Andrew Phillips’ elegant post presents a sophisticated challenge to the pessimism which underpins my Quarterly Essay. I see a serious risk that US-China strategic competition will escalate, making Asia a more contested region at higher risk of major war – more like Asia in the century before 1970 than in the decades since.
Andrew argues that Asia has changed a lot since 1970, and he identifies four kinds of change which make it less likely to slide back to the way it was before then. He concludes that we should not assume Asia cannot peacefully manage what's coming.
I absolutely agree with his conclusion. Escalating competition between the US and China is not inevitable, and important features of Asia today should act powerfully to help prevent it. Nonetheless I think the residual risk remains sufficiently high – and the consequences sufficiently serious – that Australia and other countries should put a lot of effort into managing it. This might be so even if I thought the risk is as low as Andrew does. But for several reasons, his arguments do not provide me with as much reassurance as they provide him.
Andrew's first two trends are the increasing strength of the region's states and the declining strength of conflicting ideologies. He says both trends make it unlikely that Asia will slip back into the kind of disorder we saw before 1970, because that era's troubles were clearly fostered by the weakness of some key states and the power of competing ideologies. I agree with the history but not with the conclusion.
The point is partly methodological. Andrew's point would be decisive if my argument was that Asia will become more violent in future for the same reasons it was violent in the past. But in fact, I emphasise how different Asia will be in future from anything we have known before or since 1970, and the sources of violence will be different too. The only resemblance I see with pre-1970 Asia is that the region may again be highly contested. I confess the essay only referred to Asia's violent past to help readers imagine what a disordered Asia might be like, not to explain to them how it would occur.
In fact, I think Asia is more dangerous today partly because of the changes Andrew mentions. I do not take much comfort for the fact that Asian states are stronger now then they were, because I do not think that stronger states are less likely to compete and fight than weak ones. Indeed, history does suggest that states are more likely to clash when their relative power is shifting rapidly as they grow. And the stronger states are, the more damaging their conflicts.
Moreover, while universalist ideologies may not drive competition in future, nationalism certainly can. In fact nationalism always seems to me more dangerous than any universalist ideology, because it tends to have a stronger grip on people's minds.
Andrew's third and fourth points relate to economics and institutions. He says that Asia's economic integration makes conflict more expensive and hence more unlikely, and new regional institutions make it easier to manage and avoid. The point about institutions deserves a longer analysis, but let me just say here that I think Asia's institutional alphabet soup reflects rather then supports the regional order. There is no reason to expect it to be able to manage fundamental challenges to that order effectively – indeed it is as likely to exacerbate differences by displaying them.
Economic integration is a much more serious matter. As I say in the essay, economic integration gives everyone immense incentives to manage Asia's power shift peacefully, and this is the best reason to believe they will succeed. But this is not a fool-proof mechanism. We had an excellent debate on this question on The Interpreter a few months ago, and I will not rehearse it all here.
My bottom line is simply this: building a stable new order to manage new power relativities will require compromises from everyone. Economic interdependence increases the incentives for compromise, but does not remove the necessity for it. It should ensure that both the US and China are willing to build the kind of shared leadership I propose for Asia. It does not mean that building a new order is unnecessary. So we can test the effectiveness of economic interdependence by seeing what the great powers are actually doing. Are they moving towards this kind of compromise? I do not think so.
In fact I am starting to wonder whether the golden straitjacket might actually increase risks rather than reduce them. The problem is that people too easily assume order will be preserved by the other guy giving way, because they instinctively believe that the other guy has an even bigger stake in economic integration than they do. In other words they think the other guy wears the straitjacket, but they do not. Today many Americans – and some Australians — assume that China will continue to accept US primacy, and Chinese assume that America will tap the mat. The danger is that both will be wrong.
Photo by Flickr user bibliogrrl, used under a Creative Commons license.
