The Problem With Primacydominance coincided with the post-1979 “Asian peace”—a period of remarkable stability in East Asia and the Pacific—and so the United States had little trouble holding sway over the region without provoking any conflicts. Over time, Washington
Van Jackson
In its policies toward Asia, the United States has long sought to reconcile its unsurpassed military, economic, and rule-setting prowess with a desire for stability. Until recently, this was not hard to accomplish. Washington’s international
But as the American author James Baldwin wrote in 1963, “time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue”. Even if U.S. primacy was once a source ofregional stability, there is little basis to think it will promote harmony today. The United States’ global power has diminished over the past generation, making it harder for Washington to direct the world. Other states have a newfound desire and
Nevertheless, two of the most recent U.S. presidents—Barack Obama and Donald Trump—charged themselves with the task of indefinitely propping up the sun. And President Joe Biden has picked up where both presidents left off. Initially, that meanttaking steps to constrain Beijing. Now, it means taking steps to weaken the country. Obama started the process by launching a high-profile “pivot to Asia” designed to bolster the United States’ regional military presence as a check against China’
These choices run headlong into what the preservation of peace demands. Kneecapping China’s economy, engaging in an endless arms race, aligning with local despotic regimes to encircle Beijing, and alienating smaller countries by demanding that theychoose between China and the United States might give Washington more short-term power in Asia. But these are the ingredients of regional fracture and eventual war, not stability. The United States’ Asia policy, then, is at an unacknowledged crossroads.
OUT OF CONTROLUnder Trump, a declassified White House strategy document showed that the United States’ supreme interest in Asia was maintaining “U.S. strategic primacy” as well as Washington’s “diplomatic, economic, and military preeminence”. The “loss
The United States has been working hard to remain on top in Asia for well over a decade. In 2010, then U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes declared that the Obama administration was trying “to get America another fifty years as leader”.
The Biden administration remains faithful to this path. In its 2021 strategy, it declared that “leading the world” was in the United States’ “undeniable self-interest”. It went on to say that the country’s interests “compel the deepestconnection to the Indo-Pacific” and that the United States’ presence would be “most robust in the Indo-Pacific and Europe”. The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be “the most transformative year in US force posture in the region in a
For Washington, the increased emphasis on Asia has been largely driven by the fear that China’s growing strength will impinge on the United States’ ability to shape the global order. The Pentagon has described Beijing as a “near-peer competitor”and a “pacing threat”. In response, the United States has entered an arms race against a rapidly modernizing People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It is a contest with no apparent end. The U.S. defense budget went from $700 billion in 2018 to $768
Washington’s efforts to retain its primacy in the region go beyond amassing and proliferating armaments. To achieve even greater dominance, the United States has turned the global political economy into a zero-sum struggle against Beijing. Biden hasretained Trump-era student-visa restrictions targeted at the Chinese and expanded his predecessor’s tariffs, sanctions, and company blacklists. In October, for example, administration officials banned U.S.-made semiconductor technology from being sold
The United States’ fixation on crippling China’s access to semiconductors entails more than export bans. In its October guidelines, the Commerce Department also restricted U.S. corporations from engaging in any semiconductor-related research,development, or financing with Chinese entities. “We are ahead of [China]”, explained U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “We need to stay ahead of them. And we need to deny them this technology that they need to advance their military”.
This is not the rationale of a country that is simply balancing Chinese power or trying to stop Beijing from creating a sphere of influence. It is not the strategy of a state trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. It is containment in all butname.
PRIMACY VERSUS PEACEarsenal or selling submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible. China has spent years preparing for a techno-containment strategy from the United States, launching its “Made in China 2025”
For the United States, there are many problems with a strategy based on trying to stop China’s rise. One is that on a basic level, it will not work. There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear
What maintaining U.S. primacy will instead do is menace the Asian peace. The massive military investments needed to ensure the United States remains the Indo-Pacific’s dominant power require outarming China in areas of its highest capability, closeto Chinese shores and far from the U.S. homeland. It is an impossible task. Consider, for instance, the steps Washington must take to fight a war over Taiwan. China has the natural, massive advantage of being close to the island’s coasts, all of which
Risking military escalation is only one of the ways that primacy has an antagonistic relationship to stability. As I argued in Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, any U.S. drive for economic dominance will alsoundermine regional stability because it involves breaking up the economic structures that have played a vital role in preventing war in the Pacific. The East Asian development model based on exports and interdependence was made possible because political
In decades past, Washington’s economic primacy was rarely contested by other states, and so the actions it took to remain central to Asian trade and financial flows were subtler and less visible. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration assertedcontrol over the region by making sure that burgeoning regional institutions remained informal and were led by the private sector. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration succeeded in opposing a Malaysian-led East Asian Economic Caucus and a Japanese-
Washington’s drive to outcompete China gave rise to a full-court diplomatic press to convince Asian governments that they should divest of Huawei—admittedly one of the Communist Party’s tech titans but also a major, affordable globaltelecommunications provider across the Indo-Pacific. The recently launched quest to cut off China from advanced data-processing technologies so far involves cajoling Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to comply with ever-tightening restrictions on trade,
Beijing, of course, also has a revisionist desire to promote its interests. The Chinese Communist Party is hardly a force for peace. But the reality is that China is now embedded in Asia’s financial and economic system in ways that the United Statesis not, giving Beijing the kind of political weight in Asia that Washington lacks. In addition to being a major regional financier, China is Asia’s central hub in a manufacturing network that produces finished goods for markets across the world. It is
U.S. officials, then, are demanding that Asian states work against their own long-term interests. They insist that Asian governments betray the interdependence that has fostered regional peace because doing so might give Washington—not Asia—amarginal advantage in a geopolitical struggle of questionable merit. In the best of times that would be unrealistic, and this is far from the best of times. As China grows more and more embedded in Asia’s regional architecture, the United States is in
READING THE ROOMstatecraft on the concerns of Asian societies would require a dramatic shift in how the United States conducts itself in the region, but it would also be the surest way to consolidate—rather than further embrittle—the Asian peace.
So what should Washington do instead? It could start with a dose of simple pragmatism. Asian governments want stability more than anything, and they know what serves their interests in this respect better than the United States ever could. Centering
If it tuned in, Washington would learn that small states are wary of being forced to take sides in a great-power competition. They are pleading instead for geopolitical openness and strategic pluralism in the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement: theCold War era collection of postcolonial states that refused to be subordinated to either the Soviet Union or the United States. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for instance, has repeatedly stated it will not choose between China and the
Asian leaders are also wary of any measure that would cause China’s economy to implode. It is easy to see why. The region’s economies are so interconnected with China’s that if the latter tanked (whether as a result of U.S. containment efforts orBeijing’s own failures), the rest of Asia would go down with it. Regional leaders therefore want to buoy—and profit from—the local great-power economy, one that helped insulate Asia from the worst of the 2008 global financial crisis. Asian
It is still unclear whether Asian states can actually create a new Non-Aligned Movement. But the very fact that leaders are so committed to trying suggests that Washington’s attempts to ensure regional states fully comply with its demands to smiteChina are at best ill fated. At worst, U.S. efforts will actively undermine the country’s standing and destabilize the area. The semiconductor gambit, for instance, demands fracturing Asian economic integration, which will flatline the region’s
If the United States really cares about stability in Asia, it must become a partner to any nonaligned bloc rather than an obstacle to its creation. To do so, it should increase export quotas and offer price controls for imports of commodities that areof great importance to Asian and Pacific economies. This step will aid key sources of regional economic development and bolster Asian interdependence. Washington must also help the region manage its growing levels of sovereign debt, which could cause a
These steps would all signal that Washington has the interests of Asia’s people at heart, that it is not out to control others, and that it understands it cannot coerce its way to peace. But to take any of these measures, the United States must firstshed its ambitions of primacy. The country must respond to Asia as it exists rather than treating it as an abstract arena in which it can conduct power politics.
Van Jackson is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace.
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