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Need to face the facts in Asia

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In Brief

The Obama administration has never plainly acknowledged that it faces a major challenge from China to the US-led order in Asia, and it has therefore never clearly explained its strategy to deal with that challenge. Because it has never been clearly explained, the strategy has never been carefully scrutinised to see whether it has a credible chance of working.

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Instead it has slowly become accepted as orthodoxy among the US foreign and strategic policy community without serious debate.

But we all know what the strategy is. It is to take advantage of China’s own assertive behaviour to build anxiety about China’s ambitions among its neighbours, and then harness that anxiety to assemble a coalition which will act together diplomatically to compel China to abandon its challenge, leaving the US-led order intact.

Few if any outside China would question the aim of this strategy. We can all agree that it would be great if it worked, because the regional order based on uncontested US primacy has kept Asia stable, peaceful and prosperous for decades, and nothing would serve us better than for it to last for ever.

But will it work? Robert Manning and Jim Przystup are confident it will. In their generous and well-reasoned article at East Asia Forum, they counter my argument for building a new order in Asia by arguing first that any alterative order would not be as good as the old one, and second that the strategy of building a coalition to push back diplomatically against China is working fine. Why change things to accommodate China’s ambitions, they ask, if China can be persuaded to abandon them?

I agree with the first of these arguments but not with the second. I like the old order best, but I don’t think the strategy to preserve it is working. And as it fails I fear that Washington will be left with only two disastrous options: either withdrawal from Asia or war with China. It is to avoid either of these outcomes that I advocate a new order to accommodate with China.

There are three reasons to doubt that Washington’s current strategy is working. First, it overestimates the resolve of America’s friends and allies in Asia. Certainly they are worried by China’s growing power and assertiveness, but there are real limits to their willingness to damage their relations with China in order to support America’s strategy to preserve Asia’s strategic status quo ante.

No country demonstrates these limits more plainly than Australia. Australia is America’s oldest, closest and most loyal ally in Asia, and it is happy to offer rhetorical support when Washington criticises Beijing. But Canberra places immense importance on relations with China, and has shown no willingness to take steps that jeopardise them. They refuse even to consider making a choice between the United States and China.

Second, Washington’s strategy underestimates China’s resolve. It assumes that China under Xi Jinping will back off in the face of diplomatic pressure from the United States and its Asian friends and allies. This might happen if the stakes were merely the rocks and reefs of the South China Sea, but they are much bigger than that.

China’s challenge to US leadership in Asia is about restoring China’s place as a great power, or the great power, in Asia after centuries of subjugation and humiliation. This is an absolutely fundamental objective for China’s leaders, and achieving it is seen as essential to the long term legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. China is at least as determined to change the regional order as the United States is to preserve it.

So, as has become perfectly clear over the past 12 months, mere diplomatic gestures will not deter China from using the South China Sea disputes to challenge US power in Asia. Only the clear threat of a conflict with America would do that. And China does not believe that it faces such a threat.

This brings us to the third weakness in Washington’s strategy: it overestimates the deterrent effect of US military power in Asia today. Washington’s diplomatic offensive might work if it was backed by a credible threat of military action. But China’s whole posture shows it does not take that threat seriously; on the contrary it is clear that China believes America will back off rather than risk a clash with China.

We can see why: the all-too-public debates and unedifying muddles over ‘freedom of navigation’ operations show just how reluctant Washington is to risk a clash that might escalate into conflict. And they are right to be reluctant, as China well knows: despite overall US preponderance, the asymmetries of a US–China war in the Western Pacific today mean there is little chance of a swift US victory, and a serious risk that major escalation might only be avoided if Washington blinked first. The US presidential elections so far only compound Chinese impressions that US resolve is unlikely to strengthen in the future.

The reality is that no one in Washington has seriously asked the key question: is America willing to fight a war with China to preserve the current order in Asia? Until that question has been plainly asked and unambiguously answered in the affirmative, Washington has little chance of deterring China. And my hunch is that the answer will be in the negative.

If that is right, then the chances of preserving the old order in Asia are very low indeed, and that is why it seems worth exploring what other kinds of order might take its place. We should look for a new order that maximises America’s role while minimising US–China rivalry. That would involve many compromises that most of us will be unwilling to make. The only reason to contemplate them is that they are better than the alternatives.

