Washington and its Containment of China

The initiative for a 21st century Asia-Pacific area of prosperity, recently announced by Obama, looks to confront the emergence of China in two concurrent ways. The first is through collective security, by appealing to Washington’s traditional allies in the region. The second is through a trade and economic liberalization agreement: the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership. Hugh White, professor of strategic studies from the University of Canberra, has referred to this initiative as the Obama Doctrine of Chinese Containment, affirming that it is “America’s most ambitious new strategic doctrine since Truman committed America to contain the Soviet Union.”

The first of the two sides of this initiative is a consequence of the powerful opening that China offered the U.S. when in 2010 it flexed its muscles in front of various neighbors in regard to disputes in the South China Sea and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. That fractured the uneasy strategy of gentle power that China had cultivated over various years and allowed the U.S. to position itself as the necessary ally in a region from which it had been absent for a long time.

The former notwithstanding, the American announcement that it would deploy an important contingent of Marines to the north of Australia was reminiscent of an era in which in which East Asia constituted the epicenter of the military confrontation between East and West. Statements by several ministers of foreign affairs from the region converged in their refusal to allow the region to once again become the focus of a confrontation between two great powers. Furthermore, to confront the tectonic power of the emerging Chinese economy through military alliances and expressions of raw power would be the biggest show of nearsightedness on the part of Washington.

For its part, the economic-commercial side of the initiative goes against the work done by China for several years on regional integration. As the Japanese analyst Yukio Okamoto pointed out: “The Trans-Pacific Partnership creates a clear dilemma in the region: either they direct their attention to a free trade agreement with the U.S. or maintain their economic coexistence with China.”* The East Asian economies would do better to sway the balance in one direction or the other in light of the following considerations: Should they look to a process of economic integration with China that’s already ripe and ready, as expressed in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Free Trade Area (more so Japan and South Korea), or enter into a complex process of negotiation and subsequent congressional approval with the United States, which could take several years? Should they look toward a buoyant economy, which in 2014 will become the biggest import market in the world, or towards an economy whose deficits and budget imbalances will supposedly become so big that it will hardly be able to guarantee the fulfillment of its commitments? The Obama initiative does not seem to have a lot of prospects.

*Editor’s note: the quotation, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.