White is Not Quite Right

By Ernie Bower

My friend and colleague Hugh White does a brilliant job of asking the hard questions when it comes to assessments of U.S. and Chinese power in Asia and their impact on foreign policy and national security.  His writings sometimes provide an equally compelling opportunity to clarify various positions and strategies. In a recent note in the East Asia Forum entitled “Obama and Australia’s vision of Asia’s future,” Professor White argues that “American vision is that Asia will divide into two camps, with China on one side and the rest, under U.S. leadership, on the other. It hopes that if the rest of Asia stays strong and united by America’s side, China will eventually see the error of its ways and join the US-led camp as well, thus restoring America’s uncontested primacy.”

Almost right, Hugh, but not quite.  The grand strategy and the plan behind the headlines you are reading about President Obama’s current trip to the region is indeed to convince China to join its neighbors around the region, but not in a regime dominated by U.S. primacy.  This old Cold War like polarity seems to have fixated Dr. White into trying to understand power in Asia as zero sum.  That is not and should not be the U.S. strategic goal.

The goal instead is to strengthen ties and relations around Asia so that strong and enduring regional security and economic/trade architecture can be developed that will show China that the path to prosperity, stability, and answering its own hard domestic questions about energy, food, and water security,  can be found by joining with others and playing by a common set of rules — ones that it helps develop.  This vision is in fact designed to dissuade China from exploring what it “can do” based on its new found economic power, and ask instead, as Deng Xiaoping would have instructed, what China “should do.”

Dr. White’s writings are valuable and I want to thank him again for an opportunity to provide a clarification on how the United States sees its role developing in Asia.

Ernest Z. Bower is a senior adviser, director of the Southeast Asia Program, and co-director of the Pacific Partners Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Ernest Z. Bower

Ernest Z. Bower

Ernest Bower is Chair of the Southeast Asia Advisory Board at CSIS.

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