TY - JOUR
AU - Katagiri,, Nori
AB - Abstract While the Obama administration’s Asia rebalance strategy received some praise from scholars and practitioners, it generated three problems that caused the USA to overlook many opportunities and neglect vital concerns. First, the strategy left Asia less stable by undermining US relations with China and smaller states in Southeast Asia. Secondly, it weakened America’s influence outside Asia by committing fewer resources. Finally, the rebalance was executed out of a relatively small cadre of government officials, allowing primarily civilian agencies to dictate Asia policy and excluding key branches of government. Furthermore, although the strategy competed with the strategies of restraint and offshore balancing, it never had the solid support of any international relations theories, leaving few scholars to directly associate it with a theory. Ultimately, the rebalance’s multiple logics prevented it from achieving intellectual hegemony in the American foreign policy discourse, and its substantive flaws and theoretical inconsistencies made difficult its acceptance as an enduring strategy in the Asia-Pacific region. Introduction Under a strategy known as the rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific, former President Barack Obama led the US effort to beef up its presence in the region that involved a set of initiatives to strengthen participation in regional groups and economic institutions and expand military ties with allies. Proponents of the ‘pivot’ to Asia justified it as a means of addressing China’s rise and Asian nations’ concerns about its ramifications, including those with regard to territorial disputes over the South China Sea, where a next naval war was thought likely to occur.1 The rebalance was a right move, they argued, because trade and investment flows, cultural and ethnic dynamics, and demographic shifts all pointed in the direction of Asia. The 21st century was ‘Asia’s century’, so the rebalance was a natural progression of US foreign policy. Kurt Campbell, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the rebalance’s main architect, wrote, ‘Asia should be placed more centrally in the formulation and execution of American foreign policy.’ Former Australian ambassador to the USA Kim Beazley was upbeat about the effort, saying, ‘Asia is the sunny uplands for America, and no region appreciates you more.’2 President Donald Trump has pronounced no clear path towards Asia and may indeed never have one. Instead he has proposed a set of policy ideas that differ somewhat from the rebalance. In his customarily ambiguous language, he called for a strong military, alliances based on mutual benefits, and rejection of any international commitments, all in order to ‘make America great again’.3 Long gone was the rebalance, a strategy embraced by past administration officials to engage Asian partners, but often criticised by scholars for undermining US interests one way or another.4 In what ways was the rebalance detrimental to US interests? What consequences did it generate when it was rolled out? Moreover, how did scholars evaluate the rebalance as a strategy? In this article, I make two arguments. First, I contend that, although the Obama administration had a right purpose in promoting the rebalance of engaging Asia and confronting rivals in the region, it did not tackle three problems generated in the process, which caused the USA to overlook many opportunities and neglect vital concerns. First, although the rebalance correctly reflected and confirmed the Asia-Pacific’s long-term significance, its effect was to make Asia less stable, particularly by undermining US relations with China and smaller states in Southeast Asia. Secondly, it weakened America’s influence outside Asia by appearing to commit fewer resources. Finally, the rebalance was executed out of a relatively small cadre of government officials, allowing primarily civilian agencies to dictate Asia policy and excluding key branches of government. My second argument is that, although the rebalance competed with the strategies of restraint and offshore balancing, it never had the solid support of any international relations (IR) theories, leaving few scholars that directly associated a theory with the strategy. Ultimately, the rebalance’s multiple logics prevented it from achieving intellectual hegemony in the American foreign policy discourse, and its substantive flaws and theoretical inconsistencies made difficult its acceptance as an enduring strategy in the Asia-Pacific region. I take three steps to make my case. First, I describe how the rebalance appeared during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to become a central foreign policy of the Obama administration after 2010. In so doing, I engage IR theory to explore the theoretical fit of the rebalance, arguing that the strategy was not fully consistent with any specific theories, but rather made up of parts of some of them. In other words, theoretical inconsistency prevented the rebalance from achieving intellectual primacy in American foreign policy. Secondly, I discuss the three ways in which the rebalance undermined US interests. In addition to failing to achieve discursive hegemony, I show that the rebalance did not have full support from government officials, so allowing China to challenge it and outstrip US influence in non-Asian regions. Finally, I examine a set of implications for ‘de-pivoting’ from Asia, a process that becomes increasingly likely under the current administration. Although the process of de-pivoting may help mitigate Chinese reactions to the rebalance and keep East Asia stable, allowing the USA to attend to other regions without prejudicing their stability in the process, there are three negative externalities that the process might generate. How the Rebalance Emerged as Obama’s Asia Strategy The strategic rebalance covered the geographic area of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, including Siberia to the north and Australia to the south, spanning the Pacific all the way to the Indian Ocean.5 Short of being a grand strategy, the rebalance was ‘strategic’ in that it bridged America’s operational resources with a set of political goals that it pursued in the region, such as stability, prosperity, and American leadership. But its host of military, diplomatic, and economic instruments under the broad national security architecture gave the rebalance all the appearance of a grand strategy. Arguably, the most prominent foreign policy agenda of the Obama administration, the whole regional scheme had in fact been some time in the making. Its roots were in the changing strategic environment of the post-Cold War era, when in 1993 President Bill Clinton, envisioning a ‘Pacific Century’, adopted a strategy of selective engagement and multilateralism. It was under its framework that the USA put East Asia on the path to interdependence, such as by easing certain sanctions against Vietnam and confronting region-wide issues of human rights abuses, water shortages, and piracy. The Clinton and George W. Bush administrations strengthened defence cooperation with allies and non-allies, and in so doing deployed major naval and air weapons systems to Guam and Japan. After September 11, 2001, Bush assigned an additional aircraft carrier to the existing fleet in the Pacific theatre to augment naval presence, check North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons programme, and run counter-piracy operations under the Proliferation Security Initiative. These pre-Obama investments in the region allowed Obama to say that the USA never ‘left’ Asia, although the country had clearly never committed solely to Asia either. The events of September 11 and the Iraq war in 2003 punctuated America’s devotion to counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency and justified the transformation of its army into a lighter, more agile force. T. J. Pempel argues that Bush’s policy of heavy-handed military adventurism in this period irreparably damaged America’s credibility with Asian countries. Bush fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the negligence of Asia, he contends, paying little attention to regional economy, acting unilaterally in many regions of the world, and excessively ‘militarising’ foreign policy. Former Bush officials Victor Cha and Michael Green’s response was to water down the policy’s negative impact.6 Certainly, there were considerable developments during the Bush era. For instance, the so-called 2 + 2 security meetings of the Japan-US Consultative Committee, comprising ministers of each nations’ defence and state (foreign affairs) departments, respectively, which began in 2005. The Bush administration also signed a free trade agreement with South Korea in 2007 to boost mutual trade with its key ally on the Korean Peninsula. Yet it is also true that Bush paid more attention to places other than Asia, spending billions on defence against violent insurgencies even when the need to do so was in doubt. Nina Silove goes on to say that the pivot had actually begun during the Bush, as opposed to the Obama administration, because that is when we see all the investments made towards Asia. While she has enough evidence to make this narrow argument, her argument is based on a single anecdote from one administration member—Donald Rumsfeld—and takes no account of the views of other officials.7 It seems obvious that the Bush administration was indeed geared mostly towards South Asia and the Middle East during its eight years. Obama sought to disengage from the Middle East conundrum after the attempt over a few years to resolve it and to double down his efforts more explicitly to engage Asia. After publication in 2011 of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy article calling for a more robust engagement policy in Asia, Washington expanded joint military exercises with allies for the defence of disputed islands in the East China Sea and South China Sea, reached new agreements to sell arms, and restored defence cooperation with Vietnam, Indonesia, and New