Podcast: The Lowy Institute and ANU on Asia’s Security Future

Download a podcast of a recent seminar by the Lowy Institute at the Australian National University on “Shaping Up: Order, Change and Discontent in Asia’s Security Future.”

Posted by Matthew Shannon Stumpf on March 1, 2010. Respond »

Guest Post: Heinrichs on Why Asian Community No Answer to Regional Challenges

Asian community no answer to regional challenges
by Raoul Heinrichs

As close allies of the US, Australia and Japan have had it pretty good for a long time. Since the end of World War II, neither has faced any major challenge to its security and both countries have prospered greatly from the stability America has provided.

Strange, then, that Australia and Japan, arguably the two greatest beneficiaries of America’s alliance system, have in recent months become the most vocal advocates of a radically different regional system, one in which American power and leadership would no longer be the defining feature. Kevin Rudd has proposed an Asia Pacific community, while Japanese Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has called for an East Asian community.

While the details remain vague, both proposals appear to rest on the same largely unspoken belief: that US primacy in Asia is an unsustainable basis for regional order, and that multilateral institutions, either singly or collectively, are the best possible replacement. Both leaders envisage a benign security community comprised of member states bound together by a common Asian identity, a shared commitment to maintaining peace among themselves, and a general reluctance to engage in divisive power politics.

To some observers, all of this institutional star gazing is a bit self-indulgent, the kind of diplomatic grandiosity available only to the leaders of countries like Japan and Australia, whose wealth and security are relatively well assured. This criticism, however, though not entirely unfounded, belies the very real long-term dilemma that both countries face.

For decades now, Asia’s stability has devolved naturally from America’s unrivalled power, which has allowed Washington to be everything to everyone. The US has protected Japan from China and, more indirectly, it has reassured China about Japan. For Australia and the rest of the region, the US has prevented the dangers that would arise if China and Japan were allowed to resume their competition for Asian supremacy.

But all of this is changing as shifts in the distribution of power produce new strategic calculations. China, increasingly confident in its long-term ability to see off any threat from Japan, no longer depends on the US to the same extent to prevent Tokyo’s rearmament. Across the sea, as China looms large, Japan needs the US more than ever, despite being apprehensive – and resentful — about relying on a strategically preoccupied ally who owes Beijing almost a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, the US itself faces the difficult question of whether to confront a rising China, accommodate it at the expense of its own position (as well as that of Japan), or simply expect Beijing to indefinitely resign itself to US primacy.

Having lasted now for many decades, it’s become tempting to conceive of Asia’s peace and stability as a permanent and irreducible feature of the regional environment. But beneath the trade and investment and all the day-to-day diplomacy, Asia’s great power rivalries are once again beginning to simmer. Without the dominance of the US, stability cannot be taken for granted, and in a more unpredictable environment such as this, US allies like Japan and Australia will eventually face up to some tough choices. As US primacy fades, they’ll either have to do a lot more to support their alliances with the US, or learn to expect a lot less out of them – or both.

However, if the dilemmas that Rudd and Hatoyama face are real and serious, the diplomatic solutions they’ve come up with so far fall well short of the mark. Most of the debate about a new regional architecture has focused on which countries should be included and which should be left out. Should the region have an entirely new institution, or could we simply reform one of Asia’s existing institutions, the East Asia Summit perhaps, APEC, or the ASEAN Regional Forum – or should we instead consolidate them all into one umbrella organisation?

These might be important questions, but only if creating a new regional architecture, or revamping the old one, really is an appropriate response to the seismic changes underway in Asia today, and that is what Rudd and Hatoyama have failed to adequately explain. How, exactly, will a shiny new architecture mitigate the risks of a more intense strategic competition, encouraging the major powers of Asia to behave nicely towards each other, to renounce the use of force as a way of resolving disputes, and to calculate their interests according to what’s good for the region and not just themselves. In other words, how will this new architecture stop states behaving like states?

The uncomfortable reality, of course, is that it can’t and won’t. Multilateral institutions are never more than the sum of their parts. They grow up to reflect the preferences of the powerful states that create them, or else the balance of power out of whose shadows they emerge. Even with funding, personnel and an expansive membership, institutions do not transcend power politics, as Rudd and Hatoyama might imagine, nor do they have an independently moderating effect on the strategic outlook of their member states.

Rather, they become another venue in which the same old rivalries and political games are played out – very much like the UN today.

There’s a more general point to take away here. In a world of self-interested states — with all its uncertainty and danger, and with no one to call on if things get ugly — no institutions, no matter how well funded, can eradicate the unfortunate suspicion and mistrust, and resulting hostility, that shape international life.

This is the inescapable dilemma that Rudd and Hatoyama need to think about as they head back to the drawing board.

Raoul Heinrichs is a Research Associate at the Lowy Institute and Coordinator of the Institute’s MacArthur Foundation Asia Security Project.

Posted by Matthew Shannon Stumpf on January 7, 2010. Respond »

NBR Report Underscores Mutual Distrust Impeding South Asian CT Cooperation

Issues such as the surge of Taliban insurgency in Pakistan, the fall of Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka, flip-flop of the Nepalese Maoists, India’s continuing woes with the Left wing extremism and cross border terrorism and Bangladesh’s struggle with Islamist elements have largely dominated the security discourse of the region throughout the past year. And these are not isolated annual events that plague the South Asian countries, rather these have long been affecting the regional security architecture of the region, primarily due to the transnational character of the problem.

