There is nothing romantic about this new front, void as it is of moral struggles. In naval conflicts, unless there is shelling onshore, there are no victims per se; nor is there a philosophical enemy to confront.
The 21st century's defining battleground is going to be on water (part 1)
The 21st century's defining battleground is going to be on water (part 2)
China is likely to become more open rather than closed as a society in future years. Instead of fascism or militarism, China, along with other states in East Asia, is increasingly defined by the persistence of old-fashioned nationalism: an idea, certainly, but not one that since the mid-19th century has been attractive to intellectuals. And even if China does become more democratic, its nationalism is likely only to increase, as even a casual survey of the views of its relatively freewheeling netizens makes clear.

Yet it is traditional nationalism that mainly drives politics in Asia, and will continue to do so. That nationalism is leading unapologetically to the growth of militaries in the region -- navies and air forces especially -- to defend sovereignty and make claims for disputed natural resources. There is no philosophical allure here. It is all about the cold logic of the balance of power. To the degree that unsentimental realism, which is allied with nationalism, has a geographical home, it is the East Sea.

As Thucydides put it so memorably in his telling of the ancient Athenians' subjugation of the island of Melos, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." In the 21st-century retelling, with China in Athens's role as the preeminent regional sea power, the weak will still submit -- but that's it. This will be China's undeclared strategy, and the smaller countries of Southeast Asia may well bandwagon with the United States to avoid the Melians' fate. But slaughter there will be not.

The East Sea presages a different form of conflict than the ones to which we have become accustomed. Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have been traumatized by massive, conventional land engagements on the one hand, and dirty, irregular small wars on the other. Because both kinds of war produced massive civilian casualties, war has been a subject for humanists as well as generals. But in the future we just might see a purer form of conflict, limited to the naval realm. This is a positive scenario. Conflict cannot be eliminated from the human condition altogether.

A theme in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is that conflict, properly controlled, is more likely than rigid stability to lead to human progress. A sea crowded with warships does not contradict an era of great promise for Asia. Insecurity often breeds dynamism.

But can conflict in the East Sea be properly controlled? My argument thus far presupposes that major warfare will not break out in the area and that instead countries will be content to jockey for position with their warships on the high seas, while making competing claims for natural resources and perhaps even agreeing to a fair distribution of them. But what if China were, against all evidential trends, to invade Taiwan?

What if the incident in 1979 between Vietnam and China repeats, with more lethal weaponry this time? For it isn't just China that is dramatically building its military; Southeast Asian countries are as well. Their defense budgets have increased by about a third in the past decade, even as European defense budgets have declined. Arms imports to Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia have gone up 84 percent, 146 percent, and 722 percent, respectively, since 2000. The spending is on naval and air platforms: surface warships, submarines with advanced missile systems, and long-range fighter jets.

While the United States has been distracted by land wars in the greater Middle East, military power has been quietly shifting from Europe to Asia.

The United States presently guarantees the uneasy status quo in the East Sea, limiting China's aggression mainly to its maps and serving as a check on China's diplomats and navy. It is the very balance of power between the United States and China that ultimately keeps Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia free, able to play one great power off against the other. And within that space of freedom, regionalism can emerge as a power in its own right, in the form of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Yet, such freedom cannot be taken for granted. For the tense, ongoing standoff between the United States and China -- which extends to a complex array of topics from trade to currency reform to cybersecurity to intelligence surveillance -- threatens eventually to shift in China's favor in East Asia, largely due to China's geographical centrality to the region.    

The most comprehensive summation of the new Asian geopolitical landscape has come not from Washington or Beijing, but from Canberra. In a 74-page article published last year, "Power Shift: Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing," Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, describes his country as the quintessential "status quo" power -- one that desperately wants the situation in Asia to remain exactly as it is, with China continuing to grow so that Australia can trade more and more with it, while America remains "the strongest power in Asia," so as to be Australia's "ultimate protector."

But as White writes, the problem is that both of these things cannot go on. Asia cannot continue to change economically without changing politically and strategically; a Chinese economic behemoth naturally will not be content with American military primacy in Asia.

What does China want? White posits that the Chinese may desire in Asia the kind of new-style empire that the United States engineered in the Western Hemisphere once Washington had secured dominance over the Caribbean Basin (as Beijing hopes it will over the East Sea). This new-style empire, in White's words, meant America's neighbors were "more or less free to run their own countries," even as Washington insisted that its views be given "full consideration" and take precedence over those of outside powers.

The problem with this model is Japan, which would probably not accept Chinese hegemony, however soft. That leaves the Concert of Europe model, in which China, India, Japan, the United States, and perhaps one or two others would sit down at the table of Asian power as equals. But would the United States accept such a modest role, since it has associated Asian prosperity and stability with its own primacy? White suggests that in the face of rising Chinese power, American dominance might henceforth mean instability for Asia.

In other words, the United States, not China, might be the problem in the future. We may actually care too much about the internal nature of the Chinese regime and seek to limit China's power abroad because we do not like its domestic policies. Instead, America's aim in Asia should be balance, not dominance. It is precisely because hard power is still the key to international relations that we must make room for a rising China. The United States need not increase its naval power in the Western Pacific, but it cannot afford to substantially decrease it.

The loss of a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group in the Western Pacific due to budget cuts or a redeployment to the Middle East could cause intense discussions in the region about American decline and the consequent need to make amends and side deals with Beijing. The optimal situation is a U.S. air and naval presence at more or less the current level, even as the United States does all in its power to forge cordial and predictable ties with China.

That way America can adjust over time to a Chinese blue-water navy. In international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. In the Western Pacific in the coming decades, morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands?

The balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, is often the best safeguard of freedom. That, too, will be a lesson of the East Sea in the 21st century -- another one that idealists do not want to hear.

Robert D. Kaplan (Foreign Policy)
Kaplan is senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, national correspondent for the Atlantic, and a member of the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Policy Board. He is the author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.