Hugh White is Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University.

9 responses to “Need to face the facts in Asia”

  1. Striking in Professor White’s analysis is the absence of Japan. While Australia may be the “most loyal ally in Asia” but in terms of strategic weight there is no excuse to ignore Japan, as a strong proponent of the status quo. Strong both in its capacity and in the intensity of its commitment. Unlike distant Australia, Japan does face a serious and direct security threat from China. The notion that China’s increasingly confident behavior in regard to assertions of sovereignty would lead Tokyo to seek appeasement is a complete misreading of the atmosphere and trend lines there. Also significant are Japan’s efforts, as a Host Nation and a partner of the United States, to further strengthen other elements of the possibly shaky regional coalition. They say that what makes a leader is the first follower, and here Japan sets an example for other regional partners, one that Australia might examine more closely.

  2. Professor White offers 3 reasons why he does not believe the USA’s current stratgey regarding China, especially in the SCS, is not working. Although he tries to make a strong case for his argument, I remain unconvinced. Granted China has not stopped it’s forays into the fishing areas, its buildup of some of the islands, etc. But it has so far avoided a direct military confrontation with the US, Australia, or other countries. I think more time is needed to determine where this will lead.

    I also think it is time for countries to continue to look for ways to NOT have to choose between the US and China. This old school power oriented ‘realism’ provokes the very conflicts it purports to prevent.

  3. The author is right to postulate that “the regional order based on uncontested US primacy has kept Asia stable, peaceful and prosperous for decades, and nothing would serve us better than for it to last for ever”.

    But it pays not to forget that thanks to Uncle Sam’s primacy, China, by far, is the biggest beneficiary of a ‘stable, peaceful and prosperous’ Asia for seven decades, as well as from the freedom of navigation in the East and South China Seas. Why would China rock the boat now?

    China was a basket case before 1978, until the indomitable Premier, Deng Xiao Ping, declared that “it is not the color of the cat that counts (anymore) but whether it can catch mice” and “to be rich is glorious.”

    With these maxims in place, the teachings of Marxism were tossed out of the window and today China has adopted Meritocracy, with a socialist bent, after having tried, in vain, all other political systems, including democracy, since China kicked out the Manchu warlords in the Qing dynasty, in 1912.

    (By the way, Churchill also decried that democracy is the worst system, except for the others but he did not mention Meritocracy, which is also adopted by Singapore, the Asian Tiger, which has the highest per capita reserves in the world and a per capita GDP higher than most developed nations).

    Does any Western Government have any experience governing 1.4 billion people? No. China’s leaders have 70 years of successful experience since WW2 and lifted 900 million (three times the US population) out of poverty.

    To vilify China for alleged human rights abuses contradicts America’s own egregious invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, based on lies of WMD, killing over 1 millions innocent civilians and another 3 million in the Vietnam war, plus rendition, torture and detention at Guantanamo Bay gulag, without due process, for about 146 Muslims.

    (In reality, the West has really no respect for human rights since the time the Conquistadors invaded and decimated the Mayan and Aztec civilizations and the West’s colonization of over half the world, killing tens of millions of Natives and Aborigines since 1492, including those in Australia. Did China colonize any nation? No, despite Admiral Zheng He’s 7 epic voyages from circa 1401. Tibet was annexed by the Mongols and Xinjiang by the Manchu and brought into China, during the Yuan and Qing dynasties.)

    After 38 years of doubling of her GDP, thanks to millions of jobs off-shored, mostly by the American MNCs and MNCs from other developed nations, to leverage on China’s competitive wages, China has today the world’s No2 largest economy and is the world’s largest trading nation, with a stash of over US$3.4 trillion in reserves. Again, why would China rock the boat now?

    That peace reigned in Asia for the last 70 years (aside from aberrations like the US-initiated 10 Vietnam war, the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the Korean war), was due, in no small part, to the US-drafted Article 9 of the Japan’s Peace Constitution, which puts the warring Samurai on a tight leash.

    “Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution states, to wit:

    “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

    But under US tutelage, Japan has already, today, the 4th largest military in the world and the world’s largest cache of reactor-grade plutonium, enough to make 6,000 nuclear bombs, while Uncle Sam turned a blind eye.

