Avoiding the “Thucydides Trap” in the Indo-Pacific
Intervention at the 8th Sino-US Colloquium of the
Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies,
The George Washington University
Ambassador Chas W.
Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute, Brown University
Washington, D.C. 5
October 2015
The
Indo-Pacific has emerged as the global center of economic gravity. So refocusing American attention to it makes
sense. But, even though the region’s
increased influence at the global level is not political and is only marginally
military, the "rebalance" is almost entirely military. Its economic element -- TPP -- looks like an after-thought
premised on denial of the entrenched centrality of China in the regional
supply-chain economy. And the so-called
"pivot" or "rebalance" to Asia lacks a coherent diplomatic
component.
So – not
to mince words – a focus on Asia makes sense but the way
U.S. attention is being shifted there does not.
The "rebalance" will not work.
Far from avoiding the "Thucydides trap," it walks right
into it. It is likely to be seen in
retrospect as an historic blunder that did not so much deter war as lay the
basis for it.
First, a "rebalance" aimed at
sustaining American dominance in Asia is military fantasy. It posits a perpetual American upper hand in
a contest with China to control areas adjacent to it and very far away from
America. This is a contest in which
China enjoys the inherently decisive advantages of proximity and a defensive
mission. The United States can no more
continue to control the near seas of a modernized, powerful China than
China or any other foreign nation can
hope to control the seas offshore the United States. Already, U.S. forces are being forced back to
firing positions outside the so-called "first island chain."
Second, China’s neighbors want American
help to hedge against Chinese power even as they strive to reach an
accommodation to it. But the "rebalance"
does not enlist these neighbors in a coherent effort to either balance or
engage China. And it doesn't aggregate
their strength to that of the United States to either end.
If the United
States is prepared to take on the task of balancing China’s military power
pretty much by itself, why should China’s smaller neighbors make much effort to
do so? If America is prepared to go to
war with China over disputes these smaller neighbors espouse but are themselves
unprepared to address militarily, why should they seek to settle these disputes
or exercise caution in their quarrels with China? If reliance on U.S. deterrent power leaves
these neighbors with no perceived need to do anything but hang tough on
territorial claims, what alternative to coercive measures is available to
China?
The most
egregious instance of this moral hazard is the Philippines but it is apparent
in Japan and Korea as well. Today’s
intra-Asian disputes are a pointed reminder that the war Thucydides wrote about
was catalyzed by the quarrels of allies of Sparta and Athens (Megara and
Corinth), not by disputes directly between those two great powers. (Perhaps it's also relevant that the less
risk averse and more belligerent of the two was Athens, the democracy, not
Sparta, the autocracy.)
Third, the military antagonism inherent
in the "rebalance" and the inevitable Chinese counters to it skew the
overall Sino-American relationship toward zero-sum competition. This entails major opportunity costs. For example, rather than focusing on building
frameworks to serve common interests like the protection of commercial shipping
in the heavily trafficked South China Sea, the rebalance promotes the planning
of naval maneuvers, blockades, and other forms of warfare there. Rather than facilitating the peaceful
resolution of territorial disputes by the claimants, it embeds these disputes
in Sino-American rivalry and promotes their militarization. Rather than working together to reform or
replace outmoded international financial institutions and practices, it
presumes that China and America are at cross purposes. And so forth.
Some degree of
military wariness between the United States and China is both natural and
prudent but active antagonism is unnecessary and damaging to both. The U.S. and Chinese armed forces each have a
mission to sustain a peaceful order in the space between us. We need to focus on how to build and buttress
stability in the Indo-Pacific region based on the independence and territorial
integrity of its smaller states, rather than the hegemony of the United States,
China, or both.
Stability
requires a balance in the region grounded in its smaller states' prosperity and
power of self-defense, supplemented – not
replaced – by the power of the United States and/or
others, including China and Japan. It demands
an emphasis on the resolution of disputes rather than efforts to freeze them,
unresolved and ever ready to explode, through military deterrence. And it necessitates the parallel pursuit of
common interests and opportunities by the United States and China, not just efforts
by each side separately to mitigate misperceptions and avoid potential conflicts.
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