In American recessional,
Obama visits as US global influence begins to recede
http://www.manilatimes.net/in-american-recessional-obama-visits-as-us-global-influence-begins-to-recede/92357/
President Barack Obama is
visiting Manila at a time US influence is
receding in the world. Once the “indispensable country,” an over-extended America is
starting to lose its strategic primacy.
Washington’s once-brash idealism in its foreign relations is
being replaced by a chastened view of what the United States could do to shape the
course of a world globalizing at break-neck speed. Items:
• In the Middle East, the
American incursions in Iraq
and Afghanistan
seem only to have left the region worse-off than at their start. The
intransigence of its ally Israel
has just driven together moderates and radicals in the Palestinian statehood
movement.
Putin draws the line
• In Ukraine,
Putin’s Russia is setting
limits on the expansion of western influence in Eastern Europe since the
implosion of the Soviet Union. We may also
expect Moscow
to try and reclaim its satellite states incorporated into the western military
alliance, NATO.
Since 2000, Vladimir Putin
has presided over Russia’s
emergence from the ruins of the Soviet Union.
His macho leadership and appeals to religion-based nationalism are restoring
Russian pride; market reforms and surging hydrocarbon exports are raising
living standards for everyday Russians.
• In East Asia, a
“rejuvenated” China is
threatening to rollup America’s
forward bases and security alliances in the Western Pacific. So that President
Obama is having to deal with foreign-policy challenges on two fronts—and at a
time Washington
politics is at its most dysfunctional.
No wonder, then, that on the Ukraine crisis, Moscow seems to be working with greater
forethought and economy of means.
The University
of Chicago geo-politician John J.
Mearsheimer faults Washington for even
thinking it could safely subvert such a core satellite from Russia’s
doorstep and integrate it into the western alliance.
Once the elephant and the
whale
China and the United States—one a land and the
other a sea power—were once natural allies, facing up to Japan and then the
USSR. The “elephant” and the “whale,” the eminent journalist Walter Lippmann
called them.
China’s morphing into a competitive maritime power may have
been an unintended consequence of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms that,
beginning in 1980, have made China
an export and industrial power with worldwide interests.
All of East Asia—China most of
all—benefited from the stability the Americans imposed on our home region after
the Pacific War. Between 1965 and 1990, the region’s economies grew at rates
the world had never seen before.
China—after surpassing Germany
as the largest exporter in 2009—overtook Japan to become the second-largest
economy in 2010. Now only the United
States is ahead in GDP terms—and even that
may change by 2030. Yet when Deng’s reforms began, China’s
economy was smaller than Italy’s
and just about the same size as Canada’s.
We must expect Beijing to become even
more assertive as its economic and military power grows. Its military spending
is rising by double digits. Then, too, the rift between Russia and the western alliance gives Beijing more room to play
hard-ball global politics.
Rearmament for Japan?
Mr. Obama is using concern over China’s aggressiveness on the China
Sea to strengthen US security ties with its East Asian allies. In Tokyo, his call for Japan to take a more active role in
the region is certain to find favor among the ruling conservatives.
Japan itself has been pivoting from Russia toward China. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is
fomenting a nationalist resurgence through his electoral rhetoric and symbolic
acts like his obeisances to the militaristic Yakusuni Shrine.
Tokyo has been rebuilding its military and reaching out to
its neighbors. Two years ago, it held the first Japan-India joint naval
maneuvers on the Indian Ocean. More recently,
it set up early warning radar systems close to the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu
rocks on the East China Sea.
Japan keeps no nuclear weapons stockpile; but it’s no
secret that, since 1969, it has had the economic and technical potential to
make them quickly. Through its space and satellite programs, Tokyo also keeps abreast of great-power
technologies for their delivery.
Triumphalist world view
Already China
sees its rise to wealth and power as signifying a transformed world order: the
shifting of the center of global gravity from the Atlantic
to the Pacific.
Beijing demands that Washington
acknowledge China’s
arrival as a great power—with a rightful role in “shaping new global rules and
norms.” Indeed, Beijing seems close to claiming
that, for the emerging countries, its post-Maoist development model—which
combines the dynamism of the market with the stability of state direction and
control—is a viable alternative to America’s “winner-take-all”
capitalism.
The Communist Party plans to
move 250 million rural people to big cities over the next 12-15 years. If this
mass migration succeeds, it should keep China’s
GDP growth close to Deng-era levels, broaden Beijing’s tax base, and indulge even more
lavish military spending.
Showing the red flag
I think it reasonable to assume China will become stronger proportionate to the United States
during this next decade or so. The Americans themselves expect China to reach
superpower status by 2025. Soon Washington
will have to think twice before dispatching carrier groups to the South China
Sea—as it did during the Taiwan
crisis of 1996.
Over the foreseeable future,
China Sea tensions are liable to continue, since Beijing’s deepest motives there are not so
much territorial or economic as strategic and military. China must command the China
Sea if it is to break through the forward chain of US bases and
alliances and irrupt into the world ocean.
Already China is
showing off its high-profile navy. In recent months, its warships have helped
rescue an ice-bound Antarctic expedition and aided a US
laboratory ship destroying Iran’s
chemical weapons.
Last July, five Chinese warships
for the first time transited the East China Sea,
entered the Pacific and circumnavigated the Japanese archipelago. Shortly
afterward, Beijing’s first carrier battle group
showed the red flag around the South China Sea.
In reply, the region’s states—except
for our poverty-stricken homeland—are stocking up on submarines, as the most
cost-effective way of denying their maritime territories to a hostile armada.
Vietnam last month received the first of six Kilo-class subs
it ordered from Russia.
Thailand is training crews
with its potential suppliers, Germany
and South Korea.
Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia all have operational
fleets. Jakarta
plans to have 12 subs by 2020.
More breathing space
As China’s
power capabilities mature, we may expect Beijing
to demand some loosening of the containing wall the US alliance has built around it.
There will have to be some give on that issue, as the balance of strategic
power shifts with time.
What are the East Asian
states to do? Somehow our “middle powers” must begin to erect a regional power
balance they can keep up by themselves. Not only must this arrangement
accommodate China’s
rising power. It must also protect the territorial integrity of the region’s
states and maintain the regional stability that keeps their economies afloat.