Is America winning in Asia?

In an earlier article in this space I wrote that President Joe Biden, having been distracted by the war in Ukraine, had finally turned his attention to Asia. But the way Biden’s Washington defined Asia excluded Pakistan. A great deal of attention was being given to India. The main reason for this was the growing competition between China and the United States — now the world’s two largest economies. Some analysts believe that even with a significant slowdown in the rate of growth of the Chinese economy, China will overtake the United States in terms of the size of its economy in a decade or two. Would this happen without an open conflict between the two nations? President Biden has said that “the United States won’t stand by and let China win the 21^st century.”

This sentiment was in line with the thinking of Thucydides, the Greek sage-historian who studied the conflict between Athens and Sparta and argued that conflict is inevitable when a rising power challenges the one that has been in command for a long time. The Harvard University political scientist Graham T Allison coined the term ‘Thucydides Trap’ in an article published in The Financial Times in 2012 to describe the likely conflict between a rising and an established power. He used the term to describe the growing tension between the United States and China and feared that America may go to war to prevent China from becoming the dominant world power.

According to Susannah Patton who researches Indo-Pacific strategy at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia and is the director of the Asia Power Index, her data show that the United States leverage has declined in terms of regional power dynamics. Twenty years ago, 5 per cent of exports from Southeast Asia went to China and 16 per cent to the United States. By 2020, they were both around 15 per cent. China’s increasing economic dominance was shown by the trends in regional trade. It does around two and half times more volume in the region than the United States. China is now the largest trading partner of almost every Asian country. The situation would turn even more in favour of China when the enormous amount of investment it was making in what President Xi Jinping has called the Belt and Road Initiative or BRI. Two countries are central players in this investment programme. Pakistan and Kazakhstan provide China with the links it needs to connect to the world on its western side. The port of Gwadar on the Balochistan coast in Pakistan will be linked by several motorways to Xinjiang, a restive region in China. If the present plans were implemented Gwadar could become one of Asia’s major ports.

This initiative will overcome the advantage the Americans enjoyed in terms of their vibrant private sector. However, even that edge was eroding quite quickly. In 2018, 10-year cumulative investments from China to other countries in the region were half of those of the United States. They are now 75 per cent of the US total and increasing. It is these trends that persuaded the administration headed by President Barack Obama to work hard and launch the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) which would have become the largest trade bloc ever. Obama kept China out of the agreement. Beijing responded by creating a separate regional trade grouping. It was called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, RCEP. But Donald Trump was eager to reduce the scope of all the policy initiatives his predecessor took and pulled out of the TPP. This move was a gift to China.

In her assessment Patton suggests that the Biden administration should summon the political will to rejoin the TPP as well as the RECP. The framework the American president proposed on the final day of his visit to South Korea was not as attractive for Asia as was the TPP since it did not promise greater access to the participants in the American markets. Its focus was largely on investments, particularly in the areas in which the Asian countries had great interest. The Biden administration expects that at least 10 countries will agree to join the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the IPEF, negotiations. The group included India. The framework was not as broad as the TPP but as one former trade official told David Ignatius from whose work I will turn to later that it’s “a mechanism for getting the U.S. back to the table to engage, to show leadership on issues that matter.”

David Ignatius who writes on global strategic issues in his columns for The Washington Post believes that China’s recent economic difficulties form an unexpected backdrop for the American approach to Asia. Reversals in the property, technology and financial sectors, along with new Covid-19 lockdowns, have led the International Monetary Fund to lower their growth path for China in the current fiscal year to 4.4 per cent, According to Ignatius, “Some analysts think growth will actually be much slower, and that at current rates, the Chinese economy might not surpass that of the United States by the end of this decade, as many had — or perhaps not ever.”

Returning to the work of Ignatius whose column I am using here was written before Biden embarked on his Asian visit, “Biden’s trip to Asia will offer a powerful tableau of the United States’ greatest global strength, which is its network of partnership with strong democracies. Biden is scheduled to visit with South Korea’s new president and then with the leaders India, Japan and Australia who are American partners in the so-called Quad.” An area where America’s policymakers had believed their country and its political system had a great deal from which Asian nations could borrow. But that was before some in the United States saw a serious setback in the way the country was governing itself. It had some serious corrections to make in its style of governance before it could tell Asia that its system was something they could seriously look at.

After having set the example the rest of the world could follow in developing their political systems, Americans have begun to lose confidence in their own structure. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seemed to many that Western style liberal democracy was the system the world should follow for its own good. President George Washington in his celebrated 1796 farewell address cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned. In their review of recent American political history, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who unearthed what came to be called the Watergate conspiracy wrote that “two of Washington’s successors — Richard Nixon and Donald Trump — demonstrate the shocking genius of our first president.”

Even more than Nixon, Trump did greater harm to the American democracy and its reputation abroad. There is now a big and growing shelf of books on the way Trump, America’s 45^th president, has brought the American political system to its knees. It is a subject I will revisit a few times in these articles. For the moment I will quote once again from the Woodward-Bernstein review: “Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually all means. In leaning so heavily on these dark impulses, they defined two of the most dangerous and troubling eras in American history.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 13^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.