US Asia policy and the presidential election

According to conventional wisdom, American elections are not generally won in foreign policy debates; the electorate is assumed to be primarily preoccupied with domestic political issues. Yet in some cases, particularly when foreign affairs clearly impinge upon people's interests, foreign affairs have played a pivotal role—for example, the 1992 election targeting the "butchers of Beijing."

The current election campaign seems likely to offer voters a clear choice on the central foreign policy issue of what the administration calls the "central front" of the war on terror. With the Middle East in the limelight, the world's most dynamic and second most troublesome region has earned hardly a mention. Will Asia be the dog that does not bark in the 2008 campaign? We are familiar with the statistics—the world's largest and most populous continent has been growing more rapidly than any other, with three of the biggest economies in the world and accounting for nearly 50 percent of world growth. But American interests are hardly limited to the economic sphere. The US fought more major wars in Asia since World War II than anywhere else, and the latest entrants to the ranks of nuclear weapons states and the most likely challengers to America's post-Cold War "hegemony" are all Asian. Aside from the US, Asia spends more on defense than any other region. The Strait of Malacca, through which nearly half the world's maritime trade flows, is monitored by the US 7th Fleet. With economic growth has come not only increasing Asian arms expenditures but interest in political transformation. The spread of democracy, even if sometime imperfect, accords with American ideal interests. And insofar as successful political reform tends to dampen regional security competition ("democratic peace"), it reduces the prospect of conflicts in the region into which US forces might become embroiled.

In view of the vast intra-Asian cultural, political and economic gaps, can the US even be said to have an Asia policy? If we assume that there is a functional need for a regional policy where an area is both different in relevant ways from other regions and sufficiently well-integrated that policy cannot be made for one part of the region without also having implications for the other parts, then this is increasingly true for Asia. To take just one example, the balance of power in South Asia can no longer be calculated without taking East Asia into account. How successfully has the US been able to adapt its position as regional hegemon to a region that is changing so rapidly, and that moreover shows growing interest in an exclusively "Asian" regional identity?

Asia and US security

George W Bush ran in 2000 on the claim that Clinton had weakened military preparedness, calling specifically for a more "competitive" relationship with the PRC, and shortly after his inauguration three new policies were announced to that end. First, a major redeployment of forces from Europe to the Asian Pacific, justified by nuclear development in North Korea as an immediate threat and China's prospective emergence as an over-the-horizon threat. Second, the arms budget increased by 74 percent since 2001. Third, corresponding to the administration's abandonment of the Clinton administration's Framework Agreement with the DPRK and its "constructive strategic partnership" with the PRC was a more solicitous policy toward such traditional friends as Japan, Australia and Taiwan. This return to a rimland strategy was enhanced following the post-9/11 spread of terrorism to Southeast Asia. Stylistically, an apparent preference for unilateral action was indicated in the administration's withdrawal within a few months from a series of prominent international conventions. True, a unilateralist trend was by no means absent in previous administrations, but Bush's renunciations were unusually blunt.

Especially after 9/11, the administration however began to play down any strategic confrontation with the Chinese and introduced a number of significant conceptual adjustments. It shifted from unilateralism to what Richard Haass called "a la carte multilateralism," consisting of mission-specific "coalitions of the willing" lacking permanent memberships or fixed organizational form. It adopted the doctrine of pre-emptive war in vaguely defined emergency circumstances. And it elevated the priority of nuclear nonprolife ration as a prime goal of US statecraft, based on the contingency that if terrorists gained access to WMDs they could not be rationally deterred from using them.

These strategic adjustments were publicly announced at around the same time the administration explicitly denounced the "Axis of Evil" and launched its invasion of Iraq, presumably in order to intimidate prospective ancillary targets, and there is indeed some indication it was successful in doing so (e.g., Libya agreed to nuclear disarmament in December 2003, and Kim Jung Il became publicly invisible for about 50 days). Yet the administration failed to take advantage of Kim's enhanced sense of vulnerability to pursue negotiations, leading to the presumption that it preferred a policy of "regime change" to one of regime persuasion.