Zealand. Growing concerns about China’s Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD) strategy led the Department of Defence (DOD) to issue in 2012 the Joint Operational Access Concept, a capstone, all-service response, establishing the Air-Sea Strategy Office, staffing it with officers from all four services, and developing operational concepts to counter A2AD threats. It also sent 2500 marines to Darwin, four littoral combat ships to Singapore, and enhanced rotations of its troops stationed in the Philippines. The 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) brought US humanitarian disaster missions and forward operating locations to the Philippines and joint base constructions. These moves modestly boosted the US role as defender of regional order in the wake of growing Chinese aggressiveness in the South China Sea. The military moves accompanied economic and diplomatic efforts to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Before Donald Trump withdrew the USA from the TPP on January 23, 2017, Obama had promoted regional free trade as a pathway to an eventual US-led Free Trade Agreement for the Asia-Pacific. In addition, he provided $5 billion to the US Export-Import Bank and $1 billion to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to help American firms sell energy products in the region. Joining the East Asia Summit for the first time in 2010, the USA reinforced the belief that the USA would stay committed. Theoretical Foundations of the Rebalance The way the US strategy towards Asia developed during past administrations is important, because it reveals the gap between policymakers’ views on Asia and IR scholars’ ideas about what the policy should be. As the rebalance rolled out, it competed with two foreign policy alternatives—restraint and offshore balancing—neither of which was able to satisfy the security requirements that the USA faced.8 The rebalance differed from the strategy of restraint which, according to its main proponent Barry Posen, holds that the strategic overstretch in the post-Iraq era brought the fiscal meltdown at home and subsequent call to reduce global commitments, reconfigure priorities, and share more defence burdens with its allies.9 This cost-saving posture was problematic in East Asia by virtue of generating the perception of the USA’s imminent departure from the region in ways that would enable China to take its place, openly challenge the USA, and isolate its allies. This is precisely why Trump’s isolationist tone has unnerved policymakers in Asia; retrenchment would allow China, and possibly Russia, to capitalise on the resultant strategic vacuum by bullying small states, threatening transportation corridors and trade routes, and overwhelming disputed territories in the region. Such a change would deprive the USA of the freedom of navigation across East Asia, including the disputed areas in the South China Sea and East China Sea. As a result, unlike the rebalance, retrenchment would shrink US influence and accelerate the transfer of regional leadership to Beijing. As the strategy of offshore balancing shares common values with that of restraint, they are often considered synonymous.10 Yet the difference is stark. Like the restraint strategy, offshore balancing is designed to draw down America’s global commitment and ease the way towards putting its financial house in order. Yet unlike restraint, offshore balancers aim to maintain sufficient amounts of resources offshore to maintain a semblance of regional stability by deterring the USA’s competitors from turning on its allies and enabling allies to take care of themselves. While restraint calls on the USA to seek to ‘command the commons’—sea, airspace, and space—and meet its strategic objectives through a mobile and global presence, offshore balancers focus on three regions—East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—where the USA has reason to maintain such presence. In other words, restraint is designed to draw down US global commitment, while offshore balancing aims to keep forces offshore sufficient and ready to counter and balance a rising power.11 Naturally, offshore balancing differs from the rebalance. As observed by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, offshore balancing focuses on East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East,12 which differs from the rebalance’s exclusive focus on Asia. Although both strategies have elements of balancing, there are differences of geographic focus and depth. The exclusive focus of the rebalance on the Asia-Pacific generated the perception among scholars that the USA would be ‘stuck’ in Asia while extending enhanced defence commitments to its allies in the region. This brought a sense of relief and reassurance to pro-US policymakers across Asia that the USA would be on hand should they encounter trouble with powers like China, but it antagonised those opposing a greater US presence. Contemporary variants of major IR theories offer competing descriptions of the rebalance, but none has produced theoretically cohesive explanations of the strategy. This is not surprising as the USA has combined several grand strategies in its foreign policy actions, the Obama administration having pursued more than one strategy at a time.13 Structural realism sees this as in line with US efforts to maintain its ability to balance China’s growing capability. An ‘offensive’ version of structural realism, or offensive realism, holds that China seeks to dominate East Asia and, hence, regards the US rebalance as a proper counter. Rather than allowing China to be a regional hegemon, offensive realists would see the rebalance as an appropriate response as the USA reasserts itself as maintainer of stability across the region.14 Yet some realists would argue that the rebalance is not strong enough to balance China’s power because its ‘soft’ elements of economic cooperation and diplomatic dialogue effectively dilute the hard power necessary to check China’s ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear and missile development. In fact, they argue that the USA should do more than what the rebalance did to strengthen its military alliances, conduct joint exercises, and deter enemies.15 Furthermore, ‘defensive’ realists would argue that there would be no need for the USA to proceed with the rebalance as long as the country had enough military power to deter threats and secure survival. For such analysts, the strategic rebalance was unnecessarily provocative and could only increase chances of the USA being dragged into conflicts through alliance commitments. For IR liberals, the rebalance was a legitimate American initiative to keep regional stability through economic interdependence, promotion of democratic governance, and cooperation via regional and international organisations. Democratic discourse and economic interdependence increase incentives not only for US allies and established democracies but also for non-democracies such as Vietnam and Myanmar to benefit from greater opportunities for trade, investment, and exchange programmes. Moreover, boosting regional institutions helps address common issues such as piracy, exchange counter-terror intelligence among members, build mutual confidence, and allow repeated interactions to reduce future uncertainty.16 These ideas converged under the grand strategy of liberal hegemony, led by scholars such as G. John Ikenberry, Stephen Brooks, and William Wohlforth,17 which rejects the policy of retrenchment and calls for active engagement with the world. However, some liberal institutionalists would contend that the rebalance’s heavy-handed military focus undermined efforts to buttress regional cooperation, build democracies, and achieve economic interdependence. Instead, they may say that the USA should use even more regional groups than those the rebalance promotes and spread democratic institutions. Moreover, critical for the IR liberals was precisely how the linkage between domestic politics in the USA and the Asia rebalance as a US foreign policy would work to increase US national interests. As I elaborate further, most of Obama’s cabinet members were publicly in support of the Asia rebalance most of the time, but closer inspection of various leaders’ speeches demonstrates that the administration was not always consistently united in the execution of the rebalance. This was in part because the strategy was conceived by a fairly small number of select members of the State Department, whose policy received a set of public endorsements but which nevertheless reflected generally mixed and often conflicting statements and policy directions from other agencies. Certainly, many leaders in the Department of Defence, including Ashton Carter, Obama’s last Secretary of Defence, perceived the concept of rebalance as essential to the achievement of national interests in Asia during the Obama administration,18 but the initial and most consistent execution of the strategy came from a select number of top officials in the State Department, especially after Clinton’s speeches and her call for the pivot in Foreign Policy magazine.19 Finally, constructivists would associate the rebalance as a social construct of emerging actors in the Asia-Pacific region in fostering regional identity, cultures of cooperation, and a security community.20 Constructivists see the rebalance as having the notional effect of encouraging nations to comply with the norm of collaboration to deal with common threats such as piracy and the climate change. At the same time, other constructivists might take issue with the rebalance by arguing that, owing to the hard military image the rebalance projected, the USA should try to tone down the impression and rhetoric whereby military power is perceived as central. For them, the rebalance is not necessarily the best move to address a threat that does not exist, and there is no need to make one up. What people may see as China’s threat is what the USA makes of it, and the rebalance may, thus, contribute to a hostile environment where there is no need for such a strategy in the first