Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

by Gideon Rachman

The most important non-economic Western edge goes beyond history. It is the West’s reputation for the rule of law.

As long as the US and the EU are perceived as running institutions that enforce rules predictably, impartially and swiftly, powerful people and institutions may continue t...

The fact that the relatively powerless UN General Assembly is often seen as a forum for anti-Western posturing has damaged the UN’s reputation in the US – but paradoxically boosted its international legitimacy elsewhere.

China’s successful move in 2014 to press ahead with the formation of a BRICS bank and an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank – both of which were to be based in China – was widely perceived as a reaction to the innate Western bias in the Bretton Woods institutions.

The IMF’s strictness with Indonesia (symbolised by a famous photo of the then IMF chief, Jacques de Larosière, a former French finance minister, standing over President Suharto as he signed the bailout deal) seemed to contrast strongly with its willingness to bend the rules for Greece and the tottering euro project.

ICANN’s work was originally done by a single individual: Jon Postel of the University of Southern California.

Sachin Pilot, India’s telecommunications minister, complained: ‘Globally internet traffic passes through thirteen root-servers. Nine of them are in the US, two each in Japan and western Europe . . . I believe India and other countries ought to play a much more relevant role in managing traffic flows.

But what was the source of this enduring American power? The answer it seemed was twofold: the US dollar and the US legal system. The FBI were able to build a case that was answerable in America because the bribes that were allegedly paid went through US banks – which, in turn, reflected the central role of the dollar in the global financial system.

However, the success of those efforts will depend on whether the sponsors of these new institutions are able to persuade other countries that their new forums are less open to political manipulation than the old ones, based in the West. For China, in particular, this raises very fundamental issues about the rule of law, in a system in which the Communist Party remains above all other institutions – including the courts.

The West’s institutional edge will help to preserve the global reach of Western nations, even as wealth moves east. But retaining the West’s institutional integrity will require tremendous self-discipline on the part of American and European leaders.

They point out that while the method by which the US will select its president twenty years hence is completely predictable, nobody can be sure what political arrangements will prevail in China. The potential fragility of China’s economic and political system has come into focus once again during the Xi Jinping years, as the economy has slowed and senior officials have been purged as part of an anti-corruption drive.

These relatively subtle questions of living standards, corruption and institutional power will matter a lot to the global balance of power, if international peace and stability is broadly maintained. But if the kind of dark, violent and anarchic forces that overwhelmed much of the Middle East during the Obama years spread to other parts of the world, then international politics will be shaped by cruder forces – as questions of military power and economic muscle come to the fore.

The US–China rivalry is also now at the centre of a web of dangerous rivalries in the region, which has seen a major arms race take hold in Asia over the last decade.

In the twenty-first century rivalries between the nations of the Asia-Pacific region will shape global politics – just as the struggles between European nations shaped world affairs for over 500 years, from 1500 onwards.

Yet, during the Xi Jinping era, it has become increasingly obvious that China is no longer prepared to accept American dominance of China’s ‘backyard’.

The question of whether and how the Americans should resist Chinese ambitions in the Asia-Pacific is likely to be the most critical issue in international relations over the coming decades, since it pits the world’s two most powerful nations against each other.

A generation of young Chinese has been reared on the ‘wolf’s milk’ of nationalism – and the effects of that education will last for generations.

Yet Obama’s original insight – that many of the most serious problems of the twenty-first century are truly global in nature – remains true. The big global issues make international borders and national rivalries seem either irrelevant or dangerously counterproductive.

The uprising in Syria in 2011 was preceded by four years of devastating drought, which some have linked to climate change.