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

by Gideon Rachman

the growing importance of Chinese trade and investment across the world has considerable geopolitical significance. Asian countries will be much less willing to confront China—or side with the United States or Japan in a territorial dis...

For the Abe administration, the TPP represented a last effort to push back against the creation of a China-dominated co-prosperity sphere in East Asia. Donald Trump’s repudiation of the deal was thus a grievous blow ...

For Trump himself, however, ditching the TPP made perfect sense. He had campaigned against the supposedly disastrous trade deals that America had signed in the Clinton, Bush and Obama years. The TPP was th...

But outside the United States, Trump’s move was widely interpreted as a symbol of an American retreat from global leadership.

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.”

China moved smartly to take advantage of Trump’s torpedoing of the TPP. Within days, Beijing was energetically pushing a rival China-centered free-trade area for the Asia-Pacific region.

When Trump threatened to pull America out of the Paris climate-change accords,

It would also provide the government in Beijing with significant opportunities to forge international partnerships and to portray the United States as an irresponsible global power.

His appointment of a UN ambassador who had no relevant diplomatic experience—Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina—also underlined the low priority that Trump gives to the world body.

China, by contrast, was striving to place a Chinese national as the head of the UN’s vital peacekeeping department, which runs UN-mandated military operations all over the world.

During the Obama years, the United States had sometimes suggested that China was an irresponsible international actor whose actions over the climate, or the South C...

Now it was the United States that could be presented as an unstable and dangerous player, while China played the role of the supporter of international norms and agreements.

there are three broad explanations for the new president’s divergent attitudes toward Russia and China.

First, Trump sees the world primarily in terms of economic competition. The powerful Chinese economy is a formidable competitor for the United States. By contrast, the Russian economy is relatively puny and therefore less threatening.

Second, if Trump is thinking in strategic terms, he may also be attempting to disrupt the increasingly close entente that grew up between Russia and China during the Obama years, as both count...

Trump administration may seek to repeat the maneuver in reverse: drawing closer to Moscow, so as to isolate Beijing.

third reason

some in the Trump camp are drawn to Russia is the emphasis that certain key advisers—including Steve Bannon and General Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor—place on the “war” against radical Islam.

The influence of this thinking on Trump is reflected in his advocacy of a U.S.–Russian alliance in Syria to destroy Islamic State.

The idea that Russia and the United States might be natural partners in a struggle against Islam involves rethinking the idea of the West.

During the Cold War, U.S. leaders defined the West in ideological terms, as the group of countries that embraced ideas...

That placed the Soviet Union firmly on the other si...

But for Trump advisers—who see the West in cultural or even racial terms—Russia looks more like an ally. It is a largely Christian country, run by white Europeans, that is also engaged in a violent struggle against radical Islamism in Chechnya and Syria. Putin’s cultural conservatism, including his hostility to gay marriage, is also appealing to many on the Trumpist right.

If Russia is redefined as an outpost of Western culture, Trump’s embrace of Putin makes more ideological sense. And although Trump’s advisers primarily see Putin as a potential ally in the war on radical Islam, Russia could also, in the long term, be seen as a bulwark in the struggle to maintain Western primacy in the age of Easternization.

Russia’s sparsely populated East might one day be vulnerable to Chinese expansionism.

Americans who fear the growth of Chinese power might see some merit in trying to encourage a more robust Russia, as a bulwark against Beijing.

There are, however, several objections to this approach—as practiced by Donald Trump. First, it seems entirely likely that the wily and experienced Vladimir Putin might seek to extract whatever benefits he can from the Trump administration—without allowing Russia to be maneuvered into an anti-Chinese front. Second, an entente between Moscow and Wa...

The traditional “West” as a political concept has always had two pillars: North America and Europe. But if the United States and the EU end up at loggerheads during the Trump years, the “Western alliance” will be in profound trouble. Trump, as an advocate of “America First,” might not worry about antagonizing Europe. But the demise of the Western alliance would actually gravely undermine Trump’s plans to restore American greatness, since it would decrease the power of the United States to shape world affairs. In so doing, it would also hasten the shift of wealth and power to Asia that so troubles Trump and his supporters.

As this book will show, the political effects of the rise of Asia have been slowed by the continuing strength of the Western alliance. But if the West itself now falls into disarray, the process of Easternization will accelerate still further, and with it, the decline of American power.

IN CHINESE HISTORY, foreign visitors to the imperial court were often treated as “barbarians” who were expected to pay tribute to the emperor.

Yet the foreign grandees were treated a bit like a class of schoolchildren.

President Xi began his remarks by reminding his visitors that “China is an ancient civilization with over five thousand years of history.”

China, in some ways, regards the United States as an upstart nation—

President Xi’s determination to rebuild the wealth and power of his nation was the central theme of his speech.

Thucydides trap—

destructive tensions between an emerging power and established powers,”

the dangers of a period in which an established great power is challenged by a rising power. Allison calculates that in twelve out of sixteen such cases since 1500, the rivalry ended in war.

“Thucydides trap”

war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC had been caused by Sparta’s...

President Obama

the rise of China is an epochal event that requires a response. That response must be both forceful and sustained if the United States is to preserve its privileged position in global affairs. But it must be measured and nuanced if it is to avoid plunging America into a potentially disastrous conflict in Asia. The challenge is all the more difficult because the emerging rivalry between America and China is part of a much larger story. For more than five hundred years, ever since the dawn of the European colonial age, the fates of countries and peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have been shaped by developments and decisions made in Europe—and, later, the United States.

the West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close.

Western political power was founded on technological, military, and economic dominance, but these advantages are fast eroding. And the consequences are now defining global politics.

The central theme of international affairs that emerged during the Obama years and that will shape the world for decades to come, is the steadily eroding power of the West to dominate global politics. This erosion is closely linked to the growing concentration of wealth in Asia—and in particular the rise of China.

One of its consequences is a dangerous increase in diplomatic and military tensions within Asia itself, as a rising China challenges American and Japanese power and pursues its controversial territorial claims with renewed aggression. The United States, for its part, is pushing back against Chinese power, shifting military resources to the...

American “pivot t...

The second part describes how “Easternization” is transforming politics in the world beyond Asia.

the thread connecting these seemingly disparate events is the West’s growing inability to function as a pole of stability and power, imposing order on a chaotic world.

what is new is that the political, strategic, and ideological dominance of the West is now under challenge in entire regions, all over the world—in Asia, in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and in Africa.

This weakening of Western power is most obvious in the Middle East, where a political order set up by European powers in the aftermath of the First World War and supported by the United States after 1945 is crumbling.