place. Instead, constructivists would propose greater cultural exchanges with Asian countries and promote cooperation-based on shared values such as human rights protection and rule of law. The scholarly debate demonstrates that, while theories offered various explanations of the strategy, the intellectual core of the rebalance was always infirm, preventing it from achieving hegemonic status in the American foreign policy discourse. Behind this remains the fact that no scholar ever made a widely accepted claim to the rebalance, parochial as it sounds, as ‘theirs’. After all, the rebalance was a hybrid strategy of select parts of competing theories. As such, there is no single logically coherent theory saying that the rebalance was the right strategy for Obama to adopt at the time. With few exceptions, many established scholars of international relations and US foreign policy ended up mentioning it only in passing or in the context of grand strategies that they each advocated. For example, Mearsheimer and Walt paid attention to the rebalance mostly in the narrow context of calling for offshore balancing in Obama’s (and later Trump’s) developing Asia strategy, while Posen treated it as little more than an extension of what he called ‘liberal hegemony’.21 Joseph Nye admitted the rebalance ‘made sense’ as policy, but he did not associate it with a theory or explain it from a theoretical standpoint, including soft power or complex interdependence.22 A treatment of the rebalance was also missing in a larger study of Obama’s grand strategy. In The Obama Doctrine, Colin Dueck contends that Obama’s overarching strategy was based on the combination of retrenchment and international accommodation, designed primarily to allow him to focus on securing liberal policy legacies at home. Dueck’s exploration of Obama’s choice to emphasise containment, engagement, assertion, integration, and regime change (in Libya) essentially comes with an analytical submersion of the rebalance.23 Of course, scholarly engagement is not always a good indicator of policy relevance; yet given the reasonably anticipated impact of the rebalance on international politics and US foreign policy, the lack of theoretical coherence with the strategy is remarkable. Few, if any, Asia specialists extended explicit support for the rebalance, although many offered a set of reasonably objective assessments of Obama’s Asia policy as a whole. Weighing out a total of six competing strategies for Asia, Friedberg advocated a stronger stance than the rebalance, one he called ‘better balancing’, which aimed both to engage and contain China’s aggressiveness in more robust ways.24 In a major work on coercive diplomacy and alliance cohesion in Asia, Thomas Christensen explored the internal context of the rebalance and pointed out weaknesses, in economic dimensions in particular. He also painted the rebalance as a key part of Obama’s efforts to fill the gap of the Bush-era absence of the USA presence in Asia, before going on to engage the rebalance in appreciation of Obama’s ‘mixed’ record on dealing with rising China. Ultimately, Christensen did not assign any theory to an explanation of the rebalance, but rather discussed it outside theory and developed a scant theoretical argument.25 Victor Cha argued that his theory of power-play—a US-led bilateral alliance system based on the ‘hub and spokes’ security design that allowed Washington to keep East Asia stable during the Cold War—continues to shape the US-led power structure of the East Asian political landscape. The way Cha discusses the rebalance is quite similar to Christensen’s; Cha engages the rebalance here and there as he investigates the effect of Obama’s Asia policy, without directly deciphering it from a theoretical standpoint. This is understandable, because for Cha it is more accurate to describe East Asia through what he calls a ‘complex patchwork’—a set of bilateral and multilateral configurations that aggregate to include all regional members under a US leadership—than the rebalance.26 As a whole, scholars tended either to advocate strategies other than the rebalance, go back to the theories they had embraced to criticise it, or both, but little beyond. Certainly, the shortage of scholarly engagement with the rebalance among Asia scholars does not discredit it as strategy. Yet it implies a challenge in directly associating the strategy with a particular line of established thought in international and Asian politics. Accordingly, as it was policymakers that rolled out the rebalance, the strategy was never systematically assessed in the academic community in comparison with other options, as regards the extent to which it worked to serve US interests. Evaluation of the rebalance’s strengths and weaknesses unearths several reasons why the strategy was more problematic than commonly thought. Scholars have pointed out problems with the way the rebalance was executed,27 but this article highlights the way the rebalance was conceived and formulated. First, I contend that the strategy made it difficult for the Obama administration to keep Asia stable. It gave China an untimely and ultimately unnecessary excuse to react negatively and use it as a means of justifying its military modernisation. It also forced smaller states in Southeast Asia to do things they wish to avoid—difficult decisions that amount to choosing sides between Beijing and Washington. Secondly, the rebalance deprived the USA of its ability to respond as effectively as before to security contingencies outside East Asia, such as the protracted crises in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, on balance with strategic resources allocated to Asia. Finally, the strategy enjoyed little unified support from key government agencies, which saw divisions in the interagency process. While civil-military relations stayed intact, the strategy had much to do with the State Department with other departments trailing to offer support, rather than jointly executing the strategy. These costly flaws were pointed out by scholars who did not fill the gap between the strategy and theory. Three Problems Undermining East Asian Security Proponents of the rebalance said that it was imbued with all the positive purposes, designs, and audiences that would enhance the US presence in Asia’s diplomatic, economic, and military spheres. Accordingly, the USA became more proactively regionalist in leading multinational TPP negotiations and boosting its participation in bilateral and multinational free trade agreements with a number of Asian states. These measures were geared to nurturing economic and diplomatic opportunities for the region and addressing regional concerns about China’s irredentism in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The USA pressed for more inclusive arrangements wherein it would play an even greater role. It invited China to join the TPP and take part in joint military exercises, in hopes that Beijing would reciprocate through the groups it controlled, such as the Chinese-led regional economic and space clubs—the Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organisation, respectively. Proponents of the rebalance welcomed the move as a means of improving the US diplomatic image in Asia which, they argued, had been tarnished during the Bush administration. It was, however, at odds with the two alternatives—offshore balancing and restraint. From the perspective of offshore balancers, it was a right move because East Asia was one of the three regions that the USA should focus on, but costly because it provoked tension with China, when offshore balancing would have done the opposite by stabilising the region. From the perspective of restraint, the rebalance was costly because it would embroil the USA once more in complex Asian politics, its recent involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq having taught Washington to scale down global commitments. More precisely, scholars discussed three ways in which the strategy was costly. First, the rebalance allowed China to decry the rebalance’s heavy-handed military move as incoherent with the US policy of engagement and blame Washington for escalating tension. Certainly, China had criticised the militarised aspects of US foreign policy at least since the Clinton era, but the rebalance itself gave officials in China reason to interpret it as reinforcement of US efforts to contain and encircle China through expansion of alliances and encroachment of what it took to be its own territory on contested islands.28 China both opposed Hillary Clinton’s defence of the Philippines’ sovereignty over what she called the West Philippine Sea and used it as a reason to turn aggressive in its rhetoric and actions. China’s aggressiveness proved costly to the USA as regards making it do more than it would otherwise have done to pacify these expectations. In fact, the reason why the strategy failed to gain support from the academic community has much to do with the fact that it did not achieve the US interest of stabilising East Asia. Of course, one cannot blame the rebalance alone for China’s hostile reactions because Sino-US rivalry predated the rebalance. The point is that the relative ease with which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interpreted the rebalance according to its pre-existing perceptions allowed China to use it as a pretext for advancing its interests. This rivalry intensified as China upped its military modernisation. While Obama saw the rebalance as a response to China’s rise, China called it a reason for the intensified rivalry. All this took place when China’s global influence remained modest, with a development model so unique as to be unexportable to many countries and soft power that was either contested or distinctly lacking.29 After all, even if China was America’s competitor, there was no hard evidence to show that it seriously contemplated replacing the American leadership in Asia with its own,30 other than in the cyber domain where Beijing exploited US vulnerability. None of China’s military manoeuvres, although strategically significant in the long-run, required