Responding to Structural
Change in the Asia-Pacific
Remarks
to an Australian National University - East-West Center Conference
Ambassador
Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Washington,
DC 14 April 2015
These days, people who talk
about the Indo-Pacific region – the arc of Asia from Japan through China to
Pakistan – always begin by noting that it's becoming the world’s center of
economic gravity. That’s true. The region’s economy is now half again as
large as America’s or Europe’s. In
purchasing power terms it’s twice as big.
It accounts for nearly half the world’s manufacturing. It is where the world’s supply chains
converge. It’s growing faster than
anywhere else. And it’s increasingly
Sino-centric.
Three years ago, Indo-Pacific
states began to spend more on their armed forces than Europeans did. With the exception – so far – of Japan, major
powers there are boosting their defense budgets at double-digit rates to cope
with threats within their region – from each other and from U.S. forces
there. None is yet attempting to develop
the capacity to project force into other regions of the world. But rising tensions with the world’s only
global military power – the United States – are pushing China in this
direction.
America has been part of the
Indo-Pacific state system since 1853, when Admiral Perry’s “black ships” forced
their way into Japan. Since 1945, the
United States has been the dominant power and arbiter of politico-military
relationships in the Western Pacific.
But the countries of the Indo-Pacific region have become too big and
dynamic to be regulated by any single power.
Many continue to welcome American protection. But, increasingly, reflecting their growing
wealth and self-esteem, they resist U.S. guidance and chart their own
course. The status quo is
unsustainable.
As balances of power within the
region and between its nations and the world evolve to erode the Pax Americana,
the risk of war by inadvertence is rising.
Americans and Chinese alike incline to the conceit that it is their
bilateral rivalry – rather than interactions between China and its neighbors – that drive this dynamic. But good relations between China and the
United States do not guarantee good Chinese relations with the other nations of
the Indo-Pacific. Conversely, if China
has good relations with its neighbors, it will have good relations with the
United States. This is why China’s
relations with its periphery have global impact.
The squabbles over borders that
are driving the region’s current arms races were suppressed by the Cold War and
the long American hegemony in Asia but have little, if anything, to do with the
United States. Neither are they
new. History is the remembrance of
mostly lamentable events. Asia has a
history surplus. The past there
seems never to be past. It’s just unfinished business waiting to be
put right.
China’s neighbors are without
exception committed to enhancing their prosperity though close connections to
China’s burgeoning wealth. But those
with territorial disputes with China are understandably apprehensive about how
Beijing might use its surging military power with respect to them. They turn to the United States and each other
for reassurance that China will not bully them.
The way for China to ensure that its neighbors’ craving for safety does
not become acute anxiety and active antagonism is to manage relations with them
so as to minimize their perception that they might be intimidated or humiliated
by China’s superior power. To accomplish
this, China must, at a minimum, establish mutually agreed borders with its
neighbors. This is something China can
only do with them directly, not with or through the United States.
For its part, the United States
is anxious about being excluded from Asia’s emerging Sino-centric economic
order but gratified to be wanted militarily by traditional allies and friends
there. Standing up to military bullies
is something Americans think we know how to do.
Besides, positing China as a “peer competitor” provides a cure for enemy
deprivation syndrome. And it’s good for
the defense budget, which feeds the military-industrial complex, which has
become a central prop of our political economy.
China’s challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Western Pacific enables military Keynesianism, the only kind
of economic stimulus and jobs program the U.S. Congress will support.
So we Americans are happy to
relieve Asians of the need to give serious consideration to what they might do
on their own to cope with China and content to help them manage the tensions
their disputes with China continue to fuel.
We have no direct role in these disputes and cannot solve them. We are flattered by the role of
protector. It fits with our militaristic
approach to foreign policy. Americans
have become accustomed to supremacy in Asia.
We relish being needed.
But, in many ways, the United
States is turning out to be a strategic one-trick pony. All we Americans seem to know how to do in
foreign policy is what we learned to do during the Cold War. That experience taught us to guarantee the
security of others by deploying our forces as tripwires, declaring challenges
to their security to be challenges to our own, and promising to use nuclear
weapons to defend them without necessarily consulting them about this. American strategy during the Cold War was to
isolate our adversary and deny it the influence to which its power would
otherwise have entitled it.
So the formative foreign policy
experience of the United States involved ever more militarized struggle with a
global ideological and geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union. This explains why the American response to
China’s emergence as a global economic and regional military power has been
almost entirely martial. We have made
countering Chinese power and perpetuating our quasi-imperial, post-1945
dominance of the Western Pacific the organizing principles of our Asia
policy. To this end, we are drawing
anxious Asian nations under our wing and extending implied security guarantees
to them, posturing combatively, and preparing for prolonged confrontation and
war with China, nuclear or not.
This is not quite what our
allies and friends in the Asia-Pacific signed up for. None is confident of U.S. resolve or staying
power. But all, to one extent or
another, base their national strategies on the expectation that America will
remain a formidable, if not dominant factor in the Asian-Pacific balance of
power. That is a reasonable expectation.
But America’s security partners
do not want to be subsumed in Sino-American rivalry. They seek security without antagonism, still
less war, with China. They know that
they must come to terms with – they must accommodate – the reality of China’s
rising power. They are doing what they
can to strengthen themselves and to ensure they are not alone. They want our backing to enhance their
independence and bargaining position vis-à-vis China, not to confront or
provoke it.
Unfortunately, America’s impulse
to interpose its forces between others and China, rather than fostering diplomatic dispute resolution,
inadvertently creates moral hazard.
