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Balance of Power
Balance of Power
comes to best managing the relationship between the US and China today.
It’s a little bit of Kissinger, with a balance of power strategy backed by
partnership diplomacy.
Given the big changes in the world, it may be worth talking about some
of the geopolitical and geostrategic matters. Political and strategic
events, and economic events, particularly in our interconnected world
where everything is done in real time, mean that one has to have a
feeling for the vector forces as they affect you and change you.
The Cold War was the epiphany at the end of the twentieth century
which nobody expected. The polarity of the Cold War consolidated
alliances in the West, but it also snap-froze, for 40 years, the promise
and opportunity of post-colonialism. The post-Cold War trade and
capital arrangements have reinstated population as the principle driver
of GDP, as it was before the industrial revolution. The states with the
largest populations will again be the largest states by way of GDP.
Missed opportunity
America was not alert to the post-Cold War power shifts. The US had a
chance to remake the world at the end of the Cold War. George Herbert
Bush spoke about it in a very famous speech but left office before he
could do anything about it. Bill Clinton was a domestic politician, he
wasn’t about remaking the world.
In the triumphalism of the unipolar moment, the United States saw itself
as having defeated the Soviet Union. Francis Fukuyama wrote his book
‘The End of History’; it was all over red rover, we’re all Jeffersonians
now, the market system has won.
The US, for 24 years has gone without a strategy. If you’re running the
world and you’re Number 1, and you don’t have a strategy for a quarter
of a century, you have a problem.
Confucian characteristics
It is worth reflecting, when talking about the Atlantic and the Pacific, that
the East has never been a compendium of states identified by a
common culture or religion in the way the West has always had
common bindings. Asia has always been a hierarchy, with China at the
top, rather than a balance of power or equilibrium of sovereign states
on Westphalian principles.
That all went down at Tiananmen Square in 1989. And it was Deng
Xiaoping who made the decision to walk away from it. He abandoned
his party secretary and former Premier Zhao Ziyang and his ideals for
untrammelled primacy of the party.
But Deng stuck with the deregulation and the market system. The
Shanghai Gang—Jiang Zemin and Zhu Ronghi—pushed the reforms
through, but the 10 years of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao saw the
structure fall into hapless corruption.
With Deng having made the original decision for party primacy, Xi’s task
has been to recover the legitimacy of the party, hence the crackdown
on corruption.
Balance of power
In this context, America’s policy for over a century has been to prevent
hegemony in Asia. Its difficulty is, as a key participant, its metropolitan
home and centre of gravity is located far from the geographic centre of
East Asia.
I think the key for us is that the preservation of peace between these
two great states, which really depends on the equanimity in the world,
depends upon three things: it depends upon restraint; it depends upon
force; and it depends upon legitimacy.
As Henry Kissinger put it: we need a balance of power strategy but with
partnership diplomacy.
Given the enormous and rising power of China and its ambitions, with
its growing middle class and its prerogatives in the world as a major
state, it requires a balance of power strategy. But we must deal with this
using partnership diplomacy because if ever the competition becomes
military it will be like 1900-1914; once you give the battlefield
commanders control, you can say ‘goodbye’.
In a major foreign policy speech last April, President Trump said “We
desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We
have serious difficulties with these two nations, and must regard them
with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should
seek common ground based on shared interests.”
I’ll make the point, and I’ve made it to the Americans often, America’s
future in Asia—and it should have a future in Asia—is as a balancing
power—the way Britain was to Europe during the periods of Bonaparte,
Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. It was always the offshore power that
provided the balance of power in those three important conflicts.
America can still frame and guarantee the Atlantic, providing it comes to
terms with Russia, but it can no longer frame and guarantee the Pacific.
China will never be a strategic client of the United States in the way
Japan has been a strategic client for 70 years. This is not going to
happen.
This is our big foreign policy challenge in Australia, and it’s really the
great foreign policy challenge between the two.
Paul Keating was the 24th prime minister of Australia from 1991-1996. This is
an edited version of a speech delivered at the Wharton Global Forum in
Sydney on 9 February 2018. A recording of the full speech is available here.
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