immediate deployment of additional American forces to Asia. China moreover did and does know that even if the US ‘decline’ were to open up a strategic vacuum in Asia that China could exploit, the country still had a long way to go before it could surpass US power in the region.31 Yet the rebalance fed the CCP’s rant that it must boost China’s military power to defend its sovereignty. Most notably, China increased its tempo of building installations on islands across the South China Sea. In this regard, researchers at the International Crisis Group saw in 2012 an ‘increasing number of civilian vessels patrolling disputed waters that presents the greatest potential for conflict’.32 While no declassified data are available on the precise number of naval intrusions reported by claimants, it is reasonable to anticipate continuation of rising tensions based on growing activism on the part of each of them. In addition to the military domain, China also raised what could be seen as a challenge to the regional dominance of US economic initiatives by building its own ‘world bank’, known as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the RCEP, albeit with no immediate intent to use these instruments to replace the existing regional order with its own. The AIIB’s expansive membership, over 60 state members as of October 2018, has raised concerns in Washington as to whether or not the voluntary self-exclusion of the USA and its allies, such as Japan, is strategically effective and whether or not the Japan-led Asia Development Bank (ADB) would be able to compete with it across Southeast Asia. Such Chinese-led projects buttress the One Belt One Road Initiative (OBOR), Xi Jinping’s 2013 initiative, since renamed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to enhance regional connectivity through investment, trade, and mutual confidence building.33 Beijing’s push to expand its geopolitical influence through the OBOR and AIIB has alarmed outsiders whose respective projects overlap with China’s. Secondly, the rebalance was costly owing to deepening a schism within East Asia when it was intended to unify the region. The division of the region began to look the way Friedberg had envisaged in 2010—whereby East Asia would politically split into two by the year 2020.34 On one side was a group of US defence allies—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia—that welcomed the rebalance with various levels of enthusiasm. This welcoming attitude stemmed from the concurrent fear, in the event of US abandonment, that if these countries were to encounter trouble with China, the USA would not be there for them. The sense of dependence was particularly acute in traditional allies such as Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe desperately forged Washington’s role in its struggle over territorial disputes with China (including Taiwan) in the East China Sea. Despite the well-known resourcefulness of the Self-Defence Forces (SDF), Japan has refrained from other than short-term solutions, such as scrambling fighter jets to confront the aggressiveness of the Chinese air force and making slight adjustments to collective security agreements with American forces. But it did not amend Article 9 of the Peace Constitution, which bans the use of force as a means of solving international disputes. Instead, the Japanese bought more advanced military weapons, such as F-35 fighter jets, and demanded that the USA strengthen its alliance commitment. On the other side of the division that Friedberg envisaged was a group of small states in Southeast Asia worried about what the rebalance would do—or not do—to them. On one hand, several nations in the region moved to enhance their security through closer American ties: The Philippines allowed a greater American military presence in its country; certain US restrictions were lifted on armed sales to Vietnam; closer ties with Indonesia appeared; and Singapore allowed the placement there of American littoral ships. On the other hand, many Southeast Asian nations were wary of getting entangled in Sino-US rivalry. They shunned being forced to choose sides to avoid provoking negative reactions from the other. China is the largest trading partner of many ASEAN nations, but they also rely on the USA for regional stability, so are dependent on both powers for different purposes. China’s economic role has in many ways become more important in the long run than US-provided security. Thus, while several Southeast Asian countries publicly welcomed the rebalance, they still relied on Chinese manufactured goods, traders, and investment opportunities in local infrastructure and expected Beijing to play a growing role in the security sphere as well. Dependence made small states such as Laos and Cambodia more susceptible to Chinese coercion, as seen in Phnom Penh’s appeasement of China at recent ASEAN meetings. Even Thailand, which hosts US troops on a limited basis and keeps a certain distance from China, worried that embracing the US rebalance too tightly might turn away Chinese investors and infrastructure support,35 an attitude that gained strength in 2014 after a military coup significantly weakened its civilian-controlled democratic polity. Officials in Indonesia voiced similar concerns about how the rebalance might be perceived, and former Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa warned against drawing an American ‘fault-line’ across Southeast Asia. Likewise, India kept its distance from the rebalance so as to continue to exercise autonomy in weapons acquisition, trade with China, and participation in regional groups. The latest manifestation of frustration towards US interference in Asian affairs is that of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s opposition to the US military presence in the country, which culminated in a call for ‘separation’ from the USA, and an end to joint military training and to the EDCA. Rather than enthusiastically accepting the US rebalance, therefore, these nations in Southeast Asia have used ‘light’ alignment patterns to interact with both the USA and China, keep the level of regional commitment relatively low, and maintain strategic flexibility.36 The core philosophy behind what could be interpreted as the lukewarm reactions to the rebalance is that of a third route many Southeast Asian nations have adopted that is calculated to ‘enmesh’ both China and the USA in a web of regional institutions and interdependence.37 Finally, the rebalance was costly as regards increasing the odds of entanglement. Obama used economic cooperation and engagement to tone down the rebalance’s otherwise hard-line rhetoric by insisting there was no ‘offensive’ intent behind the strategy. Yet the risk of entanglement increased because the rebalance would encourage allies to act more recklessly than otherwise, so diminishing the security of local actors in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, and pushing US allies and partners towards the heart of rising tensions. In Southeast Asia, countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia took visibly military actions against Chinese ships, which went far beyond simply asserting sovereignty in the South China Sea, such as by carrying out land reclamation on some of the disputed islands and, in Vietnam’s case, letting the US Navy (and the Russian navy) dock its ships in Cam Rahn Bay, in order to make the USA commit more explicitly to checking China’s maritime encroachments. The Philippines’ reactions raised entanglement dangers further, as Manila’s security treaty with the USA would more directly involve US forces in conflicts with Chinese ones. Clinton’s reference to the West Philippines Sea (South China Sea) enraged Chinese officials, who went on to reclaim a few contested islands before building installations on even more, this time those disputed by other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The military tension with China increased as the Philippines armed forces trained with their American counterparts and borrowed cutters from Japan’s SDF to be used in naval confrontations. Before Duterte’s opposition to the US military presence in the country, the 2014 EDCA had allowed the USA to rotate troops into the Philippines for extended stays and build and operate facilities there, while giving Philippine personnel access to American ships and planes. In 2016, the two countries agreed on five locations for US troop military bases. Not coincidentally, US forces intensified patrol and air operations over the South China Sea, a trend that became acute after China unilaterally declared an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in 2013. In its White Paper on regional security cooperation, China naturally reacted negatively to the ‘Rebalancing’ as noted in Obama’s 2015 ‘Fact Sheet’ by not only stressing its intent to cement Chinese leadership but also declaring it would counter the rebalance.38 The paper critiqued the rebalance for seeking to build a network of ‘like-minded’ states, and its strengthening of military alliances targeted at a third party.39 The paper also rejected the concept of a ‘network of alliances’ and instead encouraged other states to pursue partnerships, while casting Beijing as seeking ‘common security’.40 In Northeast Asia, Japan passed security legislation in 2015 to allow collective self-defence and make it easier for the SDF to fight side-by-side with US troops. This measure gave Tokyo not only greater defence roles in joint operations but also effectively tied the USA even tighter to Japan. The bilateral security treaty pledged US defence of Japan should Japan come under attack, and the 2015 legislation allowed Japan militarily to support US forces should the USA come under attack. The entanglement risks increased, as Japan’s Air Self-Defence Force (JASDF) reacted at an increasing rate over recent years to Chinese military aggressiveness. As Figure 1 shows, JASDF fighter jets have increased emergency scrambles to intercept foreign aircraft, and the trend that began in the 2010s became more acute as the rebalance rolled out (Figure 1).41 