Asia's New Battlefield

The USA, China and the Struggle for the Western Pacific

Richard Javad Heydarian

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783603152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This compact, insightful book offers an up-to-the-minute guide to understanding the evolution of maritime territorial disputes in East Asia, exploring their legal, political-security and economic dimensions against the backdrop of a brewing Sino-American rivalry for hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. It traces the decades-long evolution of Sino-American relations in Asia, and how this pivotal relationship has been central to prosperity and stability in one of the most dynamics regions of the world. It also looks at how middle powers – from Japan and Australia to India and South Korea – have joined the fray, trying to shape the trajectory of the territorial disputes in the Western Pacific, which can, in turn, alter the future of Asia – and ignite an international war that could re-configure the global order. The book examines how the maritime disputes have become a litmus test of China's rise, whether it has and will be peaceful or not, and how smaller powers such as Vietnam and the Philippines have been resisting Beijing's territorial ambitions. Drawing on extensive discussions and interviews with experts and policy-makers across the Asia-Pacific region, the book highlights the growing geopolitical significance of the East and South China Sea disputes to the future of Asia – providing insights into how the so-called Pacific century will shape up.

1 | THE GREAT CONVERGENCE: SINO-AMERICAN SYMBIOSIS

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Sun Tzu

One must change one’s tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.

Napoleon Bonaparte

With the decisive collapse of the USSR in 1991, the USA entered a period of unparalleled global dominance, reinforcing its long-held bid to achieve full-spectrum hegemony. Interestingly, the American-centred unipolar order emerged amid a largely symbiotic relationship between Washington and Beijing – an astonishing result of significant reconfigurations in the strategic orientation of both powers, aided by a historic leadership transition in China. In the USA, the Clinton administration played a decisive role in further integrating China into the international liberal order, transforming the Asian country into a pillar of the global economy – and an indispensable strategic partner for the USA. While the Nixon administration took the initial decisive steps to forge a mutually satisfying strategic understanding between the two powers, arguably it was the Clinton administration, perhaps more than that of any other American president in recent decades, which most proactively pursued a viable strategic partnership with China, particularly in the realm of trade and investments. On China’s part, the post-Mao leadership progressively, albeit with certain setbacks along the way, pushed the boundaries of economic reforms at home and consciously sought improved ties with neighbouring states, including historical rivals such as Japan, as well as the USA. The fateful entente between Beijing and Washington underpinned a period of relative stability and unprecedented capitalist expansion in Asia, especially in China, strengthening the pillars of a US-led liberal order in the region and beyond. The seemingly symbiotic Sino-American relationship, however, concealed deep geopolitical faultlines, with the two powers repeatedly teetering on the verge of collision.

The liberal experiment

Committed to a liberal vision, wherein interstate cooperation and economic interdependence define international relations, the Clinton administration was an enthusiastic advocate of progressive reduction in trade barriers and frictionless flow of investments across state borders. The whole liberal-institutionalist paradigm, embraced by the Clinton administration, was predicated on the following assumptions: that individual states value absolute gains of economic cooperation, that military power has become increasingly superfluous as an instrument of foreign policy, and that international organizations are capable of autonomously facilitating rule-based behaviour by rewarding cooperation and penalizing non-compliance vis-à-vis existing norms in the international system (Keohane 1982; Nye 2004). This marked the era of economic globalization, with the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), regional trading regimes such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and pan-regional platforms such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting serving as the pillars of a new order, wherein economics and trade stood as the ultimate preoccupation of interstate affairs. Intent on preventing the re-emergence of Cold War rivalries, the Clinton administration advocated the integration of post-Soviet Russia and post-Mao China into the liberal international order. The strategic rationale behind the Clinton administration’s accommodating approach was the perceived necessity to transform China and Russia into benign, responsible powers by increasing their economic and geopolitical stake in the stability and perpetuation of the existing global order. Guided by the belief that the forces of globalization could tame historical animosities and discipline the ambitions of former Cold War rivals, the Clinton administration sought to co-opt non-Western powers by appealing to the capitalist instincts of their ruling classes. Just as the post-Second World War ‘Marshall Plan’, and its variants in East Asia, allowed Washington to integrate former rivals such as Germany and Japan into the Western order, the latest wave of economic globalization, in turn, carried the promise of eliminating late-twentieth-century rivalries with communist powers. In Europe, the Clinton administration pushed for the enlargement of the European Union (EU) into the ex-Soviet space, downplaying the necessity for active containment of Moscow. To assuage Russia’s insecurities, and underscore its commitment to building a new relationship with the heir of the Soviet empire, Washington expanded the Group of Seven (G7) to the Group of Eight (G8), inviting Moscow to join the world’s most exclusive club of industrial powers. In Asia, Clinton assiduously supported China’s desire for greater economic interaction with the industrialized powers, vehemently advocating China’s membership of the WTO as well as the large-scale inflow of investments and technology into the Asian country. Despite facing tremendous pressure from the (Republican-dominated) US Congress, which maintained a critical stance on China’s political system and trading practices, the Clinton administration sought to decouple trade from human rights issues, declaring in 1994 that such an approach would ‘place [the Sino-American] relationship into a larger and more productive framework’ (Shirk 2008: 225). Such efforts were predicated on decades of carefully built rapprochement between Beijing and Washington, which commenced with the Nixon administration’s back-door diplomacy in the early 1970s, but suffered a huge, albeit temporary, setback after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Guided by the principles of realpolitik, which emphasizes the pragmatic importance of overcoming ideological differences for the pursuit of material gains, the Nixon administration sought to exploit the Sino-Soviet split (1960–89) to create a new concert of powers against Moscow. The strategy was also born out of the painful realization that the material, political and humanitarian costs of the Vietnam War dramatically undermined the foundations of American power, highlighting the necessity for creative diplomatic overtures vis-à-vis rising powers such as China. In the 1990s, however, the Clinton administration was reaching out to China from a position of strength, supposedly making Washington’s efforts look more sincere and benevolent in nature. China, meanwhile, was still grappling with the political aftershocks of the 1989 democratic uprising at home – and the horrific crackdown on student protests in Beijing and across the country that followed – which provoked unprecedented divisions within the political class, undermining the internal coherence and domestic legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). No wonder China was more than happy to reciprocate the Clinton administration’s efforts, hoping to end Beijing’s political isolation and aid a decade-and-half-long experiment with economic liberalization, which took off under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader from the...