New Cold War

Trump’s tour of Asia: an emperor with no clothes

 

Despite the razzamatazz of Trump’s visit to Asia, the verdict of the international news media was unanimous: the trip had simply served to underline the US’s declining influence in Asia; a decline that Trump is blamed for accelerating by ceding leadership to China on the crucial issues of contemporary geopolitics: trade, climate change, development and multilateral agreements.

This was reflected most clearly towards the end of the trip at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Vietnam. Trump cut an almost irrelevant and isolated figure, whose bombastic speech was peppered with dire threats on trade that were simply ignored by his audience. In telling contrast, speaking soon after Trump, China’s president Xi Jinping, talked about the positive role of globalisation and the contribution of a ‘multilateral trading regime’ to ensuring developing countries ‘benefit more from international trade and investment’ in which China pledged to play a key role.

Thus, while the changing relationship of forces between China and the West is primarily down to the continuing contrast between China’s rapid growth and the West’s relative stagnation, which predated Trump, there is no doubt that his ‘America First’ framework and isolationist foreign policy have further weakened the position of the US internationally and especially in Asia.

A recent survey conducted in 37 countries by the Pew Research Center showed that international confidence in American leadership has declined sharply in the last year, particularly in some of the key countries of the Asia-Pacific. In South Korea and Japan confidence in the US president to make the right decisions internationally fell by 71 and 54 percentage points respectively. In Indonesia it fell by 41 percentage points and even in pro-US Philippines it fell by 25 points. As the Washington Post put it: ‘This is nothing short of a disaster for American soft power’.

It is a contradictory fact for those sections of the international and American left that still have illusions in Clinton that despite Trump’s appeal to right-wing populism, racist immigration policies and proposed tax cuts for the rich, there is no doubt that if Hillary Clinton had become president she would have pursued a more aggressive US line internationally, against China, Russia and in the Middle East, not just in words – à la Trump – but in deeds.

Probably the most decisive single act in weakening the US position in Asia was Trump’s decision to pull out from the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Clinton may have also said that the deal was flawed, but she had left herself a number of let-out clauses that suggested if elected President she would probably have found a way to go ahead. The US abandoning the TPP was a major blow to its standing in the region, not least because most of the other signatories had ridden out substantial domestic oppositions to get agreement through their respective legislatures. They did not like being marched up to the top of the hill only to be left standing exposed.

Moreover, despite correct criticisms of the TPP by oppositions within the signatory countries, the deal did put something on the table for both sides. Obama’s administration, which had driven the entire process, had also faced resistance in getting the TPP through Congress, precisely because it pledged the other signatories significant new openings to the US market – albeit in return for accepting effective US regulation of their domestic economic policies, opening up their own markets to US imports and, of course, distancing themselves from China.

Trump’s alternative vision of new bilateral trade negotiations with the US has gone down like a lead balloon with potential partners. As the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee, put it entirely accurately when on a visit to Washington: ‘I think [the Trump administration] believe that, bilaterally, you are bigger than any other partner that comes along and so you get a better deal. As a result of which I think not that many partners will be keen to deal with you bilaterally.’[i] Even Japan has resisted Trump’s blandishments to enter bilateral trade talks.

Thus while US domestic protectionist lobbies and others applauded Trump for pulling out of the TPP, it was greeted with consternation in US foreign policy circles, as it left the US with no economic or trade initiative to counter China. As if to underline this, it was while most of the original TPP signatories were with Trump at the APEC summit in Vietnam that they chose to announce their plans to resuscitate the deal without the participation of the US.

Worse, immediately after Trump left the ASEAN meeting in the Philippines, the first full summit of the 16-country Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership convened also without the US. The RCEP, which has been driven by China, would be an even wider trade deal than the TPP, including China, India and South Korea, which are not partners to the TPP. This RCEP, likely to be agreed next year, will involve tariff reductions in economies that together constitute a quarter of the world economy.

The announcement that the TPP would go ahead without the US and the first summit of the RCEP were graphic illustrations of just how little the US is seen to contribute to the economic development of the Asia-Pacific region. But the TPP and RCEP were just the ones that came up during the trip. Other China-led investment and development initiatives are setting an entirely new economic agenda in Asia. These include the establishment of the $100bn Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which the US tried and failed to bloc in 2015; and the gigantic Belt and Road Initiative to develop land and sea transport and communications infrastructure from East Asia to Europe, involving 60 countries and projecting upwards of $4tr in investment over coming years.

