The USA Won’t Contain China

THE INDIAN OCEAN

FROM ADMIRAL ZHENG HE

TO HUB AND SPOKE CONTAINER MARITIME COMMERCE

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan Eve

TO BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

An Update (January 2022)

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Our final and main objective was, in 2016, to consider the emergence of the Indian Ocean as the center of 21st-century maritime container commerce with Sri Lanka as the hub and Africa becoming an essential vector.

We concentrated on the modern period, the macro-geographic data and situations in and around the Indian Ocean and on one particular aspect: the development of the hub-and-spoke model for the network of maritime connections in, around and beyond the Indian Ocean as for container commerce. We were writing after the end of the Tamil Tigers terroristic civil war in Sri Lankan, hence in 2010 and subsequent years. Mahinda Rajapaksa was President and Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the minister who led the final military offensive and won the war.

We insisted on the hub itself, Sri Lanka, which was at the time changing rapidly; on some of the various harbors around the Indian Ocean and their inland goods transportation networks, essentially railroads and highways; on the projects in that field, particularly the New Silk Road of the Chinese that has become now the Belt and Road Initiative; on the bottlenecks of the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca, for quite different reasons; and on the dead-end of the Persian Gulf, except as the starting point of a hinterland network that would, and will, develop when the wars and insecurity there are stabilized. And this last point has not changed at all.

We envisaged the various routes beyond and the final destinations. We only mentioned the railroad connection between Asia and Europe using the trans-Siberian railroad and beyond to Hamburg and Madrid, as a competing alternative. We eventually showed how backward in that field of container maritime commerce the USA was, and nothing has basically changed, backward as compared to the world and absent from the Indian Ocean and the China Seas as an actor in…