The erosion of U.S. influence along Asia's Pacific Rim and China's simultaneous rise in the region constitute a new global reality.
P. S. SURYANARAYANA in SingaporeTWO powerful images dominate the vast political horizon above the Pacific Rim of Asia today. A dramatically rising China is in constant focus, while the United States is coming under a creeping eclipse as a wounded superpower still on the prowl.
However, the U.S. is widely seen to have been wounded in one other theatre too - West Asia. Washington is, therefore, trying to shore up its waning profile in Greater East Asia. The region extends to Australia and the adjoining South Pacific area.
Until late March, Greater East Asia had not taken a close look at Washington's current tumble in Latin America. The two regions are slowly coming closer through their incipient inter-continental links under the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Surely, there is still a political hiatus between the two, but Greater East Asia is not insulated from Latin America in this age of globalisation. And, the U.S. should know that.
Of growing interest to Asia's Pacific Rim is China's latest success story of winning new friends and influencing nations in Africa. And, the trans-Atlantic links between the U.S. and Europe, which have so far lasted despite new pressures, are not decisive in shaping the dynamics of Greater East Asia.
In this big picture, the paramount importance of China to this region, a potential centre of gravity in global affairs, cannot be over-stated. However, China and other key players - Japan, South Korea and Australia - identify India and Russia as the probable proactive candidates for new roles in this region. And, one does not have to use the prism of "games theory" in international relations to notice this evolving reality behind the scenes.
In China's neighbourhood, a tell-tale story of Washington's diminishing profile is its continued exclusion from the East Asia Summit (EAS). Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has now begun to explore the possibility of signing a regional "peace pact" in order to qualify for EAS membership. With a gigantic military footprint along Asia's Pacific Rim, Washington has no soft option of acceding to this pact, which was authored by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN, a grouping of 10 countries with no great military postures or capabilities, floated the EAS in December 2005. On the security side of the ledger, admission to this forum is conditional upon the accession by potential members to ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.
Both China and Japan have given qualitatively different blessings to the EAS. Pursuing a path of political resurgence, Japan is now beginning to compete with China. And, both are eager to manage their nascent political competition, which has so far not caught much attention beyond the diplomatic parlours.
No bets have yet been placed with regard to the future of Japan-China relations. Post-imperial Japan was, at first, an accidental ally of the U.S., in the 1950s, before becoming an avid partner. Persistent popular opposition to the U.S. notwithstanding, Tokyo is today walking in lockstep with Washington. Officially pacifist Japan continues to nestle comfortably under the U.S. nuclear umbrella in the region, where both Russia and China have potent atomic arsenals. More importantly, Japan and China are in a space race too. The relevant theory is that successful space-faring nations can dominate global politics in the future as maritime powers did in the past.
The U.S. has orchestrated a chorus of "global" sentiments against China's recent success in firing a ballistic missile to destroy an earth-orbiting artificial satellite. This prompted Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to declare on March 16 that the non-threatening test was not designed against any country. China flouted no international law by carrying out carying out an anti-satellite test, he said. More emphatically, he called upon major powers to fashion a covenant to designate outer space as an extra-terrestrial zone of peace and refrain from using it for military purposes.
Japan has, in the meantime, completed deploying a network of spy satellites with a total coverage of the entire planet. Japan, too, has broken no international law. And, the stage is set for a scientific and technological competition in East Asia with long-term strategic and military overtones.
The complex web of the China-Japan competition is an emerging reality that did not earlier seem a certainty. It is in this web that the U.S. finds itself with new challenges. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops are still "forward-deployed" in Japan and South Korea. No exact figures are available at this stage of a certain flux in the U.S. "realignment" of forces in this region. So, at one plane, President George W. Bush should feel reassured by his administration's efforts to sustain America's Cold War alliance with Japan in a new format. But, at a different level, the U.S. is discovering that its strong Japan connection has come at a certain political cost.
It is not really Japan that is extracting a price. An aspect of the new strategic cost to the U.S. is that its sophisticated military presence in Greater East Asia has encouraged, not deterred, proliferation. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, as the northern part of the divided Korean peninsula is known), is a relatively small state. Yet, it sees a "strategic reason" to try and arm itself with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
On a larger canvas, time was when China did see the American alliance with Tokyo as a restraining influence on its possible desire to re-arm itself as a normal military power. However, the latest challenges in de-nuclearising the DPRK may only encourage Japan to think out of the box of old-style non-proliferation. By today's conventional wisdom, though, any future move by Japan to become a nuclear-armed state, not Tokyo's official policy as of now, should not alarm Washington. Because, it will then have a stronger ally. But this argument is fraught with the danger of ignoring the unpredictable consequences of Japanese nationalism to Washington in such a scenario. Japan being already an advanced science-and-technology power, the U.S. will need to befriend a nuclear-armed Tokyo all over again in such a possible scenario. In the diplomatic speculation behind the scenes, China too will have an altogether new Japan to deal with if it were to become a nuclear-armed power.