Moral hazard is the condition that obtains when one party is emboldened
to take risks it would not otherwise take because it knows another party will
shoulder the consequences and the costs of failure. We have seen this dynamic
at work most clearly in the confrontations between China and other claimants to
islands, rocks, and reefs in the East and South China Seas.
U.S. policies aimed at
deterrence rather than dispute resolution
embolden protected claimants to harden their positions and to avoid
consideration of negotiated settlement of their differences with China. The security guarantees these policies embody
imply that a clash between China and one of its neighbors could trigger an
American attack on China. The U.S.
“pivot” to the Asia-Pacific thus creates the illusion of American-led
collective defense even as it imposes no restraint or accountability on any of
the beneficiaries of American protection.
This posture preserves the United States’ role as regional hegemon by
ensuring that all in the region would suffer should China or any of the nations
on its periphery misjudge or mismanage existing disputes.
Five years into the “pivot,” it
is becoming clear that this kind of defense “rebalancing” by the United States,
far from constraining China, is instead arousing it. Rebalancing – still more rhetorical than real
– has aggravated rather than moderated regional confrontations. The well-intentioned U.S. effort to manage
tensions has demonstrably frustrated
rather than promoted diplomatic solutions to the disputes that threaten
stability in the region.
The extension of an avowed or
implied American military shield to each and every opponent of a Chinese
territorial claim has helped propel China into patrol-boat diplomacy and power
projection through island-building.
China is now engaged in measures short of war but bereft of diplomacy
that neither the United States nor those it seeks to protect can effectively
counter. The absence of any effort by
any party to do more than freeze the status quo perpetuates the possibility of
armed conflict that could ignite the first trans-Pacific war since 1941. Meanwhile, official Washington’s intermittent
denials that the United States is attempting to contain China or that it seeks
to frustrate Chinese initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
bring to mind Mark Twain=s
comment that one should “Never believe anything until it has been officially
denied.@
China’s capacity to conduct an
active defense of its periphery and its current territorial holdings in its
near seas is growing apace with its
economy. The military balance off the
China coast has been shifting inexorably against the United States. Strengthened Chinese defenses are already
beginning to deprive America of the ability to respond to clashes between China
and its neighbors with counterattacks from China’s near seas. This is forcing the U.S. military to prepare
to fire at China from farther away, that is, from outside the “first island
chain.” This would place China’s
neighbors – including all the counter-claimants to land features in the East
and South China Seas – forward of the U.S. naval line of battle should war
break out in the region. That makes
these neighbors not only the probable cause of potential Sino-American conflict
but a major part of the battlefield in any such war.
These trends are a convincing
refutation – if one is really needed – of the notion that the answer to the
region’s intensifying security dilemmas should or could be escalating American
efforts to sustain military supremacy along the frontiers between a steadily wealthier and stronger China and
an economically ever-more Sino-centric Asia-Pacific. Time as well as geography work to China’s
advantage. America may be holding its
own, but China is on the upswing and on its home ground. Distance attenuates power even as short lines
of communication augment it. Counterattack is inherently more demanding than
active defense, especially when it involves the projection of power across a
wide ocean.
The bargaining power of China’s
neighbors in disputes with it has been receding. It is more likely to continue to ebb than to
grow. The military balance between China
and its neighbors has been shifting in China’s favor. It is more likely to tip against the United
States over time than toward it.
Realistically, therefore, the
protection the United States can offer those with disputes with China is a
wasting asset best leveraged now rather than later. It should be seen not as a long-term answer
to the challenges of rising Chinese power.
Instead, it should be exploited to settle issues on more favorable terms
now than will be possible later and to eliminate irritants to nationalism at
home and in China rather than allowing them to fester. If China needs to settle its disputes with
its neighbors in order to calm their mounting apprehensions of it, those
neighbors also have compelling reasons to resolve their disputes with China
sooner rather than later.
China’s neighbors should
therefore see and use American power as backing for peaceful efforts to resolve
disputes with China, not as reassurance that they need make no serious effort
to settle these disputes through negotiations.
The “rebalancing” of U.S. global strategy toward the Indo-Pacific known
as the “pivot” is timely and appropriate, given the rise of the region to
global centrality. But enhanced
attention to Asia should be designed and implemented to lower military tensions
between the nations of the Indo-Pacific, not to lock these tensions in, still
less to escalate them. Addressing those
tensions is key to a mutually agreeable rather than antagonistic relationship
between the United States and China. So
it is in the interest of all concerned.
No one should underestimate
either American power or obduracy. I am
confident that, as undesirable as this would be, the United States is fully capable of
following a course of military confrontation with China, leading to a dangerous
global contest for supremacy, the outcome of which is far from certain. This seems to be the bracing future that some
of those who conceived the “pivot to Asia” anticipate. It could prove to be a case of
self-fulfilling pessimism and paranoia.
It is hard to argue that this is not now the direction in which things
are moving. Only fools, warmongers, and
complacently overconfident members of the military-congressional- industrial
complex could find that encouraging.
All the more reason for the
states of the Asia-Pacific to make use of America’s great power to facilitate
rather than delay or obstruct mutually beneficial resolution of their disputes
with China. What is inherently at stake in
these disputes is trivial. It is worth a
tough diplomatic struggle but not a war.
Were the nations of the Indo-Pacific to leverage American backing to
make their peace with China, they would create a more secure and prosperous
world for themselves as well as the United States.
This conference could make a
contribution to achieving that better future by considering how diplomatic
processes designed to resolve issues and set aside the prospect of war might
work. I would be happy to begin that
discussion now by responding to questions and comments.
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