Michael R. Auslin: Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2020.
China has emerged as the main geopolitical threat to the United States. An oligarchy, the Chinese regime opposes commercial republican regimes throughout the world, rightly regarding them as a threat to its own. As the world’s most powerful commercial republic, the United States thus stands as Chinese Communist Party’s principal rival, an ally of Asian commercial republics—regimes the oligarchs regard as nearby and very bad examples for their own at times restive people.
In this regime struggle, the Chinese have “steadily attempt[ed] to encroach throughout the Indo-Pacific, linking maritime and land trade routes under the umbrella of the One Belt One Road initiative, while expanding the operational capabilities of the People’s Liberation Navy and Air Force in waters and skies far from China’s shores.” This territory extends to Japan and Guam in the east and westward into and beyond the Indian Ocean. That is, the Chinese seek to extend their trade routes and their military simultaneously, even as the United States has done, but on the foundation of an oligarchic regime strategy rather than a commercial-republican regime strategy. Both countries encourage ‘regime change’ but the regimes they support are opposites.
Auslin finds a source for the geopolitical (as distinguished from the regime-change) strategies in the 1944 book by Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace. Whereas previous geopolitical thinkers pointed to the open seas (Mahan) and the central continental land masses (Mackinder) as the flashpoints of war in the twentieth century, Spykman saw “that it is in the rimlands”—the coastal areas on and near the Eurasian land mass—that “the real conflict had taken place,” especially during the Second World War. “According to Spykman, the most crucial waterways or global power were the North Sea and the Mediterranean in Europe, the Persian Gulf and littoral waters of the western Indian Ocean in the Middle East, and the East and South China Seas, along with the Yellow Sea, in Asia.” By the time Spykman’s book appeared, Mackinder himself had seen the same thing—as indeed statesmen had done.
Auslin recommends that the United States “acknowledge bluntly that China is contesting control not of the high seas, like Germany in World War I or Japan in World War II, but of the marginal seas and skies of Asia, even while the United States remains dominant on the high seas of the Pacific.” This will “clarif[y] our understanding of Chinese military activity in the region,” showing “the area under risk and the geopolitical pivot of the Indo-Pacific,” which might be described as “the Asian Mediterranean”—namely, “the integrated waters of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the East and South China Seas.” The passageways between those waters and the Indian Ocean (e.g., the Strait of Malacca) see one-third of the world’s commercial traffic, forming “the hinge between maritime Eurasia and the entire Western Hemisphere.” Americans should teach themselves to see as Spykman saw: “control of the Asiatic Mediterranean means control of Asia.” They should then draw the necessary policy consequence for today: “to ensure that no aggressive power gains control” over it. Failing that, allies and partners will “consider either severing ties with the United States or declaring neutrality so as to preserve their own freedom of action.”
China seeks “to reshape the world to fit its interests, picking and choosing which Western norms it adopts and which it ignores”; it ignores many of them, being “actively antagonistic to many of the values that created the post-1945 world.” Unfortunately, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet empire, most American foreign policy experts ignored China’s fairly obvious intentions just as much as the Chinese Communist Party ignored American hopes and dreams. “A China that was increasingly treated as a near peer of the United States and pulled into the global system would eventually, if fitfully, begin to manifest liberal tendencies,” the Americans supposed, because “even authoritarian Chinese leaders would be forced to grant more power to their middle class, if only to keep it supportive, and to further open their society, since development ultimately depended on cultural changes that ensured a fertile field for further capitalist-style modes of organization.” As Auslin nicely puts it, “perhaps having been transfixed by their own beliefs, liberal nations are now disappointed and surprised that a China that has reached the heights of global power is increasingly refusing to play by the global script expected of it.”
Why such complacency? Auslin doesn’t venture a guess. Among American ‘experts,’ the problem had two dimensions. First, although Americans and Europeans were fully cognizant of the importance of political regimes, having finally overcome the Soviet oligarchy, they knew very little about the Chinese oligarchs. Even during Mao’s tyranny, Western analysts failed to see Mao’s affinities for Stalinism, right down to his use of mass murder as an instrument of socioeconomic transformation. And they grossly underestimated the competence and toughness of Mao’s successors, together with their intentions. Second, Western analysts were progressives, assuming that ‘History’ was ‘on our side,’ that the momentum of events that had toppled the Russian communists would deliver the same benign outcome in China. On the contrary, the Chinese communists learned from the Soviet collapse and got busy “smothering…domestic liberal trends and prevent[ing]…the further growth of civil society inside China, all to forestall any domestic liberalization, such as threatened the CCP in 1989,” when partisans of republican regime change demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. The consequences of liberal-democratic folly now lie exposed.
