Fault Lines in a Rising Asia

By Chung Min Lee

Asia has already risen by most hard-power measures. But without an understanding of the downsides of Asia’s rise, the conventional narrative is incomplete, misleading, and inaccurate. Chung Min Lee explores the fundamental dichotomy that defines contemporary Asia. While the region has been an unparalleled economic success, it is also hom

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780870033131

Chung Min Lee

Chung Min Lee is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and chairman of the international advisory council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is an expert on Korean and East Asian security affairs with more than 30 years of experience in leading think tanks and universities in South Korea, the U.S., Japan, and Singapore. Lee served as Ambassador for National Security Affairs (2013-2016) and is the author of Fault Lines in a Rising Asia.

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Introduction

The past quarter of a century has been witness to a remarkable political laboratory including the collapse, peak, and emergence of three great powers—the former Soviet Union, the United States, and most recently, China. From a longer historical perspective, the same period also marks one of the most important tipping points in world history: the accelerated rise of Asia and a relative waning of the West within the framework of a liberal international order. Increasingly, commentators are arguing that either an Asian-centric world order or, at the very least, the dawning of an Asian century is going to become the defining characteristic of twenty-first-century geopolitics and geoeconomics. However, an Asian-centric world order and an Asian century are both poorly defined concepts and often buttressed by erroneous assumptions.

By most hard-power measures, Asia has already risen. In 2010, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) based on purchasing power parity. Just four years later, at the end of 2014, China passed the United States as the world’s leading economic power with GDP based on purchasing power parity of $17.67 trillion. In 2014, the combined GDP of China, Japan, India, and South Korea amounted to $33.26 trillion compared with $26 trillion for the United States, Germany, France, and Britain. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the United States continued to lead the world in defense spending with a defense budget of $581 billion in 2014, significantly larger than China’s $129 billion. In 2010, however, Asia eclipsed Europe as the region with the highest defense spending, and, as is well known, Asia is also home to the world’s largest conventional forces and five countries with nuclear weapons: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

But while such numbers are clearly important, they tell only one facet of the Asian story. And unless one understands the downsides of Asia’s rise, the conventional narrative is bound to be incomplete, misleading, and inaccurate. The main objective of this book lies in exploring and assessing the reasons for the Asian paradox, or the fundamental dichotomy that defines contemporary Asia: a region that has been an unparalleled economic success but that is also home to the world’s most dangerous, diverse, and divisive security, military, and political challenges. No one disputes Asia’s rise, and even with a slowing of China’s economic growth, Asia is going to become the world’s dominant economic powerhouse of the twenty-first century. Yet Asia’s future development is going to be highly dependent on its ability to prevent, mitigate, and overcome unmatched security and political dilemmas. Moreover, the rise of Asia doesn’t mean the inexorable passing of the West, imbued as it is with its own problems. And until Asia offers tangible, realistic, and politically courageous solutions to the litany of challenges it faces, its rise will be only half-complete.

In more ways than one, Asia is the department store of the world’s most pronounced security problems. The sheer multiplicity and magnitude of Asia’s security threats dwarf those of other regions. Even a cursory listing would include an emerging strategic contest between the United States and China, a nuclear-armed North Korea, accelerated maritime and naval contestation in and around the South China Sea, and uncertainties surrounding traditional but crucially important geopolitical hotspots such as the Indian subcontinent, the Taiwan Strait, and the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, Asia’s political canvas is characterized by wide-ranging political deficits ranging from one-party dictatorships, the specter of failed states (including those that are armed with nuclear weapons), contrasting shades of authoritarian regimes, weak democratic institutions, and outstanding historical tensions and legacies that continue to fester more than seventy years after the end of World War II. Of all the political problems confronting Asia, arguably the most intractable and poisonous are the deeply rooted legacies of colonialism, occupations, and war.

