It is always easier to strike down visionaries than to support them. Skeptics of Kevin Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community (APC) proposal exemplify this. The PM has been portrayed as an overly idealistic multilateralist with no concrete plan for putting his vision into effect and with little chance of winning regional support. But such criticism is not only unjustified; it betrays a clear misunderstanding of how postwar Asia’s security order is evolving.

Three basic arguments are most employed by critics of multilateral security community-building. First, they assert that the United States still exercises decisive strategic hegemony in the region. Second, they believe that China and the U.S. are destined to undergo a prolonged struggle for regional primacy. A third assumption is that most Asian states do not like developing strong regional institutions.

Fears that U.S. strategic interests in the region will be compromised by stronger regional institutions are groundless. The U.S. has not projected a strategy of predominance in the Asia-Pacific since the Nixon Doctrine was announced in 1969. Washington instead pursues an offshore balancing strategy, concentrating on deterring potential threats against regional allies with largely autonomous strategic capabilities. America’s ultimate strategic capabilities for maintaining a balance of power no longer involve the uncompromising maintenance of permanent bases on allied soil. They are instead found in U.S. long-range-strike capabilities positioned in Guam, Diego Garcia or at other facilities conducive to neutralizing ‘anti-access’ and ‘area-denial’ threats. Unmanned air combat systems, advances in missile defence and highly flexible offensive and defensive submarine systems are increasingly more relevant capabilities. The extent to which the U.S. ultimately remains a key strategic player in Asia-Pacific politics will depend on how distracted it becomes with increasingly challenging domestic political and economic problems and how tied it remains to a ‘Long War’ against international terrorism emanating from South Asia and the Middle East.

Nor is China content to remain subordinate to the U.S. in the region. But this does not mean the Chinese will contest the Americans in every diplomatic, economic and strategic sector. Likewise, they are too shrewd to automatically fall prey to hedging strategies advanced by other regional actors that would, in their eyes, only prolong U.S. strategic advantages in their part of the world. Hence their disillusionment with the inaugural East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005 that was developing in ways that was too ‘pan-Asian’ for their taste. Yet Chinese policy-makers have opted to avoid openly contesting U.S. and regional interests, instead electing to pursue an ‘engagement’ strategy towards the new Obama administration.

Accordingly, neither Washington nor Beijing secretly hopes that weak regional security architectures will not become stronger. Indeed, the Obama administration has just endorsed ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) as a precondition for its entry into the EAS. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a distinct point of attending the July 2009 ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting to demonstrate Washington’s new ‘smart power’ strategy. Unlike what some APC critics assert, China has avoided the Manichean strategy of cynically supporting Rudd’s proposal as a way of burying it. A more nuanced interpretation is that each individual Asia-Pacific state is taking its time assessing the APC in accordance with its own national interests which is an unremarkable process hardly unexpected in Canberra.

The most fundamental lesson so far revealed by the regional security community debate is that this discussion should be allowed to continue in vigorous and systematic ways. There is hardly any point in ‘killing the messenger’ before the full meaning of that message is absorbed and systematically considered over the longer-term.

This article first appeared here at the Asia Security Initiative.