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Growth in JASDF Scrambles. Source: Joint Staff, Statistics on Scrambles through the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2018 (Tokyo: Japan's Ministry of Defence, 2018), p. 1 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Growth in JASDF Scrambles. Source: Joint Staff, Statistics on Scrambles through the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2018 (Tokyo: Japan's Ministry of Defence, 2018), p. 1 Figure 2 demonstrates that of all these countries, Japan, through its air force scrambles, reacted most overtly to China’s (and Russia’s) aerial aggressiveness. These developments not only reinforce Japan’s balancing behaviour towards China, but they also show that US entanglement became more likely than before the rebalance; SDF and US forces are now so integrated that US operations are part of the laws governing the SDF.42 While causality is hard to achieve because these changes occurred at timings that were close to each other, the allied actions appear to have emboldened China to increase its aerial adventurism and to help justify its reactions for strategic reasons. US allies such as Japan have consequently become more reliant on US protection and acted more boldly against Chinese military operations. The moral hazard, seen in the form of US allies taking risks under the false sense of assurance, increased pressure on the Obama administration to take even costlier actions to reassure its allies to avoid losing credibility as a senior partner of the regional order (Figure 2). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Countries/Regions to Which JASDF Jets Scrambled. Source: Joint Staff, Statistics on Scrambles through the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2018, p. 3. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Countries/Regions to Which JASDF Jets Scrambled. Source: Joint Staff, Statistics on Scrambles through the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2018, p. 3. In sum, the rebalance was costly in three ways. First, it allowed China to condemn the rebalance’s heavy-handed military move as incoherent with the US policy of engagement and to blame Washington for escalating regional tension. Secondly, it had the effect of deepening a schism within East Asia when it was supposed to unify the region. Finally, the rebalance was costly as regards increasing the odds of entanglement, especially between China on one hand and US allies on the other. These problems added to the absence of academic support for the rebalance that stemmed mainly from established scholars’ disagreement with the strategy and preference for alternative strategies such as offshore balancing and restraint. Constraining Strategic Flexibility The rebalance’s second problem was that it constrained the USA’s ability to respond as effectively to contingencies in other regions as would otherwise have been the case. Even if the rebalance per se was not a direct cause of events that took place outside Asia, the perception that Obama allocated the bulk of resources to Asia raised enough doubts among specialists on other regions to suppose that the rebalance underscored the administration’s unjustified predispositions towards Asia. This is precisely because of the obvious trade-offs between US policy on Asia and on other regions. There were naturally disagreements about exactly where in Asia warranted US attention. Some Obama cabinet members and area scholars saw Pakistan as the centre of Asia policy, because it played a key role in allowing US forces to operate in sensitive areas bordering Afghanistan, and because government branches of its own, especially the Inter-Services Intelligence, were close to al Qaeda and the Taliban.43 Yet as the rebalance rolled out to the Western Pacific, South Asia remained highly volatile, and it was clear that sustained mass violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir required the USA to refocus on the region to a far greater extent than the rebalance would allow, since it had little to do with US strategy to engage South Asia, soothe the already uneasy US-Pakistani relations, or even to confront extremist insurgencies there. Pakistan, whose help the USA needed to fight extremists, instead moved closer to China, so to better check India. However, bearing in mind its border disputes with China across the Himalayas and in Kashmir, and also its status as a successful democracy and rising economic and demographic power in South Asia, India would be a key player through which if it could be counted as an ally to strategically ‘sandwich’ China. Consequently, the head of Pacific Command (PACOM) Admiral Samuel Locklear considered India part of the rebalance.44 For these reasons, joint American and Indian exercises took place in the South China Sea, and India’s cooperation with the US forces, largely over Chinese intentions and actions, continued in the Indian Ocean. India also moved towards more cooperation with Australia and Japan, and Japan and Australia, despite long-lingering tensions, moved closer together as well. Yet the USA never explicitly and consistently courted India in the rebalance strategy for four reasons. First, even if India saw China as a competitor, China did not consider India to be its enemy because the power gap between the two countries favoured Beijing.45 Secondly, India kept the USA at arm’s length in favour of retaining its non-alignment posture, thus ensuring that no one in the US government could officially name the sub-continent as part of the pivot.46 Thirdly, there were operational complications owing to South Asia’s division between the jurisdictions of the Central Command (CENTCOM) and of the Pacific Command (PACOM). This would necessitate coordination of the two major COCOMs under a single strategic scheme consisting in an expansive set of two operationally discrete regions. This was further complicated by the fact that CENTCOM is mainly the domain of Army or Marine generals, while PACOM is commanded by admirals. Finally, a closer relationship with India would not help the USA achieve much without complicating US relations with Pakistan. Therefore, adding India’s role to the rebalance as it stood did not constitute an ideal policy. Furthermore, the rebalance operated exclusive of any considerations regarding the Middle East and North Africa, an even less stable region, thus effectively excluding from its scope a number of serious political complications, namely the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, the war in Syria, nuclear negotiations with Iran, civil war in Yemen, and nation-building in Iraq. The political urgency of the protracted crises in these states challenged the long-term sustainability of the rebalance’s sole focus on Asia, forcing CENTCOM to maintain high-alert status and readiness to deploy forces for a host of missions, ranging from fighting the Islamic State to rescuing refugees. Most officials in the Middle East naturally found the rebalance disingenuous, if not simply astrategic. Large parts of North and East Africa were also unstable, with insurgent violence raging across the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa. The so-called ‘leading from behind’ approach that toppled Muammar Gaddafi’s regime had worked in Libya in 2011, but a similar approach would not have kept stability had a series of violent rebellions broken out across the wider North Africa region, especially as European nations, struggling as they were with their own refugee crises and financial problems, would not have been able to offer much support. Therefore, another violent Arab Spring in North Africa would have pressed CENTCOM to add even more armed operations to its main military missions against the Islamic State and its affiliates. The conflict in Ukraine and the Crimea also affected the balance of political capital that Western nations had at their disposal for dealing with Russia. The USA and Russia had certainly restrained themselves from re-entering a Cold War. Conventional military build-ups in Eastern Europe, the presence of nuclear weapons retained on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, and Europe’s dependence on Russia’s energy supply clearly helped reduce chances of the outbreak of World War III. Yet the USA had to take certain steps that showed its resolve to defend NATO, including sending war vessels to the Black Sea and placing missile defence batteries in Romania and Poland. These actions did not directly affect the rebalance per se, but nevertheless served as a reminder that the USA needed to act strongly at any time outside Asia beyond the rebalance’s coverage. The current ceasefire between Moscow and Kiev may last some time, but a full solution would require a long-term political process whereby all concerned parties agree to a set of new territorial and resource rights—hardly an achievable task if the USA stayed disproportionately committed to Asia. In the meantime, China capitalised on the US focus on East Asia to expand its influence in other regions. The trend has been witnessed in various parts of the world, even in Australia and New Zealand, where China took advantage of a relatively free political and economic environment for investors and agents,47 and also in Africa and Latin America. African governments pushed hard for foreign capital and moved from subsistence to commercial agriculture to feed their own populations. Deborah Brautigam has shown that China exports more food to Africa than it imports from the entire continent.48 Although China’s advance into Africa predated the rebalance,49 it accelerated in the 2010s. China has emerged as one of Africa’s top business partners, aggressively pursuing raw materials and opportunities in the continent’s construction market.50 China’s foreign aid to Africa expanded, as did its soft power and influence in various parts of the continent.51 Along with investment in agriculture came a massive flow of Chinese migrants that has made Africa what Howard French calls China’s ‘Second Continent’.52 These developments are under the background of a mixed record as