The immediate (i.e., 2001-03) impact of the combination of 9/11 and these policy innovations in response to it was to magnify US power throughout the region. Many Asian allies contributed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and even those who opposed it (e.g. China) did not express the sharp reservations articulated in western Europe at the time to try to impede it. Indeed China immediately embraced the war on terror as a welcome alternative to becoming the target of a new cold war, and soon proved an indispensable intermediary in dealing with the DPRK nuclear proliferation issue. Beijing and Washington formed a tacit condominium to "co-manage" East Asia's two hot spots, the DPRK and Taiwan.

To cope with North Korea, Beijing in 2003 convened the Six-Party Talks, which Washington welcomed in preference to bilateral US-DPRK negotiations. With regard to Taiwan, Beijing (after the 2005 Anti-Secession Law) adopted a lower profile in response to Taiwan's flirtations with formal independence, redefining its position as a co-defendant with the US of the cross-Strait status quo.

Though there has been some cooling of the US-PRC relationship during the second term because of lack of progress on the skewed exchange rate and large imbalance of trade, product safety issues, and other matters, these were alleviated by three considerations: First, an overtly confrontational stance was largely avoided, and bilateral communications remained open at both political-economic and military-strategic levels. Second, though the administration has re-emphasized its emergent hedging policy in anticipation of conceivable future threats from China—e.g., the establishment of new bases or "places" near China's western borders in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (the latter since withdrawn)—it is largely cloaked in the rhetoric of the war on terror. Third, apparently alarmed by Beijing's more active diplomatic participation in regional multilateral forums, the administration has attempted to utilize existing multilateral organizations somewhat more effectively, as in President Bush's 2006 Singapore proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, which APEC agreed to "seriously consider."

Although using the war on terror as the linchpin for its Asia policy helped put China back in Washington's good grace and provided a basis for enhanced security cooperation with the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, as it became inescapable in 2003-04 that no WMDs were to be found in Iraq and that US military might was unprepared to wage protracted counterinsurgency war, both the Iraqi embroilment and US leadership of the war on terror suffered an acute loss of credibility, particularly among Asia's predominantly Islamic countries. Nor was this loss alleviated by the 2005 shift in legitimating formulae from the elimination of WMDs to the spread of "freedom," as the Asian Islamic countries are already constitutionally democratic.

Yet one of the central paradoxes we need to explain is that despite this very damaging strategic blunder, US Asia policy has during the Bush administration been relatively effective. The administration has successfully stabilized Taiwan policy under relatively trying conditions, as Chen, the first elected opposition party president sought to resolve the island-state's national identity dilemma by promoting independence. The administration coped by shifting from a "strategic ambiguity" that neither side could resist testing first to "strategic clarity" (as Bush put it in 2001, we will do "whatever it takes" to help Taiwan defend itself) and then, as the risks of that stance became plain, to "double deterrence," opposing both Beijing's resort to coercive diplomacy and Taipei's drive for independence. The Bush administration thus performed a balancing act the Clinton administration never quite managed to achieve, maintaining simultaneous friendly relations with both Taipei and Beijing and also Tokyo and Beijing. Beijing has been successfully "enmeshed" in one of the world's biggest and most burgeoning bilateral trade relationships, its performance there now regulated by the WTO; indeed China's enmeshment has been so successful it has begun to arouse concerns that it profits more from the bilateral trade regime than the US. China has indeed been enmeshed, yet Americans remain discontent at least partly because the strategic intent of US policy remains so opaque. How can China's enmeshment be altogether satisfying when the US remains so ambivalent about its own enmeshment—as illustrated by attitudes toward the UN, Kyoto, the WTO, NAFTA? How far does Washington wish to push enmeshment when Beijing profits so handsomely from it?

North Korea had been central to US nonproliferation efforts since the early 1990s, but the US became re-engaged with the issue in 2002, when the administration precipitated a decisive break from Clinton's Agreed Framework (based on the claim that Pyongyang had been secretly engaged in weapons development through a parallel HEU program) and launched its more uncompromising drive for complete verifiable irreversible dismantlement (CVID). While the Kim Dae Jung administration had attempted (with Clinton's support) to eliminate Pyongyang's perceived need for nuclearization with a "sunshine" policy, the Bush administration spurned the use of such carrots but soon found itself equally unable to resort to sticks. After months of escalating verbal invective between Kim Jong-Il and Bush, Beijing's convention of Six-Party Talks was welcomed by all parties. Based on their shared interest in preventing the unpredictable DPRK regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, the administration clearly hoped to mobilize the other four participants in support of their common interests. However, by insisting on a tough, uncompromising line of no concessions until all demands were met, Washington seems to have convinced the other four it was more interested in regime change than regime persuasion, an aim that transcended their interests.

