New Cold War

The US is to blame for the crisis with North Korea, and the US could solve it

 

Once again tensions between the US and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear programme have reached a dangerous boiling point, as North Korea carried out its largest-ever nuclear test in early September.

As with previous missile and nuclear tests by the DPRK, this test was accompanied by provocative rhetoric, threats and counter-threats from both sides. But evidently this is of most concern coming from the US, as the US actually has the capacity to carry out its threats, whereas despite the blood-curdling warnings in the Western media, Kim Jong-un does not.

North Korea’s claims have included that US cities are now within the reach of its missiles, that it plans to ‘contain’ the US base in Guam and it would respond to US attack by putting ‘an end to the US’. However these threats are in reality preposterous; North Korea does not have the arsenal to inflict any damage whatsoever to the US mainland or Guam. Such threats are however very dangerous as they are used in the West to whip up public opinion against North Korea, and in support of any response made by the US.

The US, on the other hand, definitely does have the capacity to obliterate the DPRK many times over. It is therefore of great concern that, in response to the latest test, US defence secretary Mattis threatened North Korea with a ‘massive military’ reaction; and that hardline Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, told the BBC that the US should be willing to contemplate 100,000s of civilian deaths to bring North Korea to heel.

Regarding the fundamental background to these events it is US foreign policy, particularly since the 2002 launch of the so-called ‘war on terror’, that has led to this crisis. In 2003 Bush, backed by Tony Blair, faked evidence of a continuing Iraqi nuclear programme to justify by-passing the UN to pursue illegal ‘regime change’ in that country. After defeating the regime through its military policy of ‘shock and awe’, Saddam Hussein and his family were hunted down and he hanged by a kangaroo court.

In Libya, Gaddafi drew the lesson from this that he must make a deal with the US and actually close down the Libyan nuclear programme; but this did not protect Libya from NATO bombing, nor Gaddafi also being hunted down like an animal and murdered with the tacit backing of the West.

The same was intended for Assad; but with Russia backing the regime, and the populations of the US and Europe growing wary of both the costs and domestic blowback from such wars, the US was unable to simply bomb its way to overthrowing Assad.

Putin analysed the situation rather accurately, identifying the US’s repeated violations of the UN Security Council as the prime cause of the uncomfortable bed in which the US and the rest of the world is now lying: 'Foreign [US] interventions in Iraq and Libya had convinced the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that he needed nuclear weapons to survive, Putin said. “We all remember what happened with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. His children were killed, I think his grandson was shot, the whole country was destroyed and Saddam Hussein was hanged ... We all know how this happened and people in North Korea remember well what happened in Iraq.”'

In other words, the main threat to world peace comes from the US’s record of unilateral military actions – exactly as those who opposed them warned at the time.

For small states that are in the crosshairs of the US the lessons are crystal clear. There is no persuasion, no talking, no UN that will protect you if the US decides to come for you. The only solution is to do what is possible to deter the US by building up a sufficient arsenal, including nuclear weapons, so that the threatened collateral damage acts as a brake.

And North Korea has plenty of reasons to feel threatened. Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’ – which is one Obama policy that Trump is not reversing – was universally understood to be aimed at containing China, but within this North Korea was set up as a convenient scapegoat and cover for the US’s real intentions. For example, the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system in South Korea was proposed in response to North Korea, although its main target is really China and Russia – THAAD is a far too powerful system, with radar ranges of thousands of kilometres, to be aimed purely at North Korea.

From 2010, US bases in South Korea were expanded, with a new base, Fort Humphreys, slated to become the largest US base in Asia. Meanwhile North Korea’s other unfriendly neighbour, Japan, embarked on a sharp increase in its military spending and deepened its military collaboration with the US.

The DPRK’s August firing of an unarmed missile over Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island took place the day after the conclusion of US-Japan Northern-Viper-II wargames on the island that simulated invasion of North Korea and a ‘decapitation’ operation to remove the regime.

