Asia Pacific Countries and the US Rebalancing Strategy

David W.F. Huang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137587978
• eBook ISBN: 9781349934539
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the success of the US rebalancing (or pivot) strategy towards Asia, placing the US pivot in a historical context while highlighting its policy content and management dilemmas. Further, the contributors discuss the challenges and opportunities that each regional state confronts in responding to the US rebalancing strategy.
In 2011, President Barack Obama laid out the framework for a strategic pivot of US policy towards the Asia Pacific region. Writers in this volume focus specifically on Asian perception of the strategy. Among the topics they explore are: China's desire to be seen as equal to the US while maintaining foreign policy initiatives independent of the US strategic rebalance; the strengthening of Japan's alliance with the US through its security policies; the use of US-China competition by South Korea to negotiate its influence in the region; and Australia's embrace of the strategy as a result of foreign direct investmentthat provides economic benefits to the country.

Part I
Challenges and Management of US Rebalancing Strategy

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

David W.F. Huang (ed.)Asia Pacific Countries and the US Rebalancing Strategy10.1057/978-1-349-93453-9_2

Begin Abstract

The Obama “Pivot” to Asia in a Historical Context of American Hegemony

Bruce Cumings¹

(1)

Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

A longer, and revised version of this paper appeared in Yoneyuki Sugita, ed., Japan Viewed from Interdisciplinary Perspectives: History and Prospects (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

End Abstract

In the winter of 2011–2012, the Obama administration insinuated a series of defense policy moves that, at the time, seemed to promise the most significant transformation of the American military position in the world since the Cold War ended. It appeared, this new defense posture would even rework the post–World War II order itself. After all, if we were going to witness the eclipse of Europe, a withdrawal from insoluble Middle East and South Asian crises, the gravitational pull of a growing China, and an America once again turning around to face the Pacific rather than the Atlantic (as it first did in the heyday of “Manifest Destiny” in the 1840s), this is no small matter.¹

This shift began with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s article, “America’s Pacific Century,” in the November 2011 issue of Foreign Policy, announcing “a pivot point” away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and “a strategic turn” toward the Asia-Pacific, now said to be “the key driver of global politics.” She argued more generally that for the rest of this century, this region would be more important and more central than any other in the world. Soon enough, Clinton showed up in Burma (Myanmar), now apparently democratizing, and announced a resumption of diplomatic relations with this pariah state, one of China’s closest allies.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama journeyed out to establish a new American military base on the north coast of Australia, and some 2500 Marines will begin rotating through the small city of Darwin. Shortly thereafter, President Obama brought a definitive end to the Iraq War by announcing that he was calling home the last US combat forces by the end of 2012. At the same time, his Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, supported a move away from the “two war” posture that had defined Pentagon strategy for the past six decades—that is, the capability to fight large wars both along the central front in Europe and in East Asia; he also indicated that the “defense triad” of air, naval, and land forces was outmoded.² The long-running European crisis over piles of debt added its own punctuation to the apparent eclipse of Europe and the dawn of a new Pacific era.

It will be recalled that American troops never entirely came home from our major wars since 1941, except for Vietnam. With the wars in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq, many new bases appeared in the Middle East and Central Asia. Having written much about this archipelago of bases, which always had the dual motive of containing an enemy and constraining an ally (thus creating defense dependencies among our economic competitors like Japan, Germany, and South Korea), I was not surprised that Hillary Clinton called attention to the enormous US military presence in East Asia (and in this sense, it is not a pivot back to a region that the USA had left, but a return to a defense structure that has never really changed). However, I was stunned to learn that Obama actually meant it when he said all our soldiers would be out of Iraq by 2012—because it is the first time since 1945 that any president has done likewise at the end of a war. Panetta, though, may just have run some new ideas up the flag pole to see what happened.³ But with big defense cuts starting in March 2013 with the “sequester,” this new posture may win out.

The pivot (subsequently dubbed a “rebalancing”) toward the Pacific not only seemed to place Europe in the shade, but also arrived amid an Arab Spring and a Middle East not necessarily going in a direction Americans will welcome and loud rumors of war. By contrast, the Asia-Pacific region seems placid; with Burma moving in a startling and utterly unanticipated pro-Western direction, the only real fly in the ointment (assuming sporadic conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu and South China Sea Islands can be contained) is North Korea—still and all, the same old fly since 1953. The Obama administration is the first since the Cold War ended to pay little or no attention to nuclear-armed North Korea. But it has paid close attention to healing strains with Tokyo over US bases in Okinawa and with Seoul concerning changes to the US defense posture in Korea. Along a great crescent from Rangoon to Darwin to Manila to Seoul to Tokyo, all this is being done with the permanency of the US Pacific defense posture in mind—and China in focus.

Which Pacific Century?

Americans have witnessed previous spasms of attention to and rhetoric about the centrality of the Pacific and China, generally coming to naught. The first arose in the heyday of “Manifest Destiny” in the 1840s, when California came into the union and many imagined America to be a Pacific power and even the “middle country” linking Asia to Europe. The second coming of this rhetoric was in the 1970s and 1980s, as Japan’s sudden economic prowess drew attention to something new, called “the Pacific Rim.” “Pacific Rim” was the post-1975 artistry that revalued the region, an era of forward movement and backward occlusion, as Americans sought to “put Vietnam behind us.” The new trope looked forward: suddenly, the rim became the locus of a new dynamism, bringing pressure on the mainland of Asia. Organized into the new inventory were “miracle” economies in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. But “Pacific Rim” also heralded “the forgotten war.” And the centerpiece in the region was Japan, a newly risen sun among advanced industrial countries—indeed, it had risen to the very top, so said Ezra Vogel’s perfectly timed book, Japan as Number One (1979). A decade later it seemed more like a threat, and we were getting books titled The Coming War With Japan—and then all the rhetoric and bombast fizzled in the 1990s, as Japan’s bubble burst and it reverted to insignificance in American eyes. The 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan preoccupied the next decade.