While Pyongyang-Washington relations polarized, the united front among the other four thus fragmented. Not until 2005 was unity among the anti-proliferation five briefly achieved in principle in the August agreement, thanks largely to Beijing's increasingly assertive leadership. More durable consensus among the five was finally forged by Pyongyang's missile tests in July 2006 and its nuclear test three months later, which by moderating the US position and outraging the moderates (South Korea, China, and Russia) facilitated a majority in support of UN sanctions. As Washington quietly shelved its self-imposed taboos against bilateral negotiations with the north and other concessions, Washington and Pyongyang seemed finally by the spring of 2007 to have reached an agreement acceptable to the sextet broadly similar to the terms of the Agreed Framework discarded five years ago—except that Pyongyang now has the bomb.

Ironically, while still inching forward well short of CVID, the six have found value in the process itself, and the February 2007 Joint Statement thus established a Northeast Asia Peace and Security Mechanism to find "ways and means of promoting security cooperation in Northeast Asia." The subregion, otherwise bereft if such forums, might be well served by such a mechanism, particularly if and when current negotiations culminate in a more fully satisfactory DPRK agreement. Nuclear disarmament is not easy to achieve, and even an equivocal result should perhaps not disqualify an institution so expensively constructed.

Since leaving Vietnam in 1973-75 the US has kept a low profile in Southeast Asia. Foreign capital fled upon the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, which the US government made no attempt to bail out. The resulting power vacuum was filled by ASEAN, a notoriously weak political organization. ASEAN began in 1967 with five members and expanded in the 1990s to include an additional 5 in the northern tier, meanwhile also spawning a congeries of auxiliary organizations—ASEAN Regional Forum, the Asian-EU Meetings, and other regional "dialogues." Washington has consistently had little to do with these forums, sotto voce condemned as feckless "talk shops."

Although the conflation of the war on terror with strife in places like Aceh or southern Thailand that dates from the colonial era was conceptually mistaken, from the Southeast Asian perspective one benefit of the American obsession has been to reverse Washington's benign postcommunist neglect of subregional security: American special forces have been stationed in the Philippines in non-combat support of the Arroyo regime's pursuit of Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, also negotiating joint military training arrangements and aid packages with the Philippines. The US has moved toward a revival of bilateral security cooperation with Thailand and the Indonesian military, even exploring mutual security cooperation with Vietnam. Domestic support in the host countries has varied, but in hub-and-spokes networks each bilateral relationship can be negotiated discretely.

The leading US strategic partner in Southeast Asia now seems to be Singapore, which deepened its docking facilities at its own expense to make Changi Naval Base the only port in the area able to accommodate an American aircraft carrier. While the US military buildup is prepared for either local terrorism or an eventual China threat, the host countries hedge as well, joining the ASEAN + 1 FTA with China while still welcoming Japanese investment and bilateral FTAs, responding positively to India's "look east" policy, and generally declining to be drawn into a dichotomous choice between patrons.

South and Central Asia are those subregions where American strategic interests seem to have been most clearly enhanced by the war on terror. South Asia teetered dangerously close to nuclear conflagration shortly after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in May 1998. In the context of the crushing US attack on the Taliban regime in fall 2001, Musharraf however threw his full support to the war on terror, which in combination with the administration's promotion of the Indo-American detente first initiated in the final year of the Clinton administration brought the US into a simultaneously positive relationship with both subcontinental rivals for the first time in decades. The administration has since managed to maintain a delicate balance between the two, offsetting New Delhi's outrage over the designation of Pakistan as a major non-NATO ally with a "next steps in the strategic partnership" (NSSP) agreement with India and an innovative 2005 nuclear cooperation package designed to afford that country a legitimate position in the nuclear "club." Though low-level insurgency continues, the situation in Kashmir has also improved. A democratically elected government has been established in the Indian-occupied area capable of coping more equitably with popular grievances. Provided the 2005 Indo-American nuclear deal finally wins approval in the Indian parliament, the main question still pending is whether the deal will cap or unleash a South Asian nuclear arms race between India, Pakistan, and China.

