Great Power Competition and Order Building in the Indo-Pacific

Towards a New Indo-Pacific Equilibrium

Frederick Kliem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032291710
• eBook ISBN: 9781000608625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that the new great power contest between the United States and the People's Republic of China, which has as its epicentre the complex Indo-Pacific region, is having a detrimental impact on the region's existing order system. Analysing why the great powers are increasingly at loggerheads, the manifold risks this entails, and how the various stakeholders in the Indo-Pacific can find a durable regional order more constructive than confrontational, the book, avoiding theory, proposes a new equilibrium based on practical ways to manage burgeoning conflict and maintain order and stability by compartmentalising problems and challenges while seeking to maintain a balance among stakeholder interests.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331541-1

The Indo-Pacific is a region as complex as it is diverse, and it is the new epicentre of great power contestation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).¹ The main subject of this book is how particularly security can be organised in this complex region. The main underpinning thesis is that great power competition is back and playing out predominantly in the Indo-Pacific region, with detrimental impact on the existing order system. The book’s chief purpose to find a practical way to manage burgeoning conflict and maintain order and stability in a region in which neither can be taken for granted. It seeks to prove that, and analyse why, the great powers are increasingly at loggerheads; the manifold risks this entails; and how the various stakeholders in the Indo-Pacific can find a durable modus operandi, a regional order more constructive than confrontational, until such time when circumstances significantly change. To that end, this book proposes a new equilibrium as a building block for regional order to (re-)emerge. The new Indo-Pacific equilibrium aims to go beyond theoretical discussions of polarity, power balances, and institutions. It compartmentalises problems and challenges while seeking to maintain a balance among stakeholder interests by making only practical recommendations to manage issues and offer solutions to problems. It should be seen as a first step in a decades-long process of order building that can better account for the dramatically changed circumstances of the Indo-Pacific.

This dramatic change is the unravelling of an order system that has defined particularly East Asia since the end of World War II. No observer could in earnest deny that the era of US hegemony, the historic force behind a comparatively stable and peaceful post-war Asia, is over. With the erosion of this ‘Pax Americana’ in Asia, the US-led liberal hegemonic regional order is increasingly under stress. Nor could anyone sincerely dispute that the process of China’s rise is the main cause of this structural shift. Michael Leifer had early appreciated the importance of impending structural changes in Asia and – accurately – warned of subsequent developments in Asia. The US would gradually lose its unquestionable resolve in upholding a regional balance of power, and this process would significantly advantage China, whose leaders are intent on challenging the US But the latter would resist a potentially new regional hegemon to emerge.² And this in a nutshell is where we are at, as the 21st century begins.

This book will at various stages refer to the rise of ‘the rest’, the increasing potency of significant third-party states, and ask how this rise can be harnessed and advance order building. But this should not distract from the fact that the most consequential factor driving contemporary structural shift in Asia is the rise and power of China. For better or worse, China’s increasingly consolidated great power status is so substantially at odds with the status quo order of Pax Americana that the most important geopolitical question of our time has become how a train wreck of Sino-US relations, as Christopher Layne once bluntly called it, can be avoided?³ Is China trying to increase its clout in the region to achieve hegemony, as many Americans presume? Is American grand strategy to prevent China’s legitimate rise, as many Chinese presume? In early 2020, the Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani argued that the US is currently struggling to starve off a Chinese challenge to its hegemonic position.⁴ Kishore is pointing out what is already obvious to everyone living in this region: a geopolitical contest between China and the United States has broken out, is in full-swing, and is – for now – taking place predominantly in Asia. An increasing circle of expert observers agree with this diagnosis.⁵

It is undisputable that over the past decade, Beijing has become more assertive, even outright aggressive in its foreign and security policy, particularly as far as its so-called ‘core interests’ and the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are concerned. The US and its allies and partners in Asia and the world begin, to varying degrees, to see China increasingly more as a threat to regional peace and stability than as an economic opportunity. Indeed, there is now near consensus among governments in the Western world⁶ that the PRC is extending its influence in the region – politically, economically, socially, and militarily – in ways incompatible with the status quo.⁷ China’s international behaviour is causing significant unease and is starting a chain reaction of resistance. Even the most impartial stakeholders share a sense of the waning of regional post-World War II, US-led order. It remains unclear what precisely will replace this order – but China will certainly be a defining feature of it.

***

As the American unipolar moment fades into memory, the region is in urgent need of new order building. For structural reasons, hegemonic competition is inherently dangerous. Although still a taboo scenario for many, with the current trajectory it would be naïve to ignore the prospect of something resembling a new Cold War – albeit with different characteristics – and even a shooting war over regional flashpoints, such as Taiwan. But competition also poses numerous concrete security threats and complex existential dilemmas to all resident stakeholders. At the same time, hyper-globalisation has created deep and complex interdependence among all stakeholders, including the two great powers and numerous more or less independent third-party power centres, which themselves present challenges and opportunities. And the increasing salience of transboundary non-traditional security (NTS) challenges necessitates cooperation even among rivals – the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/21 is a pertinent reminder. In other words, unlike what was the case during the Cold War, the global agenda of the future makes cooperative mechanisms essential and urgent. In that sense, short of a great power war, the second greatest threat to peace and prosperity is increasing estrangement and zero-sum calculations by two essentially uncooperative great powers and their respective partners. This is a risk as substantial as it is realistic.

Identifying change is one thing. Processing this information into something valuable is another. The question Kishore Mahbubani is asking in the title of his aforementioned book, Has China Won?, is premature. The question is not who has ‘won’ or ‘lost’ the geopolitical contest – at least not yet. The question is what happens in the process, and what is the price of maintaining order during this contest. China has become America’s strategic priority. But, alas, Washington has stumbled into this great power contest having neither a coherent strategy nor clear objectives – a situation markedly different from the Cold War, when US geopolitical strategy was clearly framed from the beginning.⁸ The new US president Biden has not yet produced a China management plan to speak of and is largely continuing his predecessor’s fragmented policy approach. This simultaneous erosion of order and hegemonic leadership leads to regional quandary, a perplexed and anxious regional atmosphere. Local policy elites are increasingly uncomfortable with the region’s geopolitical trajectory.⁹ For them, the central question arising from this unfolding structural transformation of regional geopolitics is not who wins or loses this binary great power contest. Instead, they ask: how can the region’s various stakeholders respond to this shift in order to maintain a sustainable, peaceful, and prosperous regional modus operandi?

***

This book is divided into three parts: the first is conceptual; the second descriptively empirical; and the third practical and policy relevant. Chapter 2 frames the model for the establishment of a new Indo-Pacific equilibrium conceptually, and it addresses some important technical questions. Chapter 3 traces the development of Pax Americana and the emergence of the notion of the Indo-Pacific – the Indo-Pacific discussed both as a concept and as a new strategic reality with certain distinct characteristics that pose challenges and offer opportunities. Part II discusses in detail the most consequential bilateral relationship underpinning both the status quo and the unfolding structural change. It begins with chapter 4 outlining some important aspects of US-China post-Cold War history, showing that the immediate post-Cold War era offered some cause for optimism. Chapters 5 and 6 shift gear and move to contemporary great power dynamics, whose contours began to take shape in earnest towards the end of the noughts. Previous optimism was largely destroyed by developments in both China and the United States towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium. An increasing zero-sum interpretation of great power relations in a more assertive China and in the United States created a new age of an atmosphere of mistrust and gave rise to concrete new battlegrounds and flashpoints. These two chapters seek to demonstrate that this book’s main assumption is warranted: great power competition is back with a vengeance, unravelling order in the Indo-Pacific region. And it shows the concrete security threat China is posing to regional third parties, the ‘significant others’, who are increasingly compelled to contribute more to future order building.

