Cold War Heats Up in Asia

The People’s Republic of China decided to defy the “pivot to Asia” by parking its HYSY 981 drilling platform—protected by a flotilla of various vessels perhaps not including PLAN ships-- in waters that Vietnam considers part of its EEZ.

Vietnam has been displeased, to put it mildly.  It has reached out to the Philippines, indicating that it may support Manila’s legal challenge to the nine-dash-line or perhaps institute a legal case of its own.

A Vietnamese deputy prime minister is also visiting Washington DC at US Secretary of State John Kerry's invitation, apparently to provide optics for an expected US congressional resolution condemning PRC activities in the South China Sea.  The visit also raises the specter (for the PRC) of a US return to Cam Ranh Bay, the massive US-built naval base on the southish Vietnamese coast.

Many Western observers believe that the PRC has blundered into the pivot’s clever trap, and its aggressive moves are simply driving its neighbors into the welcoming arms of the United States, enabling a more forward military presence for the US around China’s borders, and justifying US claims to a central role in the region as security guarantor.

I suspect, however, that the PRC has gamed this out and is willing to roll the dice in the South China Sea.  

The long-term view from Beijing, I think, is that China occupies enough islands to move beyond the hard to defend “cow tongue” claim to a more defensible island sovereignty + EEZ formula for pursuing its interests in the SCS; China’s growing economic and military heft, its ability to limit the terms of dispute to economic terms, the unresolved issues of EEZ ambiguity, definition, and enforcement, and the PRC’s unwillingness to budge from its positions will force its neighbors to come to terms, albeit reluctantly and resentfully, over the long haul.

East China Sea is a different matter.  

On the issue of the Senkakus, the “possession is 9/10s of the law” shoe is on Japan’s foot.  Furthermore, the islands are unambiguously included in the scope of the US-Japan security treaty thanks to President Obama’s statement during his recent pivot tour to Asia (even though the US doesn’t recognize Japanese sovereignty over the islands; that’s another story), and Japan’s military infrastructure and capabilities to defend them are increasing.  Assuming that Prime Minister Abe is able to thread the needle through the Japanese constitution and past the suspicious Japanese public and institute “collective self defense”, Japanese military power will be augmented by its ability to engage in “defensive” military activity while conducting joint operations with the US.

I read the red tea leaves and believe that the PRC does not have a realistic expectation of seizing the Senkakus or otherwise changing the status quo vis a vis Japan over the islands.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the PRC has few serious intentions of occupying the Senkakus and foments tension simply as a “pricetag” retaliation for Japan’s increasingly overt and aggressive anti-PRC foreign policy.

With the PRC deterred from making a genuine move against the Senkakus, the dominant dynamic in the East China Sea will be of Japan trying to achieve unity of doctrine and response with the United States for a contain-China policy, while the PRC will be trying to wedge US and Japan.

The process plays out with Japan’s invocation of “gray zone crises” i.e. friction with the PRC manifested in non-military ways.  Japan is trying to establish a definition of gray zone conflicts that permits a military response to a non-military scenario such as the PRC's ceaseless salami-slicing, and thereby gets the United States on the hook to provide backup muscle for the Japanese move.  I see this as Japan's desired quid pro quo for signing on to "collective self defense".

One scenario I saw involved “armed Chinese fishermen” i.e. the idea that the PRC might try to seize the Senkakus with some kind of irregular force that the coast guard couldn't handle, and would require an SDF response even though PLA forces nominally weren't involved.  As the United States digests the Crimea annexation precedent, expect Japan to invoke this kind of scenario more frequently.

The United States, whose primary interest is to get Japan on the hook for US military adventures, not the other way around, is apparently resistant to nailing down the “gray zone conflict” definition and giving Japan a green light (or at least a blinking yellow) for pushing back on the PRC, especially in murky a.k.a. "gray" clashes between Japanese and PRC vessels on the high seas.

Indeed, the gray zone problem neatly crystallizes the whole problem of the pivot: that it creates a moral hazard (in Western terms) or emboldens US allies (the PRC formulation) to engage in reckless behavior not necessarily advantageous to US interests, specifically the US interest in not engaging in a scorched earth economic conflict with the PRC for the sake of some uninhabited rocks.

Failing a meeting of the minds on “gray zone” conflicts, Japan has to content itself with provocations against the PRC in the hope that a PRC over-reaction will compel the US to expand its de facto security guarantees to Japan.

I place the recent contretemps over the close-quarters flyby conducted by Chinese fighter jets against Japanese military surveillance aircraft in the area of the joint PRC-Russia naval exercise in the category of a provocation, committed with an awareness of growing US disgruntlement with the PRC as well as the Obama administration's need to explicitly stand with allies post-Crimea.

Western media has reliably regurgitated Japanese government spin that the flyby was some recklessly aggressive behavior by the PRC.

However, facts indicate that the Chinese military posted a no-fly/no sail notification concerning the naval exercise and Japan flew over there anyway. 

 

The only justification that Japan can offer is that it refuses to recognize the PRC ADIZ over the East China Sea.  In fact, the incident shows why it’s important to respect other countries’ declared ADIZs and in fact the reckless party in this episode was not the PRC, but Japan.  In terms of unintended consequences, it may also feed into US concerns about the hazards of letting Japan take the initiative in butting heads with the PRC in the ECS and then demanding US backing.

Interestingly, the official Japanese position now seem to be limited to the “Chinese planes flew too darn close” bleating.  

An as yet unnoted element of the ADIZ issue is that the United States is the only power that asserts the right to fly military aircraft through somebody else’s ADIZ without filing a flight plan (to refresh everybody’s memory, US-flagged civilian carriers respect the PRC ADIZ regs.  But the US immediately flew two B-52s into the ADIZ unannounced to affirm the US military prerogative).  

Now Japan seems to be asserting that same right for its military aircraft, at least within the PRC ADIZ, a “destabilizing” “status quo-changing” state of affairs, one that also places the Japanese military at parity with the United States on this issue.  I wonder if the US is terribly happy about this but will have to suck it up since Japan is currently dangling the collective self defense and TPP carrots before it.

It would seem unlikely that the United States would take Japan under its wing, so to speak, and conduct joint military flight patrols within China’s ADIZ as a show of support, but the Obama administration’s red line manhood is being questioned worldwide post-Syria and post-Crimea.  So it might happen.

And the PRC might just have to suck it up, consoling itself with the idea that getting its way in the South China Sea is adequate compensation for getting balked in the East China Sea.  

At the back of everybody’s mind, I think, is the potential real crisis in East Asia: the possibility that Taiwan will declare de jure independence at some time, and the PRC will be compelled to put up or shut up on the relatively existential issue of losing Taiwan.  That’s when military posturing, military threats, and military maneuvers become genuinely pressing issues.

In this context, I consider the most disturbing development in US-PRC relations is not the tussling over rocks in the South China Sea or the East China Sea; it is the decision to twist China’s nuts with the indictment of five PLA officers for hacking.  I expect the US national security civilian apparatus considers the indictment one of those clever, legalistic soft power moves that, again, traps China in the web of law and international norms.

But the battle lines in Asia have hardened: pivot vs. China.  The status quo is becoming confrontation, at least in regional security issues.  With the expectation that US and PRC forces will be engaging and confronting each other, it would seem desirable that both sides have a better understanding of their opposite numbers.  Indeed, the US Department of Defense has shown little enthusiasm for the White House's anti-hacking jihad which, in addition to clearing out the US government's stock of cyberrighteousness, seriously depreciated by the Snowden revelations, has scotched US-PRC military-to-military exchanges on ground rules for cyberwarfare.

Engagement with the PRC, for better or worse, has become a military matter.  And if a clash occurs, it had better be because at least one side really wants it, and not because of the main abettors of military catastrophe: FUD or "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt."

We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia…Or Is It Eurasia?

Current US China policy seems to be “Who Needs Russia?  We’ve got…The Philippines!”

Unless President Obama has absolute faith in the ability of the United States and the Asian democracies to restrain the PRC, there would seem to be some disturbing developments for the United States in Asia.

First of all, the People’s Republic of China parked its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone, triggering a heated response from Vietnam, anguished writhing from ASEAN, and a stern “don’t engage in provocations” fingerwag from the United States.

The PRC, however, is not yielding, implicitly highlighting the fact that the United States is failing in its self-proclaimed mission to assure peace and prosperity in the South China Sea (as I pointed out in a previous piece, the PRC’s oil-rig shenanigans accentuate the essential sovereignty/EEZ character of disputes between China and its South China Sea neighbors, and undercut the “freedom of navigation” hobbyhorse that the US has crafted to ride to the rescue of the SCS).

Although VOA reported it as “US Navy ‘Shaping Events’ in South China Sea”, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert acknowledged that the US has its work cut out for it in the SCS:

“We are starting to shape events. We have got to manage our way through this, in my opinion, through this East China Sea and South China Sea [tensions].  We’re not leaving. They know that. They would be the leadership of the Chinese navy. We believe that we have to manage our way through this."

