I don’t share the US FP handwringing over Trump’s retreat
from overarching multilateral initiatives in favor of bilateral engagements in
Asia.
The point of the complex multi-lateral arrangements—the pivot,
rebalance, whatever you want to call it, and TPP—were intended to position the
United States as the “indispensable nation” in Asia, the glue that was needed
to hold these various rickety structures together.
I considered these regimes to be weak, unsustainable in the
long term, and excessively costly in the short term.
As an example, under the pivot it would be necessary to
think seriously about some kind of regime modification in the Philippines to
neutralize Rodrigo Duterte’s hostility to the US military and sustain the
fiction of a military and diplomatic united front against the PRC.
Trump can either accommodate Duterte or overthrow him
depending on the bilateral advantages he sees in the relationship. And Duterte can bargain for the US alliance
while keeping a door open to China.
I guess the terms of art are “independent foreign policies”
for the Asian countries, “offshore rebalancing” for the US. Maybe. Apparently, the rise of Trump, otherwise
lamented by respectable FP practitioners, is causing a certain amount of heavy
breathing in the Walt-Mearsheimer quadrant.
The Trump shock helped reveal the mindset and strategies of
US globalists who had assigned the United States the role of indispensable
nation in the “principled international order”.
In my most recent Asia Times piece, Atlas Stumbled, I wrote about an interesting interview
Paul Krugman gave to VOA, in which he opines that one consequence of the
deterioration of the globalist financial regime under Trump & Brexit is
that “China will be too big to save” once its chickens of massive indebtedness and
faltering economic reform come home to roost.
Krugman’s bitter Cassandra-ism offers an interesting
perspective on what I think was an important but shaky pillar of the pivot, the
assertion that “the United States is 6000 miles away but will always be in
Asia; the PRC/CCP regime is near the center of Asia but will vanish within a
decade or two.”
The message that the United States discreetly whispered in
Asia’s ear was Chinese power is corrupt and fleeting; America’s power is pure
and eternal, so place your bets with the pivot-enhanced Uncle Sam as the
enduring Asian power, in other words.
Welp, as they say on the Internet.
I think the theoretical underpinnings of this approach is
what I choose to call “Shambaughism”.
David
Shambaugh was an original proponent of the “responsible stakeholder” strategy,
by which the PRC would be allowed to enter the international order and in
return it would ineluctably liberalize its politics and economics and become a
friendly partner of the United States.
Well, that didn’t happen for a number of reasons, one of
which I suspect was the geopolitical hollowing out of the US thanks to its orgy
of debt finance that nourished the PRC export machine, and the 2008-9 Great
Recession. Anyway, today’s PRC/CCP is
not too liberal and not too friendly.
Shambaugh naturally preferred to question the PRC/CCP’s
wisdom instead of the wisdom of his own theory, so he began promoting the
concept of the coming PRC/CCP crackup.
During the administration of Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton, China collapsism became intellectually respectable (i.e. more than a
Gordon Chang obsession) and was a ready-made and critical theoretical premise
for the pivot which, in an environment of declining US relative power, offered
a narrow but plausible path to the objective of PRC rollback (and a broad,
endless highway to enrichment and influence for pivot-oriented think tanks and
the US military).
To raid the metaphor chest, the King Canute in the
advancing tide scenario was not the United States confronting the inevitable
erosion of its power and influence as its relative strength in Asia declined;
the vulnerable monarch on the throne was the CCP, vainly trying to wish away
the inexorable advance of globalized liberal values.
My personal conclusion is that everybody’s wrong! nobody knows anything! and Asia
will reveal itself as a welter of relatively high-functioning states that will
find a way to muddle through without the guiding genius of the United States
and without submitting themselves to CCP bondage.
Hope so, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment