You're reading: China, Russia, US raise Mediterranean naval focus

PORT SAID, Egypt - Egypt has seen no shortage of empires come and go, from its own ancient civilisations to those of Greece, Rome, Britain and France. Now, it is among the outposts of the latest Mediterranean power: China.

Situated at the northern end of the Suez Canal, the Port
Said Container Terminal is one of the busiest in the region,
vital for shipments not only to Egypt but also much of Europe
and the Middle East.

Like several other key ports in the region – including
Piraeus in Greece and Naples in Italy – it is now partially
owned by China. The state-owned Cosco Pacific holds 20 percent
the terminal, helping make it one of the dominant – if not the
dominant – Mediterranean port operators.

Cosco stresses that it is a purely commercial venture and
many analysts agree. But few doubt that Beijing has made a wider
geopolitical decision to become much more involved in the
region.

For the last two years, the People’s Liberation Army Navy
has sent one or more warships through the Suez Canal to visit
southern European ports, the furthest its fleet has ever
operated from home.

But China is not the only great power now indreasing its
involvement in the area. With Russia sending warships to
positions off Syria and the United States signalling it too
intends to take the region more seriously, the Mediterranean is
clearly no longer seen as the strategic backwater many believed
it had become.

“The assumption that the Mediterranean would become a purely
Western sphere of influence appears to have been premature,”
says Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at
the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island.

“The Chinese are showing their flag in an area far from
their traditional area of operations in part to show that they
are a global power. The renewed Russian deployments are part
intended as a sign that Moscow has not gone away.”

Other strategic shifts are also taking place in the region.

The “Arab Spring” has unleashed a period of unrest and
instability across North Africa and beyond while the eurozone
crisis has left troubled southern European states struggling
with debt and searching for ready investment.

Meanwhile, the gas platforms beginning to dot the disputed
waters of the eastern Mediterranean have unleashed a scramble
for resources that has further exacerbated pre-existing tensions
between Cyprus, Turkey and Israel.

The U.S. had hoped it could pull back from the area, helping
transfer military resources to the Pacific and South China Sea
as part of a pivot to Asia aimed heavily at containing a rising
China. But last year’s Libya conflict provided stark warning
that European states had distinctly limited capacity, and as the
financial crisis bites defence budgets have been further cut.

“I don’t see a conflict,” says Gvosdev at the Naval War
College. “But… (it) does make it more difficult to do an Asia
pivot on the cheap.”

U.S. DESTROYERS TO SPAIN

In 2011 Admiral Gary Roughead – at the time Chief of Naval
Operations and the professional head of the U.S. Navy – told
senior officers the U.S. needed to return to the Mediterranean.

In the years since the end of the Cold War and Balkan
conflicts that followed, the U.S. had quietly stopped
maintaining a permanent aircraft carrier there as it focused on
Iraq and Afghanistan and confrontation with Iran.

Limited resources mean putting a permanent carrier back in
the region is all but impossible. But other ships now look set
to take up a much more permanent presence.

Last year, the Pentagon announced it was deploying four
state-of-the-art missile destroyers to the Spanish port of Rota,
in part to counter any missile threat to Europe from Iran or
elsewhere in the Middle East.

In November, as Israeli forces pounded Gaza in their brief
air campaign against Hamas, several U.S. assault ships and
escorts entered the eastern Mediterranean in what was seen as a
precursor to any evacuation of U.S. citizens. It was the sort of
deployment military officials say will likely become more common
in the years to come.

Nor, current and former officials say, does Washington have
any intention of letting gas tensions between its various
Eastern Mediterranean allies turn into open conflict.

“The Maghreb and Levant are clearly going to be unstable for
some time,” Roughead, now retired and a senior visiting fellow
at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, told Reuters.
“The eastern Mediterranean is also worrying. There’s no doubt
it’s going to require more attention.”

SYRIA WORRIES DRIVE RUSSIAN PRESENCE

It was the positioning of a U.S. carrier off Syria in
November 2011 that appeared to prompt one of the largest Russian
naval moves in recent years. As Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on
rebels and protesters became ever bloodier, Washington had
quietly moved it and its battle group towards Syria.

In what may or may not have been a direct response, Moscow
sent its only aircraft carrier – the Soviet era Admiral
Kuznetzov – into the same area to visit its naval base at
Tartus. In Moscow, Russian officials gave distinctly conflicting
signals to local and international media, some denying any link
to the Syrian conflict while others saying it was a deliberate
warning to the West to back off.

On January 17, Russian news agencies again reported two
warships were heading to Syria for exercises and to deliver
munitions to Tartus, although it was not immediately clear
whether that meant the undisclosed weaponry was headed for
Assad’s forces or Russia’s own stockpiles there.

The Russian naval base at Tartus remains Moscow’s only
Mediterranean port. Retaining access to it is seen as a major
factor in Russia’s refusal to abandon Assad.

When a Chinese destroyer and frigate sailed through Suez
into the Mediterranean in August last year, several analysts
suggested they were aiming to join joint naval exercises being
held between Moscow and Damascus.

But instead, they sailed up through the Bosporus to the
Black Sea to visit Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania.

CHINA’S “STRATEGIC AMBIVALENCE”

“The fact that it did not seize the opportunity to hold
drills together with the Russians could confirm that Beijing is
not warming to the prospect of a new Cold War and continues to
prefer strategic ambivalence about polarisation,” Jonathan
Holsag, research fellow at the Brussels Institute of
Contemporary China Studies, wrote in Chinese state-owned
newspaper the Global Times in August.

Some European and U.S. security analysts remain nervous over
the Chinese expansion – particularly in Naples, where the
Chinese-owned terminal directly overlooks NATO’s main
Mediterranean naval base. But in Greece, the Chinese investment
remains relatively popular. With the purchase of new cranes and
other equipment, Cosco has increased container traffic through
its terminal by some 70 percent each of the three years of
operation.

The vast majority of containers handled by the port are
shipped on elsewhere in the world, turning Piraeus into a much
more significant international hub.

“This investment has been very important for Greece,” says
Tassos Vamvakidis, deputy manager of the Cosco-run container
terminal. “At a time of economic difficulty, it is very
important.”

One veteran British naval officer compared China’s
approaching the Mediterranean to that of Britain in the 18th and
19th centuries, when its commercial expansion was at least as
important as its military.

Chinese officials might object to that comparison. But there
seems little doubt they intend to stay – and that includes a
high profile if occasional military presence.

“There are many good reasons for Beijing to show its flag,”
wrote Hoslag in “Global Times”, a nationalist tabloid published
by the Communist Party mouthpiece the “People’s Daily. “It is
better to make countries around the Mediterranean used to
Chinese naval presence than to alarm them later on.”