Having spent the past 200 years amassing power and thwarting challengers, how did the US, at the dawn of its unipolar moment, suddenly become so frivolous? This is a big question. Yet as Beijing begins flexing its newly-acquired muscle, and as the collective reaction to China’s rise graduates in many parts of the world from casual indifference to breathless hysteria, it’s worth reviewing the extraordinary confluence of the factors that brought us here.
It didn’t have to be like this. The sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War deprived US-China relations of their balance-of-power logic, leaving the US facing a choice: with its alliances and forward deployment in place, and with events at Tiananmen Square in recent memory, Washington could easily have recalibrated its Cold War containment strategy, taking aim at China, an ideological rival and potential future challenger. Alternatively, the US could have dismantled its alliances, withdrawn from Asia, and kept open the option of returning only if China eventually emerged as a threat, too strong to be checked by a combination of Japan and other local powers.
It chose neither. Instead, Washington maintained its Cold War instruments of power but put them to very different uses. Rather than using raw power to consolidate its gains, Washington sought to entrench its leadership by becoming everything to everyone; most notably the guarantor of regional stability. This was, after all, ‘the end of history,’ and consequently, the supposed end of geopolitical rivalry as well. Besides, at that point China was so far behind — its leaders barely holding on to power, much less threatening to dominate — that renewed containment just didn’t seem necessary.
If stability was the aim, US strategy has generally succeeded beyond all expectations. Over the past 20 years, the US has reassured Japan, Taiwan and South Korea over China and North Korea. At the same time, it has reassured China and North Korea by keeping Japan, Taiwan and South Korea on a tight leash.
But stability alone has not safeguarded American dominance. With the US assuming the costs of security, ever greater flows of trade and investment have provided for an enormous level of economic growth and development, allowing China in particular to harness the extraordinary productive capacity of its massive population. Power continues to shift.
In Washington, this has not been a major cause for concern. Some analysts reject the notion that China will ever catch up. Others have maintained that, even if it does, the US will have the wherewithal to see off any challenge to its primacy. The conventional assumption was that a powerful, prosperous and economically interdependent China would be satisfied with the status quo. As a ‘responsible stakeholder,’ China could be expected to eschew competitive behaviour because that would undermine an order which accorded, however imperfectly, with China’s national interests.
But China has not refrained from competitive behaviour — it’s just gone about it in a very smart way. Diplomatically and economically, Beijing has made itself indispensible to the US. Militarily, it made itself indomitable — until recently keeping its head down, in accord with Deng Xiaoping’s famous advice, taking full advantage of Washington’s preoccupation with the Middle East and central Asia.
Having neglected relative power considerations for two decades, Washington now faces an inescapable strategic dilemma in Asia, though one it has barely begun to reckon with. Its twin goals in the region — maintaining stability on the one hand and dominance on the other — have become increasingly incompatible. Washington cannot maintain dominance without competing more intensively with China, yet it cannot compete with China without disrupting Asia’s stability and enduring another long, costly and potentially very dangerous cold war — which it is not necessarily guaranteed of winning.
Such is the fate of sacrificial superpowers.
Raoul Heinrichs is Sir Arthur Tange Scholar at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, and editor of Strategic Snapshots at the Lowy Institute.
An earlier version of this article appeared on Pnyx.
This article is a good example of those in strategic studies that based its framework of analysis on cognitive as well as motivational bias against China. The clear example is that this article drew from the works of Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama ‘end of history’, etc. As a result, the analysis anchored on traps and attitudes that the US decision maker considers working against the US interests.
More importantly, the article reflects the lack of the post-Cold War theoretical knowledge of American Grand Strategy. The term grand strategy may strike some as perhaps a bit high-falutin’. It is known among academics in international relations and strategic studies that only through some sort of systems theory can international politics be understood. American Grand Strategy comprises the “purposeful employment of all instruments of power available to a security community.” The US pours its foreign direct investment into China for its strategic and national interests; the rise of China involves the US’s deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state’s national interest. The rise of China is not a muddling through a situation, it’s a deliberate strategic action.
In pursuing its national interests and global stability, the US-China Summit took place in Washington D.C., followed by sending the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Beijing to resume military working relationship.
Raoul,
Thoughtful piece … and thought-provoking piece.