regards US policy, notably in the field of aid. For example, research shows that US assistance to various parts of Africa in the security sector has been woefully inefficient. On one hand, there is evidence of help from the USA to strengthen its partners’ capabilities and deter and degrade threats from local militants, especially those associated with al Qaeda and the Islamic State. However, the USA did not achieve any aggregate reduction in violence in countries that received its aid; it has essentially failed to attain the goals of reducing inter-communal tensions and improving civil-military relations and human rights records.53 China has had influence in Latin America for decades. Kevin Gallagher argues that Latin America saw significant commodity-led economic growth during the so-called China boom.54 Of course, infrastructure financing and development—the main thrust of the initiative—has been a fixture of China’s approach to Latin America. Since 2005, China has extended roughly US$150 billion to support a range of projects, US$27 billion of which went towards infrastructure projects in Costa Rica, Argentina, and Trinidad and Tobago.55 Yet it was after the rebalance began that China’s influence increased. Since the OBOR commenced in 2013, its funding has increased to US$1 trillion a year and expanded to include projects in over seventy nations, including four in Latin America, which is now called a ‘natural extension’ of the Maritime Silk Road and ‘indispensable participant in the BRI’ as it has since become known. China has started incorporating Latin American countries into the BRI through bilateral ‘Belt and Road Cooperation Agreements’ that allow Chinese firms to advance their financial interests.56 Beijing has extended loans to Chinese corporations to build dams and hydroelectric power plants in the Amazon and Patagonia, lay rail track to reduce freight transportation costs in Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, finance nuclear energy plants in Argentina, and build a transcontinental trade canal through Nicaragua connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to compete against the Panama Canal.57 For these reasons, the rebalance had the effect of tightening already heavy constraints on overseas resources, which hampered any attempt to curb China’s expansion of its spheres of influence, and so weakened US global and regional influence. By pinning the USA to East Asia, both rhetorically and substantively, the rebalance allowed China to outpace America through its engagement with countries in Latin America and Africa. China’s active diplomacy and economic engagement in these regions have won influence and secured energy sources to bring home to its ageing population. This demonstrates not just how out of sync the rebalance was with the rest of the world but also how it challenged the USA’s coordination with other regions more prone to display China’s influence. As the gap in strategic priority became more pronounced, the rebalance made it more difficult for the USA to rally international support to deal with problems outside Asia. An additional danger was that of the international community becoming less supportive of future US initiatives owing to the greater tension the rebalance had caused with China—an increasingly influential actor throughout the globe, even the Arctic. Infirm Domestic Foundations There were several reasons why the rebalance was never a unified strategy across government agencies. In comparison with his first term in office, Obama’s second term was noted for its comparative paucity of Asia specialists.58 To work, the rebalance required close coordination between civilian specialists and military leaders at the highest level, but it was in fact mostly the creation of select civilian members of Obama’s first term led by the DOS. While Asia experts at the DOS welcomed the initiative, officials elsewhere saw it as out of sync with mission requirements outside Asia. The rebalance hinged heavily on the personal commitment of Hillary Clinton, but her DOD counterparts Leon Panetta and Robert Gates had other agendas to promote.59 Subsequently, various officials made public statements at odds with the rebalance’s supposedly exclusive Asia-focus. Clinton’s successor John Kerry and Defence Secretaries Chuck Hagel and Ashton Carter, aware of Asia’s importance,60 proved not consistent proponents of the rebalance, turning instead to wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.61 Kerry even publicly questioned the rebalance’s value, questioning the logic behind the move,62 while Hagel called for a reassessment of the rebalance to determine whether it was affordable.63 Ashton Carter’s declaration of the ‘third offset’ strategy in 2016 hardly lent support to the rebalance, rather showing that many of the administration’s defence initiatives during the rebalance’s timeframe did not necessarily aim to reinforce it. Simply put, the offset strategy was the third attempt the USA made to offset a shrinking force structure and declining technological superiority. Specifically targeting six areas—anti-access and area-denial, guided munitions, undersea warfare, cyber and electronic warfare, human-machine teaming, and war-gaming and development of new operating concepts—the strategy related only tangentially to the rebalance. The first three of the six areas were linked to the rebalance one way or another, but the other three had nothing directly to do with it. Excluded were efforts towards mechanisation, because the rebalance encouraged human interactions with allies through diplomacy and economic engagement. Although war-gaming is conducted for all regions including Asia, development of new concepts proved to be a search for the replacement, rather than institutional booster of the rebalance; and while some of the programmes had impact on the Navy and Air Force’s capability, they also aided the strategy towards the Middle East and Russia.64 During his first term, Obama’s foreign policy team in the DOS did include a few ‘Asia hands’ such as Kurt Campbell and Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who had served as Clinton’s right-hand men and accelerated the rebalance’s rollout. Yet after Clinton’s departure, officials in the State Department’s Asia sections did not feature high-profile ‘Asia hands’, such as Campbell, and generally struggled to compete with Assistant Secretaries of State of other regions for resources and control of foreign policy. Each made cases for their respective areas of responsibility as the short-term expediency of instabilities in the Middle East, South Asia, and Eastern Europe constantly grabbed national attention. This was precisely the time when Washington observers began to notice the palpable shortage of Asia specialists in the administration, including those on Korea issues.65 At the Pentagon, there was a similar shortage of high-profile rebalance proponents. Assistant Secretary of Defence for Asia Pacific affairs, and later Hagel’s Chief of Staff, Mark Lippert led the initial DOD effort to keep the rebalance afloat until he became Ambassador to South Korea in 2014, but his replacement, Rexon Ryu, showed negligible public enthusiasm for the rebalance before leaving the position in 2015. Meanwhile, significant issues outside Asia continued to affect DOD long-term planning, forcing the Pentagon to announce, for instance, that global warming was an ‘immediate security threat’, a statement that was probably factual but nonetheless politically inappropriate for Asian audiences.66 Meanwhile, verbal consistency on the civilian side with regard to the rebalance was lacking. While relations between civilian officials and military professionals remained functional, US armed forces underwent an adjustment period of their own. Of all service branches, Navy and Air Force chiefs of staff publicly supported the rebalance, in no small part because they were the prime beneficiaries of the focus on this predominantly maritime region.67 Most chiefs of the other services also followed up with administration policy that lent various degrees of support to the rebalance. Yet in the long run, rotations, retirements, deployments, and turnovers in rank and file constantly challenged the effort to send consistent messages. The rebalance was furthermore undermined by the fact that the previous experience of commanders in key positions demonstrated a want, rather than richness, of long-term commitment. General Martin Dempsey had been to Asia just once prior to becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011 which, although hardly unique among many commanders, confirmed the general thinness of professional contacts they had cultivated with Asian nations. It also implied the need for the USA to pay extra in order for flag officers to become better acquainted with Asia, so forcing the USA to expend even more resources on putting the leaders socially on a par with both Chinese and Russian commanders who had been ‘in’ Asia for far longer periods of time. Current chiefs, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, Army Chief General Mark Milley, and Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller, had spent most of their senior career years in Iraq and Afghanistan, a natural outcome of US commitments in the past few years, but one that said much about where real US interests lay. The inconsistent, often competing visions and experiences of military officers challenged the execution of joint operations. The Navy, which retains the commanding PACOM office, has always been more committed to the region than any other services. Under the rebalance, it began shifting 6 of its 11 fleets to the Asia-Pacific region and will have deployed 60% of its assets to the region by 2020. Its role in conjunction with the Air Force in the Joint Concept for Access and Manoeuvre in the Global Commons (formerly AirSea Battle) was central to the USA response to China’s military power. On the other hand, the Army and Marine Corps were mindful of missions that suited their specialisations in ground combat and amphibious operations, respectively, in ways that theoretically