New Cold War

Japan: Abe's landslide in seats based on no increase in votes

Shinzo Abe and his right wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) swept to an outright victory in Japan’s snap General Election at the weekend.

His LDP/Komeito Party ruling coalition won over two-thirds – 313 – of the seats in the lower house of the Japanese Parliament. Taken together with the coalition’s existing two-thirds majority in the upper house, the election delivered a ‘super-majority’ for Abe which potentially allows him to take such steps as changing the Japanese constitution without consulting the opposition parties.

Abe’s election platform included a pledge to amend the ‘pacifist’ Article 9 in the Japanese constitution, which currently means it can only wage defensive war.

However although Abe won a stunning majority in seats this was not the result of a similar landslide in votes.  

Firstly the turn out in the election was very low at 53.9 per cent, only about 1 per cent up from 2014 which registered the lowest ever turnout in a Japanese General Election.

Secondly the LDP itself only saw a tiny increase in its share of the vote – from 33.1 per cent in 2014 to 33.3 per cent this time, an increase of only 0.2 per cent – while its coalition partner Komeito saw its vote fall by 1.2 per cent from 13.7 per cent to 12.5 per cent. This meant support for the coalition overall declined from 46.8 per cent in 2014 to 45.8 per cent this year.

In other words the electorate was distinctly lukewarm towards Abe. The fact that – despite crowing in the Western press about the success of ‘Abenomics’ –Japanese economic growth for the last three years has averaged less than 1 per cent has not made Abe or the LDP particularly popular.[i] His personal approval ratings have been increasingly negative in 2017, primarily due to economic issues, but also amplified by a series of corruption scandals,[ii] and concern about the impact of the proposed change to the constitution

The reason why this nonetheless translated into a landslide in seats for the LDP was primarily due to the divisions that have beset the opposition in a system where 60 per cent of the seats are elected by a first past the post system. On the eve of the election the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) dissolved, eventually producing two new rival parties, the right-wing Party of Hope and the more liberal Constitutional Democratic Party(CDP).

The Party of Hope was launched by Tokyo Mayor, Koike provoking the dissolution of the DP.  Abe announced the election later the same day! The new party aped the policies of the LDP, supporting it on changing Article 9, and only opposing it on nuclear power and a previously agreed 2 per cent hike in sales tax – from 8 per cent to 10 per cent – which is due to come in shortly. During the election Koike suggested that her party would be willing to form a ‘grand coalition’ with the LDP, although since the election result she has denied this.

Despite the fanfare on its launch – when the DP effectively dissolved itself to allow its sitting MPs to run for the new party – Koike’s junior version of the LDP eventually came third to the other party formed out of the ruins of the DP, the CDP. Before the rapid founding of the CDP, after the election had been called, it appeared that the Communist Party of Japan would effectively become the main alternative to the LDP’s policies. In the event, the CDP won 55 seats to Hope’s 50, and 19.9 per cent of the popular vote compared to 17.4 per cent, while the Communist vote was squeezed back from 11.4 per cent in 2014 to only 7.9 per cent in 2017. Although the Communists still did considerably better than the Japanese Social Democrats, whose vote fell from a disastrous 2.5 per cent to an annihilating 1.7 per cent.

Neither Hope nor the CDP put forward a clear alternative to Abe’s policy of strengthening Japan militarily against China (with North Korea as the fig leaf for this) nor to his economic policy. The CDP opposed Abe’s proposed constitutional change, but offered no fundamentally different course for Japan domestically or internationally.

The LDP has been in government continuously in Japan since the end of the US occupation in the 1950s, on a platform of subordination of foreign, trade and domestic policy to the demands and interests of the United States. Despite Abe’s nationalistic spin on Japanese politics, he has at all points stressed that maintaining and strengthening Japan’s relationship with the US is fundamental and non-negotiable, a position reinforced by hostility to China in particular.

There have only been two moments where an alternative to the LDP was able to win elections and form a government.

The first was in the mid-1990s when, in the context of a crisis in the LDP, a series of very short-lived coalitions eventually led to a Socialist Party-led government that lasted two years, on a policy of reorienting Japan towards Asia in the context of the end of the Cold War, the end of any threat from Russia, and the growing economic weight of South Korea, the island of Taiwan and increasingly China. The US’s total hostility to this orientation forced it to abandon this course and hastened its fall leading to a return of the LDP in 1996.

The second was when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) under Hatoyama won the election in 2009 on a pledge to close the US base in Okinawa and also to reorient Japan to Asia, now China in particular, floating the idea of some community of northeast Asian states on the model of the EU. Again total hostility from the US forced Hatoyama to change course on Okinawa, and within a year he was ousted as PM and replaced by DPJ right-winger Naoto Kan, who reoriented policy back in line with the US. The LDP, under Abe, easily won the next election in 2012.

The lesson is clear. Barring a crisis in the LDP where a political current of essentially the same character replaces it under a different name, the only opposition that can hope to replace the LDP as Japan’s main party of government is one that proposes to reorient the country from the US to Asia, especially China.

Abe’s policy is to strengthen Japan’s orientation to the US, chiefly by expanding Japan’s military forces. This was begun in response to Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’, shifting US naval and military resources to the Pacific to counter China and encouraging US regional allies to rearm. It has stepped up in response to Trump’s threats that allies cannot rely on the US military umbrella unless they ‘pay their way’.

But this is not entirely popular in Japan itself. Although the recent crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes has led to some hardening of positions in the Japanese population in favour of militarily strengthening Japan, opposition to the US base in Okinawa remains strong and support for changing Article 9 of the constitution remains questionable. Not only is such a step highly controversial in Japan, but it is fiercely opposed by Japan’s neighbours, not just China and Russia but also South Korea. Japanese voters are concerned about provoking a deteriorating security situation in the region.

A number of opinion polls taken in April and May this year confirmed this.[iii] A poll by Asahi reported 63 per cent opposed to revision, with 29 per cent in favour; NHK – Japan’s public broadcaster - found 57 per cent and just 25 per cent for (down from 30 per cent in its previous 2002 poll); Kyodo’s ‘mail-in’ poll was the only one to show a majority in favour, with 47 per cent against and 49 per cent for. NHK’s poll also showed that 82 per cent thought Article 9 either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ useful for peace and security, despite also finding that 87 per cent thought Japan was currently threatened, especially by North Korea and China.

Certainly Abe is not going to back off on his support for Japanese rearmament and support for the US’s policies towards China. He has promised a ‘hard line’ on North Korea, but as for Trump himself, short of risking an all-out war that might wreak significant damage on South Korea and Japan itself, Abe does not have many options. Whether he pushes through a change to Article 9 – which looks more likely now he has a ‘super-majority’ and de facto support from the Party of Hope – is nonetheless still an open question, given the level of popular opposition.

Whatever else happens, this election result is no cause for celebration by the peace movement internationally and will deliver no economic respite to the Japanese working class.

 

[i] World Bank data. Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2016&locations=JP&start=2009&view=chart

[ii] Browne, R. ‘As Shinzo Abe’s approval rating declines, markets could question sustainability of “Abenomics”: Analyst’, CNBC, 14 July 2017

[iii] Mark, C. ‘Japan debates changing its pacifist constitution’, The Diplomat, 18 May 2017

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

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