Sea Control - Sea Control 327 - To Rule the Waves with Bruce Jones

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

Links1. “To Rule the Waves – How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers,” by Bruce D. Jones, Scribner, 2021.2. “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger,” by Mark Levinson, Princeton University Press, 2008.3. “British Warship Collides With Russian Submarine, UK Defense Ministry Confirms,” Radio Free Europe, January 7, 2022.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Bruce Jones, and we'll be discussing his book, To Rule the Waves. We recorded this quite some time before Russia invaded Ukraine, so if you're wondering why that's not coming up, that's why. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. We are still looking for audio editors to add to our team, so if you're interested, go ahead and reach out. Our email address is ccontrol at simsec.org. Send us your resume. I did want to highlight a couple of developments at the website. In the last two months, we've launched the Flotilla, SimSec's warfighting society focused on tactics and just this week launched our naval wargaming discord you can find more information at SimSec.org

finally I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, the Bilge Pumps you can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pot of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts and on that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman you're listening to Sea Control hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security Hello showmates and welcome back for Sea Control. My guest today is Bruce Jones. We're going to be

discussing his book, To Rule the Waves, How Control the World's Ocean Shapes the Fate of Superpowers. Bruce, thanks for coming on. Could you introduce yourself to our audience a little more formally? Thanks for having me on. I'm Bruce Jones. I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. I was the vice president for foreign policy there for several years and then decided I really wanted to write this book. And so now I'm a senior fellow and I direct the project on international order and strategy. Spent most of my time thinking about great power relations and global governance. Maritime issues and sea power issues are relatively new to me. But I spent quite a lot of my time doing research on things and kept on finding that the oceans were popping up where

I didn't expect them, so I decided to turn to this project a few years back. I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know more about the oceans and the way they shape the world we live in. Well, thanks again for joining us. As a reminder, all opinions express our own and not reflective of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. Let me start with that. What was your thesis statement for True Global Waves? I didn't have one when I started. I had an observation.

The observation was that the way in which great power relations were being reshaped was being driven primarily by the dynamics of naval competition in the Western Pacific. The way globalization was unfolding was driven primarily by sea-based trade. Global energy markets are much more heavily about ocean-based exploration and ocean-based flows than we commonly think about. and climate change is much more about the oceans than i think is commonly understood and so i had a an impulse to look at these major global debates geopolitics globalization global climate change through the prisms of the oceans which is what the book is i conclude with maybe two arguments that are one in which is not the conventional wisdom The first is that versus the theory, which has been with us for the last couple of decades, that globalization is going to be an important bulwark against U.S.-China tensions in particular, that actually the opposite has been true.

that when you understand the real dynamics of sea-based globalization, that it's China's perception of its vulnerability in that domain that was a critically important driver of China's return to the seas for the first time in 500 years, and that that has kicked off a series of events which have taken us to where we are now in the midst of an acute arms race, a naval arms race, and intense geopolitical tension the second thesis which follows is that to counter that we're going to have to remake our alliances and retool them around the intersection between naval capacity and technology which are inter in separately linked domains and so i end the book by calling for a new naval and technological alliance in the pacific primarily the pacific

Indo-Pacific to deal with the rise of Chinese maritime power. And I perhaps reluctantly conclude that we need to do the heavy lifting of remaking globalization away from dependence on Chinese manufacturing, which is going to be a fantastically expensive project. I don't shy away from that point. So those are some of the arguments that I conclude on. You spent a lot of time discussing sea power in the book. Would you say you just subscribe to the Mahanian definition of sea power as in not just naval power but all the all the different aspects of absolutely and and what I tried to do in the book is I didn't start trying to think of this as a update of Mahan but the more I read the more

Mahanian concepts came to me came came into the research I was extremely struck by the extent to which the chinese seem to turn to mahan and their thinking and so in the end what i do try to argue is if you look at both the commercial uh element that mahan wrote about and the way it plays into the to the naval element and the basing element but also looking at energy flows which would not have been something that was preoccupying for him but which are extraordinarily important in the modern world of the ocean sciences which navies have played a huge role on which matter a great deal and climate change uh in which the the science of ocean warming and ocean chemistry and ocean currents is is crucially important in understanding what's happening in climate change

