Hegemonize Uncharted Waters

One way to retain your sway and hegemony on a particular field, even though you have lost the lead, is by being the front-runner in framing the rules for that field. Each time America loses its lead in a particular field of trade or war, it tries to make up for it by promulgating initiatives for framing rules to regulate that arena, particularly if that arena has been till date largely uncharted – and those who have had the chance of engaging with the US bureaucracy – would be familiar with their internal parlance of “rules of the road” used to denote the drafting of rules for such uncharted arenas.

And now vide the Trans-Pacific-Partnership Treaty (TPP), this is exactly what the US is trying to accomplish. It is framing the “rules of the road” for the relatively uncharted territory of international seas.

While, there is no gainsaying the fact, that the international maritime trade is pretty much under Chinese domination – 80 pct of the steel containers that liners ferry are made in China – but America continues to the be the dominant naval power. How long this American  hegemony on naval dominance will last is something that only time will tell. The pace at which Chinese maritime presence is surging and the manner in which China is muscle flexing in the South China Sea, it may not be wrong to assume that China is rehearsing for similar dominance in the Pacific Corridor as well.

Till about 700 AD, the centre of Maritime trade was to a large extent the Indian Ocean, and for the next 700 years, China dominated the trade, the theater shifting from the Indian Ocean to the South China sea. Thereafter, the quest of the spices, followed by colonial ambitions and zeal to spread Christianity brought the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and then finally English merchants ships to anchor in Asian sea waters, with Mallaca being often the center of such trade corridor.  

With the gradual demise and withering away of colonialism, a resurgent and modern China, still inconsolable about the 100 years of Western domination on its soil, the concomitant exploitation and opium trade, coupled with the trauma repeated Japanese ingress, is now finally showing its assertiveness in the waters of the South China Sea much to the discomfort of Japan, Vietnam and Philippines.    

                                                                                                            to be continued….