As a descant to the US-China relations melody, there is a rising debate at least among the cognoscenti over US global leadership.  A recent addition to that debate is a piece from International Security brought to you by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth of Dartmouth and John Ikenberry of Princeton.  The piece, “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment” appears in the most recent winter edition of the Journal.  The examination in the Journal is one of assessing America’s grand strategies – will it be retrenchment or the continuation of US global engagement.  The authors somewhat curiously refer to an article that examines US policy in Asia by Harvard’s Joseph Nye when he was away from Harvard and at the time the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (it is curious if only because it is approaching twenty years ago that the piece was written and refers to a largely forgotten Clintonian – Bill not Hillary – report – “United States Security Strategy for the East Asia Pacific Region”).  Events and the evolution of countries – especially China – has in my opinion significantly altered the context of the article, though its conclusions may still be valid.

In any case the authors examine US grand strategy first declaring US overlapping core strategy objectives are:

• managing the external environment to reduce near- and long-term threats to US national security;
• promoting a liberal economic order to expand the global economy and maximize domestic prosperity; and
• creating, sustaining, and revising the global institutional order to secure necessary interstate cooperation in terms favorable to US interests.

For good measure though the authors recognize that “security commitments are a necessary condition of US leadership, and that leadership is necessary to pursue the strategy’s three core objectives. Without the security commitments, US leverage for leadership on both security and nonsecurity issues declines.”  There of course is the heart of the matter that US leadership/hegemony/primacy – call it what you will – remains crucial to achieving the objectives – that is US national objectives, a stable world economic and political order.  Here a reference to the 1995 Nye article is indeed helpful:

The United States is committed to lead in the Asia-Pacific region.  Our national interests demand deep engagement.  For most countries in the region, the United States is the critical variable in the East Asia security equation.  The United States is not the world’s policeman, but our forward-deployed forces in Asia ensure broad regional stability, help deter aggression against our allies, and contribute to the tremendous political and economic advances made by the nations of the region.

Now it is evident from the title of their article that three strongly favor “continuation of the globally engaged grand strategy.”  The authors in fact declare early on that such an approach is “a wholly reasonable approach to pursuing narrow US interests in security, prosperity, and the preservation of domestic liberty.”   The article then takes a long examination of the various arguments for retrenchment (I will take a look selectively at their description and evaluation of retrenchment in a follow on piece) and concludes that the cost/benefit  favors continuing US engagement – read that as global leadership. Indeed the authors suggest that critics of deep engagement overstate the costs and understate the security benefits. As the authors conclude:

Advocates of  a clean break with the United States’ sixty-year tradition of deep engagement overstate its costs, underestimate its narrow security benefits, and generally ignore its crucial wider security and nonsecurity benefits.  Many moreover, conflate the core grand strategy of deep engagement with issues such as as forceful democracy promotion and armed humanitarian intervention – important matters, but optional choices rather than defining features of the grand strategy. … In the end, the fundamental choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the Cold War is just what the preponderance of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self interested, leading power in the United  States’ position to do.

So that ‘point finale’ of their article may indeed be right, but there are nagging concerns that accompany this favorable nod at continuing deep engagement. As pointed out earlier, the changing context in Asia – the rise of China – and the more recent assertive China posture in the region challenge US leadership.  While the bilateral security  relationships are a vital part of US deep engagement in the region, it is not an answer to how to build a competitive but still non-rivalrous relationship with this rising power.  Certainly in Beijing last month most argued for building a collaborative relationship but with a few exceptions (Stephen Walt and Nicholas Burns were exceptions as pointed out in an earlier blog post here “Looking at the ‘World’ with Two Lens“)  there are few clues as to how  do this.

More broadly there is little in deep engagement that extends beyond the primacy/hegemonic approach.  While there is a expressed desire to build the institutional structures especially of the global economy, but also the regional settings, deep engagement remains locked in primacy.  There is little that describes a more global governance, multilateral  approach. There are various nods to greater multilateralism – but ‘realistically’ for the advocates it remains an exercise about US leadership – or not.  So more collective leadership is barely a topic of discussion in deep engagement.  It is this aspect of deep engagement that is ‘broken’ – or never attended to –  and needs far more intellectual and policy examination.