so i i try to take a very wide uh concept of the importance of the oceans in in our economic and our environmental life um just to mention another point uh data you know we're doing this podcast by by zoom everybody's on their smartphones everybody's ordering from amazon 93 percent of all data in the world flows on undersea cables uh the ability to interfere with that or protect those cables seems to me a crucial feature of modern power and so it's a the multiple dimensions uh of maritime power that i'm writing about not just the naval not just enabled to me hey you mentioned their undersea cables i mean we're recording this january 15th literally two weeks removed from the story of a russian submarine and a british frigate colliding the

british had some suspicion that the russians were looking at their undersea cables and their chief of defense staff came out and commented on it um but uh i i did love all the vignettes to use for the book you start in the high north at a former cold war naval base named olaf's burn in uh norway can you tell me about the base its purpose and then why norway is restoring it and why the U.S. is trying to renegotiate access to that base? Yeah, you know, when I was writing the book, it took me a long time to figure out where to start, because there are so many different elements of the book, and I wanted to start someplace that encapsulated all of them, but was also evocative, and towards the end of the research, I ended up having the opportunity,

I think I was the first civilian to go to Aulasfern in its modern phase. This was during the Cold War, NATO's northernmost vantage point on the Soviets. It's an astonishing facility. You go into this high mountain, solid granite mountain, you drive in about a mile, and then it opens up into this huge interstate, this huge submarine base carved out of this mountain. really a remarkable facility after the end of the cold war sold off into private hands used for storage essentially and now has been reactivated and rehabilitated turned back into a norwegian naval base first thing that happens the united states signed a status of forces and their american nuclear submarine station and all is turned once again why has it happened because with climate change thing of the arctic sea ice has opened up new commercial opportunities uh we're probably 15 or 20 years away from where the arctic passage is a year-round commercial

trade route that would cut in half the time it takes to ship goods uh from china to the eastern seaboard it's a major new opportunity it's created a boom in fishing it's created a boom in energy exploration and with all this commercial activity and it goes to the thesis of the book all this new commercial activity is driving greater tension. It's driving competition. It's driving re-militarization. The Russians have bulked up their facilities in Burmance. The Chinese are present and were present once again. And so what I try to capture is this interplay between changing climate, changing economics, and changing security realities. It just is an additional nice little point the company that did the work of rehabilitating olisfaren is the largest supplier

of ro-ro ships those are the kind of giant ferries that move cars and things around the world they also move military equipment and i didn't know this but 90 percent 90 percent of what we took into afghanistan with us was shipped there by this company uh a norwegian ro-ro company so again just a kind of interesting illustration of the interplay between the national security world and the commercial world all playing out on the world's oceans. Well, you shifted from there to a different vignette that revolved around U.S. Coast Guard port captains. So post 9-11, how did the U.S. expand its security perimeter at sea?

Yeah, so this is fascinating. I had seen a little bit of this when I was at the U.N. in that period, post 9-11, and dealing with the fight over new authorities and new resolutions. John Bolton had famously created something called CSI, something called PSI. This is a container security initiative and the proliferation security initiative. But I had never seen the operational end. But basically what happened is that those initiatives and new legislation in the United States gave the Coast Guard authorities and capacities to track and investigate ports around the world, including Shanghai and Pakistan and all over the place.

Basically, if you want to get your goods into an American port, you either have to go through a very onerous set of security procedures, or you have to join the Container Security Initiative. If you do that, it gives the U.S. Coast Guard the right to have an inspections capability on the ground, have intelligence capabilities go with it. So I describe it as a kind of huge extension of our sovereignty and a huge extension of our borders, in effect, the ability to secure goods coming into our borders from great distance. And of course, there are other intelligence and monitoring capabilities that go along with that. And then there's a whole series of sort of lines of defense around goods coming into our borders, which end with an inspection for nuclear materials of every container that comes into an American port at this stage. Other kinds of smuggling are dealt with, a combination of screening, intelligence, et cetera. But every container that comes into the United States is scanned for radiological material. So it's a whole series of lines of defense that protect the trade coming into the United States, but also allow us to project sovereignty outwards around the world in interesting ways.

