Editor's Note: Robert E. Kelly is a Senior Analyst at Wikistrat and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University, South Korea. A longer version of this essay may be found at his website, Asian Security Blog.
By Robert E. Kelly - Special to CNN
For all the talk about how the US might ‘pivot’ to Asia, there is little Western discussion of how China might respond to its semi-encirclement. Here are five possibilities:
1. China might pull South Korea into its orbit
China’s regional problem is that no one really trusts it. Its allies are weak – North Korea and Myanmar. The best way to head-off encirclement is to break the ring with some decent allies. Nasty, dependent dictatorships are not enough. South Korea is a central link in any semi-containment ring around China, but one where China has a lot of leverage. FULL POST
Editor’s Note: Robert E. Kelly, Senior Analyst at Wikistrat, is a professor of political science at Pusan National University, South Korea. A longer version of this essay may be found at his website, Asian Security Blog.
By Robert E. Kelly – Special to CNN
A U.S. ‘pivot’ to Asia is the foreign policy talk of the moment, but I think Americans are unlikely to embrace it.
True, Asia outweighs other global regions as a U.S. interest. Europe and Latin America are mostly democratic, fairly prosperous and at peace. Africa, sadly, remains a U.S. backwater. The Middle East is overrated. Israel and oil are important but hardly justify the vast U.S. presence. The terrorist threat is ‘overblown.’
By contrast, Asia’s economies are growing fast. Asian savers and banks fund the U.S. deficit. Asia’s addition of two billion people to the global labor pool kept world inflation down for a generation. Asian markets are now major export destinations for American industries. Five hundred million people live in the Middle East but three times that just in India. Half the world’s population lives in South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia. FULL POST
Editor's Note: Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.
By Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate
The austerity debate was the topic du jour at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. With good reason. Europe is slipping back into recession just when recovery in the United States is finally getting some traction. That has undermined the case for fiscal consolidation, which is so heavily favored in Europe.
Yet I took away a different conclusion from Davos. I moderated a session on “The New Context in East Asia,” addressed by a panel of senior representatives from Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan. With the exception of the Japanese participant, all had first-hand experience with the devastating Asian financial crisis of the late 1990’s. FULL POST
By Zbigniew Brzezinski, Foreign Affairs
The United States' central challenge over the next several decades is to revitalize itself, while promoting a larger West and buttressing a complex balance in the East that can accommodate China's rising global status. A successful U.S. effort to enlarge the West, making it the world's most stable and democratic zone, would seek to combine power with principle. A cooperative larger West - extending from North America and Europe through Eurasia (by eventually embracing Russia and Turkey), all the way to Japan and South Korea - would enhance the appeal of the West's core principles for other cultures, thus encouraging the gradual emergence of a universal democratic political culture.
At the same time, the United States should continue to engage cooperatively in the economically dynamic but also potentially conflicted East. If the United States and China can accommodate each other on a broad range of issues, the prospects for stability in Asia will be greatly increased. That is especially likely if the United States can encourage a genuine reconciliation between China and Japan while mitigating the growing rivalry between China and India.
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Editor's Note: Every week, the Global Public Square brings you some must-read editorials from around the world addressed to America and Americans. The series is called Listen up, America!
U.S. troops are out of Iraq, and U.S.-led combat operations in Afghanistan could wind down by the end of next year. At the same time, the U.S. has pivoted its attention to the Pacific and to an ascendant China. This has not gone unnoticed by the nations in the region.
China – “It is natural to see the US, which is used to being No.1 in the world, feel uncomfortable and even uneasy about China's rise,” says an editorial in the Global Times, a newspaper owned by the country's communist party.
“But they should first realize that the rise of China is inevitable as long as China can maintain a peaceful development environment. In this sense, the most effective way for the US to contain its development is to damage the peaceful environment in China and bring it into chaos.”
China – "The Philippines has signaled during a recent bilateral defense dialogue that it would expand the US military presence on its soil," says another editorial in the Global Times, adding, "China must respond to this move."
"The Philippines is a suitable target to impose such a punishment. A reasonable yet powerful enough sanction can be considered. It should show China's neighboring area that balancing China by siding with the US is not a good choice."
Editor's Note: Every week, the Global Public Square brings you some must-read editorials from around the world addressed to America and Americans. The series is called Listen up, America!
President Obama announced last week he was downsizing the Pentagon due to concerns about outsized government spending and mounting debt. But these cuts carry an important caveat, as the president made clear, “we will be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region.”
With the turn toward East Asia—and toward a rising China in particular—President Obama’s strategy has attracted a great deal of attention in the region.
China—Washington “should abstain from flexing its muscles, as this won't help solve regional disputes,” writes Yu Zhixiao in Xinhua.
“If the United States indiscreetly applies militarism in the region, it will be like a bull in a china shop, and endanger peace instead of enhancing regional stability.”
Editor's Note: Elizabeth C. Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies, is an expert on Chinese domestic and foreign policy, and U.S.-China relations. Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
By Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal, CFR.org
If there were one word to describe Asia in 2011, it would likely be tremors—not only the physical ones that devastated Japan, but also the political ones that reverberated throughout the region shaking India, China, and Thailand, waking up Burma, and further unsettling North Korea.
1. So Long Earthlings
After a stroke in 2008 and years of poor health, Kim Jung-il was not long for this world. Yet few anticipated that the Dear Leader’s 17-year ruinous reign would end in December 2011 due to the “great mental and physical strain caused by his uninterrupted field guidance tour” while sitting on a train. With his platform shoes, puffy hair, and love of film, he was an easy target for others’ mockery (see Greetings, earthlings, a classic cover from The Economist). Yet he consistently managed to outmaneuver Washington, Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul - testing nuclear devices, launching missiles, and demanding food and energy aid - all the while impoverishing his country. It is too early to predict whether Kim Jung-un, Kim Jong-il’s inexperienced and untested son and heir, will do anything differently - the rest of the world and the North Korean people, in particular, can only hope. FULL POST
By Krista Mahr, TIME
The first time that I asked my GP in Hong Kong for a prescription for birth control pills, she stopped scribbling down her notes in my file and looked up at me. “You don’t need a prescription for that,” she said, bemused. In Hong Kong, as in some other parts of the world, birth control pills are available over the counter; you can pick up your favorite brand in the drug store aisle next to condoms and pregnancy tests. Sitting there in the doctor’s chair, I felt 1) a little guilty of the beloved American habit of assuming U.S. policy is the global norm and 2) a little surprised at being the person in the room with the most conservative notions about contraception. FULL POST
Editor's Note: Joseph Nye, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, is a professor at Harvard and the author of The Future of Power. For more from Nye, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter.
By Joseph Nye, Project Syndicate
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 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in a recent speech, American foreign policy will “pivot” toward East Asia.
Editor's Note: The following post was originally published in The Diplomat, an international current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific region.
By Trefor Moss, The Diplomat
If not quite Nixon in China, the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar this week has an air of history about it. Hers might be the trip that begins Myanmar's rehabilitation in the United States and Europe.
However, another meeting, which took place in Beijing on Monday, was arguably even more important than Clinton’s upcoming audience with Burmese President Thein Sein. For the host of that encounter, Vice President Xi Jinping, is about to become the most important man in China; while his guest, commander-in-chief of the Burmese armed forces Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, is perhaps becoming the most important man in Myanmar.
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