The US has also stepped up the scale of its annual Key Resolve/Foal Eagle land and sea based training exercises held jointly with South Korea, which the North Korean government had regularly objected to. The annual training exercise was already the largest held globally by the US, and from 2010 it was upgraded continuously. In 2013 B-2 and B-52 bombers were included; the exercise in 2016 was the largest to date.

The sea-borne element of these exercises often close in on the North Korean Yellow Sea coast, where the offshore border between North and South Korea is disputed. While the land border at the 38 parallel was de facto agreed by both sides in 1953, the western sea border was not. Despite North Korea’s reasonable objections, the UN, at the behest of the US, which entirely dominated it at the time, unilaterally imposed a sea border curving up the western coast of North Korea, rather than extending the line of the land border out to sea. (see link for map)

The threatening mien of this escalating US military presence, plus the evidence of the US’s practical implementation of ‘regime change’ since 2003, is the reality that has driven the North Korean nuclear programme, which was restarted in 2003 after being suspended under the ‘Agreed Framework’ with the US in the late 1990s. The DPRK knows its nuclear weapons cannot defeat the US, but they can offer sufficient threat to South Korea and Japan that they will act to stay the US’s hand on military action. And threaten some damage to US assets as well.

However, the real defence of the DPRK is that offered by China and Russia. Quite apart from the fact that China has no more intention today that it showed in 1950 of allowing the US to be able station its troops on the Yalu river that runs along its border with the DPRK, both China and Russia are determined that the US will not spread its policies of devastation and instability (as seen in the Middle East) to their backyard.

And it is in this regard that the behaviour of North Korea becomes rather less reasonable or defensible, and more straightforwardly provocative, as despite China’s role as its chief international defender – alongside Russia – and key economic and trading partner, North Korea refuses point blank to listen to its advice or take account of its concerns.

China does not make a big campaign against the DPRK’s nuclear programme, but does suggest that the DPRK should proceed quietly and calmly, refrain from provocative rhetoric and unrealistic threats, and present itself as reasonable, balanced and prepared to talk. China would have liked to see more positive signs in response to openings like the election of a South Korean president committed to easing tensions with the North, which might have positively impacted on Moon’s own wavering.

China’s – and Russia’s – proposal in relation to the current crisis has been dubbed ‘freeze-freeze’: that the US agrees to refrain from holding military exercises off the North Korean coast and that North Korea suspends its nuclear programme to allow talks to take place.

China has stood up to the West’s demands that it impose comprehensive sanctions on North Korea, which would wreck the DPRK’s economy. But China is also concerned to avoid a complete breakdown with the West, so earlier in 2017 it agreed to a figleaf of some limited sanctions on North Korea.

Rather than showing understanding of the corner that China had been placed in, North Korea’s state media denounced China for crossing a ‘red line’ and for ‘dancing to the tune of the US’.

North Korea followed this up by scheduling missile and nuclear test at times chosen to most embarrass and create difficulties for China.

Thus, in May, a missile test was launched hours before president Xi was due to open China’s key 2017 international event, the ‘Belt and Road Forum’ in Beijing, convened to take forward proposals for improved overland and sea communication links across Asia to the West. Similarly, early September’s nuclear test was timed for the eve of the 2017 BRICS summit that was convening in Beijing.

There is no doubt that these tests were deliberately timed as a snub to China.

This is completely unreasonable behaviour by North Korea and makes its defence against the US harder.

Rather than berating China, Kim Jong-un should learn from how it handles its international relations, and listen rather more to its well-judged advice on how North Korea should conduct itself internationally.

However, in the final analysis, it is the US that holds the key to the situation on the Korean peninsula. The speeded up development of North Korea’s, still very primitive, nuclear arsenal and its missile tests are not the real threat to peace in the region. Rather its is the US’s evident capacity to inflict nuclear annihilation, and a White House that is making escalating threats to actually use it, that creates fear in every thinking person’s breast.

Overall, the US will probably not make such a reckless step, primarily because China and Russia stand behind North Korea – which together could inflict great damage on the US, even if the DPRK cannot – and Trump cannot be sure what they would do in response.

But that just means ongoing crisis and tension in the region. If the US really wanted peace and to persuade North Korea to mothball its nuclear programme it would not only have to eschew ‘regime change’, but offer clear security guarantees on the ground, including ending its provocative war games off its coasts.

The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War by Jude Woodward, Manchester University Press., 2017. Available to order in the UK and USA through bookshops and online

It’s China, stupid: Trump and US foreign policy

The furore in the US and Europe over Trump’s relations with Russia is not just a storm in a teacup but the manifestation of a serious fight at the heart of the US foreign policy establishment over how the US should orient strategically to Russia in the context of the chief question that the US confronts internationally – the rise of China.

That the rise of China is a threat to the global position of the US and that therefore the US must try to contain China is a premise shared by virtually the entire US foreign policy establishment. It was a priority for the Obama administration as much as it now is for Trump. The difference between Obama and Trump on China is not on their goals, but on tactics. Whereas Obama’s administration primarily pursued its anti-China policy through using proxies – chiefly Japan and the Philippines – to whip up conflicts with China, allowing the US to assume the guise of ‘honest broker’, Trump and his team have indicated that the US itself will lead the charge.

Trump’s more aggressive tactics towards China were flagged up from the moment he accepted the congratulatory phone call from President Tsai of Taiwan – breaching the ‘one China’ protocols that have governed US-China diplomatic relations since the Nixon thaw, whereby Taiwan’s international status is not as a recognised state, but as a province of the People’s Republic. Since the 1970s therefore the president of Taiwan has had the status of a provincial governor, and does not meet with the president of the US.

This step was followed by various threats and provocations including: appointing the extreme anti-China hawk, Peter Navarro, to head trade policy; threatening to impose a 45% tax on Chinese imports; while his nominee for Secretary of State, Tillerson, suggested the US navy might blockade China in the South China Sea. Inter alia, Trump has accused China of currency manipulation, cheating on trade, stealing jobs and failing to help deal with the North Korean nuclear program.

In this context, and contrary to the implications of much of the Western media, Trump’s friendly overtures to Putin and Russia are not the addled thinking of an unpredictable maverick, but are a central component of how he proposes to deal with China.

Since 2010, when Obama announced the new turn in US foreign policy priorities towards the Pacific to counter the growing influence of China, a highly influential strand, particularly in the Pentagon, but across US foreign policy circles – and beyond – has argued that a resetting of US-Russia relations is crucial to this. This cohort argues that the US has to seek a rapprochement with Russia in order to prevent the formation of a China-Russia axis that would be an effective counter to any US strategies against China.

Some of the most intelligent proponents of the US’s policy in Asia were therefore strongly opposed to what they saw as the unnecessary alienation of Russia through what was understood as an attempt to expand NATO to include the Ukraine by installing a pro-NATO government in 2014.

As Kishore Mahbubani, an influential Singapore intellectual and foreign policy expert put it at the time: ‘Unwise western expansion of NATO has not enhanced western security. It has only alienated Russia. Yet when the West finally wakes up to deal with a rising China, Russia would provide just the sort of geopolitical heft needed to balance Beijing’s power. Today, in direct violation of its own long-term geopolitical interests, the west is driving Russia towards China… This compulsion to act against its own interests perfectly illustrates declining western geopolitical wisdom.’^[i]

Or as Zachary Keck, now editor of the National Interest, argued: ‘… at some point the US will have to make a choice about whether the issues in other regions are important enough to scuttle ties with Russia in the Pacific. In the Asian Century, the answer to this question should almost always be ‘no’.’^[ii]

The call for a reset on Russia is explicitly based on the lessons of US strategies in the Cold War when US administrations successfully ‘triangulated’ relations between the US, Russia and China, ensuring that, apart from a few years immediately after 1949, the two Communist giants were pitted against each other, alternately courted and isolated by the US in the service of its aim to bring both regimes down.