    Abe has trashed Article 9 and will call a referendum for its amendment. If he successful, war is on the horizon, as Japan has nothing to lose, since its economy has fallen of the proverbial cliff. More in my piece in the Eurasia Review here:

    http://www.eurasiareview.com/15022016-is-abe-paving-the-way-for-a-resurgence-in-japanese-militarism/

    Will the US primacy in Asia last forever, as hoped for by the author? Don’t hold your breath.

    This is because the United States is already insolvent, with a US$19.2 trillion National Debt (US$20 trillion by the time Obama leaves office in Jan 2017), plus another US$222 trillion in unfunded debts. Watch:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Fmt2FBctQ

    So what is the US strategy today for Asia, to cope with a rising China? Topple the apple cart, using either the dog of war, Japan, as the proxy to precipitate a manufactured war, over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands or the patsy, Philippines, to start a war in the South China Sea, by invading and occupying the Scarborough shoals or the Mischief reefs.

    Is it in Australia’s interest to be dragged into a war with China, its largest trading partner, a war that could go nuclear from the start?

    Those who say ‘yes’ really need to seek professional help.

  4. I agree with Prof. White perhaps except the last paragraph. I do not know what a new world order that we should look for looks like. What compromises would be involved?

    America will keep its military superiortity over China for an idefinite time, and it seems that it can deter China in the South China Sea. But it seems that China knows better; it knows how not to be deterred in the South China Sea in spite of its military inferiority. It is fully aware that the U.S. will not resort to its military power. If the one to be deterred is sure of the other one which intends to deter being reluctant and afraid to use its military forces, the other one cannot have deterring effects at all.

    Henry Kissinger’s On China is a third-rate book at best, but Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu’s Art of War is good. It can be best countered by the same tactic. AS Kissinger said to a Japanese journalist, China will try to expand the sphere of its influence in osmosis.
    Yu Hua, a Chinese writer, said, “We Chinese are always violently brawling at each other (even among us in China).” They have cultivated the Chinese tactic for thousands of years of appearing taller, bigger and stronger and yet calibrating the power reality. The Chinese leaders are afraid that the United States will actually resort to the use of its military forces.
    But the sort of military engagement that the United States made, say, in Iraq would not be a wise policy. It should start paciently from a low level and, when it escalates, it should go up on the ladder of escalation paciently, carefully watching the Chinese response. It is China that has to back off.

    I would like to talk very briefly on free trade, very briefly because I have already written quite a lot. China had trade with other parts, but each dynasty took great care so that it would not endanger its political exclusive hold on society; in this sense too, China was an autarky society. Today China is not so; it is drastically dependent on economic relations with the outside world. Free trade has been propounded such a long time first by Britain and then by the Unites States that we mistakenly believe it is a moral virtue from which we cannot depart without committing a moral infringement. But it is simply a theoretical concept of economics and it is, when put into practice, an ideology of economic politics. We can adopt a kind of discriminatory trade policy on China.
    China has far more economic and military weaknesses than strengths.

    • Sun Tzu’s Art of War is in Chapter One of Kissinger’s book.
      China has cultivated the art of making it appear taller, bigger and stronger than it really is, and yet, perhaps because of it, has developed the art of realistically appreciating the power relations. According to Dr. John Lee, no rising country has been so realistic as China in seeing the power balance.
      paciently → patiently

  5. I read this a long time ago. I don’t know if it was a true story or not. American soldiers fighting in the Pacific area had difficulty in telling Japanese and Chinese soldiers apart. They were instructed to make the two Orientals pronounce the L sound. If they could pronounce it, it was Chinese; if not, Japanese, as the Japanese language doesn’t have the L sound.

    It is easy to tell Japanese and Chinese apart. The Japanese have thought from their historical experiences that bonnie things lie over the ocean but the Chinese think that bonnie things are in China and these things are best in the world. They have deemed themselves as being the center of human civilization: hence the Middle Kingdom. The English word kow-tow comes from Chinese. The People’s Republic of China is 中華人民共和国 in Chinese. 中華 is central civilization or the center of flower/blossom, 人 human, 民 people, 共和国 repbulic or republican country. There is no geographical information telling where it is in the world like Australia, Japan, America, France, or Russia.

    It is amazing how good the people of the West are at misunderstanding China. For this, read, if interested, my (Michi’s) comment, It Is Not China’s Fault, Nov. 16, 2015, on Michael Pillsbury/The Hundred-Year Marathon, amazon usa.
    Were there about four hundred thousand comfort women and were most of them killed after Japan’s surrender? Read, if interested, my comment American Humanism on Chinese Comfort Women, amazon usa.

    Japan wanted to avoid war with the United States and withdraw from China. I will appreciate very much if anybody reads my five comments on YaleGlobal Online/Alistair Burnett/War Drums In Asia: Back To The Eurpean Future and my (Michi’s) three replies to Alan Dale Daniel’s comment, Good But Partisan, on Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, amazon usa.

    Japanese were far more apologetic than (West) Germans. I would like everybody to read my three comments on the Project-Syndicate. org/Emily S. Chen/The Surrender of Japan’s Peace Constitution.

    Japan was not a totalitarian country like Nazi-Germany. Read my comment on the Project-Syndicate. org/Robert Shiller/Is Russian National Character Authoritarian?

    Japan was preparing to surrender and the Allied Powers like the United States and Great Britain knew it. But they had decided to drop the atomic bomb(s). Read, if interested, my (Michi’s) twenty comments on onlineopinion.com.au/Jed Lea-Henry/Hiroshima: the beginning and the end of nuclear history.

    Seventy years passed last summer since the end of the war. I guess it’s time to know the truth.

  6. I think Russians know much better, and very well, than people of the West including the U.S.A. of how to interpret China due to their long experience. If the West flinches before Xi Jinping’s frightfulness, it will be playing into his hands.

    As the L sound tells a Chinese from a Japanese, so the deeply felt and unshakable idea of the Middle Kingdom tells China apart from Japan. This easily visible, outstanding contrast is shown in the difference in the two countries’ response to the West. I doubt that China will be satisfied, from its culture, with primus inter pares.

    Japan’s War and Peace is far more interesting, if the West correctly reads it, than Tolstoy’s, but the West does not read it correctly, thus saving itself self-righteousness. For instance, Japan wanted to save itself from being carved up by the Westen imperialism and proposed that China would take the lead in putting up common resistance, but it was simply snubbed by China, and so Japan had to do it for itself. Since the Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Far East centered around the Korean peninsula, Japan had to begin with separating Korea from the Chinese suzerainty. Most, if not all, of Western observers thought that Japan would be easily thrown to the ground.

    Two events most shocked the Chinese diplomatic circle in the twentieth century. The first was that Japan, which China looked down upon for thousands of years, sat on the side of the table with the white race nations at the Beijing peace conference after the Boxers’ rebellion in 1901. The other was that Japan had a permanent seat in the Council of the League of Nations, while China did not. “For one thing, the Chinese have never reciprocated the warm feelings of the Japanese, viewing them with distrust and more than a little contempt. The Japanese nostalgia for China has been a classic case of unrequited love (Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanes, Charles E Tuttle, 1978, p417).”
    Japan invaded China. From this fact, the West drew a totally wrong conclusion that Japan wanted to take all of East Asia, expelling the West. The pivot of Japan in conducting its foreign policy was to maintain good relations first with Great Britain in the nineteenth century and then with the United States in the twentieth century. The Americans and the British were even in prewar Japan the most popular people, but this friendship was not reciprocated. Tojo, for instance, as War Minister and Prime Minister, was eager to get out of the prolonged and economically and militarily emaciating war with China. He insisted on two or three years to take to withdraw. How many years did Presiden Nixon take to get out of Vietnam? Secretary of State Hull insisted on a few months. The story goes back a little to the Spanish-American War of 1898. “By defeating the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, the United States had staked out a psychological claim to the islands….where it was bound to feel the Kaiser’s aggressive foreign policy….the United States was being sucked into the vortex of Anglo-German Realpolitik…In fact, Japanese diplomats freely urged the decision on the United States, preferring that country to any other as a neighbor in the south Pacific (A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, Yale University Press, reprinted in 1962, pages 22 and 23).” George F. Kennan’s American Diplomacy is also instructive. This is a long story, longer and far more interesting than Tolstoy’s

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