In its policies towards Asia, the United States has long sought to combine its superior military, economic and policy-making capabilities with a desire for stability. Until recently, this was not difficult to do. Washington’s international dominance coincided with the post-1979 “Asian Peace”—a period of remarkable stability in East Asia and the Pacific—so that the US had little trouble dominating the region without creating conflict. Over time, Washington came to believe that US dominance and regional tranquility did not coexist but were causally linked. As a result, US policymakers made maintaining Asian dominance a cornerstone of their regional strategy, arguing that without Washington’s leadership, Asia would descend into war.
But as American author James Baldwin wrote in 1963, “time reveals the foundations upon which any kingdom rests, and eats away at those foundations, and destroys doctrines, proving them true.” Although US dominance was once a source of regional stability, there is now little reason to believe that it will promote harmony. The global power of the United States has waned over the last generation, making it harder for Washington to rule the world. Other states have a new willingness and ability to resist, subvert, attack, or seek alternatives to US priorities, including through violence. And the power of these countries may continue to grow. It defies history to hope that the sunset of US hegemony will never come, especially as China—the world’s most populous state and Washington’s main global competitor—draws its power from its central place in the international economic system.
However, two of the last US presidents—Barack Obama and Donald Trump—charged themselves with the task of protecting the sun indefinitely. And President Joe Biden has picked up where both presidents left off. At first, this meant taking measures to contain Beijing. Now, it means taking steps to weaken the country. Obama began the process by launching a “pivot to Asia,” designed to bolster the United States’ military presence in the region as a check against China’s rise, linking his country’s economy to eight states near China’s borders. Trump, who saw how China’s important economic position was giving it increasing influence on the world stage, started a trade war with Beijing. His administration also deepened Washington’s ties with Taiwan. Biden has ramped up the build-up of the US military, streamlined regional military power and tried to assemble the beginnings of a containment coalition against China with local powers in Asia.
These options go hand in hand with what peacekeeping requires. Bringing China’s economy to its knees, engaging in an endless arms race, aligning with local despotic regimes to surround Beijing, and alienating smaller countries by forcing them to choose between China and the United States could give Washington more short-term power in Asia. But these are the ingredients of regional rupture and eventual war, not stability. The United States’ Asia policy is therefore at an unacceptable crossroads. Washington can pursue regional peace or achieve regional dominance, but it cannot do both.
OUT OF CONTROL
The United States of America has been working for more than a decade to keep itself on top of Asia. In 2010, then US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes stated that the Obama administration was trying to “lead America for another fifty years”. Under Trump, a declassified White House strategy document showed that America’s top interest in Asia was maintained by “the United States. Read also : USA midfielder Adams joins Leeds from Leipzig.” strategic superiority” as well as Washington’s “diplomatic, economic and military priority”. Losing “US dominance in the Indo-Pacific”, the administration claimed in the document, would “undermine our ability to pursue US interests around the world”.
The Biden administration remains faithful to that path. In the 2021 strategy, he stated that “leading the world” was the “undeniable interest” of the United States. He went on to say that the country’s interests “compel the deepest connection to the Indo-Pacific” and that the United States’ presence will be “strongest in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe”. The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be “the most transformative year for US force posture in a generation,” a line that may be comforting, but which it considers ominous. The Department of Defense is fulfilling that promise by modernizing its large traditional presence in Northeast Asia, expanding its footprint in the Pacific Islands and Australia, areas where China’s military cannot seriously challenge it. It is also deploying an array of new lethal weapons, such as the B-21 nuclear-capable stealth bomber. With the fanfare of a new iPhone unveiled in December, the B-21 is priced at $203 billion, which is somewhat below the original budget.
For Washington, the increased emphasis on Asia is driven by fears that China’s growing power will affect the United States’ ability to shape the global order. The Pentagon has described Beijing as a “virtually competitive” and “pace threat”. In response, the United States has entered an arms race against the rapidly modernizing People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It’s a competition with no apparent end. The US defense budget increased from $700 trillion in 2018 to $768 trillion in 2020. By 2023, it will eclipse $850 billion. Aid to Ukraine accounts for just over $50 billion of that total. The United States provides increasingly advanced weapons technology to friends and allies.