Hence today, as a 2012 article in the Atlantic Sentinel put it, what the US needs is to deploy a ‘reverse “Nixon goes to China”’, when in the 1970s, deft American tactics and diplomacy, playing into Sino-Soviet fears and rivalries, had allowed it to draw China into its global Cold War containment of the USSR: ‘…much as Nixon and Kissinger sought the “dragon” to balance against the stronger “bear”, the United States must consider the reverse.’^[iii]

However any such reorientation of US policy towards Russia was completely blocked under Obama by the dominance of the existing Democrat, Pentagon and security service foreign policy establishment – supported particularly by their British counterparts – for whom the priority vis-à-vis Russia remained NATO and the US’s alliances in Europe, not China. These establishment Atlanticists and their European allies agreed on the need to confront China, but not at the expense of bringing Russia in from the cold. Strategically they feared this would encourage the emergence of a Germany-Russia axis, with support elsewhere in Europe, which in turn would give Germany too much leverage against the US internationally and might even threaten to displace the primacy of the US-Europe alliance in the future.

Germany had long pursued a policy of strategic partnership with Russia, and acted as its advocate in Europe even during the Cold War. Although since coming to power in 2005 Merkel had been more outspoken on human rights issues in Russia than previous German Chancellors, she had essentially continued this traditional German ‘ostpolitik’ towards Russia. The Atlanticist hawks in the state department and CIA were looking for an opportunity to bring this to an end.

Thus it was entirely the decisions of the US that led to the breakdown in relations with Putin’s Russia and the growth of an increasingly strong China-Russia axis in Asia and internationally. 

Putin – although a self-professed Russian nationalist – was not elected in 2000 on a platform of changing Yeltsin’s 1990s policy of orientation the West. He did pledge to take a firmer position against further NATO expansion, preventing the growth of ‘external’ i.e. Western, influence in the disputed territories around Georgia, and defeating the challenge in Chechnya. He had good reason to believe that a compromise was possible with the West on such a basis, as Yeltsin had received clear guarantees that NATO would not seek to expand to Russia’s borders, Russia and the US had a shared interest in defeating terrorist currents like that operating in Chechnya and the Russian areas around Georgia were far from the US’s current sphere of operations or interests.

In 2002 Putin supported the US invasion of Afghanistan – despite its proximity to Russia’s sensitive Central Asian backyard – and even helped broker the agreement to US bases for its Afghanistan operations in the Central Asian states.

However relations with the US broke down progressively after 2002 with NATO’s decisions to incorporate the Baltic states and to develop the European ‘Missile Defence Shield’ – essentially an updated variant of 1980’s Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ proposal aimed at delivering NATO a first strike nuclear capability.

Early in Obama’s presidency he appeared to seek a reset with Russia. With the more superficially pro-Western Medvedev having temporarily replaced Putin as Russian president in 2008, and a new president in the White House the door seemed open to improved relations. Obama’s 2009 announcement that NATO missile interceptor deployments in the Czech Republic and Poland would not go ahead seemed a step in this direction. In return for Russian support in persuading China not to veto a 2010 Security Council resolution expanding sanctions on Iran, Obama lifted US sanctions on the Russian arms export agency. Russia, and therefore China, also supported the 2011 UN no-fly zone over Libya.

But Obama took no more fundamental initiative and US relations with Russia continued to be run by the old hands of the CIA and state department, and soon the pattern of tensions had re-emerged with clashes over renewed missile defence deployments, disagreements over the scope of the UN resolution on Libya, and most seriously over Syria. Assad is a key Russian ally, and Russia’s interests in Syria include access to the Mediterranean port of Tartus where the Russian navy has a facility.

