AS ANY READER of Patrick O'Connor's seafaring novels will know, naval commanders can be masterful at tactics and resolute in battle. But put them ashore to deal with civilian politics and long-term strategy, and they are hopelessly out of their intellectual depth.
That, however, is fiction. Real life these days is quite another matter if Admiral Dennis Blair, commander of all United States military forces in the Pacific region, is at all typical of the modern breed. He is a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, a one-time White House foreign-policy official and now a four-star commander based in Hawaii who worries most about how to keep his forces from ever having to fight anybody.
Admiral Blair's army, navy and air force personnel and equipment would be the first called to duty if the US and China ever drift towards conflict. He discussed some of his thoughts about the Sino-American relationship during a recent visit to Hong Kong after travelling to Beijing with William Cohen, the US Secretary of Defence.
Strategy intrigues him, and he tries to look beyond the usual military concepts. 'I like the economic model in which the theory of comparative advantage says both sides win when you do a commercial transaction. Conventional military thinking is that it is always win-lose.'
And Admiral Blair believes it is possible to have political relations in Asia which have no losers, thanks to the declining role of ideology - the 'isms' which kept the 20th century at war so often. The current Asian flashpoints, he says, involve a series of distinct regional disputes 'with histories of being contained, including the DMZ [demilitarised zone in Korea] and the Taiwan Strait'.
In his view, these problems - however important - don't represent issues which will inevitably lead to the creation of competing alliances, such as 'a China camp against an anti-China camp . . . So if we can break through in our thinking . . . I believe we can build a security structure in this part of the world that will provide for . . . peaceful development', rather than one dominated by hostile rivalries.
