全球新秩序：亚洲世纪必有战争？

Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping met in China’s historic city of Wuhan last month. Greeting each other warmly, the Indian and Chinese leaders talked over cups of tea and strolled in bucolic gardens. President Xi noted he had only twice met a visiting foreign leader outside Beijing. On both occasions, it was for Modi. Yet rather than demonstrating cordial ties between Asia’s ascending giants, the meeting served mostly to highlight divisions, given Sino-Indian relations have worsened greatly since Modi became prime minister in 2014, in particular after a military stand-off near the Bhutanese border last year. Both sides wanted a “reset”.

4月，纳伦德拉·莫迪(Narendra Modi)与习近平在中国历史名城武汉举行会面。印度与中国的两位领导人彼此致以热烈问候，品茶聊天，林园散步。习主席表示他只有两次在北京以外接待到访外国首脑。而两次都是为了莫迪。不过，与其说此次会面展现了两个日益上升的亚洲大国之间的友好关系，不如说主要是突出了分歧。自2014年莫迪担任总理以来，中印关系大为恶化，尤其是去年在不丹边境附近的军事对峙后。双方都想要“重置”。

Modi’s position was the weaker of the two. India’s economy is smaller than China’s, and its military far punier. Many in New Delhi feared that the subtext of the summit was a plea that China should avoid more meddlesome border incidents that could destabilise Modi’s re-election campaign next year. Xi appeared more self-assured, having recently extended indefinitely his term as leader. Yet for all the rapidity of his ascent, China’s leader also often appears unsure how best to manage the complexities of his new global reach.

在两位领导人中间，莫迪的地位要弱一些。印度的经济规模小于中国，其军事力量更弱。新德里方面许多人担心此次峰会的潜台词是请求中国尽量避免插手边境事件，这可能会破坏莫迪明年争取连任。习近平显得更为自信，最近他的领导任期得到了无限延长。不过他的上升速度虽快，这位中国领导人在如何最好地管理自己新的全球影响力的复杂性上，也常常表现出不确定。

This pervasive sense of uncertainty is part of what US foreign policy thinker Robert Kaplan calls The Return of Marco Polo’s World, meaning the emergence of a new global order that would seem oddly familiar to the 13th-century explorer. Conventional wisdom suggests America is in relative decline while China, India and other emerging powers are on the up. Kaplan’s vision is more complex. “The map will increasingly be defined by a new medievalism,” he writes. The power of states will decline while loyalties to “city, empire and tribe” will matter more, as they did before the advent in the 17th century of the modern nation state following the Peace of Westphalia. “The smaller the world becomes because of the advance of technology,” Kaplan writes, “the more permeable, complicated and overwhelming it seems, with its numberless, seemingly intractable crises.” Little wonder even powerful leaders such as Modi and Xi struggle to make sense of it.

这种无处不在的不确定感也是美国外交政策思想家罗伯特·卡普兰(Robert Kaplan)《马可波罗世界的回归》(Return of Marco Polo’s World)的一部分，而这个书名的意思是一个新的、会让这位13世纪探险家有种奇妙的熟悉感的全球秩序出现了。人们普遍认为美国处于相对下降阶段，而中国、印度及其他新兴大国处于上升阶段。卡普兰的观点则更为复杂。他写道：“世界地图将越来越被一种新的中世纪主义所定义。”国家的力量将下降，而对“城市、帝国和部落”的忠诚将更加重要，就像现代民族国家在17世纪随着《威斯特伐利亚和约》(Peace of Westphalia)的签订而诞生之前那样。卡普兰写道：“世界由于科技进步变得越小，它看起来就越可渗透、越复杂、越让人难以抵挡，伴随无以计数的、看似难以解决的危机。”无怪乎即使莫迪和习近平这样强有力的领导人，也很难理解这个世界。

Kaplan’s book is a stimulating account of a coming era of global confusion. Its first chapter laying out his thesis, which started life as a paper commissioned by the US defence department, is especially good. The other chapters are drawn mostly from older magazine essays, including a series of profiles of global thinkers such as Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, and John Mearsheimer, a controversial “realist” international affairs scholar. Realism views the world as “an anarchic jungle” populated by anxious, self-interested states, and basically sums up Kaplan’s views. He even devotes a highly critical chapter to Donald Trump, arguing that the US president’s policies do not deserve to be viewed as part of the same school.

卡普兰这本书非常有启发地探究了一个即将到来的全球混乱时代。第一章尤其精彩，陈述了他的论点，出自他受美国国防部委托撰写的一篇论文。其他章节主要来自他之前在杂志上发表的文章，包括一系列对全球思想家的介绍，如哈佛大学(Harvard)政治学家塞缪尔·亨廷顿(Samuel Huntington)，以及争议性的“现实主义”国际事务学者约翰·米尔斯海默(John Mearsheimer)。现实主义认为世界是由焦虑的、自利的国家组成的“无政府主义丛林”，这基本总结了卡普兰的观点。他甚至专门用一章高度批判了唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)，称这位美国总统的政策不配被归入该流派。

Geography matters to Kaplan, as does history. He is upbeat about the future for long-lived civilisations such as Iran and Turkey, even if their economies are shaky. Technology is also crucial to his understanding of the coming world, both for the way it empowers protesters and terrorists, but also because it drags major powers into localised conflicts, as happened in Syria. Other factors, from quarterly growth figures to military budgets, concern him less. The ideas he draws from this worldview are divisive but compelling. In Monsoon, an earlier book, he coined the metaphor of a “string of pearls” to describe China’s proliferating naval bases around the Indian Ocean. Academics often treat the concept snootily, claiming it has little predictive value. But it is still widely used by diplomats and journalists, because it describes so nicely what most think China is up to, namely spreading its reach across India’s backyard.

