In an article published in Foreign Policy magazine in the late 2011, it was asserted that the United States was shifting emphasis in its foreign policy. The text was signed by none other than the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. In the subtitle, she stressed that “the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq”[1], and because of that, she urged the United States to be a protagonist in the process of emergence of East Asia as an economic and, increasingly, geopolitical center. Therefore, she argued that the United States, rather than simply bring home its troops allocated in the two countries abovementioned, should relocate them across the Asia-Pacific, so that the country retained its status as leader and guarantor of the liberal global order.
It is noticeable that in her article, as well as in other speeches in the White House and in the Department of State, the author seeks to avoid an explicit rhetoric of confrontation with China, which seems to be the main novelty of the new U.S. strategy for Asia. The presence of the United States in that region and its military and economic hegemony, as we will see, are not exactly a recent originality, as they have been constant over the past decades.
The pivot to Asia-Pacific is a strategy to face China, which, in turn, explains the new tactics adopted even before the publication of Clinton’s article. The strategic change, which in some ways can be traced back to the 1990s, stems from the reassertion of the U.S. regional supremacy in the context of the rapid Chinese rise. To accomplish this task, it is expected that military forces will concentrate on the region again and that projects on trade regulation, diplomatic initiatives and the strengthening of military alliances with Japan, South Korea and the Southeast Asian countries will be launched. However, the general direction of the American foreign policy has remained the same over the past decades, which is to keep the nation as the leading force that promotes trade framework, economic flows, navigation and the environment in that region.
The current U.S. presence in Asia is not new. Already in the mid-19th century, the country was prominent in the Pacific in the cases of deployment of war fleets to impose treaties to China and Japan. By the end of the century, the United States emerged as a major force in the Pacific Ocean, with the territorial conquests of Hawaii and the Philippines. After World War II, the U.S. supremacy culminated with the defeat of Japan and the relative weakening of Great Britain and France. Since then, the United States has retained primacy in Asia-Pacific by maintaining a large portion of its naval fleet in that part of the world, keeping a dense network of regional allies and military bases along a zone ranging from Alaska to Malaysia, including the Aleutian Islands, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, thus de facto controlling the Strait of Malacca, a key point for global shipping routes. This massive presence in Asia-Pacific, comparable only to the relevance of Western Europe, was persistent in the U.S. foreign action during the Cold War, not only to halt a possible military advance of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, but also to enable a nuclear deterrence against both nations.
In addition to the military presence, the U.S. foreign policy has explicitly stimulated economic empowerment of many countries in the region, and the Colombo Plan[2] is illustrative of that. This policy can be understood either for strategic reasons, to face common threats, or for economic ambitions, given the increasing transnationalization of U.S. conglomerates. Japan succeeded in its economic reconstruction already in the late 1950s, thanks to the pre-existence of important national economic groups, among other factors. It was then followed by “waves” of economic miracles, such as the Asian Tigers in the 1970s and 1980s (South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan) and the New Tigers in the following decades (the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and, more recently, Vietnam).
In the case of China, still in 1971, the country not only normalized relations with the United States, but also reoriented its global policy, thus becoming an important player in the opposition to the Soviet Union. This allowed the influx of investments from the United States and mainly from Japan, even before the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, by the end of that decade. Since then, China’s economic progress has been remarkable, providing the country with economic strength both regionally and globally. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of an economically strong and politically more confident China has increasingly been a reason for worry in the U.S., although some economic sectors in the latter kept interest in the continuity of the progress of China. The result was an ambiguous American foreign policy toward China at that time: on the one hand, the U.S. hampered the Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization and banned the arms trade as a response to the tragic events of 1989[3], on the other hand, it did not stop or reduce the volume of economic flows between both nations.
During the election campaign in 2008, Barack H. Obama and his supporters emphasized the need for the United States to turn to Asia, and criticized the presence of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since he took over the presidency in 2009, the diplomatic relations with China have degraded in light of disagreements about trade, monetary and environmental policies. Moreover, the dispute over the control of the maritime territories between the countries of the region, including China and some of the local U.S. allies, has aggravated in the period.
In this context, the Asia-Pacific pivot embraces different tactics on at least three fronts. The first one is military, through the expansion of the contingent stationed in Japan and, to a lesser extent, in Australia and Thailand. A similar process may occur in the Navy, with the increase from 50% to 60% of the overall U.S. naval capability in the region.[4] From a qualitative point of view, a doctrine of Air-Sea Battle has been released, the design of which, according to U.S. military experts, is a response to the development of Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) doctrines by certain countries, including China.
The second kind of tactics is basically economic, and the flagship has been the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP, which was signed in the early 2016 and is awaiting ratification, covers issues that go beyond trade liberalization, such as labor regulation, intellectual property rights, among other matters, and involves 11 countries of the Pacific basin, with the notable exceptions of China and Russia.[5] The third method of promoting influence has been by means of diplomacy itself, through the expansion and strengthening of regional alliances, especially with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), with which the United States has signed a treaty of friendship. Furthermore, the continuity and, in some cases, the deepening of the bilateral relations with India[6], South Korea and Japan is a process that was already visible during the Bush administration.
The Asian pivot is an ongoing process, which can be summed up as a strategic readjustment of the United States, given the perception that China questions the current correlation of forces, which is more favorable to Washington than to Beijing. Although China has gained ground on the economic realm and has been increasing its military expenditures, thus narrowing the gap between itself and the U.S., the latter remains superior in several areas, such as the military competition (especially maritime), the influence of regional actors, the level of technological development and the ability to enforce international rules and regimes. This strategy has been possible thanks to the gradual disengagement of the U.S. from the Middle East, although serious problems in Europe, particularly in Ukraine, may distract Washington. Moreover, this new configuration may relegate other parts of the world, especially South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, to a secondary role within the strategic priorities of the U.S.
[1] CLINTON, Hillary. America’s Pacific Century. Foreign Affairs, Nov. 2011. Retrieved from
[2] Sometimes dubbed as the “Asian Marshall Plan”, in a reference to the European reconstruction plan, the Colombo Plan is actually an international organization whose purpose was not economic reconstruction, but rather the development of countries in South, Southeast and East Asia.
[3] In that year, protests took the streets in several cities in China, to which authorities responded with violence in some cases, eventually causing a massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
[4] SUTTER, Robert G. et al. Balancing acts: the U.S. rebalance and Asia-Pacific stability. Retrieved from < http://www2.gwu.edu/~sigur/assts/docs/BalancingActs_Compiled1.pdf> on Sep. 13, 2016.
[5] For a deeper insight on the TPP and other mega-regional trade agreements, see: Valdez, R. Brazil and the mega trade agreements: principles, history and challenges. Retrieved from < http://panoramainternacional.fee.tche.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/20160610panorama_v1_n4_en_final.pdf> on Sep. 14, 2016.
[6] In 2010, India received explicit U.S. support to occupy a permanent seat in an eventual reform of the United Nations Security Council.
