Asia's New Geopolitics

Military Power and Regional Order

Desmond Ball, Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Tim Huxley, C. Raja Mohan, Brendan Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000536270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

Intensifying geopolitical rivalries, rising defence spending and the proliferation of the latest military technology across Asia suggest that the region is set for a prolonged period of strategic contestation. None of the three competing visions for the future of Asian order – a US-led 'Free and Open Indo-Pacific', a Chinese-centred order, or the ASEAN-inspired 'Indo-Pacific Outlook' – is likely to prevail in the short to medium term. In the absence of a new framework, the risk of open conflict is heightened, and along with it the need for effective mechanisms to maintain peace and stability.

As Asia's leaders seek to rebuild their economies and societies in the wake of COVID-19, they would do well to reflect upon the lessons offered by the pandemic and their applicability in the strategic realm. The societies that have navigated the crisis most effectively have been able to do so by putting in place stringent protective measures. Crisis-management and -avoidance mechanisms – and even, in the longer term, wider arms control – can be seen as the strategic equivalent of such measures, and as such they should be pursued with urgency in Asia to reduce the risks of an even greater calamity.

CHAPTER ONE

A region in flux

Geopolitics can be conceived of as an exercise in the peaceful use of military power;¹ it is the stuff of the ‘grand chessboard’, of tectonic power shifts, the art of the long view.² The long-standing perceived importance of military power in the international order, and hence of geopolitics, went into eclipse with the passing of the superpower stalemate at the end of the Cold War. In Asia, most observers were optimistic that the region’s burgeoning economic interdependence and its nascent multilateral institutions would together create a new era of peace and prosperity.³ Yet Asia’s institutions are increasingly conspicuous by their absence, and initially promising mechanisms for avoiding and managing crises have also unravelled as simmering tensions have flared across the region. Three visions for the future of the region – a US-led ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP), a Chinese-centred order, and an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-inspired ‘Indo-Pacific Outlook’ – are now vying to replace the post-Second World War US-led Asian order.

In this Adelphi book we examine the growing geopolitical rivalries, defence-procurement trends and developing military capabilities in Asia in the context of the present ill-equipped regional security architecture and a fraying international order. Looking at Northeast, Southeast and South Asia in turn, we consider whether and how the collective effects of the ways regional states are employing military power to defend and advance their long-standing territorial claims will allow one of the three competing visions to triumph, or whether the struggle between these competing frameworks will continue for decades.

The evolving Asian order

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic brought many parts of the globe almost to a standstill during 2020, Asia’s geopolitical rivalries intensified. Chinese naval vessels and military aircraft entered the waters and skies around Taiwan with unprecedented frequency. The deadliest clashes in decades erupted along the disputed Sino-Indian border. North Korea’s nuclear and missile development continued apace, challenging the extended-deterrence guarantees long given by America to its Asian allies. As China and the US edged towards partial ‘decoupling’, there was even talk in policymaking and analytical circles of a ‘new Cold War’, underscored by an expansion in military exercises and naval stand-offs in the increasingly contested waters of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

A decade ago, hopes were high that Asia’s burgeoning security architecture would reduce the risk of such flare-ups and serve to manage major crises when they occurred. The expansion of the annual East Asia Summit (EAS) from its original 16 Asian states to include the US and Russia in 2011 and the establishment the previous year of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM+), comprising the same countries, were cited as evidence that an optimal regional cooperative footprint had been found.⁴ But this was overly optimistic. In June 2020, for example, Pyongyang announced that it was severing all communication lines with South Korea – which it described as an ‘enemy’ – before blowing up a liaison office that the two countries had agreed to establish during an April 2018 inter-Korean summit.⁵ And the deadly China–India border clash in June 2020 occurred despite an agreement on a new military hotline between the two countries at an informal summit in April 2018, in the city of Wuhan, between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.⁶

As hopes for an effective Asian security architecture crumble, the post-1945 rules, norms and institutions that helped maintain peace and stability in the region (and indeed globally) are also atrophying. Some observers have even suggested that the so-called ‘rules-based international order’ has already ended.⁷ Concern that the unravelling of the old order may foreshadow a much darker strategic future in Asia is apparent in regional governments’ statements on security and defence. Vietnam’s 2019 defence white paper, for example, argued that territorial disputes in the region are ‘likely to become more complex, potentially leading to conflicts, threatening regional stability, peace, and prosperity, and triggering a regional arms race’.⁸ Japan’s 2020 defence white paper noted that ‘uncertainty over the existing order is increasing’ due to an accelerating and intensifying ‘inter-state competition across the political, economic and military realms, in which states seek to shape global and regional order to their advantage as well as to increase their influence’.⁹ Australia’s July 2020 ‘Defence Strategic Update’ warned that ‘major power competition, coercion and military modernisation are increasing the potential for and consequences of miscalculation. While still unlikely, the prospect of high-intensity military conflict in the Indo-Pacific is less remote … including high-intensity military conflict between the United States and China.’¹⁰ Three broad strategic trends underlie these concerns: declining US willingness to underwrite Asia’s security order, rising US–China tensions and weakening Asian multilateralism.

US engagement

The willingness and ability of Washington to continue underwriting the rules and principles which have traditionally defined the limits of permissible action in the Asia-Pacific, coupled with the balance of military power needed to enforce them,¹¹ are increasingly in doubt. Allan Gyngell, a former head of Australia’s Office of National Assessments, noted with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic that ‘it is hard to think of a global crisis over the past fifty years to which Washington has offered the international community so little response’.¹² No international order lasts indefinitely, and it is likely, particularly given the re-emergence of power centres in China, India and possibly Indonesia, that Asia’s US-led order would eventually succumb. There is, however, a strong case that the ‘America First’ posture during the presidency of Donald Trump has hastened the incumbent order’s decline.

Trump’s disdain for alliance relationships undermined one of the central pillars of that order. He made his intentions clear on the campaign trail in March 2016, when he signalled a desire to withdraw American forces from Japan and South Korea and to support the development of nuclear weapons by those two treaty allies.¹³ Following his historic June 2018 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore, Trump again expressed his wish to bring US troops home from the Korean Peninsula.¹⁴ He subsequently accused Japan and South Korea – regarded traditionally as the cornerstones of America’s Asian alliance network – of taking ‘tremendous advantage’ of the US, and he demanded they quadruple the financial contribution they each make towards the costs of the US military presence.¹⁵

The incoming administration of President Joe Biden pledged to renew and strengthen America’s commitment to its Asian allies, even though the administration of Barack Obama, in which Biden served as vice president, had also called on US allies to increase their defence contributions, albeit less crudely and confrontationally than Trump.¹⁶ And Trump’s emphasis on allied burden-sharing was part of a much deeper pattern. Half a century earlier, then-president Richard Nixon’s July 1969 announcement at a press conference in Guam that America’s Asian partners must assume greater responsibility for their own defence sent a shockwave through the alliance system, especially against the backdrop of US failure to make headway against communist forces in Vietnam.¹⁷ Upon entering office in January 1977, Jimmy Carter tried to make good on a campaign promise to remove US ground forces from South Korea, only to be stymied by bureaucratic and congressional opposition.¹⁸ Questions regarding the future of the US-led order re-emerged in the wake of the Cold War, precipitating reductions in American forces in the region that were eventually halted as a result of the 1995 US ‘Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region’, which required that the US maintain a minimum forward presence in Asia of approximately 100,000 military personnel.¹⁹

