Cold War Mindset and Centrality

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A recent essay on Washington-Beijing relations wants us to believe that Western capitalism’s global rise was accomplished by playing fairly with the rest of the world.

Last week’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta once again demonstrated the paralysis of this decades-old multilateral forum as it faces the region’s increasingly fraught security dynamics. ASEAN tirelessly proclaims its “centrality” to the region, but its inability to develop a coherent response to Chinese aggression against several of the bloc’s members or the crisis in Myanmar has effectively killed that claim.

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Washington Cold War Mindset

By Marco Carnelos

A recent essay on Washington-Beijing relations wants us to believe that Western capitalism’s global rise was accomplished by playing fairly with the rest of the world.

Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and historian Niall Ferguson recently published an Economist essay on Washington-Beijing relations. They deserve a rebuke.

Their reflections note the differences between the 20th-century Cold War and the second one allegedly now taking place between the US and China. But they continue to be haunted by a Cold War mindset. 

They mistakenly convey the impression that only China has benefited from its opening to the international economy. They mention neither the huge benefits that US and EU corporate sectors got from outsourcing to China a large part of their manufacturing, essentially transferring to Asia all their supply chains; nor the astronomical profits they earned. 

Rice and Ferguson rightly recognise that China’s success cannot be explained only as intellectual-property theft - as many Western, uninformed opinion-makers and politicians tend to believe - but this is as far as they are willing to go towards offering a fair assessment of US-China relations.

They lament that “China had been chipping away at American power for years”. It is difficult to understand what their point is. Rice is a former secretary of state and Ferguson, in particular, has written excellent books on the rise of western capitalism. They should be aware more than anyone else that humankind’s history has been relentlessly characterised by nations chipping away power from other nations.

History, after all, has been a succession of empires taking over other empires. Do Rice and Ferguson mean to imply that for the American one, there is a sort of manifest destiny to maintain forever its global leadership, with no other nation able to do better?  

Some might object that China is challenging the US by not playing by the rules. This topic remains controversial, but leaving aside the similarly controversial question about who established such rules and how they have been applied in recent decades, do Rice and Ferguson really want us to believe that western capitalism’s global rise was accomplished by playing fairly with the rest of the world? Come on!

Capital sins

The two authors mistakenly provide the impression that the real problem with China started with President Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2013. They attribute two capital sins to him: speaking of “surpassing America in frontier technologies” and calling “the Taiwan Strait Chinese national waters”. Neither represents a fundamental threat to US national security. 

The first sin falls within the scope of lese-majeste. The hidden message conveyed by the two authors is that no nation, least of all communist China, should dare to challenge the American technological edge. Well, they are arriving late: China is already surpassing the US in some of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s leading technologies, from 5G to the Internet of Things, while moving to close the gap in semiconductors. 

The latest shock to Washington was Huawei announcing that its new Mate 60 Pro smartphone would be powered by a seven-nanometer processor - a project conceived, designed and built in China, without a single American component. It is hardly necessary to remember that the Chinese company has faced American sanctions and bullying for more than four years. 

If, after all this, Huawei has been able to unveil a mobile phone that could challenge the iPhone 14 and, possibly, the just-released iPhone 15, then perhaps Chinese leaders may wish for their whole technological sector to be placed under US sanctions.

The second capital sin concerns Taiwan. It is formulated obliquely by referring to the waters between the island and mainland China. No doubt, these are international waters, but the real issue here is China’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan, which could affect the breadth of the international waters in the Taiwan Strait. 

For the record, this issue was not created by Xi when he reached power a decade ago; China has asserted its rights vis-a-vis Taiwan for decades. In 1971, the United Nations voted to admit the People’s Republic of China (mainland China) and to expel the Republic of China (Taiwan). In a nutshell, there is only one China, but the US still arrogantly pretends to decide when this sovereignty can be effectively exercised.

All Chinese leaders, from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping up to Xi, have not changed their position, although the latter might have claimed China’s rights more assertively. On the contrary, the US has been gradually distancing itself from its One China policy - not formally, but through deliberate acts.

The more ludicrous complaint that Rice and Ferguson level against China is that it has “built an impressive global network of telecommunications infrastructure, underwater cables, port access and military bases … in client states”. Has the US done anything different in recent decades? 

Learning lessons

Washington and its Anglosphere clients (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) run the biggest system of interception and control over all communications on the planet, not even sparing their own allies; it is called Five Eyes. The US military has more than 800 bases spread around the globe, while China has just one military base outside its borders, in Djibouti.