It should be noted that this book doesn’t delve into the immense socioeconomic challenges facing Asia, not because these issues aren’t important, but because that would necessitate a very different manuscript. Cursory overviews could have been made of a range of issues such as rapid urbanization, widening social inequalities, ballooning social welfare costs, and changing ideational affinities and national identities. But such snapshots could hardly justify the in-depth assessments these topics rightly deserve, although some exceptions were made such as the potential impact of key demographic drivers on major national security choices like military-manpower trajectories in select Asian states. Thankfully, the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of Asia’s rise have been widely covered by eminent specialists. Hence, the focus here is on examining Asia’s core strategic fault lines, given their magnitude, interconnectivity, and potentially volatile consequences.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for Asia’s parallel narrative, or the importance of understanding the flip side of Asia’s rise, including the immense problems and challenges across Greater Asia. A bird’s-eye view is presented of the well-known story of Asia’s accelerated economic growth and development and such key unintended consequences as potentially debilitating demographic trends in Japan and South Korea. Attention is paid to some of the more salient features of Asia’s core challenges, such as great power rivalries and growing military competition, as well as the major speed bumps the region has to successfully overcome if an Asian century is going to become a pronounced feature of the emerging international order rather than mere hyperbole.

Chapter 2 assesses the range of political challenges facing Asia, given that the region is home to a truly diverse mix of political regimes: established democracies, democracies in need of greater consolidation, one-party Communist states, failed or very fragile states, authoritarian states in transition, illiberal democracies, and formerly democratic states that have reverted to military rule. Understanding political matters is essential to comprehending why so many security issues continue to haunt Asia given that historical legacies, political cultures and traditions, misperceptions, and vastly divergent values and norms continue to affect the shaping of security problems. The number of democracies has expanded in Asia with the downfall of the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986, the restoration of democracy in South Korea in 1987, and Indonesia’s democratization since the end of the Suharto era in 1998. But the region also faces immense political hurdles that most certainly will have critical security implications, such as the potential for regime collapse in North Korea and the military’s continuing grip on power in Pakistan, Myanmar, and Thailand, where the army has taken power through two military coups just over the past decade. Hybrid democracies such as Malaysia and Singapore are also undergoing key transitions.

Chapter 3 highlights the diplomatic twists and turns of Asia’s titans and the triggering of a new Great Game involving all the world’s major stakeholders, such as the United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan. Each of these countries’ Asian strategy in the 2010s is examined, including the requirements of and obstacles to the U.S. rebalance to Asia, India’s search for a new global role, Japan’s quest for a more normal security posture, Russia’s own tilt toward Asia, and, at least for now, a Russian-Chinese entente. Great power politics is hardly new to the Asian strategic landscape. But as U.S. power and influence begin to compete with increasingly assertive Chinese actions, the region’s actors are all recalibrating their own strategies characterized by mixtures of hedging, accommodation, and in some cases contestation vis-à-vis an increasingly powerful China. No single great power is going to dominate Asia like Imperial China did. For the next two to three decades, an intensifying struggle for mastery is going to be the new normal across Asia.

Chapter 4 delves into what resembles a de facto arms race in Asia and critical developments including the growing prominence of the Indo-Pacific as a major maritime zone of competition. Attention is also paid to major force modernization and growing power projection capabilities of the region’s key military forces—Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF), the U.S. military presence in the region, and India’s own military priorities—as they begin to face China’s stronger, more agile, and modern People’s Liberation Army. The evolving military balance on the Korean Peninsula is also examined given the growing asymmetrical capabilities of North Korea, including nuclear weapons. Most worrisome is the potential for unintended and accidental military clashes in the South or East China Sea mixed with low-intensity conflict scenarios in key geopolitical hotspots.

Chapter 5 examines one of the most dangerous and strategically significant dimensions of twenty-first-century Asia, or the dawning of what many experts have called the second nuclear age. The role of nuclear weapons in the context of Asian security is examined by assessing the history and consequences of the A. Q. Khan weapons of mass destruction (WMD) network and the genesis of the nuclear competition in South Asia between India and Pakistan, including an overview of the two countries’ distinct roads to nuclear sovereignty. Much has already been written about the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs and capabilities; the focus here is on the growing intractability of the Indo-Pakistani nuclear standoff and the deep structural problems confronting Pakistan. In particular, the role of the Pakistani armed forces and the Inter-Services Intelligence in supporting extremist forces as a counterbalancing maneuver vis-à-vis India has triggered chain reactions that continue to reverberate.

Chapter 6 is devoted to Asia’s other major nuclear quandary, the story of North Korea’s nuclear-weapon program and Pyongyang’s array of weapons-exporting networks and WMD collaboration with Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Syria during various intervals over the past three decades. For South Korea, a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons is the worst strategic outcome other than all-out war. But Seoul’s responses to the challenge have been shaped by demands driven by the need to counter North Korea’s conventional threats, politicized threat perceptions, a fractious political consensus on dealing with North Korea, and preparation for nonlinear contingencies. In Japan, growing nuclear and ballistic missile threats from North Korea are perceived as core national security concerns that have triggered Tokyo’s SDF to adopt more proactive defensive measures. A nuclearized North Korea on top of an increasingly assertive China has prompted similar but also qualitatively different responses from Seoul and Tokyo.

