Asia’s Parallel Narrative
Despite tectonic shifts in global politics and major dislocations over the past quarter century such as the ending of the Cold War, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the war on terror, the consequences of the Arab Spring of 2011, and the Ukrainian crisis, Asia’s rise is the predominant feature of contemporary geopolitics and geoeconomics.1 The major contours of Asia’s rise have been told from virtually all angles. Particularly since China’s accelerated economic growth over the past two decades, the main question was when, and not if, China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economic power. According to International Monetary Fund data, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest economy at the end of 2014, as measured by a gross domestic product (GDP) based on purchasing power parity (PPP) of $17.63 trillion compared with $17.41 trillion for the United States. In nominal GDP, the United States continues to lead with $17.41 trillion compared with China’s $10.35 trillion, but the consensus among China watchers is that even in nominal GDP, China is likely to surpass the United States by 2024, if not earlier.2
Such comparisons offer mere snapshots of a country’s capabilities, but in this instance it illustrates just how far China has come since economic reforms began in 1978. It has also been asserted that the rise of Asia signals an inevitable decline of the liberal international order that was created and led by the West, particularly by the United States, in the aftermath of World War II. Such claims are predictably contentious, but as Henry Kissinger wrote in August 2014, “Vast regions of the world have never shared and only acquiesced in the Western concept of order. These reservations are now becoming explicit, for example, in the Ukraine crisis and the South China Sea. The order established and proclaimed by the West stands at a turning point.”3
Asia’s rise as the world’s third strategic pillar, side by side with the United States and the European Union (EU), means that divining Asian futures has assumed global implications. This is because how Asia transitions in the decades ahead is going to profoundly affect global wealth, international security, and sustainable development throughout the twenty-first century. The magnitude of Asia’s rise means that any emerging world order is unthinkable without considering Asia’s central role. In 2014, the seven largest economies in the Asia-Pacific region—China, Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, and Taiwan—totaled $36 trillion, or 33.7 percent of world GDP, and accounted for 43 percent of the world’s 7.2 billion population.4 Thus, how Asia evolves in the decades ahead cannot but affect the makeup of the broader international system.
The Incomplete Asian Story
Nevertheless, the dominant narrative of Asia’s rise remains significantly incomplete and in many respects inaccurate. Why? Because it’s a story that usually celebrates the brighter sides. Those include the region’s spectacular rags-to-riches drama, the transformation of China and India, the growing appeal of the so-called Beijing Consensus—the underpinnings of a Chinese development model based on a quasi-free market system with strong guidance by the state, as an alternative to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies—and the inevitability of a new world order that is going to be led by Asia. This story is told without really thinking through just how Asia plans to create, lead, and maintain a new regional order, let alone an international one. More fundamentally, such a view assumes that there is wide-ranging consensus in Asia on what constitutes an intrinsically Asian order, the critical features of an Asian security architecture, and, perhaps most important, which regional powers should take the lead in shaping such an order and the structure under which it would be maintained.
Even the oft-mentioned notion of an Asian century is replete with conceptual ambiguity and highly imprecise characteristics since it gives the illusion of political and perhaps even ideological cohesion across the vastness of Asia. Are the makings of an Asian century primarily economic? Is an Asian century synonymous with a Pax Asiana, that is, an Asian-led international order? To what extent do Asia’s major and middle powers agree on common political and security agendas? Indeed, the deeper one delves into defining the characteristics of an Asian century, the gap between idealized perceptions of One Asia and the realities of a highly diverse region only becomes wider.
There is little doubt that Asia has made enormous economic and technological progress with growing military capabilities, but wide-ranging political discrepancies exist between Asia’s strategically consequential states and their contending security interests. Another important facet of the Asian security discourse is the parallel debate on the growing likelihood of the inevitable decline of the West commensurate with Asia’s rise. The West faces enormous challenges just as its preponderance in the international system is ebbing. But even though the relative weight of the dominant Western powers has decreased over the past three decades, the United States and the EU combined still account for nearly half of global GDP. In addition, if one perceives the West beyond the narrow confines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and as a broader manifestation of shared values, norms, and interests, the assumptions underlying a declining West have to be revisited.
No one doubts Asia’s unprecedented economic growth in the post–World War II era, particularly since the rise of the so-called Four Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and, much more significantly, the economic transformation of China and India. But celebrating Asia’s rags-to-riches story shouldn’t ignore or minimize current and emerging fault lines across Asia with potentially critical implications for regional stability and security. To grasp a fuller picture of Asia’s rise, it is imperative to understand key negative drivers and the impact they may have on Asia’s future trajectories. Asia isn’t just the major engine of the world economy; it is also home to most of the world’s gravest security threats.
The Misconceptions of an Asian-Led New World Order
Notwithstanding the spreading of democracy since the 1980s, Asia confronts enormous political and social challenges. How an authoritarian one-party dictatorship in China will continue to coexist with a flourishing market economy and an increasingly freer society remains unknown. But however the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rebrands itself as the guardian of a New China as it prepares for its hundredth anniversary in 2021, China’s rulers can no longer ignore the Fifth Modernization—democratization, greater institutionalization of the rule of law, and the upholding of civil liberties.5 (The Four Modernizations that were spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping when reforms began in 1978 included agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology.) China’s leaders have rejected any adoption of a Western-style democracy, and they expressly believe that the trumpeting of so-called universal values and human rights by the West is highly inconsistent given the abuses wrought by Western imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, China continues to maintain that since it doesn’t insist that the West adopt Chinese values and norms, neither should the West insist on a quid pro quo. China is entitled to such views if one takes into consideration the deeply ingrained notion of the so-called century of humiliation that stretched from the 1840s to the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. And it is also very clear that even long-established democracies face enormous political challenges: just consider the absolutely stunning amount of money—$1 billion each for the Democratic and Republican Party nominees—that has to be raised to run a U.S. presidential campaign.
