Very long, but very informative.
Miriam
TomDispatch
Tomgram: John Feffer, Trump, China, and the Unsettled Future of Asia
By John Feffer
Posted on June 1, 2017, Printed on June 3, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176290/ ;
In case you hadnt noticed, as in the Middle East and Europe, were in a new
Trumpian age in Asia. If you want to confirm that, check out the recently
leaked transcript of an April 29th phone conversation between the American
and Philippine presidents (published in full at the Intercept). Donald Trump
launches the call with a bonding gesture, comparing his own sleepless habits
to those of Rodrigo Duterte. (Youre just like me. You are not a person who
goes to bed at all. I know that, right?) He then implicitly makes another
comparison between the two of them, congratulating the Philippine president
on his anti-drug program in which he has loosed police and paramilitaries to
kill at will, resulting in more than 7,000 extrajudicial executions across
his country. I just wanted to congratulate you, says Trump, because I am
hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem. Many countries have the
problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just
wanted to call and tell you that. You can feel, I think, his yearning for
the powers of an autocrat in that statement, as well as his long-term
obsession with the war on drugs. When Duterte responds by decrying drugs as
the scourge of my nation, Trump, in his typical fashion, takes a
backhanded whack at his predecessor. (I... fully understand that and I
think we had a previous president who did not understand that...)
Only then, in full tough-guy mode, does he move on to scourges of his own,
bringing up the North Koreans and bragging -- while leaking what was
undoubtedly classified information -- that the U.S. has two nuclear subs
cruising somewhere off the Korean coast: We have a lot of firepower over
there. We have two submarines -- the best in the world -- we have two
nuclear submarines -- not that we want to use them at all. Ive never seen
anything like they are, but we dont have to use this, but [North Korean
leader Kim Jong-un] could be crazy so we will see what happens. In other
words, the American president is boasting about being ready for nothing less
than nuclear war in Asia, even as he tries to get Duterte to call Chinese
President Xi Jinping to put further pressure on Kim.
All in all, it was quite a performance and yet consider it but a toe in the
water when it comes to what used to be proudly labeled an American lake.
(As a Tin Pan Alley song title of the World War II era put it, To Be
Specific, Its Our Pacific.) If you want to take the full plunge into the
cold waters of that ocean and of our Asian future -- and believe me, its
not what you imagine -- then follow TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author
of the dystopian novel Splinterlands, into an era that may be anything but
bright for the United States, China, or other Asian lands. Tom
Goodbye Pacific Pivot, Hello Pacific Retreat
Who Will Take Americas Place in Asia?
By John Feffer
Asia has been the future for more than a generation.
When Americans try to glimpse whats to come, images of the Pacific Rim
flood the imagination. For movie audiences in 1982, the rain-soaked Los
Angeles of Blade Runner looked like downtown Tokyo. By 2014, the City of
Angels in the Spike Jonze film Her had more of a Shanghai vibe. This
upcoming October, with the release of Blade Runner 2049, Los Angeles will
likely resemble Seoul.
Off-screen as well, Asia has been almost as good as a time machine. When I
was coming of age, it was the place to go for anyone hankering for the next
big thing. After college, a number of my classmates traveled to Japan to
strike gold teaching English. Today, recent grads are more likely to visit
the big cities of South Korea and China, or head further south to Singapore
and Malaysia. They all come back, as I did in 2001 after three years in
Asia, with stories of the future: bullet trains, otherworldly urban
landscapes, the latest electronic gizmos.
So, its not surprising that when foreign policy elites think about what
will replace a U.S. superpower in relative decline -- speculation that has
grown more feverish in the Trump era -- they, too, look East. But no longer
to Japan, which is passé, or South Korea, which has also perhaps peaked.
Instead, they tremble before China, which has already surpassed the United
States in gross economic output, while steadily enhancing its military
capabilities. It seems like the only country remotely capable of challenging
the United States as the worlds sole superpower.
