US
pivot sparks Asian arms race By
Richard Heydarian
MANILA - Against the
backdrop of renewed large-scale US military sales
to Asian allies, and with newly re-elected US
President Barack Obama choosing the region as his
first official foreign destination, regional
maritime disputes between China and Southeast
Asian states are poised to intensify in the months
ahead.
Under the new leadership of Xi
Jinping, China has progressively buttressed its
maritime claims across the South and East China
Seas on both diplomatic and military fronts. Other
Pacific powers, namely Japan and India, have also
begun to deepen their strategic engagements with
Southeast Asian partners, including through the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN)
multilateral mechanisms.
The Obama
administration signaled the formal commencement of
the US's "pivot", or what
officials in Washington commonly refer to as a
"rebalancing" towards Asia, in November 2011 when
the president stated to the Australian parliament:
"As a Pacific nation, the United States will play
a larger and long-term role in shaping this region
and its future."
The key strategic aim of
the "pivot", experts contend, is to contain
China's maritime assertiveness and protect freedom
of navigation in the Western Pacific, a global
artery for trade and energy transportation. Yet
the US's strategic re-focus on Asia has
paradoxically not only strengthened the hands of
Chinese hawks calling for a more muscular
counter-strategy but also emboldened the US's
regional partners, namely Japan, Philippines, and
Vietnam, to push their claims more aggressively.
Washington's recent decision to equip its
regional allies with an expanded package of
sophisticated military hardware, featuring
state-of-the-art warplanes and anti-missile
systems, could aggravate an already combustible
regional dynamic and extinguish any prospects for
a peaceful resolution of the ongoing disputes. The
dramatic boost in US military commitments to the
region also underlines the Obama administration's
growing reliance on a primarily military-oriented
- as opposed to trade- and development-driven -
approach to re-asserting US primacy in the
Pacific.
Military-industrial
pivot Growing Sino-American frictions over
Asian territorial disputes promises to define both
countries' foreign policies in the years ahead.
The US's recent big-ticket military sales to
regional allies also underscore the degree to
which the American industrial-military complex has
been energized in the process. The US pivot is
thus reinforcing a large and growing network of
vested interests in the ongoing disputes.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of recent
US commitments is the Aerospace Industries
Association (AIA), a massive trade group that
includes top Pentagon suppliers such as Lockheed
Martin Corp, Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp.
Fred Downey, vice president for national security
at the AIA, recently said: "[The pivot] will
result in growing opportunities for our industry
to help equip our friends."
Facing an
anemic economy and reeling from deepening fiscal
woes, the Pentagon has initiated across-the-board
budget cuts, expected to amount to almost US$500
billion over the next 10 years. This has not only
raised questions over the US's capacity to rein in
China's perceived expansionism and aid troubled
allies but has also evoked deep worries about
where future profits will arise among American
arms suppliers.
As Ken Lieberthal,
director of the Thornton China Center at the
Brookings Institute and former president Bill
Clinton's top China adviser, puts it, "The most
important single element to our success in Asia
will be whether domestically we get our house in
order, whether domestically we're able to adopt
and integrate a set of policies that will
effectively address our fiscal problems over time
and show that we can actually function effectively
politically." [1]
To buttress its
expressed commitment to regional security and
freedom of navigation in international waters and
revive the domestic defense industry, Washington
has stepped up its increasingly sophisticated
military sales to the region. Since 2011, the same
year that President Obama formally launched the
pivot, the US's worldwide military sales have
hovered above US$60 billion, with a $6.9 billion
acquisition deal with India in 2011 and $13.7
billion in overall sales to Pacific partners in
2012.
This year's sales feature, among
other things, a $5 billion Lockheed Martin
radar-evading F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft
deal with Japan, a $1.2 Northrop Grumman
high-flying RQ-4 "Global Hawk" spy drone deal with
South Korea, and a $1.85 billion Lockheed
Martin-led retrofitting of Taiwan's 145 F-16A/B
fighters with advanced radars and electronic
warfare suits. [2]
The US has also
encouraged further self-reliance and
inter-operability among allied Asian nations,
creating an inversed "wall of China" on Beijing's
adjacent waters.
With the recent election
of a right-wing administration in Tokyo under
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan has responded to
Washington's call for a more assertive Japanese
role in regional affairs. The new Japanese
government is considering revitalized defense ties
with Asian partners, sales of advanced military
hardware such as stealth diesel-powered submarines
and seaplanes, and enhanced inter-operability with
major naval powers in the Pacific.
