Category Archives: Asia

My Submission on Dodko to the University of Nottingham’s Blog Symposium on Asian Territorial Disputes

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The China Policy Institute of the University of Nottingham in Britain is running a blog symposium – cool idea! – this week on Asia’s territorial disputes. Here is the series page, and here is my submission. I’d like to thank the CPI blog director, my friend Jon Sullivan, for inviting me to submit. Not surprisingly, I was solicited to write on Dokdo/Takeshima/Liancourt.

Regular readers of my work will notice some of my preferred themes – that Korean claim is probably stronger; that a Japanese acceptance of that is nonetheless necessary to legitimate that sovereignty claim; that Korea wildly overblows the importance of this conflict because ‘anti-Japanism’ is central to modern South Korean identity.

The other entries in the series are worth your time if this area interests you. I was happy to participate. Below the jump is my contribution:

My Lowy Post: Relax (again), Japan is Not ‘Re-Militarizing’

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If there is any one trope in Korean and Chinese international relations writing I don’t like, it is the causal, constant, angry insistence on reading Japan as always ‘remilitarizing.’ In just about everything I read by Korean and Chinese authors on northeast Asia this is repeated relentlessly, as a truism, and usually in the worst possible normative light: not only is Japan ‘remilitarizing,’ it also apparently has neo-imperial designs on Asia.

Sorry, Koreans and Chinese, but this is just not true, not at all really. Note for example, that Japan always seems to be in the process of re-militarizing in this manner of writing. It is never actually done doing so; it’s constant and insidious. No matter what Japan does on national security, it always is described as re-militarizing. Apparently Japanese remilitarization has been going on for decades; which is another way of saying it isn’t really happening at all. Note too, that no one ever seems to remark on Japan’s paltry defense spending or systemic dependence on the US military. So this is just silly boilerplate; it’s far more about Korean and Chinese nationalist dislike for Japan than any real empirical trend. But since it gets repeated so often, and seems to be taken for granted by just about everyone in Korea and China, it is worth laying out in some detail why is is bunk.

The essay below the jump is re-post of this essay for the Lowy Institute in Australia.

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My Lowy Post: Relax, Korea is not ‘finlandizing’ for China

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This is the first of two part series (one, two) I wrote for the Lowy Institute last month. I have the feeling that the centenary of WWI this summer has gone to everyone’s head, because I’m reading lots of posts all over the place about WWI and the parallels to the Asia-Pacific. And while there are some, a lot of this is hype. Northeast Asia is actually pretty stable – until Japan decides it has finally had enough of Chinese salami-slicing in the region I suppose. But increasingly, I think there are a lot of hawks out there, especially in the DC think-tanks and the PLA, who really dislike the status quo and hence over-hype small changes like Xi’s trip to South Korea or yet another North Korean provocation. But there’s no need to add to a march to war with threat inflation, which is what I am trying to counter-act here.

The essay follows the jump.

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My July Diplomat Essay: Seoul’s Ban of Uber is a Classic Example of Asian Mercantilism

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So this is a blog about Asian security, but regular readers will know that I write a lot about political economy too. And nothing drives me up the wall so much as the endless NTB gimmickry so common in Asian to prevent free-trade outcomes that national elites and entrenched mega-corporations don’t like. If you live in Asia and want to know why everything is so outrageously expensive, or why you can’t get technologies/products your friends take for granted in the West, here it is: endless crony protection, tariff or otherwise, to block imports that are superior and/or bring price competition. If the US has had too much deregulation, Asia desperately, desperately needs it. Romney for president of Korea!

The case of Seoul City banning the car-sharing app Uber is a classic example of everything wrong with Asian mercantilism: xenophobia, competition-quashing, monopoly rent protection, reverse engineering someone else’s idea, shameless nationalist demagoguery of a successful foreign enterprise, hypocritical rejection of free-trade ideals by a country that runs a regular trade surplus, open violation of free-trade norms despite recently signing multiple FTAs, and so on.

So below is a reprint of my recent essay for the Diplomat on this disgrace.

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My Lowy Essay on China Picking 3 Fights in 9 Months: Japan, Phils, Vietnam. WTH?

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The essay below is a reprint of something I wrote for the Lowy Institute a few weeks ago (original here). I got into back-and-forth with Brad Glosserman and Hugh White over Chinese foreign policy intentions. I am still not entirely sold on the idea that China is a full-blown revisionist, like Putin, or worse, Wilhelmine Germany. There are other possible explanations.

The map to the left is the so-called “Nine Dash Line,” China’s preposterously capacious maritime claim in the South China Sea. I wonder if it’s even worth noting anymore that UNCLOS can’t be possibly be used to justify this. Everyone knows that now, right? The claim is just nationalism, pure and simple.