The US strategy towards China is containment in all but name.
Washington’s efforts to maintain dominance in the region go beyond the accumulation and proliferation of armaments. To gain even greater dominance, the United States has turned the global political economy into a zero-sum battle against Beijing. Biden has maintained Trump-era student visa restrictions aimed at Chinese and expanded his predecessor’s tariffs, sanctions and blacklists of companies. In October, for example, administration officials banned the sale of US-made semiconductor technology to one’s competitor in Washington. It’s a remarkable step, given that semiconductors were largely irrelevant to global power politics until the United States christened them a central focus of national security. By stating that these technologies—found in everyday goods such as smartphones and televisions—are essential to national strength and prosperity, and that its enemies should not be allowed to have them, Washington has exposed its radical militarism.
The US settlement that blocks China’s access to semiconductors involves more than just export bans. In the October guidelines, the Commerce Department also restricted US corporations from conducting semiconductor-related research, development or financing with Chinese entities. “We are ahead of [China],” explained US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. “We have to stay ahead of them. And we have to deny them the technology they need to advance the army.”
This is not the reason for a country trying to balance Chinese power or prevent Beijing from creating a sphere of influence. It is not the strategy of a state trying to separate itself from the Chinese economy. In all but name, it’s a holdover.
PRIMACY VERSUS PEACE
For the United States, there are many problems with a strategy based on trying to stop China’s rise. One is that it won’t work at a basic level. There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars to modernize the US nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will make China do anything but continue to arm itself as quickly as possible. See the article : A conservative vision for the United States. China has been preparing a techno-containment strategy for the United States for years, and in 2015 launched the “Made in China 2025” initiative, precisely to ensure that it has a strong domestic technology industry. And the rest of Asia is not willing or able to isolate Beijing under the current political conditions.
To maintain US dominance is to threaten peace in Asia. The large military investments needed to ensure that the United States remains the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific require overwhelming China in areas of its greatest capabilities, near China’s shores and far from the US homeland. It is an impossible task. Consider, for example, the steps Washington must take to wage war against Taiwan. China has the natural and massive advantage of being close to the island’s coasts, all of which fall within China’s air defenses. To repel a PLA attack on Taiwan, the United States would need absurd levels of modern weaponry, a blank check to the Pentagon. It would have to engage in what the sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “the race of fools”: piling up missiles and cultivating military positions that fuel jingoism on both sides, increase instability, and lead each state to adopt the worst interpretations of the other. intentions One has to strain quite a bit to discern the imbalance of military power in favor of stability theory, the active proliferation of weapon platforms and the signaling of a decision that requires flexing muscles.
Risking military escalation is only one of the ways in which dominance has an antagonistic relationship with stability. As I argued in The Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, any US push for economic dominance will undermine regional stability by disrupting the economic structures that have played a vital role in preventing war in the Pacific. East Asia’s development model based on exports and interdependence became possible because political leaders decided to prioritize national development over nationalistic revanchism. Asian heads of state have put dozens of territorial disputes, many of which still linger, in the background to create a thicket of regional institutions that promote informal, consensus-based trade and diplomatic practices. The result was impressive economic growth and remarkable stability.
American officials are asking Asian states to work against their interests.
In recent decades, Washington’s economic dominance was rarely contested by other states, so its actions to remain at the center of Asian trade and financial flows were more subtle and less visible. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration asserted control over the region, ensuring that the growing regional institutions remained informal and led by the private sector. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration succeeded in opposing an East Asian Economic Caucus led by Malaysia and a Japanese Asian Monetary Fund—both of which would have excluded the United States. The George W. Bush administration deliberately ignored the East Asia Summit, which was still held in Washington. But times have changed. Today, the United States does not have a central position in the political economy of Asia. As such, its bid to assert greater control from the periphery therefore requires a far more heavy-handed approach than in the past, including the destruction of the economic interdependencies that have helped keep the peace.