“The world may never fully know the degree to which American and other advanced nations unknowingly subsidized the growth of the Chinese economy” through providing university education to Chinese students and through failing to prevent the theft of trade secrets. “Beijing has found all-too-willing counterparts in both foreign businesses and governments, all of whom find it easier to buckle under increasingly outrageous Chinese demands than to risk losing their economic access by taking a critical stand.” More, China has begun to demand “that its foreign partners surrender Western values and openly espouse China’s worldview for continued access to its markets.” Among these partners stands the bland dolt now running the Apple corporation, Tim Cook, who has averred, “We believe in engaging with government even when we disagree.” Of course he does.
Chinese technological and economic growth have in turned enabled the regime to develop advanced weaponry “designed to target the strengths of U.S. forces in Asia” and “to project Chinese power throughout the waters of the Indo-Pacific region.” Chinese policy “is traceable directly to the worldview and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party,” that is, to the way of life and purposes of the Chinese regime.
Or, as stated in an early policy statement issued by Premier Xi Jinping titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” China faces a “complicated, intense struggle” with the West generally and the United States in particular over “false ideological trends” such as “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” “civil society,” and “neoliberalism,” all of them contradictory to the principles of the Chinese regime, described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or, to use a somewhat more charged formula, national socialism. To counter these “trends,” the Chinese regime works through its overseas propaganda arm, the United Front Work Department, founded by Mao in 1939, nearly a decade before his Communist Party forces seized power on the Chinese mainland. Today, the United Front aims at influencing government officials, executives of commercial and media corporations, and academics worldwide with a combination of carrots and sticks. Payoffs include the refusal of Czech and Greek officials to support the European Union’s condemnation of human rights violations in China and of its depredations in the South China Sea. In addition, “Australian politics have been rocked in recent years by allegations of massive Chinese donations to politicians.” It is easy to predict that the United States will see similar scandals, at some point.
“Learning to live with a newly assertive Chinese military is the major security challenge facing Asian nations in the twenty-first century.” And not only Asia, and not only in exclusively military terms. “Chinese companies”—state-owned enterprises, all—have purchased port in several European countries while undertaking infrastructure and mining projects in Africa, Latin America, and even the Arctic. China offers loans to many countries, but the penalties for default run high; “Sri Lanka learned this the hard way in late 2017, when it was forced to hand over control of its largest port, Hambantota, to China after it could not pay off bills to Chinese firms,” thereby giving Beijing “a strategic outpost in the Indian Ocean.” The military, political, and economic objectives of these enterprises are integrated, not separated, as one should expect. Americans in particular should see this—or would, if they remembered the Theodore Roosevelt’s geopolitical strategy.
Indeed, since the Chinese regime to some extent merely acts as any great power, including the United States, typically acts, what’s the problem. “Perhaps little of this would matter if China were evolving into a more liberal society, with an accountable government and more cooperative foreign policy.” It isn’t. Instead, the regime is doubling down on oppression at home while building its capabilities for continued power grabs abroad. The regime struggle between monarchic and oligarchic contempt for the natural rights of human beings did not end with the defeat of its two principal agents in the twentieth century, Germany and Russia. China has eagerly taken up that mantle.
Given its sheer size, India might seem a credible counterweight to China. Auslin confines much of his analysis of India’s real weakness to criticisms of its failure to integrate its women into its political economy. The caste system, undergirded by the traditional practice of arranged marriages, has left too many Indian girls and women under-educated and under-employed. “In the country as a whole fewer than half of India’s women are literate”—a condition American women (for example) did not endure at any time in their nation’s history. India also suffers from excessive regionalism within its borders and worries about Pakistan, now a Chinese ally, on its border.
That leaves Japan as the most viable ally of the United States in Asia. Feudalism there was modified by the seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa family raised itself to the status of first among equals. Feudalism itself collapsed in the late nineteenth century, as “lower-level ex-samurai deposed their feudal lords and took power, centralizing the state and forging Japan into a modern nation-state” capable of winning wars against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905. The regime of military oligarchy which had united the nation behind it would cause that nation, and the rest of the region, considerable agony by the time it was crushed, half a century later. In reaction to the severe punishments inflicted upon it for its imperial ambitions, Japan has remained somewhat ‘isolationist’ in its foreign policy, although hardly so in its economic policy. “Most Japanese appear to welcome the physical security brought about by Japan’s exclusionary nationalism, even as they choose how and when to integrate with the surrounding world.”
In terms of its regime, the Japanese oligarchy has been replaced by a mixed-regime type of commercial republic, wherein the emperor remains as the symbol of the nation, “the spiritual core of Japan,” and major corporate oligarchs wield considerable influence. The regime has succeeded “in providing a stable and secure life for its people, despite significant economic challenges and statistical stagnation” of its population, “maintaining cohesion at home and certain barriers against the world” without anything like the repression seen in China. Its educational system has proven especially effective, with Japanese students scoring at or near the top of standardized test scores, worldwide.
