By Bilahari Kausikan, Published The Straits Times, 11 Jun 2014
CHINA has highlighted the need for a new model of great power relations. Who can really disagree? The United States seems to have echoed this, or at least used a similar form of words.
But do they really mean the same thing? Apparent understanding can be more dangerous than clear disagreement.
It is all the more crucial therefore to examine what has changed and what remains constant in major power relations. My focus is on US-China relations, the most crucial relationship in East Asia. But the lessons are also applicable, in different degrees, to Sino-Japanese relations and to Sino-Indian relations.
First, what has not changed?
Here, the road to East Asia passes through Europe, and specifically through European Union-Russia relations and Ukraine.
Why was the EU and the US caught completely flatfooted by Russia's annexation of Crimea and its subsequent actions in eastern Ukraine?
Russia and Ukraine share an intimate and complex history. Ukraine is a deeply divided country with only a very short modern history as an independent entity. Russia cannot lose Ukraine without losing an essential part of itself. This ought to have been obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the region.
Although its specific actions were not known, it was entirely predictable that Moscow was bound to respond in some way to any attempt to draw Ukraine closer into the Western orbit. Yet the West and, in particular, the EU were completely blindsided.
Having neither the capability nor the stomach to take certain kinds of actions, the EU conveniently assumed that Russia was similarly disposed. Ukraine paid the price for the EU's feckless encouragement of the European ambitions of a segment of its population.
It is pointless to complain after the fact about the unacceptability of 19th century behaviour in the 21st century. Why assume that all states share a common conception of appropriate 21st century behaviour? Rivalry is an intrinsic part of every major power relationship, an imperative imposed by a system of sovereign states.
Interdependence, refined
This is not new. There have been previous historical periods of interdependence between major powers. But the current degree of interdependence between major powers is, I believe, qualitatively different from the past.
The economies of the US and China are today profoundly intertwined in a truly global economic system in a way that has no real historical precedent. Neither Washington nor Beijing can today achieve national goals without working with the other. Neither particularly likes this, but they both know it.
The former USSR was "containable" because it largely contained itself by pursuing a policy of autarky. But China is today so enmeshed in the world economy that the US might as well try to contain itself as contain China.
Many economic roads today pass through East Asia. But the final destination is more often than not still the US. And so China might as well try to displace itself from East Asia as try to displace the US from the region.
Geography is never merely geography. It is defined by real flows of trade, investment, finance and production chains and therefore by the definition of political and strategic interests.
"East Asia" once meant only north-east Asia. Today South-east Asia is routinely included within its ambit.
The East Asia Summit (EAS) has further broadened its definition to include the US, Russia, India, Australia and New Zealand. The EU and Canada aspire to join the EAS. Neither has a good claim at present. But if this should ever come to pass, the definition of East Asia will be further expanded.
Therefore, notions such as Asian security being determined only by Asians, as has been recently suggested by China, may represent superficially attractive ideals, but are impractical and not in the region's own interests.
They are ideals that have been around in some form since the early 20th century and history has shown these ideals are capable of metastasing into something less than benign, as in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
And this is so because profound US-China interdependence co-exists with an equally profound strategic distrust. Interdependence in fact enhances distrust because it exposes mutual vulnerabilities.
The US and China are groping towards a new equilibrium.
East Asia should not lose sight of the fact that rivalry will inevitably infuse this search for a new modus vivendi. No one yet knows whether it will be based on some really "new model" or on more traditional if not outright atavistic models masquerading as "new".
It will be very difficult. And it will entail wrenching psychological adjustments on the part of both powers and the region.
But a new equilibrium is achievable because both Washington and Beijing need it and nothing stays the same forever.
In the process, robust competition between the US and China is inevitable, but conflict is not inevitable. And this is so despite fraught disputes over maritime boundaries in the East and South China Seas in which the US is not a claimant but has important interests including the credibility of its alliances.
Neither need China's military build-up lead to conflict. It is entirely natural that any country will defend what it considers its sovereign rights. It is also entirely understandable that any country will want the best possible military that it can afford because the capacity to defend one's self is an essential attribute of sovereignty.
What is critical is how a country defends sovereignty and what use it makes of its military force. The jury is still out in East Asia.
Will claims of sovereignty be pursued within common frameworks of norms, including procedural norms to change norms regarded as obsolete or unjust, or by unilateral actions based on superior force?
Will the norms be forward-looking or backward-looking? History is not an appropriate criterion because it is subject to multiple interpretations, and interpretations are constantly being revised as new facts come to light and new interests emerge.
I do not know when the US and China will reach a new modus vivendi, although I suspect that the time frame will be measured in decades and not just a few years. But when it is established, the rest of East Asia will just have to take dressing from it.
But the small countries of East Asia - and all of us are small in population, gross domestic product and military might compared with the US and China - are not entirely helpless spectators.
Asean-led forums such as the EAS are a useful supplementary means of encouraging the US and China to develop a constructive and predictable pattern of relations, although the critical factors will be bilateral between these two key major powers.
The question that cannot yet be answered is what price will the rest of us pay for a new modus vivendi between the US and China. Major powers never pay the full price themselves.
The writer, a veteran diplomat, is policy adviser at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He delivered this speech on June 3 at the Asia-Pacific Roundtable in Kuala Lumpur, organised by the Malaysia Institute of Strategic and International Studies.
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