Rice and Ferguson also note that “Chinese influence has evolved from pure mercantilism to a desire for political influence”. Again, has the US done anything different in its history, at least from 1898 (the Spanish-American War) onwards? Does the 1823 Monroe Doctrine sound familiar to Rice and Ferguson?

In essence, all the complaints they level against China are a monumental case of the pot calling the kettle black. Both appear to want the US to take advantage of Chinese missteps. But so far, it has been exclusively China taking advantage of serial US missteps. 

The two academics are right to assert that the US and China should “avoid accidental war”, and similarly right to blame China for its unwillingness to discuss accident prevention. But in Chinese tradition, form is substance; how could the two nations agree on accident prevention while the Chinese defence minister is under US sanctions? 

Furthermore, the US has a massive military deployment along Chinese coasts, with bases in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Maybe this is an element of wider context that Rice and Ferguson should have considered to make their arguments more academically fair. In other words, who is really threatening whom?

Finally, they reference former American diplomat George Kennan’s 1946 “long telegram” on the Soviet Union, and hint at a possible Chinese implosion ahead. They should be careful what they wish for. A Chinese implosion would have devastating consequences for the stability of East Asia and the global economy. Large parts of Chinese policy over the past several decades have been specifically targeted at avoiding such an eventuality.

Rice and Ferguson would do better to keep in mind another of Kennan’s far more relevant lessons on Nato’s eastward expansion, which today has thrown Russia into China’s arms. Yet, the biggest lesson here is that when missteps are involved, US and Western democracies are second to none.

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With ASEAN Paralyzed, Southeast Asia Seeks New Security Ties

By Derek Grossman

Last week’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta once again demonstrated the paralysis of this decades-old multilateral forum as it faces the region’s increasingly fraught security dynamics. ASEAN tirelessly proclaims its “centrality” to the region, but its inability to develop a coherent response to Chinese aggression against several of the bloc’s members or the crisis in Myanmar has effectively killed that claim.

When the bloc was established in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand (with Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam joining later), the group’s stated intent was to cooperate to preserve regional stability and peace. Yet today, ASEAN faces the greatest risk since its inception of failing to achieve this fundamental goal. Much of the blame goes to the bloc’s consensus principle, which requires all nations to agree on a policy before proceeding. Indeed, the lack of ASEAN consensus has paralyzed its response to key security challenges.

Of course, the most pressing security challenge currently facing ASEAN is the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, which threatens renewed war in the region. China has made expansive sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, embroiling it in maritime territorial disputes with Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Beijing bases its claims on its own narrative of historical territorial rights, whereas ASEAN and the United States uphold existing international law and norms that define maritime boundaries. Despite ASEAN’s official support of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which codifies these laws and norms, only the individual member states on whose maritime territories China has encroached have spoken out and are willing to do anything about it.

For example, following the release of Beijing’s new official map of China in late August, the affected ASEAN nations except Brunei pushed back on the map’s expansive boundaries in the South China Sea. (China’s map also claims territories that India and Russia consider theirs.) At the summit, ASEAN chair Indonesia abstractly emphasized the need to “strengthen stability in the maritime sphere in our region … and explore new initiatives toward these ends,” but the bloc could not come up with any unified or actionable response. Instead, the summit communiqué noted that ASEAN members maintain a “shared commitment to safeguarding and promoting peace, security, and stability in the South China Sea, particularly given the recent development”—language that painstakingly avoided mentioning either China or the map. Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, when asked directly about the map by a reporter, ignored the question.

Another issue paralyzing ASEAN is how to handle fellow member Myanmar, which is mired in a brutal civil war following a coup in February 2021. ASEAN aims to skip over the junta-led nation’s scheduled chairmanship in 2026, replacing it with the Philippines. But the group could not muster any actionable policy on Myanmar, merely lamenting the fact that ASEAN’s “Five-Point Consensus,” which calls for peaceful negotiations among “all parties concerned” as well as access to the country by a special ASEAN envoy, has failed. In typical talk-shop fashion, ASEAN members simply stated that they “were gravely concerned by the lack of substantial progress on the implementation by the authority in Myanmar.”

Because ASEAN lacks the ability or will to act, individual ASEAN members are building their own bilateral partnerships and coalitions. The Philippines has been particularly besieged by Beijing’s recent antics, including the Chinese Coast Guard’s firing of a water cannon against a Philippine resupply mission in the Spratly Islands last month and China’s use of a “military-grade” laser to blind an earlier Philippine mission in February. Hoping to deter further Chinese incursions, Manila has strengthened its treaty alliance with Washington by expanding access by the U.S. military to several bases across the country, including air and naval facilities in Cagayan, which lies just opposite of Taiwan on the northeastern tip of Luzon Island.

