Maybe the End of the American Century Starts Here
by Peter Lee - China Matters
I try to eschew dramatic, click-baiting headlines, but I think current developments in Asia are a big deal. President Obama is visiting Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea.He’s not visiting the People’s Republic of China. He never planned to, because this trip is meant as an exercise in pivot-love, the bromance of Asian democracies + the United States dedicated to…
…well, let’s cut to the chase.
Dedicated to the containment of the People’s Republic of China.
The pivot to Asia, in my humble opinion, started out as a rather cynical exercise by the United States in encouraging pushback against the PRC by its aggrieved and alarmed neighbors, so that the US could step up, flourish its world’s best military and soft power muscle, and thereby claim a prime position in the evolving East Asian economic and security order.
I’m not saying the PRC hasn’t been acting like a dick in its dealings its neighbors. What I’m saying is the best way to deal with that was not by slapping up a confrontational security alliance by hyping local dustups as a challenge to global economic and security well-being.
The pivot, in other words, has foundations built on sand. It uses the rhetoric of existential threat to create expectations of unity and determination that simply aren’t there. The pivot actually relies completely on the idea that the United States, because of its military superiority, can deter the PRC before the Asian democracies really have to decide that they want to participate in a war of annihilation with the PRC for the sake of the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, Second Thomas Shoal, and Paracels, hereinafter The Worthless Islands Nobody Wants to Die For or TWINWTDF.
Personally, I think the United States would have advanced the interests of its allies, regional stability, and its relations with the PRC by measured engagement on individual issues, but that didn't happen. Instead, we got the pivot which, in a pattern familiar to grandiose American global and regional escapades, will probably provide full employment over decades for the diplomats, soldiers, and spooks tasked with trying to manage its fundamental and intractable problems while royally screwing up the localities it is ostensibly rescuing/protecting/assisting with its ostentatious intransigence.
In bad news for the United States and the pivot, it looks like the PRC has decided to call that bluff.
When Secretary of Defense Hagel visited the PRC, his counterpart, Chang Wanquan, stated:
"The China-U.S. relationship is neither comparable to U.S.-Russia ties in the Cold War, nor a relationship between container and contained. China's development can't be contained by anyone."
This statement is not just bravado and bullshit, in my opinion. It reflects the PRC’s considered response to the threat of the pivot.
Specifically, the PRC is stating that the containment model doesn’t apply because the PRC is deeply integrated into the global economy and, indeed, into the economies of its putative adversaries. The PRC does not recapitulate the containment of the USSR envisioned by George Kennan; for Kennan, the USSR had intentionally isolated itself and sought to prop up its rule by invocation of the Western threat, so economic isolation automatically underpinned the military element of containment.
Also, I think the PRC position is based upon the perception that there are no existential issues involved in the PRC’s conflicts with its neighbors. Nobody wants to upset the global economic applecart by starting World War III over TWINWTDF.
So the PRC is signaling it does not fear the pivot. Or, more accurately, the pivot has produced genuine disadvantages and costs to the PRC, but it has decided it is in its interests to push back, strategically and systematically, instead of trying to modify its behavior to suit the US and its pivoteers. That’s why the PRC excluded Japan from the naval fleet review planned at Qingdao and, when the US pulled out to demonstrate its support for its pivot partner, cancelled the whole exercise instead of pursuing some face-saving compromise.
If pressed, the PRC will seek to demonstrate the weakness of the pivot and the hollowness of the US military-based deterrent by pounding away at its antagonists at their most vulnerable points, specifically their economic links to the PRC and their assets inside the PRC (and, perhaps, letting its courts seize a Japanese ore ship to satisfy a 77-year old legal claim).
Unfortunate developments in the Ukraine, I think, have a lot to do with the recent evolution of strategic jostling.
The PRC, while politely appalled by the Russian annexation of Crimea, also noted that the United States and EU quietly parted ways on the need to confront Russia even with sanctions, let alone militarily and apparently essayed some mischief of its own, interfering with the Philippines' resupply of its detachment of marines on the Ayungin Shoal.
The United States, bearing in mind the rather dismal picture of Western resolve exhibited on the matter of Ukraine and setting the table for President Obama's Asian trip, decided it needed to double down on unity with its pivot partners, coming down more explicitly and categorically on the side of the Philippines and Japan on their island issues (for details see my Asia Times Online article attached below).
Also, I believe, the absolute identification of the US with the interests of the shaky and compromised Ukraine regime, its refusal to engage with Russia on the crisis that the US-supported coup had created, and its adventurism in trying to destabilize Russia by attacking its oligarchs with sanctions served further notice, if any was needed, that in times of genuine crisis when the boot might be put to a geopolitical adversary, US professions of honest brokerdom and responsible leadership in dealing with inconvenient “strategic competitors” were meaningless.
As a fitting symbol of the US “all in” determination to support the Kiev regime and whitewash its deep and disturbing flaws, I give readers this immortal image of Joe Biden defiantly giving the grip and grin with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of Ukraine’s “ultranationalist” Svoboda party for the cameras of the world press.
Add to that the US decision that enabling Japanese remilitarization, symbolized by collective self defense, is an indispensable component of the pivot. The US looks to be too deep in Japan’s embrace to restrain Japan’s undeniable independent inclinations in regional policy (undeniable, that is if one looks closely at Japan’s discrete adventurism in the Philippines, with North Korea, and the DPP opposition in Taiwan) and, if it extracts itself to try to play the “honest broker” its efforts will be equivocal and less than effective.
G2—a mutually supportive and productive engagement between the PRC and the US—never lived, even though Hillary Clinton took pains to declare it dead. Now, the “honest broker” ship has sailed, for good, I think, courtesy of the deepened US commitment to the pivot.
The PRC’s increased willingness to defy the pivot and chip away at US deterrent credibility by attacking the interests of its allies--and its determination to test its ability to endure the real diplomatic, economic, and political costs of festering hostility with its neighbors against the resolve of the region and disapproval of the United States--is, I believe, related to the fact that the pivot and Japanese security activism has exacerbated a lot of the PRC’s festering disputes with its neighbors.
The PRC can expect a series of crises related to the pivot and emboldened neighbors in the upcoming years, including a possible loss of the Philippine arbitration over the nine-dash line, continued friction with Japan (which Japan will welcome if not incite in order to keep PRC firmly in the ranks of Asia’s scary bad guy), and also on the radar, the possibility that the viscerally anti-PRC DPP will win the presidential elections in 2016 and, if they lose, subject Taiwan to a Maidan-style political crisis.
To this uninviting mix add the prospect of eight years of Hillary Clinton, a confirmed and enthusiastic panda-slugger and pivot proponent, in the White House, and the growing credibility of the PRC-excluding Trans Pacific Partnership, prospects for favorable developments for the PRC in its East Asian dealings are rather slim.
So it looks to me like the PRC is no longer solely relying on the "long game"--the idea that it could dodge confrontation with the United States and "slice the salami" in the South China Sea until its demographic, military, and economic sway over East Asia would appear insurmountable and the region and US would quietly reconcile itself to the idea that the PRC should be calling most of the shots.
Instead, it looks like the PRC has decided that, rather than waiting for the crises to erupt and have to engage in risky adventures in the South China Sea or the Senkakus or, God forbid, actually have to do something about its intransigent stance on Taiwan de jure independence, it will pre-emptively go on the offensive and chip away at the foundations of the pivot and the credibility of the US deterrent by fomenting selected confrontations on its own, more favorable terms.
I’m not expecting open confrontation with the US, by the way—it will be the pre-eminent military force in Asia for the foreseeable future—and superficial comity will prevail. But I do not expect it to be a particular fun time to be a US ally. The cost of membership in the pivot, in other words, will be continued PRC pressure and harassment and discrete economic warfare.
Asian countries that hedge their bets and eschew active membership in the pivot, on the other hand, might do rather well in their dealings with the PRC.
Collateral damage of this PRC strategy may involve abandoning the World War II victor’s dispensation, which granted the United States the central role in Asian security and was promoted by the PRC when it still appeared that the US might constrain Japan as well as the PRC. Shorn of its unique moral and security role among the Asian nations (with their burgeoning economies and defense budgets), the US may find itself increasingly perceived as an economic competitor and source of security instability, rather than the font of prosperity and security it imagines itself.
That’s why I’m saying President Obama’s trip to Asia might serve as the marker for the end of the “American Century” and the beginning of the “Pacific Century”.
In passing, I guess I should address President Obama’s explicit statement that the Senkakus were covered by the US-Japan Security Treaty.
Nothing particularly new here; Secretary of State Clinton affirmed coverage in 2010 and I think it’s been reaffirmed incessantly since then.
Now, if President Obama had declared that the US regarded the Senkakus as Japanese sovereign territories (he didn’t; he carefully described them as territories administered by Japan), the PRC would have justifiably gone apeshit.
I am getting a little tired of repeating this point, but Nixon returned the Senkakus to Japanese administrative control with the understanding that Japan would negotiate their sovereignty with “China”, especially Taiwan which, by any interpretation is the most plausible candidate. By nationalizing three of the islands in 2012, the Japanese government basically spit on that deal and provided a certain degree of encouragement to PRC hopes that the US might act as a real “honest broker” over the islands. Not to be, in my opinion.
If one wants to explore the real mystery of the Senkakus, their role in Japanese security adventurism, and what the PRC expects of the tenor and integrity of US-PRC relations in a Hillary Clinton presidency, I invite readers to reflect on this passage from the Japan Times in August 2010 (link no longer available; if anyone can find it behind the paywall in the archive, please let me know):
The Obama administration has decided not to state explicitly that the Senkaku Islands, which are under Japan's control but claimed by China, are subject to the Japan-US security treaty, in a shift from the position of George W Bush, sources said Monday.
The administration of Barack Obama has already notified Japan of the change in policy, but Tokyo may have to take counter-measures in light of China's increasing activities in the East China Sea, according to the sources.
In other words, the Obama administration was ready to sidle closer to the PRC’s side on the Senkaku Islands. But a few weeks later, PRC relations blew up with the detention of the Chinese fishing boat off the Senkakus, the rare earth “crisis”, and Hillary Clinton’s affirmation that the Senkakus were, surprise, covered by the treaty. I think history will judge that the whole episode was a “counter-measure”, a provocation if you will, by Clinton and Seiji Maehara (Maehara insisted over the objections of the cabinet that the Chinese captain be tried in Japanese court, guaranteeing an international incident).
With this lengthy preamble, here is my Asia Times Online article from April 22, 2014:
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