The conclusion reflects upon some of the major lessons from an Asia that is at once the showcase of economic success and an icon of entrenched security dilemmas. How Asia manages to ameliorate or even overcome traditional geopolitical tinderboxes and new zones of strategic competition is going to have a profound impact on the shaping of a regional order well into the twenty-first century. Until Asia meets this challenge, Asia’s rise can’t be regarded as synonymous with an Asian-centric world order. Nor is an Asian century a predetermined outcome based on political cohesion and collective action. Asia is much too broad, diverse, and complex to conveniently include it under one huge geographic roof.

In the end, running the world, as opposed to running into it, requires profoundly different skill sets, political acumen, globalized institutions, and values that transcend national borders and biases. Asia has yet to demonstrate that it fully encompasses these traits.

CHAPTER 1

The Other Side of Asia’s Rise

Asia’s Parallel Narrative

Despite tectonic shifts in global politics and major dislocations over the past quarter century such as the ending of the Cold War, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the war on terror, the consequences of the Arab Spring of 2011, and the Ukrainian crisis, Asia’s rise is the predominant feature of contemporary geopolitics and geoeconomics.1 The major contours of Asia’s rise have been told from virtually all angles. Particularly since China’s accelerated economic growth over the past two decades, the main question was when, and not if, China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economic power. According to International Monetary Fund data, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest economy at the end of 2014, as measured by a gross domestic product (GDP) based on purchasing power parity (PPP) of $17.63 trillion compared with $17.41 trillion for the United States. In nominal GDP, the United States continues to lead with $17.41 trillion compared with China’s $10.35 trillion, but the consensus among China watchers is that even in nominal GDP, China is likely to surpass the United States by 2024, if not earlier.2

Such comparisons offer mere snapshots of a country’s capabilities, but in this instance it illustrates just how far China has come since economic reforms began in 1978. It has also been asserted that the rise of Asia signals an inevitable decline of the liberal international order that was created and led by the West, particularly by the United States, in the aftermath of World War II. Such claims are predictably contentious, but as Henry Kissinger wrote in August 2014, Vast regions of the world have never shared and only acquiesced in the Western concept of order. These reservations are now becoming explicit, for example, in the Ukraine crisis and the South China Sea. The order established and proclaimed by the West stands at a turning point.3

Asia’s rise as the world’s third strategic pillar, side by side with the United States and the European Union (EU), means that divining Asian futures has assumed global implications. This is because how Asia transitions in the decades ahead is going to profoundly affect global wealth, international security, and sustainable development throughout the twenty-first century. The magnitude of Asia’s rise means that any emerging world order is unthinkable without considering Asia’s central role. In 2014, the seven largest economies in the Asia-Pacific region—China, Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, and Taiwan—totaled $36 trillion, or 33.7 percent of world GDP, and accounted for 43 percent of the world’s 7.2 billion population.4 Thus, how Asia evolves in the decades ahead cannot but affect the makeup of the broader international system.

The Incomplete Asian Story

Nevertheless, the dominant narrative of Asia’s rise remains significantly incomplete and in many respects inaccurate. Why? Because it’s a story that usually celebrates the brighter sides. Those include the region’s spectacular rags-to-riches drama, the transformation of China and India, the growing appeal of the so-called Beijing Consensus—the underpinnings of a Chinese development model based on a quasi-free market system with strong guidance by the state, as an alternative to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies—and the inevitability of a new world order that is going to be led by Asia. This story is told without really thinking through just how Asia plans to create, lead, and maintain a new regional order, let alone an international one. More fundamentally, such a view assumes that there is wide-ranging consensus in Asia on what constitutes an intrinsically Asian order, the critical features of an Asian security architecture, and, perhaps most important, which regional powers should take the lead in shaping such an order and the structure under which it would be maintained.

Even the oft-mentioned notion of an Asian century is replete with conceptual ambiguity and highly imprecise characteristics since it gives the illusion of political and perhaps even ideological cohesion across the vastness of Asia. Are the makings of an Asian century primarily economic? Is an Asian century synonymous with a Pax Asiana, that is, an Asian-led international order? To what extent do Asia’s major and middle powers agree on common political and security agendas? Indeed, the deeper one delves into defining the characteristics of an Asian century, the gap between idealized perceptions of One Asia and the realities of a highly diverse region only becomes wider.

