Divide et Impera

G7 and G20 divisions threaten ASEAN, historical ignorance and utopian expectations cloud Western response to Ukraine, Blinken "We do not support Taiwan independence"

Jun 23, 2023

UPDATE: The recent G7 summit in Hiroshima and the subsequent G20 tourism meeting in Kashmir underscored the stark contrast between the two groups’ rhetoric. While the G20 emphasized its “one Earth, one family, one future” motto, the G7’s combative attitude could be summarized as “We must divorce China.”

The Russo-Ukrainian War has raged since February 23, 2022 with historical ignorance and utopian expectations clouding the Western response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. But this time, there has yet to be an acknowledgement of the most relevant fact on the ground, namely the deep divide in Ukraine between the Galician Party, rooted in the west of the country and now dominant in Kiev, which is committed to expunging any Russian cultural and spiritual presence in Ukraine, and the Muscovite Party, which sees Russia and Ukraine not as enemies but as spiritual, if not exactly political, brothers.

"We do not support Taiwan independence." These were perhaps the most important six words spoken by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his China visit. They signalled the end of several years of deliberate ambiguity, vacillation and provocation in relation to U.S. policy.

ASEAN Between the US and China

By Lili Yan Ing

The recent G7 summit in Hiroshima and the subsequent G20 tourism meeting in Kashmir underscored the stark contrast between the two groups’ rhetoric. While the G20 emphasized its “one Earth, one family, one future” motto, the G7’s combative attitude could be summarized as “We must divorce China.”

For the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), decoupling is not an option. While the region could benefit from production and investment shifting away from China to ASEAN countries, a full economic decoupling between the Chinese economy and the West could also result in trade diversion, higher production costs, and reduced welfare over the long term.

The push to decouple the American and European economies from China currently seems to be limited to sectors such as energy, semiconductors, information and communication technology, mining, and minerals. But decoupling is expected to affect nearly every industry, including machinery, mechanical appliances, electrical components, and automobiles.

Given that ASEAN economies are equally dependent on the United States, the European Union, China, and East Asia, the bloc must maintain neutrality, refrain from taking sides, and strengthen cooperation. By leveraging their growing economic and political influence, member states could promote peace, foster cooperation, and increase engagement with the international community.

Amid the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, ASEAN countries must also deepen regional economic integration. Over the past two decades, intra-ASEAN trade as a share of members’ total trade has stagnated at around 22-23%. To be sure, members’ exports to the rest of the world have increased over this period. But ASEAN countries’ share of global trade barely increased between 2000 and 2022, growing from 6.4% to 7.8%.

There are three possible explanations for the stagnation of intra-ASEAN trade since the turn of the century. The first is the region’s model of shallow integration. Because most ASEAN-made products are substitutes rather than complements, the scope for increased trade between members is inherently limited.

Second, stricter rules of origin and non-tariff measures could act as trade barriers. While these regulations and procedures are aimed at ensuring health, safety, and environmental protections, their design and implementation can inadvertently impede trade and investment.

Lastly, it is important to recognize that ASEAN is not a self-contained region. Member states rely heavily on investment and technology from countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China. And while the bloc functions as a united group, it is not a customs union, which means that member states may engage with other countries or blocs on their own. This flexibility enables members to pursue their own interests and seek diverse partnerships and agreements while maintaining the cohesion and vitality of the ASEAN community.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes all ten ASEAN countries, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, is a case in point. Representing roughly one-third of global GDP and one-quarter of the world’s total trade and investment, the RCEP is the world’s largest free-trade area, and its aim is to foster greater trade integration by reducing tariffs on 90% of product lines.

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (previously known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership) is another example. Since 2018, four ASEAN countries – Singapore, Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia – have joined the CPTPP, which accounts for roughly 13% of global GDP and aims to reduce tariffs on 98% of product lines.

The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), a newly established grouping launched by US President Joe Biden’s administration in May 2022, also seeks to foster regional partnerships. But the agreement has faced criticism for being exclusionary and divisive. In addition to the US, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and New Zealand, seven ASEAN countries – Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Brunei – have joined the IPEF. But Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar have been left out of this new framework.