supplemented sea and air missions. The number of soldiers assigned to Asia grew from 60 000 to 100 000 between 2014 and 2015 under the Army’s Pacific Pathways rotation, in two-to-three month deployments to Asian countries. In sum, the mission requirements that the rebalancers envisaged were hardly in sync with the geographic features of the region and the operational focus of their target audiences. The multi-continental deployment of security and economic resources clearly challenged the Asia focus inherent in the rebalance. A range of critical security and economic events outside the region demanded sustained and often unpredictable American responses, requiring the USA to be vigilant towards virtually every corner of the globe. Conclusion In the article, I engage IR theory to explore the theoretical fit of the rebalance, arguing that parts of the strategy were inconsistent with what scholars would expect it to be and generated multiple logics that put the rebalance out of theoretical balance. Of the two arguments I advance in this article, the first—that theoretical inconsistency prevented the rebalance from achieving intellectual hegemony in the American foreign policy discourse—stems in part from the other—that scholars have pointed out so many problems in ways that weaken the centrality of the strategy in IR discourse. I contend that, in promoting the rebalance, the Obama administration had a valid desire to engage Asia and confront critical actors in the region but that its messages and orientation suffered flaws that forced it to overlook many opportunities and fail to address vital concerns. The rebalance weakened America’s influence outside Asia by committing fewer resources to areas that truly mattered, made Asia less stable by deepening the regional division, and allowed select branches to dictate Asia policy in the rebalance’s execution. As it is outside the research scope of this article to investigate the Trump administration’s Asia policy, I conclude by offering a brief discussion of lessons that the rebalance presents for the administration. Trump’s actions represent a clear departure from the central premise of the rebalance—diplomatic engagement, economic cooperation, and confidence building. As such, they also signal the beginning of what may be called the process of ‘de-pivoting’. If any, de-pivoting will not be cost-free; it will involve logistical, opportunity, and operational costs. First, Obama promoted the rebalance by sinking a heavy logistical cost to move military personnel, families, civilian support staff, and equipment to East Asia. Redistributing the resources away from Asia to ‘de-pivot’ would incur additional expense at a time when the USA seeks to cut these very logistical and operational costs. The toll would be enormous, since the Trump administration seems not to have settled on a strategy with which to replace the rebalance, and, therefore, has ‘nowhere’ to turn to after Asia. This spells all kinds of trouble; extra costs would arise once the USA moved its assets out of Asia back stateside and more upon making logistical decisions to move them out of the USA again once the next strategy is decided. Secondly, opportunity costs accumulated as the USA turned to Asia more than it did outside the region, which affected its missions in key security hotspots such as, for instance, Nigeria, against Boko Haram, and Somalia, against al-Shabab. The war against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State demanded enormous capital expenditure but did not end before Obama left office, and the US cyber system remains under constant attack, domestic and foreign. Similarly, Obama was unable effectively to address Asian concerns about China and Russia’s cyber attacks—an important topic that the rebalance was clearly not designed to address, but which rapidly appeared and affected US relations with a number of countries in Asia. Thirdly, operational costs related to the rebalance have mounted owing to the USA having conducting military exercises with Asian states, at times even inviting China’s participation, to build mutual confidence. De-pivoting may force the USA to roll back some of these investments, so emboldening China to act aggressively and thus increasing China’s influence in the region. If indeed China does become more aggressive as a result, the USA might be forced to ‘re-pivot’ to Asia, which implies even more of the logistical complications, operational disturbances, and economic losses associated with the redistribution of assets to the region. Furthermore, the USA would face serious damage to its credibility as global sole superpower upon making known its intent to shift away from Asia. Trump’s declaration to withdraw from the TPP is already making China the bigger winner by forcing small states in Asia to look to Chinese capital from the AIIB and RCEP. Pivoting away from Asia would make the USA seem knowingly to have let down its allies there. A de-pivot, therefore, will hurt America’s reputation and make a future rebalance to Asia less credible. Merits of de-pivoting include freeing up US commitments for world affairs, which may modestly work for the belief system of Trump’s cabinet members, although not necessarily for US interests. The administration may become better able over time to address contentious issues with Russia and Europe and problems related to vulnerabilities in cyberspace. The ongoing diplomacy with North Korea may also harness positive steps towards stability on the Korean Peninsula, although it seems prudent to be on the side of caution with regard to whether or not the two countries will be able to negotiate a deal that both sides can agree upon. Yet there is no guarantee that US relations with Asia will improve under Trump’s guidance, especially with the recent souring of trade relations with China, and nor has Trump’s dealing with North Korea’s missile and nuclear testing done much to stabilise the region. After all, it is the responsibility of Trump himself to execute Asia policy right at the time when parts of Asia, such as China and North Korea, are fast unravelling. Acknowledgements For comments on earlier drafts, the author thanks Jennifer Lind, an unnamed Japanese government official, anonymous reviewers of the article, and participants in his panel at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2016. For financial support, he thanks Saint Louis University and the United States Air Force. The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the institutions discussed here. Footnotes 1 Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2014). 2 Kurt Campbell, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia (New York: Twelve Books, 2016), chapters 1–2, 7. 3 Donald Trump, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), pp. 31–48. 4 For example, see Aaron Friedberg, ‘The Debate Over US China Strategy’, Survival, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2015), pp. 89–110; Thomas Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), pp. 250–1; Georg Löfflmann, ‘The Pivot between Containment, Engagement, and Restraint: President Obama’s Conflicted Grand Strategy in Asia’, Asian Security, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2016), pp. 92–110; Robert Ross, ‘The Problem with the Pivot’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 6 (2012), pp. 70–82; Hugh De Santis, ‘The China Threat and the “Pivot” to Asia’, Current History, Vol. 111, No. 746 (2012), pp. 209–15. 5 I do not discuss South Asia extensively because the rebalance does not explicitly include the region under its auspice. For an argument on this judgement, see Nick Bisley and Andrew Phillips, ‘A Rebalance to Where? US Strategic Geography in Asia’, Survival, Vol. 55, No. 5 (2013), pp. 95–114. 6 T. J. Pempel, ‘How Bush Bungled Asia: Militarism, Economic Indifference and Unilateralism Have Weakened the United States across Asia’, Pacific Review, Vol. 21, No. 5 (2008), pp. 547–81; Michael Green, ‘The United States and Asia after Bush’, Pacific Review, Vol. 21, No. 5 (2008), pp. 583–94. 7 Nina Silove, ‘The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia’, International Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), pp. 45–88. 8 Evan Montgomery, ‘Contested Primacy in the Western Pacific: China’s Rise and the Future of U.S. Power Projection’, International Security, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2014), pp. 115–49; Avery Goldstein, ‘First Things First: The Pressing Danger of Crisis Instability in U.S.-China Relations’, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2014), pp. 49–89. 9 Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Joseph Parent and Paul MacDonald, ‘Graceful Decline: The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment’, International Security, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2011), pp. 7–44. 10 The two terms are so close that even Posen at one time confused them under a single grand strategy when he wrote that ‘Two are variants of a ‘‘primacy’’ strategy; one is a variant of “restraint,” sometimes termed ‘‘offshore balancing”.’ I thank one of the reviewers for raising this point. See Barry Posen, ‘Stability and Change in U.S. Grand Strategy’, Orbis, Vol. 51, No. 4 (2007), pp. 561–7. 11 Posen, Restraint. 12 John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 95, No. 4 (2016), pp. 70–83. 13 Colin Dueck, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 14 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2014). 15 Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: Norton, 2011). 16 Van Jackson, ‘Red Teaming the Rebalance: The Theory and Risks of US Asia Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2016), pp. 365–88. 17 G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); G. John Ikenberry, Stephen Brooks, and William Wohlforth, ‘Don't Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment’, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2013), pp. 7–51. 18 Ashton Carter, ‘Remarks by Secretary Carter and Q&A at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Singapore’, U.S. Department of Defense, 4 June, 2016, https://dod.