Washington’s push to outmaneuver China created a full-court diplomatic press to convince Asian governments to divest from Huawei, one of the Communist Party’s tech titans but also a global and affordable telecom provider in the Indo-Pacific. So far the newly launched quest to strip China of advanced data processing technologies has led to increasingly stringent trade, investment and intellectual property restrictions against Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And there is no reason to expect that this round of economic strangulation will be the end of the pain it seeks to cause. Instead, it’s Mills’ “idiot’s race” again, but with economic policy. In Washington’s view, if China is on the move as an aggressive power, the last thing the US would want is to cut Beijing off from other countries’ markets. Without that access, China would have even less incentive to restrain itself.
Beijing, of course, also has a revisionist drive to promote its own interests. The Chinese Communist Party is not a force for peace. But the reality is that China is now embedded in the Asian financial and economic system in a way that the United States is not, giving Beijing the political weight in Asia that Washington lacks. In addition to being a major financier in the region, China is the center of Asia in a manufacturing network that produces finished goods for markets around the world. It is the largest trading partner for most economies. It has created many organizations that connect the region, the most famous of which is the Belt and Road Initiative. Crucially, China belongs to most of the agreements that make up the economic architecture of Asia, such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the Chiang Mai Initiative for Intraregional Currency Swap, the Asian Bond Markets Initiative, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Plus Three (China, Japan, and South Korea), and the Tripartite Cooperation Secretariat. Washington, on the other hand, is not one of them.
US officials are therefore asking Asian states to work against their long-term interests. They point out that Asian governments are betraying the interdependence that has fostered regional peace, because doing so could give Washington—not Asia—a marginal advantage in a geopolitical battle of dubious merit. In the best of times that would be unrealistic, and this is far from the best of times. As China becomes increasingly embedded in the regional architecture of Asia, the United States is in a worse material and symbolic position to make such demands than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
READING THE ROOM
So what should Washington do instead? It might start with a dose of simple pragmatism. Asian governments want stability more than anything, and they know what works for them in that regard better than the US ever did. This may interest you : Assistant Secretary Lee Satterfield Travels to New York City for Repatriation of Cultural Property to Cambodia – US Department of State. Focusing statecraft on the concerns of Asian societies would require a dramatic shift in how the US behaves in the region, but it would also be the surest way to strengthen, rather than undermine, peace in Asia.
By tuning in, Washington would know that small states are being wary of being forced to take sides in the competition of great powers. They are calling for geopolitical openness and strategic pluralism in the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement: a collection of Cold War-era post-colonial states that refused to be subordinated to the Soviet Union or the United States. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for example, has repeatedly stated that it will not choose between China and the United States. The President of East Timor has made it clear that his country’s seeking economic support from China does not mean that it is “taking sides”. Indonesia and some Pacific Island governments have expressed interest in establishing supplier cartels for valuable raw materials such as nickel, which would give these countries the cash and modest political leverage they need for true autonomy. And as Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said last September, “No one wants to be forced to make bad choices. Nobody wants to become a vassal state or a cat’s paw.”
Asian leaders are also wary of any measures that would cause China’s economy to implode. It’s easy to see why. The economies of the region are so tied to China that if the latter were to collapse (due to US containment efforts or Beijing’s own failure), the rest of Asia would go down. The region’s leaders therefore want to boost, and take advantage of, the local superpower economy, which helped insulate Asia from the worst of the 2008 global financial crisis. Asian governments are not naïve about the dangers facing China, and it is true that in states where corruption is prevalent, Chinese investments seem to exacerbate nepotism, kleptocracy and structural violence. But even regional elites are not as paranoid about China as the United States seems to be.
Small states are afraid of being forced to take sides in a competition between great powers.
It is not yet clear whether Asian states can create a new Non-Aligned Movement. But the fact that the leaders are so committed to trying suggests that Washington’s attempts to ensure that regional states fully comply with China’s counterclaims are, at best, ill-fated. At worst, US efforts will actively undermine the country’s position and destabilize the region. The semiconductor gambit, for example, calls for disrupting Asian economic integration, which will flatten the region’s growth. Washington’s maneuvering could prompt China to engage in even more aggressive behavior abroad or further stoke nationalist sentiment at home, and in turn lead to more militarism from the United States. This dangerous cycle is far from attractive to Asia, which is why most states on the continent would rather work together to promote non-alignment than contribute to great power competition.
