But don't rush out to begin that crash course in Mandarin and exchange your dollars for yuan quite yet. The showdown between Beijing and Washington is unlikely to play out exactly as the Chinese hope and Americans fear.
The Decline of the United States
On a visit to Beijing in October 2016, in the presence of the Chinese leadership, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared, "America has lost now. I've realigned myself in your ideological flow." He went on to imagine a new axis of Russia, China, and the Philippines arrayed against the arrogance of American power.
Talk about shockers. The Philippines has traditionally been a cornerstone of U.S. influence in Asia, a place for Washington to station troops, dock ships, and, in the post-9/11 era, send military advisors to help suppress a Muslim insurgency. Moreover, Manila had gone toe to toe with Beijing over disputed islands in the South China Sea, even submitting its case to an international tribunal for arbitration. But that was before Duterte became president in May 2016 and labeled President Obama, who took a dim view of Duterte's gruesome record of extrajudicial killings, a "son of a prostitute."
The apparent defection of the Philippines was the coup de gr ce for one of the Obama administration's most heralded foreign policy efforts aimed at staving off American decline. In October 2011, just before the Arab Spring broke out, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton authored an article in Foreign Policy laying out what would become known as the "Pacific pivot." The United States, at the time, was fitfully trying to extricate itself from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to imports from Mexico and Canada, as well as investments in shale fracking and sustainable energy, Washington was no longer quite so dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The Obama administration felt that it might finally put the failures of the Bush years behind it and turn to new horizons.
The Pacific pivot should have been called the Willie Sutton policy. When Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, "That's where the money is." So, too, with Asia. It contains four of the top 11 economies in the world: China's, Japan's, India's, and South Korea's. With the United States focused on losing bets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, China has been cornering this rich Asian market. By now, it has become the leading trading partner for South Korea, Japan, Australia, and virtually all of Southeast Asia.
To recapture its edge in the region, the Obama administration promoted a free trade compact known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). U.S. negotiators managed to achieve the near impossible by getting a dozen disparate countries on the same page while leaving China out of the picture. But Congress proved, at best, lukewarm on the deal. And sentiment among the American public ran even colder -- so cold, in fact, that one of its chief architects, Hillary Clinton, fearing that the trade agreement might take her presidential bid down in flames, came out against it in 2016. Withdrawing from the TPP would, of course, be one of Donald Trump's first acts as president.
The United States, in fact, faces more than just an economic challenge in Asia. Washington had long considered the Pacific to be an "American lake." It currently has 375,000 military and civilian personnel stationed within the Pacific Command's ambit and devotes roughly half its naval capacity to Pacific waters. It maintains treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as dozens of military bases in the region. But China, after more than a decade of double-digit increases in military spending, has begun pushing back against American pretensions to be the only Pacific power around. It has developed new weapons to deny the U.S. military access to its coastal waters and has come to excel at cyberwarfare, vacuuming up huge amounts of confidential data by hacking into U.S. government agencies. Meanwhile, in the world of spy versus spy, China has managed to plug leaks on its end by jailing or killing more than a dozen U.S. intelligence assets.
Even before the ascension of Donald Trump, the Pentagon's effort to pivot eastward had come up short. For all its overwhelming military edge, Washington has increasingly found itself unable to dictate outcomes through force anywhere in the Greater Middle East. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and turmoil in Yemen and Libya have all continued to bedevil the U.S. military.
In the meantime, the Obama administration made some token rearrangements of its forces in the Pacific, sold some high-tech weaponry to its allies in the region, and threw some brush-back pitches at Beijing. But in the end, as with so many of Obama's initiatives, the Pacific pivot proved largely aspirational. The U.S. never really pivoted out of the Greater Middle East.
As a presidential candidate, Trump was content to bluster about Chinese threats, even as he also threatened to withdraw the U.S. nuclear umbrella from both Tokyo and Seoul. He demanded that U.S. allies pony up more money for American help and protection, while offering no new ways of anchoring the United States in the Pacific.
Now in the Oval Office, Trump has sent mixed signals. He's repaired relations with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but he's also been pushing a major rise in the Pentagon budget. And what country would be the target of those additional tens of billions of dollars in military spending? The U.S. Navy certainly doesn't need a 350-ship force to counter the Islamic State. Trump has welcomed the election of South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, but also insists that he wants to renegotiate "bad" trade and security deals with South Korea. He has tried to bully North Korea, but has also held out the possibility of meeting personally with that "pretty smart cookie," Kim Jong-un.
Thanks to his erratic pronouncements, even though it's early in Trump's term, American influence in the region is already dropping as inexorably as the president's approval ratings at home. Add to this mix a president who only wants big wins but doesn't see the likelihood of that happening in Asia and you have the definition of decline.
That decline has, in recent years, often been calculated in terms of approaching horizons: when North Korean missiles can reach the West Coast; when China's military spending pulls closer to the Pentagon's; when Japan and South Korea, like the Philippines, begin to reconsider their allegiances. Now, in the Trump era, add one more item to the list: when Asia faces an incompetent, corrupt, and self-defeating administration in Washington.
The way seems clear enough for China, the strongest country in Asia, to fill the potential vacuum. But, as they say, the best-laid plans oft do go astray.
The Weakness of Asia
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