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/791472/remarks-by-secretary-carter-and-qa-at-the-shangri-la-dialogue-singapore/. 19 Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 20 Amitav Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Muthiah Alagappa, Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 21 Mearsheimer and Walt, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing’, pp. 70–83; Posen, Restraint, p. 6. 22 Samuel Ramani, ‘Interview: Joseph Nye’, The Diplomat, 10 June, 2015, https://thediplomat.com/2015/06/interview-joseph-nye/. 23 Dueck, The Obama Doctrine. 24 Friedberg, ‘The Debate over US China Strategy’, pp. 89–110. 25 Christensen, The China Challenge; Thomas Christensen, ‘Obama and Asia: Confronting the China Challenge’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 5 (2015), p. 29. 26 Victor Cha, Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 198–206. 27 MiraRapp-Hooper, Patrick Cronin, Harry Krejsa and Hannah Suh, ‘Counterbalance: Red Teaming the Rebalance in the Asia-Pacific’, Center for a New American Security, 14 November, 2016, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/counterbalance-red-teaming-the-rebalance-in-the-asia-pacific. 28 De Santis, ‘The China Threat and the “Pivot” to Asia’, pp. 209–15. 29 David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 30 Robert Ross argues that ‘this shift was based on a fundamental misreading of China’s leadership. Beijing’s tough diplomacy stemmed not from confidence in its might … but from a deep sense of insecurity born of several never-racking years of financial crisis and social unrest’. See Ross, ‘The Problem with the Pivot’, pp. 70–82. 31 Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, ‘Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia’, International Security, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2016), pp. 7–48. 32 International Crisis Group, ‘Stirring Up the South China Sea (II): Regional Responses’, 24 July, 2012, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/south-china-sea/stirring-south-china-sea-ii-regional-responses. 33 Literature on China’s One Belt One Road initiative has been expanding. For recent example, see Peter Ferdinand, ‘Westward Ho—The China Dream and “One Belt, One Road”: Chinese Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping’, International Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 4 (2016), pp. 941–57; William Callahan, ‘China’s “Asia Dream”: The Belt and Road Initiative and the New Regional Order’, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2016), pp. 226–43; Wang Yong, ‘Offensive for Defensive: The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New Grand Strategy’, Pacific Review, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2016), pp. 455–63. 34 Aaron Friedberg, ‘The Geopolitics of Strategic Asia, 2000–2020’, in Ashley J. Tellis, Andrew Marble, and Travis Tanner, eds., Strategic Asia 2010–11: Asia’s Rising Power and America’s Continued Purpose (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2010), pp. 25–78. 35 Kitti Prasirtsuk, ‘The Implications of U.S. Strategic Rebalancing: A Perspective from Thailand’, Asia Policy, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013), pp. 31–7. 36 John Ciorciari, The Limits of Alignment: Southeast Asia and the Great Powers since 1975 (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 2011). 37 Evelyn Goh, ‘Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia: Analyzing Regional Security Strategies’, International Security, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2008), pp. 113–57. 38 The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘China’s Policies on Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation’, 11 January, 2017, http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1429771.shtml. 39 The White House, ‘Fact Sheet: Advancing the Rebalance to Asia and the Pacific’, 16 November, 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/16/fact-sheet-advancing-rebalance-asia-and-pacific. 40 Chan Lai-Ha, ‘Soft Balancing against the US “Pivot to Asia”: China’s Geostrategic Rationale for Establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 6 (2017), pp. 568–90. 41 This is in part owing to Japan’s 2012 nationalisation of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, but the trend has stabilised since then. 42 Nori Katagiri, ‘Between Structural Realism and Liberalism: Japan’s Threat Perception and Response’, International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2018), pp. 325–43. 43 Obama officials saw the highest strategic priority in the order of Pakistan, al Qaeda in Yemen, Iran, North Korea, and cyber attacks by China. Bob Woodward, Obama’s War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), pp. 3–9. 44 Samuel Locklear, ‘Introduction: Why is the Indo-Asia-Pacific Important?’, Statement of Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, U.S. Navy Commander, U.S. Pacific Command Before the House Armed Services Committee on U.S. Pacific Command Posture, 5 March, 2013, http://www.pacom.mil/Media/Speeches-Testimony/Article/565163/pacom-house-armed-services-committee-posture-statement/. 45 M. Fravel Taylor argues that ‘China views India’s rise as a positive development that promotes China’s own core interests’ more than it challenges them. This stance allows China to ‘avoid a potentially costly confrontation that would harm the growth of both countries, block the formation of a close U.S.-India relationship, and reduce the overall influence of the United States over China’. M. Taylor Fravel, ‘China Views India’s Rise: Deepening Cooperation, Managing Differences’, in Tellis, Tanner, and Keough, eds., Strategic Asia 2011–12: Asia Responds to Its Rising Powers-China and India, (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2011), pp. 65–100. 46 Nick Bisley and Andrew Phillips, ‘A Rebalance to Where? US Strategic Geography in Asia’, Survival, Vol. 55, No. 5 (2013), pp. 95–114. 47 Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia (London: Hardie Grant, 2018); Hugh White, ‘Old Friends in the New Asia: New Zealand, Australia and the Rise of China’, in Robert Patman, Iati Iati, and Balazs Kiglics, eds., New Zealand and the World: Past, Present, and Future (Singapore: World Scientific, 2018), pp. 187–98. 48 Deborah Brautigam, Will Africa Feed China? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 49 See, for instance, the series of articles in The China Quarterly, Vol. 199 (2009). 50 Lee Ching Kwan, The Spector of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 51 Cheng Zhangxi and Ian Taylor, China’s Aid to Africa: Does Friendship Really Matter? (London: Routledge, 2017). 52 Howard French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa (New York: Random House, 2017). 53 Stephen Watts, et al., Reforming Security Sector Assistance for Africa (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2018). 54 Kevin Gallagher, The China Triangle: Latin America’s China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); David B. H. Denoon, ed., China, The United States, and the Future of Latin America: U.S.-China Relations, Volume III (New York: NYU Press, 2017). 55 Carol Wise, Dragonomics: The Rise of China in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 56 Enrique Dussel Peters and Ariel Armony, Building Development for a New Era?: China’s Infrastructure Projects in Latin America and the Caribbean (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2018). 57 Enrique Dussel Peters and Ariel Armony, “Chinese Infrastructure in Latin America: A New Frontier”, 14 August, 2018, https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/10776-Chinese-infrastructure-in-Latin-America-A-new-frontier. 58 Christensen, The China Challenge, pp. 245–57. 59 Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014). It contains DOD’s strategic thinking mostly pinned on the Middle East and South Asia. Of 15 chapters, not even 1 chapter is devoted to a discussion on East Asia. 60 Ashton Carter, ‘The Rebalance and Asia-Pacific Security: Building a Principled Security Network’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 95, No. 6 (2016), pp. 65–75. 61 Michael Auslin, ‘The Asian Pivot under New Management’, The Wall Street Journal, 21 January, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324624404578255382220771310. 62 Elizabeth Economy, ‘Secretary of State John Kerry on China’, Council on Foreign Relations, 27 February, 2013, https://www.cfr.org/blog/secretary-state-john-kerry-china. 63 Craig Whitlock, ‘Budget Cutting Forces Pentagon to Review Strategy’, Washington Post, 18 March, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/budget-cutting-forces-pentagon-to-review-strategy/2013/03/18/413a2b54-8fff-11e2-9c4d-798c073d7ec8_story.html?utm_term=.a8f25ce4171c. 64 Mackenzie Eaglen, ‘What Is the Third Offset Strategy?’, RealClearDefense, 16 February, 2016, https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/02/16/what_is_the_third_offset_strategy_109034.html. 65 Joshua Rogin, ‘Few Korea hands on Obama administration’s Asia leadership team’, Foreign Policy, 12 February, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/02/12/few-korea-hands-on-obama-administrations-asia-leadership-team/. 66 Coral Davenport, ‘Pentagon Signals Security Risks of Climate Change’, The New York Times, 14 October, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/us/pentagon-says-global-warming-presents-immediate-security-threat.html. 67 Jonathan Greenert and Mark Welsh, ‘Breaking the Kill Chain’, Foreign Policy, 17 May, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/17/breaking-the-kill-chain/. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Institute of International Relations, Tsinghua University. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A Critical Assessment of the Asia Rebalance
JF - The Chinese Journal of International Politics
DO - 10.1093/cjip/poy018
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-critical-assessment-of-the-asia-rebalance-t7KLi0M2cN
SP - 35
VL - 12
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -