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March 17, 2019
It is one thing to make an intellectual judgment that U.S. foreign policy needs to “pivot” away from the Middle East and toward East Asia (Donilon actually prefers the word “rebalance”)—it is quite another to stick to the plan amid the relentless crises flowing from the Middle East.
It was a historic irony that the United States announced its decision to rebalance its foreign policy toward Asia in 2011—the very year that the Middle East exploded into a cycle of revolution, repression, turmoil, and war that was initially given the optimistic label of the “Arab Spring.”
November 2011—
President Obama announced that the United States was winding down its wars in the Middle East, in favor of a new commitment to Asia:
“the United States has been, and always will, be a Pacific nation.”
The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.”
“The United States will continue our effort to build a cooperative relationship with China.”
The remaining years of the Obama administration were defined by a constant tension in foreign policy making between the desire to maintain a strategic focus on Asia and the relentless pounding headaches of turmoil in the Middle East and then Russia.
China’s infamous “nine-dash line”
implies that almost all the South China Sea falls within its own territorial waters.
“by 2009, much of Asia had concluded that the U.S. was on its way out as a Pacific power.”
But winning the intellectual battle was one thing. Maintaining America’s focus on Asia and translating that into a series of consistent and effective policies was quite another.
in practice it was hard to avoid China dominating discussion of policy toward Asia. First, there was the sheer size of the country’s economy—which, by 2015, was five times that of India, the other would-be Asian “superpower.” Second, China, by the nature of its political system and the scope of its strategic ambitions, posed a much more direct challenge to a U.S.–led world order than an American ally, such as Japan, or a fellow democracy, such as India.
America and China were simultaneously partners and rivals. As the two largest economies in the world, with deeply intertwined trading systems, they shared an interest in global economic stability. There were also global challenges—such as climate change—that both nations had an urgent interest in solving. And yet these economic partners were also strategic rivals.
Over the course of the Obama administration’s eight years in power, America came increasingly to see China as more a rival than a partner.
“80 percent competition and 20 percent cooperation.”
For many years, both Republicans and Democrats had operated on the assumption that China’s rise could be managed by giving the nation a clear stake in the maintenance of the postwar international system—a system that had essentially been designed and maintained by the United States. Thus America supported China’s application to join the World Trade Organization—an application that was approved in 2001 and that gave the Chinese economy a significant boost.
the talk of China and the United States becoming a “G2” that would together crack the world’s toughest international problems.
The Obama team’s initial interest in the G2 idea was rooted in its focus on transnational global problems—including financial instability, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. It was clear that on all these challenges, progress would be dependent on getting cooperation from China—which was the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its second-largest economy, a nuclear state, and permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Yet President Obama’s first visit to Beijing in November 2009 proved to be a sharply disillusioning experience.
Yet on arrival in Beijing, he found that the Chinese were unyielding on all the key issues that the United States had marked out as possible areas of partnership—from currency to climate to sanctions on Iran.
This rebuke made a deep impression on the new U.S. president and his advisers,
The downward spiral in U.S.–Chinese relations continued in the weeks that followed President Obama’s visit.
China announced that it was suspending military-to-military contacts with the United States in response to American arms sales to Taiwan.
the United States had a “national interest” in “respect for international law in South China Sea.”
“Chinese and American presidents find it hard to communicate.
For all his public charisma, President Obama can be chilly in private—and he struggled to build close relationships, even with other Western leaders.
Behind the day-to-day setbacks and frustrations of managing U.S.–Chinese relations, America was taking an increasingly dark view of China’s ambitions in Asia.
“It’s true that China needs stability and the cooperation of the U.S. to complete its rise. But it also sees the U.S. as the biggest impediment to that rise.”
U.S. officials became convinced that if they did not react, their Asian allies would begin to doubt Washington’s staying power, and the U.S.–led security system in the Pacific would begin to unravel.
They also began to see Chinese ambitions as essentially unappeasable.
For all the talk of economics, it was this strategic concern that was ultimately the driving impulse behind the Campbell-designed pivot—as well as the subsequent efforts to persist with the redeployment of American forces to the Pacific.
“what seemed the natural order of the post–World War II period when the United States accounted for around 35 percent of global GDP is not sustainable when the United States is below 20 percent.”
John Kerry, the new secretary of state, and Susan Rice, the new national security adviser—seemed much less interested in Asia.
When China announced its intention to set up an AIIB in Beijing, the reaction in Washington was suspicious and hostile.
Citing concerns about governance and transparency, America began to lobby its allies to refuse to join the AIIB.
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.
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—
giant new free-trade deal for the Asia-Pacific region,
The TPP covered twelve nations, which are said to account for 40 percent of world trade and included the United States and Japan—but very pointedly did not include China.
it had been Congress’s reluctance to approve changes to national voting weights at the IMF, which would have better reflected China’s economic clout, that had helped to convince Beijing that it would never get a fair deal in the Bretton Woods institutions based in Washington.
Congressional skepticism reflected a wider backlash among the American public against free trade and globalization in general.
Like the Obama administration, the Japanese government faced formidable difficulties in persuading powerful domestic interests to accept a new trade deal.
TPP
Today’s Japan, although still rich and technologically advanced, is an aging society with a shrinking population and an economy that has been stagnating for twenty years. It is also a country with a strong nationalist faction and a worryingly ambiguous relationship with its wartime past. No man better embodied that ambiguity than Shinzo Abe himself.
SHINZO ABE has a lot in common with Xi Jinping.
came to power in Tokyo and Beijing within weeks of each other.
Both men see their central task as “national rejuvenation.”
Both are charismatic leaders and nationalists.
