Misunderstanding America's 'Pacific
pivot' By Benjamin A Shobert
If hand-wringing created enough friction
to start a fire, Washington would be aflame over
what to make of America's "Pacific pivot".
President Barack Obama set this all in motion
when, in November 2011, he announced that his
administration had "turned our attention back to
the Asia-Pacific region". China's leaders were
understandably perplexed at what to make of this;
after all, it is not as if the United States has
been disengaged from this part of world.
Economic ties between the Asia-Pacific
(APAC) region and the US continue to expand. The
United States maintains an impressive military
presence throughout the region, although the Obama
administration made public its plans to expand
this even further. Collectively, this announcement
and the policy shift it set
in motion have been
subject to widely divergent interpretations.
Some are content to see America's "Pacific
pivot" as a purely economic matter. Obama's
announcement pointed to the Trans-Pacific
Partnership free-trade agreement, which was then
still in progress, as one specific achievement he
hoped to see come from this adjustment. Critics of
the TPP have pointed out that legislators in
Washington have less visibility on what is being
negotiated than do US corporations. The latter's
interest in seeing trade barriers reduced
increasingly runs at cross-purposes with the
former's growing concern over the country's
economy.
Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic
Strategy Institute, who is a critic of the TPP
specifically and more generally of what he sees as
naive negotiations on the part of American
policymakers, has written about the TPP: "These
texts have been broadened a bit to try to cover
some new topics like state-owned enterprises, but
essentially they are no different from what has
gone before both in substance and procedure. We
can't know the result yet, but in the past, the US
trade imbalance has widened after each new
agreement." Criticisms like this point toward an
even larger question about what to make of
America's "Pacific pivot"; namely, whether this
change is also part of an ongoing struggle by the
US to secure its place in today's globalized
economy.
America's refocusing away from
other parts of the world to put even more
attention on the APAC region is perhaps not that
surprising; after all, it is largely perceived as
conventional wisdom that the next hundred years
will be more interesting, exciting and lucrative
in APAC than in the developed West. Consequently,
even aging powers across the euro zone and North
America are eager to find a way to stay engaged
with, and relevant to, what is going on in the
APAC region. The US is not above this trend. The
Obama administration's "Pacific pivot" can and
should be understood in part as an effort to
position itself as somehow central, and not
peripheral, to what most agree will be a Pacific
Century. In this way, this strategy is an attempt
to secure America's place in a globalized market
that will increasingly skew more and more toward
APAC.
As a consequence of this economic
reorientation, America's "Pacific pivot" will also
have military implications. Secretary of Defense
Leon Panetta recently made public the Pentagon's
plans to shift 60% of the US Navy into the
Pacific. One of the recent recipients of the
Pentagon's largesse has been Australia, where
2,500 US marines have already been sent and, as
military historian Max Boot recently observed,
"the greatest danger they are likely to face is
alcohol poisoning". The larger agenda Panetta
points to is the need for the APAC region to
remain safe for, in particular, safe passage at
sea of the goods that interconnect and thereby
stabilize a region that could too easily fall into
a destructive arms race.
Conventional
military theory has it that, as Stratfor's Robert
D Kaplan has written, "the Indo-Pacific is in the
midst of an arms race that complicates the
security of the region's sea lanes". China's
economic rise and the subsequent military spending
it has chosen to invest in have set in motion
corresponding expenditures on the part of
Australia, India, Japan and South Korea, not to
mention many of the smaller regional players such
as Singapore and Vietnam.
Even though none
of these countries has a pronounced military
advantage over any other - yet - the multipolar
military and economic order taking shape in APAC
reminds many of what happened across Europe in the
late 19th century. This fear animates many leading
foreign policy scholars around the world -
including many in APAC itself - to advocate for a
stronger presence by the United States as a
governing actor whose near-hegemony can keep a lid
on the simmering tensions and miscalculations that
could set the region ablaze.
Yet each of
these reasons for America's "Pacific pivot" miss
why it is that it was politically advantageous for
Obama to make such a public adjustment, with the
related military implications, given all that is
going on with respect to US power around the
world. The common thread that knits this all
together, that makes it all actionable, is that it
was politically necessary for Obama to do this.
His administration's "Pacific pivot" owes as much
to practical political considerations as it does
any fundamental repositioning of US power.
Conservatives have misunderstood Obama
since the first days he took office. Eager to
portray him as a classic liberal, they have
struggled to see the many ways in which his
foreign policy was simply a continuation, if not
intensification, of policies put in place by his
Republican predecessor George W Bush. In missing
this aspect of President Obama's leadership, they
have miscalculated much of what animates his
foreign policy: the desire fundamentally - once
and for all - to put behind him the perceptions
that Democrats are weak on matters of foreign
policy and national defense.
Since George
McGovern's emasculated run for the presidency, the
Democratic Party has struggled to put behind it
the common perception that its view of foreign
policy is feckless and obstructionist. Within
Democratic circles, it is widely accepted that the
party suffers from being perceived as weak in
these areas. In this way, Obama's muscular foreign
policy and the comfort his administration has with
the military dimension to his "Pacific pivot" are
not only sensible steps, they also serve to beat
back the public sense that Democrats are weak in
these areas.
Americans can already see the
influence of this adjustment: Among the many
difficulties Republican challenger Mitt Romney is
facing relative to running against President Obama
is how precisely to appear more hawkish or more
national-defense-centric. This, in part, explains
why Romney's few foreign-policy statements of note
have led commentators to blanch over views that
one noted were to the right of notably hawkish
John Bolton. Romney's casting about in these areas
largely reflects how the assertive foreign policy
of Obama has taken the oxygen out of the room.
Traditional Republican attacks on Democrats'
foreign policies now seem dated and irrelevant.
It is worth noting that Obama's foreign
policy has led many of his former supporters to
decry that he has turned his back on campaign
promises and, in some cases, furthered such
practices as drone attacks in Pakistan that many
Democrats believe will create their own insidious
form of blowback against US interests in the
region.
What cannot be doubted is how
effective Obama's foreign policy has been
emasculating long-held Republican criticisms over
Democrats' weaknesses in foreign policy. Embodied
by what his administration has been willing to do
in Pakistan coupled to his "Pacific pivot", he has
repositioned the Democratic political brand in
ways that have the possibility to challenge
long-held American perceptions about Democrats
fundamentally.
Yes, the current
administration's refocus on APAC has important
economic effects. It equally holds the potential
to reaffirm America's central place in an
interlinked world where the center of everyone's
interest has shifted from North America to Asia
and the Pacific. Similarly, Obama's adjustment
addresses concern over how the region could
devolve into conflict absent the presence of a
governing power like that only the United States
possesses.
Was Obama's "Pacific pivot"
good policy? Perhaps. But more than anything else
it was masterful politics.
Benjamin
A Shobert is the managing director of Rubicon
Strategy Group, a consulting firm specialized in
strategy analysis for companies looking to enter
emerging economies. He is the author of the
upcoming book Blame China and can be
followed at www.CrossTheRubiconBlog.com.
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