Asia's future is in the hands of its middle powers

Hugh White, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, has been waging a determined fight against Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Asian regional vision in a series of articles and blog posts.

The crux of his critique can be found in the title of a speech he gave in Tokyo earlier this month: "War in Asia remains thinkable." He points to the existence of two, overlapping contemporary Asian realities. One is the Asia in which cooperation and integration are proceeding apace as the region's economies continue to develop. The other is the Asia of arms race, nationalist feuds, border disputes, security dilemmas, and possibly war. Professor White then focused on what the region's powers can do to ensure that the latter reality is Asia's future, positing that the options for a new regional order are (1) EU-style Asian integration, (2) enduring American primacy, (3) a balance of power, or (4) a concert of powers to run the region, with the US, China, and Japan at the center. He advocates the last, suggesting that the first is too optimistic, the second possibly unsustainable (especially because — and this is a key point — "The fear is that for many Americans primacy has become, not (as it was) a means to the end of peace and stability, but an end in itself. That raises the real risk that Americans will find themselves undermining stability in Asia in order to preserve their primacy"), and the third too dangerous.

But a concert will be difficult to achieve, because the US, China, and Japan would have to concede much to make it workable. The US would have to accept China as an equal, China would have to concede important roles to the US and Japan, and Japan would have to drop its antagonism towards China.

I would argue that Japan has the most to gain from such an arrangement: it would take a seat at Asia's head table, would still have the US engaged in the region, and it would have the option of cooperating with China to restrict the US when the latter is out of line. In fact, I think Professor White vastly overstates Japan's hostility to China. In a column in The Australian last week, he suggested that Prime Minister Rudd "flubbed" his Japan trip because he failed "to tell Japan that Australia wants a vibrant, strategic relationship with a strong and active Japan, but we also want the same kind of relationship with China." I think his vision of Japan's China policy is a bit dated (i.e., it's a better description of the revisionist conservative approach to China than the Fukuda approach to China). Japan's conservatives may ultimately win the fight over China policy, but for now Japan's approach to China is no less contested than Australia's (or India's or America's). Not all Japanese are as afraid of distance from the US as Professor White seems to think (in this post for example) — and thanks to the US shift on North Korea, even conservatives in the LDP who might have been reluctant to consider a looser alliance may now be willing to think otherwise.

Meanwhile, I think he's too quick to dismiss a balance of power for Asia. We can already see how the Asian international system will develop in the behavior of ASEAN, which has maneuvered among China, Japan, and the US and made itself the hub for a variety of regional mechanisms. ASEAN and the region's other middle powers (including the bigger middles, Australia, Japan, and India) will ultimately be responsible for keeping the peace in Asia, hedging against China by maintaining active security ties with the US to ensure that the US remains present in the region, hedging against a US attempt to stifle China by conceding a greater regional leadership role to China in the economic realm (and exploring new security ties with the PLA). In the meantime, regional integration would continue. Professor White says little about Asia's middle powers in his Tokyo address, but I think that it will be the middles who determine Asia's future because it is they who are stuck between the US, the longtime security guarantor, and China, their most significant economic partner. It is they who have the greatest need for stability and a sustainable balance between the US and China, moderating the extremes of each country's behavior.

Japan, despite the size of its economy, fits the profile of an Asian middle power (in part because it is not open enough, and thus lacks the influence that comes with economic openness); despite the vitriol of the conservatives, Japan is not in a position to choose between the US and China.

There is still hope for peace in Asia, but it will depend on the middle powers to restrain the great powers and keep them from opting for policies that will drag the whole region into a conflagration.

What if the Australian prime minister came and nobody noticed?

Is there a news blackout on Prime Minister Rudd's visit to Japan?

He made a speech on climate change in Kyoto and visited Hiroshima on Monday, and neither Yomiuri nor Asahi have articles online about his activities.

It's possible that they have articles in the print edition that aren't online, but if that's the case, why did neither newspaper feel that it was worth posting articles online?

Australians can talk about the dangers of neglecting uneasy Japan, but perhaps they should be more worried about being neglected by Japan. Or perhaps it's silly to have a discussion about who's neglecting whom and recognize that over the long term Australia and Japan will have a sound relationship on the basis of deepening their bilateral ties and moderating the behavior of the US and China, the region's first-tier powers.

Rudd's vision

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, arriving in Japan Sunday for a four-day visit, delivered a foreign policy address on Wednesday of last week that has sparked a major debate in Australia about the future of Asian multilateralism.

