Reinforcing Washington's Asia-Pacific hegemony

The Asia-Pacific region has now become one of the key geostrategic concerns of the US.  Central to the exercise of US hegemony over the region is the encirclement of China through a network of military and economic agreements with the neighbouring countries. Joseph Gerson explains.

A YEAR ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signalled a major transformation in US foreign policy in an article titled 'America's Pacific Century', which announced the US 'pivot' toward Asia, the Pacific, and the strategically important Indian Ocean. 'One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade,' she wrote, will be 'to lock in a substantially increased investment - diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise - in the Asia-Pacific region'. The increased engagement, she wrote, would be underwritten in part by 'forging a broad-based military presence'.

Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon published its new 'strategic guidance' paper, which, signalling at a shift away from Iraq and Central Asia, named the Asia-Pacific region and the Persian Gulf as the nation's two geostrategic priorities. To emphasise the new commitments, Clinton, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, and President Barack Obama made high-profile visits to allied Asian and Pacific nations. Republicans, in Mitt Romney's foreign policy white paper, upped the ante, insisting that the United States 'expand its naval presence in the Western Pacific' and pressure its allies to 'maintain appropriate military capabilities'.

The continuing pursuit of Asia-Pacific hegemony

The pivot is best understood as an extension of a century and a half of US foreign and military policies. In the 1850s, US Secretary of State William Seward argued that if the United States were to replace Britain as the world's dominant power, it would first have to dominate Asia - hence the purchase of Alaska, the northern route to Asia. By the 1890s, Washington had finally assembled the navy needed to challenge Britain's mastery of the seas. Meanwhile, amidst an economic depression and related domestic turmoil, policymakers saw access to the Chinese market as a way to put the unemployed to work while increasing corporate profits and establishing the United States as a global power. The turn-of-the-century sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbour provided an excuse for the United States to declare war on Spain, seize the Philippines and Guam (as well as Puerto Rico and Cuba), and annex Hawaii to secure the refuelling stations needed to reach China.

After Japan's defeat in the Second World War, the Pacific became an 'American Lake'. Hundreds of new US military bases were established in Japan, Korea, Australia, the Marshall Islands, and other Pacific nations to reinforce those in the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, which were greatly expanded. Together these bases 'contained' Beijing and Moscow throughout the Cold War, serving as launching pads for the Korean and Vietnam wars as well as for military interventions and political subversion from the Philippines and Indonesia to the Persian Gulf.

In the late 1990s, when China was first seen as a potential strategic competitor for Asia-Pacific hegemony, the Clinton administration adopted a two-track policy of engagement and containment. Deng Xiaoping was welcomed to Disneyland, President Clinton was welcomed in Beijing, and China was given the green light to join the World Trade Organisation. Meanwhile, the US-Japan military alliance, which has long functioned as the NATO equivalent in East Asia, was reinforced. The Clinton administration sent nuclear-capable aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait and accelerated missile defence deployments designed to neutralise China's missile capabilities. Before they were sidetracked by the 'war on terror', President George W Bush and company promised to 'diversify' US Asia-Pacific military bases, reducing their concentration in North-East Asia in order to distribute them more widely along China's periphery.

Although the Bush administration extended the 'war on terror' to Indonesia, the Philippines, and southern Thailand, it otherwise largely neglected Asia and the Pacific. This opened the way for growing Chinese influence, deepening the integration of South-East Asian nations into China's surging economic orbit. With the pivot, the Obama administration has signalled its determination, according to the Guardian's Simon Tisdall, 'to beat back any Chinese bid for hegemony in the Asia-Pacific', even at the expense of a new Cold War. As General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it, 'the US military may be obliged to overtly confront China just as it faced down the Soviet Union.'

The new Cold War and its footprint

Joseph Nye, Bill Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defence and a primary author of US Asia-Pacific policy, previewed the pivot's intellectual foundations in a piece for the New York Times. He warned of the potential dangers of rivalry between rising and declining powers. Twice during the 20th century, Nye noted, the United States and Britain failed to integrate Germany and Japan into their world order, resulting in two catastrophic world wars. To avoid an apocalyptic repeat of history, he urged the United States to simultaneously engage and contain China. Months before the 'pivot' was launched, in words reminiscent of the 1890s, Nye wrote that 'Asia will return to its historic status, with more than half of the world's population and half of the world's economic output. America must be present there. Markets and economic power rest on political frameworks, and American military power provides that framework' (emphasis added).

