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As the global significance of the Asia-Pacific continues to rise, the area’s regional security is arousing more concern. To improve security in the Asia-Pacific, should a new security architecture be established? What institutions should be counted on to guarantee the region’s peace and stability? What is the role of the U.S. alliance system? During the World Peace Forum held by Tsinghua University on July 7-8 in Beijing, scholars from China, Malaysia, Thailand and the United States shared their opinions on these topics. Excerpts follow:
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies, Thailand: It is very clear from the Chinese world view that [regional security] is a positive sum. But in other places, I think there are some negativesum mindsets and mentalities. I know that in some higher education classes in the United States, there is a fixation—a deterministic fixation with the kind of realistic view that it has to be a zero sum. I don’t know how that will turn out, but it is important to be able to convince our mindsets, to think of the architectural investments, as a positive sum.
For the last 500 years, Asia was never really that important. It was about the West, the Europeans, and then the Americans. Now it is very clear we are a dynamic region. The economies of East Asia will continue to grow robustly. But the gap is we don’t have the security mechanisms to provide not just the prosperity which we are likely to have but the peace we also need—the peace and stability that have to go with the prosperity. That is the main problem of East Asia for the next five decades. One would wish that we
could have a NATO in Asia, but we have a different background. NATO was designed after decades of war and conflicts. In this region, we have a very different makeup, different constraints and different imperatives. We cannot import or even be inspired by the NATO or European models. Cui Liru, President of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations: The current security architecture of the Asia-Pacific is not functioning so well. Economies in the region have been very dynamic. Economic cooperation has dominated the
relationships among countries in the region. This, to a large extent, may have covered up many of the problems that still exist there. Security and stability are the basic conditions for continuing economic development of the Asia-Pacific. To that end, we need to form a security architecture that covers the whole of the region. I think that is also the aspiration of the vast majority of the countries within the region. However, this is still an ideal prospect that cannot be realized in the short term.
So in my point of view, in the whole transitional period, the Asia-Pacific security relationship and security activities will go forward on two tracks. One is to manage the situation, using the existing mechanisms to strengthen dialogue and communication. I think the overall situation is controllable because over the years we have formed reliable, mature dialogue mechanisms. The second track is to explore new ways to improve the regional security situation including the regional security architecture. China and the United States need to establish a new type of relationship between major powers. Security is a significant component of their relationship.
Mohanmed Jawhar, Chairman of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia: The architecture for security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific is diverse and multi-layered. Some of the forums are based on a win-win formula for promoting peace and security. What I mean by win-win is that all members work toward promoting common peace and prosperity. And among these I would say ASEAN, ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea), the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting.
There are others that are not based on working together for advancing common prosperity, but are rather based on advancing particular groups’ security. They are based on notions of adversarial security. These are, of course, bilateral, trilateral or even quadrilateral alliances in this region—defense alliances, security alliances. And their premise is that there are or there can be military threats from more powerful adversaries, and alliances between two or more powers can provide better deterrence. There can be other reasons, of course, for some of these alliances, like in the case of the U.S.-Japan alliance. It happened following World War II, under special circumstances. The network of alliances helps maintain hegemony while providing assurance for the lesser partners in the alliance system. This is the case for the U.S. alliance system in this region as well as around the globe.
On this question of whether we need a new umbrella architecture or whether we need to make changes to the existing architecture, I opt for the second alternative. First, it would be very difficult to create a new architecture. Many issues are involved. And many such attempts were tried but did not succeed. Second, many good things have been done by the existing architecture, and each has made a contribution to the regional security.
What needs to be done is to improve what we have. This can be done incrementally and meaningfully. Some of the things that can be done are not revolutionary ideas. First, we must further the capacity of the ASEAN Secretariat. Second, for the time being, ASEAN essentially relies upon its own indigenous resources in the secretariat. I think we should be able to invite nonASEAN members to also contribute their skills and expertise to the secretariat under the ASEAN leadership. The third is to rationalize the work of the various processes and institutions to reduce overlap and save resources.
Douglas Haines Paal, Vice President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the United States: Our watch on East Asia has been focused in recent days on the tensions in the South China Sea over claims and counterclaims on territorial seas and respective national programs for the development of the hydrocarbon and other suspected commodities. In 2010, we had a significant increase in regional tensions from fishery development in the South China Sea between the Philippines, Viet Nam and China over their respective claims over the area, and between Japan and China over Diaoyu Islands.
The United States has got a deeply entrenched alliance system that stems from the Cold War at the end of World War II. The alliance system was stretched beyond its capacity when the United States attempted to form SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, in the 1950s. That organization long ago passed its due date. Since then, the United States has relied on the alliance structure, with its principal allies being South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand, in the Asia-Pacific region. The alliance structure has recently been reinforced. During the first years in the 2000s, the American administration under George W. Bush addressed a lot of American forces’ attention to West Asia—to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Barack Obama administration is in the process of withdrawing American forces from those two venues. They articulated last November the new policy to rebalance the Asia-Pacific region. A lot of people here in China believe this is an effort to increase American presence in the region in order to meet the rise of China as a challenge to American authority and to have security interests in the region. I tend to look at it differently. I see the American rebalancing in the region as a restoration of America’s position in the late 1990s. America’s involvement in the region started eroding in 1997 with the financial crisis that originated with the decline of the baht in Thailand and spread throughout the region. At that time, the Bill Clinton administration chose not to be particularly helpful.
In 2001, the September 11 incident caused our attention to drift more to West Asia. We started drawing down our forces in the AsiaPacific region in order to meet our needs in West Asia. The Obama administration is now trying to rebalance back to where we were in the 1990s. To me this is not a new spike in America’s capability in the region, but rather saying, as Obama articulated in November, the United States is creating a floor and perhaps a ceiling on its role in East Asia while we are drawing down our forces in Europe, Latin America and West Asia.
This is often misinterpreted in this region by Chinese media as a sign that the United States is increasing its forces in the region and preparing a new kind of counter threat. The Americans will proceed to protect their interests through their alliance structure and I think they will see significant adjustments to get back to their late 1990s level of involvement.
The likelihood of being able to join with Japan on a stronger position in the region is very low. Japan has constitutional limitations on its armed forces activities overseas and it is deeply politically conflicted. South Korea similarly has deep social divides that will prevent it from becoming a major activist in regional security architecture.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies, Thailand: It is very clear from the Chinese world view that [regional security] is a positive sum. But in other places, I think there are some negativesum mindsets and mentalities. I know that in some higher education classes in the United States, there is a fixation—a deterministic fixation with the kind of realistic view that it has to be a zero sum. I don’t know how that will turn out, but it is important to be able to convince our mindsets, to think of the architectural investments, as a positive sum.
For the last 500 years, Asia was never really that important. It was about the West, the Europeans, and then the Americans. Now it is very clear we are a dynamic region. The economies of East Asia will continue to grow robustly. But the gap is we don’t have the security mechanisms to provide not just the prosperity which we are likely to have but the peace we also need—the peace and stability that have to go with the prosperity. That is the main problem of East Asia for the next five decades. One would wish that we
could have a NATO in Asia, but we have a different background. NATO was designed after decades of war and conflicts. In this region, we have a very different makeup, different constraints and different imperatives. We cannot import or even be inspired by the NATO or European models. Cui Liru, President of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations: The current security architecture of the Asia-Pacific is not functioning so well. Economies in the region have been very dynamic. Economic cooperation has dominated the
relationships among countries in the region. This, to a large extent, may have covered up many of the problems that still exist there. Security and stability are the basic conditions for continuing economic development of the Asia-Pacific. To that end, we need to form a security architecture that covers the whole of the region. I think that is also the aspiration of the vast majority of the countries within the region. However, this is still an ideal prospect that cannot be realized in the short term.
So in my point of view, in the whole transitional period, the Asia-Pacific security relationship and security activities will go forward on two tracks. One is to manage the situation, using the existing mechanisms to strengthen dialogue and communication. I think the overall situation is controllable because over the years we have formed reliable, mature dialogue mechanisms. The second track is to explore new ways to improve the regional security situation including the regional security architecture. China and the United States need to establish a new type of relationship between major powers. Security is a significant component of their relationship.
Mohanmed Jawhar, Chairman of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia: The architecture for security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific is diverse and multi-layered. Some of the forums are based on a win-win formula for promoting peace and security. What I mean by win-win is that all members work toward promoting common peace and prosperity. And among these I would say ASEAN, ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea), the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting.
There are others that are not based on working together for advancing common prosperity, but are rather based on advancing particular groups’ security. They are based on notions of adversarial security. These are, of course, bilateral, trilateral or even quadrilateral alliances in this region—defense alliances, security alliances. And their premise is that there are or there can be military threats from more powerful adversaries, and alliances between two or more powers can provide better deterrence. There can be other reasons, of course, for some of these alliances, like in the case of the U.S.-Japan alliance. It happened following World War II, under special circumstances. The network of alliances helps maintain hegemony while providing assurance for the lesser partners in the alliance system. This is the case for the U.S. alliance system in this region as well as around the globe.
On this question of whether we need a new umbrella architecture or whether we need to make changes to the existing architecture, I opt for the second alternative. First, it would be very difficult to create a new architecture. Many issues are involved. And many such attempts were tried but did not succeed. Second, many good things have been done by the existing architecture, and each has made a contribution to the regional security.
What needs to be done is to improve what we have. This can be done incrementally and meaningfully. Some of the things that can be done are not revolutionary ideas. First, we must further the capacity of the ASEAN Secretariat. Second, for the time being, ASEAN essentially relies upon its own indigenous resources in the secretariat. I think we should be able to invite nonASEAN members to also contribute their skills and expertise to the secretariat under the ASEAN leadership. The third is to rationalize the work of the various processes and institutions to reduce overlap and save resources.
Douglas Haines Paal, Vice President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the United States: Our watch on East Asia has been focused in recent days on the tensions in the South China Sea over claims and counterclaims on territorial seas and respective national programs for the development of the hydrocarbon and other suspected commodities. In 2010, we had a significant increase in regional tensions from fishery development in the South China Sea between the Philippines, Viet Nam and China over their respective claims over the area, and between Japan and China over Diaoyu Islands.
The United States has got a deeply entrenched alliance system that stems from the Cold War at the end of World War II. The alliance system was stretched beyond its capacity when the United States attempted to form SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, in the 1950s. That organization long ago passed its due date. Since then, the United States has relied on the alliance structure, with its principal allies being South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand, in the Asia-Pacific region. The alliance structure has recently been reinforced. During the first years in the 2000s, the American administration under George W. Bush addressed a lot of American forces’ attention to West Asia—to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Barack Obama administration is in the process of withdrawing American forces from those two venues. They articulated last November the new policy to rebalance the Asia-Pacific region. A lot of people here in China believe this is an effort to increase American presence in the region in order to meet the rise of China as a challenge to American authority and to have security interests in the region. I tend to look at it differently. I see the American rebalancing in the region as a restoration of America’s position in the late 1990s. America’s involvement in the region started eroding in 1997 with the financial crisis that originated with the decline of the baht in Thailand and spread throughout the region. At that time, the Bill Clinton administration chose not to be particularly helpful.
In 2001, the September 11 incident caused our attention to drift more to West Asia. We started drawing down our forces in the AsiaPacific region in order to meet our needs in West Asia. The Obama administration is now trying to rebalance back to where we were in the 1990s. To me this is not a new spike in America’s capability in the region, but rather saying, as Obama articulated in November, the United States is creating a floor and perhaps a ceiling on its role in East Asia while we are drawing down our forces in Europe, Latin America and West Asia.
This is often misinterpreted in this region by Chinese media as a sign that the United States is increasing its forces in the region and preparing a new kind of counter threat. The Americans will proceed to protect their interests through their alliance structure and I think they will see significant adjustments to get back to their late 1990s level of involvement.
The likelihood of being able to join with Japan on a stronger position in the region is very low. Japan has constitutional limitations on its armed forces activities overseas and it is deeply politically conflicted. South Korea similarly has deep social divides that will prevent it from becoming a major activist in regional security architecture.