In all these scenario games, the current rise of China is regarded as an irreversible trend. Some U.S. experts, like Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, express doubts about the ability of China to reach the pinnacle without any political upheaval at home. Their reasoning is that any major financial crisis, seen as a possibility during the ongoing process of economic reforms, can have "political consequences" for China as a whole.
But these strands of speculation do not alter the precipitous fall of U.S. prestige in Greater East Asia and do not also affect the confidence of China's leaders like President Hu Jintao. On March 22, Washington singularly failed to prevent the DPRK from walking out of the Beijing multilateral conference over the issue of de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. The generally adversarial relationship between the DPRK and the U.S. could not absolve the latter of any blame in this regard. After all, the relevant session of those multilateral talks was made possible only by the U.S. moves to lure the DPRK with a financial bait. Surely, Washington had made no secret of its total diplomatic dependence on Beijing to carry the talks forward. Yet, it was equally no secret that progress would depend on Washington's own ability to keep Pyongyang engaged.
Two other events, with far-reaching consequences of a greater order, illustrate the dramatic erosion of U.S. influence along Asia's Pacific Rim and China's simultaneous ascendance as a nation of destiny in the region.
South Korea, a long-time U.S. ally through a historical accident and some later-day realpolitik, has now secured a new military pledge from the giant. The U.S. has agreed to transfer to South Korea "wartime control" over its own troops in its own home turf in 2012. The finer details are irrelevant to the demonstrative fact that Seoul is coming out of Washington's shadow to play an autonomous role in East Asia. Seoul's ethnic links with the DPRK can complicate the U.S.' agendas of the future if it fails to take note of the sensitivities of allies and former allies. Seoul has largely stood by the U.S. in its folly of the current occupation of Iraq.
Australia, under Prime Minister John Howard, has been more steadfast than any U.S. ally on Iraq. So, Canberra's evolving equation with Washington is, in many ways, the defining story, as of now, about the limits of American influence in this part of the world.
Finer details apart, an eloquent testimony to this is the manner in which Howard has remained firm in emphasising the need for peaceful co-existence with China in this era of globalisation. In entering into a security pact with Japan recently and in joining the U.S. and Japan earlier for "a trilateral strategic dialogue", he did not barter away Australia's right to autonomy in engaging China.
For the U.S., the varying desires of its allies for autonomous strategic objectives are not the only signs of its new weakness in this region.
Should Washington accede to ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, that too will be a sign of the taming of the wounded superpower.
Washington's relative failure to keep its regional allies subservient is matched, at the other end of the Asia-Pacific spectrum, by China's successes in forming new institutions. To offset this, India is being wooed, either directly by the U.S. or by one of its proactive lieutenants, to participate in Washington-friendly activities such as maritime exercises of the military kind.
The future direction of this very new development is not yet clear. It is, therefore, easily overshadowed by China's own efforts to create a security architecture of regional powers for regional peace and stability.
Foremost among these new institutions and mechanisms is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). This includes Russia and excludes the U.S. India and Pakistan are now observers. The SCO is expected to focus on issues of energy security and non-conventional threats such as terrorism. Authoritative Chinese sources have told this correspondent that Beijing looks upon the SCO as a potential concert of powers that could ensure Asian stability. Japan, China's close neighbour, is excluded from the SCO as of now. But Beijing has much Asia-related engagement with Tokyo in the ASEAN-created fora. Significantly, Daniel W. Drezner, a U.S. expert, has perceptively noted that China has already begun to create institutional structures outside the U.S.' reach. The gradual decline of the U.S. on matters pertaining to Asia has certainly helped China in this regard.
No less important a factor is China's articulation of its policy of "peaceful rise". Zheng Bijian, China's best-known exponent of this policy, has set out the uniqueness of this idea. In his presentation to the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., he said that "the Chinese dream" of a "peaceful rise" would be different from "the American dream" of energy-use extravagance and the like. China will not follow the old "European dream" of colonisation. Nor will China be inspired by the old "Soviet Union dream" of "arms race, expansionism and hegemony". China, in this perspective, seeks a harmonious society with all-round growth at home and a harmonious international order.
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