But it was the threatened expansion of NATO to include Ukraine – provoking an inevitable fierce confrontation with Russia – that brought relations crashing down. The policy was driven through by the US in the face of pleading by Merkel, who made a special trip to the White House to urge caution, and most of the EU, who preferred a more conciliatory policy.  The bullish approach of the US was revealed in a leaked phone-call between US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine at the time, in which her response to the attempts by the EU to defuse the crisis and broker a compromise was to say ‘fuck the EU’.

The upshot was the Ukraine crisis, with predictable Russian intransigence especially over Crimea, creating the excuse for a new round of international sanctions and a breach in relations between Russia and Germany.

But, as the China hawks had feared and predicted, it led also to a sharp turn in the priority Russia attached to its relations with China, with the rapid announcement of a series of new oil pipelines, east-west transport links, greater resources to their existing cooperation on security issues in central and northeastern Asia, more joint military and naval exercises and closer coordination in the UN Security Council.

Trump has signalled a different orientation to this series of interconnected international questions, breaking with the European preoccupations of the current chiefs of the security services and pursuing a policy more in line with that advocated by the Pentagon and the China hawks who now surround him. Essentially this means a reset with Russia, attempting to draw Russia away from its close coordination with China, while also supporting the most explicitly anti-EU forces in Europe to weaken Germany and project a US-Russian alliance to Putin over the heads of the European states. The aim is to free up the US’s hands to concentrate on China, while weakening the EU against any potential challenge to US hegemony from that quarter.

As such a pro-Russia policy flies in the face of that pursued by the US foreign policy establishment and the security services since the Cold War, and because they are convinced that soft-pedalling on Russia will allow Germany to strengthen unacceptably, Trump’s reorientation on Russia has met an unprecedented and relentless campaign to derail it. This has involved not just the CIA but also the British security services, and has included the claims that Putin interfered in the US presidential elections and the presentation of a dossier, compiled by a British ex-spy, of alleged extraordinary behaviour by Trump in Russia, meant to imply he is therefore susceptible to blackmail by Russia.

So far none of this has made Trump change his mind on how to approach Russia or China. Some of his appointees have been more conciliatory in their confirmation hearings, but Trump himself has been unapologetic. He has ramped up the rhetoric against China, fired shots at the EU and continued to reach out to Russia. If he is determined on this course, then heads will have to roll in the CIA and elsewhere in the US establishment – another reason for the breath-taking determination of the campaign to stop it.

Trump ran his campaign on the slogan of ‘making America great again’ and while this could mean different things to different people, on one question it was entirely clear: China is a threat to America’s global position and to blame for the decline of many of its industries; China is the main enemy and has to be stopped. He sneered at Obama for being weak on China, and promised that at a foreign policy level all other questions were to be subordinated to bringing down China. That included a reset with Putin.

The next months will show whether this Trump reorientation holds or whether the unrelenting campaign against Russia forces a reverse turn.

But even if Trump holds to his course on Russia, a stable deal is far from easy to achieve. There would have to be some agreement over Syria, which does look possible now that much of the opposition has been defeated. But agreements on Iran and Ukraine would also be needed. Trump could back down on his pledge to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but Israel would strongly oppose a settlement in the region that both stabilised Assad in Syria, and allowed a strengthening of Iran. And there is not an obvious deal that could be imposed on Ukraine that both Russia and Germany would accept.

Trump has promised a major turn in US foreign policy in order to concentrate on China. But this is already proving far from easy to carry out.

[i] Mahbubani, K. 2014, Look to China for wisdom on dealing with Russia, FT, 21 March

[ii] Keck, Z, 2013, Russia as a US-China battleground state, The Diplomat, 20 November

[iii] Lawson, GR. 2012, Beyond the reset: reverse ‘Nixon goes to China’, The Atlantic Sentinel, 12 May

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