While everywhere Trump went he was treated to a charm offensive, the pomp was almost in inverse proportion to his actual influence. In Japan Prime Minister Abe described Trump as his ‘favourite guy’ (to play golf with!) – before announcing the relaunch of the TPP without the US a few days later. In South Korea he was introduced at the National Assembly as ‘leader of the world’, while President Moon oiled that Trump was ‘already making America great’ again. But immediately on Trump’s departure South Korea announced a reset of its relations with China and limits to the deployment of the US THAAD anti-missile system that China objected to. In the Philippines President Duterte sang Trump a Filipino love song at their gala dinner, but continued to reorient his country to China and turned down any role for the US in the South China Sea.

For its part, China did not throw around such personal praise during Trump’s visit, but the red carpet was rolled out for him in every respect.

But despite the glitz, Trump will find it hard to show what he brought home from the trip, either on trade – which he had declared was the number one issue for his Asian tour – or on strengthening the US’s military position in the region.

The exception is that he can say he signed trade and investment deals with China worth $250bn – a very considerable sum. However, scratching the surface reveals that these deals are all in the form of Memoranda of Understanding, reflecting aspirations, future potential projects and expressions of interests rather than definite commitments. This is not to say that the Chinese are acting in bad faith and do not intend to meet at least some of what has been proposed – and even if only 25% came to fruition, $60plus billion is a lot of investment. But it does leave open what would happen to these deals if the US were to ratchet up the military pressure over North Korea or in the South China Sea?

As outlined above, it was when Trump reached Vietnam for the APEC summit that the pomp accompanying his Asian tour fell away and the emperor was seen to have no clothes. His speech to APEC was to all intents and purposes ignored. Perhaps as a result, or because the trip was almost over, Trump, whose tweets had been more measured than usual during his visit, returned to using Twitter to trade insults with North Korea and launch unexpected policy initiatives. But apart from provoking a North Korean death threat for describing Kim Jong-un as ‘short and fat’, even his tweets brought little interest.

This was most striking in the lack of any response to his tweeted and off-the-cuff suggestion that the US ‘mediate’ on the South China Sea disputes: ‘I’m a very good mediator’ he claimed. The silence with which this was greeted was in sharp contrast to the flurry of diplomacy, protests from China, remilitarisation and stepped up conflict that flowed from Hillary Clinton’s offer made in the same terms – in the same country – in 2010. That Clinton speech in Hanoi marked the launch of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, which led in particular to a heating up of conflict between the various claimants to islets in the South China Sea, which in turn was used to justify a sharply stepped up US naval presence in the Sea.

This time Trump’s audience simply shrugged and moved on. On the one hand this was partly because the experience of stepped up US intervention in the region after 2010 had not been positive. US involvement had led to disruptive tensions and military threats compared to the relative stability of the preceding period when the disagreements over territory in the South China Sea had been successfully managed bilaterally or under the auspices of ASEAN.

IMF projected growth rates for the key South China Sea economies – not just China – suggest they will massively outstrip growth in the US (and EU) over the next five years.[ii] Given that military conflict in the region is about the only thing that could disrupt this, there is no appetite among these countries for signing up to a US policy of ratchetting up tensions with China over disputes in the Sea.

But above all, it is because the countries of the region increasingly no longer feel obliged to answer when the USA calls or jump when it says ‘Attention!’

It is true that US still has a substantial military advantage over China, and is still accepted as key security guarantor by most countries in the region. But as these countries do not believe the Western hype that China is engaged in a dangerous expansionist policy in the region and do not feel under military threat from their neighbours, the US’s military might has limited clout in determining priorities. As former Philippines president Gloria Arroyo said during the ASEAN summit: ‘[In the 1980s] everybody thought China would become a competitor. Today, we see China is not a …competitor. It’s a collaborator, a donor and a market.’

By contrast with Trump’s blundering and bombast, China has shown an increased sureness of foot in the international arena, sidestepping Trump’s rhetorical excesses and relentlessly pursuing stable international relations, demonstrating subtlety and effectiveness in dealing with the series of tensions that have emerged in the last year as a result of the big changes in the White House.

On the one hand China has drawn clear ‘red lines’ which have been accepted – for example, in turning around Trump’s early suggestions that the US might break with ‘one China’ on relations with Taiwan. On the other, China has been prepared to meet the US ‘half-way’ on such issues as sanctions on North Korea, some liberalisation of trade, for example allowing the import of more US beef and the MOUs signed during Trump’s visit.