Such exclusions could exacerbate economic disparities between ASEAN members and heighten regional tensions, offsetting the benefits of existing mega-regional trade agreements, such as the RCEP. Some critics have argued that the IPEF is largely symbolic and intended to appeal to American voters rather than implement effective policies that benefit its members. Likewise, trade ministers from across the Indo-Pacific recently convened in Detroit to discuss a series of measures aimed at bolstering supply chains for essential goods, such as semiconductors and critical minerals. But the agreement they reached lacks clear policy objectives beyond reducing dependency on China.

Given that they cannot afford to decouple from either side, the escalating rivalry between China and the West puts ASEAN countries in a difficult position. Trade between the bloc’s member states and Europe more than tripled between 2000 and 2022, from $110.5 billion to $342.3 billion. Similarly, ASEAN’s trade with the US surged from $135.1 billion to $452.2 billion. ASEAN exports to the US nearly quadrupled from $87.9 billion to $356.7 billion over the same period.

At the same time, trade between ASEAN and China reached $975.3 billion in 2022, an astounding 24-fold increase from 2000. ASEAN countries’ exports to China increased by a factor of 18 during this period, from $22.2 billion to $408.1 billion.

Moreover, East Asia, the US, and the EU are all significant sources of foreign direct investment in ASEAN countries. In 2021, East Asian countries accounted for 33% of total FDI in the region, while the US and EU accounted for 22% and 15%, respectively.

Given the depth of these economic ties, urging ASEAN countries to decouple from China is deeply unfair. It is also short-sighted, because decoupling would undermine trade and economic development within the bloc, fueling political instability across the region.

Read full article here.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

By Daniel J. Mahoney (edited)

Since the Maidan Revolution of 2014, secretly encouraged and strongly supported by the United States, the Galician Party has been triumphant, encouraging the comprehensive de-Russification of Ukraine, even if Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians and the majority of them speak Russian at home. Fourteen thousand Russophone Ukrainians were killed in “anti-terrorist” campaigns in the east of the country after the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014 (which had been arbitrarily zoned to Ukraine by then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 at a time when intra-Soviet Union “borders” did not really matter). There was brutality on the “separatist” side, too. Compounding matters, the new Ukrainian government made no serious effort to implement the Minsk II agreements of 2015. These would have given language rights and some cultural autonomy to the Donbas (and other Russian-oriented regions in the east of the country) and might have helped defuse the situation.

The mainstream narrative passes over all of this in silence, or near silence, when its purveyors talk about the sources of the present conflict. The truth, however, is much more complicated. As Nicolai Petro lays out with impressive equanimity in his recent book The Tragedy of Ukraine, the Galician Party has its roots in the nationalist ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This underground organization formed the basis of Stepan Bandera’s anti-Soviet resistance movement during and after World War II. One is obliged to have some sympathy for the Banderites, who were caught between the conflicting evils of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. However, as Petro demonstrates, that movement advocated what its chief ideologue called “Ukrainian spiritual totalitarianism.” It hated Russia far more passionately than it opposed Communism. The Russian government’s constant claim about Ukraine being a nation of Nazis is crude and hyperbolic. But important currents of Ukrainian nationalism then and now continue to have unsavory political views and connections. Groups such as the Svoboda Party and the Azov Battalion (major actors behind the 2014 Maidan rebellion) are hardly fighting for “liberal,” “democratic,” and “European” values as our political and media elites endlessly repeat. While a liberal, or at least a moderate, current is present among Ukrainian nationalists, it is far from dominant. To say that “Ukraine is fighting for democracy” is far from the truth on the ground.

As for Russia, to draw on a famous remark by Talleyrand, its invasion of Ukraine was “worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.” This point has been made brilliantly in a series of essays by the foreign policy analyst Srdja Trifkovic in Chronicles Magazine. Trifkovic is not insensitive to Moscow’s legitimate grievances, including reckless efforts to expand NATO to include Ukraine, which run counter to the deep historical and cultural connections between Russia and Ukraine, not to mention Russia’a legitimate security interests in that part of the world. But as Trifkovic points out, if Russia’s goal remains the “demilitarization” of Ukraine, the invasion has hardly served that purpose. Quite the contrary. Indeed, as Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in the pages of the Claremont Review of Books, Ukraine, with massive NATO support, is the most militarized society on earth. That process had already begun after the Maidan Revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea. The United States was the principal architect of this policy of massive militarization in response to the allegedly global threat of Russian “imperialism.” Here was what could call a “self-fulfilling analysis.”

