Washington's Eastern Sunset

The Decline of U.S. Power in Northeast Asia

Jason T. Shaplen and James Laney

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  After 60 years of U.S. domination, the balance of power in Northeast Asia is shifting. The United States is in relative decline, China is on the rise, and Japan and South Korea are in flux. To maintain U.S. power in the region, Washington must identify the trends shaping this transition and embrace new tools and regimes that broaden the United States' power base.

JASON T. SHAPLEN, a Policy Adviser at the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization from 1995 to 1999, is a Director at the nonpro?t organization Project Renewal. JAMES LANEY, U.S. Ambassador to South Korea from 1993 to 1997, is President Emeritus of Emory University.

Since the end of World War II, U.S. policy in Northeast Asia has been primarily based on bilateral alliances throughout the region, most prominently with Japan and South Korea. Counterintuitively perhaps, until recently China endorsed this approach. It relied on Washington to keep Japan's ambitions in check by providing for its security and to maintain stability on the Korean Peninsula by acting as a deterrent.

But today, China is no longer willing to leave the region's stability in Washington's hands and is working to counter U.S. alliances. Beijing has conducted a diplomatic offensive to build up its own bilateral relationships in the area. Over the past two decades, it has established diplomatic relations with longtime U.S. allies such as Singapore and South Korea, reestablished relations with Indonesia, and mended fences with India, Russia, and Vietnam. It is also beginning to improve its relations with Japan. Although tensions between the two countries remain high, reciprocal state visits over the past year have helped ease them.

China is also reaching out in the multilateral arena. Having overcome its distrust of multilateral forums (which arose in part from its fear of always being outvoted), China now participates in them more fully than Washington. Beijing is a member of ASEAN + 1 (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China), ASEAN + 3 (ASEAN and China, Japan, and South Korea), the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the East Asian Summit. China is also building a network of free-trade agreements in Asia to supplement its bilateral and multilateral relationships. In addition to the Chinese-ASEAN free-trade agreement, it has a free-trade agreement with Thailand, is negotiating or conducting feasibility studies for trade deals with Australia and India, and has proposed an ASEAN + 3 free-trade area.

It is imperative that as the balance of power in Northeast Asia shifts, the United States develop a comprehensive, coherent, and consistent set of policies that address the economic, security, demographic, and nationalist components underpinning the transition while taking into account China's diplomatic initiatives. The United States has an extensive set of tools designed to serve this end, including bilateral alliances, multilateral forums, and free-trade agreements. But it does not use all of them to the extent that it should. The tool kit is also missing critical components, particularly relating to security regimes and soft-power initiatives. The United States should fill these gaps immediately and use all available instruments in various combinations, favoring neither bilateralism over multilateralism, as it has in the past, nor multilateralism over bilateralism.

For example, the United States should more fully embrace the ASEAN Regional Forum and APEC and negotiate more bilateral and multilateral free-trade agreements, particularly with India and ASEAN. It should also join the East Asian Summit, even though the group's mandate overlaps somewhat with that of the broader but more unwieldy APEC, and seek observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Furthermore, the United States should more frequently employ its hard power for soft-power purposes, as it did in 2005, when it dispatched the U.S.N.S. Mercy on a humanitarian mission to Indonesia after it was devastated by a tsunami. Equipped with 12 operating rooms and 1,000 hospital beds, the Mercy's crew treated almost 10,000 patients and performed close to 20,000 medical procedures. The goodwill the mission generated was quantifiable: according to the Pew Research Center, in 2003 only 15 percent of Indonesians polled reported having a favorable view of the United States, but by 2005, after the Mercy's post-tsunami deployment, that number had jumped to 38 percent. Washington wisely undertook a similar goodwill effort in 2006 by sending the Mercy into South and Southeast Asia. Over the course of five months, its crew treated almost 200,000 patients, performed more than 1,000 surgeries, and trained more than 6,000 local medical professionals. A small team of sailors from the U.S. Naval Construction Force also made repairs or improvements to medical centers, schools, and other infrastructure onshore. Soft-power initiatives such as these could help counter anti-Americanism, especially at a time when the war in Iraq has left many nations with the impression that the United States uses its military might inappropriately.

In addition to more fully utilizing some of the tools it already has, the United States should also immediately add some that it is missing, particularly in the security realm. For example, a security regime for Northeast Asia is urgently needed. The recent six-party nuclear agreement involving North Korea could serve as a catalyst for a much-needed Northeast Asian security forum, which could initially comprise the signatories to the agreement: China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. To ensure that North Korea does not hold these meetings hostage while still encouraging its participation, the forum should assume a "5 + 1" format, in which North Korea would be an official observer. This status would allow North Korea to participate if it pleased but not prohibit the group from meeting if it did not. The forum, which need not preclude more six-party talks on the narrower issue of North Korea's nuclear program, could address issues such as arms control, crisis management, and conflict prevention and resolution. It could further serve as a valuable mechanism for managing tensions between China, Japan, and South Korea. From Washington's perspective, such a forum would also allow the United States to reassert its leadership in a way that is not possible in larger security groupings such as the ASEAN Regional Forum.

Another important tool that the United States should add is a meaningful security relationship with China. Creating such a bilateral arrangement would require striking a fine balance. On the one hand, China should not be allowed to see so much of the United States' military strength that it knows exactly how to benchmark it against its own military. On the other, it is important to build solid military-to-military relationships, particularly at the level of midranking officers. Until last year, the United States and China had never held joint military exercises, even though China had held such exercises with at least ten other nations, including India. (This past May, Beijing agreed to hold further periodic joint exercises with New Delhi partly because it is concerned that the United States will try to contain China by embracing India.) Going forward, Washington should carefully observe China's expanding military ties with other nations and take proactive steps to strengthen its own military ties with Beijing.

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