The New Global Politics of the Asia-Pacific

Conflict and Cooperation in the Asian Century

Michael K. Connors, Rémy Davison, Jörn Dosch

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317232674
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Asian History

Now in its new and fully updated third edition, The New Global Politics of the Asia Pacific continues to provide a compelling analysis of a region undergoing dramatic changes. Based on new research and offering fresh interpretation, this edition evaluates the prospects for continuing US dominance in the 'Asian Century'. Whilst presenting evidence for a multifaceted 'Beijing Strategy', which aims to counter the US by building an alternative regional order, it also explains Japan's definitive departure from its limited military role. Providing an introductory guide for the main frameworks needed to understand the region, including realism, liberalism and critical theory, this new edition is reader-friendly, and offers sophisticated competing explanations. Key content includes:

• Intra-regional conflicts in the South China Sea and the Korean peninsula,

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• The different responses within the Asia-Pacific to theglobalization of Western ideas of democracy and political economy,

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• The underappreciated success of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in building a regional identity,

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• The European Union's soft power in the region.

A highly topical account, which offers an overview of the main actors, institutions and contemporary issues in the Asia-Pacific, the book will be essential reading for undergraduate students of Asian Studies, International Politics, and anyone interested in the region.

1 Introduction

Asia’s ‘Great Game’?

Rémy Davison

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 United States (US) presidential election signalled a seismic shift in the international relations of the Asia-Pacific. The Trump administration also threatened to disrupt the complex network of security and trade institutions that successive US administrations have carefully constructed since 1945. During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump canvassed raising tariffs on Chinese goods from between 10 per cent and 45 per cent; and he accused Beijing of currency manipulation, imposing taxes on US exports, and of militarizing reefs and artificial islands in the South China Sea. Trump also asserted that the Chinese leadership was ‘not helping’ the US with North Korea. Prior to taking office, Trump took a call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in December 2016, declaring subsequently that ‘the US was not necessarily bound by the “one China” policy’ (Reuters 12 December 2016). Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe was forced to meet with Trump twice to obtain assurances that the US–Japan alliance was secure.

The Philippines’ President Duterte declared his support for Trump, dismissing Obama with whom he had had a difficult relationship. In December 2016, the outgoing Obama administration found itself at odds with the transitional Trump team, as President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the US, sparking a diplomatic fracas. The Trump administration has challenged the orthodoxies that have governed US diplomacy in Asia for almost 50 years. Since 1971, US strategy in the Asia-Pacific has been built on a tripartite structure: containment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the USSR/Russia; maintenance of US hegemony in Asia via naval preponderance; and a system of formal and informal alliances throughout East and South Asia that enveloped Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Singapore, The Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. But the flashpoints that have now emerged in the East and South China Seas, as well as North Korea, represent some of the biggest international security challenges since 9/11. In 2016, Jane’s Defence Budgets estimated that by 2025, China will outspend all other militaries in the Asia-Pacific region combined, while India in 2016 surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia and ranked fourth in defence procurement expenditures (IHS Markit 2016).

In the first decade of the 21st century, three major events promulgated a profound reconfiguration of international politics. The first was the 11 September, 2001 attacks on the US; 9/11, it is widely agreed, ‘changed everything’. The second event was the Iraq War of 2003; and the third event was the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, the longer-term implications of which are still opaque. The three events are integrally linked; the 9/11 attacks drove the United States to develop forceful foreign and security strategies, redefining its relations with India, China and Russia in the global war on terror. The Iraq War divided both the Islamic world and the US’s traditional allies, while simultaneously shifting the US budget from surplus to deep deficit. Finally, the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis exacerbated the US debt spiral.