China’s success can be measured by a real retreat by Trump from his ultra-hostile starting point on relations with China. Personally Trump has appeared wrong-footed by China, overly keen to assert that he and Xi have a special relationship and that China is a ‘good friend’. During the trip Trump went further, taking the Western media aback by saying ‘I don’t blame China’ for ‘unfair’ trade relationships with the US, instead reproaching previous US administrations. And it is not just a matter of words. In the White House, extreme China hawks, like Peter Navarro, have been sidelined, while others, like Steve Bannon, have departed.

While this success is considerably down to China’s effective foreign policy responses, not just towards the US but also its Asian partners, Trump’s policies have isolated the US further. China’s success in building partnerships in Asia is because it is consistently putting forward solutions to complex regional problems that offer mutual benefit in securing stability for trade and economic development.

It is precisely on these decisive issues for the fast developing economies of Asia that Trump’s ‘America First’ protectionism is empty. Thus perhaps the most telling assessment of Trump’s Asia tour was the despairing The Washington Post headline: ‘This is how a superpower commits suicide’.

Jude Woodward is the author of ‘The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War’, Manchester University Press, 2017

 

[i] Donnen, S. ‘Globalisation marches on without Trump’, Financial Times, 6 November 2017

[ii] The cumulative IMF growth rate projections for 2016-22 for these countries are: Philippines 48%, China and Vietnam 44%, Indonesia 37%, Malaysia 34%, Hong Kong SAR 20%, Singapore 17%, Province Taiwan 13%, compared to the US and EU on 12% apiece. Source: IMF World Economic Outlook October 2007, calculations courtesy John Ross

US ‘pivot’ to Asia hits Filipino rocks

The US foreign policy establishment is reeling after its strategy to reassert itself in Asia and contain the rise of China received a hammering from an unexpected quarter – its long-term ally, former colony and reliable stooge, the Philippines.

Roderigo Duterte, having replaced former president and US acolyte, Benigno Aquino, in July this year, immediately began distancing the Philippines from the US. This culminated in an announcement during an October visit to China that the Philippines’ foreign policy orientation was ‘separating’ from the US and that in future the country would seek to be more aligned with China.

Since 2010, the US has relied extensively on the Philippines to carry out its ‘pivot’ to Asia: a reorientation in US foreign policy aimed at countering the rise of China and securing a new period of American leadership in Asia. With the other Southeast Asian countries proving less than enthusiastic to drive forward a US policy that would damage their relations with China, the US had to depend on the Philippines to spearhead US policy in the region.

A key tactic in the US’s intervention in Southeast Asia has been to whip up tensions around the long-standing, conflicting claims to islands and shoals in the South China Sea, using these disputes to label China a ‘regional aggressor’ and persuade the other countries bordering the Sea to invite the US to act as ‘mediator’ and step up its naval presence aimed at China.

The sovereignty disputes are of long-standing, and had provoked occasional blow ups in the past, but since the 1990s had been largely managed in a multilateral framework led by ASEAN with the engagement of China. China’s approach to how to deal with the disputes had been set out by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, when he said to then president Corazon Aquino: ‘we can set aside this issue [of sovereignty] for the time being and take the approach of pursuing joint development’; and not let ‘this issue stand in the way of China's friendship with the Philippines and with other countries’. In other words, as on other similar disputes – for example with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands – China has pursued a policy of restraint, maintaining its territorial claims, but not seeking to force the issue to a conclusion, while seeking compromise on how to deal with issues like fishing rights, seabed exploration and coastguard and naval activities. In this context ASEAN was able to set a multilateral framework for how the disputants should deal with conflicts that inevitably arose, with the result that any major clash had been avoided for nearly twenty years. While all the countries neighbouring the Sea – including China – had objected to various steps others had taken at different times, the conflicting sovereignty claims had not become the overriding matter in their mutual relations. As Fu Ying, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the People’s Congress put it: ‘The disputes… spilled from those islands and reefs… but without spinning out of control.’

Hence when, in 2010, the US suggested the conflicting claims in the Sea required US intervention, this was not particularly welcomed. The other parties to the dispute did not see any particular new threat emerging from China’s behaviour, which remained much as it had for the previous 20 years. China was not aggressively expanding its claims in the Sea; like the other parties to the dispute it had secured its claim to specific rocks and reefs by building some facilities and other features, and maintained coastguard patrols, but this had been going on for years.