The anxiety of declining U.S. influence became so intense during the Obama
years that the notion of a Group of Two (G2) gained considerable currency:
if we cant beat em, went the thinking at the time, then maybe we should
join em. However seriously intended such a proposal to co-rule the world
with China might have been, the Obama administration never followed up
beyond agreements on climate change and bilateral investment.
Ambitious and impatient, Beijing decided to strike out on its own. It has
unveiled a twenty-first-century, industrial-strength version of the
post-World War II Marshall Plan with which the U.S. once put a devastated
Europe back on its feet. Chinas vision, however, focuses on the building
up of all the countries on its periphery and some even further afield, as it
tries to draw the whole Eurasian continent into its sphere of influence.
Although its expected to provide an estimated $1 trillion to more than 60
countries, this One Belt, One Road plan is anything but a charity mission.
It will direct a major influx of resources to Chinese construction
companies, bring minerals and energy to Chinese factories, and promise a
better potential return on investment than U.S. treasury bonds. Some
infrastructure projects will also allay security concerns, like the energy
pipelines to be built through Myanmar that will bypass the watery bottleneck
of the Malacca Straits where a determined adversary could potentially shut
off 80% of Beijings oil imports.
The victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 elections has only deepened anxiety
over Chinas ascendance among Washingtons policymakers and pundits. During
his campaign, Trump frightened both the neocons and more conventional
militarists with his talk of avoiding military entanglements overseas. As
president, he has pledged to boost military spending but seems to have no
idea of how to use all the Pentagons new toys other than to bomb the
stuffing out of the militants of the Islamic State.
Nor does Trump care a whit about the soft power the United States has
traditionally used to cultivate international support. For instance,
Washington had long promoted international financial institutions and free
trade agreements, but Trump has railed against the false song of
globalism. China, meanwhile, is positioning itself to become the new
overlord of global capitalism, even going so far as to set up a parallel
international financial system to realize its vision. The Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which began operations in January
2016 without the support of the United States or the European Union, will
function like the World Bank in providing financing for Chinas various
building projects abroad. Whereas Beijing controls less than 5% of the votes
at the World Bank, it commands 28% of the shares in the AIIB. Although still
a small operation compared to Chinas commercial banks, it will be quite
capable of scaling up if the opportunity arises.
The contrast between Beijing and Washington has become even sharper around
climate change. Trumps denial of global warming -- he once labeled it a
Chinese hoax -- has whetted the Beijing leaderships appetite for global
influence. As one of its top climate change negotiators said shortly after
Trump won the November election, Chinas influence and voice are likely to
increase in global climate governance, which will then spill over into other
areas of global governance and increase Chinas global standing, power, and
leadership.
All of this is part of a larger trend of power flowing from West to East. In
2010, North America and Western Europe were responsible for 40% of the
global gross national product. By 2050, that share, the Economist
Intelligence Unit estimates, will fall to 21%, with Asias share rising to a
commanding 48.1%.
But dont rush out to begin that crash course in Mandarin and exchange your
dollars for yuan quite yet. The showdown between Beijing and Washington is
unlikely to play out exactly as the Chinese hope and Americans fear.
The Decline of the United States
On a visit to Beijing in October 2016, in the presence of the Chinese
leadership, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared, "America has lost
now. I've realigned myself in your ideological flow." He went on to imagine
a new axis of Russia, China, and the Philippines arrayed against the
arrogance of American power.
Talk about shockers. The Philippines has traditionally been a cornerstone of
U.S. influence in Asia, a place for Washington to station troops, dock
ships, and, in the post-9/11 era, send military advisors to help suppress a
Muslim insurgency. Moreover, Manila had gone toe to toe with Beijing over
disputed islands in the South China Sea, even submitting its case to an
international tribunal for arbitration. But that was before Duterte became
president in May 2016 and labeled President Obama, who took a dim view of
Dutertes gruesome record of extrajudicial killings, a son of a whore.
The apparent defection of the Philippines was the coup de grâce for one of
the Obama administrations most heralded foreign policy efforts aimed at
staving off American decline. In October 2011, just before the Arab Spring
broke out, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton authored an article in Foreign
Policy laying out what would become known as the Pacific pivot. The United
States, at the time, was fitfully trying to extricate itself from wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to imports from Mexico and Canada, as well as
investments in shale fracking and sustainable energy, Washington was no
longer quite so dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The Obama administration
felt that it might finally put the failures of the Bush years behind it and
turn to new horizons.
The Pacific pivot should have been called the Willie Sutton policy. When
Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, Thats where the money
is. So, too, with Asia. It contains four of the top 11 economies in the
world: Chinas, Japans, Indias, and South Koreas. With the United States
focused on losing bets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, China has
been cornering this rich Asian market. By now, it has become the leading
trading partner for South Korea, Japan, Australia, and virtually all of
Southeast Asia.
To recapture its edge in the region, the Obama administration promoted a
free trade compact known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). U.S.
negotiators managed to achieve the near impossible by getting a dozen
disparate countries on the same page while leaving China out of the picture.
But Congress proved, at best, lukewarm on the deal. And sentiment among the
American public ran even colder -- so cold, in fact, that one of its chief
architects, Hillary Clinton, fearing that the trade agreement might take her
presidential bid down in flames, came out against it in 2016. Withdrawing
from the TPP would, of course, be one of Donald Trumps first acts as
president.
The United States, in fact, faces more than just an economic challenge in
Asia. Washington had long considered the Pacific to be an American lake.
It currently has 375,000 military and civilian personnel stationed within
the Pacific Commands ambit and devotes roughly half its naval capacity to
Pacific waters. It maintains treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, and
the Philippines, as well as dozens of military bases in the region. But
China, after more than a decade of double-digit increases in military
spending, has begun pushing back against American pretensions to be the only
Pacific power around. It has developed new weapons to deny the U.S. military
access to its coastal waters and has come to excel at cyberwarfare,
vacuuming up huge amounts of confidential data by hacking into U.S.
government agencies. Meanwhile, in the world of spy versus spy, China has
managed to plug leaks on its end by jailing or killing more than a dozen
U.S. intelligence assets.
Even before the ascension of Donald Trump, the Pentagons effort to pivot
eastward had come up short. For all its overwhelming military edge,
Washington has increasingly found itself unable to dictate outcomes through
force anywhere in the Greater Middle East. The rise of the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and turmoil in
Yemen and Libya have all continued to bedevil the U.S. military.
In the meantime, the Obama administration made some token rearrangements of
its forces in the Pacific, sold some high-tech weaponry to its allies in the
region, and threw some brush-back pitches at Beijing. But in the end, as
with so many of Obamas initiatives, the Pacific pivot proved largely
aspirational. The U.S. never really pivoted out of the Greater Middle East.
As a presidential candidate, Trump was content to bluster about Chinese
threats, even as he also threatened to withdraw the U.S. nuclear umbrella
from both Tokyo and Seoul. He demanded that U.S. allies pony up more money
for American help and protection, while offering no new ways of anchoring
the United States in the Pacific.
Now in the Oval Office, Trump has sent mixed signals. Hes repaired
relations with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but hes also been pushing a major
rise in the Pentagon budget. And what country would be the target of those
additional tens of billions of dollars in military spending? The U.S. Navy
certainly doesnt need a 350-ship force to counter the Islamic State. Trump
has welcomed the election of South Koreas new president, Moon Jae-in, but
also insists that he wants to renegotiate bad trade and security deals
with South Korea. He has tried to bully North Korea, but has also held out
the possibility of meeting personally with that pretty smart cookie, Kim
Jong-un.
Thanks to his erratic pronouncements, even though its early in Trumps
term, American influence in the region is already dropping as inexorably as
the presidents approval ratings at home. Add to this mix a president who
only wants big wins but doesnt see the likelihood of that happening in Asia
and you have the definition of decline.