Richard Pipes, the famed historian of Russia, was hardly reticent about his disdain for Russian political culture, which he associated quite one-sidedly with antisemitism and “patrimonial despotism.” But in a conversation with me at a conference on the Cold War at Hillsdale College in the fall of 2009, he proclaimed his vehement opposition to NATO expansion to include Ukraine and Georgia. Even the most liberal-minded and pro-Western Russians, he suggested, would find such a move threatening and destabilizing, an “existential threat” to the Russian nation, just as Americans would be alarmed by Russian troops in Canada or Mexico. But in the 14 years since Pipes made those remarks, the ability of the Western political class to look at things even provisionally from the Russian perspective—a sine qua non of geostrategic thinking—has nearly disappeared.

In fact, our response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by little or no soul-searching about our own significant role in the unfolding of the tragedy. Instead, we are subjected to endless moralistic effusions about Russian perfidy and the purity of the Ukrainian cause. In his fine recent book, The Roadto Ukraine: How the West Lost Its Way (please note the subtitle), the eminent sociologist Frank Furedi suggests that Western elites were so committed to “endism” (the “End of History,” facile humanitarianism, the end of war especially for the European avant-garde of humanity) that they could only see this essentially regional conflict, borne of conflicting interests and borders, as a massive assault on the post-political ethos of Western elites. Add to this dogmatic identification of Russia with the Soviet Union in many establishment conservative circles, and the Left’s disdain for the social conservatism of the Russian people, and the ground is set for angry moralism as a substitute for principled but realistic judgment in approaching relations with post-Communist Russia.

There are consequences for these precipitous moralistic judgments. The indefinite continuation of the conflict in Ukraine risks leaving that country as a charnel house, a victim of Western moralism as much as Russian aggression. In Russia itself, the regime has hardened with draconian (and ultimately counterproductive) punishments for open opposition to the war, and a growing fixation with “Nazi” efforts to surround and subvert historic Russia. The rhetoric of Russia’s ruling political class has grown more brutal and crass.

Contrary to legend, Putin has never been particularly nostalgic for Bolshevism. He strongly supported the teaching of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russian high schools. But in February, a leader of Putin’s United Russia Party in the Duma called for eliminating “garbage” such as The Gulag Archipelago from the school curriculum, surely an ominous sign. Thankfully, other members of the ruling party strongly responded to this crude assault on Russian national memory and the greatest anti-totalitarian masterpiece of our time. For the time being, Solzhenitsyn remains in the school curriculum. But there is no doubt that Russia is moving in the wrong direction, in part because of Western imprudence and also because of the ossification of a political order that lacks sufficient civic openness and vitality.

In truth, Solzhenitsyn represents a fundamental example for the future of a decent Russia: an unwavering defense of conscience and human dignity, an adamant refusal to conflate the best of historic Russia with crude authoritarianism or soul-destroying totalitarianism, a humane, moderate, and self-limiting nationalism or patriotism, and a desire for equitable dealings between Russia and Ukraine. Extreme Ukrainian nationalists hated him and all things Russian. But he never reciprocated such hatred.

In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, the great Russian writer lambasted his fellow Russians for turning a blind eye to legitimate Ukrainian grievances over the centuries. He believed Ukraine should be free to go its own way but not with unjust “Leninist” borders left over from the Soviet period. In Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn eloquently reminded his Ukrainian interlocutors that both the Ukrainian and Russian peoples were victims of an inhuman ideology built on the twin foundation of violence and mendacity. Famine, terror, and collectivization afflicted both great peoples, even if Ukrainians suffered particularly cruelly in 1932 and 1933. Shared opposition to totalitarianism ought to shape and deepen common bonds built in suffering and a shared defense of human dignity. Like most Russians, Solzhenitsyn opposed indefinite NATO expansion (he died in 2008). But half-Russian and half-Ukrainian himself, he once wrote that “If, God forbid, there is war between Russia and Ukraine, I will have nothing to do with it, nor will I permit my sons to join.” Solzhenitsyn is a living reproach to the extreme nationalists on both sides: his repeated calls for “repentance and self-limitation” can perhaps challenge and modify the thinking of frenzied partisans.