According to some analysts (Dadush and Stancil 2009, Fisk 2009), this period saw the balance of global financial power move in China’s favour by 2010. By 2050, according to a widely cited Goldman Sachs (2005) report, the economic centre of gravity will have shifted decisively to the Asia-Pacific. Three of the world’s four biggest economies will be Asian: China, Japan and India. By 2015, China’s GDP of US$ 11 trillion was almost three times that of Japan (World Bank 2015). In 2016, South Asia was the world’s fastest growing economy (World Bank 2016), while emerging Asia (the ASEAN-4) grew on average almost 7 per cent between 2013 and 2015 (IMF 2016). China now has more billionaires than the US, while Asia’s billionaires now outnumber Europe’s (The Economist 17 June 2015). In 2015, the Asia-Pacific region’s share of global GDP was 40 per cent, with China accounting for 70 per cent of the total (ADB 2015).

Despite its modernization and expanding institutional architecture, there is still no regional security organization in Asia, no region-wide economic institution, and, indeed, no commonly held definition of what comprises ‘Asia’. Thus, as recently as 2002, Hemmer and Katzenstein (2002: 575) could still ask, ‘Why is there no NATO in Asia?’ The answer is deceptively simple: in Europe, the United States built institutions; in Asia, it did not. The seductiveness of this answer fails to capture the complexity, uncertainty and instability of the Cold War era in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1949, no one could have predicted the endurance of the Beijing and Taipei regimes, the Sino–Soviet split, or America’s ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. Equally, few could have anticipated the rapid marketization of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) economy after 1978, the extraordinary growth of the East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs), or the equally extraordinary collapse of many of them in 1997–98.

The Asia-Pacific is such a fluid and dynamic region that it demands continual reappraisal and reconsideration. At the dawn of the 21st century, politico-economic instability, terrorism and security threats emerged as the key issues confronting the nations of East Asia. In parts of the region, the Cold War is far from over, evidenced by the re-emergence of a forceful North Korean regime, which embarked on an aggressive ballistic missile programme in the 1990s. Although Pyongyang’s position appeared to soften following rapprochement with South Korea, and certain diplomatic guarantees from the US, tensions flared up once more during 2002–03, as the communist regime posed a new threat to its immediate neighbours, South Korea and Japan.

The Asia-Pacific has emerged as a region of global significance. It houses the world’s two biggest economies, the world’s largest military power and the world’s most populous nation. The region is also home to eight of the world’s ten largest military forces. The Asia-Pacific is also the most nuclearized region in the world, hosting six of the world’s nuclear weapons states: the US, Russia, China, North Korea, India and Pakistan, and there is no regional consensus on arms control or WMD (see Kondapalli 2008). Communist, democratic and authoritarian regimes cohabit and co-exist within the region, if not always peacefully. Although the Yalta system, which divided the post-war world into US and Soviet spheres of influence, has disappeared, many Cold War relics remain scattered throughout the Asia-Pacific. Taiwan remains a point of friction between the US and China; the PRC remains a communist state politically, albeit one with many of the trappings of a capitalist market economy; the 1953 division of the two Koreas at the 38th parallel is still intact; Japan remains a military client state of the US; and US security dominance in the region persists, although serious challenges have emerged from Beijing and Pyongyang.

This chapter commences with a brief discussion of key developments in the Asia-Pacific during the Cold War. This is followed by an examination of the major paradigms in international relations – realism, liberalism, neo-Marxism and constructivism – which have been highly influential prisms through which both academic analyses, as well as policy-makers, have viewed international relations in the Asia-Pacific. We provide an overview of the book in the final section of this chapter.

