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To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World's Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers - Hardcover

Jones, Bruce

 
9781982127251: To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World's Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982127252 ISBN 13: 9781982127251
Verlag: Scribner, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

From a brilliant Brookings Institution expert, an “important” (The Wall Street Journal) and “penetrating historical and political study” (Nature) of the critical role that oceans play in the daily struggle for global power, in the bestselling tradition of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography.

For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit.

All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows. A brightly painted forty-foot steel shipping container loaded in Asia with twenty tons of goods may arrive literally anywhere else in the world; how that really happens and who actually profits from it show that the struggle for power on the seas is a critical issue today.

Now, in vivid, closely observed prose, Bruce Jones conducts us on a fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases—from the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated security arrangements in the Port of New York. Along the way, the book illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America’s standing going forward.

As Jones reveals, the three great geopolitical struggles of our time—for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing climate—are playing out atop, within, and below the world’s oceans. The essential question, he shows, is this: who will rule the waves and set the terms of the world to come?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce D. Jones is a senior fellow in the Talbot Center on Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution, where for four years he was also vice president for foreign policy. He has lived and worked in Asia, Africa, and Europe, including serving with peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and the Middle East. He has documented the changing dynamics of world power in several previous books about international affairs. He has been a senior advisor to the World Bank and has lectured or been a nonresident fellow at Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and New York University.

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Prologue Prologue – A Box in the Jungle
The heart of the Amazon is more than a thousand miles from the ocean. To get there, one must fly to Manaus, Brazil, in the very center of the rainforest. First established as a fort by Portuguese explorers in 1669, the outpost was of little account for its first century and a half until the industrial revolution created a demand for a plant brought back from the Amazon—rubber. Bendable, shapable, useful for thousands of purposes, rubber became an essential component in industrialization, and at the time could not be sourced anywhere but from the Amazon. In the race for profit that followed, German, Portuguese, and American businessmen vied for access to the Amazonian rubber tree, and Manaus become a hub of imperial commerce. The fossils of that period adorn the city to this day—from a seven-story mansion in the style of a Bavarian Schloss, a market building built as a replica of Paris’s Les Halles, and the Teatro Amazonas, to a pink and white opera house topped by a dome covered with thirty-three thousand ceramic tiles painted the yellow, green, and blue of the Brazilian flag—one of the more surprising marvels of the late imperial age. It’s a gritty town of wilderness and industry and eccentricity surrounded in every direction by over 1,500 miles of rainforest.

The vastness of the rainforest is broken only by the Amazon River, which courses along the banks of Manaus, three miles wide and seven hundred feet deep—neither the widest nor the deepest stretch of the Amazon, but still moving an astonishing volume of water.I Manaus also borders another river, the Rio Negro, or Black River, which runs 1,400 miles southwest from the highlands of Colombia, emptying into the Amazon. Its name comes from the color of the water, a kind of translucent chocolate black, like someone had poured the world’s supply of Coca-Cola into a riverbed. Where the two rivers meet and start to flow together at Manaus, a strange natural phenomenon occurs. For the space of three and a half miles, the two rivers flow through the same wide channel, but their waters do not mingle: they flow alongside each other, one chalky and the color of sand, the other thin and dark—two parallel streams of water surging, touching, occasional eddies swirling together, but not merging. This is caused by the radically different densities of the two bodies of water, the one full of vegetable residue accumulated as it runs through the upper stretches of the rainforest, the other scraped clean of anything other than minerals by its long descent down the mountains. In Manaus it is known as the “Meeting of the Waters,” though that hardly captures the wondrous oddity of the sight.

One may take a riverboat out to see the Meeting of the Waters, and the aquatic life it attracts. Of particular appeal is a subspecies of pink dolphins unique to the Amazon. They concentrate at the confluence of the two rivers, where the separate streams mingle and churn up an abundance of fish on which to feed. The giant Amazonian pirarucú, or arapaima, is a staple of the dolphins’ diet, and of the cuisine found in the restaurants of Manaus.

There, amid the whimsy of the remote city and splendor of the rainforest, I saw a familiar but wholly unexpected sight: a stack of sky-blue metal containers, neatly piled on a small container ship steaming its way upriver against the strong current. The boxes were instantly recognizable by their color and logo—a seven-pointed star painted white against the sky-blue backdrop—the symbol of Maersk, a shipping giant headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, a distance from Manaus of six thousand miles as the crow flies.

That Maersk had a wide global reach did not surprise me, but to find some of its containers on the deck of a transport ship 1,500 miles up the Amazon was eye-opening. If there was ever a visible symbol of the total worldwide penetration of modern globalization, this was surely it. And the sight established for me something I had understood intellectually but not viscerally: that it is sea-based trade that is the primary driver of modern globalization. There in the heart of the rainforest was the evidence.

Shipping containers are now a ubiquitous feature of the modern world. Once you start looking for them, you can’t stop seeing them. Drive down the highways and byways of the United States or Europe and you notice these containers everywhere. The 18-wheeler is a storied part of the American history of continental trucking; but it’s been displaced by the “prime mover”—a flatbed truck onto which is latched one of these shipping containers. Containers have also remade rail: watch a train transport at a road crossing and you are bound to see the Maersk logo on container boxes stacked two high on these freight trains, alongside containers from Taiwan, Korea, South Africa, Germany, and many points beyond. There’s a secondary market for containers for housing and industrial design. You can even buy used containers on Amazon. But at the core, they are an instrument of global trade—the most visible, but as it turns out far from the only, manifestation of the way bulk shipping has transformed the world economy—and is starting to transform world politics.

The penetration of Western trade into central Brazil was just one part of a wider phenomenon that has been unfolding over the past three decades. Brazil was one of several important, populous countries—China and India being two essential others—that decided at the end of the Cold War to open up their economies and join the maelstrom of globalization. The entry of more than 2.5 billion people into the global economy has had dramatic effects. Many of those changes have been for the good. China, India, and Brazil between them pulled more than a half a billion people out of poverty and created a global middle class. Internationally, more than sixty countries were pulled out of poverty by the ever-further expansion of the world economy, and by China’s huge appetite for natural resources and exports of cheap manufactured goods—a dynamic made possible by changes in global shipping. Having grown into an economic giant, China helped the United States navigate the global financial crisis, and Chinese growth helped the rest of the world recover from that shock. The Singaporean diplomat-turned-writer Kishore Mahbubani, one of the foremost chroniclers of the rise of Asia, made popular in his book The Great Convergence the application of an old aphorism to the phenomenon of modern globalization: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

The tides were also critical to a second part of the changing story of the global economy: energy. Here, too, Brazil played a key role, though not in the Amazon. For it was in the long gentle slopes of the continental shelf off of Brazil’s eastern shore that deep-sea energy exploration first took hold outside of the United States. Pulling other countries into globalization meant huge economic growth, and that in turn put major pressure on the world’s supplies of oil and gas. The plumbing of the ocean depths for new sources of those fuels has been a critical part of the changing patterns of trade and geopolitics in the past decade, from Brazil to the East China Sea to the Arctic Ocean.

But it was also in the tides that early signs appeared suggesting that all was not well with the rise—or more accurately, the return—of these giant nations. In 2009, China made...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982127252
ISBN 13 
9781982127251
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SCRIBNER
https://www.simonandschusterpublishing.com/scribner/

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