US policy focus shifting to Asia-Pacific

By Sushil Seth

The US preoccupation with the war on terror and military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade has distracted it from its focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

This may be changing.

The main reason is that China is making waves in the region, causing disquiet among its Asian neighbors. This was evident last year over a whole range of regional issues.

The Obama administration, when it came to power, was hoping to create a peaceful partnership with China. There were a series of high-level visits to China with that objective in mind.

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was there thanking China for continuing to buy US bonds.

She announced that human rights issues wouldn’t be allowed to derail US-China relations.

Premier Wen Jiabao, on the other hand, worried about China’s investments in US treasury notes in the light of economic recession in that country.

And when President Obama visited China, Beijing didn’t seem to regard it as anything special.

China appeared to regard all these special gestures by the new Obama administration as a sign of US weakness, and hence an opportunity to advance its own ambitions.

It reminded one of the Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union when it sought to push its global agenda by underestimating the young President Kennedy, who took power in 1961.

When the Soviet Union installed missiles in the US backyard, it led to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the first nightmarish case of a possible nuclear Armageddon.

Which is not to suggest that China might be tempted to do something equally dangerous and outrageous.

The point is that the US is starting to have a rethink about its Asia-Pacific policy in the wake of China’s determination to push its own regional agenda. The response to US overtures for a peaceful partnership has been rebuffed.

The time has, therefore, come to consider that China is more interested in a hegemonic role, seeking to edge out the US, if possible.

China is not a partner but a serious challenger and a threat.

Australia, a US ally, spelled out the Chinese threat to the region in its 2009 defense white paper.

It is reinvigorating its defense ties with the United States and Japan, and starting an annual strategic dialogue with South Korea.

During a recent visit to Japan, Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the Japan National Press Club, “The region is in strategic flux, where changing power relativities are playing out against a background of historical mistrust and conflict.”

She emphasized, “Stability and security depend on the integral role of the US and on developing the right regional architecture to encourage co-operation on security challenges…”

She couldn’t have been clearer about the new destabilizing element in the region.

Canberra, therefore, has a challenge of its own to reconcile its strategic alliance with the United States and its primary economic relationship with China.

Beijing is not terribly happy over Australia’s security alliance with the United States, but is resigned to it.

As a sop to China, the Gillard government has agreed to the visits of Chinese navy ships.

But the central strategic tenet of Australia’s policy, its military alliance with the United States, remains with the goal of meeting a future Chinese military threat.

Japan and South Korea feel similarly threatened.

At the same time, other regional countries are busy developing their own options.

None of them believe China’s routine assertion that it is not a hegemonic power.

In the US, there is increasing realization that they should wrap up their military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to face the most serious challenge from a very assertive and, sometime, angry China.

The killing of Osama bin Laden is likely to hasten this process.

In a wide-ranging article on the Obama administration’s foreign policy in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza writes, “ One of [Thomas] Donilon’s [national security adviser] overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and China’s unchecked influence in the region.”

Similarly, Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, has said, “ We’ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years.”

But, “… our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.”

This is not to suggest that the US and China are on a confrontation course in the short term.

Indeed, the two countries are periodically engaged in strategic and economic dialogue at high levels, designed to manage their often-prickly relationship.

And in this, China’s poor human rights record is emerging as a difficult issue.

A case in point is the recent strategic and economic dialogue between the two countries in Washington where China’s crackdown on dissidents and other human rights issues was prominently highlighted by the US side.

Indeed, a recent interview by Hillary Clinton to the Atlantic Monthly was released during the 2-day talks.

In this interview, Clinton labeled China’s human rights record as “deplorable.”

She also said, “They’re worried [about the Arab Spring of revolution], and are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand.”

Considering that she had earlier said, during her China visit, that human rights wouldn’t be allowed to derail Sino-US relations, this is quite a turn around in US attitude to China’s violation of human rights.

The two-day talks with the Chinese side, according to the Guardian, ended with “worsening relations over censorship and crackdowns on dissidents.”

The US appears quite serious on censorship and human rights violation by China, and is allocating funds on developing technology to overcome internet censorship.

It is interesting that among many words and subjects banned by Chinese censors, Hillary Clinton has joined the honored ranks.

According to the Guardian, Chinese internet censors “recently blocked search results for ‘Hillary Clinton’ after a speech championing internet freedom.”

China is paranoid about a “jasmine revolution” type popular uprising, which it believes has been encouraged by the United States all over the Middle East.

And it fears that the United States is up to no good with its advocacy of human rights in China.

Only a paranoid and insecure regime can conjure up such fears and conspiracies.

Therefore, it will always be difficult to create a partnership for peace with China’s oligarchs looking for phantoms everywhere.

Since they want to quarantine China from the prevalent revolutionary virus, their record on human rights is going to get worse.

Combined with their hegemonic designs on the Asia-Pacific region, the United States will have a difficult time managing relations with China.

Precisely because of this, the US needs to give grater attention to China’s so-called “peaceful rise”