On hearing this question, most Americans of course would say the United States is a stabilizing factor in the Asia-Pacific region. I suspect most Chinese and quite a few others would disagree, and say it is destabilizing.
Recent American behavior at home and abroad tends to reinforce views that question whether the United States is really a factor for stability and suspect that the United States is in fact a force for instability. One recent example: the Obama administration, after saying America put its efforts against terrorism in the wrong war, in Iraq, instead of the right war, in Afghanistan, then announced a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan, only simultaneously to announce its intention to withdraw. Afghanistan’s neighbors heard the second part, and ignored the first. America’s reliance on Pakistan increased, but its relations with Islamabad rapidly deteriorated.
Obama’s officials announced America’s “return to Asia,” and many old friends in the region welcomed renewed attention from Washington, while many Chinese suspect the United States’ “return to Asia” really means engaging in a form of containment of China. Some even say that since the Taiwan Strait has become calmer with the ascension of Ma Ying-jeou, the United States is turning to the South China Sea as a new pressure point to keep China in check.
At home, the U.S. legislative process appears broken, for all to see. The latest action of raising the U.S. debt ceiling seemed to accomplish nothing, while diverting legislators’ attention from doing things that need to be done. This has contributed to post-Great Recession calculations that the United States is declining as China is rising. As in many countries, the United States is now entering a new election season, so that what has seemed chaotic up to now will soon appear orderly in comparison to what is coming.
America’s great contributions to post-World War II international order are suspected of coming to their end, as Washington increasingly finds itself unable to finance anything except replacement body parts for the elderly and interest payments to our creditors.
But I want to challenge you to turn these arguments around. America’s greatest accomplishments may be behind it, but still more great accomplishments lie before it.
America, like China’s new aircraft carrier, turns slowly, and is not small enough for sudden course corrections. Lacking a parliamentary system, by the choice of our forefathers, we do not have sweeping changes brought about by a single election. Change comes incrementally with each two-year election cycle.
In 2008, the public rejected the incumbent president’s party and voted for “change you can believe in.” The public then perceived that the promised change did not occur, and voted in the largest number of opposition Congressmen ever to change seats in 2010. We are now getting ready for 2012, and will then face 2014.
Judgments made about America’s future today will have little value if they do not also calculate the outcomes in the coming two elections. Judgments made today about America’s future are inherently premature, not because we do not know what the future will hold—and we do not—but because we know the next two election cycles will likely bring more change, not more continuity.
Since America’s beginning, change following crises has not come quickly. It took Franklin Roosevelt twelve years and a world war to get America going again after it fell from its position as the world’s leading creditor and exporter in the Great Depression. It took Ronald Reagan four years after Jimmy Carter’s four years, to rebuild American momentum lost in the 1970s inflation and retreat from Vietnam.
The United States is a welcoming country. We are mostly the children of immigrants and we welcome new immigrants. After the failure of the early twentieth century international institutions to preserve growth and peace, the United States led the construction of open and welcoming institutions after World War II, such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization/General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Bretton Woods instruments, and others.
This American record is perhaps the most stabilizing and anti-destabilizing in human history. It accepts change as an integral component of stability. It shuns the stability of the tomb in favor of the stability of growth and development. And it showed the world after history’s most violent war defeated and victor alike can live in peace and prosper together.
The second way in which I would like to examine the United States as a factor for stability versus instability is to use Harvard Professor Joe Nye’s metaphor: he has said security is like oxygen; you don’t notice it until you don’t have it. Nye has repeatedly underscored the American contribution to Asia-Pacific stability through its security presence and forward deployment.
Critics of the American security presence in the Asia-Pacific region view it as, among other things, an inappropriately preserved relic of the Cold War, a period that ended more than twenty years ago. Alliances and partnerships with Asia’s most rapidly developing economies, which once seemed like indispensable means to secure their successful development, now get viewed as focusing American energies on societies that are not keeping up with the times and as not in step with—or even opposed to—China’s emerging dynamism, China’s re-rise to preeminence in Asia.
Others could well point to America’s shortcomings during the Indo-China conflict, prolonged reluctance to reconcile to the end of the Chinese civil war, and lack of success at helping Korea ultimately reunify as examples of the United States not contributing to long-term Asian stability.
But let me challenge two assumptions buried in these critiques of America’s contemporary political and security role in the region. The first is that the region has achieved an internal stability that no longer requires the United States to play so prominent a role.
The second is that even if instability erupts, there is enough internal cohesion and cooperation in the region to manage new sources of instability without outside interference. Under this logic, significant U.S. participation is unwelcome and unnecessary.
Taking on the first assumption, I would like to discuss the prospects for China’s continued transition over the next decade or two. Impressed by the vast progress achieved by the Chinese people over the past thirty years, many observers, businesspeople, economists, and other analysts naturally tend to make straight-line projections of continued economic growth and social stability into the decades ahead.