None were therefore prepared to risk their rather calm and economically productive relations with China in order to shore up a fading US Asian hegemony by whipping up a confrontation over these conflicting claims. Only the Philippines, under president Benigno Aquino enthusiastically signed up to the new US policy.

Apart from during a brief period in the 1990s, the Philippines had always been the US’s most reliable and subordinate ally in the region, and its economy was also far more dependent on trade and investment relations with the US. It had been the slowest growing of the Southeast Asian economies in the period that saw the ‘Asian miracle’ economic growth in countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia through the late 1980s and 1990s. Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis most of the other ASEAN countries strongly reoriented towards regional trade and investment relations, particularly with China, and also with the growing economies of the Mekong peninsula, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Against this the Philippines’ closer integration with the US market continued, as did its slower growth. Undoubtedly Aquino hoped that the vocal support from the Philippines for US policy in the region would result in a boost to US trade and investment, particularly as the country struggled with the impact of the 2008 world financial crisis.

The Philippines’ key contribution to the US’s new policy in Asia was to provoke a confrontation with China over the disputed Scarborough Shoal. In 2012 it broke the prevailing calm by sending the Filipino Navy to drive Chinese fishing boats out of the area, where both had regularly fished for decades. When China responded in kind – by blocking Filipino fishing boats from the Shoal – Aquino accused China of behaving like ‘Hitler over the Sudetenland’ and, with US backing, referred the disputed oceanic claims between China and the Philippines to the international arbitration court in The Hague.

This was exactly the type of response that the US had been angling for in its ‘pivot’ to China. A crucial aspect of the US policy – which simultaneously played out in a similar 2012 stand-off provoked by Japan with China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea – was to use these long-standing sovereignty disputes over various rocks and islands to create confrontations with China that could give credence to US claims that China was pursuing a new expansionist and aggressive regional policy that necessitated a stepped up diplomatic and military engagement of the US to keep under control.

The problem was that despite the 2012 escalation of conflicts over the Scarborough Shoal with the Philippines and over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands with Japan, neighbouring countries were not convinced of a growing threat from China – not least because they knew exactly how and why these confrontations had come about. Thus despite all its efforts, the US failed to get ASEAN or any of its individual members to openly condemn China’s role in the South China Sea, while South Korea and Taiwan took a distance from Japan’s activities in relation to the Diaoyu. Only Vietnam, at various points, looked like getting hooked by the US tactics in the region, stepping up military collaboration with the US and occasionally echoing some of the stronger rhetoric emanating from the Philippines against China. But even Vietnam backed off from significantly risking its relations with China through itself becoming a protagonist to the Philippines’ case against China in The Hague.

Nonetheless, the narrative of plucky little Philippines against the Chinese communist behemoth had some cut-through in the West. This allowed the US to internationally justify a stepped up naval presence in the South China Sea and provocative actions toward Chinese positions in the disputed Spratly Islands. A number of US ships sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese installations in both the Spratlys and Paracels; US air sorties for close reconnaissance increased from about 260 in 2009 to over 1,200 in 2014; US warships and planes began making frequent so-called ‘innocent passage’ transits through China’s territorial waters and airspace. US Pacific commander Harry Harris said that the US intended to send warships to close quarters with China in the South China Sea about eight times a year. 

In July this year the US strategy was crowned by a ruling from the UN arbitration court that China’s claims and activities in the South China Sea were not lawful, finding comprehensively in favour of the Philippines. The US declared China an international ‘outlaw’, and began discussions with Japan, Australia and the UK on joint naval patrols through the South China Sea to defend ‘freedom of navigation’ and international law.

But from the very moment of this tactical triumph, the underlying weakness of the US’s position in the region began to become painfully clear. Apart from Japan and the Philippines, no other country in the region did much more than ‘note’ the Hague ruling; ASEAN could not agree a position. The Vientiane 11^th East Asian Summit ignored the ruling and strongly averred that security issues in the Sea should be dealt with by negotiations, reasserting the role of multilateral regional initiatives to manage the disputes that include rather than confront China.

The message to the US was clear: the escalation of tensions in the region since 2012 had not been welcome, and continuing attempts to use the ruling to militarise relations in the region would not be supported. There was an evident shared desire to return as rapidly as possible to the status quo ante 2012, when a combination of China’s policy of restraint in seeking any final settlement on the disputes and ASEAN’s role in setting a compromise framework for how they were handled had kept conflicts muted and manageable.

However it was the US’s former colony and chief agent in the region, the Philippines, that delivered the US a decisive blow. Announcing the Philippines would no longer deliver the bullets of US policy against China, Duterte first scuppered a proposed meeting with Obama over the summer by insulting the character of his mother, then announced that the Philippines intended to end joint military exercises with the US, finally using a visit to China in October to declare that the US-Philippines special relationship was officially over.

The visit to China and these declarations bore immediate fruit for Duterte. As well as delivering $24bn in Chinese investment deals, a couple of weeks after the visit, without any fanfare or announcement, China once more allowed Filipino fishing boats access to the Scarborough Shoal. Thus after four years of bluster by the US, the situation before the manufactured confrontation in 2012 was restored quite simply, with both Chinese and Filipino boats fishing in and around the Shoal without hindrance from either side. Ultimate sovereignty is once more shelved, with both China and Philippines formally reiterating their continuing opposed claims.

The blow of the Philippines’ announcement was closely followed by similar steps by prime minister Najib of Malaysia, who in late October signed a defence deal with China, reaffirmed that their disputes in the South China Sea would continue to be dealt with bilaterally and indicated a further general tilt towards China and away from the US in Malaysian foreign policy. Unlike the Philippines, throughout the previous 5 years of rising tensions, Malaysia had tried to steer a middle course, but these Autumn 2016 decisions indicated a significant new bias toward China.

While the primary driver for stabilising relations with China is economic, both countries have also strongly objected to US’s interventions into their domestic affairs. While Duterte’s violent ‘war on drugs’ has clearly involved extrajudicial killings and major issues of human rights, his popular mandate is currently unchallenged and he has pointedly rejected the interventions of the US on the issue as attempts to reassert its past colonial prerogatives. In Malaysia the US accuses Najib of direct involvement in a massive fraud scandal, which has also been rejected as unacceptable US interference.  While there are undoubtedly issues for which both Duterte and Najib should be held to account, neither country accepts the right of the US to interfere in its old imperious way on such domestic issues. As Najib put it, it is not for ‘the former colonial powers… to lecture countries that they once exploited on how to conduct their own internal affairs today’.

It is precisely this ability for countries to stand up to US demands on how they run their internal affairs or conduct their foreign policy that the US has sought to pre-empt by its ‘pivot’ to Asia. The option of economic collaboration with a rising China, coupled with the growing value of its military protection, means they can reject the kind of interference from the US that they just had to put up with in the past. This is what the US wants to cut off in its drive against China.

Instead this is all adding up to a looming defeat for the US in Asia and its hopes of preserving its place as the dominant power in the Pacific. Rather than a militarised standoff in the South China Sea between the smaller, weaker countries of the periphery and the mighty China, in which the US could present itself as sailing to the rescue, proposals like joint US-Japan-Australia naval patrols in the South China Sea look like nothing more than provocation.

When Duterte was in Beijing, he declared that ‘the US has lost’, culturally, economically and militarily. This is exaggerated: the US has a great deal of residual strength and once the US presidential election is out of the way, whoever wins, it will find new ploys and means to turn events in its direction. But there is no doubt that the US position in Asia has desperately weakened and its overweening project of ‘America’s Pacific century’ increasingly looks a pipedream.

The US, UNCLOS and the militarisation of the South China Sea

On 12 July, the Arbitration Court at The Hague handed down judgment on the case brought under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) by the Philippines against China. In a pre-arranged declaration, the Court ruled comprehensively against China’s claims in the South China Sea.

From the outset, China rejected the authority of the Court. When China signed up to UNCLOS in 1996, it also exercised its right under article 298 of the Convention to opt out of the arbitration process. China’s legal right to do this is unchallenged, meaning that at the very least, China is correct to say that the judgment is not binding. But there is also a strong case that the court went beyond its competence in de facto ruling on issues of disputed sovereignty.

As a result, the judgment will do nothing to resolve the disputes in the South China Sea. But that was never the intention. The real aim of going to the Arbitration Court was to internationalise the dispute, justifying the involvement of the U.S. and, in particular, providing a rationale for an exponential increase in the presence of the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea.

From around 2009, with the aftermath of the world financial crisis accelerating the rate at which China was catching up to the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, the U.S. administration took a decision to ‘pivot’ U.S. foreign policy to Asia, with the aim of ‘preserving U.S. primacy in the global system… in the face of rising Chinese power’.