Locating the Asia-Pacific region

As Hemmer and Katzenstein note, there is a great deal of confusion over what constitutes ‘Asia’, the ‘Asia-Pacific’ and the ‘Pacific’. As Desker (2008: 56) notes, ‘“The Asia-Pacific region” includes the countries located on and within the edges of the Pacific Ocean, as well as India, which is beginning to play an important role in the politics of the region’. However, important, albeit artificial, geographical divisions are frequently drawn between East, South and Central Asia. For example, Palmer (1991: 21) asks whether the Asia-Pacific can be described as a region, due to its diffuse geography, ethnicity and culture. The first edition of The New Global Politics of the Asia-Pacific focused predominantly on what former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans described as the ‘East Asian hemisphere’, comprising Northeast Asia (China, Japan, the two Koreas and Taiwan), Southeast Asia (the ASEAN 10), Australia and New Zealand. But the breadth of Asia, as well as the Pacific and Indian Oceans, means that Russia, Mongolia and Chile can rightfully claim membership of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), while both Russia and India are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Russia has long been an Asian, as well as a Pacific and European power, while India’s geostrategic location, in addition to its emerging status as a major economic power, make it a key player in the Asia-Pacific region. In the eastern Pacific and the Pacific Rim, both the US and Australia, due to their respective strategic and economic interests, are heavily enmeshed with the East Asian region; however, due to their geographical locations and cultural backgrounds, they are not geographically located within the Asian region, although geopolitically and geo-economically, they are inseparable from Asia. Implicitly, APEC’s very nomenclature recognized this fact in that it broadened the notion of Asian economic co-operation to encompass the Asia-Pacific, a form of transcontinental regionalism Keohane and Nye (2001: 2) term ‘multicontinental interdependence’. In 2005, the promulgation of the East Asia Summit (EAS) saw Australia and India assume membership, with the US and Russia acceding in 2011.

Students of international politics confront a definitional minefield when attempting to determine the geographical boundaries of ‘Asia’ or the ‘Asia-Pacific’, and this is rendered all the more difficult by notions of ‘Asian’ versus ‘Western’ values. This encompasses a wide range of issues and models, a number of which we consider in Chapter 13: authoritarianism v. democracy; communitarianism v. human rights; and the capitalist development state v. laissez-faire capitalism.

APEC proves the exception, rather than the rule, in studies of East Asia. Unless the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is promulgated, APEC is the only Asia-Pacific economic organization that includes states from outside Northeast, Southeast or South Asia. ASEAN, the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), ASEAN Plus Three (APT) and Malaysia’s 1990 East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC) proposal comprise East Asian states exclusively. Conversely, security and dialogue fora, such as the Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), co-opt other states and regional actors, including the EU, Australia, Russia and the US, within a broad framework of mutual interests. However, it is notable that neither the ARF nor ASEM has developed the complex institutional framework of ASEAN, which became the ASEAN Community in 2015, while none of the other East Asian regional organizations, including the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and the Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC), remains.

This book investigates the transformation of the Asia-Pacific from regional to global actor. In the last 15 years, the region has become the centre of the global supply chain, the crux of the world’s growth trajectory and home to 3.6 billion people, 51 per cent of the world’s population (Washington Post 7 May 2013). That the region is of critical global significance, both strategically and economically, is beyond contestation. Of equal importance is the fact that both the US and Europe have developed such a level of interconnectedness with the Asia-Pacific that it arguably ranks foremost in the minds of American and European policy-makers, ahead of other potential flashpoints, such as the Middle East and Central Asian regions.

The making of the Cold War in East Asia

The Cold War may have been a battle between the US and Soviet Union, but its battlefields were to be found in East Asia: in China, Korea and Vietnam. In this respect, conflict, confrontation and co-operation in East Asia have provided rich empirical data for analyses of the region. In the immediate post-war period, international relations theory was dominated by realism, which monopolized national foreign policy agendas throughout most of the world.

Historians have debated the causes of the Cold War incessantly, but all concur that the Korean War was a pivotal moment in this emergent bipolar international system. Gaddis (1982: 110–15) argues that Korea was fundamentally an error of US foreign policy, driven by two imperatives: first, to atone for its early Cold War failures in Greece, Iran and Berlin; and, second, to restore US ‘credibility’ against the perceived threat of Soviet and Chinese communist expansionism. Gaddis asserts that despite US Secretary of State Acheson’s assurances to Beijing that US interests extended only to preventing Soviet imperialism in China, in reality US policy was directed towards ‘preventing the basis of a durable alliance between the Soviet Union and China’.