There is little doubt that Asia has made enormous economic and technological progress with growing military capabilities, but wide-ranging political discrepancies exist between Asia’s strategically consequential states and their contending security interests. Another important facet of the Asian security discourse is the parallel debate on the growing likelihood of the inevitable decline of the West commensurate with Asia’s rise. The West faces enormous challenges just as its preponderance in the international system is ebbing. But even though the relative weight of the dominant Western powers has decreased over the past three decades, the United States and the EU combined still account for nearly half of global GDP. In addition, if one perceives the West beyond the narrow confines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and as a broader manifestation of shared values, norms, and interests, the assumptions underlying a declining West have to be revisited.

No one doubts Asia’s unprecedented economic growth in the post–World War II era, particularly since the rise of the so-called Four Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and, much more significantly, the economic transformation of China and India. But celebrating Asia’s rags-to-riches story shouldn’t ignore or minimize current and emerging fault lines across Asia with potentially critical implications for regional stability and security. To grasp a fuller picture of Asia’s rise, it is imperative to understand key negative drivers and the impact they may have on Asia’s future trajectories. Asia isn’t just the major engine of the world economy; it is also home to most of the world’s gravest security threats.

The Misconceptions of an Asian-Led New World Order

Notwithstanding the spreading of democracy since the 1980s, Asia confronts enormous political and social challenges. How an authoritarian one-party dictatorship in China will continue to coexist with a flourishing market economy and an increasingly freer society remains unknown. But however the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rebrands itself as the guardian of a New China as it prepares for its hundredth anniversary in 2021, China’s rulers can no longer ignore the Fifth Modernization—democratization, greater institutionalization of the rule of law, and the upholding of civil liberties.5 (The Four Modernizations that were spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping when reforms began in 1978 included agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology.) China’s leaders have rejected any adoption of a Western-style democracy, and they expressly believe that the trumpeting of so-called universal values and human rights by the West is highly inconsistent given the abuses wrought by Western imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, China continues to maintain that since it doesn’t insist that the West adopt Chinese values and norms, neither should the West insist on a quid pro quo. China is entitled to such views if one takes into consideration the deeply ingrained notion of the so-called century of humiliation that stretched from the 1840s to the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. And it is also very clear that even long-established democracies face enormous political challenges: just consider the absolutely stunning amount of money—$1 billion each for the Democratic and Republican Party nominees—that has to be raised to run a U.S. presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, the challenges the West faces in consolidating or improving democratic governance by no means should be construed across Asia as an excuse for extremely uneven levels of political development, the prevalence of authoritarian regimes and semi-democracies, and the existence of some of the world’s worst governments. The world’s only remaining totalitarian regime—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—remains resolutely committed to producing more nuclear weapons while maintaining a family-run Communist dynasty. Poverty and corruption continue to pose massive challenges to India, despite the fact that it has experienced significant economic growth since the early 1990s. The security of extremely fragile states or de facto failed states could become even more precarious. In Pakistan, for example, that is because of the significant politicization of the armed forces, the intelligence services’ ties to fundamentalist Islamic forces, a broken political and educational system, the flourishing of myriad terrorist groups, and questions pertaining to the ability of the government and the army to maintain firm control of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

For its part, Japan has been an exemplary democracy in the post–World War II era and has developed into America’s most important Asian ally, but its closest neighbors have become increasingly concerned over Tokyo’s rightward shift, particularly under the stewardship of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. From reinterpreting Japan’s so-called peace constitution to expanding Japan’s right to exercise collective self-defense, Abe has accentuated an assertive security posture. His December 2013 visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where class A war criminals are listed among the millions of Japanese war dead, and follow-on visits by members of his cabinet spiked already high tensions between Japan and China. The year 2015 was highly symbolic since it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the normalization of relations between South Korea and Japan and the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Prime Minister Abe reiterated his desire to improve ties with South Korea, including the desire to hold a bilateral summit with President Park Geun-hye, but Park insisted on tangible progress on a highly contentious history issue before she would meet with Abe.