That decline has, in recent years, often been calculated in terms of
approaching horizons: when North Korean missiles can reach the West Coast;
when Chinas military spending pulls closer to the Pentagons; when Japan
and South Korea, like the Philippines, begin to reconsider their
allegiances. Now, in the Trump era, add one more item to the list: when Asia
faces an incompetent, corrupt, and self-defeating administration in
Washington.
The way seems clear enough for China, the strongest country in Asia, to fill
the potential vacuum. But, as they say, the best-laid plans oft do go
astray.
The Weakness of Asia
Japan is the incredible shrinking country. Between 2010 and 2015, the
population of Americas most steadfast ally in the Pacific dropped by a
million people to just over 127 million. As a result of a strikingly low
fertility rate and negligible immigration, there could, according to
official projections, be only 85-95 million Japanese by 2050. By 2135, after
living in a fossilized society, the last Japanese, at the age of 118, could
breathe his or her final breath. This worst-case scenario, as spelled out by
former trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz in his recent book Japan Restored,
is perhaps far-fetched, but Japan is nevertheless on a path toward what
looks like national seppuku: ritual suicide by attrition.
Ah, well, thats Japan, you might think. Its been in a fiscal funk since
its economic bubble burst back in 1990. But the rise, stagnation, and
shrinkage of that country remains a cautionary tale for all the other lands
that have followed its path of export-led and state-facilitated growth.
After all, South Korea has entered its own period of diminished economic
expectations, with anemic growth, widening inequality, and pervasive
corporate corruption. Young South Koreans, facing the prospect of
unemployment or poorly compensated contract labor, refer to their country as
Hell Choson, a play on the Choson dynasty that ruled from 1392 to 1897.
Taiwan, another member of the flying geese of industrialization
responsible for Asias tremendous economic growth, faces a strikingly
similar set of problems, according to economist Frank Hsiao, including low
and stagnating wage rates, increasing income inequality, the hollowing out
of domestic industries, and languishing exports.
Some of the shine is even wearing off Chinas economic miracle. The days of
annual double-digit growth in its gross national product are long past.
Officials are happy now if they can cite growth figures closer to 7% (and
even those are believed to be overstated). The Chinese labor force has been
contracting since 2012. Strikes and labor protests increased dramatically in
2016, while unrest continues in Chinas westernmost provinces of Xinjiang
and Tibet. The governments official anti-corruption campaign, despite
netting some highly placed individuals, has only driven the corrupt into
more discrete forms of graft.
Meanwhile, its not only Japan that faces a demographic crisis. The
fertility rates of both Taiwan (1.12) and South Korea (1.25) are even lower
than Japans (1.41), while Chinas (1.6) is only a bit higher. None of them
is close to the replacement rate of 2.1. Approaching 2050, all four
countries will have to dig deep to pay the retirement benefits and
healthcare costs of all the industrious workers currently outperforming
their counterparts elsewhere in the world. What was once called Japan
passing -- investors skipping that country in search of better
opportunities elsewhere in the region -- is already morphing into China
passing. Financial flows are also going to be affected by the rising waters
of climate change, which, later in the century, will threaten major cities
like Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Predicting the coming supremacy of the East has been a veritable cottage
industry in the West, and its stock is still rising as Chinas One Belt, One
Road venture, meant to tie the vast Eurasian continent together, goes head
to head with Trumps my way or the highway. The future, however, promises
to be far messier than China or its boosters imagine. Demographics,
corruption, and reduced economic growth -- not to mention environmental
degradation and the declining legitimacy of its ruling partys ideology --
are by no means the only problems that Beijing faces.
Asias New Nationalism
The United States once billed itself as the antidote to nationalism in Asia.