In foreign policy, Japan is “likely to take a middle path” between isolationism and engagement with the world, “improving its high-end defensive capabilities and modernizing its forces while maintaining political limits on what those forces can do,” with the United States remaining “at the center of Japan’s security planning for the foreseeable future.” The Japanese might engage in joint military exercises with Australia and India while supplying arms to the smaller countries in Southeast Asia. “But Tokyo is unlikely to desire or sign any more mutual defense treaties, or to commit its forces to combat abroad,” even including naval operations in the South China Sea, which remains indispensable to its own commercial traffic.
In past centuries, China and Japan have confronted one another many times. Today, however, for the first time, both countries are “strong, united, global” powers, “well aware of the other’s strengths and their own weaknesses.” Neither country “has any real allies in Asia,” having preferred rather to dominate than to befriend the smaller powers, thereby “making it difficult to create bonds of trust,” as Auslin drily puts it. As China’s foreign minister put it during a meeting of representatives of Asian countries in 2010, “China is a big country and you are small countries.” Being the biggest of the big, and given big India’s relative disarray, China may well “secure its goals, at least in the short run, if not longer,” as the “smaller nations are under no illusion that they can successfully resist China’s encroachments.” Japan is reduced to the role of “a spoiler,” complicating China’s strategic calculations without being able to deter them. Overall, “ASEAN nations have focused more on the U.S.-China relationship, since it is the United States that has formal Southeast Asian allies and has inserted itself into the South China Sea dispute.” Japan nonetheless serves as an example to many Asian nations of how to win prosperity without despotism.
What, then, can the United States do to counter Chinese ambitions, ambitions that aim at threatening American security and challenging the American regime? First, American strategists and American citizens generally need to understand the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. The American military already does, assigning responsibility for the area to its Indo-Pacific Command. The extraordinary diversity of geographic structures, languages, religions, and regimes featured in this region easily distracts analysts from understanding it as one thing, geopolitically. Accordingly, there has been “little in Washington’s policy that initially could be considered a comprehensive or consistent strategy, let alone a truly grand strategy”; the first attempt at framing such a strategy only occurred with the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, and it consisted of committing to a permanent military presence in the region, regime change in Japan, and containment of communism. Even then, “it was not until the Obama administration that a new, overarching [strategic] concept came to be articulated, the so-called pivot or rebalance to Asia.” This only spurred the Chinese rulers to accelerate their longstanding policies of military modernization, encroachments in the South China Sea, cyberattacks on American government and businesses, and “support for authoritarian regimes around the world.”
Unluckily for even the Chinese, “the very size of the Indo-Pacific, with more than half of the world’s population, along with its complexity, political diversity, and numerous problems, means that no one power can dominate the region, as seems possible in a smaller, territorially contiguous realm like Europe.” Even hegemony is “difficult,” as Auslin expects the Chinese to learn. To hasten that learning curve, America should never ignore Chinese provocations, strengthen its alliances with India, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, and defend free trade throughout the region.
This notwithstanding, Auslin ends his book with a cautionary tale, “the Sino-American Littoral War of 2045.” Having already taken effective military control of the South China Sea, “through which as much as 70 percent of global trade passed,” and having ignored a decision by The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration in favor of the Philippines against China in 2016 (why worry, since no one moved to enforce it?), and having noted the Obama administration’s hesitation to conduct military operations in the area many years earlier, China had continued its military buildup in the region. This eventually induced Taiwan to enter into a Hong Kong-like ‘one country-two systems’ agreement while persuading South Korea to end its alliance with the United States. Three blocs then emerged in the Indo-Pacific: U.S.-Japan-Australia; China/Taiwan-South Korea; the nonaligned ASEAN countries. India and Russia contented themselves with playing on the edges; Europeans withdrew from the region altogether.
One thing having led to others, the 2045 war was fought in the continental seas and littorals; the United States avoided the Chinese mainland while the Chinese refrained from attacking Japan. The denouement occurred when America’s Japanese-based forces were stopped and the Chinese proposed a ceasefire before the U.S. Navy could bring in reinforcements from Hawaii and San Diego. Having gained firm control over its adjacent seas and littorals, China “was willing to cease combat operations to consolidate its significant gains, while the United States accepted its strategic losses and did not want to widen the war, which could have resulted in further defeat,” thanks to the now-proven effectiveness of Chinese military technology. American statesmen reduced U.S. military presence in the region, regrouping their forces in Japan and Australia. Chinese advances more or less stopped there, however. “Beijing soon discovered that its unwilling allies required the investment of Chinese political, economic, and military capital, which restricted Beijing’s freedom of action postbellum.” For its part, America could only rest semi-content as “an offshore balancer,” its alliances in the region weakened.
“As the cold peace settled on the region, the Chinese and American blocs settled down into a prolonged contest for influence in Asia.”
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