Also, this week also witnessed a slobbery authoritarian love-fest between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a confab in Shanghai, also attended by Iran and a bunch of stans, illustrating the completely predictable dynamic of the Western hardline on Ukraine driving Russia and its gas into the arms of the PRC.

As of this writing the gas deal has not gotten done, apparently because of a disagreement over the unit price, and because the PRC is jibbing at the Russian demand for a $25 billion prepayment—a prepayment that, I might add, will relieve Gazprom of the financial embarrassment incurred by shipping Ukraine a few billion dollars of gas that it hasn’t been paid for, provide a nice receivable (if not immediate cash cushion) for Russia as it haggles with Ukraine (and a rather anxious Europe) re the next round of gas shipments to the West, and establish a precedent for demanding prepayment for Ukraine.

If the gas deal doesn’t go down, the US foreign policy commentariat in general and the Obama administration in particular will breathe a quiet sigh of relief that the dreaded Eurasian alliance of ex-Commies and pseudo-Commies in Russia and China has failed to occur.

If the gas deal gets done, especially on the basis of a ruble/yuan settlement that sidelines the dollar, on the other hand, the manure should hit the fan.

Right now, the Western response to these Asian developments has been pretty muted, a sign, I think that the foreign policy consultant/think tank/media complex has not received any useful guidance from the Obama administration.

My personal feeling is that the United States is loath to acknowledge the Eurasian “ghost at the banquet” and is declining to escalate openly at the current awkward juncture.  Instead, the Obama administration is quietly rolling out a sequence of passive-aggressive reproofs to the PRC.

Last week the USN Blue Ridge just happened to cruise past the Scarborough Shoal.

This week, the Justice Department indicted 5 PLA officers for hacking US corporations.

This sort of thing was always in the cards.  Starting in 2011, the Obama administration had been methodically rolling out the PRC cyber-bad-guy product for over a year, to be capped by a formal direct confrontation with Xi Jinping by Barack Obama concerning Chinese cybersins at Sunnylands in June 2013, followed by some public naming and shaming, but then Boom!  Snowden!  Doh!

The Snowden thing seems to have derailed the campaign for a year or so—most of the hacking allegations in the DOJ indictment date to 2012 or before, an indication that the United States is belatedly working off its depreciated pre-Snowden inventory of PRC misbehavior.

In rolling out the indictments yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder was obliged to abandon the pre-Snowden framing—that PRC hacking was a Defcon 1 threat both to the US economy and the global Internet commons—in favor of condemning the PRC hackers for the one kind of hacking that the United States government still asserts it does not do…corporate spying…for corporate advantage.

In context, I should point out that the United States has an unequivocal agenda of espionage on economic matters pertaining to energy, since energy is a matter of “national security”.  As to whether the information on potentially unfavorable developments in oil, gas, and uranium is simply put into a dossier for President Obama to wring his hands over, or whether actionable intelligence somehow makes it to pro-Western energy giants, is something that I and the reader can currently only speculate about.

However, it will be interesting if Glenn Greenwald comes up with any blockbuster revelations concerning Brazil, its over the top anxiety concerning the security and secrecy of the bidding process for its massive “deep salt” offshore oil blocs (first award included Total & two PRC companies), Brazil’s stated desire to disconnect from the US Internet, and any US NSA/CIA hijinks.

Also, I might point out that, in the founding document of the pivot, “America’s Pacific Century” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defined US “economic security” as “national security”, which would conceivably place a broader range of corporate information into the purview of the CIA and NSA.

A look at the indictment seems to indicate that the US wanted to make sure its threat to prosecute looked credible, and not be hamstrung by US corporations’ unwillingness to air matters pertaining to vital proprietary knowledge or the loss thereof in open court.

Many of the hacking infractions pertained to US firms that were involved in various trade disputes with the PRC on issues like solar panels, steel, and whatnot and already involved extensive declarations of fact before the WTO.   

The US grand jury returned the sealed indictment on May 1 and the Department of Justice exercised its discretionary powers to unseal the indictment on May 19; in other words, the timing was a matter of choice by the Obama administration.  I suspect it was a squib fired across the PRC’s bow in response to the PRC’s defiance in the SCS and its romance with Russia.

The PRC has responded with spluttering denials, suspension of a working group on cybersecurity, and threats of a chill in military-to-military ties.  

The Obama administration’s move doesn’t seem to have much of an upside; it scotched the joint US-PRC work on groundrules in cyberwarfare, something that I think is of genuine interest to the Pentagon if not the keyboard commandoes of the national security apparatus; it also threatens military-to-military exchanges, again a priority for the military, which cherishes interactions with opposing commanders it may be called upon to confront or fight; and it provides very little consolation for US high tech businesses like Cisco, which are reeling from the public revelation of their intimate games of footsie with the NSA.

