The Strategic Options of Middle Powers in the Asia-Pacific

Chien-Wen Kou, Chiung-Chiu Huang, Brian Job, Chien-Wen Kou, Chiung-Chiu Huang, Brian Job

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367741600
• eBook ISBN: 9781000593068
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

This book analyses the responses of middle powers in the Asia-Pacific toward the contemporary great powers' rivalry of the United States and China, through specific cases studies of South Korea, Australia, Japan, India, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Presenting local perspectives from multiple middle powers as they face the task of maintaining the international order in light of the recent competition between China and the United States, it further develops theories of foreign policy analyses, forming a systematic framework through initiating crucial concepts, including reluctant hedging, economic statecraft, and strategic position-taking. The contributions also provide an in-depth examination of the contemporary geo-politics of the region, including the impact of both the Trump and Biden administrations, Beijing's "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, cross-strait relations with Taiwan, and the influences of Japan, Vietnam, Australia and South Korea, revealing that regional middle powers do indeed exert influence on the direction of regional cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.

Providing comprehensive studies of many regional powers in the Asia-Pacific, this will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of International Politics, Asian Politics, Asian Studies as well as policy makers on Asia-Pacific relations.

1Introduction

Chien-wen Kou and Chiung-Chiu Huang

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156314-1

While the Peloponnesian War remains a popular analogy in academia and public opinion to describe the current rivalry between China and the United States, relatively less attention has been paid to the responses of regional actors in the Asia Pacific. While the election of the Biden administration appeared to hint at an end to antagonism between the two great powers at the end of 2020, this great power rivalry has only intensified ever since then. Biden’s China policy has been markedly different from Trump’s in terms of strategic style, but it has continued the antagonism between the two sides. While Trump touted unilateralism, emphasized “America First” and weakened conventional alliances between Washington and its Western allies, Biden has returned to multilateralism and chosen to strengthen traditional security communities in diverse regions that have been led by the United States, intending to employ these multilateral settings to contain China and suppress its increasing influence. These changes in U.S. foreign policy have placed more challenges on regional actors in the Asia Pacific.

The importance of the great power rivalry is well recognized and wildly discussed today, and its influences have been noted by observers and experts in International Relations (IR). Yet, relatively less attention has been paid to the receiving side of these influences. Investigating and analyzing the responses of other actors in the Asia Pacific will help researchers and policy makers further evaluate the impact and future direction of this great power competition. In this series, we have proposed that greater attention be paid to the repositioning of lesser powers in the Asia Pacific region in response to this rivalry. The policies and strategies of middle powers are particularly crucial as they shoulder the responsibility of stabilizing the international order. Therefore, understanding the strategic thinking of middle powers in the Asia Pacific should help us predict the evolution of the international system in this era of great power rivalry.

The competition between the United States and China today differs greatly from the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While the Cold War was defined by a clash between opposing ideologies and antithetical designs for the international order, the current rivalry is not so much a conflict between political ideologies, but a competition for dominance over the international system and its leadership. After its reform and opening up policies in 1978, China has been the key beneficiary of the current international regime. Existing international regulations and regimes were designed by Western powers at the end of the Cold War and dominated by them ever since, and China after its rise remains profoundly entangled with and heavily reliant on this order. At the same time, this rising great power needs to revise its regulations in order to gain further benefits from the system and acquire greater legitimacy and respect from the international community. Yet, if this divergence between the United States and China intensifies, there remains the potential for this rivalry to develop into a competition between rival ideologies and dominance in the global order.

On the other hand, Cold War competition occurred in the realm of science and technology but was largely military in nature, and its effects did not relate as directly to technological development in non-military spheres. The current U.S.–China rivalry, however, is deeply shaped by the power of globalization, a high degree of interdependence and the division of labor. At best, it is possible that the deep entanglement of both great powers with the global market and supply chains may serve to limit the intensifying antagonism between them, though certain diplomatic and military conflicts have the potential to overweigh their concern for the well-being of technological development and the global financial and trading system. Continued rivalry might further lead to the decline or even collapse of certain global high tech and traditional industries, a possibility for which we can find no precedent in the rivalry of the Cold War.