Chinese suspicions are understandable in the context of the Bush focus on "hard" power and his long-standing interest in balancing China, plus long nursed Indian resentment of their losses in the 1962 border skirmish. And the US base in Kyrgyzstan is very close to the Chinese border, and to its nuclear test range in Xinjiang. Thus in the wake of the bloody crackdown (amid Western protests) at Andijon, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization asked Washington in 2005 to set a deadline for withdrawal from Central Asiaand the US was out of Uzbekistan within the year. There is also impatience in both Central and South Asia over the US attempt to impose sanctions on Iran and Myanmar, because these countries need access to natural resources and do not want sanctions to interdict the construction of oil pipelines.

The Bush security policy, though damaged by the invasion of Iraq and by the conceptual errors on which the war on terror was constructed, seems to have managed to contain adverse repercussions by muting the rhetoric. Alternating between a triangular policy of working with China to deal with the DPRK and Taiwan and a Shultzian reliance on the hub-and-spokes system, the Bush administration has generally maintained regional peace and stability. Despite a temporary setback in Thailand, democracy has continued to thrive, with recent competitive elections in Taiwan, Thailand and even Malaysia. Bush's nonproliferation efforts have had more mixed results, depending on whether a nation is an ally or an adversary—countries find it easier to disarm in a friendly context than when facing enhanced threats.

Rather than Asia's having been neglected due to the administration's preoccupation with the Middle East, it might be more precise to say the region's newfound interest in multilateralism has been neglected, consistent with the administration's unilateral bent, allowing these strivings to drift toward an exclusively Asian regional identity. The Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), designed to prevent arms proliferation by interdicting North Korean shipping, and its offspring, the Regional Maritime Security Initiative, focused on the growth of piracy around the Straits of Malacca, have been criticized for lack of transparency and limited effectiveness, among other reasons. These groupings may not even survive the Bush presidency. Yet multilateral institutions in the region are still so weak that the impact of this hiatus should not be exaggerated. The truly important regional relations remain bilateral ones, and the hub-and-spokes alliance system is something the administration took care not to neglect.

Asia and the US political economy

Asian economies, taking advantage of Japanese investment and access to the American market, have enjoyed high GDP growth rates for several decades, but the current structure of the Asian regional economy dates from the Asian Financial Crisis, which had devastating but differing effects throughout the region. The clearest winner was the PRC. China also experienced sharp financial adjustments, but Beijing responded by selling bonds to reflate the economy with massive public works and infrastructure investment projects, reforming its financial system, and reforming state-owned industry along Western corporate lines. It was thus in responding to the crisis that the conditions were laid for a new division of labor in Asia with China at the center as "workshop of the world." By 2005 China was Asia's second largest economy and fourth largest in the world; since 2006 it boasts the world's largest foreign exchange reserves (on record). FDI inflows into China increased from $1 billion in 1985 to over $50 billion by 2002; even during the 2001-02 worldwide recession, they continued to pour into China.

Thus China's enormous economic potential has changed the landscape of Asian capitalism. As China's Asian neighbors find new niches in which they can compete, they acquire an objective stake in China's continued success. With greater regional integration around the China hub, a center-periphery relationship has emerged redolent of the tributary relationship between the middle kingdom and its neighbors in days of yore.3 Though not adverting explicitly to this historical precedent, China's increasing focus on Confucianism in its focus on "soft power" may represent an effort to draw on it symbolically. Of course, China's rise also raises anxieties that there will be losers; one of the prime tasks of China's new diplomacy has been to smooth over such fears. Beijing has done this by offering multilateral free trade associations or bilateral preferential trade arrangements and by playing a more active role in international organizations.

To what extent will China's emerging role as regional economic locomotive permit it to take a leading role in regional organization? As Ernst Haas first pointed out, one of the central prerequisites of regional organization-building is the existence of a strong centripetal market. China's recent emergence as the hub of regional supply chains and assembly production has enabled it to fulfill this need, and it can plausibly argue that its continued rise is to the benefit of the region.

