Despite the relentless shift of global economic might to Asia, and China’s
Despite the relentless shift of global economic might to Asia, and China’s rise as a great power — the central historical events of our time, which will drive world affairs for the foreseeable future — America’s focus has been elsewhere. The terrorist attacks of 2001, followed by the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Great Contraction of 2008, the Arab Spring, and Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, all diverted the United States from helping to create a lasting structure of peace to accommodate today’s resurgent Asia.
This month, US President Barack Obama can begin to redress this imbalance when he hosts the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in his native state of Hawaii. The meeting’s timing is fortunate, because a number of critical Asian issues are coming to a boil.
The South China Sea, for example, is now churning with competing claims to its islands, atolls, and sea bed, including China’s bold assertion that all of it is Chinese sovereign territory. At this year’s ASEAN summit in Bali, it was agreed that these territorial disputes be settled through bilateral negotiations. But the scope of Chinese claims doomed that agreement from the start; indeed, China now insists that the sea constitutes a core national interest, on a level with Taiwan and Tibet, for which it is prepared to fight.
The absence of such a structure of peace has been obscured, to some extent, by America’s dominant role in Asia since the Pacific War. But China’s rise and America’s other global and domestic concerns have left many Asians wondering just how enduring those commitments will be in the future. Nevertheless, China’s recent strategic assertiveness has led many Asian democracies to seek to deepen their ties with the US, as South Korea has done with a bilateral free-trade agreement. The US is reciprocating by pledging not to cut Asia-related defense spending, despite the big reduction in overall US defense spending that lies ahead.
What Asia most needs today is a well-conceived regional system, embedded in binding multilateral institutions. A “Trans-Pacific Partnership” between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US, and Vietnam to govern supply-chain management, intellectual-property protection, investment, rules on state-owned firms, and other trade issues — likely to be announced in Hawaii — is a good start in the economic sphere. But much more is needed.
Ultimately, the best way for peace to prevail in the region is for the US and China to share responsibility for a regional order with Asia’s other powers, particularly India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea.
In Hawaii, Obama and the other assembled Asian leaders — particularly the Chinese — must begin to choose between these two Asian futures.