Those were relatively contemporary examples. So you transition from there to some history. How did Portugal and then Britain become the dominant sea powers of their day? yeah i spent a little time on this and you know it is ironic um that portugal achieved that in by discovering the sea route to asia i say ironic because of course it's the westernmost country in in asia in europe but of course what you have to do is sail further west out into the atlantic to pick up the trade winds and that gives you enough speed and enough current to carry around the cape of good hope um what's i think really important about that moment is that it happens to coincide by just a couple of decades it's just a couple of decades later than a second phenomenon which is china which had had a very sophisticated

maritime case to withdraw that capability for internal reasons you know pressures from the north internal cohesion questions china withdraws this very sophisticated maritime capability just before europe in the in the guise of the portuguese just before europe shows up in asia and it it's a i think an extremely important historical fact which hasn't been much commented it on, that you start the process of European domination of global trade and of globalization of international order through this accident of what was at the time a relatively weak European power showing up in Asia, just as the world's most competent maritime nation withdrew its capability.

That kicks off Portuguese dominance of the high seas for a period of time. britain comes afterwards starting with the east english east india company the other companies with which they engage in exploration and and particular naval exploration the really significant fact there it seems to me is that it's british naval power so i mean britain france and spain and others are fighting for dominance in the european context but globally the combination of the English East India Company and British Naval Technology allow Britain to maintain superiority in the high seas to the point where they push into India and gain the Indian Empire

and then a little bit later push into China. And it's really the push into China in the 1850s that seems to me that really sets up the world that we live in now, the creation of modern globalization, Literally, some of the terms of contemporary trade and the legal terms of the WTO come directly out of the treaties we signed at the end of the opium wars. I'd like to remind American listeners that it wasn't only Britain that fought the opium wars in China. It was also the United States, that we had a naval presence inside mainland China for 94 years, the longest overseas military presence we ever had, deployed on the Yangtze River out of Pacific Station in Hong Kong. And that really sets up the modern dynamic of Britain and then later the United States as the globally dominant navies, having suppressed both Indian and Chinese naval and commercial capability.

And of course, now what we're watching is the return of Chinese capability. And the big question I end my book on is whether we'll see India return as a maritime, it's never been a maritime power, whether we'll see it return genuinely and whether it will actually emerge as a maritime power, which would be a significant change. How did the U.S. supplant the British? It's interesting to look back at it because, of course, it happens gradually. You know, Roosevelt, after the Spanish-American War, the Spanish-American War, of course, was not fought either in America or in Spain. It was fought in Cuba and the Philippines. We went to very significant naval battles to win that war. But he takes a hard look at this and realizes that it's not, it was sort of luck, as much as anything else, luck and skill, but it was not about the capability of our Navy, and realizes that we have to invest very substantially in the capabilities of our Navy launches, what was known as the Great White Fleet, really begins the period of American naval modernization.

To the point whereby probably at some point along the way World War I, we are already the more powerful navy than Britain. But we don't choose to play a global role in that period. And there's this kind of second historical oddity of post-World War I in the United States where we sort of pull back. We don't launch ourselves outwards as a global power. we pulled back so britain remains the globally dominant navy in that period of time even though by then we had the larger and the most more sophisticated navy and then of course it's world war ii where uh you know our navy both provides the the bridge the commercial and the and the true bridge to europe and fights and wins the the pacific war and it's at the end of that

with britain largely dismantled as a global power japan dismantled as a naval power russia not yet risen as a as a naval power and we are for all intents and purposes alone on the high seas uselessly with a number of british assets at our disposal and and that that increases over the next decade and a half where we acquire a series of british coaling stations and bases and really have the infrastructure of global global naval power by the by the 1950s and now shifting over to kind of the civilian realm how did maersk become a shipping superpower Yeah, so this is an important piece of the story. So Maersk is a Danish company. It's the largest shipping company in the world now. It wasn't in the 50s and the 60s. It was all American companies that were larger then. It's an American entrepreneur, McLean, who begins what at the time seems like a small change in shipping, which is he launches the commercial version of containerization.

Containerization had been used by the Army and a couple of others before, but only a small scale. He really creates the first modern commercial container shipping firm, Sealand, and grows to become a very substantial firm. Maersk is one of the early international companies to look at containerization and think, oh, this might really be a significant shift in the business. They're not the first adopter. Hong Kong moves very quickly, a couple of others. But Maersk reasonably early recognizes that containerization is going to change the dynamics of global shipping and starts to invest heavily in container shipping. What happens next is that containerized shipping simply takes over everything else and both creates and rides a huge rise in global trade that occurs in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. There's a very good book by an economist, Mark Levinson, who wrote about containerization in the 1980s and its huge consequences in terms of generating growth and trade.