If the United States really cares about stability in Asia, it must become a partner of any non-aligned bloc, rather than an obstacle to its creation. To do so, it would have to increase export quotas and provide price controls for imports of goods of great importance to the economies of Asia and the Pacific. This step will support key sources of regional economic development and strengthen Asian interdependence. Washington also needs to help the region manage rising levels of sovereign debt, which could cause a severe depression across the region. It should open up international markets to governments that improve the relationship between capital and labor rather than perpetuate labor repression. And the United States should offer reparations to many affected societies, such as the Marshall Islands (destroyed by US nuclear testing), Cambodia and the Philippines (which owe the US enormous debts incurred by previous corrupt autocratic regimes), and Guam (a colonial possession that has not been given the opportunity for self-determination one).
All these steps would indicate that Washington has the interests of the people of Asia at heart, that it is not trying to control others and that it understands that it cannot force its way to peace. But in order to take any of these measures, the United States must first abandon its ambitions for dominance. The country must respond to Asia as it is instead of treating it as an abstract area where it can engage in power politics.
When did America emerge as a world power?
On August 12, 1898, the United States and Spain reached a cease-fire agreement in the brief Cuban-Philippines conflict. The war brought America onto the global stage as a military power.
Did the US come out of ww1 as a great power? On April 6, 1917, by shifting its industrial power and vast manpower behind France and Great Britain against Germany and its allies, the United States tipped the balance of the conflict and emerged as a global power.
How did the United States become a global superpower in the aftermath of World war II?
Fueled by growing consumer demand, as well as the continued expansion of the military-industrial complex as the Cold War intensified, the United States reached new heights of prosperity in the years following World War II.
How did the United States emerged as a world power?
During the Mexican American War (1846-1848), the US conquered the northern half of Mexico. During the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US took control of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba. After these acts of imperialism, when one country expands its rule over another, the US became a world power.
How did the US become a global power?
When did America become a world power? The US became a world power in 1898 when it took control of the Spanish Empire. This allowed the US to project its power across the planet.
How did the United States become a global superpower after World War II? Fueled by growing consumer demand, as well as the continued expansion of the military-industrial complex as the Cold War intensified, the United States reached new heights of prosperity in the years following World War II.
How did the United States emerged as a world power?
During the Mexican American War (1846-1848), the US conquered the northern half of Mexico. During the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US took control of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba. After these acts of imperialism, when one country expands its rule over another, the US became a world power.
Is the federal government responsible for foreign affairs?
Which department of the US government is responsible for conducting foreign affairs and diplomacy? Secretary of State The Secretary carries out the President’s foreign policy through the State Department, which includes the Foreign Service, the Civil Service, and the US Agency for International Development.
Who is responsible for foreign affairs?
The Secretary of State, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, is the President’s chief advisor on foreign affairs. The Secretary carries out the President’s foreign policy through the Department of State and the US Foreign Service.
What are the major responsibilities of the federal government for foreign policy?
Protect the United States and Americans; Advancement of democracy, human rights and other global interests; promote international understanding of American values and policies; and Support US diplomats, government officials, and all workers at home and abroad who make these goals a reality.
What was the US strategy during the Cold War?
During the Cold War, Pentagon strategists adopted a “containment” policy to prevent Soviet expansion. The US military did not anticipate the end of the cold war and was caught without a new strategy when the Soviet Union collapsed.
What strategy did the US use against the Soviet Union during the Cold War? George F. Kennan, a career Foreign Service Officer, formulated the “containment” policy, the basic strategy for the United States to fight the Cold War (1947-1989) with the Soviet Union.
What were the six main strategies of the Cold War?
What were the six main strategies of the Cold War?
- Brinkmanship.
- espionage
- External support
- the alliance
- Propaganda
- Substitute wars
What goals did the US have during the Cold War?
The goal of the Soviet Union during the Cold War was to maintain control of Eastern Europe and spread communism. The goal of the United States, along with Great Britain, was to stop the spread of communism in Western Europe and throughout the world.