In embarking on this, U.S. strategists urged: ‘Nothing would better promote the United States’ strategic future and grand strategy toward China than robust economic growth’. But this is not happening. While the U.S. has given a central role to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a proposed free trade agreement between the U.S. and some Pacific Rim countries that excludes China – the reality is that China’s economy is much more dynamic and more attractive than that of the U.S. A purely economic competition with China is one that the U.S. will lose.

Therefore, in its ‘grand strategy’ against China, the U.S. has been forced to rely more and more on the military front, where it still has a huge strategic advantage over China and will have for decades to come.

The two key arenas for increased U.S. military pressure on China are the South China Sea and northeast Asia. A few days before The Hague ruling, South Korea agreed to the installation of the U.S. THAAD missile defence system, allegedly to counter North Korea, but with a range of 2000 km, it is clearly aimed at China.

In 2010, the U.S. declared that the South China Sea was within its sphere of  ‘national interest’ as a prelude to stepping up its military presence. U.S. navy surveillance intensified; U.S. air sorties for close reconnaissance increased from about 260 in 2009 to over 1,200 in 2014; more than 100 U.S. planes have been stopping over each month at Clark, the former U.S. airbase in the Philippines.

In 2003 there were six visits by U.S. warships to Malaysian ports; in 2012 there were over 50. More recently, U.S. navy ships have sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese installations. U.S. warships and planes have also made frequent so-called ‘innocent passage’ transits through China’s territorial waters and airspace. Japan has threatened it will also send warships to ‘defend freedom of navigation’ in the Sea.

In 2012, Manila agreed the U.S. could return to its old Subic Bay naval base from which it had been kicked out in 1992. Australia agreed to a new U.S. Marine base in Darwin, within striking distance of the South China Sea.

Taking the issue of China’s claims to the Arbitration Court was a further step in militarising the disputes in the South China Sea. China described it as ‘a political provocation under the cloak of law’, inspired by the U.S. with the Philippines a willing puppet.

It blew up the bilateral and ASEAN-led negotiating regime that had ensured stability in the Sea for the previous 20 years which allowed a ‘golden era’ in China-ASEAN relations‘from 1991 to the end of 2010, during which bilateral cooperation flourished and trade ballooned nearly 37 times, from no more than $8bn to $300bn’. China’s GDP rose rapidly and most Southeast Asian economies expanded more than five-fold.

China’s approach to the disputes in the South China Sea was set out by Deng Xiaoping. When China eventually signed a peace treaty with Japan in 1978, Deng had said the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands could be left for the ‘wisdom of future generations’ to find solutions which they could not. He took the same approach to the South China Sea, saying to president Aquino of the Philippines in 1988: ‘We can set aside this issue for the time being and take the approach of pursuing joint development’ and not let ‘this issue stand in the way of China’s friendship with the Philippines and with other countries’.

Led by China, this approach was largely followed by the other main parties – the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam. On this basis in 2002, China and ASEAN agreed to a Code of Conduct for Parties in the South China Sea, which shelved the question of sovereignty and set in place non-binding protocols for joint seabed exploration and other activities in contested areas. This had meant the disputes over islands and reefs were in the background but ‘without spinning out of control’.

This framework of bilateral agreements and ASEAN-led protocols did not altogether prevent issues arising. There were numerous breaches of the ASEAN Code of Conduct – mainly not by China – but these were kept within bounds.

But once the U.S. entered the fray arguing this historic dispute could no longer be left to those directly involved and insisting on the involvement of the big international guns – not just the U.S. itself but Japan and Europe ­– this framework began to crumble. Particularly when anyone that stood up to China’s claims was backed up by with a visible show of U.S. naval power.

The use of UNCLOS to try to delegitimise China’s claims in the South China Sea is ironic, as the main role of the 1982 Convention had been to allow the atrophied old colonial empires to use their island remnants to define vast tracts of the world’s oceans as their ‘exclusive economic zones’. The 1982 Convention had introduced a ‘revolutionary change in the law of the sea’ by adding to the previously defined 12 nautical miles (22 kilometres) of territorial waters, a new designation of much more extensive ‘exclusive economic zones’ (EEZ) giving rights to explore and exploit waters and seabed 200 nautical miles out from anything defined as ‘land’.