And at that time, he's talking about these giant container ships, which have 4,000 containers on them. For the book, I sailed on the Madrid-Marsk between Singapore and Shanghai. That ship had 20,526 containers on it. It was the largest container ship at the time. And when I was on it, there was a lot of gossip about somebody producing a 23,000-large container ship, but they didn't really think it could happen. And lo and behold, a few months later, indeed, of course, it was China, launched a 24,000 TEU ship. So these are just massive vessels that Maersk captured that early, and they've been the lead in containerization pretty much ever since. They've had the largest container ship in the world most years, OOCL, which is a company out of Hong Kong.

But most years since the 1970s, Maersk has had the largest container ship in the world and now has the largest network of container ports and cranes and et cetera. And as a consequence, it's probably the world's most important trading firm. What caused U.S. shipbuilding to contract and led to China's rise? but that's a complicated question and i think there's sort of two different parts to it american shipping declined for a number of different reasons uh sealand itself which was the firm that really created containerization was eventually bought out by maersk there's an important piece here which is called the jones act which is a piece of legislation that requires that american ships use american crew and that shipbuilders use american labor

etc basically it's a piece of nationalist legislation and like most other things that have been protected by nationalist legislation they've essentially been priced out of existence it's just vastly cheaper to build a ship in the philippines than it is to build in the united states and even korea until pretty recently so basically american shipbuilding got priced out of the market the question of china's rise is a little different and has a couple of pieces to it one which has often been neglected is the way hong kong moved early uh recognizing that containerization was going to be an important wave hong kong was one of the earliest point ports to shift towards containerization and rode the wave of containerization to the point where

in the 90s it was the second largest port in the world then of course it goes back to china and just at that moment when china's entered the wto india and others brazil all these countries of enter globalization countries that were out of globalization during the cold war they enter globalization but china gets this massive advantage in the form of one of the world's largest and most sophisticated ports and is able to just sort of vault into sea-based globalization um and then of course because it's a low-cost producer it's able to play the role that it does but i what i argue in the book and what i charted the book is that the the existence of large-scale bulk shipping containerized shipping and bulk ore and grain and other kind of raw materials shipping

really was what enabled china's economic rise because it allowed them to import raw materials at very low cost and export at very low cost the scale of bulk shipping is such and the costs per unit are so low that essentially it removes distance as a cost factor in production um we estimated at one point if you took made a bunch of t-shirts in vietnam or laos or something get it to a chinese port put it in a ship sail it to los angeles and it's less expensive per t-shirt to do that than it is to drive it from you know long beach up into downtown los angeles it's just it's so inexpensive per unit to do bulk shipping and so there's no there's no distance barrier for these countries to enter enter globalization and you see it in the size

of chinese ports you know over the last couple of months we've all been watching container ships stacked up outside the port of los angeles long beach la long beach does eight million container drops a year shanghai does 42 million container drops a year the next five ports are the next five largest ports are all chinese so just an illustration of just the vast scale that and the vast role that china has taken on in in globalization and in trade so we kind of whizzed through the scripted questions because i wanted to get back to your two observations there i'm going to ask you to expound on those a little bit more um you propose sort of a new naval technological alliance what what should that alliance look like what should it do

yeah look it seems to me that um first of all i'll say that you know two days after i published the book um there was this announcement that took everybody's by surprise by biden morrison and johnson of the australia uk us deal for nuclear submarine technology and very importantly by the way there was a deal not only for nuclear submarine technology but also for other technologies quantum cyber ai undersea detection etc and that that intersplicing between naval and technological is very important i write about in the book i spent some time on uh what's i think the most sophisticated asia's class destroyer in the fleet looking at the technologies around radar sensor long-range strike etc your your reader listenership will know that extremely sophisticated

computational and sensing technologies is central to the operation of the modern navy um as i've often said to listeners this is not you know a british ship of the line and a french ship of the line exchanging cannon fire in the middle of the indian ocean someplace these are very sophisticated technological um instruments of power wholly linked into much wider networks of computational and sensing capability and to and to missile missile batteries of a range of types um i say this because august does seem to me to kind of represent a first step towards that alliance we've also seen a uk us japan based sharing and another technology sharing arrangement didn't get as much press as the august one but it was significant uh the beginnings of leader level

