The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin

No longer did shipments have to be broken down into boxes and crates and sacks and hoisted around by hordes of longshoremen, taking up many days in port and adding substantially to costs. Instead, packed into containers, they could be lifted by cranes, with the operator high above in a cabin, and moved between shore and ship. The world of longshoremen that had been depicted just a couple of years earlier in the 1954 film On the Waterfront was on its way out.

His next step was to detour ships on their way back from Vietnam, now empty of cargo, to Japan to pick up containers filled with inexpensive goods destined for U.S. customers.

In 1980, the year Deng began his reforms, McLean initiated the first container service to China.

Seven of the world’s top ten container ports too are Chinese—Shanghai the largest—and China normally accounts for over 40 percent of the world’s container shipments.

McLean died in 2001. On the day of his funeral, the shipping industry honored him; worldwide, container ships sounded their whistles to recognize the man who had done so much to knit together the global economy. In his obituary, the Journal of Commerce called containerization “the most significant development in shipping since the shift from sail to steam power.”3

The South China Sea may be about oil and natural gas and flows of trade. Yet, as the International Institute for Strategic Studies puts it, “maritime disputes in the South China Sea are at their heart about power politics.”

The relationship of the G2—between the “rising power” and the “dominant power”—has become more complex as the balance shifts between the two countries—and as the economies of the rest of Asia become increasingly integrated with China’s.

Xi Jinping is of a new generation—the first Chinese leader born after World War II. His father, a veteran of the revolution, had risen to vice premier, before being purged and imprisoned.

In the words of a book prepared by China’s Foreign Language Press, after Xi’s father was “wronged and disgraced, Xi experienced tough times. During the Cultural Revolution he suffered public humiliation and hunger, experienced homelessness, and was even held in custody on one occasion.”

He was then sent off as an “educated youth” to the countryside, where he labored for seven years. For a time, he lived in a cave and slept on “earth beds,” and then in a work camp. “Life...

In November 2012, several days after becoming party leader, Xi led the new Politburo on a very short field trip—just across Tiananmen Square to the National Museum of China.

In 2013, Xi also became president. In the years since, he has launched what has been called China’s “third revolution,” following on those of Mao and Deng.

In turn, Xi declared that China now “stood tall and firm.” He evoked a “mighty east wind” that would carry China forward. And, with a message that he said was aimed at those “who are accustomed to threatening others,” and clearly referring to the South China Sea, he declared, “It is absolutely impossible to separate a single inch of territory of our great country.”

Incidents and near collisions continue in the South China Sea between Chinese ships and American navy vessels making “freedom of navigation patrols,” including in October 2019, when a Chinese destroyer came within forty-five yards of an American destroyer, forcing it to “jam on the brakes.”

In response to the growing competition, the United States introduced its own new map for the entire region—what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the “map of the Indo-Pacific,” which firmly places India in the region as a major counterbalance to China.

The contest over the South China Sea and the U.S.–China rivalry create dilemmas for the countries that comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—ASEAN.

The countries face continuing challenges in balancing and then rebalancing. “Southeast Asia is integrated in security terms with the United States but in economic terms with China,” said Chan Heng Chee, former Singaporean ambassador to the United States.

The ASEAN counties are increasingly integrated with China in terms of trade. In 2005, U.S. trade with ASEAN was 50 percent higher than was China’s. Today it is reversed: ASEAN’s trade with China is 50 percent higher than with the United States.

China’s arms buildup has led other countries in the region—ASEAN, as well as Japan and Australia—to spend increasing sums of money on weapons.

China has been a great beneficiary of the open world economy and the free flow of commerce on the world’s oceans that the United States has championed,

Some measures could reduce the risks in the South China Sea. The ASEAN countries and China are negotiating a code of conduct to reduce tensions in the region.

A much stronger military-to-military dialogue and greater transparency about programs could help to mitigate the growing “strategic mistrust” and the uncertainty about the critical but often murky question of intentions.

Or perhaps the best that can be hoped for—as a play on the “MAD” (mutually assured destruction) of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff in the Cold War years—may be “MAA,” “mutually assured ambiguity.”

In terms of energy, the clash of nations can be eased with the recognition that the offshore waters of the South China Sea are unlikely to be another Persian Gulf in terms of supply

For Japan and South Korea, which also depend mightily on the South China Sea as the highway for much of their exports and imports, its control by China would be regarded as a potentially major threat.

Those two nations would become increasingly alarmed, in the words of a retired Japanese admiral, by “China’s unilateral ambition to monopolize the whole South China Sea” and achieve “control of most of the sea lanes of communications” and “the lifelines” of Japan and Korea.

Between the G2, the interdependence is extensive: General Motors sells more cars in China than in the United States.

When Donald Trump became president, he changed the setting on the table. No longer, in the view of his administration, is China an economic partner, albeit a challenging one.

The trade war is part of a striking shift in the overall approach of the United States. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy represented a sharp break from the position of five previous presidents.

Trump’s National Security Strategy throws “engagement” and the WTO consensus out the window. It casts China as a deeply menacing geopolitical rival and at the top among America’s “adversaries.”

The language highlights a fundamental shift away from two decades of a “war on terror” to a new strategic era—rivalry with Russia, and much more so with China. As Secretary of Defense Mark Esper put it, “China number one; Russia number two.”

In an October 2018 speech, Vice President Mike Pence elaborated on the new perspective. China, he said, had “masterminded the wholesale theft of American technology” and has built “an unparalleled surveillance state” and “an Orwellian system.”

China responded with its own white paper, “China’s National Defense in the New Era.” While more moderate in some parts—it talked about areas of cooperation between China and the United States, including their respective militaries—it too defined the “new era” as one of great power “strategic competition.”

The white paper went on to blame “external forces”—again, the United States—for fueling the Taiwanese independence movement.

Together, the Chinese white paper and two U.S. papers, one analyst soberly observed, provide “a clear warning of growing strategic rivalry between an existing and emerging superpower”—a

The continuing rancor over the coronavirus and its origins in Wuhan made relations worse. And then, in May 2020, after months of demonstrations in Hong Kong, some violent, Beijing imposed its security laws and security systems on the semiautonomous Hong Kong.

Beijing’s “Made in China” 2025 strategy, enunciated in 2017, aims to make China a leader in ten high-tech industries.

The battle over technology has already been joined over 5G connectivity and, specifically, the Chinese company Huawei.

Amid the rising tensions, a warning about the dangers of “mutual animosity and zero-sum calculations” came from Robert Zoellick, who in 2005, as deputy secretary of state, had originally outlined the concept of China as a “responsible stakeholder.”

Economic interdependence has been the ballast to the military and strategic rivalry, but that ballast appears to be at risk of being dumped overboard into the South China Sea, along with the more cooperative attitude that went with it.

The obvious fact is that neither the United States nor China is “going away.” While tensions are rising, the G2 are hitched together on the same planet.