Biden’s Asian Triangle
Feb 4, 2021JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.
The Japan-US alliance remains popular in both countries, which need each
other more than ever. Together, they can balance China’s power and cooperate
with China in areas like climate change, biodiversity, and pandemics, as well
as on working toward a rules-based international economic order.
CAMBRIDGE – How Joe Biden handles China will be one of the defining issues
of his presidency. He inherits a Sino-American relationship that is at its
lowest point in 50 years. Some people blame this on his predecessor, Donald
Trump. But Trump merits blame for pouring gasoline on a fire. It was China’s
leaders who lit and kindled the flames.
We should not be afraid of a post-pandemic world that will not be the same
as the status quo ante. We should embrace it and use all appropriate fora and
available opportunities to make it a better world by advancing the cause of
international cooperation.
Comments from Javier Solana, Andrés
Velasco, Mark Leonard, Kemal Derviş, et al.
21Add
to Bookmarks
PreviousNext
Over the past decade, Chinese leaders abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s moderate
policy of “Hide your strength, bide your time.” They became more assertive in
many ways; building and militarizing artificial islands in the South China Sea,
intruding into waters near Japan and Taiwan, launching incursions into India
along the countries’ Himalayan border, and coercing Australia economically when
it dared to criticize China.
On trade, China tilted the playing field by subsidizing state-owned
enterprises and forcing foreign companies to transfer intellectual property to
Chinese partners. Trump responded clumsily with tariffs on allies as well as on
China, but he had strong bipartisan support when he excluded companies like
Huawei, whose plans to build 5G networks posed a security threat.
At the same time, however, the United States and China remain
interdependent, both economically and on ecological issues that transcend the
bilateral relationship. The US cannot decouple its economy completely from
China without enormous costs.
During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union had almost no economic or
other interdependence. In contrast, US-China trade amounts to some $500 billion
annually, and the two sides engage in extensive exchanges of students and
visitors. Even more important, China has learned to harness the power of
markets to authoritarian control in ways the Soviets never mastered, and China
is more countries’ trading partner than the US is.
Given China’s population size and rapid economic growth, some pessimists believe
that shaping Chinese behavior is impossible. But this is not true if one thinks
in terms of alliances. The combined wealth of the developed democracies – the
US, Japan, and Europe – far exceeds that of China. This reinforces the
importance of the Japan-US alliance for the stability and prosperity of East
Asia and the world economy. At the end of the Cold War, many on both sides
considered the alliance a relic of the past; in fact, it is vital for the
future.
US administrations once hoped that China would become a “responsible
stakeholder” in the international order. But President Xi Jinping has led his
country in a more confrontational direction. A generation ago, the US supported
China’s membership in the World Trade Organization, but there was little
reciprocity; on the contrary, China tilted the playing field.
Critics in the US often accuse Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush
of naiveté in thinking that a policy of engagement could accommodate China. But
history is not that simple. Clinton’s China policy did offer engagement, but it
also hedged that bet by reaffirming its security relationship with Japan as the
key to managing China’s geopolitical rise. There were three major powers in
East Asia, and if the US remained aligned with Japan (now the world’s
third-largest national economy), the two countries could shape the environment
in which China’s power grew.
Moreover, if China tried to push the US beyond the first island chain as
part of a military strategy to expel it from the region, Japan, which
constitutes the most important part of that chain, remained willing to
contribute generous host-country support for the 50,000 US troops based there.
Today, Kurt Campbell, a thoughtful and skilled implementer of Clinton’s policy,
is the key coordinator for the Indo-Pacific on Biden’s National Security
Council.
The alliance with Japan enjoys strong support in the US. Since 2000, former
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and I have issued a series of
bipartisan reports on the strategic relationship. In our fifth report, released
on December 7, 2020 by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and International
Studies, we argue that Japan, like many other Asian countries, does not want to
be dominated by China. It is now taking a leading role in the alliance: setting
the regional agenda, championing free-trade agreements and multilateral
cooperation, and implementing new strategies to shape a regional order.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spearheaded a reinterpretation
of Article 9 of Japan’s post-war constitution, to strengthen the country’s
defense capabilities under the United Nations Charter, and, after Trump
withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he preserved the regional trade
pact as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TPP. Abe also led
quadrilateral consultations with India and Australia regarding stability in the
Indo – Pacific.
Fortunately, this regional leadership is likely to continue under Prime
Minister Yoshihide Suga, who was Abe’s chief cabinet secretary and is
likely to continue his policies. Common interests and shared democratic values
continue to form the bedrock of the alliance with America, and public opinion
polls in Japan show that trust in the US has never been higher. It is not
surprising that one of Biden’s first calls to foreign leaders after his
inauguration was to Suga, to assure him of America’s continued commitment to
strategic partnership with Japan.
The Japan-US alliance remains popular in both countries, which need each
other more than ever. Together, they can balance China’s power and cooperate
with China in areas like climate change, biodiversity, and pandemics, as well
as on working toward a rules-based international economic order. For these
reasons, as the Biden administration develops its strategy to cope with China’s
continued rise, the alliance with Japan will remain a top priority.
Writing for PS since 2002
215 Commentaries
Follow
Joseph S.
Nye, Jr. is a professor at Harvard University and author, most recently, of Do Morals Matter? Presidents and
Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment