Changing global power balance

S P SETH

It is amazing how fast the global strategic balance is changing. What it means is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ascension of the United States as the only global superpower in the nineties, the world is transiting into a state of multi-polarity. While the US still remains the most powerful military machine in the world, its position is strongly challenged by Russia and China. Take, for instance, the Ukrainian situation. While the US and its western allies have sought to pressure Russia through a regime of economic sanctions, they have so far avoided any military action to confront it. Indeed, President Putin at one point cautioned the NATO alliance not to mess with Russia, which has nuclear weapons.

In the case of China, even as it was flexing its political and military muscle in South China Sea and East China Sea, the US was avoiding any military confrontation. The contrast was quite marked with mid-1990s when the US sent its naval flotilla towards Taiwan Strait when China was seeking to thwart presidential elections in Taiwan by a show of military force. But now while China is  asserting its power and making sovereign claims on islands in South China Sea and East China Sea, the US is mostly confining its role to criticizing Beijing’s unilateral action. The situation has eased a little bit since China withdrew its oilrig from the vicinity of Hanoi-claimed South China Sea islands, as well as going easy on its air identification zone over and around the contested (with Japan) group of islands in the East China Sea. But the tensions can re-surface any time as China is determined to assert its ‘sovereignty’.

An interesting development in this changing strategic calculus is Japan’s active defence policy. Under its US-designed post-WW11 constitution, Japan is a pacifist nation not allowed to wage war. It has a substantial self-defence force but it is not meant for operations outside the country. And its defence is basically under-written by its security alliance with the United States. But lately, since Shinzo Abe became Japan’s Prime Minister in 2012, Japan is reacting to China’s assertion of power in the region with a certain creative re-interpretation of its pacifist constitution to enable it to be an active security partner with its allies and friends.

Even though it was the US that imposed the pacifist constitution on Japan after its defeat in WW11, it would now welcome Japan playing a defence role to supplement US’s over-stretched military commitments in the region and around the world. As long as the US was both the dominant Pacific and world power, the regional countries at odds with China over territorial and maritime disputes were quietly confident that the US would underwrite their security, not just for their sake but also to maintain its own naval supremacy. Things have changed since then as China is becoming more powerful and more assertive. And such assertive power projection has happened much more under President Xi Jinping, who took over the presidency around the same time, early in 2013, as Shinzo Abe who became Prime Minister late-2012. In other words, the region is becoming unstable with both China and Japan determined to tough it out. Indeed, this almost led to aerial and naval incidents over their contested East China Sea Islands.

While the US seems keen not to let the regional situation get out of hand between China and its regional allies/partners, the tensions in the region have the potential of developing into something ugly at any time. China sees US behind all the regional challenges to its power, which historically it regards as its own. By that logic, the US is an outside power with no business to be flaunting its reach. But the United States is equally determined to remain engaged as an Asia-Pacific power with its own strategic, economic and political interests as well as by virtue of its security and other commitments to regional countries. Indeed, during his recent visit to Australia to attend the G-20 meeting in Brisbane, President Obama  reiterated US “pivot” to Asia-Pacific, with the deployment of a substantial part of its navy to the region. In other words, the US is not letting China strategically appropriate the Asia-Pacific region to its own sphere.

That might be so. But China seems determined to alter the existing regional order designed by the US-led western alliance. For instance, China has floated a parallel regional economic architecture of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) purportedly to help regional countries develop their economic potential. Under US pressure, Australia and South Korea opted to stay out of it, obviously regarding it as rivaling the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. In the same way, China is actively pursuing an Asia-Pacific free trade area to rival the US-led Trans-Pacific partnership from which China is excluded. In other words, we are witnessing greater competition and rivalry between China on one side, and the US and its Asian allies, like Japan and Australia, on the other. And that portends trouble for the region.

It is not just Asia-pacific region that is a center of strategic rivalry. Elsewhere in Europe, Russia and the US-led EU/NATO are involved in a serious confrontation with Russia, with Ukraine as its epicenter. Russia was supposed to see sense from US-led economic sanctions as they are hurting its economy and the pain is likely to increase. At the recent G-20 summit in Brisbane, President Putin was warned that further sanctions awaited Russia if President Putin didn’t back off from Ukraine. But so far it would seem that it was having the opposite effect. Moscow is expanding its military reach far and wide. As Russian defence minister, Sergey Shoigu, has reportedly said, “We have to maintain military presence in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific, as well as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.” Indeed, lately, Russia and China are drawing closer. Moscow and Beijing recently signed a multi-billion dollars gas deal. And their navies are reportedly holding naval exercises in the Pacific and indeed in the Mediterranean next year.

Moscow is also strengthening its relations with Iran in the area of nuclear energy by undertaking to build two nuclear reactors, with six more likely to follow. These power plants will operate under the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. But the timing of Moscow’s announcement to coincide with the deadline of November 24 for a nuclear deal between Iran, and its dialogue partners in the matter, wasn’t appreciated by the US.

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has likened the new global power balance to the 18^th and 19^th century. To quote Kerry, “In many ways, the world we’re living in today is much more like 19^th century and 18^th century global diplomacy, the balance of power and different interests, than it is the bifurcated, bipolar world we lived in the Cold War and much of the 20^th century.” In whatever way one looks at it, it points to greater instability.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

Contact: susshilpseth@yahoo.com.au