Asian States Are Worried the U.S. Is a Perennially Distracted Superpower

Isheika Cleare

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When the Biden administration imposed export controls to restrict the transfer of sensitive technology to China, it signaled the United States’ final abandonment of the once-popular political theory that China’s integration into the global economy would make it freer and friendlier. Washington is proactively enacting more aggressive policies to delay China’s rise to global preeminence. But it doesn’t want to do this alone and has already reached out to allies in Europe and elsewhere. The most difficult sell, however, is likely to be to China’s neighboring states.

For Indo-Pacific states, this is a fraught request, as picking sides risks jeopardizing regional stability and economic growth. U.S. officials want Asian states to help it hold back China’s rise by withholding material support and cooperation or, even better, by actively pushing back against Chinese expansion. Most Pacific states, from Vietnam to the Philippines, want to continue to enjoy trade with China, one of their biggest economic partners, while receiving security protection, explicit or otherwise, and regional balance from the United States. This strategy allows them to maintain neutrality and avoid alienating either power. Calm coexistence and the continuance of the status quo is their best bet.

If this is the collective inclination, what level of support can the United States reasonably expect for its China policy? Because Asia is not a monolith, naturally, responses to U.S. policy shifts will vary. Yet there are some strategic concerns that cross borders and, for some of Asia’s main power players, the incentives to resist the region’s security hegemon may outweigh the call to fence in the region’s economic hegemon.

There are three factors that could cause Asian states to recoil from the United States’ preference for a more aggressive stance toward China. First, China is economically powerful. For 13 uninterrupted years, it has been the top trading partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Through the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure and manufacturing in countries throughout the region. China also imports billions of dollars in commodities and products. In 2020 alone, both Japan and South Korea earned more than $130 billion in exports to China.

The United States lacks a coherent economic response to China’s commercial power, although it tried to develop one under former President Barack Obama, when U.S. diplomats led the initiative to establish the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). When former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the TPP, he weakened U.S. leverage in a region primarily composed of two types of states: “developing” states that are trying to get rich and “developed” ones that are trying to stay rich. Yet trade openness has hardly improved under President Joe Biden, who has yet to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP’s new name, or any other Asian free-trade agreement. Biden has tended to favor nonbinding “unconventional” economic arrangements that leave tariff levels untouched and do not expand market access. This is a huge turnoff for market-hungry, export-dependent states. In addition, the Pacific’s middle and minor powers view free-trade agreements as a robust tool not only for promoting free trade but also for codifying the rules that will eventually regulate trade and investment. Underestimating the profit motive and ceding agenda-setting power is a poor strategy for winning friends and influencing allies.

Second, Pacific states must keep their eyes fixed on China’s growing military power as Beijing is increasingly able to deny these countries aerial and maritime access to contested territories and seas. Take, for instance, the geographic precarity of the United States’ most stalwart Asian allies, Japan and South Korea. They are essentially maritime states, heavily dependent on access to common waterways for trade and for the import of vital resources. Hardening their China posture may pose strategic dangers now that China is the world’s largest naval power and the United States’ military advantages are in relative decline. The United States is a distant friend, while China is a geographical fact.

Yet Japan’s security concerns, like those of many other Pacific states, don’t just cut one way. The United States’ hawkish China policy largely aligns with Tokyo’s own interest in checking Beijing’s aggression. Earlier this month, Japan’s prime minister authorized an considerable increase in defense spending over the next five years, partly driven by wariness of China’s Taiwanese provocations and partly to defend its territorial claim over the disputed Senkaku Islands, known in China as the Diaoyu Islands.

From a strategic standpoint, China’s military hostility should push the Pacific’s weaker powers to join the United States’ counterbalancing initiative. Yet Pacific states have reason to worry about U.S. commitment to the region. The United States sometimes struggles to maintain strategic focus on Asia. Such inconstancy prompted Singapore’s former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, to criticize U.S. policymakers for heralding their reengagement with Asia and, thus, treating global politics as though it were a movie they could “pause” when they got distracted and simply press “play” when they were ready to reengage. Lee warned that the United States “cannot come and go” according to its whim and still expect to “substantially affect the strategic evolution of Asia.”

Three months before Biden declared that “America is back,” 15 Asia-Pacific nations went ahead and signed the world’s largest trade agreement—the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—without U.S. participation, delivering “a coup for China.” Preoccupied with the war on terror, then-U.S. President George W. Bush abandoned dealing with China and failed to reengage with the region until years after the 9/11 attacks, which became “an incredible geopolitical gift to China.” By the time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed on a diplomatic trip to Asia “the United States is back” and ready to “[give] great importance to this region,” China’s emergence as a superpower had already drastically transformed Asia’s security and economic landscape.

The United States is a dominant power in Asia, but it is also a distracted power. The earnestness of U.S. leadership and policymaking is complicated by its competing commitments and globe-spanning interests. As the self-proclaimed “indispensable nation,” U.S. international policy has mission crept its way to encompassing the foreign and domestic policies of most nations and all regions of the world, producing whiplash and policy instability. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia emphasized strategic engagement and was welcomed as a reprieve from years of neglect. However, in 2016, Trump took the United States’ isolationist, nationalist tendencies to new lows. When his administration managed to direct and sustain focus on the Pacific, his policies and especially his personal positions evinced extreme inattention to historical precedent and strategic prudence. Arguably, during the Trump era, the United States in Asia may have devolved into something worse than a distracted power—it became an uninterested one. Now, wizened by the Trump years, many Asian leaders are observing with skepticism Biden’s attempts to undo diplomatic damage, reaffirm the United States’ security commitments and persuade others to help check China’s rise.

But Trump’s 2016 election not only shattered many preconceptions about the steadfastness of U.S. commitment, it also sowed doubts about the nation’s political system. The United States’ dysfunctional response to COVID-19, along with shocking scenes of police brutality and electoral chaos, pushed questions of institutional competency and democratic bona fides to the fore. Such concerns speak not to the United States’ resolve, but to its ability. A house divided against itself cannot stand up to China. Under such conditions, it makes little strategic sense for Asian states to risk their neighbor’s wrath in support of a distracted power with a spotty record of fidelity. Russia’s war in Ukraine has done much to patch up the United States’ image in Europe and showcase its military and economic power. Nevertheless, Asian states remain nervous about stirring up trouble in their own backyard.

To its credit, the Biden administration appears to recognize the need to avoid a maximalist, zero-sum China policy and has not adopted a with-us-or-against-us mentality that would alienate allies. In the latest National Security Strategy report, the administration claims to “prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over [China] while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia.” On paper, the administration has resisted conflating the dangers posed by China and Russia. The stated U.S. intent is to constrain a dangerous Russia while merely out-competing China. In practice, D.C.’s attention is as fixed on Beijing as Moscow, even if the conflict is less immediately intense—and Asian states can read the language coming out of Washington, from senators to the FBI, as well as anyone else.

While Asian states cannot escape the reality of Sino-American rivalry, they remain wary of outright siding with the United States and the problems that come with it. They have no desire to be pushed to the front of the stage by an unreliable ally. To win and preserve the support of Pacific nations, the United States must demonstrate that it is willing to fulfill its obligations and promises, that it is able to fulfill its obligations and promises, and that it intends to concentrate attention on the Indo-Pacific over the long term.