Vietnam took matters into its own hands as well. China continues to harass Vietnamese fishing boats and natural resource exploration activities in the latter’s internationally recognized exclusive economic zone. A Chinese Coast Guard water cannon attack against Vietnamese fishermen late last month prompted Hanoi to elevate its partnership with Washington from “comprehensive” to “comprehensive strategic.” The historic upgrade following U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Hanoi last weekend was even more remarkable because Vietnam skipped the intermediate level of “strategic” partnership and placed the United States on par with China in Vietnam’s hierarchy of foreign relationships. Hanoi has traditionally been exceptionally incremental and cautious in its relations with Washington in order to avoid unnecessarily angering Beijing. For Vietnam to take such a bold step strongly suggests that it felt it had no better option. No doubt Hanoi’s action was driven at least in part by ASEAN’s continued inaction regarding Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. Even when Vietnam held the chairmanship in 2020, it was unable to push its partners toward a concrete response.

Indonesia is also increasingly wary of China’s plans in the disputed region. Although not an official maritime claimant against China, Jakarta nearly came to blows with Beijing in late 2019 and early 2020 over Chinese Coast Guard ships and fishing boats encroaching into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone. The tensions focused on the waters surrounding Indonesia’s Natuna Islands, which overlap slightly with the southern tip of China’s nine-dash line in the South China Sea. In recent years, the two sides have quietly repaired bilateral ties mainly through economic engagement. But Jakarta’s lingering security concerns are pushing it closer to Washington. In June, for example, the U.S. Air Force was given first-ever clearance to land two B-52 strategic bombers on Indonesian soil. Last month, Jakarta opened the second iteration of the multinational Super Garuda Shield military exercise with fellow ASEAN member Singapore, as well as Australia, Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. The exercise features combat training such as amphibious, airborne, and airfield seizure operations.

The Philippines is also not waiting for the bloc to act. It has been expanding its multilateral security arrangements with other partners in order to bolster deterrence of China in the South China Sea. Late last month, when Manila was briefed on joint U.S.-Australian-Japanese naval exercises, a Philippine official said that the country is open to participating in the future. Last week, Manila and Canberra elevated their bilateral ties to a strategic partnership, in large part to counter Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. The Philippines has also welcomed the support of minilateral security groups outside ASEAN, including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and the Australia-United Kingdom-United States security pact (AUKUS). By contrast, other ASEAN members (with the sole exception of Singapore) are generally either silent about these groups or raise concerns, as Indonesia and Malaysia have done with respect to AUKUS.

ASEAN’s paralysis over Myanmar has also prompted at least two members to seek alternative solutions. In early 2022, for example, Cambodia—while it held the rotating ASEAN chair—engaged in what was derided as “cowboy diplomacy” with the Burmese junta. Cambodia’s then-prime minister, Hun Sen, bucked the bloc’s Five-Point Consensus by traveling to Naypyidaw and meeting directly with junta leader Min Aung Hlaing in an attempt to legitimize the regime and reverse its blacklisted status. In the end, Phnom Penh backed away from the plan, but the intent to go around ASEAN was clear.

More recently, Thailand, which shares a long border with Myanmar, also decided to circumvent ASEAN by engaging with the regime directly. In July, Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai met with jailed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi—which would not have been possible without first securing the regime’s permission. Earlier, in December 2022, Thailand organized a multilateral discussion between the junta’s then-foreign minister, Wunna Maung Lwin, and representatives from several ASEAN members, including Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Other ASEAN members were also invited but declined. The Thai Foreign Ministry tried to paper over divisions by declaring that “the consultation was a non-ASEAN meeting but intended to complement ASEAN’s ongoing collective efforts to find a peaceful political resolution.”

ASEAN’s latest summit simply reconfirms the long-standing argument that the forum is unwilling or unable to deal with increasingly acute regional challenges. As a result, ASEAN members have and will inevitably continue to seek out alternative paths, whether bilaterally or multilaterally, to resolve contentious issues. Besides creating coalitions of the willing among themselves, they will also look beyond ASEAN to partners such as Australia, Japan, and the United States, as well as, increasingly, countries such as India and South Korea.

At the ASEAN summit, Indonesian President Joko Widodo warned against the bloc getting swept up in great-power rivalry and being held hostage by the crisis in Myanmar. Instead, he stated, “I see it as Indonesia’s task, along with other ASEAN countries, to ensure that the ship of ASEAN must continue to sail.” With the bloc’s continued inaction, however, the ship seems to have sailed without ASEAN on board.

Derek Grossman is a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp., an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, and a former daily intelligence briefer to the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs. Twitter: @DerekJGrossman