地理对卡普兰至关重要，历史也一样。他对伊朗和土耳其等悠久文明的未来持乐观态度，即使它们的经济不稳定。科技对于他认识即将到来的世界同样至关重要，既是因为科技对抗议者和恐怖分子的赋能，也因为它将大国拖入局部冲突，比如叙利亚的情况。季度增长数字、军事预算等其他因素，他则较少考虑。他从这一世界观中获得的想法存在争议，但很精彩。在他之前的著作《季风》(Monsoon)中，他创造了“珍珠链”这一比喻来形容中国环印度洋不断增加的海军基地。学者们对这一概念往往嗤之以鼻，称其没什么预言价值。但它仍得到外交官和记者的广泛使用，因为它恰好描述出大多数人认为的中国的意图：将其触角伸到印度后院。

In this latest work, the image of Polo describes a new and enlarged geopolitical playing field. The path of Polo’s journeys across the Eurasian landmass is often called the “silk road”, even though that phrase was coined only in the 19th century. Kaplan thinks this same region will now be the heart of 21st century conflict. “As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres,” he writes, suggesting that a weakened west can only watch as Eurasia itself becomes the focus for international competition. Against this backdrop the US must understand its inability to shape global events as it did after the cold war. Instead, America’s objective should be simple: to stop China dominating eastern Asia in the way the US itself does across the western hemisphere.

在这本书中，马可波罗的形象勾勒出一个新的、扩大了的地缘政治竞技场。马可波罗穿越欧亚大陆的那条路通常被称为“丝绸之路”，虽然这个短语在19世纪才被造出来。卡普兰认为如今该地区将成为21世纪冲突的中心。他写道：“随着欧洲消失，欧亚大陆凝聚到了一起。”意思是衰弱的西方只能看着欧亚大陆本身成为国际竞争的焦点。在这种背景下，美国必须认识到它无法像冷战后那样决定全球事件。相反，美国的目标应该简单化：阻止中国以美国支配西半球的方式去支配东亚。

Once a leader of nonaligned nations, India itself now aspires to be a “leading power” able to shape events and win a greater role at global institutions such as the UN. This new assertiveness flows partly from a growing economy. But the accident of geography plays a role too, as Kaplan notes: “If the early-twenty-first century has a geographical focus, this would be it: the Greater Indian Ocean from the Gulf to the South China Sea, and including the Middle East, Central Asia and China.” India is especially fearful of encirclement by China’s powerful military. Modi’s aim is therefore what Ayres calls “attaining primacy in the Indian Ocean”, an aim India is pursuing with plenty of US support. America’s calculus is crude but logical: if there are two big powers in Asia, namely China and India, one alone cannot dominate. So far, India has made only tentative steps to match China’s big-spending infrastructure push, but in time it too will use its economic sway to buy friends and influence allies.

作为曾经的不结盟国家的领导者，印度现在渴望成为能够影响各种事件、并在联合国等全球机构中发挥更大作用的“主导力量”。这种新生的自信在一定程度上来源于其经济的不断增长。但正如卡普兰所指出的，地缘事件也发挥着一定的作用：“若说21世纪初有什么地理上的焦点的话，那就是这里了：从海湾到南中国海之间的这片印度洋，同时包括中东、中亚和中国。”印度尤其害怕被中国强大的军队包围。因此，莫迪的目标是艾尔斯所说的“在印度洋取得首要地位”，印度追求这一目标得到美国的大力支持。美国的盘算虽然粗糙但合乎逻辑：如果亚洲有两个大国，即中国和印度，它们中的一个就不可能成为亚洲霸主。到目前为止，印度只采取了一些初步的举措来应对中国大手笔花钱的基础设施建设，但总有一天印度也会利用其经济影响力收买朋友并影响盟友。

Kaplan begins his book with a line from international relations academic Kenneth Waltz, noting glumly that “theorists explain what historians know: war is normal”. Later he quotes US cold war-era diplomat George Kennan explaining the logic of colonialism: “Unless we took those territories, somebody else would.” A similar hard-headed realpolitik now governs the battle for influence fought between China and the US, and increasingly India too. A new world of geopolitical competition is being born, but one where even powerful states cannot entirely control events. This uncertainty makes for confusion, and potentially for conflict too. The amiable tone of summit meetings such as Xi and Modi’s in Wuhan suggests the Asian century might be more stable than the period of American hegemony that preceded it. That impression is likely to be misleading.

卡普兰的书以国际关系学者肯尼思·华尔兹(Kenneth Waltz)的一句话开头，他沮丧地指出，“理论家解释了历史学家知道的东西：战争是常态”。后来他引用了美国冷战时期外交家乔治·凯南(George Kennan)的话，解释了殖民主义的逻辑：“如果我们不占领那些领土，别人就会。”如今，一种类似的顽固的现实政治主导着中美之间争夺影响力的斗争，中印之间也越发如此。一个充满地缘政治竞争的新世界正在诞生，但是即使是强国也不能完全控制事态。这种不确定性造成了混乱，也可能导致冲突。习近平与莫迪在武汉的峰会气氛友好，这表明，亚洲世纪可能比之前的美国霸权时期更稳定。但这种印象可能会有误导性。