In South Asia, terror elements operate across national borders, seek refuge in neighboring countries after perpetrating violence, build terror infrastructures in lawless territories, recruit cadres and trade arms with tacit support of State and other non state actors. But unfortunately, South Asia lacks any regional cooperative mechanism to tackle this common menace, mainly due to both historical discords and prevalent mutual political distrust.

This urgent challenge has been elaborately addressed in the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) Special Report “Counterterrorism Cooperation in South Asia: History and Prospects” (No. 21, December 2009). Sumit Ganguly, author of this timely report sheds some light on the history of terrorism in the region, along with the past (negligible) countererror cooperation among South Asian nations. He also highlights the prospects and challenges for effective regional counterterrorism cooperation in the region.

Major Findings

1-Two discernable patterns emerge from the cases of terrorism in South Asia. First these cases all involve indigenous uprisings that turned to the use of terrorism. Second, every case saw external intervention frequently exacerbating the original conflicts, prolonging their duration, dramatically expanding their scope.

2-There are few examples of effective regional counterterrorism cooperation in the region. South Asian States have been more prone to use terrorist proxies to achieve foreign policy goals rather than evince willingness to engage in viable counterterrorism cooperation.

3-The prospects of counterterrorism cooperation in South Asia distinctly mixed. Though the possibilities for Indo-Pakistani Counterterrorism cooperation in the foreseeable future are negligible, there are limited prospects for cooperation between Bangladesh and India, Sri Lanka and India and Nepal and India.

Read the Complete Report Here.

Posted by Animesh Roul on January 6, 2010. Respond »

In the News: Jakarta Post Analysis on the Rudd Conference on Asia-Pacific Community

In “It’s a slow boat to Kevin Rudd’s Asia-Pacific village,” Chief Editor Endy Bayuni reported in Monday’s Jakarta Post on the conference convened by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this weekend on “The Asia Pacific: A Community for the 21st Century.”

He writes:

[Rudd] deliberately omitted his own vision of a community, preferring to allow countries to decide together what exactly they want and how they intend to get there. In the absence of a clear vision, however, one inevitably gets the impression that this community is more responsive to events rather than one that decides its own course, a boat that follows where the wind and the rough waters take it without a clear destination, as long as it stays afloat.”

Read the entire opinion here.

Send the Asia Security Initiative blog your thoughts at asiblog at macfound dot org, or through the comment box at the bottom of the post.

Posted by Matthew Shannon Stumpf on December 7, 2009. Respond »

Special Report: Rajagopalan on Defining Asia

So, Is President Obama Really Going to Asia?

This week, President Obama is visiting Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul. Five cities of global importance that happen to be located in Asia. East Asia, to be precise. We can go back and forth on Singapore, which is located in Southeast Asia but really, to most Asians is like Europe.

A few weeks ago, I wrote from New Delhi about the great distances within my subcontinent-sized country. Today, I look at Obama’s itinerary and reflect on the size of this continent about which several of us have been blogging for the last six months or more. What is Asia? What does it mean to say something or someone is Asian? A landmass, a continent that embraces 4-5-6 civilizations with spillover along all its geographical frontiers can scarcely be imagined so easily, let alone a policy agenda or diplomatic platform evolved for its ‘teeming billions.’

Most people from this continent find the American conflation of ‘Asia’ with ‘East’ or ‘Pacific’ Asia a little annoying. But it’s a hangover from the times not a lifetime ago, when world maps were colour-coded by colonizer and where regions were named according to their distance from Europe (Near East, Far East, Middle East). Equally, the terms West Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia have little resonance for people from the regions, who usually resent being lumped with others into a category—but at least they are geographically somewhat precise. And they take cognizance of distance, diversity and difference of interest.

President Obama is visiting Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul. Really, he is visiting East Asia. Far away from the realities of people in Tehran. In Sharjah. In Kandy. In Paro. In Almaty. In Chennai, for that matter. He cannot go everywhere, that’s fine; but let’s understand that his visit has different kinds and different levels of significance for all these people.

President Obama’s discussions will mostly be on bilateral issues. However, since most of these capitals belong to the same one or two regional security complexes, some issues will be discussed more than once and from more than one perspective. But they will still be East Asian issues from East Asian perspectives. And many of them will have neither relevance nor interest to people in other parts of Asia.

Moreover, when the President stops over at the APEC Forum, he will still not be talking with Asia’s leaders. He will be talking with leaders of states around the Pacific and then one or two others. The composition of APEC is not an accident of history; there was a conscious decision to keep a good part of Asia out of the organization.

But APEC is made of many important global players and when they speak they will speak about matters of global importance to a global audience. They will not, however speak for most of Asia and they will certainly not speak to most of Asia’s pressing economic, political and security problems.

Perhaps American interests would be best served if policymakers could start to disaggregate ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian’ in their minds, taking real cognizance of the mind-boggling range of identities and interests here. Hyping this visit as an Asian excursion overstates the reach of this itinerary or any diplomatic agenda the President could possibly have.

International relations scholars like summit diplomacy and the high table of international politics because so much else that we study is abstract, intangible and as we now like to say, ‘constructed:’ constructed by law like the state, constructed by polemics like the nation or constructed by scholars like anarchy and neorealism. But the real value of summit meetings can only be decided on a case by case basis. Perhaps the Obama visit will bring something fresh, something bold to the international politics of East Asia; but until we see that it does, let the buyer beware …

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on November 15, 2009. Respond »