It was this new designation of EEZs that added urgency and fervour to the clash between the UK and Argentina over the Falklands/Malvinas in 1982. The combined EEZ of the Falklands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands delivers the UK rights over two million square kilometers of the South Atlantic, almost three times the EEZ of the UK itself (774,000 km2). In the Pacific, excluding the U.S. west coast, Alaska and the Aleutian Island chain, the U.S. EEZ around its other island territories amounts to 5.8m km2. Compared to these, China’s claim in the South China Sea is tiny, moreover it is not a far-flung outpost of former empire, but its own backyard.[1]

What is even more ironic is that while the U.S. has happily used the UNCLOS definitions to claim exclusive rights over vast areas of the Pacific Ocean and now demands China abides by the outcome in The Hague, the U.S. itself is one of a tiny handful of countries that has never ratified UNCLOS, unlike China.

However, while the ruling may have gone against China, in some respects the response has simply underlined the continuing relative weakening of the U.S. position in the region. The international enthusiasm for The Hague ruling has been muted to say the least. ASEAN failed even to agree that the ruling ‘could be useful’ and decided not to say anything; Singapore simply ‘noted’ it, as did South Korea; Vietnam did not mention the ruling but called for acceptance of international law. The EU could only agree to note that the ruling had gone against China, while the statement from the July Asia-Europe summit in Mongolia didn’t mention it at all. Taiwan rejected it in terms as strong as Mainland China.

So the ruling may have been a blow against the perceived status of China’s claims in the Sea, it is by no means left isolated.

So what will happen next? The U.S. and the Philippines will brand China an international outlaw; the U.S. will continue to ratchet up its military presence while blaming China for the militarisation of the South China Sea; and as long as China grows at 6.5 per cent annually, just by existing it will continue to undermine the U.S.’s attempts to assert its ‘leadership’ in Asia-Pacific.

Notes:
[1] Peter Nolan, Imperial Archipelagos, New Left Review, No 80, March-April 2013.

 

This article was written for The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond, and the original publication can be found at https://newcoldwar.org/u-s-unclos-militarisation-south-china-sea/

America’s “Pacific pivot”: Round One to China

Obama’s November week-long, whistle stop tour of Asia – attending the Beijing APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation) summit, the ASEAN meeting in Myanmar and the G20 in Australia – was intended to re-launch America’s crucial Asia-Pacific (aka China) strategy, in the doldrums since Obama’s aborted 2013 trip cancelled in the context of the “fiscal cliff” crisis.[1] Instead the trip merely underlined how much ground the USA has to make up in order to trump China’s growing influence in the region.  

The goal of the Obama trip was to roll out a display of the USA’s superior economic and strategic weight in the region, demonstrating America’s continued ‘indispensible’ role and putting China in its place.

The American plan was to dominate the APEC agenda with discussion on progressing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement from which China is excluded. Alongside this Obama would be associated with a regional show of force through parading the power of the USA’s encircling alliances, particularly its crucial trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea. Added to that, on the sidelines the USA would demonstrate its ability to drive a wedge between China and its regional friends – Vietnam and Myanmar – while gathering nationalist Modi’s India into America’s close embrace against the alleged “China threat”. This strategy was a failure on all fronts.

The TPP remained stalled – although now Obama aims to use the Republican majorities in Congress to overcome the domestic obstacles that have contributed to its delay.

Rather than a resurgent Japan wheeled out as a counterweight to China, Abenomics dramatically hit the skids, with the announcement that the economy was sliding into recession and Abe forced to call a snap election.

Meanwhile South Korea’s Park Geun-hye resolutely refused to bend to US pressure to reopen top-level relations with Japan, broken off in response to Abe’s revisionism on Japan’s Second World War crimes.

On top of that Vietnam proved keen to smooth troubled waters with China and wouldn’t play to the USA’s tune at ASEAN. Myanmar’s military-backed government has stalled on American encouraged progress towards “free” elections, as promised US investment has failed to materialise. This left the Philippines isolated to fulminate alone against alleged Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.

And to cap it all Modi continued along his careful course of courting both the USA and China, significantly refusing to join in American-led rhetoric against alleged Chinese regional aggression.

As a result the photo opportunity that ended Obama’s tour after the G20 was just a tired restatement of America’s long-standing military agreements with Australia and Japan.[2] Rather than a new triumphal arc of American economic and military alliances surrounding China, Obama’s Asian parade ended in a retreat to where the USA started – reliant on its pre-1990s old Cold War allies.

But while America strategy seemed beset by woes, China quietly moved into the spotlight.

