Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

a senior EU official in Brussels, who remarked to me, “It’s interesting, when the Brits were the world’s dominant economy, they were also the main promoters of free trade. And then when America became the world’s dominant economy, they became the main promoters of free trade. And now America is losing its faith in globalization and China is becoming the main advocate of free trade. You can feel the wheels of history turning.”

BROADLY SPEAKING, I have tried to balance two strands of thought in my analysis. The first is that the rise of Asia is correcting a global imbalance of political power that has its origins in Western imperialism. In that sense, the rise of Asian powers is an important step toward a more equal world.

The magnitude of the shift in economic power that is under way was captured by an exhaustive recent report for the Australian government, which pointed out that “Asia is set to overtake the combined economic output of Europe and North America within the decade to 2020.”

the idea that the fragility of the Chinese or Indian systems means that the Easternization story will soon end ignores the extent to which the West’s own rise was accompanied by episodes of extreme instability. The United States, after all, fought a civil war in the middle of the nineteenth century, but that did not halt its rise to global preeminence.

America’s closest ally breaking ranks and joining the AIIB gave the green light to all the other U.S. allies that also wanted a piece of the infrastructure action. Within weeks, fifty-five other nations, including Australia, South Korea, and Germany, had agreed to join the AIIB. The sole major hold-outs were America and Japan. But rather than looking like the bulwarks of a coherent anti-China front, Washington and Tokyo risked looking isolated and petulant. Observing this spectacle, Larry Summers, Obama’s first treasury secretary and a former president of Harvard, was convinced that he was watching history unfold—and not in ways that advantaged the United States. “The past month,” he wrote in April 2015, “may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.

731—the number of a notorious wartime Japanese military unit that had conducted biological and chemical experiments, including vivisections, on Chinese and Korean prisoners of war. The official Japanese explanation was that this was just an unfortunate coincidence. But nobody I met in South Korea believed that, and they were not alone in their skepticism.

The 731 incident was just the most startling of a series of diplomatic gaffes with a nationalist theme during the Abe administration. In 2013, Japan unveiled the largest battleship it had constructed since the Second World War. The vessel was nominally a destroyer but was, in fact, an aircraft carrier in all but name. The construction of the ship was a legitimate, arguably necessary, response to China’s naval buildup. But by naming the new vessel the Izumo—the same name as one of the ships that had led the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s—Japan handed a propaganda gift to the Chinese. And the gifts kept on coming. That same year, Japan’s deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, talking about the need to revise his country’s pacifist constitution, cited the Nazis’ rewriting of the German constitution as a possible model.

When, in July 2015, Abe’s government presented legislation easing the restrictions on the Japanese military, the opposition walked out of parliament, while demonstrators chanted outside. For any foreigners worried about a resurgence of Japanese nationalism, these public misgivings were, in some ways, reassuring. The mood of the Japanese public still looked strongly pacifist,

If a conflict were ever to break out, the U.S. navy could attempt to strangle the Chinese economy at the Strait of Malacca and the three other less used straits (Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar) that connect the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

“They often talk as if they think Chinese domination of the Pacific is inevitable.”11 And indeed Kishore Mahbubani, a former head of the Singaporean Foreign Ministry, was fond of remarking, “We know that China will still be our neighbor in 1,000 years. We don’t know if the Americans will still be here in 100 years’ time.”

Subramanian was even more of a skeptic. In 2011, he had argued that China would displace the United States as the world’s leading economic power. His book Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance begins with a provocative vision of a U.S. president in 2021 applying for an emergency loan from a Chinese director of the IMF.

Demographers think that India is likely to surpass China as the world’s most populous country, with 1.4 billion people, around 2022. And some economists reckon it might be the world’s largest economy by 2050.3 As Shekhar Gupta, one of India’s most influential journalists put it to me, “Indians now tend to believe that India is on the rise and China is going down. We are the only growing power in the world.”

Clinton’s argument was that since the U.S. budget deficit was, to a significant extent, funded by Chinese purchases of U.S. Treasury bills, China was effectively America’s banker, and she asked, “How do you get tough on your banker?”8 Clinton’s analysis of the leverage China’s ownership of U.S. Treasuries gave to Beijing was disputed by many economists, who argued that a mass sale of the bills by the Chinese would damage their own interests by driving down the value of China’s savings. But the broader point about the political consequences of shifting economic power was hard to dispute. A wealthier China has more leverage over

William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, asserted that “the nation that draws most from the earth, and fabricates most, and sells the most to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the great power of the earth.”

The expense of the American military program is illustrated by the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fighter, which proved so expensive to produce—at a “through-life cost” of $670 million a plane—that only 182 of them were bought, as opposed to the original plan to purchase some 650. The result was to significantly reduce America’s military capacities. As Mark Urban, the BBC’s defense correspondent, notes, “If America held back some squadrons for home defense, it is unlikely that it could deploy more than a few dozen Raptors in any confrontation with China, with its hundreds of fighter jets.”18 The F-22 was not an isolated example. The new B-2 Stealth bomber—the most modern bomber plane the United States possesses—is “so colossally expensive to procure that at the time it was calculated that an aircraft of the same weight made of solid gold would have been cheaper.”19 As a result, America has been able to build only nineteen B-2s, of which just six are likely to be deployable on any given day.

Russia’s unease is heightened by the knowledge that the country’s sheer size is the product of a history of imperial expansion at the expense of its Asian neighbors, including China. In the 1600s, Russia’s land surface almost trebled, as the country expanded beyond the Ural Mountains.16 By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia had become, in the words of the historian John Darwin, “after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia and a colossal colonialist.” Tsarist Russia played a crucial role in the “demolition of the old China-centred world order in East Asia.”17 Much of the Russian Far East, including Vladivostok, was once Chinese and was ceded to Russia through the Treaties of Aigun and Peking in 1858 and 1860: two of the notorious “unequal treaties” of the Qing era that now make up so much of the mythology of modern Chinese nationalism.18

With the West’s global economic dominance slipping into history, the “soft power” conferred by the Anglo-American world’s domination of international law is becoming more and more crucial to ensuring that the world continues to be “wired” through the West.