We in the United States (and the West more broadly) must not associate legitimate opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with enduring animosity to all things Russian or support for the exclusion of Russia from the community of nations. That is neither just nor in our national interest. Moreover, serious investigation and reflection upon our own culpability in the tragedy is necessary if we are not to give rise to a dangerous and eventually tragic escalation of enmity and conflict between East and West. That is a much-needed first step in avoiding a fatal fall into the abyss.

Read full article here.

Blinken's defining six words of stability

By Daryl Guppy

In six clear words, Blinken pulled the rug out from under recent U.S. military policy that was increasingly built around the false ideas that China's Taiwan region would be attacked by Chinese mainland and that this would trigger an inevitable China-U.S. conflict.

This is a narrative widely promoted in Western media despite China's frequent statements for peaceful reunification. The narrative started life as an unlikely potential scenario, but supported by Western media, it was rapidly given the ring of "certainty."

China-hawk politicians added to the narrative. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch-dominated media ran front page stories on the inevitability of an armed conflict. These stories, quoting U.S. funded think tanks like the Australian Security Policy Institute and others in the employ of the U.S., made the prospect of conflict seem unavoidable.

In part, the Defence Strategic Review prepared by Australia was based on the prospect of this "inevitable" conflict. The purchase of nuclear submarines and the foundation of AUKUS were to a significant degree underpinned by the idea of an inevitable conflict initiated by events around the Taiwan region.

In just six words, Blinken has removed those foundations of policy leaving Australia stranded with an eye-wateringly expensive contribution to the U.S. economy and arms industry.

Blinken's six words are a welcome clarification of U.S. policy, but they are neither definitive nor bonding. If definitive, then we would expect to see U.S. President Joe Biden endorsing these clear commitments. To date, this has not happened. Although we can assume that Blinken spoke with the authorization of the president, we cannot assume that President Biden will stick to this clear policy affirmation during the upcoming election campaign.

Blinken's affirmation is not binding on any new incoming U.S. President. The 2024 elections may see the return of Donald Trump, or some other right-wing anti-China hawk. They may seek a return to ambiguity or outright abandonment of the policy.

However, there is at least a 12-month window of opportunity for de-escalation. Whilst no major progress was made on a range of contentious issues, it was the reopening of discussion after five years that was in itself the most important outcome. The meetings were an opportunity to clarify positions away from media hype and domestic political point scoring. The meetings laid the foundations for further discussions around specific issues.

It's against this background that Blinken introduced this subtle but important shift in what had become an ambivalent U.S. policy toward Taiwan, vis-a-vis China. This reaffirmation of the previous United Nations endorsed policy position will enrage those who want war with China, but it signals intelligent and thoughtful heads are finally prevailing.

Those who seek to undermine any restoration of normal relations between China and the U.S. cannot be underestimated. Blinken's previously planned visit to China was sabotaged with the discovery of a wayward weather balloon. The balloon had been on the radar for nearly two weeks before its "discovery" was leaked to national media.

This visit by Blinken was subject to another sabotage attempt with the fortuitous "discovery" leaked to the media about some alleged Chinese facilities in Cuba, seemingly another attempt to sabotage Blinken's visit.

The Western media believes the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a critical sign of Beijing's willingness to engage with Washington and stave off a dangerous deterioration in relations between the two superpowers. This is a face-saving conclusion that simply ignores the explicit return to the United Nations position in the U.S. policy approach.

Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, remarked that a choice needs to be made between dialogue and confrontation as well as cooperation and conflict. Blinken's six words show that a positive choice has been made. And hope the U.S. will stick its actions to its words.

Read full article here.

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