Power in Asia By JULES MENKEN a p OLITICS, it is
often said, is the art of the possible; which means that it is concerned not only with what people want to do—since without desire there can be no political action—but also, and primarily, with what they have power to do. From this standpoint the present world situation, in one of its most profound aspects, reflects a dead- lock of power. The deadlock is not equal everywhere. It is complete between the Soviet Union and the United States, where neither as yet possesses means of effective action, direct or indirect, against the other. It is practically complete in Europe and in relation to Japan. It is far from complete elsewhere in non-Communist Asia.
The revolution which has produced the present power-situation in Asia has long historical roots. The newcomer to paramount power there is Russia; and the developments which have led to this go back to the seventeenth century, when the Manchus— the last of her imperial dynasties—came to power in China. At this time the Ottoman Turks not only ruled over most of western Asia and south-eastern Europe, but also were strong enough to send their armies in 1683 to thunder for the last time at the gates of Vienna. Persia was weak; in India, the Moghuls were overstraining their strength; while Japan had withdrawn into the isolation which was not effectively breached until the American Commodore Matthew Perry and his " black ships " sailed into Yedo Bay in 1853. In this situation China was strong enough, under one of her great emperors, to annex the independent Chinese kingdom in Formosa, occupy Lhasa, extend her suzerainty over Inner and Outer Mongolia, and safeguard northern Manchuria by compelling Russian assent to the treaty of Nerchinsk (1689). It is significant that the Chinese were able to overcome the Russian forces opposing them—thanks largely to the efficient artillery which the tech- nical knowledge of the Jesuits provided. This constellation of power, like all others, altered with time. Its successors until today may be described, with suffi- cient accuracy for present purposes, as the Russo-British, the Japanese-British, the Russo-American, and the Communist- Western. At first China's relative strength in the regions which concerned her did not decline. In Mongolia and Tibet, another Chinese emperor completed his ancestor's work, achieved the conquests which made Sinkiang a Chinese pro- vince, and in a punitive action against Nepal in 1792 forced the Gurkhas to become tributaries. Meanwhile, Russia, reducing Turkish power and expanding her frontiers to the south, was preparing for the successful wars against Persia, the conquest of the Caucasus and the Central Asia khanates, and the expansion of her effective power eastwards to the Pacific. Parallel with these developmentt went the British conquest of India—which rested first and foremost on the supremacy which Britain fought for and established at sea— and the Opium War with China (1842), which for they first time exposed to the West the full weakness of the decaying Manchu power. Much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an unresolved Anglo-Russian rivalry in widely separated areas of Asia.
The closing years of the nineteenth century and the first four and a half decades of the twentieth century saw the next two power-constellations in Asia—the Japanese-British, and the Russo-American. The period of Japanese-British power may be regarded as beginning in the 1890's, when Britain was unchallenged in southern Asia and influential in China, and when a Japan vigorously modernising her naval and military forces made war successfully on China (the immediate cause was Korea); this period ended with the Japanese con- quest of Malaya, Burma, and the Netherlands East Indies in 1942, which carried Japanese arms to the frontiers of India and threatened Australia. In these decades two German threats to Britain's very life reduced British naval strength in Far Eastern waters to secondary or tertiary importance; the local military strength of both Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia was insufficient to prevent Japan's expansion on the mainland of East Asia; and American naval power, whether capable or incapable before 1941 of dealing with the Japanese forces opposing it, was checked politically until Pearl Harbour set it free for action and thus cleared the way for future victory. During the closing years of the Second World War Britain, in her final period of rule in India, built up an Indian Army some two millions strong. By this time, however, the brief period of Russo-American power in Asia had begun. In the Pacific, paramountcy passed to the United States, whose unstinted naval effort gave her by 1945 a strength at sea unsurpassed in history; while on land, after the defeat of Germany, Soviet military power was unchallenged in Asia.
Between 1945 and the Commilhist aggression in Korea in June 1950, demobilisation and the last previous economy cam- paign in the United States slashed the American armed forces almost to impotence. Demobilisation also reduced the Soviet armed forces, but by no means comparably; while Soviet arms production—particularly of jet aircraft and tanks—continued at a high level. Moscow armed and trained a powerful North Korean army; whereas South Korea, with little more than a police force, was left almost defenceless. Concurrently, the conquest of China by the Communists unified the country for the first time for decades and brought into power a regime which had fought it way to victory, whose forces had grown at almost every stage of the process, and which now proceeded to create Chinese armies of unprecedented strength.
Thus the present Communist-Western constellation of power in Asia has emerged'. In western Asia Turkish armed forces, largely modernised but severely straining Turkish resources, have been created with American aid and arms. In South Asia, both Pakistani and Indian forces are weak in relation to Soviet and Chinese military strength, and in any case are largely immobilised by Kashmir. Only at grave peril can Pakistan and India ignore the development of Communist air bases in Sinkiang and the Chinese forces which stand on the Indo-Tibetan frontier. In South-East Asia, the Vietnamese forces created by French training and American arms are numerically weaker than the Viet Minh forces which oppose them, while their military effectiveness has also still to be fully proved. Communist China has utilised the opportunity of the Korean war to retrain and modernise her armies, to equip them with Soviet-made tanks and artillery (the effectives thus re-trained and modernised number some 2+ millions), and also to develop an air force which two years ago had more than 2,000 aircraft (many of them jets), and is stronger today. The end of hostilities in Korea will free Peking, if it so desires, to move to the Indo-Chinese frontier modernised forces which would transform the local military balance. China, moreover, is engaged with Soviet help on a process of industrialisation, the primary purpose of which (following the Soviet example) is to create on her own territory the heavy industries which are the foundation of modern war. The South Korean armies which the Americans have trained and equipped are far weaker than the Communist forces, Chinese and North Korean, which can be brought against them. Powerful Soviet land, sea, and air forces are also in East Asia. Japan, practically unarmed, would be easy meat for the Communists but for the American forces stationed there.
Political power in its largest sense means more than military power. Among other things, it includes men's ideas, feelings, and aspirations. Even allowing for this, one conclusion is clear. The free world must develop much greater military power in Asia if its position there is not to be lost practically by default. To do so the West must have a margin, much greater than today, of armed strength uncommitted by other demands and requirements. How central is such power to the whole future of Asia appears from the violence of the Soviet and Chinese reaction to the mere suggestion that the United States and Pakistan are considering military arrange- ments which would lessen the present Communist advantage in this area. If the West fails to create sufficient military strength to meet the growing Communist challenge, the new balance of power in Asia will result in catastrophe whose dimensions are incalculable.
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