However, it was the Soviet Union’s own diplomacy which destroyed the Sino–Soviet entente cordiale and divided the ‘monolithic’ communist bloc. Stalin’s China policy in the 1940s was essentially motivated by realism, not international communism. Moscow sought to avoid a powerful communist state on its borders which might not only exhibit independence, but could also ultimately pose a challenge to the leading and guiding role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In response, Mao’s forces recommenced their insurrections against the Nationalists, leading to the virtual disintegration of the Nationalist government by 1948. Mao’s suspicions of the Soviets deepened as Stalin urged him to concentrate his forces in northern China, leaving the south to the Nationalists. The damage to Sino–Soviet relations was permanent: in 1950, Stalin secured Mao’s agreement that Mongolia would remain ‘independent’, albeit as a Soviet satellite. In return for some nominal financial and material assistance, Mao was also forced to cede to the Soviets some mining rights in Manchuria and Xinjiang.

If China could win concessions from the Americans while remaining in the Soviet camp, US Secretary of State John Dulles wrote in 1952, ‘then there is little reason for her to change’ (Gaddis 1992: 75). However, the Eisenhower Administration was uncertain about how to divide the communist bloc. Truman had viewed vigorous action in Korea as the only means by which to restore US credibility in the region, in an attempt to combat the perception that the US had ‘lost’ China. Conservative George Kennan had warned in 1947 that Soviet communist expansion had occurred much more quickly and successfully than the imperialist acquisitions of the fascist and Nazi regimes in the 1930s. Therefore, Kennan (1947) argued, both Communist China and the USSR needed to be contained, while the PRC could also be isolated from international affairs by continuing US support for the Nationalist regime in Taipei.

In East Asia, as well as Europe, Kennan’s doctrine of the need to ‘contain’ the USSR became the linchpin of American policy. In Europe, the Soviet thrust was halted 80 miles west of Berlin; but in East Asia, the fall of the Nationalist Chinese government to Mao’s communists in 1949 indicated that the US had underestimated the power of international socialism’s ‘second front’. Under a joint Soviet–American agreement, the two sides withdrew from the Korean Peninsula in 1949. However, North Korean forces’ invasion of South Korea in 1950 provided the Truman administration with the justification for military re-engagement with the region. The US deployed the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan in June, ostensibly to protect the South Korean regime, as the Rhee government in the South had been quickly driven out of Seoul by North Korean forces by September 1950. The US’s response was a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution in October, calling for the establishment of UN-sponsored forces to restore stability in Korea. As the Chinese Nationalist government, now based in Taipei, was a permanent member of the UNSC, the PRC had no vote on the issue. The Soviet delegation absented itself, and the three other permanent members – the US, Britain and France – voted in favour of the resolution.

The US, Britain and Australia entered the war on the South’s side with UN support for the intervention. In response, PRC ‘Volunteers’ covertly assisted the North. It has recently become apparent that the USSR also played a major covert role in the conflict. Although this was unclear at the time, the Korean War was the first armed conflict staged between nuclear powers. Despite the cessation of hostilities in 1953 with no decisive victory, the division of Korea, with a communist-dominated North, persists as one of the last remnants of the Cold War.

Throughout the Korean War, the American conservatives’ view – that Mao’s China and Stalin’s USSR formed a monolithic communist bloc – appeared correct. The Soviets supplied China with over US$ 250 million in material assistance during the conflict, and relations were co-operative on issues such as Port Arthur and mineral resources in Manchuria and Xinjiang, which the Soviets returned to the PRC. Khrushchev’s emergence as Soviet leader in 1957 initially maintained conciliatory policies towards China. However, the Soviets were disbursing a greater proportion of their foreign aid to satellites such as Egypt and, simultaneously, demanded China repay Korean War loans. Khrushchev also offered Soviet nuclear technology to Mao in return for virtually complete control over Chinese foreign policy. Mao, having witnessed the ruthlessness of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, rejected the overture. In 1959, Khr...