An article in the Nikkei Asian Review caught my eye yesterday. In an interview, Joseph Nye, a former assistant secretary of defence under president Clinton and former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, proclaims that America’s leading position in the world remains secure despite the fading of its soft power caused by Donald Trump. He openly disputes the notion that Asia’s economic rise and deepening interconnectedness will supplant the US in the 21st century.
According to Nye, America remains the only country with global capacity in hard power, and in soft power he claims it still does better than China. However, he doesn’t entirely dismiss and disagree with slogans like “The future is Asian”, the title of even a book authored by global political analyst Parag Khanna, as he concedes a shift of the economic centre of the globe from Europe to Asia, or from the Western to the Eastern hemisphere.
The point Nye seems eager to make, though, is that Asia can or will not be able to create a united front to take on the West. Asia is to be seen as many countries such as China, Japan, India and so forth. America’s ability to organise itself politically and militarily cannot be compared to that of an entire heterogenous region. He talks about dividing lines within Asia, as in authoritarian on the China end and democracies such as Japan and India on the other.
To point out the differences may all be factually correct, but isn’t Nye missing an important point in his argument when he emphasises that the future is not Asian in terms of the global balance of power? The former assistant defence secretary appears to be as American as they come. Like I have asked in a recent
piece, why does it always have to be about winning with the Americans? He doesn’t use the term winning, but his scenario is by definition confrontational.
Again, the world is not a football stadium, and we no longer live in the dark ages when tribes were busy killing, or shall we say winning over, other tribes to safeguard their own existences and defy mortality. That was 1,500 years ago, and have we learned nothing? To be sure, the world is resource-constrained, and the masses tend to respond to bias emotions and, as a friend put it very accurately then, are happily resorting to nothing more basic than joy versus pain and winning versus losing.
However, when Beijing talks about the development of and trade with neighbouring countries and regions further away along the Belt and Road, it really doesn’t matter whether the national systems are heterogeneous or not. What Americans don’t seem to want to understand amid their propaganda swamp is that it is simply a process of inclusion, not for the purpose of China reconfiguring other governments to form a united front with America in geopolitical terms but for joint economic progress.
There is no arguing that China is the largest economy in Asia, and will be for some time to come. That Beijing is looking to provide leadership in this generational undertaking is only too natural, as is its desire to export excess capacities to the developing part of Eurasia and Africa as well as to expand its ecosystem for the benefit of Chinese trade. This is rather existential for China as a modernising nation, and so it is for most of Asia on a wider scale.
There is admittedly no point to be naive here, and China has been and will be looking out for its own interests. But why on earth would China be on a mission to desperately look for coalition partners, together with them achieve geopolitical superiority, and proactively attempt to depose America as the sole superpower? The country’s transition from an export-led emerging market to a consumption-based modern country is China’s number one objective and by far not anywhere near completed.
The coronavirus outbreak will undoubtedly be a set-back, but of course, the future will be Asian! China’s plans for Belt and Road are a testament to uniquely visionary leadership in the world, maybe only comparable to America’s role post WW2. It should not be confused with dark age-era war games by trigger-happy powers. Joseph Nye may be a sage in his own right and by pedigree, but he seems to be falling too easily into the trap of polarising between continents for the sake of containing perceived threats to America’s outworn ego and special status.