Park has been adamant that the Japanese government must reaffirm previous statements on the World War II–era sexual slaves issue (euphemistically referred to as comfort women) before bilateral ties can be fully restored. Korean-Japanese relations in the first two and a half years of Park’s five-year term arguably sank to their lowest point since diplomatic ties were established in 1965. By the summer of 2015, however, and concomitant with Washington’s strong desire for Seoul and Tokyo to meet each other halfway, South Korea and Japan were trying to reset the relationship, and the first bilateral summit between the two countries in three years was held in Seoul on November 2, 2015.

Maintaining cooperation between Japan and South Korea is critical, especially in the context of security ties among Japan, South Korea, and the United States, in order to respond effectively to outstanding threats such as a nuclearized North Korea that is on the cusp of miniaturizing nuclear warheads and a China that is expanding its military footprints. Japan views China as a key security concern and has been particularly vocal about Beijing’s robust naval and air operations in Japan’s adjacent waters. Understandably, South Korea is heavily preoccupied with addressing the growing array of asymmetrical threats from North Korea, but China’s military prowess and more direct challenges toward U.S. forward military presence in Northeast Asia are also becoming sources of concern for defense planners in Seoul. Finally, South Korea needs to forge a bipartisan, depoliticized national security strategy and appraise much more realistically the growing spectrum of over-the-horizon security challenges, particularly if it seeks to assume the lead throughout the unification process.

In more ways than one, the Seoul-Tokyo relationship encapsulates the fragility of even vitally important bilateral relationships and the powerful resonance of domestic politics, historical memories, and hardened national identities. Across Asia, virtually all the bilateral relationships between the major powers, such as the Sino-U.S., Sino-Indian, Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, and even the recently improving Sino-Russian relationships, are characterized by varying degrees of combustive forces and strategic mistrust, notwithstanding growing economic and commercial ties. In the Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Pakistani rivalry has had a nuclear dimension as far back as 1974 when India first tested a nuclear device; the rivalry has been overtly nuclear since the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998. Four wars have been fought between India and Pakistan, and the conditions for strategic stability have become much more complicated. Conflict shadows are omnipresent in other subregions, notably the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and, increasingly, in the East and South China Seas.

In 2010, Asia’s collective defense spending surpassed that of Europe for the first time. Even as intraregional trade continues to flourish, Asia’s strategically consequential powers without exception are increasing military investments, upgrading their forces, enhancing their power projection capabilities, and strengthening their intelligence resources. If Asia’s right hand is busy counting profits in yuan, yen, and rupees, its left hand is equally busy signing defense contracts and making new security arrangements.

There is no doubt that Asia’s transformation over the past half century has been unprecedented in its compressed and accelerated economic development. Measured by GDP growth, a rise in exports, the number of registered patents, increasingly modernized armed forces, and globally active conglomerates, the very term rising Asia is a misnomer because Asia has already risen. But usually left undefined is precisely how Asia is going to dominate the emerging international order and how Asia—or more specifically, its leading powers—is going to take the lead in forming new political and economic architectures.

China’s official launching of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in June 2015 is one key indicator that China’s and Asia’s share of the global economic pie is going to grow. Fifty countries signed up as the AIIB’s charter members, with a number of other countries that were either waiting for domestic approval or have declared their intention to join. The AIIB was launched with $100 billion, 75 percent of it coming from Asia though 15 percent of voting rights are allocated equally regardless of the equities, and China has a 30 percent stake but a voting share of 26 percent.6 Even though China’s economic clout is bound to increase with the founding of the AIIB, the liberal international economic order remains firm. Asia’s rise is real and China’s clout is increasing, but those are not synonymous with the creation of some type of an intrinsically Asian order given the immense diversity, contrasting strategic interests, and political mistrust that exist across Asia today.

Why Asia’s Rise Doesn’t Mean the End of the West

Despite such shortcomings, it has become increasingly commonplace to assert that Asia’s rise is occurring in parallel with the rapid decline of the West, including the relative ebbing of American influence. Such a perception has been driven by the belief that while the United States (and by extension, the West) continues to maintain an economic, technological, and military edge, the capabilities gap between the United States and China and between the West and Asia is narrowing rapidly so that, as Niall Ferguson noted in 2010, what we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance. This time the Eastern challenger is for real, both economically and geopolitically.7 As Zhang Yunling asserted, The rise of China will end the current Western-dominated world order, [although] it won’t end the Western world, as some alarmists in the West fear.8

