(World Today Wednesday 24 August 2016)
Fears over China’s growing influence in Asia
Prospect of Trump win threatens to put ‘Asian pivot’ in a spin
Republican advisers have said that if Donald Trump wins the US presidency,
Asian countries would be forced to tilt towards China. Photo: Reuters
TOKYO / SEOUL — Asia faces a redrawing of the geopolitical order if Republican Donald Trump becomes United States president — a prospect that scares Washington’s allies while handing a gift to China, its principal rival.
Tokyo and Seoul are bracing for change after the US election, with some in the region fearing that even a Hillary Clinton win could herald unwelcome shifts. That includes bigger defence bills and the likely demise of President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, which pointedly excludes China.
But it is a Trump presidency, which would herald a strong new strain of isolationist politics, that stands to wreak more damage over Asia, a continent of emerging superpowers such as China, home to more than half the world’s population and target of Mr Obama’s Asian “pivot”.
A group of Republican foreign policy experts sounded the alarm last week. “We especially fear a Trump presidency’s impact on America’s future in Asia where China’s influence in the region, now the global economy’s centre of gravity, grows apace with its power,” they wrote.
“Should Mr Trump become president and put his nostrums into practice, Asia’s response will be prompt and epochal,” the Republican advisers added. “Asia’s big or small countries will be forced to tilt towards … the Chinese. Some of them may move quickly to seek security in a new proliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Chinese nationalists now see China usurping the US as the pre-eminent power in the region in less than a decade, should Mr Trump win the election and follow through on his “you pay up or we pull out” ultimatum to Seoul and Tokyo.
“If Mr Trump distances the US from its allies, particularly Japan, objectively that can be a good thing for China’s strategic position,” says Prof Shi Yinhong, an international affairs specialist at Renmin University in Beijing.
Beijing has recently chafed at the Obama administration’s endorsement of an international tribunal ruling that dismissed almost all of its expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea — and the deployment of a missile defence system that Washington and Seoul say is aimed at defending South Korea from North Korea, not Beijing.
Prof Kuni Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat and expert on the Japan-US security treaty, says that “the dark side has awakened in the US” — a reference to blue-collar and middle-class angst about globalisation, inequality and immigration. These forces have produced a strong strand of “neo-isolationism” in the US of a type that the Japanese find especially troubling.
“Whether (Mr Trump) is elected or not, this dark side will continue to run in US politics and could make it more inward-looking,” he says. “That could raise the incentives for a US president to request additional burden-sharing on security — not only from Japan but (also) South Korea and even Nato allies.”
Dr Kim Ji-yoon at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul agrees that “whoever becomes president, it is inevitable that South Korea will have to bear more costs to sustain the (US) alliance”.
In China, the ruling Communist party has also learnt over the years that US presidential candidates tend to say one thing during an election campaign and do the opposite after they are in the Oval Office.
Campaigning for the White House just three years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Mrs Clinton’s husband railed against the “butchers of Beijing”. But by the end of his second term, Mr Bill Clinton had helped lay the foundations for China’s rise as an economic and military power by agreeing to its accession to the World Trade Organisation.
Prof Shi at Renmin University notes that Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton are likely to take tougher stances than the Obama administration on territorial issues in the South China Sea — something US allies in the region would welcome — but adopt more protectionist trade policies.
Their stance on trade is likely to cause short-term problems for Beijing but has already delivered at least one windfall — the likely demise of the TPP, the economic complement to Mr Obama’s military pivot towards the region.
Both Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton have expressed strong opposition to the TPP, which Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong calls a “litmus test of (US) credibility and seriousness of purpose” in the Asia-Pacific region.
Asian analysts also generally believe that the US government’s institutional checks and balances will grant at least a short-term buffer against any dramatic realignment of regional power.
“Even with Mr Trump’s unpredictability and the power of the presidency, the current system of alliances wouldn’t be shaken by him alone,” says Mr Min Jeong-hun at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul. “Congress, his cabinet and public opinion are all likely to play an important role in (regional) diplomacy.”
Prof Xie Tao, a US expert at Beijing Foreign Studies University, agrees that a sudden withdrawal of US military forces from South Korea and Japan is a “fantasy”. “If he really does that, half a century’s work by the US in Asia would vanish like smoke and ashes,” Prof Xie said. “Congress and all sorts of interest groups would strongly oppose it.” FINANCIAL TIMES