Asian neighbours: When elephants fight
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Apr 20th 2017
FOUR YEARS AGO, after Xi Jinping and Barack Obama had embarked on a “new type of great-power relationship” at a Californian ranch called Sunnylands, the world was soon speculating about a new “G2” or a “Chimerica”; after all, the two leaders’ economies were joined at the hip. Yet China’s Asian neighbours felt uncomfortable. “When elephants mate,” says a South-East Asian diplomat, “we ants get trampled.” “But when elephants fight,” an Australian strategist retorts, “the ants get trampled even more.”
Outside China, every Asian country bar North Korea welcomes America’s presence in the region and wants it to remain. Asians value American security, along with the clear rules underpinning post-war prosperity that the security has allowed to be upheld. Asians also value their economic relations with China, but they fear that the alternative to an open American order is a hierarchical Chinese one. Given China’s open ambitions, and its closed authoritarian political system at home, it would be a very different world.
Countries in the region, a Singaporean ambassador explains, “don’t want to choose: it gives you more room to play.” Preserving maximum sovereignty is an overarching goal for most of them. But it is getting harder for them to hedge their bets. Chinese counterparts, says the ambassador, insist that the Asian bifurcation, of relying on America for security and China for prosperity, should not be allowed to persist.
Japan, the region’s second-biggest power, is least troubled by any need to choose: under its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, it has thrown itself firmly into its alliance with America. That is partly because of the growing threat to Japan posed by a nuclear, warlike North Korea under Kim Jong Un. But Mr Abe has also helped convince his people that both the economic and the security threats from China are existential. In words and actions, China has frequently been hostile towards his country (whose incomplete acknowledgment of its second-world-war record has not helped). Mr Abe’s political dominance in Japan owes much to his willingness to articulate the China challenge. In his view, this has to be countered with strong regional military, diplomatic and economic alliances, led by America.
It was an immense disappointment to Mr Abe that almost as soon as Mr Trump took office, he dumped the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-country grouping including Australia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam that had over several years put together a “gold-standard” free-trade pact for the Asia-Pacific region. Mr Trump claimed that the deal sold American businesses and workers down the river. Its partners retort that America got everything it asked for in the negotiations, such as longer patent protection for drugs and stronger intellectual-property rights. All the painful adjustments that TPP entailed were to be made by smaller members.
Given that Mr Trump was so willing to abandon the economic dimension of America’s commitment to the region, Mr Abe was acutely aware of the risk that he might dump the military dimension too. After all, during the presidential campaign Mr Trump had lambasted Japan and South Korea for supposedly free-riding on America’s security commitment to them. Some 54,000 American servicemen and their families are stationed in Japan and 28,500 in South Korea. Mr Trump had said both countries should do more for their own defence and contribute more to the upkeep of American forces. He even threatened withdrawal. He also suggested that Japan and South Korea could develop their own nuclear weapons. Considering the implications for those countries, and for the febrile region as a whole, it was an astounding proposal.
Mr Abe, in a nimble bit of diplomacy, made sure he was the first foreign leader to go to America to congratulate the president-elect on his victory. Mr Trump visibly warmed to him, and later invited him back to his Florida golf resort, Mar-a-Lago, for a weekend of man-hugs and an unsettling 19-second power handshake.
Mr Abe is a nationalist with dreams of a Japan unshackled from American tutelage, but right now he needs a strong alliance. He pressed all the right buttons with Mr Trump, talking up the potential for Japanese investment in America and pointing out that his government is stretching the country’s pacifist constitution (which the Americans imposed after the second world war) to allow more scope for Japan’s Self-Defence Forces to come to the aid of allies. He also made clear that Japan already bears much of America’s defence burden, paying for about 75% of the American military presence in Japan—any more, a regional diplomat jokes, and Japan would be shelling out for American soldiers’ wages, almost turning them into mercenaries.
Mr Abe’s efforts did not stop Mr Trump from pulling the plug on the TPP, but Japanese officials are still pleased with their recent diplomacy. Even North Korea’s test launch of a missile that landed in the Sea of Japan while Mr Abe was in Florida worked to his advantage: Mr Trump declared that Japan and America were standing shoulder to shoulder. The Japanese diplomats also came away with insights about how to tutor an American president unfamiliar with Asian priorities. They say that he can concentrate on only one thing at a time, and reckon that educating him will be an open-ended pursuit.
The neighbour most troubled by Mr Trump’s presidency may be Australia, a long-standing, staunch American ally. The first telephone call after the American election between the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and Mr Trump (the contents of which were leaked by someone in the White House) was a disaster.
Australia had struck a deal with the previous American administration under which America would resettle a small number of asylum-seekers currently in dismal camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. But this was news to Mr Trump, who accused Australia of wanting to export the “next Boston bombers” and told Mr Turnbull (himself no shrinking violet) that his was “the worst call by far” of all the conversations he had had with world leaders that day. He then hung up.
The incident has set Australian policymakers and strategists talking about re-examining the relationship with America. The two countries have had their disagreements before, says James Curran, a historian at the University of Sydney, but they have not been aired in public like this since Richard Nixon. When that president got cross with Gough Whitlam, the independent-minded Australian prime minister at the time, he put Australia on his “shit list”.
Policymakers reckon that Australia now faces the biggest shift in its strategic position since the end of the second world war. Its economy is heavily dependent on Chinese purchases of iron ore and coal, but it has “subcontracted its entire strategic role to Washington”, says Hugh White of the Australian National University. Many strategists want Australia to be less slavish in its relations with America, while praying that Mr Trump will prove a more reliable partner.
Mr White goes further, arguing that Australia must prepare for a China-led future. Yet that argument meets resistance at a time when China appears increasingly bent on driving a wedge between Australia and America. On a visit to Australia in March, the prime minister, Li Keqiang, dangled the prospect of closer economic ties, but also warned Australia against a “cold-war mentality” and taking sides between China and America.
Given Australia’s strategic position between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the country’s strategists expect its waters to be increasingly frequented, and even contested, by the Chinese navy. The chief debate in foreign and defence policy now revolves around not allowing China to push Australia around. But the central paradox remains: to maintain a strong defence policy, Australia needs a strong economy—and for that it needs strong trade ties with its chief potential adversary.
South-East Asia’s people have lived close to big powers for centuries and learned to hedge their bets. In sum, such hedging denies China an entirely free hand to act as it wishes. Japan’s growing investment and diplomatic activities in South-East Asia, for example, increase smaller countries’ options. Indeed, the balance of power in Asia is determined not just by the struggle for primacy between America and China but also by the interplay of lesser powers: Japan and South Korea in North-East Asia; and Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and even India (increasingly looking eastwards) in South-East Asia. But America still needs to be part of the picture.
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines on a state visit to Beijing last October tried to mend relations damaged by a case the Philippines had brought before an international tribunal at The Hague, contesting China’s South China Sea claims. “I announce my separation from the United States,” he told his delighted hosts. “America has lost now. I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow.” Mr Duterte loudly called for American troops to leave the Philippines and for joint military exercises to end. China rewarded him with new markets and lavish dollops of aid. Oddly, though, it turns out that the Philippines’ annual bilateral drills with America are due to take place as usual this year. There is even talk that Japan might join them.
Danang airport, a big American base during the Vietnam war, mainly serves Chinese tourists these days. Many of them are shuttled to the Crowne Plaza, a hulking hotel on the city’s crescent-shaped beach flanking the South China Sea. They like to play blackjack in the casino, where the croupiers conduct their games in Mandarin.
About a quarter of Vietnam’s 10m or so visitors a year are Chinese, more than any other nationality. Though locals in Danang grumble about the rudeness of Chinese gamblers, “we welcome everyone,” says a Danang official, with a stiff smile. Many Vietnamese regard China with wariness. Even the state-controlled media run critical stories about Chinese investors buying up large quantities of land near Danang. They also carry reports of fishermen from Danang and nearby central provinces being detained by Chinese patrol vessels when they fish near disputed reefs and islands in the South China Sea. The Vietnamese are still indignant over China’s seizure in 1974 of the Paracel islands, which contain the largest of the sea’s disputed islands and rocks.
Yet they are also well aware that China is their country’s largest trading partner, as well as overwhelmingly more powerful than little Vietnam. That became painfully evident in 2014 when, in a provocative gesture, a state-owned Chinese company towed an oil-exploration rigs to a point south of the Paracels and about 120 nautical miles (220km) from central Vietnam’s coast—well within the country’s exclusive economic zone. Some Vietnamese fishing vessels steamed out to the rig in protest, only to be rammed, and in one case sunk, by a far larger Chinese fleet. The incident sparked riots in industrial zones in Vietnam in which protesters targeted foreign businesses and Chinese workers. Several people died. When China issued a travel warning to its citizens, tourism in Danang collapsed.
The Vietnamese respond to such vexations the way they have always done: they strike compromises. Le Khai, who has fished in the South China Sea for four decades, runs a gnarled finger through the sand to make two circles of vastly different sizes. “China is very big, Vietnam very small,” he says. So he does not take his fishing boat too far into disputed waters, although he insists that the Paracels are Vietnamese. Farther down the coastal road, the owner of a souvenir shop says that nine-tenths of his customers are Chinese tourists. For him, Vietnam’s maritime claims are indisputable, but they do not pay the bills.