How the international system and the prevailing global balance of power is likely to be reshaped over the next two to three decades and beyond is one of the most hotly debated topics in international relations, especially with regard to how long the United States will retain its role as the world’s only superpower. A wide-ranging spectrum of views in the academic and policy communities could be categorized into three broad clusters. The first group could be construed as those who assert that the liberal international order that was created and led by the West (but especially by the United States since 1945) is very likely to be displaced by a new world order driven by the rise of China and other emerging major powers such as India and Brazil. The second group is characterized by those who argue that while there is going to be a relative decline in U.S. and Western power over the next several decades, China’s rise is replete with uncertainties, and that at any rate, no great power in the foreseeable future other than the United States has the ability to project power globally and to play a leading role in maintaining international security. The third group consists of those who contend that the United States is likely to retain its leading strategic edge at least through the first half of the twenty-first century, given its ability to rejuvenate itself economically and militarily as it has shown since 1945 and the fact that no emerging great power, including China, has quite the mix of hard and soft power that the United States exerts.

Chinese perceptions of the decline or resilience of U.S. and Western power are an important barometer in assessing the debate. Views in the Chinese academic and policy communities are diverse, although the official stance as espoused by the CCP continues to stress the need for a sustained rise of Chinese power and the desirability of fostering a world order that isn’t dominated by Western values and norms. The prolonged and costly U.S. involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rekindled the debate in China on the possibility of creating a new structure of power that wasn’t premised on U.S. dominance.9 According to Bonnie S. Glaser and Lyle J. Morris, many Chinese analysts viewed the U.S. financial crisis in 2008 as sounding the death knell for unfettered American economic and hard power predominance and the dawn of a more inclusive multipolar system in which the United States can no longer unilaterally dictate world events.10 But missing from the debate on the inevitable decline of the West, they wrote, is just how Asia, and particularly China, is going to actually restructure the prevailing international order.

Conspicuously absent from the debate is discussion of how a multipolar system would operate and what role China would play in the new world order. Would a more equal power distribution among major powers result in greater competition or cooperation, in balancing or bandwagoning, for example? If future international developments persuade Chinese leaders that the United States is in decline and that a multipolar world has arrived, Chinese experts will need to more closely examine such questions.11

After the Unipolar Moment

The period between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the outbreak of the world economic crisis in 2008 has often been referred to as the unipolar moment, when the United States didn’t confront any major strategic competitor. Writing in 1990 as the Warsaw Pact was dissolving and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, Charles Krauthammer noted that the immediate post–Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center for world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.12 Although Krauthammer stated that a multipolar world was going to emerge some decades down the road, he didn’t explicitly forecast that China was likely to be the primary theater peer and argued, at least into the foreseeable future, for a robust American role.

We are in for abnormal times. Our best hope for safety in such times, as in difficult times past, is in American strength and will—the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them. Compared to the task of defeating fascism and communism, averting chaos is a rather subtle call to greatness. It is not a task we are any more eager to undertake than the great twilight struggle just concluded. But it is just as noble and just as necessary.13

While there was a broad consensus on the preponderance of U.S. power in the immediate post–Cold War era, some foreign policy commentators argued that the unipolar moment would be short-lived and that like other hegemons in world history, the United States would ultimately forfeit its preeminent global position due to imperial overstretch. Others contended that the United States didn’t really face any potential contender that would displace it, and hence, it was likely, in the foreseeable future at least, to buck the historical trend of the rise and fall of great powers.14

Conversely, Christopher Layne has argued that Pax Americana, or the U.S.-led international order since 1945, won’t be sustained for three main reasons. First, given the host of structural economic problems confronting the United States such as its looming national debt and inability to sustain high levels of defense spending over the long run, the United States is very likely to scale back its foreign military commitments. Second, the United States doesn’t have the necessary economic clout to revitalize the international order, and the only real way it can retain its preeminent global position is to continue to be a major provider of global public goods—which it can no longer afford.15 Third, the post-1945 international order is unlikely to be locked in due to the rise of other great powers (notably China), and if China and other emerging powers perceive an irreversible decline in U.S. power, they will opt to reshape the international system to better suit their interests, norms, and values.16 Joseph Nye has written that it goes against common sense and history to believe that the United States will have a dominant share of world power forever, but at the same time, he noted that the rise of the rest is as much a factor in assessing the relative decline in U.S. or European power in the post–Cold War era.17

For example, if the American century began in 1941, will the United States still have primacy in power resources and play the central role in the global balance of power among states in 2041? My guess is yes. In that sense, the American century is not over, but because of transnational and non-state forces, it is definitely changing in important ways… . America has many problems and they raise many questions, but they are not creating an absolute decline that gives us a clear answer about when the American century will end.18