In the speech, Mr. Rudd laid out his vision for an Asia-centered Australian foreign policy that sounds remarkably like post-cold war foreign policy thinking Japan. His three pillars for Australian foreign policy — the US-Australia alliance, global multilateralism, and regional multilateralism — are quite similar to Prime Minister Fukuda's recent foreign policy address, which reaffirmed the US-Japan alliance but sought to embed it in a cooperative regional framework. Indeed, substitute "Japan" for "Australia" in this speech, especially at the beginning when Mr. Rudd discusses domestic changes that must be made to ensure that Australia remains competitive in the region, and this is a more than adequate policy speech to put in the mouth of a Japanese official — making my point that Australia and Japan find themselves in a similar position today.

In any case, the crux of the speech was the third pillar, cooperation in Asia. Mr. Rudd opened this section of his remarks with the now familiar litany illustrating the growing importance of Asia and the attendant challenges (changing demographics, growing resource and energy demand, lingering security flashpoints). He is right to emphasize the need for effective multilateral mechanisms: bilateral relationships and mini-lateral groups that include only democracies (and only a handful of democracies at that) will not be able to solve the region's challenges. Accordingly, he called for a "Asia Pacific Community," a new organization that includes all the region's power (i.e., an East Asian Summit that includes the US) and covers the whole range of political, security, and economic issues facing the region in the coming decades. Perhaps consciously borrowing from Fukuda Yasuo, Mr. Rudd spoke of an "open" Asia-Pacific region.

He might be on to something. His APC would likely be bigger than the EAS but smaller than APEC, meaning that it would include the US — still a "resident" Asian power, as argued by Robert Gates in Singapore last week — but would be less unwieldly than APEC, which still has yet to prove itself an effective organization for addressing Asian challenges. (Paul Keating, the Australian prime minister who worked hard to create the APEC leaders' meeting, defended his creation in The Australian in response to Mr. Rudd's speech, in the process demolishing the straw man of a sovereignty-pooling Asia Pacific Union similar to the European Union, a model explicitly rejected by Mr. Rudd in his speech. Meanwhile, I would be more impressed with Mr. Keating's defense of APEC if it were written by someone other than the man who pushed for the creation of its most significant feature.) But, then again, Asia might be best served by multiple smaller organizations. How will an APC solve Northeast Asia's problems? Might not Northeast Asia be best served by a standing forum growing out of the six-party talks, as desired by Chris Hill and others? Won't Asia be best served by overlapping multilateral circles, ASEAN + 3 for economic issues that span Northeast and Southeast Asia, EAS (or APC) for transregional issues, and APEC for transpacific discussions, with a smattering of functional organizations to address environmental, security, and other problems? No single effective organization can meet all of the region's needs; an alphabet soup of multilateral mechanisms is unavoidable. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it may increase the odds of the region's powers actually solving problems. (Allan Gyngell, executive director of the Lowy Institute, made a similar point here, calling himself a "deconstructionst" on Asia-Pacific multilateral institutions.)

Meanwhile, looking ahead to this week's meetings in Japan, Mr. Rudd emphasized the importance of Australia's relationship with Japan — but in contrast to his predecessor (and Mr. Fukuda's predecessor, for that matter), Mr. Rudd focused on cooperation on global problems, especially climate change, development, and non-proliferation, and bilateral economic cooperation. In case there were any doubt, the "quad" is dead. Australia under Kevin Rudd will not be party to an Asian NATO designed to contain China.

In short, Mr. Rudd and Mr. Fukuda should have a lot to discuss this week. Both are looking to shift their countries' foreign policies from centering on their alliances with the US to new approaches that embed the alliances in their Asia policy, lessening the tension between the ties with their biggest security partners and their most significant economic partner(s).

I suspected in November when Mr. Rudd took over for John Howard just after Mr. Fukuda replaced Abe Shinzo, it would be a new beginning for the Australia-Japan relationship and for the region as a whole. It is still too early to tell whether this is the beginning of a shift — both leaders will have to convince their successors to commit to their visions, and it is unclear what the US and China, among others, think of their ideas — but it may yet prove to be a fortunate coincidence that Mr. Rudd and Mr. Fukuda are in office at the same time.

(For more commentary on Mr. Rudd's speech, definitely check out The Interpreter, the Lowy Institute's excellent group blog.)