America has a lot at stake. For 40 years it has been the region’s uncontested leader. Now China wants to lead instead, and is trying to ease America aside. That means the era of uncontested US primacy has passed. This is a big loss for America, for Australia and much of Asia, but it is the strategic price we must all pay for China’s economic miracle.
There are two competing visions of Asia’s future now. China’s vision is that America will slowly fade as a strategic power in Asia, leaving China as the region’s new uncontested leader. America’s vision is that Asia will divide into two camps, with China on one side and the rest, under US leadership, on the other. It hopes that if the rest of Asia stays strong and united by America’s side, China will eventually see the error of its ways and join the US-led camp as well, thus restoring America’s uncontested primacy.
Of course neither Washington nor Beijing describes their vision in such blunt terms. But behind the diplomatic drapery, these are clearly the plans to which each side is working. Washington has suddenly woken up to the magnitude of China’s power, and now understands that Asia, not the Middle East, is where it faces its most decisive challenge. That’s why Obama is making this trip. He is here to persuade America’s friends and allies to sign up to Washington’s vision of Asia’s future.
At APEC in Hawaii, Obama promoted the economic element of his vision. His Trans-Pacific Partnership initiative is aimed at building a new economic framework in Asia that includes America’s friends and allies and excludes China. It is not clear that is a good idea. Now Obama is coming to Canberra to promote the political and strategic element of his vision. He wants to draw America’s loose network of Asian allies and friends together into a more unified military coalition to confront China’s growing maritime power. That will be the underlying message of his speech to Parliament tomorrow, and it is the symbolism at the heart of the announcement he will make about US military training in Darwin.
Practically and operationally, the new rotational training deployments for US marines mean very little. Symbolically and strategically they mean a great deal. They show Australia’s willingness to join America’s military coalition against China. And make no mistake: this is all about China. For 40 years, despite our close alliance, Australia has been careful not to line up militarily with the US against China. That is why the Darwin announcement is so significant.
More broadly, taken together with Julia Gillard’s enthusiastic embrace of his Trans-Pacific Partnership, the new military arrangements signal Australia’s support for Obama’s overall vision for America’s role in Asia’s future. For Obama, this is an important win.
But is it a win for Australia? That depends on whether Obama’s vision will work, and on what the alternatives are.
For his vision to work, three things will have to happen. First, a lot of China’s Asian neighbours will need to decide that siding with America against China is in their interests. None of them want to live under China’s shadow, and all welcome US support, but none want to make China an enemy. Keeping them on side will be harder than it looks.
Second, America itself must decide whether taking China on like this is worth the cost. Economically, Obama’s vision of Asia’s future makes no sense, because America is as interdependent with China as everyone else. And strategically, Americans will have to decide whether they really are willing to back all their Asian friends and allies in any fight they pick with China. A small stoush in the South China Sea could become very costly and dangerous for the US.
These are issues that Americans themselves have not clearly addressed. Few of America’s political leaders, pundits or the public at large have yet come to grips with the new geometry of power, and the hard choices America now faces.
Third, for America’s plan to work, China will have to be persuaded to accept US leadership in Asia even as it overtakes America to become the richest, and hence ultimately the most powerful, country in the world. That seems highly unlikely. And if China pushes back rather than comes around then America’s vision of Asia’s future does not lead us gently back to the era of uncontested US primacy. It pushes us brutally forward towards a new era of unbridled strategic rivalry — a new Cold War, or worse.
If the only alternative to America’s plan to perpetuate its primacy in Asia is China’s vision of its own uncontested leadership, then we might reluctantly accept a new Cold War as the lesser of two evils. But these are not the only possibilities. A new Asia could evolve in which China exercises more power and influence than it has before, but does not dominate, and in which America no longer exercises primacy, but still plays a large and vital role. In short, an Asia in which the US and China share power.
This should be Australia’s vision of Asia’s future. We do not want to live under Chinse domination, but nor do we want to be squeezed by US–China rivalry. That is why, having given Obama a respectful hearing, we should explain why we take a different view. That is what good allies do.
Hugh White is professor of strategic studies at ANU and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute.
This article was originally published by the Sydney Morning Herald here.
White is Not Quite Right: Ernie Bower
My friend and colleague Hugh White does a brilliant job of asking the hard questions when it comes to assessments of U.S. and Chinese power in Asia and their impact on foreign policy and national security. His writings sometimes provide an equally compelling opportunity to clarify various positions and strategies. In this recent note entitled “Obama and Australia’s vision of Asia’s future,” Professor White argues that “American vision is that Asia will divide into two camps, with China on one side and the rest, under U.S. leadership, on the other. It hopes that if the rest of Asia stays strong and united by America’s side, China will eventually see the error of its ways and join the US-led camp as well, thus restoring America’s uncontested primacy.”
Almost right, Hugh, but not quite. The grand strategy and the plan behind the headlines you are reading about President Obama’s current trip to the region is indeed to convince China to join its neighbors around the region, but not in a regime dominated by U.S. primacy. This old Cold War like polarity seems to have fixated White into trying to understand power in Asia as zero sum. That is not and should not be the U.S. strategic goal.
The goal instead is to strengthen ties and relations around Asia so that strong and enduring regional security and economic/trade architecture can be developed that will show China that the path to prosperity, stability, and answering its own hard domestic questions about energy, food, and water security, can be found by joining with others and playing by a common set of rules — ones that it helps develop. This vision is in fact designed to dissuade China from exploring what it “can do” based on its new found economic power, and ask instead, as Deng Xiaoping would have instructed, what China “should do.”
White’s writings are valuable (http://cogitasia.com/a-peaceful-future-for-asia-whites-response-to-ernie-bower/) and I want to thank him again for an opportunity to provide a clarification on how the United States sees its role developing in Asia.
Ernest Z. Bower is a senior adviser, director of the Southeast Asia Program, and co-director of the Pacific Partners Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
http://cogitasia.com/white-is-not-quite-right/
Well many thanks to Ernie Bower, both for his very kind recent remarks about my contribution to the debate on US-China relations, and for his entirely apposite and stimulating observations on my description of America’s vision of Asia’s future. http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/11/16/obama-and-australias-vision-of-asias-future/ Ernie was responding to my claim that America’s vision is of an Asia divided between Chinese-led and US-led camps. He says this zero-sum, Cold War-style polarisation is not what America wants. In one sense, I’m sure he is right: America does not want China as a rival. It would prefer China willingly to accept America’s view of Asia’s future. But that is a bit like my wife saying to me: ‘There is no reason for us to argue, as long as you don’t make the mistake of disagreeing with me.’
Actually, my wife is far too sensible to ever say such a thing, but I am not so sure about US foreign-policy. The question is not whether America wants an adversarial relationship with China, but how far it is prepared to compromise to avoid one. And I think President Obama gave us the answer in his very important speech in here in Canberra this week.
In this passage, and throughout the speech, President Obama gave no hint that he believed that Asia’s future was up for negotiation between the US and China. He vividly articulated America’s vision, and made it clear that he expected China to conform to it, or face the consequences. In other words, he was saying there is no reason for the US and China to be rivals, as long as China accepts America’s vision for Asia.
And that is a problem. America’s insistence on asserting its vision and its leadership in Asia is certain to lead to an intensifying, increasingly zero-sum rivalry between the US and China, for the simple reason that China will not conform. So I suggest to Ernie that even if the US does not desire zero-sum rivalry with China, it is not willing to do anything substantive to avoid it, and is pursuing a policy which makes it more or less inevitable. One of the few things I recall from my brief study of the law is a maxim that goes like this: ‘A man is presumed to intend the natural consequences of his acts.’
Of course there is a lot more to be said about why China’s power makes it necessary to accommodate it, and how far America should be willing to compromise with China to avoid rivalry, and about what China should be willing to offer as well, and about the consequences for all of us if they fail. But those are debates for another time. And I know that in those debates, Ernie will continue to show those qualities, not just of incisiveness and wisdom but of openness and generosity, that so characterise his great contribution to our thinking about Asia.
Prof. White’s commentary is exceptionally cogent and his brutal candour should make his readers – and officials in Canberra and Washington – pause.
With transitional uncertainties triggered by the current state of systemic fluidity running parallel to global economic turbulence rocking established powers on the two shores of the Atlantic, stabilisation would perhaps be more helpful than a quest for extending US primacy into the indefinite future – itself a problematic proposition given the steady coalescence of capacity in alternative nodes of power such as in the BRICS grouping.
This latter process is transforming the strategic landscape and the international security context in which post-hegemonic US power will be exercised. Balancing, or seeking to balance, Chinese assertive delineation of its own Monroe Doctrine Sinica with reinforced military capability may be a bit like conducting repeated and large-scale naval-air exercises in the Yellow Sea. Whether North Korea and China will be deterred depends as much on the calculations made and priorities established in Pyongyang and Beijing as it does on the muscularity of US and South Korean maritime prowess.
The efficacy of US endeavours across the South China Sea, too, will be at least partly shaped by Chinese – and indeed, others’ – responses. The dialectics of mutual insecurity and sense of damaged pride do not suggest China will be constrained to satisfy the demands and expectations of the US and its allies simply because carrier task groups are more forbidding fighting forces than PLAN’s carrier-less capabilities. Obama the academic-turned-politician should know this better than many of his peers, but in the context of a difficult economic situation in an election year, objectivity may have lost some of its shine. And I’m not even pointing to the economic. financial and commercial semi-symbiosis which has transformed the trans-Pacific landscape over the past two decades, certainly since China acceded to the WTO.
This is why I wish to commend Prof. White on the ineluctable logic of his analysis. I do hope your readers are provoked into considering the issues with a greater degree of rational detachment. Let me attach a few papers which I prepared earlier – that, too, carry a similar message:
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Obama-Era.pdf
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Xiangshan-Forum-paper.pdf
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/LSE-IDEAS-Asia-Pacific-Security-Dynamics.pdf
Kind regards
mahmud