Now, even as the Obama administration repeats that 'a thriving China is good for America' and pursues engagement via various diplomatic channels, it is hedging its bets.

Military alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand, which serve as 'the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific', are being revitalised. Having adopted an air-sea battle doctrine, the Pentagon has committed to deploying 60% of its nuclear-armed and high-tech navy to the Asia-Pacific. According to the New York Times, this includes 'six aircraft carriers and a majority of the Navy's cruisers, destroyers, littoral combat ships and submarines, [and] an accelerated pace of naval exercises and port calls in the Pacific'.

Recognising that relying on military power alone is not a winning strategy, especially given the near-equal influence of economic power, the Obama administration has also pressed a diplomatic campaign to negotiate a 'Trans-Pacific Partnership'. The goal is to create the world's largest and most demanding free-trade area in ways that deepen the economic integration of the US and its Asia-Pacific allies while simultaneously reducing their economic dependence on China.

The expansion has come at a price for the region's people.

In Japan it means reaffirming the nuclear alliance, despite President Obama's ostensible commitment to creating a nuclear-weapons-free world. It also means amplified efforts to pacify Okinawan resistance to decades of US military colonisation, the continued and dangerous basing of the nuclear-capable USS George Washington aircraft carrier in Tokyo Bay, the deployment of accident-prone Osprey aircraft in the urban Futenma base in Okinawa, accelerated missile defence deployments, and expanded joint intelligence operations targeting China and North Korea.

In South Korea, where the US military continues to have authority over all South Korean military operations in wartime, joint military exercises have been expanded - including in the Yellow Sea, where in defiance of Chinese warnings, the United States recently deployed the George Washington. To take the naval challenge closer to the Chinese coast, a massive Korean naval base is being built at a World Heritage site in Jeju Island's Gangjeon village, which according to Yonhap News will 'accommodate submarines and up to 20 warships, including US Aegis-equipped destroyers and their missile defence systems'. This has sparked intense and disciplined non-violent resistance in Korea.

In South-East Asia, the Obama administration upped the military ante by responding to China's increasingly militarised claims to nearly all of the mineral-rich South China Sea - through which 40% of the world's commerce passes - by declaring (US-policed) free navigation of the seas a US strategic priority. Reinforcing Philippine claims to the 'West Philippine Sea', the Pentagon has also increased weapons sales to the Philippines, accelerated joint military exercises, and explored the return of military bases. The pivot also entails strengthening the US military's relationships with Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam, with the latter engaging in joint military exercises and, under its 'friends with all nations' policies, providing access for US and allied navies at Cam Rahn Bay. Washington's renewed ties and military-to-military contacts with Burma, which could restrict China's access to the Indian Ocean, have also raised serious concerns in Beijing.

To complete China's encirclement, the Obama administration has established a new Indian Ocean base in Darwin, Australia, pursued a tacit alliance with India, and is expanding its 'partnerships' with New Zealand and Mongolia. In April, the United States even won an agreement to keep a yet-to-be-determined number of US forces in Afghanistan through 2024. Closer to home, Hawaii is to host nearly 3,000 more Marines, Osprey warplanes, and further base expansions.

Meanwhile the Chamorro people of Guam, whose tiny island nation's strategic location makes it an ideal fallback site for the day when US troops are finally ejected from Japan, are bearing the brunt of the pivot. Even though US bases already occupy 28% of the 500-square-mile island, 3,000 more US Marines and their families are scheduled to be redeployed to Guam from Okinawa, and there are plans for massive expansions of existing bases.

In an August speech in Japan, Cara Flores-Mays of Guam explained what the pivot will mean for her Chamorro grandfather: 'He has not known freedom,' she said, 'and it's likely that he never will.' The same applies to the peoples of many other Asia-Pacific nations, who have largely been shunted aside in the great-power calculus governing US policy in the region.                            

Joseph Gerson directs the Peace and Economic Security Programme for the American Friends Service Committee's Northeast region. He is a member of the Working Group for Peace and Demilitarisation in Asia and the Pacific. The above is extracted from an article which was published on the Foreign Policy In Focus website (www.fpif.org) under a Creative Commons licence.

*Third World Resurgence No. 264/265, August/September 2012, pp 53-55