China’s opener was the announcement of a new Siberian gas deal with Russia, signed on the fringes of the first day of APEC, which dominated the headlines the day Obama arrived in Beijing. Not only is this deal strategically important for China’s future energy security, it underlined China’s refusal to go along with Western driven sanctions on Russia, and gave further evidence of the strengthening of the strategically crucial quasi-alliance between the two countries.

This agenda-setting coup was followed up by a joint Chinese-South Korean announcement of the virtual finalisation of their bilateral free trade agreement. Given that the Americans heavily invested in attempts to persuade South Korea to postpone or preferably stay out of any such agreement, counter-posing the alleged benefits of the TPP, this was a further demonstration of China’s growing pull and America’s fading glory.

America’s problems with South Korea highlight a recurring feature of the reshaping of relations in the Asia-Pacific. While South Korea remains deeply committed to a military alliance with the United States, it is not willing to forego the benefits of close trade and investment relations with China, (nor, Incidentally, to be bullied into unpopular support for revanchist Japanese nationalism). Increasingly this is the problem that the USA faces across the region: India, Indonesia, Thailand, even Taiwan, Vietnam and others are happy to accept the offer of a US military umbrella but reject signing up to strings that mean stepping up conflict with China.

But the biggest headlines of all came for China’s announcement of its commitment of $40 billion to a “Silk Road Investment Fund” to provide finance for a trans-Asian network of roads, railways, seaports and other critical infrastructure, which won the warm-hearted applause of all China’s Asian continental partners.[3]

China's "Silk Road" initiatives – referencing the ancient East-West trade routes across the Asian continent and via the Indian Ocean – are a typical example of China's "win-win" strategic international interventions. China proposes to puts up the money for much-needed infrastructure development, linking China to the West overland via Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and In via Central Asia and Pakistan, and by sea via the Indian Ocean with port developments planned in Thailand and Sri Lanka. This investment of course offers greater speed, efficiency and security for China's own International trade, but also gives an enormous impetus to all the countries involved.

The attractions of this were underlined by a 2009 study by the World Bank aligned Asian Development Bank, which showed that the South Asian region needed national infrastructure investment of around $8 trillion and $290 billion in regional infrastructure investment by 2020 to sustain its growth trajectory.[4]

 China's $40 billion for regional infrastructure investment projects, plus a further $20 billion it has made available for cheap loans, will make a substantial contribution to growth in the region. Such Chinese intervention is possible for two reasons; firstly its high growth rates create funds for investment and secondly these are held by state banks, which can be directed on their investment priorities.

The USA on the other hand – despite being the most buoyant of the G7 economies coming out of the 2008 financial crisis – is still experiencing below trend rates of growth, its FDI is contracting and its import market is scarcely growing. Moreover, all it can do is urge its private companies to invest in the region; most have simply not responded to the call.

Thus while China offers major infrastructure development contributing to growth, the USA offers minimal and unreliable private sector investment, accompanied by pressure for increased military spending to contribute more fully to defence agreements with the United States.

Unsurprisingly China's proposal is proving more popular.

Of course the growing weight and presence of China in the region causes some jitters, hence the generally warm welcome given to stepped-up US naval and other military presence in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. But this is an insurance policy, and it would be a mistake to interpret this as a growing military line-up behind the United States against China.

Soon after his first election to the presidency in 2008 Obama announced the long-awaited reorientation of American foreign policy to the Pacific to counter China. The aim was to pull back from the Middle East, engage Russia in pressurising Iran and encircling China, shift US military resources to Asia, while extending and reinforcing it East Asian alliances.

Instead of pulling out of the Middle East however the American administration became bogged down in a military intervention in Libya, the attempt to do so in Syria and now again Iraq. This set of distractions all gave China time to extend its own relations in the Asia-Pacific region without the active presence of the USA.

But worse, rather than tying in Russia to its Asia strategy, US intervention in Ukraine has ensured Russia has grown closer and closer to its Chinese neighbour, and refused to go along with further sanctions on Iran.

The series of November meetings in East Asia showed not Obama's strength but the degree to which China is increasingly the key poll of attraction in the region.

Round one of America's attempted new Cold War against China has clearly gone to the other side.

 

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[1] "US shutdown: Barrack Obama cancels Asia trip", BBC News, 4th October 2013

[2] "US, Japan and Australia to deepen alliance", Financial Times, 16 November 2014

[3] "China's Silk Road initiative's challenge US dominance in Asia", John Kemp column, Reuters, 10th November 2014

[4] Investment for a Seamless Asia, Asia Development Bank Institute, September 2009