After the failure of the U.S.-China Alaska talks, the United States turned back to its European allies for support. This Time it went better than the G7 video conference in February, when Blinken’s meeting with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and EC Vice President Josep Borrell was followed by a joint statement agreeing to restart the China dialogue between the United States and the EU.
The central phrase of the statement reads, “Secretary Blinken and High Representative Borrell confirmed that credible multiparty democracy, protection of human rights, and compliance with international law support stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. Both sides aim to work together to promote secure, sustainable, free and open maritime supply routes and supply chains, and look forward to deepening cooperation with like-minded partners where interests and approaches converge.”
Highlights of this article.
▪ Why didn’t Biden revive Obama’s “Asia-Pacific rebalance”?
▪ Indo-Pacific stakeholders: different focus on core and peripheral concerns
▪ Post-2020 allies are still on the fence about the U.S.
There are only two key words: credible multiparty democracy and the Indo-Pacific region. For the sake of narrative logic, let’s start with the second point.
Why did Biden not revive Obama’s “Asia-Pacific rebalance”?
The Biden Administration has taken Trump‘s rejection as the starting point for everything in domestic affairs, but it has failed to reject Trump’s approach in international geopolitics, even the Indo-Pacific strategy.
The Indo-Pacific region from the geographic concept into the geopolitical strategic concept of this process, not just a terminology game, has its practical significance.
On November 7, 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an article in Foreign Policy explaining the U.S. Asia-Pacific policy, referring to the “Asia-Pacific region The article referred to the “Asia-Pacific region” as the “land and sea belt” that stretches from the Indian subcontinent through Southeast Asia to the U.S. West Coast in the shape of a half-moon arc, and described this region as the strategic and economic center of gravity of the world in the 21st century. China, as the number one country in the Asia-Pacific region, is particularly sensitive to this and has therefore been studied, according to researchers, who say that statistics based on White House archives show that the Obama administration’s diplomatic strategy includes 537 references to the “Asia-Pacific” and six references to the “Indo-Pacific.
On October 18, 2017, Secretary of State Tillerson delivered a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. think tank, entitled The U.S.-India Relationship in the Next Century,” which did not use the traditional “Asia-Pacific” geopolitical concept, but instead used “Indo-Pacific” to define the geopolitical region from the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean in the U.S. strategic framework for Asia.
In short, the Asia-Pacific and the Indo-Pacific are two major strategic concepts, with differences in the countries of interest accommodated within them. The “Asia-Pacific” encompasses Asia and the Western Pacific, with Japan and Australia as the main stakeholders; the “Indo-Pacific” includes India, and Australia and Japan would welcome the expansion of their allies.
From the U.S. perspective, the Indo-Pacific strategy will integrate the sea lanes from the Western Pacific along Southeast Asia from Thailand and Burma to the west of the Indian Ocean, continue the U.S. strategic eastward shift, stifle China’s expansion in the region, and continue to keep the huge market in the region open to the U.S. while maintaining U.S. global leadership – from the Asia-Pacific rebalance to the Indo-Pacific strategy. The Indo-Pacific strategy is a major success of Trump’s geopolitics.
What’s more, the U.S.-China relationship has long been over a million hills in those four years, and even if China clearly wants a return to the Obama-era U.S.-China relationship, the Biden administration can’t do it. This is the main reason why the Biden administration has been unable to revive the Asia-Pacific strategy.
Indo-Pacific Stakeholders: Core and Peripheral Concerns Have Different Priorities
Since the Trump Administration proposed the Indo-Pacific Strategy, the geopolitical concept has been widely accepted, but the core and peripheral concerns of the stakeholders are different.
Australia and Japan focus on defense. Australia began to focus on “military competition” with China a few years ago – in 2018, Australia won the right to build the Black Rock military base in Fiji by beating China in a relatively advantageous bid, which demonstrated the Australian government’s real concern about strategic competition in the South Pacific. The Australian government’s real concerns about strategic competition in the South Pacific. Australia has also tried, unsuccessfully, to resolve the diplomatic issue of China’s access to Vanuatu.
Japan is now keenly aware of China’s growing political and military pressure and has made serious preparations on all fronts. “meeting. A day before the meeting, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun published an article saying that in military terms, although the total military strength of the United States far exceeds that of China, the U.S. military advantage over China could still be shaken if China and the United States come into conflict in the Asia-Pacific region because it will take a long time for the United States to centralize and bring its worldwide war effort to the Asia-Pacific region.
According to reports, the U.S. Department of Defense has conducted a number of “hypothetical war” exercises on its computers in recent years, and the U.S. military has lost to the Chinese military in every one of these exercises, without exception, in the Taiwan Strait over the past few years. The government of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also held several secret chess rehearsals to imagine various situations around Japan, but the results all showed that the U.S. military and Japanese Self-Defense Forces in the Indo-Pacific combined were at a disadvantage against China. Based on the U.S.-Japan projection, Japan is now particularly serious. Japanese media also reported: this 2+2 talks, the United States and Japan confirmed cooperation on the Taiwan emergency.
However, the attitude of European powers on the Indo-Pacific strategy is focused on politics rather than defense. The German version of the strategy starts with the economic importance and strategic complexity of the Indo-Pacific region, and emphasizes the themes of “rule-based” and “balance of power,” with German Foreign Minister Maas making several statements. The theme is political and diplomatic presence, and does not highlight the security implications of the strategy. The French version of the Indo-Pacific strategy, which was initially proposed as a balance of defense and power, has not been updated since Biden took office.
Although Blinken and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Borrelli issued a joint statement, the EU has a weak mandate and relies on the French and German powers for its implementation. Second, the two sides only talked about “the goal of both sides is to cooperate to promote secure, sustainable, free and open maritime supply routes and supply chains”, focusing on business interests, not the security and defense of the region.
It is clear from the ongoing debate over the EU budget that there are differences between France and Germany, which advocate a stronger geopolitical awareness and a “great power presence,” and other EU countries, which are primarily concerned with their own economic interests, on where to spend their money. Therefore, the joint statement of the EU and Blinken will have much more diplomatic implications than strategic ones.
Allies still wait and see about the U.S. after 2020
Now back to the phrase “credible multi-party democracy” in the U.S.-European Union joint statement, the EU commissioners are appointed by each country, and do not pursue multi-party rotating governance, which “credible multi-party democracy” should be the EU’s demand to the United States. It is not for no reason that the EU now demands this of the United States. From various public statements, European dignitaries and observers have had numerous discussions after the truth of the 2020 election surfaced, and have doubts about the two-party politics that are now in complete opposition in the United States.
Steve Hilton, former director of strategy for the British prime minister, said on Fox’s Faulkner Focus on March 20: “The competence of the U.S. president is an important public issue. The U.S. and the world are wondering who is running the Biden gang. Some suspect that Obama is running Biden’s camp, and that Obama’s handlers and chief strategist are Soros. That’s a big reason why the outside world suspects the election is flawed.”
On the defense of the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. military has called for strengthening, but the Biden administration is cutting military spending, which also makes the outside world suspicious.
In recent months, senior generals and retired generals from the U.S. military, from the Navy and Air Force to Strategic Command, have testified before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, stressing that the U.S. military must do all it can to deal with the military threat from the Chinese Communist Party, but also coincidentally pointing out that the U.S. military in the Obama era has a low level of preparedness for the Chinese Communist Party and has not done the necessary defense preparations, and that not only is the military’s equipment obsolete, but it is also underfunded. on March 3 Politico reported that Phil Davidson, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, asked the defense secretary to pressure Congress to approve a $5 billion budget in 2022 for weapons and missiles to “deter” China.
Davidson’s request was echoed among the top brass of the U.S. military, but Rep. Adam Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Democrat from Seattle, Washington, said he opposes a massive increase in military spending and believes the U.S. military does not need to do that. The Navy’s official website reported on March 10 and March 16 that the Biden administration’s first military budget is poised to cut the military budget from the previous fiscal year set by Trump by 2.5 percent. As a result of the military budget cuts, the Pentagon has had to consider reducing the size of the Navy fleet, which directly puts the U.S. in a difficult position to implement its security commitments in the Indo-Pacific region with insufficient military power. (See endnotes for sources in this paragraph)
When Trump was in power, he asked Japan, South Korea, Germany and others to bear part of the military costs of the U.S. military presence. Although the allies were unhappy with this, it was clear that Trump did not abandon his allies and had confidence in the U.S. to ensure the security of its allies. But now at a time when China’s military pressure is increasing, the Biden administration is at odds with the military and cutting military spending. In addition to Japan, Australia and other core member countries of the Indo-Pacific strategy, Europe and others will certainly have various other compromises to China, another protagonist of the Indo-Pacific strategy.
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