What’s really struck me though about China’s maritime claims is how Beijing has really ramped up the tension in just a few months. In the last 9 months, China has picked serious fights with Japan (over its ADIZ), the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal, and now Vietnam over that oil rig. That much bullying in such a short period of time, very obviously coincident with Xi Jinping’s ascension, pretty much tells the world that the new Chinese administration is becoming the regional bully we’ve all been fearing for 20 years. This strikes me as unbelievably foolish, as there is a very obvious anti-Chinese containment ring waiting in the wings. A lot of people in the US, Japan, and increasingly Southeast Asia would be happy to see this outcome. My strong sense is that US patience particularly is running out, and that ‘neo-containment’ is around the corner.

So this essay is a last ditch effort to try explain Chinese belligerence as an outcome of Chinese dysfunction. Let’s hope this is right, because if the hawks are right that arguments such as mine are just excuse-making for Chinese belligerence, then I guess we have to contain China. Scary stuff.

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My Newsweek Japan Story on the Sino-Vietnamese Clash in the South China: End of the Peaceful Rise?

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Below is the English version of my essay for the current volume of Newsweek Japan. (Japanese version here.)

Regular readers will know that I have argued for awhile that we (the US) should not provoke China into unnecessary hostilities. I’ve thought for awhile that Hugh White’s idea of a concert in Asia is the most likely to insure peace. If the US insists on giving no ground, then a Sino-US conflict out of sheer misperception is likely. But accommodating China can’t be seen as an invitation to bully the neighborhood – just not so much as to cause a war with America. So it is a fine line to walk, and China certainly isn’t helping. In the last year, it has picked fights with Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines. Like most people, I find this pretty scary, but also somewhat inexplicable. Increasingly, I think the ‘peaceful rise’ days are over (argued below), but this might also be external fallout of a new Chinese administration looking to prove itself to the PLA. I hope I am wrong…

“On May 2, China placed an oil rig inside Vietnam’s offshore exclusive economic zone. This deployment was accompanied by some 80 ships, include armed warships. Vietnam responded by sending out its coast guard. These ships were meet by ramming and water-cannon. This in turn sparked anti-Chinese rioting in Vietnam that has killed dozens and sent Chinese workers fleeing the country. In the last year, China has also tangled over islands in the South China Sea near the Philippines and with Japan over Senkaku.

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Guest Post – Dave Kang: ‘Military Spending in East Asia is Lower than You Think’

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The following is a guest-post by my good friend Dave Kang. Dave teaches international relations at the University of Southern California. If you are working on East Asia, you really should know his stuff; if you don’t, get to it. Below he complements his recent TNI essay with the full flow of charts and graphics. This post is a very important rejoinder to the constant assertion (think Robert Kaplan) that East Asia is on the brink of war and that everyone is freaked out by China. The thing is, East Asian military spending doesn’t actually suggest that at all. Data first everyone…

“In a recent National Interest essay I argued that military expenditures in East Asia do not appear to be excessively high. In this post I’d like to post the figures that informed the TNI essay (for some reason, TNI made me take out all the graphics – isn’t that what the web is for?). The figures are quite vivid, and help explain why I made the fairly straightforward interpretation of the data that China’s neighbors, according to IISS and SIPRI, aren’t balancing it the way everyone says they are.

The standard way in which security scholars measure a country’s militarization is to measure the “defense effort” – i.e., the ratio of defense expenditures to GDP. The defense effort serves as a proxy for domestic politics: the share of its economy that a nation devotes to the military reflects a nation’s priorities, and the trade-offs the country chooses to make. When countries perceive a significant external threat, military priorities take precedence over domestic priorities such as education or social services. In times of relative peace, countries are more willing to devote a greater share of their economy to domestic priorities – perhaps the best example of this was the ephemeral “peace dividend” following the Cold War. Putting Latin America next to East Asia also allows for a much better sense of scale and comparison (Figure 1).

Figure 1: East Asian and Latin American defense spending, 1988-2013 (% of GDP)

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Countries: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Australia.

Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela

Source: Information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), http://www.sipri.org/databases/milex, 2014.

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My CSIS-PacNet Newsletter on US Alliances in Asia: Balance-Positive, but Downsides should be Admitted Too

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So I wrote my first article for CSIS the other day – for their PacNet series on Asia-Pacific issues. If you aren’t on the PacNet list-serve already, you probably should be. They have pretty good reach, and they manage to get a lot of good people to write for them – so who knows how I got a call. My thanks to the editor, Brad Glosserman for soliciting me.

This essay (below the jump) is a tweaked version my original essay for the Diplomat. The argument is the same, only Brad made it a little sharper and more pointed than in the original. So here I will take a moment to respond to some of the ‘you’re-appeasing-the-Chinese’ comments I have gotten. The point of the essay is not to suggest that the US should leave Asia. Instead,

1) We (Americans) should realize there are unintended consequences to our actions out here. I think we sometimes miss that due our nationalist blinders that an American presence in the world is an automatic good. It is almost always mixed, as we should know by now with our up-down involvement in the Middle East. This tries to illustrate that.