Other foreign policy analysts, such as Charles A. Kupchan, have emphasized the point that regardless of the primacy of American power today, a shift in the distribution of power over the long term is inevitable. Moreover, he noted that Pax Americana was possible because Pax Britannica set the stage for a nonconfrontational power transition between the United States and Great Britain and the fact that the United States has been able to retain its post–World War II hegemony owing to the critical role of its European allies and Japan. Whether defeating communism, liberalizing the global economy, combating nuclear proliferation, or delivering humanitarian assistance, Western allies formed a winning coalition that made effective action possible.19 However, Kupchan warned that the large emerging economies of China, India, and Brazil will ultimately overtake the United States and the West. He argued that history suggests that a more equal distribution of power will produce fluid alignments, not fixed alliances … [and] as the twenty-first century unfolds, China is more likely than other emerging nations to threaten U.S. interests. But unless or until the rest of the world is forced to choose sides, most developing countries will keep their options open, not obediently follow America’s lead.20

Commentators such as Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani have stressed the incipient deterioration of Western leadership and Western institutions compared to their initial success and earlier contributions to global welfare and international security. Asia’s march to modernity can help produce a more stable world order … [but] the West is not welcoming Asia’s progress, and its short-term interests in preserving its privileged position in various global institutions are trumping its long-term interests in creating a more just and stable world order, he wrote.21 He has also asserted that unfortunately, the West has gone from being the world’s primary problem solver to being its single biggest liability.22 More recently, Mahbubani wrote in a 2014 newspaper column that the self-proclaimed Islamic State "emerged as a complete surprise. It would have been ignored if innocent Westerners had not been killed. The decapitations forced the West, especially the U.S., to react. However, [the Islamic State] does not pose a great global threat. It is an isolated tumour."23 (Emphasis added.)

No one would argue that the West doesn’t face immense challenges and problems or that the relative weight of the United States and the major European powers hasn’t declined since the end of the Cold War. But it is altogether a different matter to proclaim that the major ills of the international system are mostly the doings of the West or to suggest that the inexorable, continuing rise of Asia is going to result in the creation of an Asian-dominated or even an Asian-run new world order. On the surface, Asia’s rise could be perceived as leading toward an intrinsically Asian-centric world order. But given Asia’s irreversible ties and linkages with the international system and vice versa, the Asia of the 2010s is profoundly different from the Asia of the 1910s or the 1950s.

A more globalized, outward-looking, and liberal Asia has every right to proclaim a greater voice in world affairs, but at the same time, it means that Asia must assume far greater responsibility for the global commons. Incessant and unrelenting castigation of the West by some Asian political leaders or public intellectuals in many ways is a convenient excuse for their own countries’ frailties, vulnerabilities, and political shortcomings. Blaming the West for most of the world’s ills may be politically expedient, but it is conceptually faulty, empirically weak, and intellectually shallow since the real litmus test of Asia’s rise is whether Asia can create a better mousetrap—that is, a new world order that provides greater security, prosperity, equality, and justice. The liberal international order is in need of repair, but until Asia finds a better global architecture that respects and maintains human rights, ensures democratic principles and civil liberties, and also emphasizes good governance, the rise of Asia is going to remain an unfinished task.

Underestimating Western Resilience, Overstating Asian Cohesion

Whether the West more broadly and the United States in particular will be able to continue to play key roles in maintaining the liberal international order is contingent on numerous factors including renewing the purpose of American power, the ability of the West and states such as Japan and South Korea that are allied with or identify strongly with the West to tackle an increasingly complex array of security and economic challenges, and the capability to cope with new strategic realities such as closer Sino-Russian relations. For example, tension is growing between the United States and Russia, and as Graham Allison and Dimitri K. Simes warned in a 2015 article, the United States can’t afford to treat Russia as a has-been, depleted, great power for two key reasons: first, Russia has the world’s largest inventory of nuclear weapons, and second, regardless of the U.S. attitude, Russians still perceive Russia as a great power.24 And although the degree to which Chinese and Russian strategic interests continue to converge over the longer term is going to be driven increasingly by the growing disparity between Chinese and Russian power, for the time being, Beijing and Moscow are joining forces against a common adversary: the United States.

