Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

257 Pages·2017·1.57 MB·English

by  Gideon Rachman

ALSO BY GIDEON RACHMAN
Zero-Sum Future:
American Power
in an Age of Anxiety

To Natasha, Joe, Nat & Adam
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Gideon Rachman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
PART I: EASTERNIZATION IN ASIA
1 From Westernization to Easternization
2 The Risk of War
3 China—An End to Hide and Bide
4 America Reacts
5 The Japanese and Korean Dilemmas
6 The Battle for Southeast Asia
7 India—The Second Asian Superpower
PART II: EASTERNIZATION BEYOND ASIA
8 The Question of American Power
9 The Middle East—The Crumbling of the Western Order
10 Europe and Its Well-Sealed Windows
11 Russia Turns East
12 Borderlands
13 Africa and the Americas—China Beyond Its Backyard
14 The West’s Institutional Advantage
CONCLUSION Beyond East and West
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
PREFACE
THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP WAS A REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT. The
implications of his presidency for international politics are profound. Ever since
1945, all American presidents have shared a commitment to an international
order built around two central pillars. The first is the promotion of international
trade. The second is a global security system based on U.S.-led alliances.
Trump threatens to pull down both pillars. The forty-fifth president of the
United States is an avowed trade protectionist. And he is also a man who has
consistently questioned the value of U.S.-led alliances, calling NATO “obsolete”
and suggesting that America’s defense treaties with Japan and South Korea are
bad deals for the United States.
Trump’s revolutionary approach to world affairs is underpinned by a
discontent with the process that this book calls “Easternization”—a shift of
power and wealth from the West to Asia. By 2014, according to the IMF, China
had become the world’s largest economy—ranked by purchasing power. The
United States is now number two—relinquishing the top spot that it had held
since the late nineteenth century. In 2009, China had also become the world’s
largest merchandise exporter—a position that the United States had held since
the Second World War. China’s rise is part of a broader shift in economic power
to Asia (see here). In pledging to “Make America Great Again,” Trump
implicitly promises to reverse this process of Easternization—restoring America
to its unrivaled position, both in terms of living standards and global power.
The Trump drive to restore American greatness threatens to create conflict
between the United States and the rising powers of Asia—above all, China.
Under President Xi Jinping, who came to power in Beijing in 2012, China has
also moved in a much more nationalistic direction. Well before Trump pledged
to “Make America Great Again,” Xi had made a similar pitch to nostalgic
nationalism, promising a “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation. With
Trump and Xi in power in Washington and Beijing, the stage is set for a
potential clash between American and Chinese nationalism in the Pacific.
The most obvious potential conflict is over trade. If Trump follows through on
his threat to impose swinging tariffs on Chinese goods, he would certainly
provoke retaliation. A trade war would ensue, poisoning commercial relations
between the first and second largest economies in the world and destabilizing the
global economy.
The threat of a real war between the United States and China has also risen
following Trump’s election. Much of this book is concerned with the slow but
steady increase in geopolitical rivalry between America and China during the
Obama years. The arrival of Trump in the White House threatens a significant
acceleration in this process. The deliberate but careful attempts of the Obama
administration to push back against Chinese ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region
are likely to be replaced by a new Trump approach that is much more openly
confrontational, and more impulsive in style. Even before taking office, the new
U.S. president demonstrated his willingness to antagonize Beijing—by speaking
directly to the president of Taiwan, something that all U.S. presidents have
refused to do since the normalization of relations between the United States and
China in the 1970s.
If a direct military conflict between China and the United States does break
out during the Trump years, the likeliest arena for a clash is the South China Sea.
In his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, Rex Tillerson, Trump’s new
secretary of state, signaled a significant hardening in the American attitude to the
artificial islands that China has been building in the South China Sea (see here).
Tillerson likened the island building to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea
and said that the Trump administration intended to let Beijing know that “your
access to those islands is not going to be allowed.”
Taken at face value, that sounded like a threat to blockade the islands, on
which China has been constructing military installations. China would almost
certainly attempt to break such a blockade by sea or air. The stage would be set
for a modern version of the Cuba missile crisis. The Chinese government’s
official reaction to the Tillerson statement was restrained. But China’s state-
controlled media was ferocious. The Global Times, a nationalist paper, warned