2) The good things that America is supposedly bringing to Asia are almost never measured. They are just assumed under a miasma of American exceptionalist awesomeness: we are awesome, therefore our presence is Asia is good for them. Instead of assuming in classic American Whig fashion, that all good things go together, how about a little more modesty?

So, yes, if your black/white alternative vision for Asia is Chinese regional hegemony, then US East Asian regional hegemony is great. Until China liberalizes/democratizes, we should probably stay, and that is probably a good thing. I agree that China is sort of a threat against which we should be hedging. (But Dave Kang makes an argument that China’s neighbors’ military spending does not actually suggest they see China as a big threat.) But, there might alternatives to a big militarized pivot and tacit cold war with China. Maybe some kind of concert with China, Japan, India and Australia, plus smaller powers, can be arranged. Also, we need a way to prevent East Asian allies (and ‘shadow-allies’ like Indonesia or Vietnam) from free-riding on us too much. (NATO free-riding is very severe and is crippling the response to Crimea, so it is actually pretty important to get US Asian allies to step-up.) I am not yet convinced that these alternatives to a Sino-US cold war are impossible – hence this essay. But yes, Chinese behavior in the East and South China Seas gives me pause too. It is hard to know the right way forward here.

Here is that CSIS essay:

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My Lowy Post on Obama’s Asia Trip – Watch Every Interest Group Instrumentalize it for its Own Purposes

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PHOTO: Barack Obama waves as he walks down the stairs from Air Force One at Fiumicino Airport on March 28, 2014 in Rome, Italy.

So Obama is off to Asia this week for a quick trip that is inevitably being over-hyped by every Asia analyst on the planet as some major turning point in the US relationship with Asia. It’s not: below is re-printed my original, ‘watch-elites-manipulate-the-Obama-trip’ comment for the Lowy Institute. The spin will be over-the-top as every Asia pundit races for media exposure. Presidential trips are a great opportunity for the analyst community to posture and hyperventilate about how Obama ‘must’ do this, ‘has’ to do that.

Yawn.

Most of that is bunk. A lot of that is 1) analysts trying to demonstrate their own relevance and self-importance – is it surprising that Asia hands defend the Asia pivot so vociferously? But there is also 2), the unwillingness of a lot of Asia hands and hawks to admit that the US does not actually ‘have’ to do anything in Asia. America has huge freedom to move here, and Asian states – both allies and China – need the US way more than we need them. Where would Asian economies be without the US consumer? And even China might be nervous about a US forces withdrawal given the open balancing behavior that would likely spark in Japan, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. So ignore all the commentary that the US ‘needs’ Asia; the real story is the opposite and that space which that gives the US to play hard-ball on things like Asian mercantilism and North Korea.

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Obama’s State of the Union once again Demonstrates that the US doesn’t really Care that much about Asia

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This graphic is a word-cloud of the president’s state of the union address last week. I am not even sure the word ‘Asia’ is in there.

The following is a local re-up of a piece I originally wrote for the Lowy Institute, where I now blog twice a month. Basically, I argue a theme regular readers here will have heard before – that the ‘pivot’ to Asia is mostly an elite project in the US and that most Americans don’t really care about Asia that much. If I say ‘China’ to my friends in the US, the first thing they think of is cheap stuff in Walmart. So whenever anyone tells me that Asia ‘needs’ the US, or that we’re ‘ceding’ Asia to China, or even Russia (oh, please), because we missed the ASEAN Regional Forum or whatever, I just roll my eyes. Without the American consumer Asian economies would collapse, and, Red Dawn fantasies aside, no Asian state is a security threat to the US (barring the infinitesimally small likelihood of Chinese nuclear strike on the US homeland).

What that means is that the only Americans who think that the US needs Asia are those who support US global hegemony and therefore cannot differentiate among US core interests – such as basic stability in Canada and the Caribbean basin, or a secure oil flow from the Persian Gulf – and US choices to be involved in places like Iraq or South Korea. The pivot to Asia, much like NATO 20 years after the Cold War, is a choice, not a necessity. That doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t ‘pivot’ – indeed, I think it is a good idea myself – but it must also be admitted that retrenchment from many of these commitments would not obviously harm US security, even if many allies would not like it. Neocons and think-tanker far too often elide this crucial distinction. Is Asia important? Does it matter? Yes, sure. Does the US need Asia? No – unless you believe the US and its globe-spanning hegemony are identical (hint: they aren’t). US allies interests are not always synonymous with America’s and if we don’t see that, we invite free-riding, chain-ganged conflicts, and a gargantuan national security state.

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