Needless to say, the indictment also did nothing to advance what should be the sin qua non of superpower geopolitics: trying to drive a wedge between the PRC and Russia by highlighting differences in treatment.  But instead of stroking Xi Jinping, we gave him a whack on the snout at the same time we’re pummeling Putin.

That is, it would seem, rather stupid, since Russia is wary of PRC economic dominance, especially in the Siberian east, fears the demographic onslaught of the “Yellow Horde”, and is not an automatic and natural ally of China.

Nevertheless, “Eurasia” is now becoming a thing, and that’s not very good news for the pivot to Asia.  The pallid multilateralism of the pivot, I must confess, does not compare favorably to the muscular posturing of red strongmen that makes the hearts of neo-nationalists, particularly in Russia, go pitty-pat.

The premise of the pivot—that an ostensible united front of the US and Asian democracies will impel the PRC to modify its behavior to adhere to desired Western norms—is taking a hit along with the optics.

As the relative weight of the US and Europe in the world economy diminish, US sanctions encourage disintermediation of the US financial system in the world economy, the US pursues an ineffectual but polarizing all-stick/zero-carrot confrontation with Russia at the very time it is seeking to isolate the PRC diplomatically, and “Eurasia” looks more viable, the PRC’s willingness to bear the cost of defying US soft power increases.

Don’t get me wrong.  PRC aggressiveness in the South China Sea is real.  Problem is, the US will to confront the PRC in the SCS is not.  The Rube Goldberg structure of the pivot announces that fact instead of hiding it.

As the deterrent effect of US soft power in Asia dwindles, the US must decide whether to force developments in Asia into the sphere in which it still exercises unquestioned dominance—the hard power of military action—or resign itself to an ineluctable erosion of US prestige and influence in the region and a retreat to bilateral horsetrading with the unpalatable “Eurasian” powers.

It will also be interesting to see if America recognizes that it has a choice, albeit from an unattractive menu of options.  But if the Western spin of the Ukraine crisis is any guide, the US will console itself with the fantasy that it is merely reacting passively to aggression, the pivot was forced on it, and the PRC can be blamed for the unwise choices that Washington made.

The U.S. is not in the business of acknowledging it made bad foreign policy, even though it has made spectacularly bad foreign policy during the Obama as well as Bush administrations.  The usual temptation is to blame incapable proxies and venal antagonists for crises exacerbated by the United States.  

For a useful illustration, I direct readers to the case of Libya, where the US & NATO destroyed the governing authority, handed the reins over to groups totally incapable of exercising power, and are now apparently backing a coup by an ineffectual strongman who just might make things right; the cavalcade of bloody disaster that is US policy in Syria; the botch in Ukraine; and, for that matter, the massacre and misery of Iraq.  And I almost forgot the disaster that the US-midwifed regime of South Sudan has become.  And how about Yemen?   

Either the US is rather maladroit practitioner of foreign policy, or failure is displaying an inexplicable bias for dogging American actions.

For a classic specimen of US bewilderment at the pickle it’s in, I direct you to “China’s Grand Strategy Disaster” by Brad Glosserman of CSIS.  He is genuinely gobsmacked that the PRC cannot perceive the subtle genius of the pivot, which is so evident from the privileged perspective of the Washington Beltway.  Must be collective terror and/or insanity in the PRC ruling elite:

Why, then, does China stick to this course? Either no one in the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership sees the big picture—which is a very disturbing scenario—or no one in that leadership is prepared to question the wisdom of current policies, because the price of dissent is potentially too high. If true, that should be extremely worrying. That logic implies the momentum of current decisions cannot be diverted and confrontation, if not clashes, will follow.

There is only one convincing explanation for Chinese behavior: Beijing is trying to harvest a new source of energy to fuel its economy—capturing the power generated by Deng Xiaoping as he spins in his grave.

You know, I’m not sure a diagnosis of collective insanity in Zhongnanhai is really going to reassure President Obama that the pivot to Asia is the magic elixir for America’s “Pacific Century”.

There is, of course, another convincing explanation: that the PRC thinks it has enough regional clout to avoid catastrophic long term consequences from the transitory distaste of its neighbors and US for its policies, just as the United States feels it can shove its Ukraine policy down the throats of Germany and the EU.

For the US in Asia, I predict a choice off the confrontation/accommodation menu of “both and neither”, escalating but indecisive sanctions and military posturing, a mish-mash of soft power and hard power antagonism, i.e. an era of ugly and counterproductive muddling.  Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.