A few points of dissent though. The true irony in the Asia-Pacific is not so much the U.S.’ facilitation of China’s rise as much as the fact that the actor with perhaps the most revisionist ends in Asia, China (and to a lesser extent India) is also the most status-quoist in its means. For it is confident it can rise within the system. And the author of the extant Asian system (and presumably the party that should be the most committed to the status quo), the U.S., is instead among the most revisionist in its means, insecure of its future regional standing.
Second, America’s true unipolar moment was in 1945, not 1990. Unfortunately the Soviet geo-strategic and ideological challenge, then, spoiled the party. The sudden disappearance of the Soviet challenge, both, generated an exaggerated sense of unipolarity and served to mask the relative decline of American power … and the chickens (of American overstretch) are now coming home to roost. Washington’s elite however is still in a state of cognitive dissonance in terms of dealing with this power shift … acknowledges it, yet unwilling to grapple with its underlying implications.
Finally, whether Beijing has chosen to truly muscle-flex remains to be seen. The 1992 territorial seas law, 1994-96 cross-Straits visa and missile crisis, 1995 Spratly mess, and 1996 Senkaku flare-up was followed by China’s more restrained and beneficial New Security Concept. After Cheonan obstructionism, Senkaku trawler incident, Sino-Indian boundary tensions,and aggressive talk regarding south china sea over past 18 months, every inkling that China is once again going to borrow a page from its recent past and also perhaps update its Security Concept. Indians have been at the receiving end of growing warmth in recent months (see Hu-Singh meeting at Sanya) … and (most) southeast Asians could presume they will be its next object of affection.
Best, Sourabh
The problem is that the US went a bit crazy when faced with the Soviet challenge, and then it went a bit crazy when faced with the Islamic terrorist challenge. Now, we are in danger of the US going a bit crazy when it finally faces up to the Chinese challenge.
The US doesn’t really have a grand strategy, and that is because it does not have people in charge of its foreign affairs who can wisely craft one. This was not always the case. The US did develop a fairly coherent and smart grand strategy during the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan. This perfectly sensible strategy was allowed to drift with neglect during the thirties, with drastic consequences. The “containment” policy of the Cold War era was the next big effort at a grand strategy. The conventional wisdom is that the US “won” the cold war, but IMHO this had far less to do with our grand strategy than is credited; the US grand strategy in that era was deeply flawed and poorly executed, with the 55K names on the Vietnam memorial being “Exhibit A”. The present “War on Terror” is less of a Grand strategy than it is a knee-jerk over-reaction, and has been even more deeply flawed and poorly executed than “containment” ever was. In sum, the US just isn’t at all good at devising and following a grand strategy. Because we are pretty much isolated by oceans from the other great powers, we’ve had the luxury of being able to get away with this. It may eventually get to the point where we no longer have that luxury.
If I could draft a US grand strategy, what would I recommend? Actually, I’d go back to TR/Mahan as a starting point, and build a maritime forward defense strategy. Being surrounded by oceans that separate us from any potential peer competitors is our single greatest strategic advantage, so I would suggest making the most of it. Gen. McArthur strongly advised that we not get into any more land wars in Asia, and we should have listened to him. We need to concentrate most of our effort in our navy and air force, because we really don’t need a huge army. That means that we really do need to confine our interactions with Asia to the periphery, and mostly offshore. The mainland of Asia should have to see to its own “stability”. It makes sense within a maritime strategy for the US to maintain alliances with Japan and Australia, as these are offshore from the mainland, give us bases for forward deployment, and are defensible provided that the US does maintain a strong navy and air force. The move by the Phillipines almost two decades ago to give the US the boot was actually a great favor to us, because the defense of the Phillipines has always been the great Achilies Heel of the US grand strategy, was arguably the reason why Japan ultimately went to war against the US, and would have set the US and the PRC on a collision course in the S. China Sea. Now, the US can afford to back off a bit and give the PRC some strategic space in the S. China Sea without placing its own defense posture in a vulnerable position.
It is possible to stake out a grand strategy for the US that defends its real national interests, yet does not necessarilly guarantee and inevitable conflict with the PRC. The modus vivendi between the two powers simply needs to be a mutual understanding that China’s security requires a large and dominant army in East Asia, unchallenged by the US, while the USA’s security requires a large and dominant navy in the Pacific (beyond the S. and E. China Seas), unchallenged by the PRC. If the two sides can come to this realization, then there is no good reason why there cannot be peace between the great Pacific powers for many decades to come.