US–China tensions

Nixon was able to consolidate the US position in Asia through a historic normalisation of diplomatic relations with China, a bold geopolitical play that shifted the Cold War balance of power back in America’s favour.²⁰ The bargain he struck with Beijing, however, has to a significant degree unravelled, and with it the engagement strategy that successive US administrations had hoped would tame if not transform China.²¹ During the Obama era, for example, Sino-US tensions intensified over Beijing’s increasingly repressive internal policies; allegations of Chinese intellectual-property theft, cyber espionage and political-influence operations; and the militarisation of the South China Sea.²² Attitudes towards China had hardened across the US political spectrum and also, significantly, in the traditionally pro-Beijing business community. The Trump administration identified long-term strategic competition with China as America’s most important international challenge, and responding to that challenge as the country’s top foreign-policy priority.²³ Many prominent US strategic commentators suggested that a new Sino-American cold war was already under way.²⁴

The global pandemic that began in early 2020 accelerated this deterioration in US–China relations. Neither country initially responded well to the COVID-19 outbreak. In China, local officials in Wuhan and elsewhere in Hubei province (where the virus first appeared), and perhaps also in the higher echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), almost certainly failed to disclose information about the spread of the virus.²⁵ On the US side, Trump was slow to react, claiming initially that the risk to the American people and economy was limited. Beijing responded by zeroing in on Trump’s failures, aiming to deflect domestic criticism and to repair the significant damage done to China’s international image. Chinese medical personnel and supplies were also sent to places hit hard by the pandemic – including some in Asia, such as the Philippines.²⁶ Trump in turn responded with an anti-Chinese narrative, insisting that COVID-19 should be referred to as the ‘Chinese’ or ‘China’ virus – a characterisation supported by more than half the American public.²⁷ He clearly had an eye on the November 2020 presidential election; during the campaign, Biden charged that Trump’s lacklustre COVID-19 response stemmed from the fact that he had been too conciliatory towards China and too accepting of Beijing’s COVID-19 assurances. China subsequently emerged as a major campaign issue, further straining Sino-American ties.²⁸

These strains were evident in the absence of US–China cooperation during the pandemic, in sharp contrast to the experience of past crises, such as the 2008–09 global financial crisis when cooperation was so close that it prompted calls for the establishment of a US–China ‘Group of Two’ or G2.²⁹ During the pandemic, however, calls in the US for the ‘decoupling’ of the countries’ economies, already under way to some degree, have become more raucous.³⁰ A complete decoupling of the two economies remains unlikely given their high degree of interdependence, particularly in the financial sphere,³¹ but the COVID-19 crisis has also highlighted American dependence on Chinese supply chains, and continued economic disengagement seems inevitable as this vulnerability is addressed.

Asian multilateralism

Asia’s multilateral groupings in general have struggled to respond to any of Asia’s major crises over the course of the past three decades: the North Korean nuclear crises of 1993–94, 2010 and 2017; the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis; or the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, to name but a few. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, for example, the frequency of multilateral gatherings in the region decreased sharply, as many member states could not afford to attend.³² And while multilateral institutions often display an institutional ‘stickiness’ that allows them to survive well beyond their use-by date, the very raison d’être of some long-standing regional groupings is already being challenged. The pandemic’s damaging economic effects will further weaken these bodies.

Multilateral forums should, in theory, serve as venues for mediating and dampening geopolitical rivalries. In practice, however, such gatherings sometimes also become arenas where those rivalries are played out. For example, while the annual IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore has provided an important platform for Asian security dialogue, including through the opportunities it provides for private bilateral meetings, it has often also seen Sino-American and Sino-Japanese tensions come to the fore.³³

At the global level, the May 2020 gathering of the World Health Assembly (WHA) was a tense affair, as the European Union and Australia advanced a co-sponsored resolution – which China initially resisted, but ultimately supported – calling for an ‘independent’ review of the handling of the pandemic. A simultaneous Taiwanese bid to secure WHA observer status languished at Beijing’s insistence, an exclusion the United States’ then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo described as ‘spiteful’.³⁴ Xi also used this gathering to burnish his country’s leadership credentials, pledging U...