Nevertheless, the challenges the West faces in consolidating or improving democratic governance by no means should be construed across Asia as an excuse for extremely uneven levels of political development, the prevalence of authoritarian regimes and semi-democracies, and the existence of some of the world’s worst governments. The world’s only remaining totalitarian regime—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—remains resolutely committed to producing more nuclear weapons while maintaining a family-run Communist dynasty. Poverty and corruption continue to pose massive challenges to India, despite the fact that it has experienced significant economic growth since the early 1990s. The security of extremely fragile states or de facto failed states could become even more precarious. In Pakistan, for example, that is because of the significant politicization of the armed forces, the intelligence services’ ties to fundamentalist Islamic forces, a broken political and educational system, the flourishing of myriad terrorist groups, and questions pertaining to the ability of the government and the army to maintain firm control of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
For its part, Japan has been an exemplary democracy in the post–World War II era and has developed into America’s most important Asian ally, but its closest neighbors have become increasingly concerned over Tokyo’s rightward shift, particularly under the stewardship of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. From reinterpreting Japan’s so-called peace constitution to expanding Japan’s right to exercise collective self-defense, Abe has accentuated an assertive security posture. His December 2013 visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where class A war criminals are listed among the millions of Japanese war dead, and follow-on visits by members of his cabinet spiked already high tensions between Japan and China. The year 2015 was highly symbolic since it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the normalization of relations between South Korea and Japan and the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Prime Minister Abe reiterated his desire to improve ties with South Korea, including the desire to hold a bilateral summit with President Park Geun-hye, but Park insisted on tangible progress on a highly contentious history issue before she would meet with Abe.
Park has been adamant that the Japanese government must reaffirm previous statements on the World War II–era sexual slaves issue (euphemistically referred to as comfort women) before bilateral ties can be fully restored. Korean-Japanese relations in the first two and a half years of Park’s five-year term arguably sank to their lowest point since diplomatic ties were established in 1965. By the summer of 2015, however, and concomitant with Washington’s strong desire for Seoul and Tokyo to meet each other halfway, South Korea and Japan were trying to reset the relationship, and the first bilateral summit between the two countries in three years was held in Seoul on November 2, 2015.
Maintaining cooperation between Japan and South Korea is critical, especially in the context of security ties among Japan, South Korea, and the United States, in order to respond effectively to outstanding threats such as a nuclearized North Korea that is on the cusp of miniaturizing nuclear warheads and a China that is expanding its military footprints. Japan views China as a key security concern and has been particularly vocal about Beijing’s robust naval and air operations in Japan’s adjacent waters. Understandably, South Korea is heavily preoccupied with addressing the growing array of asymmetrical threats from North Korea, but China’s military prowess and more direct challenges toward U.S. forward military presence in Northeast Asia are also becoming sources of concern for defense planners in Seoul. Finally, South Korea needs to forge a bipartisan, depoliticized national security strategy and appraise much more realistically the growing spectrum of over-the-horizon security challenges, particularly if it seeks to assume the lead throughout the unification process.
In more ways than one, the Seoul-Tokyo relationship encapsulates the fragility of even vitally important bilateral relationships and the powerful resonance of domestic politics, historical memories, and hardened national identities. Across Asia, virtually all the bilateral relationships between the major powers, such as the Sino-U.S., Sino-Indian, Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, and even the recently improving Sino-Russian relationships, are characterized by varying degrees of combustive forces and strategic mistrust, notwithstanding growing economic and commercial ties. In the Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Pakistani rivalry has had a nuclear dimension as far back as 1974 when India first tested a nuclear device; the rivalry has been overtly nuclear since the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998. Four wars have been fought between India and Pakistan, and the conditions for strategic stability have become much more complicated. Conflict shadows are omnipresent in other subregions, notably the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and, increasingly, in the East and South China Seas.
In 2010, Asia’s collective defense spending surpassed that of Europe for the first time. Even as intraregional trade continues to flourish, Asia’s strategically consequential powers without exception are increasing military investments, upgrading their forces, enhancing their power projection capabilities, and strengthening their intelligence resources. If Asia’s right hand is busy counting profits in yuan, yen, and rupees, its left hand is equally busy signing defense contracts and making new security arrangements.
There is no doubt that Asia’s transformation over the past half century has been unprecedented in its compressed and accelerated economic development. Measured by GDP growth, a rise in exports, the number of registered patents, increasingly modernized armed forces, and globally active conglomerates, the very term “rising Asia” is a misnomer because Asia has already risen. But usually left undefined is precisely how Asia is going to dominate the emerging international order and how Asia—or more specifically, its leading powers—is going to take the lead in forming new political and economic architectures.
China’s official launching of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in June 2015 is one key indicator that China’s and Asia’s share of the global economic pie is going to grow. Fifty countries signed up as the AIIB’s charter members, with a number of other countries that were either waiting for domestic approval or have declared their intention to join. The AIIB was launched with $100 billion, 75 percent of it coming from Asia though 15 percent of voting rights are allocated equally regardless of the equities, and China has a 30 percent stake but a voting share of 26 percent.6 Even though China’s economic clout is bound to increase ...