The Rules of Geopolitics Are Different in Asia Indo-Pacific states care about great-power balance, not promoting democracy. By Walter Russell Mead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rules-of-geopolitics-are-different-in-asia-11567460320
Colombo, Sri Lanka
The drama in Washington sometimes makes this difficult to remember, but the most important foreign-policy development of the current presidential term isn’t the president’s tweets. It is the slow, inexorable shift in American strategy from the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters of world politics to what U.S. diplomats and military officials call the “Indo-Pacific.” That shift, which the Obama administration called the “pivot to Asia,” isn’t the special property of Republicans or Democrats, of national-security hawks or doves.
Yet if Americans are increasingly united on the importance of the Indo-Pacific, we are very far from united on strategy there. This is partly because the executive branch is led by a president with unconventional views who is often at daggers drawn with the network of professionals and institutions that have shaped American foreign policy for many decades. But larger forces are at work than President Trump.
Never in human history have so many people and states faced such an avalanche of political and economic change as the Indo-Pacific faces today. If American policy makers find it challenging to understand and respond, they aren’t alone. The teams around Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe are often similarly perplexed.
There is another problem: The tools of statecraft and habits of mind the U.S. developed during the Cold War and its unipolar aftermath are in many cases poorly suited to the Indo-Pacific. An Indo-Pacific coalition of powers aimed at balancing China will look and feel very different from the Atlantic alliance that contained Soviet communism after World War II.
Just how different was evident as I met with India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and a series of Indian analysts and policy makers recently. The message was unambiguous: India wants to cooperate with the U.S. to reduce the threat from China, but concepts like “the liberal international order” have no real purchase in New Delhi. India may be a democracy, but it isn’t a crusader. It sees no particular ideological or moral value in globalizing the values of the European Union and NATO or in extending the American Century. Mr. Modi’s India wants to balance China to preserve its independence and the development of its indigenous civilization and values, not to promote the Westernization of Asia.
The rules of alliance-building are also different in the Indo-Pacific. Sri Lanka’s troubles with China have gotten a lot of attention lately. After Sri Lanka was unable to repay the cost of a Chinese-financed (and poorly thought through) port development on its southern coast, China demanded and got a 99-year lease on the port to satisfy the debt. This sent tremors through the region, causing other countries to take another look at the fine print on their Belt and Road contracts with China.
Sri Lanka seems less worried than some of its neighbors. From my hotel window in Colombo I can see a giant new development rising on one of China’s artificial islands across the bay from the Sri Lankan capital. Like the Hambantota port project in the south, the economic projections for this massive development strike many observers as overly optimistic, and there was little demand for the new island in Colombo. Nevertheless, thanks to a diplomatic push by China, it is there, and again much of the new acreage—270 acres of the 665 on the new island—is leased for 99 years to China.
So is Sri Lanka handing itself over to China? That is not how it looks from Colombo. Sri Lanka, whose native kingdoms guarded their independence by balancing among Portuguese, Chinese, South Indian, French, Dutch and British powers for hundreds of years, has another view of how a small country can maintain its independence in a hostile world.
The goal, they feel, isn’t to choose among the jockeying great-power rivals, but to keep the bidding perpetually open. They want to avoid driving any great power into outright hostility and ensure that each one has reasons to support Sri Lankan independence.
This Asian realist thinking underlay the enthusiastic participation of many Indian Ocean countries in the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, and it continues to shape their view of relations with the U.S. and China today.
Western Europe was politically and culturally a much easier theater for American statesmanship than the Indo-Pacific world. Nostalgia is of little use. Both security and economic interests are pulling the U.S. toward deeper engagement in the Indo-Pacific. The region holds the key to the future of U.S. power, and Americans must learn to make themselves at home there.
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