CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Toshi Yoshihara
Asian waters promise to be a new geostrategic locus of international politics in the
coming years. This assertion may seem somewhat jarring or even bizarre to the
casual observer of world affairs. After all,successiveAsianpowers,including
China, Japan, and Russia, repeatedly tried and failed to dominate their nautical
environment militarily over the past century. Not an Asian great power but
Europe’s unsurpassed naval power preserved maritime order in the region during
the imperial heyday of the nineteenth century. The U.S. Navy succeeded to this
role in the Pacific following World War II. Unsurprisingly, then, Asia’s abrupt
turn to the seas over the past decade has elicited little to no attention from most
observers and has been viewed with indifference by many who have taken note.
This oversight, however understandable, could cost nations with a stake in the
Asian order dearly as the international system undergoes a barely perceptible but
momentous maritime shift.
This transition is symbolized by two seemingly unrelated events at opposite
ends of the earth: the retreat of European states from the seas and the entry of
Asian states into the oceanic arena. The noted world historian Paul Kennedy
points to a ‘‘remarkable global disjuncture’’ involving ‘‘massive differences in the
assumptions of European nations and Asian nations about the significance of
sea power, today and into the future.’’^1 He notes that Western capitals, with the
exception of Washington, appear ready to abdicate their status as maritime
powers, while Asian leaders seem eager to expend national treasure on building
up their navies. As Kennedy readily concedes, the global implications of this ap-
parent divergence are far from clear at the moment. But the regional phenomenon
in Asia, where closely clustered fleets of navies are growing at fairly rapid rates
nearly simultaneously, raises some intriguing and troubling questions.
What explains this sudden rise of navies at virtually the same time within a
specificgeographicregion?Whatarethestrategicimplicationsofthissurgein