Adm. John Aquilino is a warrior who intuitively understands global geopolitics. A 1984 graduate of the Naval Academy with a degree in physics, Aquilino is a naval flyer who was deployed in support of Operation Deny Flight, Deliberate Force, Southern Watch, Noble Eagle, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom, earning the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Air Medal, the Bronze Star Medal, and unit and campaign citations. Since May 2021, Aquilino has served as commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, which includes 380,000 servicemen and servicewomen in a region that encompasses 36 countries and more than 50 percent of the world’s population. Aquilino recently sounded the alarm about the danger of the emerging Sino-Russian alliance. “I only see the [Sino-Russian] cooperation getting stronger,” Aquilino told the Aspen Forum, “and boy, that’s concerning. That’s a dangerous world.”
It is a dangerous world because of geopolitics. Long ago, the great geopolitical thinkers Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman drew attention to the centrality of the Eurasian landmass in the global balance of power. Mackinder identified central Asia as the “heartland” of global politics and the potential seat of a world empire. Spykman viewed the coastal regions adjacent to central Asia as the “rimland” and warned that whatever power or alliance of powers commanded the rimland controlled Eurasia and the “destinies of the world.” Both strategists understood that Eurasia contains most of the world’s people and resources. A glance at a map reveals that an emerging Sino-Russian bloc controls a huge swath of Eurasia, but unlike imperial Russia and the old Soviet Union of Mackinder and Spykman’s time, the current strategic alliance between China and Russia boasts control of much of north-central-eastern Asia (Mackinder’s “heartland”) and parts of coastal East Asia (Spykman’s “rimland”) and possesses significant naval and air power to take advantage of China’s lengthy eastern coast.
Aquilino cited Sino-Russian “combined patrols” in the western Pacific and Beijing’s intelligence assistance to Russia in its war with Ukraine as evidence of the “no limits relationship” between the two Eurasian giants. The strategic partnership, he suggested, is “truly real,” despite historical and cultural differences. In April, Aquilino appeared before the House Armed Services Committee and stated that “the Indo-Pacific is the epicenter of 21st century geopolitics.” China, he warned the committee, “aspires to become the world’s leading power,” and its goal is “to replace the existing international order with a system that benefits authoritarian regimes at the expense of all other nations.” President Xi Jinping and other communist leaders have “directed the PLA to develop the capability to seize Taiwan by force and surpass the United States as the dominant power in the Pacific.” China has engaged in the “largest, fastest, most comprehensive military buildup since World War II in both the conventional and nuclear domains.” Aquilino also noted China’s improved space, counterspace, and cyber capabilities. (READ MORE: Sino-Russian Geopolitics With Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell)
But the most important part of Aquilino’s testimony was titled “PRC-Russia Cooperation.” Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin seek a “new world order,” Aquilino claimed, and they have a “‘no limits’ strategic partnership” that includes military cooperation at both the conventional and nuclear level. “By the 2030s,” Aquilino said, “for the first time in its history, the United States will face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries, creating new stresses on stability and new challenges for deterrence, assurance, and risk reduction.” This strategic competition “now encompasses all forms of national power across all domains.”
The Indo-Pacific is now the most important rimland region. “We do not have the luxury of time,” Aquilino observed, and we must “seize the initiative” to “maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific.” He would surely agree with Spykman’s advice in The Geography of the Peace (1944): “The United States must recognize once again, and permanently, that the power constellation in Europe and Asia is of everlasting concern to her, both in time of war and in time of peace.” As Spykman argued, the United States must “continue to collaborate with any powers seeking to prevent the consolidation of the rimland regions” of Eurasia.
