Hedging the Asia bet

Amitav Acharya

Posted online: Friday, September 08, 2006 at 0000 hrs IST http://www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/12190.html


The US security strategy for Asia today is widely known as “hedging”. According to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006, “Shaping the choices of major and emerging powers requires a balanced approach, one that seeks cooperation but also creates prudent hedges against the possibility that cooperative approaches by themselves may fail to preclude future conflict.”

While this may suggest that the US is shaping the strategic choices of Asian countries, in reality, the US is acting out of necessity brought about by developments over which it has little control. These include the emerging multipolarity of Asia, supplanting both Cold War bipolarity and the so-called ‘unipolar moment’, the changing perception of China in the region, induced partly due to Chinese diplomacy, the changing purpose of US alliances known as the “hub-and-spokes” system, and the impact of regional multilateral dialogues in shaping regional security norms.

The US hedging strategy is China-centric. It is consistent with the long-standing US goal of preventing the emergence of any ‘peer competitor’. China is the obvious candidate to assume such a role. But the US is not pursuing an outright containment strategy towards China. This is deemed to be unnecessary and would not attract regional support at a time when China is behaving as a “constructive’ regional player.

Moreover, containment is more suited to a bipolar international system, such as the Cold War. Emerging Asia, with three simultaneously rising powers, China, Japan and India, is multipolar. In a multipolar region, a natural role for the US would be to assume the role of a “balancing wheel”, tailoring its opposition to whichever power may seek to dominate the region in concert with its other great power rivals. But unlike Britain in 19th century Europe, the US cannot be the balancing wheel of Asia, because it is unlikely that Japan or India, the other major powers of Asia, would aspire to regional hegemony, thereby requiring the US to side with China to contain their ambition. Moreover, such a posture would question the credibility of relatively fixed US alliance commitments, especially to Japan.

A hedging strategy combines both balancing and engagement of China, the latter exemplified in the former deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick’s description of China’s as a ‘responsible stakeholder’.

One reason for the new approach are changes to US alliances in the region: ‘the hub and spokes’ system. First, some spokes are in worse shape than others. The US alliance with Korea is the most fragile, partly due to Seoul’s reluctance to identify with the Bush administration’s ‘axis-of-evil policy’ towards North Korea that killed Seoul’s own ‘sunshine’ policy. The US alliance with Thailand is also wavering, as Bangkok courts Beijing for economic gain and strategic reassurance. By contrast, US alliances with Japan and Australia have become more robust, while the US-Philippines alliance is marked by uncertainty due to Manila’s fear of a popular backlash against using it too obviously to fight its southern extremists. Neither is the US too keen to give in to Manila’s desire to use the alliance to drag it into a confrontation with China over their dispute in the South China Sea.

With some of its traditional alliances in flux, the US is developing new security partnerships, notably with India. But some Indian strategists would prefer to remain “swing players”, and not have India automatically side with the US in a confrontation with China. Only Japan can be expected to lend such relatively unqualified support to the US in dealing with China-related threats, but this could change if Sino-Japanese relations improve. Another reason for American ‘hedging’.

The hedging strategy is also shaped by the changing nature of regional security threats. These are transnational in nature and include terrorism, pandemics, humanitarian crises induced by natural disasters. The US security forces in the region are increasingly involved in addressing such threats, sometimes outside the framework of its traditional alliances. Moreover, China is often a partner in such operations. This redefines the purpose of the traditional US alliances and make them less exclusive. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated at the 5th Shangri-la dialogue in June 2006: “For much of my adult lifetime, security and stability in the Pacific was maintained essentially by a network of bilateral defense relationships between the United States and our allies and partners. This was notably unlike the situation in Europe, where we had a relatively large and more formal alliance - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But now we see an expanding network of security cooperation in this region, both bilaterally between nations and multilaterally among nations - with the US as a partner. We see this as a welcome shift.”


To be sure, the US has not and will not become an overnight convert to security multilateralism in Asia. It soft-pedals its participation in the ASEAN Regional Forum, and is suspicious, if not outright hostile, towards the East Asian Summit, from which it is excluded. But the norms of dialogue and confidence-building developed through multilateral dialogues are one of the reasons why an outright containment of China is politically difficult for Washington, and why a ‘hedging’ is preferable. The writer is deputy director, Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a senior fellow, Asia-Pacific Foundation, Canada