Evelyn Goh
EAST ASIA IS TODAY beset by a confluence of strategic challenges: How to minimize the risks while maximizing the benefits of China’s resurgence; how to cope with the rising uncertainties surrounding America’s commitment and reliability; and how to weather the storms of the Sino-US trade war, “de-risking” and decoupling.
In this rapidly evolving international order, allies and supporters of the United States that have prospered in recent decades of US primacy have had to rethink most radically their strategies and security policies, if only because their economic fortunes are now increasingly, equally, or mostly, vested in China. For Asia, the two decades of US hegemony after the Cold War ended (circa 1991-2008) were an “interregnum,” not the norm.1 As I have argued elsewhere2, we have now entered an “Age of Uncertainty,” characterized by:
a) The end of US hegemony, China’s ascendance, and the emergence or persistence of other secondary powers that have systemic effects (Russia, India, possibly other BRICS). This has renewed and expanded great power competition across the military, economic and political/institutional realms. The result is uneven power diffusion and a growing, deep-seated strategic uncertainty. Practitioners of strategy and security have to deal with “more actors, more factors, more vectors,” and many struggle to develop frameworks and modes of operation that can cope with these complex problems.3 We see a great deal more self-help and ad hoc coalitions in the security realm, and in some places, a notable hankering after an idealized past (e.g. the need to “protect the liberal international order”).
b) Unprecedented interdependence, fueled by globalization and technological revolution, which has led both to extreme wealth accumulation and to unprecedented distribution of prosperity across countries and the world. At the same time, with the recent experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, the effects of the Russo-Ukraine war on the global economy, and the global climate emergency, we are living through clearly evident vulnerabilities that arise from the extreme interdependence of globalization.
c) The still many unknowns about what some call the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR), including recent fears about artificial intelligence leading to human extinction.
DIAGNOSIS
This is not just or yet a power transition: It is a more fundamental “order transition.” A transition of power mainly refers to the switching out of the hegemon, or a change in the distribution of power. Transitions of order are more fundamental, as they involve renegotiations and fights over changing the values underpinning international society, the balance of rights and responsibilities for the powerful, the terms of leadership and supporter-ship, what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and the way of doing things.4
This essence is often lost in the popular discourse on international order in which disputants are focused on promoting a particular version of “the new order.” In contrast, we need to focus on understanding the order transition, even if it is messy and as yet indeterminate. Why? Because power diffusion, extreme interdependence, and the human-technological revolution together oblige us to cope with a messy transition in which US-China geopolitical competition is only one part of the picture. It also renders unhelpful the tendency to treat security/geopolitics and economics as dichotomous. To cope with this transition, we need to understand our situation coherently, avoid narrow great-power-only lenses, cultivate autonomous thinking and make appropriate diagnoses.
Across the very diverse region of East Asia and the Pacific, we now face the same condition: extreme interdependence, plural interests (and allegiances), and post-US hegemony. This systemic condition helps dampen some rather significant differences in history, ideology and what some like to call “strategic culture.”
A neat way to think about this is: We are all “crossroads” now, just as Southeast Asia has always been. This sub-region is a maritime and continental thoroughfare linking India and China, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Therefore, its lived reality already features many powers — super, great, offshore, regional, rising, aspiring — staking their various interests and operating economically and militarily. More importantly, Southeast Asian economies (like most East Asian ones) rely heavily on foreign markets and investors, and must deal with a slew of other powerful non-state and trans-state international actors, including international financial institutions, multinational corporations and standard-setting agencies.
Thus, Southeast Asian policymakers generally regard the international order to be asymmetrical, uneven and multi-pillared, involving more actors, factors and vectors than the concept of polarity can capture. This is not a matter of mere perception; it generates a different universe of choice-sets, one in which regional policymakers see more potential for policy combinations and trade-offs, and less need to resort to simple binary options.
As I have observed elsewhere, “Southeast Asian states avoid invidious choices — such as choosing to ally with only one great power — fundamentally because they do not see themselves as playing a game that exclusively revolves around two great powers. They are playing multiple, overlapping games to manage economic interests, security threats and political imperatives at the local, regional and global levels — in some of these, China and/or the US is important, but not in all.”5 Like many post-colonial states and rapidly-developing economies, Southeast Asian policymakers juggle problems of economic growth and distribution, and political regime legitimacy. In these challenges, the US and China might be variously unhelpful, irrelevant, or equally useful. In this context, pressures to choose one side — whether in a potential war or technological decoupling — seem like attempts to reduce Southeast Asia’s multi-dimensional reality to an artificial two-dimensional chessboard.
But elsewhere in this region, the context and reactions are somewhat different — at the US-allied end of the spectrum especially, some struggle with moving past their previous reflexive strategic thinking and capabilities. For example, Japan today seems to be experiencing an interesting dualism. As Yusuke Ishihara observes, on the one hand, “Japanese leaders’ imagination about their available military options has stretched as Japan’s self-restraints have eased:” this is seen, for instance, in Tokyo’s recent decisions to acquire long-range missiles and abolish the 1 percent GDP ceiling on defense spending. At the same time, though, “Japanese leaders’ imagination about Japan’s broader strategic options has shrunk” rather than expanded, such that they “… cannot imagine any other option but to embrace the United States.”6
By comparison, Australia has struggled for decades to move beyond simple dichotomies and the ideological constraints of being the white man’s outpost at the furthest end of Asia. At its most egregious, the insecurities engendered by the ongoing order transition can bring forth controversial proclamations like the then-defense minister Peter Dutton saying, as “a statement of reality” in 2021, that it was “inconceivable that [Australia] wouldn’t support the US” in any conflict over Taiwan.7 In a more constructive mode, enterprising Australian leaders or public intellectuals have been at the forefront of promoting new regional initiatives such as the ill-fated Asia-Pacific Community and the better performing Indo-Pacific imaginary.
Significant changes in mindset are required to navigate this era of uncertainty, because the challenges are bigger and deeper than US-China competition or conflict in and of itself would suggest. Different parts of the region and of strategy/foreign-policy establishments are in various stages of grappling with this endeavor — and they are all experiencing growing domestic contestation and divergence, some played out more publicly than others. The journey is harder, but also more urgent for some than for others.
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