After World War II, it established a permanent military presence across the
region to prevent the resurgence of Japanese militarism. It portrayed itself
as a neutral party, with no territorial ambitions. It restored the island of
Okinawa to Japan in 1972. It refused to take sides in several island
disputes in the region. In this way, its liberal internationalism squared
off against the illiberal Communisms of China, North Korea, Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos.
Both these supranational ideologies, which flourished in the region during
the Cold War, have entered hospice care in the twenty-first century.
Communism has functionally disappeared from the region, replaced by
nationalisms of varying degrees of intensity. Xi Jinpings China and Kim
Jong-uns North Korea are hardly the only places where nationalism has taken
root.
In Japan, for instance, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is busy trying to rebuild
the very militarism that the United States once professed to despise. A
succession of U.S. administrations has aided and abetted this right-wing
nationalist effort to dispense with the countrys post-World War II peace
constitution and push the Japanese Self-Defense Forces onto the offensive.
Nationalist leaders, meanwhile, have assumed power throughout Southeast
Asia: the murderous president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte; the
former military commander, now prime minister of Thailand, Prayuth
Chan-ocha; and the corrupt Najib Razak, prime minister of Malaysia. Even
more ominously, nationalism has taken hold in South Asia, particularly in
India, which recently replaced Great Britain as the worlds sixth largest
economy and where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made Hindu exceptionalism
the heart and soul of his ruling party.
One obvious result of this rising nationalism has been escalating arms
imports across the region. According to the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute, India became the worlds largest arms importer in
2012-2016. During that period, Southeast Asia's arms imports rose by more
than 6%, with Vietnam jumping to 10th place globally. In 2012, for the first
time, Asia surpassed Europe in overall military spending.
Both the nationalist rhetoric and those weapons imports are certainly linked
to regional perceptions of the waxing and waning of great powers. To
reinforce their claims to the South China Sea and several other disputed
territories, countries in the region feel the need to arm themselves in the
face of a newly aggressive China and a perennially distracted United States.
At the moment, those two countries are cooperating in one key area: pouring
money into the kind of military hardware that could someday lead to a
catastrophic showdown. This reality has led ever more foreign policy
analysts to invoke the Thucydides trap, in which a rising power like
Athens (read: China) takes on the hitherto dominant power Sparta (read:
America) in a long, debilitating conflict like the Peloponnesian War (read:
World War III).
But the conflicts in Asia may, in fact, shape up quite differently.
Movements for greater self-determination are undercutting the reach of both
the rising and the reigning superpower. Consider the contrasting examples of
Myanmar and South Korea.
China is the largest investor in Myanmar, and at one time the two countries
were as thick as thieves. But relations between them have grown tense. In
2011, the new civilian-led government in Myanmar stopped work on the
Myitsone dam, one of a number of mega-projects financed by Beijing. Plenty
of Burmese blame China for helping to prop up the military junta, writes
journalist Tom Miller in his new book, Chinas Asian Dream. Newly
enfranchised, the Burmese have taken aim at projects like Myitsone, where
90% of the electricity generated would have gone to China. Myanmars leader
Aung San Suu Kyi must now decide between permanently mothballing the dam,
which would require paying back the $800 million owed Chinese financiers, or
going forward with a deeply unpopular project she previously opposed.
The example of Myanmar is not unique. Sri Lanka has recently swung away from
China and back toward India. Filipino President Duterte has recently edged
back toward a United States led by Donald Trump, who has praised the
Philippine leaders drug war (despite its massive human rights violations).
Vietnam is perennially suspicious of Chinas geopolitical intentions, but
anti-Chinese sentiment has also been building in Laos, Indonesia, and
Malaysia. One Belt, One Road might outstrip the Marshall Plan in size, but
it lacks the underlying regional political solidarity that ensured the
latters success.
