How
many warships does it take to remove chemical weapons from Syria? One more this week than it took last
week, apparently. If you’re a big,
important country with a big, important navy, you want to be involved in the
good-citizenship exercise in Syria.
A 31
December deadline for getting some of the chemical stockpile
to waiting ships in Latakia was missed, as readers
will remember. But it looks like
that will give China a late-arriving opportunity to join in the maritime leg of
the effort, by providing a warship to escort the Norwegian and Danish ships transporting the chemical
cargo.
On 1
January, Defense News correspondent Chris Cavas tweeted that Chinese frigate Yancheng, which had deployed 30 November for antipiracy
patrol in the Gulf of Aden, was headed northward through the Suez
Canal.
(Interestingly, according to Chinese reporting, Yancheng had participated
with her sister ship, the frigate Luoyang, in a live-fire exercise in the Gulf of
Aden, the day
before her Suez transit. Quite
feasible, but a reminder that today’s People’s Liberation Army Navy is well
capable of a relatively high “optempo,” or operational tempo – at least in
waters where it has now spent five straight years gaining far-flung, at-sea
experience.)
The
official PLAN notification of Yancheng’s task was
made public the next day (2 January).
And on Saturday, 4 January, Yancheng arrived in Limassol, Cyprus for a port
visit ahead
of her escort duties. Chinese
nationals in Cyprus turned out to give the frigate a big
welcome.
The
other nation providing a warship escort for the transport of Syrian chemical
weapons is Russia. The materials will be moved to Italy,
where M/V Cape
Ray (T-AKR-9679), operated by the U.S. Maritime
Administration and the Military Sealift Command, will take custody of them for
destruction.
The
warship escorts are overkill, of course.
The warships being provided by Norway and Denmark are more than enough,
and there is zero likelihood of a piratical attempt on the chemical convoy
between Syria and Italy. All the
danger in transport is confined to the war-ravaged territory of Syria. (If there are unanticipated
maritime-transport problems, the convoy’s transit path will be within reach of
Turkish, Greek, and Italian rescue assets the entire way. Regardless of what the warship escorts
do, it’s the rescue assets that will have to respond if there are mechanical
failures or maritime accidents.)
Participating in this transit as an additional escort is
a show-the-flag operation. Hey,
nothing wrong with that. Except
that the underlying political structure and intentions of the two providing
nations, Russia and China, are nothing like the good-citizen, peace-on-the-seas
posture of the Pax-era United States, Norway, or Denmark. Russia’s and China’s influence on the
high seas are not politically interchangeable with those of NATO or the British
Commonwealth navies.
The
multilateral organization of the antipiracy effort off Somalia, combined with
the recession of the U.S. Navy from its Pax-era posture overseas, has been
setting us up for this shift for half a decade now. (I wrote about this in 2009 and 2010, and specifically
about the first visits by operational Chinese naval task forces
to the Mediterranean, in an article in 2012.) Navies are one of the best ways to
expand your overseas influence: not just to “be there,” but to put down markers,
drive stakes, signify national interest.
That’s what Russia and China are doing, and their
interest goes far beyond Syria.
They are in a competition to establish themselves as power brokers in the
Eastern Mediterranean, which, as I have noted before, functions as the world’s
“Great Crossroads.” Every global
interest intersects there, and no one’s interest goes unaffected by what happens
there.
Prescient observers back in early
September, seeing the likelihood of Chinese interest in the possibilities of the
Syria situation, ran with uncorroborated blog speculation that a Chinese warship had moved into the
Eastern Med,
during Obama’s lead-from-behind episode with the “red line” on Syria.* Although I don’t assess that a Chinese
warship ever entered the Med back at that time, ... [See rest at
links]
CDR, USN (Ret.)
Hemet, CA
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