THE SHAPE OF NEW ASIA

Enders Wimbush has been a good friend of mine since he was Director of Radio Liberty under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He played a pivotal role in bringing freedom to the subject peoples of the Soviet Union. He possesses one of the sharpest geostrategic minds not just in Washington, but in the world. I encourage you to read his analysis of America’s stakes in Asia carefully. -JW

Asia, more than the Middle East, will compete for the attention of America’s next president. It is in Asia that America’s most vexing security challenges will likely emerge in the next few decades.

The shape of New Asia will be formed in large part from three powerful interactive forces: America’s resolve, or lack of it, to play the key role in creating a new security architecture for Asia; the specter of an unmanageable rising China; and the deterioration of security in the “Crescent of Crisis” stretching from the southern Philippines to the Persian Gulf.

It is ironic that as America’s presidential candidates debate how the U.S. can achieve its goals in Iraq and get out, for most Asian strategists the post-Iraq world has already begun. My recent conversations with strategists and decision-makers from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia and India reveal a deep anxiety that the American public’s aversion to persistent casualties, the steep cost of the war, and uncertain chances for success in the hostile Islamic world will cause the next American president to be overly cautious about projecting power. The sense that America may begin to hedge its commitments to Asia has already taken root and could become a powerful driver of Asians’ security strategies.

Uncertainty about America’s commitment intersects with Asians’ growing concern about how to manage an economically robust rising China. Today China is the largest trading partner of most major Asian states, including U.S. allies Japan, South Korea and Australia. In 2003, nearly 80% of the increase in Japanese exports went to China, which increasingly serves as Japan’s manufacturing labor force as well.

At a recent conference of the Project for the New American Century in Washington, a number of Asian security experts observed with some trepidation that China “looks more and more like us,” and they worried that China’s economic weight in the region is leading to their “Finlandization”: a self-imposed willingness to accommodate China’s interests by not challenging their mighty neighbor.

The counterweight for offsetting China’s growing muscle, they noted, has traditionally been the U.S. military presence in the region, which empowers them to continue to make choices that China might not otherwise approve.

Along the “Crescent of Crisis” lies a bubbling mess. At the heart of the problem is Indonesia, whose thousands of inhabited islands stretch across much of Asia’s landscape. A weak and irresolute government in Jakarta is trying unsuccessfully to counter social pathologies that may eventually overwhelm it. Revolutionary turmoil and terrorist activity in the southern Philippines blends seamlessly into the morass.

Islamic militancy — fed by decades of quiet Saudi contributions to mosques, hospitals and madrassas and stimulated and stirred by hundreds if not thousands of Islamic militants and terrorists from the Arab world, Pakistan, and elsewhere — is the engine that increasingly links true believers to criminals and terrorists. Most of the world’s Muslims live along the crescent.

The interactive quality to the area’s many pathologies is evident, and it becomes more and more likely that these dynamics will cascade across the states in the region. An Australian colleague recently characterized the emerging mess in the middle of Southeast Asia as “Mad Max worlds”: failing states; drug cartels and crime syndicates that hide locally but communicate and operate globally; pirates and other threats to critical energy supply lines from the Persian Gulf and Indonesia to key Asian economies; separatist movements and non-state actors that are stronger than the states they inhabit; transnational environmental catastrophes that lead to conflict; and much more.

Security planners in a number of Asian governments speak privately of their fear that China may seek to enhance its regional position or to control resources, especially energy, by taking advantage of these instabilities. Some now plan against scenarios that feature China aggressively pursuing a range of interests in the context of Asia’s eroding periphery.

Currently, Asia boasts no effective multilateral security organizations capable of keeping the U.S. engaged, quieting fears of an unmanageable China, or containing the dangers in the crescent of crisis. Moreover Asians are unlikely to produce one by themselves. Asean, APEC, Saarc and other Asian multinational organizations, which try to adjudicate their member states’ conflicting interests, claims, and ambitions, are notable for their strategic limpness and lack of military capacity. Only the United States can provide the necessary leadership for a new security regime.

At opposite sides of Asia, the strategic evolution of two states, Japan and India, suggests the outlines of such an architecture. Japan, Asia’s strongest military power and America’s strategic anchor in the region, is slowly inching toward a new security identity whose outcome is still uncertain. Strong forces in Japan seek to enhance its power and to free Japan to play a wider security role throughout Asia by amending Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which prohibits the Japanese from projecting military power.

More and more, some Asians welcome a more visible and militarily assertive role for Japan, despite Japan’s recent history as their adversary. Their view that Japan has become “a normal nation” and must play a larger role in Asia underscores, perhaps, their concern that American power and influence may be receding.

Countervailing forces, resulting in no small measure from Japan’s bad demographics — the population is among the world’s oldest, and getting older — seek something close to a “Fortress Japan.” This would be attained through sufficient military power to deter adversaries’ opportunism, but would focus mostly on rebuilding Japan’s economic strength, a process that almost by definition entails greater accommodation of China.

At the other side of Asia, India continues to emerge as a promising economic power and pivotal strategic actor. India’s security interests converge with America’s (and Japan’s) at most points. Managing rising China, whose economic and military tentacles in Burma, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh cause Indian security planners to fear “encirclement,” is the predominant long-term preoccupation among most Indian strategists. A South Asian power, India seeks to contain not just implosion-prone Pakistan but the destabilizing forces it radiates throughout the region from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia.

As in Japan, energy security is a key Indian concern embracing both the oil India imports — mostly from the Persian Gulf — and the welfare of its nearly three million strong expatriates, which operate much of the critical infrastructure of the Gulf’s energy production complexes. India’s longstanding relationships with America’s current and past adversaries, for example Iran and Vietnam, suggest openings for both influencing today’s enemies and initiating creative coalition building that the U.S. will find difficult to achieve on its own.

In the War on Terror, India is a frontline state, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population. Yet Indian Muslims are notably absent from the ranks of today’s radical Islamic terrorists. Strategists for the Global War on Terrorism should ask why.

The next U.S. president should embrace the design and implementation of a new strategic architecture for Asia as his Big Idea in foreign policy, beginning with consolidating strong security relationships with India and Japan as top priorities. Few ideas promise larger payoffs for American interests. The next president has a vital role to play in shaping the New Asia, and he should seize it.

Enders Wimbush is currently a director of the Center for Future Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC. This article has also been published in the Asian Wall St. Journal.