It is a human curiosity that we think we can know the past, the present, and—by extension—the future. We labor to make sense of the first two, often failing, but the future? That is why most of the books about the rise of Japan, or China, or some other wunderkind, hit the remaindered used-book table with the speed of light. Still, today it seems entirely predictable that Obama’s Pacific pivot and Clinton’s “American Pacific Century” are serious, and here to stay—mainly because the Pacific is, and has been for nearly 70 years, essentially an American lake.

The Great Crescent

I wish this phrase were my coinage, but it was Dean Acheson’s at the dawn of the Cold War, when as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, he sought a revival of the devastated Japanese and German industrial economies, fueled by an ocean of Middle Eastern oil then sloshing into world markets—a crescent stretching, in his words, “from Tokyo to Alexandria.”⁴ Acheson’s advisor, George F. Kennan, was more of a “realist”; his containment doctrine said, in essence, you need an advanced industrial base to be serious about war-making; we had four in our zone and the Soviets had one, and containment meant keeping things that way.

American military bases on the territory of our allies (Japan, West Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain) would provide essentially “free” security, and with the Japanese and German militaries turned into inconsequential constabularies, the forces that brought on World War II would be neutered. Harvard historian Charles Maier and others have referred to this as a “productivist” coalition, working in tandem to produce “miracle” economies in West Germany, Japan, and subsequently South Korea and Taiwan. This coalition so dramatically outperformed their counterparts in the communist world that the latter essentially threw in the towel in 1989–1991.

Not China, however, which in 1979 looked around at its Asian neighbors and asked, essentially, how about our own miracle economy, right here, right now? Deng Xiaoping led this fundamental reorientation. Why crawl along at a snail’s pace, Deng said, while Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were racing ahead? “Seek truth from facts” was his clarion call in 1979, after taking maximum power. Deng promoted pragmatism, namely “truth is to be discovered in the practical consequences of conduct to the notion that whatever works is necessarily truth.”

What worked was state-directed export-led development fueled by cheap credit, as China completed an East Asian trajectory that Japan first pioneered in the 1920s, going thence through Seoul, Harbin, and Taipei, finally to Beijing: capitalism with Chinese characteristics, masquerading as socialism. All the while, Deng pursued a compliant foreign policy, an East Asian “peaceful environment” allowing China to concentrate on modernization. And did it work: China’s economy grew at about 9.4 % per annum on average over the next three decades (but no better than South Korea and Taiwan from 1965 to 1997).

A North Pacific Crescent

Today the new productivist coalition is similar to that of the 1950s–1990s, centered on a rapidly growing country exporting to the capacious American market, a country moving up the technological ladder from toys to textiles to autos and steel, which just happens to be run by communists—but the Great Crescent today is rather different. Middle Eastern oil is still critical, but more critically, it is systematically declining in importance as new oil and gas sources and alternative fuels emerge, and China’s environment gets so fouled and polluted that the only way out is to stop burning oil and coal. Instead, we should think of a North Pacific crescent making up the most dynamic core in the world economy—not this or that country, but complex human exchange across an expansive ocean.

When talking about a coming miracle or menace, the mote in so many writers’ eyes is to assume that nations compete. As Paul Krugman showed in his book Pop Internationalism, they do not: industries compete, firms compete, and exports and imports do not compete: that is, about one quarter of China’s exports to the USA consists of Walmart subsidiaries making things and sending them back to…Walmart. In contrast to the Japan and South Korea models, China has allowed much more direct foreign investment—$50 billion worth by US firms alone, according to Hillary Clinton’s 2011 essay. Absent the American market, and the Chinese economy would collapse. Absent Beijing’s willingness to pile up more than $1 trillion in US debt, and the American economy might collapse. The Pacific crescent is a multifaceted, multilayered web of interdependence.

This crescent begins in San Diego and the US–Mexican maquiladora production complexes, moves up the coast through Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, around the Aleutians to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and Beijing, then down to Shanghai, Hong Kong/Shenzhen, and Singapore. It encompasses the top three economies in the world, vibrant cities holding tens of millions of well-educated people, and city-states more prosperous than any in the world. In any of these places, including presumably declining and wheezing Japan, all you see is affluence and high-technology solutions to the intractable problems that plague the middle regions of the USA: bullet trains speeding from Tokyo to Osaka, or Shanghai to Beijing; the most wired city in the world, Seoul; two city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore, with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of half a trillion dollars; bright young people who score highest in global tests of math and science skills. To think of it another way, California by itself is another Italy in GDP; Japan’s economy is 60 % bigger than the highly productive German one; South Korean GDP is approaching the size of Spain’s; Silicon Valley and Seattle are unmatched in high-technology prowess.

The financial crash in September 2008 stimulated another period of handwringing about American decline, but the key point is that over the past 6 years, the USA suffered relatively less than the European economies, and the East Asian economies hardly suffered at all. Now try to name one significant high technology that China has that the USA does not, and you instantly see why China is no security threat to the USA—and they know this better than anybody.

The Obama pivot acknowledges three overwhelming facts of our time, and quietly asserts a venerable but largely overlooked American codicil. First, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1. Challenges and Management of US Rebalancing Strategy
• 2. Regional Responses
• 3. Taiwan and Maritime Disputes in East and South China Seas
• Backmatter