As an American intimately involved with Asia for the past four decades, I tend to be much more cautious in my judgment about China’s future. We saw such projections in the 1980s about Japan’s future. Some who write today about a “G2” of the United States and China wrote back in the 1980s about how Tokyo and Washington were ready to guide the region and globe’s progress in the years ahead.
All the Asian “tiger” economies of the latter part of the twentieth century had their growth spurts, followed by wrenching adjustments to lower rates of growth and to development models that could no longer emphasize access to low cost capital for investment-led growth and industrialization. China is but the latest and biggest of these success stories.
But I am convinced that once the current investment phase reaches its point of rapidly diminishing returns, which will probably occur within the next five years or so, Beijing’s leaders also will confront the necessity of managing wrenching change. China’s twelfth five-year program is already trying to wrestle with this transition, but evidently is encountering impedance within the system, resistance to change that can only be expected to occur.
The tiger economies, each in its own way, also had to develop the political institutions and culture to manage the economic transitions they experienced. The net result was a political pluralization that developed at different paces and in different ways in different nations, but that over time increasingly accommodated rising expectations from the public. In this regard, China, which must deal with the largest scale challenges of any country, is still a long way from entering this necessary stage of political development and reform.
Complicating all the pains and costs of change is the reality that China’s population harbors a strong sense of nationalist grievance and, relatedly, that China has some unresolved disputes with its neighbors. After a spectacular display of diplomatic and strategic skill with its neighbors from the late 1990s until about 2007, the harder edge of China’s diplomacy began to prevail over the softer, and the region has since reacted.
There should be little wonder in China or elsewhere that the American return to Asia from its distractions in the Middle East is being so welcomed, from Korea to Indonesia and Malaysia, and to India and Australia and in between.
That this has happened at a moment when China feels proud after having achieved famous successes—in the Olympics, economic growth and stability after the global financial crisis, the Shanghai Expo—can only add to the emotions of the moment.
As China’s anticipated difficult economic transition unfolds, what today seem to be opportunities for countries in their business with China, I believe, may turn into issues or disadvantages. The challenges to China’s economic and political system, and their potential echoes in China’s foreign policy, will all reinforce a tendency growing since the end of the Cold War for countries to “hedge” their international relationships. In this changed atmosphere, for China’s neighbors, and I would assess even for China itself, the American counterweight and presence will be far more stabilizing than destabilizing.
Now, to address the second assumption mentioned above that Asia has reached a point of cohesion where American presence and activity is less needed than previously, I can only say I wish it were so. Sometimes critics of the United States say the Americans are so wedded to their “hub and spokes” network of alliances, that they are standing in the way of progress toward regional security architecture to handle the region’s problems.
The record does not support such allegations. When the Australians conceived of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the United States offered unconditional support. But when Mahathir bin Mohamad proposed an “East Asian Caucus,” Washington and its friends readily recognized that as a divisive effort to force the United States unnaturally out of Asian-Pacific affairs.
The United States also joined in the Six Party Talks framework on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula at China’s behest. The mixed results of the process so far have taught a lot of lessons, but they have not led the United States to walk away from the process. Indeed, with Chinese brainstorming at work, the United States today is giving the talks format yet another chance to prove itself.
I will not go into detail about the ASEAN-led processes, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and its many offshoots. Let me just say the United States is in all of them in a spirit of cooperation and seeking success.
A preoccupied Bush administration had difficulty saying yes or no to the concept of the East Asia Summit (EAS), but the new Obama administration offered to give it a try as well, while signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce as a precondition it could accept. All of us hope the EAS will find its feet and be worthy of the high-level attention it draws in its initial phase.
But these multilateral forums are still at an incipient stage and have yet to prove their strength and durability. Until we have security and economic mechanisms in the region that produce significant results reliably over time, it would be the height of folly to abandon the structures and habits that have brought Asia to this point of relative success today. Moreover, given that the largest party to the Asia-Pacific dialogue appears to face important transitional challenges, this emphasis on continuity in security would seem all the more prudent.
And returning to my early theme, that to many today the United States seems “down,” and some may say “out,” due to the aftermath of the financial crisis and domestic gridlock, I would caution that Asians should not make premature judgments about the United States, and in fact I am confident they are too shrewd and experienced to do so.
America remains a hugely wealthy and technologically advanced country. Its lead in most fields is widening rather than narrowing, although it needs to find a way to readjust the distribution of its vast wealth, not through decisions by the state against individuals, but by creating incentives for individuals to deploy their wealth in coherent and productive ways. That process is under way in the most thunderous and seemingly inefficient way possible. But I remain confident that it will deliver an America whose presence and involvement will be viewed more as a contribution to stability than a factor for instability.
This Asia Pacific Brief is based on remarks given at the CICIR conference in Beijing.
