Asia’s return to the center of world affairs is the great power shift of the twenty-first century. In 1750, Asia had roughly three-fifths of the world’s population and accounted for three-fifths of global output. By 1900, after the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, Asia’s share of global output had shrunk to one-fifth. By 2050, Asia will be well on its way back to where it was 300 years earlier. But, rather than keeping an eye on that ball, the United States wasted the first decade of this century mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in a recent speech, American foreign policy will “pivot” toward East Asia.
President Barack Obama’s decision to rotate 2,500 US Marines through a base in northern Australia is an early sign of that pivot. In addition, the November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, held in Obama’s home state of Hawaii, promoted a new set of trade talks called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Both events reinforce Obama’s message to the Asia-Pacific region that the US intends to remain an engaged power. The pivot toward Asia does not mean that other parts of the world are no longer important; on the contrary, Europe, for example, has a much larger and richer economy than China’s. But, as Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, recently explained, US foreign policy over the past few years has been buffeted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, concerns about terrorism, nuclear-proliferation threats in Iran and North Korea, and the recent Arab uprisings. Obama’s November trip to Asia was an effort to align US foreign-policy priorities with the region’s long-term importance.
In Donilon’s words, “by elevating this dynamic region to one of our top strategic priorities, Obama is showing his determination not to let our ship of state be pushed off course by prevailing crises.” The Obama administration also announced that, whatever the outcome of the defense-budget debates, “we are going to make sure that we protect the capabilities that we need to maintain our presence in the Asia-Pacific” region.
Obama’s November trip was also a message to China. After the 2008 financial crisis, many Chinese expressed the mistaken belief that the US was in terminal decline, and that China should be more assertive – particularly in pursuing its maritime claims in the South China Sea – at the expense of America’s allies and friends. During Obama’s first year in office, his administration placed a high priority on cooperation with China, but Chinese leaders seemed to misread US policy as a sign of weakness.
China’s anxiety about a supposed US containment policy is on the rise again, now that Clinton is insisting that the country’s maritime disputes with its neighbors be placed on the agenda at next year’s East Asia Summit in Manila, which will be attended by Obama, Hu Jintao, and other regional leaders.
But American policy toward China is different from Cold War containment of the Soviet bloc. Whereas the US and the Soviet Union had limited trade and social contact, the US is China’s largest overseas market, welcomed and facilitated China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and opens its universities’ gates to 125,000 Chinese students each year. If current US policy towards China is supposed to be Cold War-style containment, it seems unusually warm.
American military forces do not aspire to “contain” China in Cold War fashion, but they can help to shape the environment in which future Chinese leaders make their choices. I stand by my testimony before the US Congress of 1995 in response to those who, even then, wanted a policy of containment rather than engagement: “Only China can contain China.”
A version of this article was first published in Project Syndicate