By Mercy A. Kuo and Angie O. Tang
Insights from Muthiah Alagappa
The Rebalance authors Mercy Kuo and Angie Tang regularly engage subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. rebalance to Asia. This conversation with Muthiah Alagappa – non-resident Senior Associate in the Asia Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia, Civil Society and Political Change in Asia: Expanding and Contracting Democratic Change, and Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features – is the ninth in “The Rebalance Insight Series.”
Please explain the nature of Asia’s strategic landscape.
Although it has become fashionable to talk about a transformed or transforming Asian strategic landscape, I believe that landscape is characterized by both continuity and change. Continuity stems from the fact that most Asian countries, which became free of colonial rule only in the post-World War II period, continue to be engaged in contested processes of making nations and states that are likely to endure for several more decades, if not centuries, with no set terminal point. As in other parts of the world, change including progress, setbacks and reversals, should be expected. For now nation-making concerns center on forging single, unified nations out of multiple peoples inhabiting territories claimed by the state, unifying divided nations or seeking autonomy if not outright independence for certain peoples. State-making concerns center among others on developing widely accepted political systems for the acquisition and exercise of state power, devolving state power to local levels, and the desire of several incumbents – parties and individuals – to hold on to state power in perpetuity. Most violent conflicts in Asia including those on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, between India and Pakistan and the numerous so-called minority struggles for autonomy and independence are grounded in contentions over nation and state-making projects. Future conflict may also arise from contestations over limitations imposed from above on public political participation and competition for state power especially in countries with one-party dominant political systems. In light of their primary focus on nation and state-making challenges, political leaderships in Asian countries do not envision a clear break between domestic and international concerns. Their international behavior has and will continue to be shaped by concerns relating to winning domestic struggles over nation and state-making.
The change dimension in the Asian strategic landscape stems primarily from the sustained rapid economic growth of Asian countries especially China over the last several decades. China is now the world’s second largest economy followed by Japan. Asia has become one of the three core economic regions of the world with growing interest on the part of Asian powers in reshaping global and regional orders to increase their weight and influence in those orders. Rapid economic growth has also enabled Asian countries to devote greater resources to military modernization and build-up contributing to change in the strategic landscape. Interest in reordering regional and global orders, preserving territorial integrity and sovereignty, and resisting “imperial” domination frequently pits certain Asian powers, especially China, against the United States which will continue to be the primus inter pares power in the region for several more decades. Consequently, the China-U.S. dynamic is growing in significance in the Asian strategic landscape. Although this dynamic could become a de facto fault line, thus far it has not fundamentally altered existing dynamics of the numerous conflicts in the region. In the foreseeable future the foreign and security policies of Asian countries will be driven by the symbiosis of continuity and change with strong emphasis on territorial integrity, preserving sovereignty, resisting imperial domination, and increasing their weight and influence in regional and global orders.
Read the full story at The Diplomat