Whether China can claim a more comprehensive leadership role from this remains to be seen, but barring possible disruptions, all trends harbinger the rise of a new Asia, with China at least at the economic hub and quite likely eventually emerging in a leading political position as well.

The rise of Asia and US political choices

As Asia has risen, it has become more economically and to some extent politically integrated. US policy has shifted from a hegemonic stability pattern of open American markets and targeted developmental aid to the virtual disappearance of American developmental aid and negotiated access to the American market. The last state to benefit from the hegemonic stability tradeoff has been the PRC, which has synthesized market access with a disciplined workforce, shrewd economic leadership, unprecedented openness to the outside world, and an artificially cheap currency.

There is a growing mismatch between the organization of security and the pattern of economic cooperation: the hub-and-spokes system is losing spokes to a network of transnational supply and assembly chains with China at the hub. Emerging patterns of multilateral political coordination are still open-ended, but are increasingly sensitive to economic trends.

The rise of Asia is not new, though its regional reorganization with China in a much stronger position is relatively recent. In the American foreign policy orientation toward this, the tendency has been for realism to be embedded in the state and defense departments and for idealism to be expressed in presidential campaigns. Since Tiananmen this idealism has tended to manifest itself in an outburst of anti-China rhetoric focusing on human rights violations during elections.

The 2008 election has left China more or less unscathed, so far. But this may change this summer. Democratic candidate Sen. Obama was among the Senate sponsors of a bill last year that threatens punitive duties on Chinese goods to force Beijing to revaluate the yuan; Republican candidate Sen. John McCain advocates a policy of "hedging" against China's growing global and regional influence by strengthening US alliances and maintaining its military presence in East Asia, and by creating a "League of Democracies." McCain challenges Beijing to be more transparent about its military buildup and pledges to push China on human right issues; Obama views China as "neither our enemy nor our friend" and recognizes that China offers both challenges and opportunities. On trade the two parties seem to have reverted to their pre-Clinton positions of Republican support for free trade and Democratic opposition, making McCain the popular choice in much of the region (excepting of course Indonesia).

The possibility of major damage to Sino-US ties cannot be dismissed. If, as some experts in Washington predict, the Democrats win up to 30 seats in the House and 5-6 seats in the Senate, Congress might have veto-proof majorities to pass restrictive trade legislation or to impose sanctions in response, say, to continuing protests in Tibet. Other issues of concern include climate change. Both presidential candidates and the vast majority of congressional contenders promise to shift US policy dramatically. This probably will happen quickly after January 2009 and it means that China will likely become a new target of US and perhaps international criticism regarding this set of sensitive issues. China's recent diplomatic activism and arguments in international forums dealing with environmental protection and climate change probably will not assuage broad American anger at China's wasteful use of energy in the production of goods and services. China recently surpassed the US as the top greenhouse gas producer (though per capita emissions are much less). Once the United States faces up to its responsibilities on environmental protection and climate change, American officials and public opinion predictably will expect no less of China . The US presumably will be prepared to help with the transfer of expertise and technology, provided China can safeguard intellectual property rights and pay a fair price. Overall, American demands seem to mean greater and significant costs for China either in implementing meaningful efforts to curb greenhouse gases or in bearing the consequences of being seen as an international outlier on this issue.

Yet the US electorate's perception of Asia tends to focus on ideals rather than economic or security issues. Thus Chinese currency manipulation and a rising current account imbalance were already extant in 2004 but never became an electoral issue, and seem no more apt to move voters to the polls in 2008. Violations of human rights at Tiananmen were not a domestic issue until 1992, whereupon they became valuable political capital, but after the election the issue was overwhelmed by commercial interests. Tibet might have played an analogous role in 2008, but seems to have been swept from the headlines by Asian natural disasters. Thus American Asia policy doesn't appear likely to be seriously affected by the campaign. But the next administration will be well advised to rethink and revise Asia policy in the light of the emerging Sinocentric regional integration discussed above, which though perhaps insufficiently dramatic to become electoral fodder has thought-provoking implications for the future of the country.