meetings of the quad and the beginnings of joint naval exercises with the quad bringing india into the mix also significant so i actually think we're already starting to see sort of the putting in place of the building blocks of this linking american capability japanese taiwanese australian and indian those from my mind are the kind of critical naval capabilities we need to be talking about maybe buttressed by european naval capability i'm a bit on the fence of how much that matters but certainly linking the united states japan india australia uh with much higher now than that has been in the case in the case in the past joint exercises um ultimately be very good to get to interoperability of a variety of different types uh but we've begun laying the building

blocks that it seems to me which is a good thing and then how do you propose that we reconsider globalization i know this answer may take a minute right so go very expensively no um look i i actually think there's really only one way that this can well there are two ways it can happen one which is disastrous which is that we end up in a shooting war with the chinese and blockades and and suddenly you can't have a commercial flow out of china and if you think we had inflation this year wait till you know i mean just the the interruption to trade if we end up in a kind of clash with the chinese before globalization is remade in any meaningful sense. And I'm not sure we could sustain it economically. The administration and the previous

administration have begun very focused, targeted efforts to remake supply chains and critical goods and stuff. That matters. But what I'm talking here about is something more substantial. And I think the only way the more substantial version can happen is if India really decides to open itself to international economics in a way that it never really has before there's been a bit of a yin and yang here previous episodes where the west has wanted india to open but india's been recalcitrant i think it's actually the opposite right now i think india genuinely wants to open internationally there's not a lot of appetite for that in the west i mean imagine trying to get a you know free trade deal with india passed in congress right now but if we could see india really take

the steps to open up uh to inward investment and to to outward exports they could fill some of the space that is currently occupied by china china is going to be moving up the value scale anyway and it would generate a low cost producer at scale that nobody else really can can uh nobody else really can take on that role they would then also need to be networked i point out in the book that if you look at the top 50 ports in the world china has a top five india has number 26 one port in the top 50 it's just an indicator of a country that really has not organized itself towards imports and exports it would have to do that there are energy questions or naval questions a bunch of questions around india but if india remakes itself in those terms and if the west

partners with it in doing so, then I think we could have a very different globalization, which is much less reliant on Chinese supply, and that would make a big difference to where we are. Do you think the answer there is more India than retooling anything that we're doing here at home as far as rebuilding manufacturing capacity here? Or is it the cost here is prohibitive? I think the costs here are prohibitive. I mean, we're going to be able to do it in certain high-tech industries and we should and i hope we do um look you know it's not uh it's not very popular to say that

this these days but globalization has been very good for the u.s economy it's been very bad for the u.s polity it's been very good for the u.s economy um so we could go backwards on that we could retool all that i think it would be astonishingly expensive to do that i will point out that during the first year of the pandemic when people like me and others were talking about delinkage from china and this kind of stuff american consumers went on amazon hit buy now and we saw a seven percent increase in in global trade based almost entirely on american domestic consumption almost all of it supplied from china right the american public is not looking to spend seven hundred dollars to get a flat screen tv they're just not right and so to restore

manufacturing to the united states to do those kinds of things we could do that if we're willing to take a very substantial hit to the cost of living in the short term um i just don't see that in the united states so i think a a more networked version of retool and globalization is is more likely to succeed and be and be viable and i come back to your point about very specific high-tech industries i think we're also within the last two weeks of an announcement from uh i think a new microchip uh facility going to be built in ohio so but a lot of things working out for you as far as uh predictions that you made and uh so that from publication date i'm gonna have to i'm gonna go back and reread this and you know put some put some money in some stocks we are unfortunately uh

out of time for today the book is to rule the waves how control the world's ocean shapes the failure of superpowers uh we'll have a link um to where you can find it online uh in the book uh mark levinson you reference i believe that's the box how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger we'll have a link for that as well but i'd like to thank my guest bruce jones uh bruce where can we find you online and what are you working on next uh i'm at brookings uh brookings institution easy to find there on the brookings website pretty accessible i'm on twitter um to be honest with you right now i've been doing so many more talks and podcasts on this book that i'd anticipated so which is great uh but i'm

sort of starting to turn to what's next um haven't quite decided on that one yet i'm i'm i'm interested in challenging the notion that we're in a new cold war i don't think that's the way to think about the world but i haven't quite decided how to write that yet so thank you again for joining us to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time thanks for having me really appreciate it © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.