10 minute read
Process vs. Structure
Strategic Vision vol. 10, no. 50 (September, 2021)
New Biden administration raises questions on East Asian security policy
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Masahiro Matsumura
Then-Vice President Joe Biden raises his glass to toast Chinese President Xi Jinping at a state luncheon in Washington, DC in 2015.
photo: US State Department
With China rattling its saber fiercely, the world is now paying significant attention to the issue of security in East Asia. Yet, the new administration of US President Joe Biden is taking a milquetoast position on China policy, neither taking a bold new direction nor clarifying whether the hardline anti-China policies adopted under the previous administration of former President Donald Trump will continue to define the US position on this crucial dossier. A comprehensive analysis employing a global political-economic perspective is necessary to identify where the region’s security question stands, and why Biden is so indecisive on the China issue.
It is under the conditions of an intensified US-China hegemonic rivalry that Biden has replaced Trump, who took an across-the-board confrontational approach to dealing with Beijing’s aggressive behavior. Yet, this new administration has not developed a coherent strategic vision for dealing with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This has produced uncertainty over whether or not Trump’s tough stance on China will continue. It also poses difficult policy challenges for frontline states, such as Japan and Taiwan, which rely on the United States as their sole security guarantor.
Today, the China Question is central to American domestic politics and national security strategy because the United States prospered as a result of China’s growth over the last two decades, even to the point that China emerged into a challenger. The United States first became the region’s hegemon at the close of World War II. However, as its manufacturing sector increasingly lost its international competitiveness, it underwent relative economic decline, beginning with the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the US dollar to gold—the Nixon Shock of 1971—and continuing thereafter.
The Latin American debt crisis in the early 1980s manifested a serious dearth of opportunities for domestic capital investment in manufacturing, driving major American commercial banks to extend excessive loans to regional sovereign borrowers, on the incorrect assumption that they would never be insolvent. This means that, at the firm level, American banks could neither expand the scale of businesses nor increase profit-making without investing in thriving manufacturing sectors. At the systemic level, US hegemony based on manufacturing power was destined to decline sooner or later due to its irreversible evolution into a service economy.
Economic revival
Despite these challenges, the United States successfully revived its economic hegemony in the 1990s thanks to demand for capital investment in the then-emerging information technology (IT) sector, which only hastened the shift to financial services. Consequently, US industrial capitalism has morphed into financial capitalism, while turning the national economy into a “world investment bank” vis-à-vis major ex-communist bloc and emerging economies that were thirsty for huge capital investments in their manufacturing sectors—especially China. Thanks to this investment, the PRC rose to become the “world’s factory,” singlehandedly consuming almost half of the world’s total metal and fossil-fuel resources.
The authoritarian political system in Beijing, eager to stimulate growth, forced State-directed banks to issue bad loans, resulting in a landscape marked by zombie state-owned enterprises and the incessant
construction of empty cities. Economists began to perceive this as an unsustainable growth bubble that, along with the asset-price and credit-market bubbles being created by the US Federal Reserve, are essentially two sides of the same coin. This suggests that the two nations will share the same fate as a consequence of their mutual financial ties.
The rise of populism in the United States and other major liberal democracies is the result of socio-economic bipolarization and political disunity, brought about in part by the industrial hollowing-out effect of financial capitalism. Behind this, there exist entrenched national schisms, which render the Biden administration far politically weaker in terms of a popular mandate than even the Carter administration had been. This weakness is not helped by the murmurings—ignored by the legacy media but nonetheless prevalent both domestically and internationally—that there had been grave electoral fraud in favor of Biden.
Thus, the birth of the Biden administration is a manifestation of anti-Trump reactionary political forces consisting of ousted political appointees, military brass, policy intellectuals, and other beltway lifers who sought to restore the status quo ante and, perhaps, a temporary revival of the ancien regime.
With Trump and his confrontational attitude toward China gone, rent-seeking by establishment insiders and elites could be re-enabled through the structure of interdependency with China. It has not gone unnoticed internationally, for example, that despite the US media playing down the issue for domestic audiences, the allegations against the president’s son, Hunter Biden, about his lucrative, cozy business relationships with Chinese companies, including Bohai Harvest RST, Sinopec Marketing Co. Ltd., China Molybdenum Co., among others, give the outward appearance of cash-for-access deals. While this does not make the Bidens PRC assets, it does have the appearance of grave impropriety, and raises suspicions that these relationships could easily be used by the communist regime as leverage for the adoption of policies sympathetic to Beijing’s interests. Naturally, this is most worrisome in countries, such as Taiwan and Japan, that are in close proximity to the China threat, and which are reliant on America for their national security.
At the politico-strategic level, the United States and China—the declining hegemon and a rising great power—have fallen into the Thucydides trap, particularly because PRC President Xi Jinping has abandoned the longtime policy of “hide your capabilities and bide your time” and instead adopted an expansionist approach involving an unprecedented arms buildup and aggressive expansion of the PRC’s sphere of influence, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative. Biden has been implicitly critical towards Trump’s policies, including his powerful pushback against China. Stakeholders fear Biden will be more likely to appease China to preserve the aforementioned structure of profitable interdependency. In fact, Biden’s foreign and national security policy team consists of high-ranking ex-officials from the Obama administration. This makes it highly plausible that the team will repeat Obama’s failed appeasement policy toward China in the name of “strategic patience.”
There are positive signs, however. It is somewhat heartening for Japan and Taiwan that, for the time being at least, the Biden administration has not rushed to change the China policies put in place by Trump. It continues to follow the severe trade sanctions and restrictions on direct investment and technology transfers in the IT field, and has not reversed course on the clampdown on the Confucius Institutes that Beijing operates all around America. Moreover, the US Navy has sustained the Trump-era gunboat diplomacy by invoking freedom of navigation and overflight rights in the region, particularly the South China Sea.
China marked the 70th anniversary of defeating Japan in WWII by holding an enormous military parade and declaring a new national holiday.
photo: Eugene Kaspersky
Seaman Zachary Douglas looks through binoculars on the bridge wing as the USS Mustin (DDG 89) conducts routine operations near the Paracel Islands.
photo: Cody Beam
Any major policy change would be difficult to justify since the policy’s rationale was outlined by the abrupt declassification of a White House policy memo shortly before the end of Trump’s term. Titled US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific, the memo revealed the growing national security challenges posed by China. Moreover, there is bipartisan recognition of the China threat in Washington, as well as in American society.
Biden’s official policy document of March 2021, the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, is rhetorically sophisticated yet lacking in specifics. It contains veiled anti-Trump thinking that favors diplomacy and multilateralism over deterrence and the use of military force. Reading between the lines, however, the guiding values of big government and the welfare state that are tasked with a variety of policy agendas, necessitate the relative weakening of the importance of military and security issues and urging allies to play a larger role in non-military issues, such as pandemic response, public health, and climate policy. The guidance refers to a contradictory policy on nuclear arms that concurrently pursues a lower reliance on nuclear forces and more credibility on the issue of nuclear deterrence. This may shake the credibility of Washington’s extended nuclear deterrence to Japan, as well as the viability of the two nations’ bilateral alliance that serves as the cornerstone of the hub-and-spokes system.
Weary of the forever-wars in the Middle East, the American public is unwilling to support any new, long-term, unilateral, international security commitments. The state’s declining fiscal capacity has resulted from ever-growing cumulative federal debt and an overall economic structural vulnerability, and is now considerably stressed by the unprecedented
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force JS Ikazuchi, left, USNS John Ericsson, and the USS Ronald Reagan conduct a replenishment-at-sea.
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force JS Ikazuchi, left, USNS John Ericsson, and the USS Ronald Reagan conduct a replenishment-at-sea.
photo: Jason Tarleton
levels of spending aimed at countering the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant increase in defense spending will surely deepen America’s indebtedness, vulnerability, and systemic risks. However, the Budget Message of the President for FY 2022 proposes a marginal increase in the defense budget in nominal terms (albeit a decrease in real terms). By and large, Biden’s supporters have little interest in the US role in world politics, while he pays lip service to a “strong America.” On the other hand, Trumpians disagree with America’s longstanding role as the “world policeman,” constantly being asked to sacrifice its blood and treasure to defend the international order. They instead advocate that the United States use its power to defend its own interests in world politics. Evidently, US allies are no longer able to fully depend on the US hegemon to safeguard international peace and security.
The Biden administration seems to be continuing America’s longstanding regional security policies, with a major focus on Japan and Taiwan, to help counter the challenge posed by a rising China. It is also continuing its military-diplomatic efforts to strengthen the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, consisting of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, and to build an Indo-Pacific version of a miniNATO.
Joint statement
On March 16, President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga issued a joint statement in Washington DC titled Japan-US Global Partnership for A New Era, to further strengthen the bilateral alliance vis-à-vis a rising China. Yet, there is growing concern in Japan over whether America’s defense commitments will be honored in the event of a Senkaku Island (Diaoyu) contingency. Some view the United States as only having a strategic interest in maintaining the sea lines of communication, and not being willing to risk war with China to protect what might be perceived as Japan’s fishery interests. Aware of the Senkaku Paradox, Japan is pressing hard to beef up its own defensive capabilities.
Several days prior to his meeting with Suga, Biden sent former Senator Chris Dodd and former Deputy Secretaries of State Richard Armitage and James Steinberg as special envoys to Taipei, to assure the people there of America’s continued commitment to the defense of Taiwan. Reportedly, the US military has dispatched a significant military advisory body to ensure that Taiwan’s military forces are interoperable with their US counterparts. These and other conciliatory signals from the Biden administration may have been designed to reassure the people and government of Taiwan—who were the only Asian nation among those polled in a YouGov survey to have expressed support for a second Trump term—worried about the Biden administration’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense. To make up the difference amid such uncertainty, the island’s leaders have recently been building up their own defensive capabilities. Unfortunately, these moves by Biden require neither significant fiscal investment nor political capital. Biden’s regional security policy remains unclear, and his political commitment is likewise questionable.
The outcome of US-China hegemonic rivalry remains to be seen amidst their dynamic strategic interaction within the stable structure of interdependency. The two now increasingly rattle their sabers and engage in verbal battles, even as each is burdened with grave socio-economic vulnerabilities. Yet the process and structure will eventually disintegrate as the transition of the world economy to a service economy comes to an end.
During that transition, the effectiveness of mutual deterrence between the United States and China will remain highly uncertain so long as the Biden administration, due to vested interests in support of continued US-China interdependency, is neither equipped with a solid strategic vision nor with the political commitment to stand resolutely against China’s more egregious behavior. Now that Chinese aggression is acknowledged openly, Japan and Taiwan have to enhance their own defensive capabilities, and quickly. They also need to strengthen military-to-military relations with the United States at the operational level. Last but not least, given the fact that they share similar risks, Taipei and Tokyo should informally coordinate their military operation planning.
The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG 62) transits the South China Sea during a routine patrol.
photo: Sarah Myers
Dr. Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics at St. Andrew’s University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) in Osaka, Japan. He can be reached for comment at masahiro@andrew.ac.jp
