"Hedging" has become a new buzzword in US
strategic discourse, particularly vis-a-vis China.
This was most notable in the US 2006 National
Security Strategy, which stated that the United
States "seeks to encourage China to make the right
strategic choices for its people, while we hedge
against other possibilities".
Other
authors have ascribed hedging behavior to both the
US and China, stressing that they are both
pursuing policies that combine
"engagement and integration
mechanisms" with "realist-style balancing in the
form of external security cooperation with Asian
states and national military-modernization
programs".
Other writers have attributed
hedging behavior to Japan and, in my own case, to
Southeast Asia. The clear similarity in all these
studies is the idea that the "hedger" does not
adopt simply a containment or balancing strategy
as opposed to engagement, but rather employs a
mixture of the two, as "insurance" against the
uncertain present and future intentions of target
states.
In my view, applying the rhetoric
of "hedging" to US policy toward China is
conceptually problematic and may result in
unhelpful policy obfuscation and misperception.
In fact, what has been referred to as
"hedging" behavior is the norm in international
relations - engagement and diplomacy are the
staples of international life. Most states adopt
insurance policies, and while they establish
military relationships with other states, they
avoid committing themselves to potentially
antagonistic stances toward other states most of
the time.
For any state, the bulk of
foreign policy and diplomacy is about preserving a
maximum range of strategic options. Small and
medium-sized states rarely engage in true
balancing, for it is costly. Large and powerful
states rarely stick their necks out to adopt
obviously offensive strategies aimed at power
maximization or world domination.
The
bipolar Cold War system did see the two
superpowers adopt to some extent such domination
strategies, while other states were forced into a
situation where they were more likely to choose to
align themselves with (or be absorbed into the
sphere of) one superpower. But this is an anomaly,
and one could argue that even during this period
the superpowers combined engagement with
containment, especially during the period of
detente in the 1970s. Since the end of the Cold
War, most of the world has returned to the normal
state of "hedging" in international affairs; but
the US has woken up to this trend only very
recently.
Thus the concept of "hedging",
to be useful, needs to be defined properly. To
have any coherent meaning, hedging must be
distinguished from balancing, containment,
bandwagoning, buck-passing, and other more
straightforward strategic choices. For instance,
while it may be argued that hedging strategies
encompass balancing or containment, they must be
shown to differ significantly from these, either
through the inclusion of significant engagement
and reassurance components, or (more important)
the demonstration that apparent containment
strategies (such as alliances) are regarded as
means to ends that are substantively different
from those of straightforward balancing or
containment.
Thus lumping together the
strengthening of the US-Japan alliance and the new
quasi-alliance between the United States and India
with the range of US security relations with some
Southeast Asian countries is confusing. The latter
relationships are aimed either at
counter-terrorism or preserving a general forward
US military presence in the region. US-Southeast
Asian military relations are aimed at general
deterrence, and are not targeted against China, in
the absence of direct China-Southeast Asian
military confrontation. This is in contrast to the
more direct strategic competition or potential
territorial conflicts between mainland China and
Taiwan, China and Japan, or China and India.
In this sense, it is not clear why
strengthening the US-Japan alliance, or
maintaining the US-Taiwan defense relationship, is
hedging rather than balancing behavior. Evan
Medeiros, an expert in Chinese foreign and
national-security policy, argues that the Taiwan
issue and the US use of external balancing,
especially the alliance with Japan, are
potentially destabilizing aspects of its hedging
strategy. These are destabilizing precisely
because they are aspects of Washington's Asia
strategy that most blatantly derive from
containment of China (and therefore are not
hedging behavior). Note also that the Taiwan issue
is outside any "hedging" possibility, because it
is the key issue on which the US and China are
balancing against each other's power.
My
preferred definition of hedging is "a set of
strategies aimed at avoiding (or planning for
contingencies in) a situation in which states
cannot decide on more straightforward alternatives
such as balancing, bandwagoning, or neutrality.
Instead, they cultivate a middle position that
forestalls or avoids having to choose one side (or
one straightforward policy stance) at the obvious
expense of another."
Specifically in
regard to the changing security structure in the
Asia-Pacific region, I believe that hedging is the
most accurate term to describe the strategy when
engagement policies are pursued at the same time
as indirect balancing policies. Indirect balancing
policies are policies designed to counter the
target state's ability to constrain the subject
state, either through non-specific deterrence or
defense strengthening, or through building
diplomatic, economic, and political relationships
with third states or organizations that can be
converted into leverage against the target state
when relations with it deteriorate.
I
would also insist that any analysis of hedging
include examination of which state(s) and what
outcome(s) a country is hedging against, as often
there are multiple targets and aims of hedging.
For instance, the defense and regional
institutional strategies of Southeast Asian states
are aimed as much at hedging against the
possibility of a US drawdown in the region as
possible Chinese aggression or domination.
Recognizing the necessary complexity of
hedging strategies means that it becomes essential
to ask which part of a combination of policies is
in fact "the hedge". For East Asians vis-a-vis
China, engagement is the main policy and indirect
balancing is the hedge; for the United States, it
sometimes appears that containment-as-deterrence
is the main policy and economic and institutional
engagement is the hedge.
Adopting a more
rigorous definition of hedging may lead to the
conclusion that hedging is, in fact, a luxury of
the relatively weak. A country like the United
States, which wields preponderant power in the
international system, cannot lay claim to hedging
strategies. There are two reasons for this.
First, a dominant power is likely to
define its security interests in a zero-sum
fashion and develop strategies aimed at preserving
its power and influence to the exclusion of other
powers (see the 2002 National Security Strategy).
If the aims of its strategy are in essence to
prevent competition, then it is in fact not
hedging against outright Chinese aggression, but
any Chinese encroachment into US spheres of
influence, which, in the context of rising China,
is a guaranteed result.
Second, because of
its preponderance of power, any US claim to
"hedge" will be greeted with skepticism by weaker
states. US hedging strategies that are heavy on
containing alliances and light on multilateralism
or reassurance are especially suspect. In this
context, the reaction of the target country -
China - is particularly important. Beijing is
unlikely to buy the shift in US rhetoric toward
hedging; it and others may read the new discourse
as a deliberate attempt to draw attention away
from encirclement policies. So it is unclear how
such a shift can dampen the security dilemma.
"Hedging" is not a particularly helpful
term in understanding or making US-China policy.
Washington would be better off highlighting and
expanding areas of agreement and cooperation with
China, while candidly admitting areas of
disagreement and suspicion as a first step to
opening frank dialogue and engagement in
negotiating a new Asian security order.
Evelyn Goh
(evelyn.goh@politics.ox.ac.uk) is
university lecturer in international relations at
St Anne's College, Oxford University.
