China's aircraft-killing missile is a matter of perspective

For realists, international relations is defined by the constant struggle for power between international actors. For them, the news that China may be near to perfecting an aircraft-carrier-killing missile might be troublesome. According to the AP:

Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America's virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas.

China may soon put an end to that.

U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defenses of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).

Analysts say final testing of the missile could come as soon as the end of this year, though questions remain about how fast China will be able to perfect its accuracy to the level needed to threaten a moving carrier at sea.

If China were to develop a missile capable of sinking a U.S. aircraft carrier at sea, it would dramatically alter the balance of power in the world. For balance-of-power realists, this development would signal the need for a possible realignment of U.S. alliances in Asia. For power transition realists, this is a tipping point that makes conflict between the U.S. and China much more likely. Yet, even if we assume the worst case scenario and China perfects this technology by the end of the year, I wonder if it really means anything.

Liberals will point out China is so dependent on the U.S. economically that it would have no real reason to ever use this capability. China can sink our carriers now, theoretically, with its nuclear arsenal, but no one seems to worried about it. Constructivists, on the other hand, might point to the relative obscurity of this article as evidence that while bastions of realism, like the military, are concerned about a rising China, the U.S. and China enjoy a relationship that is based on rivalry, not aggression. As long as that identity holds, conflict remains unlikely. It also means that the mere threat of a change in the relative balance-of-power might not be something to get so worked up about.

Google Earth and Complex Interdependence

One of the more difficult concepts to explain to students is the notion of complex interdependence, or the transformation of international relations through economic and political interdependence. Facilitated by globalization, or the widening, deepening, and accelerating of connections among societies, IR theorists like Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye claim complex interdependence accounts for the decline of military force as a policy tool and the increase in economic interdependence. It also means a gradual reduction in the capacity of states to control events.

In an article in the Washington Monthly entitled "The Agnostic Cartographer,"John Gravois provides a fascinating example of complex interdependence, Google Earth:

That new user-generated system of production, married to the technology of searchable “virtual globes” like Google Earth, has given rise to what people have begun calling “neogeography.” In the colonial era, the mapmaker’s imperative was to tame the foreign wilderness with names and boundaries—to discipline a profusion of facts and claims into a narrow and authoritative set of data. Now the profusion of facts and claims is a feature, not a bug. With the ability to zoom in on visual fields of higher and higher resolution, a digital map can contain more and more information—various local names for the same landmark, personal annotations, a picture of someone’s dog in a field. “The modern era was an era of the expectation that every feature should have a single name, and a top-down authority would determine that,” says Goodchild. “I think we’re moving past that with digital technology.” With policies that often favor ambiguity, Google maintains centralized control over the most official features on its maps—national borders, bodies of water, and the like—while in the “community layer” of map information, users have an open canvas. Geography has been democratized.

Powerful states once determined the names of geographic features. Today, even powerful states are forced to ask Google to change how it has chosen to label certain features or to remove the names given to things by its users if they disagree with the geopolitical ramifications.