After gradually becoming acquainted with the current global market system over decades and in response to its rapid rise in the global political arena, China has built its own international regimes. Among these, the Belt and Road Initiative (the BRI) has been the most representative and significant. Nevertheless, the BRI is still utterly reliant on the existing multilateral setting that includes regional and global international organizations and institutions (Tuidong gongjian sichouzhilu jingjidai he 21 shiji haishang sichou zhilu de yuanjing yu xingdong [推動共建絲綢之路經濟帶和 21 世紀海上絲綢之路的願景與行動, Vision and actions on jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road, 2017). This fact serves to illustrate the nature of the current rivalry, which is one of both confrontation and sustained high-level interdependence. It is also likely that it will continue in this form for some time (Huang & Kou, 2020). Unlike a Cold War alliance, the BRI is not a formal pact that targets specific actors, groups, or organizations. Both Washington and Beijing have not built official alliances with precise goals that are targeted toward one another, albeit the United States, with its Free and Open Indo-Pacific and QUAD initiatives, is indeed prolonging and strengthening its strategy of containment that targets China and its military deployment.

More than simple confrontation, the current great power rivalry requires a balancing between political competition and the continuity of interdependence and the division of labor in the global economic system. This has never been easy for state actors in the Asia Pacific, and increasing uncertainty in the international system is only adding to the challenge. Decades of globalization have profoundly shaped the behaviors of a majority of states. States in the Asia-Pacific region have been accustomed to relying on Washington’s support in the military and security aspects of their national interests while maintaining their dependence (or even over-dependence) on China’s markets and economic benefits. This has greatly shaped the responses and strategies of Asia-Pacific states toward great power rivalry.

Middle powers are understood to be tasked with assisting great powers in the maintenance of the international order while acting as mediators between them and small states. As such, an analysis of the diverse responses of middle powers toward great power rivalry has the potential to uncover certain revelations that deepen our understanding of the direction of international politics and may even predict the direction of interstate antagonism. As middle powers in the Asia Pacific face an involvement in asymmetrical power relations with two rivaling great powers, analyzing their strategies and responses will also help us to better understand the effects suffered by each, including developments in technology and the expansion of markets, global trade, and economic power.

In the hopes of reaching the abovementioned goals and providing an overarching destination for its research, this book proposes two research questions which shall be analyzed from diverse perspectives in the following chapters: How are middle powers in the Asia Pacific responding to this competition between China and the United States? How do they define or redefine their status in the region under the context of this great power rivalry? The authors of this book have presented diverse and unique viewpoints to answer these questions. As such, we have not put forth a synchronized definition for the term middle power, as this would place limitations on our authors as they conduct their case studies and formulate their arguments. At the same time, we do acknowledge that a precise definition for middle powers is essential, and the following section shall be concerned with discussing and debating the meaning of the concept and its necessity in the analysis of responses toward great power rivalry in the Asia Pacific.

The Concept of Middle Powers and Its Implications in the Asia Pacific

This volume has been devised to present a picture of the diverse perspectives of middle powers in the Asia Pacific as they face great power rivalry in an unprecedented form. The contributors of each chapter either present the dilemmas and risks faced by these middle powers or propose potential solutions which differ from conventional approaches. As an overwhelming majority of our contributors are based in the Asia-Pacific region, this work is a reflection of the concerns and perspectives of local communities. However diverse, these concerns have shared rationales and expectations, as each are offered on the behalf of states that seek a solution to the impasse of great power rivalry. The application of their identities as middle powers has therefore concatenated the analyses found in each chapter. While we do not intend to provide a coherent definition of the term for the cases included in this book, all contributors in this series have understood middle powers to be key actors in this great power competition. While their actions in response to great power rivalry are understood to be a symptom of current developments in international politics, middle powers, acting together, are clearly capable of influencing the perspectives and attitudes of the international community, however limited these influences may be when compared with those of great powers.

