|
If anyone had doubts that the much ballyhooed 2011 pivot to Asia was not much of
a move, and that all the hot spots continue to be in the near, not far, east
(east viewed from an American vantage point), the recent news should have
removed these doubts. Reports suggest that the first international trip the
President is planning to make at the start of his second term will include stops
in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan. Secretary of State John Kerry was on the
phone with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders even before he reached his desk.
Making peace here is said to be one of the only two international issues that
President Obama is emotionally engaged in and sees as part of his legacy. (The
other is equally quixotic: moving toward zero nukes – by further reducing the
strategic arms the US and Russia are holding, thus “inspiring” other nations to
follow.)
Middle East: A Region Vexed by Conflict and Turmoil
Syria is crying out for action; Iran is moving closer to making a nuclear bomb
that the US Administration is committed to preventing it from building; Pakistan
is accelerating its military nuclear programme and is a troubling and unstable
‘ally’; and several Arab regimes are tittering or threatened, including the oil
suppliers to the west. Like it or not, ending the war in Iraq and scaling it
back in Afghanistan, will not extricate the US from the very vexing and pressing
problems in this region.
Why the Pivot is Symbolic
Some critics argue that the 2011 pivot to Asia (widely read as meaning China)
was mainly symbolic and part of a typical positioning for the re-election
campaign. These critics point out that all the pivot involved was the moving of
250 Marines to Darwin, Australia, some 2,600 miles from China, which has roughly
1.3 million troops. Also, a few war ships were moved from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. (Actually, more was done, including adding or expanding military
alliances with several nations in the region, joint military exercises and new
diplomatic initiatives, but still not much in the scale of such deployment on
other fronts.)
The reason the Far East was chosen, the same critics argue, was that the Obama
Administration, like all Democratic ones, is forever facing criticism from
Republicans for being weak on defence. Given that the Obama Administration had
very little to show for what it considered ‘its’ war in Afghanistan, and that
the Iraq it left behind was floundering, facing up to China seemed like a safe
bet. A report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies adds that
some view Obama’s Asia pivot as an attempt to, “deflect attention from [the]
high unemployment rate and weak economic growth,” and “impress voters and
counter his Republican rivals,” with tough-on-China rhetoric ahead of his 2012
re-election campaign. Now that the elections are over, the US should be ready to
acknowledge that China is not a major threat to it or its global role, at least
in the near future, and that the region is not as easy to deal with as some seem
to have assumed.
Dragon Slayers vs. Panda Huggers
Although there are great differences in the assessments of China’s developing
military capabilities and intentions, both Dragon Slayers and Panda Huggers (the
nicknames given to China hawks and doves, respectively) agree that it will be
many years before China would be able to challenge the US as a regional power,
and decades before it might become a global strategic power. The hawkish Robert
Ross, a China scholar at Boston College, finds that, “China’s ability to impose
increased costs on US naval forces does not provide it with a war-winning
capability vis-à-vis the United States…Well into the twenty-first century the
United States can retain conventional military superiority in maritime East
Asia.” Robert J Lieber, professor of international affairs at Georgetown
University, finds that the emergence of China as a “plausible counterpart or
peer competitor” to the US is a, “very long-term possibility.” “There is no
serious military man in China or in the United States who thinks that China has
any prayer of dominating the US militarily in the coming three or four decades,”
states Kenneth Lieberthal, leading China expert at Brookings.
China’s Rise to World Domination: Rough Road Ahead
Many who worry about China’s rapid economic rise, at least implicitly, assume
that a big economy translates into the nation’s capacity to field a large
military force. However, such notions ignore that China’s economy, expected to
catch up with the US in 2035 (not exactly tomorrow) if it continues to grow at a
rapid rate (which it no longer does), must also feed, cloth, house and otherwise
service four times as many people than the US. Indeed, China’s per capita income
is $8,400 – a figure closer to that of much poorer countries such as Algeria and
Ecuador. The US income per capita is $48,100, and the gap between the two
countries is expected to persist, with the US per capita GDP remaining nearly
three times that of China through 2050.
In addition, China is beset by major domestic challenges due to severe
environmental problems, a rapidly aging population, high levels of corruption,
growing political tensions, as well as rising expectations as a greater share of
the population seeks to achieve the same affluence that urban centers along the
coasts have gained. A regime whose legitimacy is no longer based on communism,
but on the promise of the good life defined as materialistic affluence, has
little foundation on which to base a call on its people to make sacrifices for
international ambitions. Indeed, there are no signs that current Chinese
ideology, despite some belligerent statements by some generals and public
intellectuals, calls for world domination.
The fact that China laid claims to much of the South China Sea because it
considers its resources vital to its economy is not an issue. Such claims are
often made. Japan and South Korea are at loggerheads over a set of islets in the
Sea of Japan. Russia and Canada recently laid claims to a comparably vast area
of the Arctic Ocean. Moreover, in the recent past, China has typically chosen to
settle such differences over borders through negotiations.
True, there have been some skirmishes, but they have been so far extremely minor
(Chinese boats are believed to have cut the cables of a gas and oil survey ship
in Vietnamese waters, and the Philippines attempted to detain some Chinese
fishermen. China’s vessels locked its radar on Japanese ships). However, if
China would resort to force to capture parts of its surrounding waters, this
would amount to a sea change. The nations of the region count on the United
States to help sustain a world order in which nations do not use their military
to grab territories. Indeed, most nations of the world would be troubled if this
principle would go by the wayside.
At the same time, whether the US is willing to go to war over a bunch of tiny,
uninhabited piles of rocks, is a question that must be carefully weighed before
it signals that capturing these islands would represent the crossing of some
kind of a red line. At issue are not the islands themselves, but the resources
the sea holds, which are vital to China’s future, whose economy depends on a
secure import of large scale energy resources and raw materials. Will the United
States seek to choke off such supplies, at least as vital to China as the import
of oil from the Middle East is to the US, or look for ways to enable China to
serve this core interest while making accommodations with its neighbours? Will
the United States turn this issue into a ground for a power struggle or a
starting point for serious dialogue? As Graham Allison recently put it, “leaders
in both China and the US must begin talking to each other much more candidly
about likely confrontations and flash points. Even more difficult and painful,
both must begin making substantial adjustments to accommodate the irreducible
requirements of the other.”
Asian Nations: Wait and Watch
Above all, Asian nations, friend and foe, are watching the US’s dealings with
its allies and friends in the Middle East. If they are going to be left to fend
on their own – Iran to acquire nuclear bombs, Pakistan to proceed as it
currently is, Jihadists to take control of Syria and overthrow other governments
(such as that of Bahrain and Jordan), Salafists to push the Muslim Brotherhood
governments in Egypt and Tunisia to stricter Islamist rule and clashing with
secularists, and, above all, Saudi Arabia to go by the way of the rest of the
region – Asian nations will inevitably conclude that the US is an unreliable
ally. This is true for South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, among
others. In the next few years, the pivot to the Far East will remain largely an
empty phrase and the course of the US alliances in much of the region will be
determined, oddly, in the place where it is reported to be scaling back, that
is, in the Near East.
|