Page 1 of 2 US the loser in Asia push
By Tanaka Sakai
Translation by Hase Michiko
In his remarks to the Australian parliament on November 17, President Barack
Obama declared that the United States was making the Asia-Pacific region a top
priority. While promising a continued US military presence in the region, Obama
also expressed his intention to strengthen US-China cooperation.
This declaration, however, was made at the same time as Obama announced a
series of anti-China measures: to station US forces permanently in Australia
for the first time, to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - a
multilateral trade agreement that excludes China - and to discuss the South
China Sea Islands at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit,
to Beijing's displeasure. Therefore, the Japanese media view
Obama's emphasis on Asia as strengthening an anti-China containment ring.
In Japan, there is heightened expectation for Obama's new policy, which is
thought to signal that the US is finally treating China as an enemy. However,
the "awkward timing" of the US announcement doesn't sit well with me. Since the
late-1990s, US-China relations have seen China's ascension and America's
decline, especially in the economic arena. An anti-China policy of the United
States would inevitably involve pro-US Asian countries like Japan, South Korea,
and ASEAN.
Those Asian nations, however, cannot afford to antagonize China because it has
replaced the US as their biggest trading partner. The same is true for the
United States: it cannot go too far in antagonizing China, the largest holder
of US treasury bonds, because if China sold them, US finance and the dollar
would collapse.
If the US intended to treat China as an enemy and fortify its anti-China
containment as a national strategy, it should have started sooner. From the
perspective of the interests of both the Asian nations and the United States,
it is absurd for the US to adopt an anti-China policy in Asia at a time when
China has become the most important country in the economic arena.
Give Asia priority - abandon UK and Israel
If one puts the issue in a global, rather than Asian, perspective, one begins
to see another meaning of the US declaration to give Asia top priority. The
flip side of an emphasis on Asia is putting less emphasis on the Middle East
and Europe, the regions that previously received top US priority.
In the Middle East, Israel has dictated US world strategies since the1970s, but
Israel now needs US support more than ever. Until the invasion of Iraq in 2003,
US domination in the Middle East had served Israel well. After the 9.11 attacks
in 2001, US world strategy so focused on the Middle East that some said it had
become a Middle-Eastern country, while US allies in Asia, including Japan, were
close to being ignored.
Since then, however, there has been a backlash against the extreme anti-Islam
policy of the United States in the form of an anti-US , anti-Israel Islamist
movement; since the revolution in Egypt last spring, Islamism has been
accelerating under the rubric of democratization. Previously pro-Israel Egypt
and Turkey have since turned anti-Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, once a
puppet of the US and Israel, is increasingly defiant in its attempt to gain
United Nations membership. Even in formerly secular Tunisia and Morocco, the
Islamists are rising in the elections.
The United States has not changed its pro-Israel policy. US politics is still
under the thumb of right-wing Israelis. However, the US followed the wishes of
the Israeli right-ring in carrying out "democratization" as a way to overturn
the government, and as a result anti-American, anti-Israel Islamism has risen.
For this reason, it has now become impossible for Israel to press the US to
change the current situation in ways more favorable to Israel. Besides, US
military forces are scheduled to pull out of Iraq by the end of the year. US
military influence in the Middle East will decrease dramatically.
At the very time that all this was happening, the Obama administration launched
its policy of giving Asia top priority. The US government will maintain the
appearance of being at Israel's beck and call, but in practice it is about to
abandon Israel surrounded by its enemies. The Muslim Brotherhood is overjoyed.
From a Middle-Eastern perspective, Obama's emphasis on Asia means the
"abandonment of Israel".
US global policy-making has also been dictated not only by Israel but by the
United Kingdom. To the UK, the 40-year-long Cold War was a long-term strategy
to fortify its alliance with the US with the objective of confronting the
Soviet Union. After the Cold War, the US-UK alliance controlled the world
through financial markets. Today, however, as the US-UK financial system
continues to break down, Obama's emphasis on Asia means a shift to prioritizing
Asia over the US-UK alliance, and this is not good news for the UK.
The European Union is in the midst of a euro crisis. American and British
speculators are trying to crush the euro, their potential rival, to protect the
US dollar as the key international currency. Financial integration of the euro
zone, which would strengthen the EU, is needed to stave off the ongoing crises.
The EU, centering on Germany, has been battered by the US and UK in this
crisis. Therefore, after the current crisis the EU will reduce its dependency
on the US and strengthen its collaboration with countries like Russia, which
are anti-US and geopolitically important to the EU. Just as Europe was going
through this transition, Obama unleashed his "Asia First" announcement, which
is virtually a declaration of a "Europe Second" policy.
The United States was traditionally an "Atlantic country". This time, the US
has announced that "we are a Pacific country". To Europe, this means that the
US will not emphasize Europe as before. American speculators caused the bond
crisis, hurting the EU; the EU in turn is likely to think: "If the US is not
going to emphasize Europe, we won't emphasize the US , either."
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Europe-US military alliance, will
lose its importance, too. The end of the NATO mission in Afghanistan in 2014
will likely be a turning point.
US -China strategy not transformed
Let's turn to Asia again. The most important question left unanswered in
Obama's Asia-first announcement is "whether the US is going to treat China as
an enemy in earnest." "Does the US consider China an enemy or a future ally?"
The question itself and the ambiguity surrounding it existed 100 years ago,
when the United States supported Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Revolution. The
United States considered China a prospective ally until the Korean War in 1950
(which is why the US made China a permanent member of the United Nations
Security Council after World War II even though it was then a divided and weak
country).
Between the Korean War and president Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972,
the United States was dominated by the Cold-War camp (the
military-industrial-British complex) and tended to view China as an enemy.
Nixon's China visit transformed the situation, and the United States has since
had the mixed policy of viewing China both as an enemy and as a prospective
ally.
In US politics under the powerful influence of the military-industrial complex
supported by the UK and Israel, previous US administrations deliberately left
ambiguous the question of whether China was an enemy or an ally. Although the
ambiguity lingers, since the 1990s when it lifted the economic sanctions that
it had imposed after the Tiananmen Square incident, the US has gradually been
treating China more as a prospective ally in the situation in which it began to
develop as an economic superpower.
The strongest recent expression of the US embrace of China as a prospective
ally was the proposal for a "US -China G2", recognizing China as "a responsible
superpower (-to-be, along with the US ) during the former George W Bush
administration.
If Obama's "Asia First" declaration was a clear indication of "China as an
enemy", that would be a reversal of the China strategy that the US had
maintained until the end of the Bush administration. But it is unclear whether
Obama's Asia-first policy is a policy to treat China as an enemy. This
vagueness is a continuation of the deliberate ambiguity in the US strategy
toward China since Nixon's visit to China. The conclusion drawn from the
foregoing analysis is that Obama has not reversed the previous course of US
strategy toward China.
The interests of the military-industrial complex, which pushed the US to treat
China as an enemy, have been paralyzed by the failure of the wars on terror.
Large US companies, including financial interests, are making profits in China
and would not want to be driven out of the Chinese market as a result of
worsening US-China relations. I do not think that there are many at the center
of power in the US who wish to promote "an anti-China policy that goes beyond
campaign rhetoric".
Recently, even the military-industrial complex has refrained from promoting an
overt anti-China agenda. The Department of Defense is said to be working on a
military strategy called "Air-Sea Battle" to contain China. At a recent
Pentagon press conference, however, the discussion remained opaque, only
revealing that "it is a not a strategy, not a concept of operations, ... and is
not directed at any particular country". [1]
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