Image Credit: bostonglobe.com

This past week Asia-Pacific leaders gathered in Russia’s east – at Vladivostok in fact – for the annual meeting of APEC.  Though President Obama was absent – the demands of the election season upon him – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was there representing the United States.  Hillary in fact had been doing the rounds prior to the meeting visiting several ASEAN countries before meeting the Chinese leadership in Beijing.  It is evident from those meetings and other conversations that the US and China reside in quite different places when it comes, for example, to resolving the island disputes in the South and East China Seas.  As noted by various media sources there seemed to be little compromise on the part of the two great powers concerning these disputes.  Indeed China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi asserted once again that there was “plentiful historical and jurisprudential evidence” for China’s claims to sovereignty over much of the South China Seas.

In some respects the island disputes represent the leading edge of current tension between the two and indeed in the region.  So, let me go back to examining the grand strategies of the US-China.  In my previous post I looked at the article by Aaron Friedberg in “Bucking Beijing:  An Alternative US China Policy”.  If I can summarize his position it is:  significant hedging and a serious commitment to balancing.  The strategy entails “push back” relying on a balance against China by the US with key allies and a military buildup accompanied by a firm and continuing US commitment.

So there we are:  a traditional grand strategy of balance.  So let me turn to the other article in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.  This article “How China Sees America: The Sum of Beijing’s Fears” is by Andrew Nathan of Columbia and Andrew Scobell of Rand. On its face this article – and the grand strategy that accompanies it – appears to tone down US strategy and to rely more on diplomacy.  It recommends this on the basis that China is not a revisionist state.  Implicitly they seem to suggest neither is the United States.  As the authors argue:

But widespread perceptions of China as an aggressive, expansionist power are off base. Although China’s relative power has grown significantly in recent decades, the main tasks of with Chinese foreign policy are defensive and have not changed much since the Cold War era: to blunt destabilizing influences from abroad, to avoid territorial losses, to reduce its neighbors’ suspicions, and to sustain economic growth. What has changed in the past two decades is that China is now so deeply integrated into the world economic system that its internal and regional priorities have become part of a larger quest: to define a global role that serves Chinese interests but also wins acceptance from other powers.

On the interdependence conflict continuum, China is much further along the interdependence/cooperation continuum.  As the authors suggest some international relations specialists in China see at least some compatibility of interests:

A small group of mostly younger Chinese who have closely studied the United States argues that Chinese and American interests are not totally at odds.  In their view, the two countries are sufficiently remote from each other that their core security interests need not clash.  They can gain mutual benefit from trade and other common interests.

But the authors also admit that these scholars are outnumbered by strategists – from the military, from the security services – and I suspect the Party who believe that the US remains committed to hegemony and containment of China and these folk “… believe that China must stand up to the United States militarily and that it can win a conflict, should one occur, buy outpacing US military technology and taking advantage of what they believe to be superior morale within China’s armed forces.”

Well if the view is dominant, then it would appear that rising confrontation is inevitable. Here however the authors return to interdependence and the belief that the mutual interdependence even vulnerability “carries the best medium-term hope for cooperation.  Fear of each other keeps alive the imperative to work together.  In the longer term the authors urge the two to create a new equilibrium of power that maintains stability but does so by admitting China to a larger role in the global system.

How can the United States do this – push and cajole China and the United States to this new place.  Well here are some of the elements:

• The US has to draw clear policy lines without threatening China – pushing back where necessary to establish these lines of division.  This must be done with professionalism and not rhetorical belligerence;
• The US should push for a Taiwan resolution that Taiwan’s citizens will accept;
• The US must insist on freedom of navigation in the seas surrounding China;
• The US must press for an open world economy and defend human rights;
• The US must maintain its military predominance in the western Pacific, including the South and East China Seas;
• The US must upgrade its military capabilities, maintain its regional defense alliances, and respond confidently to challenges; and
• The US must seek a balance of common interests and avoid threatening China and do so by upgrading the mechanisms of collaborative management.

So sans possibly the rhetoric and the threatening behavior, this looks a lot like Aaron Friedberg’s US grand strategy.  In other words hedging and balance.  Well maybe there is no alternative.  But I think not.

Traditional grand strategy seems to suggest two poles – hegemony by the United States or balancing by the United States.  But there is another strategy – that interestingly enough – some realists and now some liberals and even some neoconservatives – suggest is the grand strategy in Asia – “offshore balancing”.  So let’s turn to that approach in the next post.

Image Credit: Official logo of ASEAN