The use of the term “middle power” has become prevalent in the discipline of IR since the post-Cold War era. Nevertheless, there continues to be controversy regarding both the definition of the term and the criteria for evaluating whether a state qualifies as one. As Robertson (2017, p. 356, 366) points out, a single agreed upon definition of the term is still elusive, however popular some may be. Robertson argues that debates regarding the definition of a middle power are not about discovering “the meaning of a word” or “the nature of a thing;” rather, they have evolved into a competition between academic schools of thought, political competition for the control of foreign policy narratives, and competition for prestige between states.

Regardless of how the concept has been socially constructed, middle powers have still been defined in a variety of ways. Parlar Dal (2018, pp. 5–8) has observed that middle powers are most often characterized according to functional, positional, and behavioral attributions. For instance, functional definitions of a middle power have often rested on a state’s relative political and economic capacity, which are wholly imprecise. Likewise, capacity-based (or positional) definitions are also problematic due to the inherent incomprehensiveness of certain power-measuring indicators. Also flawed are behavior-based definitions of middle powers, as the selection of cases (of behaviors) are frequently biased due to the personal preferences of researchers (Robertson, 2017, pp. 362–363).

Dal (2018, pp. 5–8) further points out that little attention in IR has been paid to the regional–global power nexus in middle power diplomacy. He notes that middle powers are often trapped between the pursuit of global status and the need to remain regionally focused, which poses both opportunities and challenges. At the same time, middle powers stand to benefit from acting as a bridge between global and regional political arenas. As these goals are often in conflict, middle powers can feel constrained by regional issues in their attempts to expand their scope of influence and enhance their status on the global stage. In our series, we acknowledge that the current regional–global power nexus has become entangled due to the intensified great power rivalry. If their strategies work well, middle powers in the Asia Pacific can even increase their importance in the global arena by attending to matters at the regional level.

In terms of the number of middle powers in the contemporary international arena, Abbondanza (2020, pp. 415–416) observes that roughly 20 states fit the criteria, and these states are among the top 30 nations in economic terms. He further notes that a growing number of middle powers have emerged along with the relative decline of the Western great powers and the rapid and steady rise of Asian ones. Abbondanza also recognizes the diversities and controversies regarding the criteria for defining a middle power. Still, most researchers and experts tend to define middle powers based on their own preferences and their unique understanding of the characteristics of middle power. For instance, Efstathopoulos (2018, p. 48) emphasizes that the positional and behavioral aspects of a state are the essential criteria for defining it as a middle power. The positional aspect depends on a state’s material capabilities; and the behavioral aspect means that a middle power should follow certain distinct patterns in its diplomatic performance.

No matter how researchers prefer to define middle powers, most of their analyses present specific expectations for a middle power’s patterns of behavior. For example, a middle power state is frequently assumed to take the role of a good international citizen which devotes itself to the welfare of the international community. In addition, a middle power is expected to demonstrate a strong preference for multilateralism and engage in multilateral activism in its foreign policy. Meanwhile, a middle power can be expected to take the lead in crisis management and actively mediate in international disputes and conflicts. More importantly, a middle power is assumed to conduct niche diplomacy and secure its influence in international regimes. It will be looked to provide intellectual and entrepreneurial leadership, allying with other like-minded states. Hence, middle powers are “not only those middle-ranking states that advance distinct preferences and deploy distinct diplomatic methods, but also as those states that display both influence and effectiveness in realizing their objectives at the international level” (Efstathopoulos, 2018, pp. 48–59).

A middle power’s ideational influence and entrepreneurial effectiveness can be recognized by defining it as an “international stabilizer” (Jordaan, 2017). The role of an international stabilizer is different from the so-named emergin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Appendices
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Asia-Pacific Middle Powers under the New Format of Great Power Rivalry
• Part II New Analytical Concepts and Framework for Middle Powers’ Strategies
• Part III Cases of Asia Pacific Middle Powers in the Era of New Great Power Rivalry
• Index