And yet China is not alone in feeling a backlash in the region. In South
Korea, for instance, a decade of conservative rule came to a crashing end
with the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye on corruption charges, a
hastily organized election, and the victory of progressive Moon Jae-in. The
new South Korean leader is no firebrand, so dont expect a dramatic break
with Washington. South Korea has been subservient to the United States for
too long to risk that any time soon. Moon has, however, promised to take
another look at the missile defense system -- the Terminal High Altitude
Area Defense (THAAD) -- that the United States worked so hard to deploy in
South Korea before he took office. The new president also wants to mend
fences with China, the countrys largest trading partner, and revive a more
cooperative relationship with North Korea as well.
Meanwhile, in Japan, opposition from politicians, activists, and ordinary
citizens in Okinawa has blocked a plan hammered out in Tokyo and Washington
to close an old U.S. military base in the city of Futenma, only to build a
replacement elsewhere on the island. Okinawa is where America houses a good
deal of its Pacific firepower. The refusal of Okinawan inhabitants to
support the construction of the new base has not only scrambled the Pacific
plans of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton but given new legitimacy to
the idea of withdrawing U.S. forces from Japan and South Korea to a
secondary tier of islands like Guam.
The growing willingness of Asian countries to put their own interests above
those of their putative patrons has also made it more difficult for the
region to find common ground. Asia is not remotely cohesive, writes
Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. There is
no East comparable to the West. Though the region is integrating
economically, it is riven by active conflicts, bitter historical memories,
and deep cultural divisions.
Past as Prologue?
If liberal internationalism no longer appeals to U.S. allies in Asia -- or,
indeed, to the new leadership in Washington -- it might be easy enough to
assume that the future will be a replay of the past: the return to a
Sinocentric universe that prevailed for 1,000 years or more in the region.
Instead of local satraps loaded with gifts visiting an emperor in Beijing,
the leaders of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines will build dams
and ports and pipelines with Chinese money and then repatriate much of the
proceeds to that country.
As it happens, though, the intensification of nationalism in Asia has
greatly complicated this picture and may leave leaders like Duterte playing
Beijing off against Washington, or striking out on their own, or perhaps
seeking help from India -- or even Saudi Arabia, which has made a bid for
greater influence among Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and
Malaysia. If the rise of China has caused much anxiety in the West, so has
the possibility that no country will become dominant in Asia in the wake of
U.S. decline and that a new kind of chaos will descend on the region.
The idea of a multipolar world, without dominant powers and guided solely
by the rule of law, is theoretically attractive, Financial Times journalist
Gideon Rachman writes in his recent book Easternization. But he adds, I
fear that just such a multipolar world is already emerging and proving to be
unstable and dangerous: the rules are very hard to enforce without a
dominant power in the background.
For years, Asia has contemplated an alternative to both Chinese and American
hegemony. Following the example of the European Union, politicians and
scholars have imagined a future of economic and political integration. But
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, and similar efforts continue to fall far short of the EU ideal
(which itself looks increasingly shaky and fragmented).
In other words, despite all those dreams of Asias glittering future, its
unlikely to resemble the peaceful prosperity of Europe, nor is it likely to
see a continuation of U.S. hegemony or a repeat of the China-centered system
of centuries past. Its likely, however, to involve population decline,
economic contraction, heightened nationalism, and rising waters -- a future,
in short, filled with troubles and dangers of every sort.
Although Washington still commands considerable power in the region, it
could stand back, Trump-like, and just watch everything unravel. Or,
alongside Beijing, it could make a serious investment in a new organization
of security and economic cooperation, in which the United States and China
would be equal partners, the region could have its collective say, and the
new nationalism would be deprived of its major raison dêtre.
Without such a supranational vision that could bring the region together
around the twin threats of climate change and economic inequality, one thing
is essentially guaranteed. The Asia to come wont look shiny and new like
some Hollywood movie. The future may not look like Asia at all, but more
like Europe circa 1913, at the edge of conflict and cataclysm.
John Feffer is the author of the new dystopian novel, Splinterlands (a
Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails
as a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning. He is the director of
Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a
TomDispatch regular.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror
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a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 John Feffer
© 2017 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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