the shifting politics of Asia

wishful thinking or momentum?

Dr. Cassandra Lewis will discuss cyber on 20 April at 1000 eastern in our next Timely Topic webinar. I posted the link in comments yesterday but please alert me if you did not receive it. Should be a fascinating hour on a hot hot hot issue.

We are coming closer to stating a desired endstate for the western Pacific. Some Taiwan supporters genuinely seek to protect the island and its democratic-loving population but make no mistake the emerging objective is containment of the PRC. There is even a feeling in some quarters, though I think it fading ever so slightly, that the true endstate we want is to eliminate PRC governance by the Communist Party. But we want to contain as we did between 1948 and 1992 elsewhere.

The Biden administration most definitely aims to achieve this largely through assuring allies and partners in the region unite to prevent the PRC from ‘gaining’ states at our loss, in a true zero-sum way of thinking. This differs from President Trump’s more penchant to embrace less predictable stances on everything in the region.

China’s overly demanding behaviour provided the basis both to spur actions strengthening partnerships, if not formal alliances, and developing expectations of greater links. The 13 March unveiling of the details on the extremely expensive AUKUS initiative is a prime example of hope that if the United Kingdom-Australia-United States are growing far closer, how could others be far away?

Japan has increased its commitments to defense through financial commitments and revising its defense guidelines, reversing eight decades of non-military, constitutionally prohibited military development to become a major military power. This dramatic shift, along with rumblings of South Korea embracing greater duties, would bring Chinese fears of encirclement to the fore, satisfying years of U.S. nudging for action.

Stop. It’s one thing to see improvements but seeing a whole scenario of unbroken allies holding in China strikes me as fanciful, if not dangerous. Let’s consider what the impediments are to seeing U.S. friends around the region completely subdue China’s aggression. As I noted last week, humans create friction points which prevent completely anticipated straightline results in policy.

The messaging emanating from United States is all over the page, at times including the present administration. Remnants of President Trump’s anti-ally rhetoric, whether opposing formal alliances in NATO or Japan and South Korea, still resonates in a wide swath of the Republican Party.

Republicans are also casting doubts about their willingness to continue support to Ukraine, a position the NATO members still advocate. Do our allies completely believe we mean it when we talk about alliances, legal agreements by which one state says it will formally take responsibilities, including potentially sacrificing the lives of our service personnel, on behalf of other peoples?

This is not a partisan comment: Democrats, particularly the Ocasio Cortez and Sanders wing, have long asked why we are putting more emphases on foreign needs than those of the workers of the United States.

What financial commitments are we seriously seeing the U.S. public endorse? As Ukraine fatigue grows, is the public truly convinced of the depth of the PRC threat? Is it an existential one that the public will support financiallly for forty years as it did the Cold War? President Macron’s recent trip to Beijing may signal Europe reviving its love affair with Beijing; how does that play here?

Are there any opponents to the new AUKUS roadmap in Britain or Australia? Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party govern a rather splintered Great Britain, a country still struggling with post-Brexit impacts. The Conservatives first took power this round in 2010 and must face a general election in early 2025. Currently Labour is ahead but would Sunak be able to sustain his commitment to this financial and political marriage with Washington and Canberra that must endure for at least a generation to deliver the promised results.

Australia’s leader signalled a commitment deliberately to apprise the public of the depths of this accord but neither Labour (currently in power under Anthony Albanese) nor the Conservatives Down Under have a lock on power. The vast resources, $368 billion to buy submarines built by the three nations in partnership along with $3 billion for investment in the U.S. industrial base to support the deal over the next twenty years, are incredible amounts of cash for a nation spending $36 billion on defense in 2023. Would successor governments continue such enrmous amounts?

Southeast Asia remains a region where states prefer ambivalence to guaranteed behaviour. Cambodia and Laos remain open to flat out patronage with Beijing while Vietnam’s Communist Party leaders desire autonomy yet never seem able to break their nominal partnership as two of the remaining Marxist-Leninist regimes. Hoped for closeness between Washington and Hanoi appears a chimera yet one we pursue as if it is nearly here. (Then again, I am the one who says we cannot straightline behaviour, aren’t I?)

The Thai military retains its decades’-long ability to play one capital off against another but that ought not be the basis to hope for formal, long term support. Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and even Singapore recognise that Beijing’s importance in this region is unavoidable, retaining far closer ties with China than Washington wishes.

Perhaps the most unpredictable state in the western Pacific remains the Philippines. The Biden Administration was delighted two months ago when the Marcos government consented to a wider U.S. military deployment but the former U.S. colony has proven rather vulnerable to Beijing’s inenticements over the last few years. U.S. mil-to-mil connections will lead to far greater foreign assistance since Beijing dangles that tool at a time the U.S. Congress is threatening to end foreign aid altogether.

Taiwan, of course, is increasing its defense spending but, as I have said monthly over the last six months, we don’t have formal ties with that island so we are not going to sign an alliances under the current conditions. Taiwan’s uniquely non-existent legal status with everyone else in the region continues raising questions about how these states would respond to an attack on the island: would others really put their homelands under danger of attack by signing up to protect Taiwan? Nations enter agreements for their national security; how far could others be counted on for Taiwan’s security? Circumstances would matter as much as formal ties.

In short, we must be realistic about our internal dissent (not to mention financial questions) and the future of each of the governments we are counting upon to ring China in a grand deterring manner. I desperately hope we are honestly assessing each of these individual relationships rather than assuming we know where things will lead. I am quite confident we do not have certainty on most of these questions which is a dangerous way to fall into finding that actions have consequences. This strikes me as more of a stretch than some folks want to hear; I would love to be wrong on this. Talk me down here, folks.FIN

Daniel Hurst and Julian Borger, ‘Aukus: nuclear submarines deal will cost Australia $368 billion”, TheGuardian.com, 13 March 2023, retrieved at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/14/aukus-nuclear-submarines-australia-commits-substantial-funds-into-expanding-us-shipbuilding-capacity

Julian Kerr and Andrew MacDonald, ‘Australia’s 2022-2023 defense budget climbs by 7.4’, janes.com, 30 March 2022, retrieved at https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/australias-202223-defence-budget-climbs-by-74