The third and final part of this book seeks to offer policy relevant propositions. Chapters 7 and 8 lay out in detail both form and function of the new Indo-Pacific equilibrium. This equilibrium consists of two parallel, interdependent order-building projects that in their sum seek to create an equilibrium, equalising those detrimental forces that seek destruction of the status quo. These two interdependent pillars are, one, a hard power interpretation of balance – the constrainment of Chinese assertiveness and coercion if and when necessary; and two, a multi-dimensional concept of partnership – engagement both within multilateral institutions and minilateral functional partnerships. Both chapters address the three most pertinent questions: Who can perform these functions, how, and what should be on the immediate agenda? The agents and agency, as it were. Chapter 9 will conclude the book with a broader discussion of how smart leadership can galvanize all regional states to commence a process of new order building, of a new Indo-Pacific equilibrium.

This equilibrium should not be understood as a final order system, but as a twofold project to construct a foundation of equilibrium upon which a new order can gradually emerge. In their sum, these two order-building projects seek to establish the necessary modus vivendi and modus operandi for all stakeholders in the Indo-Pacific region. To some extent, these two pillars of order building reflect the traditional dialectic between neorealism and liberal institutionalism in international relations theory. This book grounds their understanding of what contributes to peace empirically by showing how the current strategic environment offers opportunities to combine notions of power with institutional interpretations of order and stability. This order building project broadly traces the footsteps of William Tow’s ‘convergent security’ approach.¹⁰ It embraces Tow’s belief in a holistic integration of multiple schools of thought in order to be politically relevant, not theoretically pure. Although the new Indo-Pacific equilibrium proposed here is conceptually different from Tow’s model, it equally embraces diversity and proposes an eclecticism that hopes to help underwrite future regional stability.

Unlike William Tow’s convergent security model, conceptualised two decades ago and discussed in the following chapter, this book can account for significant change in empirical circumstances, including the acceleration of China’s rise and the contemporary definition of strategic Asia, the Indo-Pacific which offers different challenges and opportunities. This book can also account for the more recent harsh downturn in Sino-US relations, and indeed China’s relations with the region at large. On the empirical side, this book takes a deep dive into contemporary great power dynamics as they unfold in the Indo-Pacific and provides a comprehensive overview over current competition and how the often-diagnosed Chinese assertiveness plays out in concrete flashpoints. It shows how dangerous these trends are, but, most importantly, it shows a way how this can be managed and an equilibrium achieved. These propositions stem from the author’s experience with and analysis of past and present strategic trends in the Indo-Pacific. All information is sourced from observation and experience of over almost two decades of studying and living in the region. Over the course of this book-specific research since 2018, many interviews with experts, diplomats and policymakers are supplemented with extensive primary and secondary literature. The main argument has been tested numerous times at both academic and track-2 and -1.5 conferences.

The post-World War II, largely US-led order is giving way to something new. What this is remains unclear. It is somewhat misleading to speak of China’s rise; although China’s power and influence has not yet peaked, China has already risen. The most consequential question of the first few decades of the 21st century will be how to deal with a confident, strong, assertive, and unapologetically authoritarian China. How American and China manage great power relations will have a substantial impact on almost all pressing global challenges. But predictions of American decline are premature, based more on sentiment than fact. As Fareed Zakaria points out, the end of the American unipolar moment is less a consequence of US decline and more of ‘the rise of the rest’.¹¹ If Washington manages to maintain its material status quo and simultaneously harness the potential of its partner countries that make up this ‘rest’, one can foresee a stable order for the Indo-Pacific region. This book has achieved its purpose if it instills a degree of optimism into the still open debate about whether Asia is ripe for rivalry or not. It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: Conceptualising the Indo-Pacific Equilibrium
• PART II: US-China Relations and the Indo-Pacific: From Honeymoon to Rivalry
• PART III: Operationalising a New Indo-Pacific Equilibrium
• Index