By
Robert D. Kaplan
Significant
movements in world affairs often go unnoticed by the
media. For what fits inside the strictures of hard
news are usually dramatic statements by politicians,
dramatic actions by military units or dramatic
economic shifts. But what also really changes
history are the gradual developments that accrue
over time. That's one of the reasons you are liable
to learn more by reading serious books or scholarly
reports than by reading newspapers. Asia is a case
in point.
The
news about Asia is relentlessly repetitive and often
insignificant, however tragic in human terms
sometimes. Indeed, the recent building
collapse in Bangladesh was heartrending, but
geopolitically it was of marginal importance. The
jousting between China and Japan over disputed
islands in the East China Sea is important -- but
after reading about it for months on end,
unrevealing. The same with the islands
in the South China Sea. We already know that
Japan has a more activist prime minister and for
years his country has been shedding
its quasi-pacifism, if only the media would
finally tell us more.
So
what is really going on in Asia, slowly and
undramatically in news terms but critically in
historical terms? It is the demonstrable tendency of
Asian countries to strengthen ties with each other
rather than solely depend on the United States for
balancing against China. According to the Center for
a New American Security in Washington, a centrist
think tank with which I am affiliated, the growing
momentum of bilateral links of nearly every country
with nearly every other one is nothing less than an
"emerging Asian power web." Over the past decade,
this expanding network of relationships within the
Indo-Pacific has included high-level defense visits,
bilateral security arrangements, joint operations
and military exercises, arms sales and military
education programs.
The
bottom line: As Asian countries -- from India to
Vietnam to Indonesia to Malaysia to Japan and so on
-- arise out of poverty, guerrilla war and
stagnation, they are forging robust relationships
with each other, providing a whole new security
dynamic to go alongside the U.S.-China rivalry. The
Asian power web is also an offshoot of the emergence
of midlevel powers, which are now forging deeper
links with each other -- thus "widening the
analytical aperture," in the words of the report,
through which international relations must be
viewed.
Keep
in mind that by 2025, Asia is likely to account for
almost half of the world's economic output and four
of the world's top 10 economies: China, India, Japan
and Indonesia. Moreover, Asian investment in the
United States and U.S. investment in Asia have
doubled over the past decade. To the extent that any
one part of the world is more important than any
other, Asia should now dominate American foreign
policy thinking, especially since the war in Iraq is
over, the one in Afghanistan
is winding down and the likelihood
of boots on the ground in Syria is small. The
first-term Obama
administration's "pivot" to Asia was less a bold
departure than an acknowledgment of ongoing
trends.
To
be sure, the United States has been busy negotiating
increased access and presence arrangements in the
Indo-Pacific, notably rotating up to 2,500 Marines
through northern Australia and rotating up to four
new littoral combat ships through Singapore. By
2020, the ratio of American warship deployments
between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans will change
from 50-50 to 60-40.
But
as the emerging Asian power web reveals, America's
renewed emphasis on the region represents only one
level of the strategic changes afoot, especially as
the size of the American Navy reaches a plateau. To
wit, India is training Vietnamese submariners. Japan
has signed a security arrangement with Australia.
Japan has also increased its high-level exchanges
with South Korea by more than 50 percent since 2000.
Indonesia and Malaysia have more than doubled their
respective high-level exchanges with India and
Singapore during the past decade. Vietnam and
Australia now regularly exchange high-level military
delegations. Vietnam and Japan have announced their
intention to accelerate defense cooperation, as have
Vietnam and India. Perhaps more significantly, trade
between India and the countries of Southeast Asia
increased 37 percent from 2011 to 2012 alone. This
is part of a proliferation of intraregional foreign
trade agreements.
Some
of this may just be fluff. Politicians announce many
initiatives at summits that rarely amount to
anything. And whatever the intentions, meetings
alone do not change the dynamics of raw military and
economic power. Moreover, all these nations are
disparate and divided, and China has numerous levers
to use against each separately, and against such a
fragile webwork of smaller powers. So one must ask:
Can this new webwork function without the United
States as a ringleader?
Moreover,
despite this flurry of new bilateral defense
cooperation, can any of these countries really fight
in a war? Only Australia, India and Vietnam have
been tested on the battlefield in decades, and even
then, not in a meaningful sense so far as the
scaled-up use of air and naval forces is concerned.
Nothing reveals military inadequacies like actual
combat. That's why the
United States is so dominant. Say what you will
about Iraq and Afghanistan and drone
strikes, but they have continued for more than a
decade to hone the skills that matter most in the
U.S. military. Therefore, short of an outbreak of
hostilities, one of the best ways to judge this
emerging Asian power web is by the quality of joint
military exercises, hours of flying time of fighter
jets and so forth.
But
maybe there are other ways to evaluate what is
happening. As the report states, countries in the
region "have begun hedging against" various
uncertainties "by deepening engagement with
like-minded states" in order to build a diversified
"portfolio" that "reduces the risk of overinvesting"
in the military power of the United States or in the
economic power of China. Of course, a number of
these bilateral agreements constitute diplomatic
superficialities -- but that's how many serious
relationships begin in the first place. Give the
process time, in other words.
The
point is that Asian countries are scared, even as
they have become more powerful. They are concerned
about China's regional economic dominance, despite
China's
own economic problems. And they are worried that
the United States might not have the staying power
over the long run to remain militarily engaged in
the Pacific Basin to the degree that it has in the
past: budget cuts, sequestration, a history of
abandoning regional partners and perhaps even a
vague isolationist impulse are all things emanating
from Washington that cause anxiety among Asian
allies.
This
desire to start the process of hedging against a
one-dimensional, hub-and-spoke approach to
Washington and Beijing comes at a historical moment
when various Asian countries have the wherewithal,
conceivably, to act in unison. After all, India is
emerging as an authentic midlevel power with a
sizable military -- with great power pretensions
deeper into the new century. Japan is adopting a
normal, non-apologetic attitude toward its own,
altogether considerable military might. Australia,
always a feisty military power with a heroic
tradition to go with it, has begun to see beyond
American military unipolarity. Vietnam and Malaysia,
with all their recent economic and domestic
political travails, have emerged in the past
half-century from long periods of internal wars and
rebellions to project power out into the South China
Sea. Indonesia has yet to fall apart and, meanwhile,
is becoming an economy of scale in its own right.
Singapore has always punched above its weight
militarily and has always been eager to network with
other states.
The
emerging Asian power web is another aspect of the
so-called rise of the rest, as opposed to the
continued dominance of the United States and Europe.
More specifically, it shows how the era of Western
domination of the Pacific and Indian oceans,
initiated by the Portuguese at the end of the 15th
century, is continuing to ebb as China rises and
other Asian states draw closer in some ways to each
other.
The
question now becomes: Will China continue to rise?
Or, will it falter domestically in the face of an
excruciatingly complex economic transition? And how
might that affect regional power dynamics? The last
place to look for such gradual developments may be
in the
newspapers.
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