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WALL STREET JOURNAL
China or the U.S.? Asian Nations’ Answer: Neither
Revival of TPP and ‘quad’ of democracies to counter Beijing show
an alternative storyline
By Andrew Browne
HANOI—It’s a neat narrative: America’s inevitable decline means the
inexorable rise of China.
As Xi Jinping consolidates his power at home and promotes his $1
trillion-plus “Belt and Road” infrastructure program abroad, a
“post-American” age dominated by the Middle Kingdom is indeed becoming
easier to imagine.
But wait. Asian countries have other ideas. When Mr. Xi and Donald Trump
joined an annual gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders in Vietnam last week,
the most significant drama didn’t star either Chinese or American
actors.
Galvanized by Japan, the 11 remaining members of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership pushed closer to a trade pact that offers a liberal
alternative to the Chinese economic model of protected markets and
policies favoring state “champions” while also advancing the vision of
multilateralism as the Trump administration pushes for one-on-one deals.
Few predicted this outcome. When Mr. Trump pulled out of the TPP on his
third full day in the Oval Office, commentators widely declared the most
ambitious trade deal in history dead. Many predicted that China,
excluded from the laborious, decadelong TPP negotiations, would step in
and fill the void with its own regional trade pact. If further evidence
was needed that a historic power shift was under way, this was it.
Yet the TPP lives on. Last-minute resistance from Canada upset plans to
close the deal last week, but its proponents hope for a completion early
next year. Its survival challenges the simplistic notion that Pax
Americana in Asia will give way to Pax Sinica as inevitably as Britain
once ceded its place in the world to the rising power across the
Atlantic.
What the past week has amply demonstrated is that Japan and other
regional players—Australia and New Zealand also strongly back the
free-trade arrangement, now rebranded the Comprehensive and Progressive
Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership—intend to have their say in the
matter.
The region has alternatives, even if Mr. Trump’s America drifts off on
its own and Mr. Xi, emboldened by his recent elevation to Mao-like
status, decides to launch a new power play. Much of its future will be
shaped by coalitions of countries with shared values. Sometimes, these
will embrace one or both of the economic superpowers on either side of
the Pacific. Other times, they won’t.
The other big story in Asia over the past week was also substantially
written in Shinzo Abe’s Japan—the revival of a democratic “quad” also
including India, Australia and the U.S. It conducted its first meeting
on Saturday in Manila.
Although this looked like a made-in-America initiative— Rex Tillerson,
the U.S. secretary of state, floated the idea of a “free and open
Indo-Pacific” in a speech last month—it springs from a regional angst
about China’s growing assertiveness and the U.S. ability under Mr. Trump
to muster a response.
The group was originally launched in 2007, but fell dormant a year later
after Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, pulled out over fears
of offending China, by far the country’s largest trading partner.
Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College
London, writes that the group’s revival following an apparent change of
heart by Canberra is all about regional power centers combining to
manage “China’s rise and America’s incompetence.”
Mr. Abe, who has heightened fears on both counts, proposed a similar
concept—he called it a four-nation “diamond”—just before he took power
in a landslide in 2012. Earlier, in a 2007 speech to the Indian
parliament, he spoke of a “dynamic coupling” of the Pacific and Indian
Oceans as “seas of freedom and prosperity.”
Skeptics say of the power-shift scenario in which an exhausted and
muddled America hands over Asian leadership to a focused and dynamic
China that it is off by a wide margin.
First of all, the U.S. decline is much exaggerated. As the Harvard
professor Joseph Nye points out, America still has what he calls “four
aces”: favorable geography (the U.S. is surrounded by oceans and allies;
China by rivals); energy security; a better ability to withstand a trade
war, and possession of the world’s reserve currency.
In addition, smaller countries have agency, too, a fact that China
appears to have belatedly recognized. At a summit of the 10-nation
Southeast Asian bloc and China in Manila, Beijing agreed to start talks
on a code of conduct for the South China Sea, where China’s construction
of artificial islands has convinced neighbors that its rise will be
anything but peaceful.
Of course, all of these arrangements are tentative. The renamed TPP may
yet fall apart. The “diamond” could lose its glitter; powerful
constituencies in both India and Australia argue against confronting
China too openly. The code-of-conduct negotiations may drag on
indefinitely. (Preliminary discussions have been ongoing for more than a
decade.)
The one certainty is that regional power is shifting. In relative terms,
China is gaining at America’s expense. Predicting how this will end,
however, is a fool’s errand: The constellations that will help determine
the future are only just emerging. |