Recent
military sales are allowing the US to gradually
pass the buck to Asian partners, prodding the
latter to bear a growing share of costs associated
with deterring China's perceived expansionism,
including in the South China Sea.
Diplomatic trade-off The biggest
losers in the US-China driven escalation will
likely be the political moderates who have called
for a more sanguine, diplomatic resolution of the
decades-long maritime disputes and deeper
pan-regional economic integration.
In the
2012 Australia-US Ministerial Meeting's joint
communique, outgoing US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton sought to reassure her Chinese
counterparts of Washington's intentions by
stating, "We welcome a strong, prosperous and
peaceful China, which plays a constructive role in
promoting regional security and prosperity... We
do not take a position on competing territorial
claims in the South China Sea."
In
addition to the US Navy decision to invite China
to join the large-scale, US-led "Rim of the
Pacific Exercise" in 2014, Obama's choice for the
next heads of the defense and state departments,
namely Senator Chuck Hagel and Senator John Kerry,
have underscored the importance of a symbiotic
Sino-American dynamic.
"... We need China,
and China needs us. We have to get this
relationship right. After all, we are talking
about our connection to one-sixth of humanity,"
Senator Kerry stated as the chair of the Foreign
Affairs Committee in the US Senate. "The most
serious problems we face today, from nuclear
proliferation to climate change, can't be solved
alone. And, economically, our futures are deeply
intertwined and will remain so." [3]
During the NATO summit in Chicago last
May, Senator Hagel praised China for its
socio-economic progress and called for the
alliance to welcome it as a normal emerging
competitor. "They are a great power today, and
they are going to continue to be a great power,
and that's okay. But we shouldn't cower in the
wake of that, or we shouldn't be concerned that
they're going to take our place in the world,"
said the two-term senator, who will most likely be
Pentagon's next leader. [4]
The overtly
military aspects of the US's pivot, however, have
vindicated hawks in Beijing who have consistently
downplayed American reassurances of peaceful
coexistence and an amicable global partnership.
"Although American political leaders
regularly deny it, the US military is working to
contain China in the Asia-Pacific region. American
military planners have developed a posture in Asia
that is designed with the obvious purpose of
putting China's seaborne commerce at risk," said
Justin Logan in a recent report by the Cato
Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "The
first problem with American strategy is that its
'congagement' [containment and engagement]
approach is built on contradictory policies." [5]
The new Chinese leadership under Xi is
also intent on consolidating domestic power by
appeasing hawks in both the military as well as
other fiercely nationalistic quasi-civilian
quarters. This explains recent measures by Beijing
in both the East and South China Seas, whereby
Chinese military and paramilitary elements are
reported to have taunted Japanese forces
patrolling the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and harassed
Vietnamese vessels conducting energy-exploration
surveys in the South China Sea.
China has
also stepped up its diplomatic offensives, not
least through the issuance of controversial maps
and passports that lay overt claim to disputed
territories. In addition to its controversial
passport design, bearing the full-extent of
Chinese territorial claims across Asia, in
November China published a map claiming
territories that fall within Vietnam's Exclusive
Economic Zone (EEZ). The provocation was followed
by two other official maps released in January
featuring the Japanese-controlled Senkaku/Diaoyu
islands as well as maritime areas within the
Philippines' EEZ under Beijing's sovereignty. [6]
By rallying regional allies against China
and equipping them with state-of-the-art military
equipment, the US pivot risks intensifying Chinese
anxieties while emboldening strategic partners
such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan - and
even India - to push Beijing into a corner. [7]
Despite all its imperfections, ASEAN is
still the region's best shot at establishing a
workable dispute-settlement mechanism to resolve
the ongoing disputes. With Brunei assuming the
chairmanship of the regional bloc, there is a new
opportunity to build on prior diplomatic efforts
under Vietnam's (2010) and Indonesia's (2011)
leaderships to develop a binding Code of Conduct
in the South China Sea.
But a US-driven
arms race in the region, one that benefits
Washington's military-industrial complex, could
torpedo any chance at patient, peaceful diplomacy.
Richard Javad Heydarian is a
foreign affairs analyst focusing on Iran and
international security. He is the author of the
upcoming book The Economics of the Arab
Spring: How Globalization Failed the Arab World,
Zed Books, 2013. He can be reached at
jrheydarian@gmail.com
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