The US and China’s struggle for power in Asia

It’s quite an impressive feat of engineering, but no one paid much attention until just a few months ago, and when they did it wasn’t the structures but their strategic significance that grabbed attention. The startling aerial photos of new military bases being created out of dredged sand conveyed, more concretely than anything else, the image of China’s power on the march.

This increased focus did not happen by accident. Since earlier this year Washington has mounted a deliberate campaign of drawing attention to what China has been doing in these waters. The aim has been specifically to stoke fears about China’s growing power, and encourage other governments to support the US in pushing back against it.

.. China’s strategy is based on the fact that because the US is an outside power its leadership in Asia depends on formal and informal alliances with countries in the region. Beijing appears to have decided that the best way to undermine US leadership is to weaken those alliances. By applying carefully graduated degrees of pressure to US-aligned countries like Japan and the Philippines over long-running territorial disputes, China is trying to show that the US is no longer willing to confront China on their behalf.

.. If a conflict flared today, the US would no longer score a rapid and decisive victory. It would most likely face either a costly and humiliating stalemate or a dangerous escalation towards a bigger conflict.

..  The simple facts of geography mean that primacy in Asia means more to China, so it is more willing to accept the costs and risks of confrontation. China assumes the US understands this. The problem is that American policymakers, even now, do not agree. They still think that if the US stands firm China will back off and go back to accepting US leadership in Asia.

.. Five months later, China launched the first of its direct challenges to US resolve in the East China and South China seas. It used armed ships to muscle the Philippines out of disputed waters around the Scarborough Shoal, which had traditionally been under Philippine control.

.. The island-building program is clearly intended as an intimidating display of China’s growing wealth and power, which is hardly likely to win it any friends. But that does not make it as plainly wrong as Washington would wish.

.. The reality is that the US can do nothing to stop China building islands or turning them into military bases unless it is willing to take the kind of decisive action that would most probably lead to a military clash, risking escalation to a wider war.

..  From one side he would be told that the US simply had no choice but to support Japan even if that meant war with China, because to do anything less would be to abandon US leadership in Asia.

.. The US seeks to remain the primary power in Asia, and China seeks to replace it.

.. They say that the US should accept that escalating strategic rivalry with China is inescapable, and should commit itself to do whatever it takes to confront and contain this new rival, just as it did with the Soviet Union, and hopefully with the same result.

.. The second group of new ideas heads in the opposite direction. A number of experts argue that Washington should try to avoid escalating rivalry with China, by sitting down with Beijing to negotiate agreements on the many issues of contention between them.

.. Channelling John Howard’s promise to Beijing 19 years ago, Abbott declared that our US alliance “is not directed against anyone”.

Krugman: China is no longer buying our debt

Remember all the dire warnings about what would happen if China stopped buying our debt, or worse yet, started selling it? Remember how interest rates would soar and America would find itself in crisis?

Well, don’t tell anyone, but the much feared event has happened: China is no longer buying our debt, and is in fact selling tens of billions of dollars in U.S. debt every month as it tries to support its troubled currency. And what has happened is what serious economic analysis always told us would happen: nothing. It was always a false alarm.

What Changes Lie Ahead From the Trans-Pacific Partnership Pact

By lowering trade barriers among the United States and 11 nations scattered around the Pacific Rim from Japan to Chile, the pact is intended to help countries specialize in producing and exporting whatever goods and services they can make most efficiently, while importing the rest. In the long run, that could help decrease some of the prices consumers see in stores.

.. In the auto industry, for example, 45 percent of the value of each car or light truck will need to be produced in a Trans-Pacific Partnership member country for the vehicle to be charged little or no duty by customs officials. By comparison, the North American Free Trade Agreement used a different methodology that effectively required 53 percent to 55 percent of the components by net cost to be produced in North America. So the new agreement has the effect of allowing slightly more components to come from outside the trade region, most likely from China.

.. The Obama administration has promoted it as a way to strengthen trade relationships with American allies as tensions have increased with China. At the same time, American trade officials have also suggested that it could be a model for an eventual free-trade pact with China itself.

The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?

In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed.

.. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.

.. More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.” Others identified an array of contributing causes of the Peloponnesian War. But Thucydides went to the heart of the matter, focusing on the inexorable, structural stress caused by a rapid shift in the balance of power between two rivals. Note that Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.

.. Did increasing hostility between Britain and Germany stem more from German capabilities or German conduct?

.. Crowe’s answer was unambiguous: Capability was key. As Germany’s economy surpassed Britain’s, Germany would not only develop the strongest army on the continent. It would soon also “build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” In other words, Kissinger writes, “once Germany achieved naval supremacy … this in itself—regardless of German intentions—would be an objective threat to Britain, and incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”

.. The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.” Everyone knows about the rise of China. Few of us realize its magnitude. Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power.

.. When Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s fast march to the market in 1978, he announced a policy known as “hide and bide.” What China needed most abroad was stability and access to markets. The Chinese would thus “bide our time and hide our capabilities,” which Chinese military officers sometimes paraphrased as getting strong before getting even.

.. realists see an irresistible force approaching an immovable object. They ask which is less likely: China demanding a lesser role in the East and South China Seas than the United States did in the Caribbean or Atlantic in the early 20th century, or the U.S. sharing with China the predominance in the Western Pacific that America has enjoyed since World War II?