These are serious challenges for the United States and the West, and the strategic landscape going into the 2020s is marked not only by the rise of the rest but also by a potent mix of traditional, nontraditional, and hybrid sources of conflicts. However, as vexing as these challenges are, they do not mean a fundamental redrawing of the global balance of power. And notwithstanding the unparalleled growth of Asia’s major economies, the combined nominal GDP of the United States and the European Union in 2014 was still $35.9 trillion, or some 46 percent of world GDP. More important, linear assumptions on the inevitable decline of the United States can be as faulty as linear assumptions on the continuing rise of Asia and the parallel belief that positive economic performance, political stability, and strategic consistency are traits that are imbued in the BRIC emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.25 As Ely Ratner and Thomas Wright commented back in 2013:

But predicting the decline of the United States has always been risky business. In the 1970s and late 1980s, expectations of waning power were followed by periods of geopolitical resurgence.

There’s every reason to believe that cycle is recurring today. Despite gridlock in Washington, America is recovering from the financial crisis and combining enduring strengths with new sources of influence, including energy. Meanwhile, emerging powers are running into troubles of their own. Taken together, these developments are ushering in a new era of American strategic advantage.26

As Robert Dujarric and others have noted, the notion of the West is broader than NATO since today, the West comprises two groups. One is made of European nations and their overseas offshoots, which share the same socio-political order and roots. Another comprises countries, primarily in East Asia, which have adopted the Western liberal model, with Japan and South Korea being the biggest examples.27 Dujarric also emphasized that:

There is a long history of declinism in the West. This is more productive than complacency, but it is misplaced. The West’s strength is its ability to continuously evolve and absorb. There are now hundreds of millions of non-Europeans who willingly live under Western-designed political and legal institutions in countries that freely decided to ally with the U.S. The West continues to act as a magnet for immigrants, including some of the most dynamic and educated individuals on the planet. The twenty-first century may yet see its continued expansion.28

Even with the EU’s problems, such as Greece’s deep structural economic issues that could reignite domestic voices calling for the country’s eventual exit from the eurozone, the fallout from the Ukrainian and Syrian crises, and the possibility of very fraught European-Russian and U.S.-Russian relations over the next several years, the EU has shown itself to be much more resilient. As Michael Cox and others have noted, while there is no doubt that key Asian states have made tremendous economic progress with corresponding influence, the notion of an Asian century is characterized as much by hype as it is by tangible developments. Even with Asia’s rapid economic growth, Cox pointed out, Asia is simply too broad and diverse to be seen as a collective actor:

Asia’s weight in the world has certainly risen; but by much less than is commonly assumed … [and] Asia still has long way to go before it will catch up with the West—a West by the way, whose combined output is still double that of the East.

If we are nowhere near arriving at a so-called Asian Century, one of the other reasons for this is that the entity we call Asia hardly exists as a collective actor. As many observers have pointed out, one of the most remarkable features of Asian political landscape is how fragmented it happens to be. Thus, many in Asia, China in particular, harbour deep resentments towards Japan. Japan in turn bitterly resents China’s rise. And India has problems with nearly all of its Asian neighbours, China especially. Most Asian nations also have a very powerful sense of post-colonial identity. This not only fosters quite a degree of suspicion of each other, but also weakens any sense of common purpose.29

The rise of Asia is one of the most important political and economic developments in the post-1945 era—if not the most significant development—but it is a complex process led by actors with very different political goals, worldviews, and institutions. Asia’s rise is not synonymous with the beckoning of an Asian century. For the foreseeable future, the liberal international order isn’t likely to be replaced by an Asian-led international order. But neither will the international order continue to be dominated by key Western powers as it was during the Cold War and until the outbreak of the global recession in 2008. In the interim, fluctuations, rather than deep structural changes, are likely to characterize the international system. The West is still likely to exert influence in world affairs, though not nearly as much as it did before, and its actions are going to be constrained by rising great powers such as China and, to a lesser degree, India. Moreover, falling defense budgets, mounting economic challenges, and the massive complexity of pronounced security threats such as the emergence of the Islamic State, maritime tensions in the South China Sea, failed states with growing nuclear arsenals (North Korea and Pakistan), and the crisis stemming from unprecedented international refugees will result in much higher thresholds for effective and collective action on the part of the Western powers. As Mark Urban of the BBC has written:

The U.S. and its NATO allies will find it increasingly difficult to protect their interests or to act for the broader good, as they did in reversing [then Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait in 1991 or in containing the Yugoslav wars a few years later. Instead they will more often find themselves watching from the side-lines as ungoverned space expands and the values