of the possibility of a “large-scale war” between the United States and China,
while the China Daily spoke of a “devastating confrontation between China and
the U.S.” Independent observers had come to similar conclusions. Speaking to
me in Davos a couple of days after Tillerson’s statement, Vivian Balakrishnan,
the foreign minister of Singapore, warned that any effort at a U.S. blockade in
the South China Sea would lead to a war between the United States and China.
The Singaporeans, who maintain close ties to both Washington and Beijing and
whose natural style is cautious and technocratic, are not given to hysteria. Many
observers wondered whether Tillerson had gone further than intended in his
Congressional testimony. His statement seemed to change the traditional U.S.
position that its sole concern is freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,
and that it takes no position on Chinese sovereignty over the islands. But in the
days after Tillerson’s testimony, the Trump administration did nothing to
withdraw or clarify his statements.
A decision by President Trump to confront China over its territorial claims
would represent a new development in the president’s thinking, for Trump’s
most longstanding and profound concerns about Asia are economic.
Conventional economic theory has long held that the growing wealth of Asian
nations is a good thing for the United States, since it creates larger markets for
American companies and cheaper goods for American consumers. But Trump
and his advisers emphatically reject this idea. They blame the stagnation of the
living standards of American workers on “globalism”—otherwise known as
international trade and investment. Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist in the
Trump White House, argues that, “The globalists gutted the American working-
class and created a middle-class in Asia.”1 In his view, the increasing wealth of
Asia—far from being the mutually advantageous process envisaged by
mainstream economics—has impoverished the United States.
During the election campaign, Trump was visceral in his denunciations of
China, proclaiming that, “We have a $500 billion deficit with China…We can’t
continue to allow China to rape our country…It’s the greatest theft in the history
of the world.” Those who hoped that Trump would abandon protectionism after
winning office were quickly disappointed. On the contrary, the new president
placed protectionists in key positions in his administration. Peter Navarro, author
of a book and film called Death By China, was appointed to head a new National
Trade Council, based in the White House. Navarro’s intellectual ally and
sometime coauthor, Wilbur Ross, was made Commerce Secretary. Robert
Lighthizer, another noted protectionist, was given the job of chief trade
negotiator.
Navarro’s film begins by urging viewers, “Don’t buy Made in China.” It
points out the considerable loss in U.S. manufacturing jobs since China joined
the World Trade Organization in 2001, and blames this on a range of “unfair”
Chinese trading practices, including lax environmental standards, currency
manipulation, intellectual property theft and illegal export subsidies. Some of the
ills that Navarro highlights, such as commercial espionage, are real enough.
Other complaints, such as the charge of currency manipulation, are outdated.
The broader difficulty with the Trump–Navarro analysis is that its promise to
bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States is misleading. Advances in
robotics and artificial intelligence mean that modern factories employ relatively
few workers, compared to the past. Manufacturing employment is now leveling
off, even in China, as robots replace people on the production line and the really
low-skilled jobs migrate to poorer countries in South Asia or Africa (see chapter
13). A protectionist drive by the Trump administration is likely to raise living
costs in the United States, without doing much to boost employment.
The pursuit of protectionist policies has implications that go well beyond
economics. China would see the partial closure of American markets as a hostile
act that threatened the health of its economy and thus its internal political
stability. Overt American protectionism aimed at China would also mark a
fundamental break with the strategy that the United States has adopted over
many decades to deal with the rise of China. This strategy was based around the
assumption that burgeoning trade with China would ultimately bolster America’s
global leadership by creating a Chinese interest in the maintenance of a global
order, designed and maintained in Washington. Robert Zoellick, who served as
deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush, summed up this theory when he
suggested that China would become a “responsible stakeholder” in the
international order.
This reassuring idea came under severe strain during the Obama years (see
chapter 4), as it became increasingly obvious that China is intent on becoming
the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific region. A tilt toward protectionism under
the Trump administration would represent the final abandonment of the
responsible stakeholder theory. It would also mean that the most important field
of U.S.–Chinese cooperation—trade and investment—would turn into an area of
rivalry. With both strategic and economic competition mounting, the United
States and China would be locked into an increasingly overt struggle for power
in the Pacific.