iran, the oil-rich Caspian Sea basin, the Red Sea, the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Levant, and modern-day Turkey. It roughly tracks the Asian geography of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Today, China, not Russia, is the problem of Asia.
In Mahan’s time, the geopolitical struggle over this Asian region (the “great game”) was waged by Great Britain and Russia. Today, the geopolitical struggle over this region is waged by the United States and China. And this new great game will determine the global balance of power into the foreseeable future.
China launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, using economic leverage to further its geopolitical ambitions. Those ambitions include the unfinished business of the Communist Revolution of 1949, i.e., gaining control of Taiwan, which the U.S. prevented by inserting the 7th Fleet between China and Taiwan at the beginning of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. China’s goals entail nothing less than what they see as full redemption from the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949) through the attainment of super power status by 2049. President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” described by Michael Pillsbury in The Hundred-Year Marathon as “a resurgent China that would reclaim its rightful place atop the global hierarchy,” could soon be a reality.
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