by Parag Khanna
These disparate Asian awakenings are congealing. In 2014, Chinese president Xi Jinping declared to a gathering of Asian leaders in Shanghai, “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.”14 As much as China’s neighbors fear its meteoric rise and ambitions, they also share Xi’s sentiment. Asians don’t want to play by outsiders’ rules. No Asian nation—not even US allies Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia—will do anything for the United States that isn’t first and foremost in its own interest. It is as if Asians are saying “Asia first.” US president Donald Trump’s popular slogan “America first” has been a rallying cry that captures the sense of US economic victimization—primarily by Asian economies with large trade surpluses vis-à-vis the United States. Asians, too, want to ensure that global rules suit their preferences rather than allowing them to be exploited.
Yet there are deep differences in worldview between the West and Asia today. Western commentators tend to describe the present geopolitical landscape as a “global disorder” and point to their own errant policies as the cause of declining Western influence—implying that once the United States and Europe get their act together again, the West will be back on top. Asians, by contrast, see their return to the cockpit of history as a natural destiny irrespective of anything the United States or Europe does. Rather than disorder, they are presiding over the construction of a new Asian-led order encompassing the vast majority of the world’s population.
This is not to say that Asia will be devoid of conflict. Most of the world’s major geopolitical flashpoints lie in Asia, from the Sunni-Shi’a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran to the Korean Peninsula. China has territorial and maritime disputes with India, Vietnam, and Japan. The Arab states and Israel are squaring off against Russia and Iran in Syria, with fragile Iraq caught in the middle. Paradoxically, it is part of the process of becoming a system that neighbors square off violently against each other rather than an outside yoke restraining them. War is as much a part of a system as trade or diplomacy. Friction is evidence of just how important a system’s members are to each other, whether as allies or as adversaries. Recall that European states congealed into the European Union only after the horrors of World War II, not before. Asia’s wars—past, present, and future—and their settlement are thus intrinsic to the process of building an Asian system.
While scenarios for Asian conflicts abound, however, Asia has in recent decades maintained an overarching stability. Asia’s big three powers—China, India, and Japan—all have strong leaders with long-term mandates. They are nationalistic, spend massively on their militaries, and have skirmished directly on land or sea. But they have also prevented their altercations from escalating past the point of no return. The United States still helps its allies deter China, while Asian powers such as Japan, India, Australia, and Vietnam are strengthening their bonds to counter Chinese aggression. Meanwhile, new institutions embed China into patterns of restraint with its neighbors and rivals. The more Asian nations are drawn into this maneuvering, the more dynamic and complex the Asian system will become.
This constant multidirectional hedging among ever more pairs of Asian countries is how the Asian diplomatic system is forming from the bottom up. The Asian system does not, and will not, have rules as formalized as those of Europe. There is no supranational Asian parliament, central bank, or military—no “Asian Union,” as former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd once boldly proposed.15 Instead, the Asian approach to integration involves building complementarities and deferring dangerous issues. Fundamentally, Asians seek not conquest but respect. A sufficient degree of respect for one another’s interests is enough.
Europe’s postwar decades do, however, show the way in one of the most fundamental aspects of forming a stable system: socialization among political elites, businesses, academics, think tanks, journalists, sports clubs, youth groups, and other communities. For a long time, many Asian citizens have been fed historical narratives of animosity about their neighbors. Yet, though suspicions and negative stereotypes remain strong—especially between Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Japanese, Saudi Arabians and Iranians—Asians are getting to know one another better than ever through diplomacy, business, tourism, student exchanges, and regional media. From Al Jazeera to CCTV, Asian youths are becoming more knowledgeable about their fellow Asians and comfortable with their Asian-ness. Over time, perceptions will shift, interests will align, policies will change, and coordination will deepen. The more Asians socialize with one another, the more confidence they will have in solving their problems together.
Asia in the Global Order
In the fall of 2017, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier invited me to participate in a televised discussion on the future of Western civilization. He began the conversation by asking me, “What’s the view from Asia?” My response: The view from Asia is that history has not ended but returned. Asia commands most of the world’s population and economy, has catapulted into modernity, maintains stability among its key powers, and has leaders who know what they have to do—and are doing it—to prepare their societies for a complex world. Complacent Western intellectuals conflate material circumstances and ideas, as if the latter remain triumphant despite no longer delivering the former. But ideas compete not in a vacuum but rather on the basis of their impact in the real world.
GROWING TOGETHER: EUROPE AND ASIA FORM THE MOST SIGNIFICANT AXIS OF GLOBAL TRADE.
Europe and Asia are the two most significant regions in global trade, and their trade with each other comprises a greater trade volume than any other pair of regions. As infrastructural linkages and trade agreements expand, Eurasian trade is accelerating and far outstripping either region’s trade with North America.
The biggest geopolitical phenomena of the past three decades have come in rapid succession: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the consolidation of the European Union, the rise of China, the US shale energy revolution, and now the emergence of an Asian system. Global order is about the distribution of power and how that power is governed. The anchor of global order isn’t necessarily a single country or set of values, as was the case with the currently waning Western liberal international order. Instead, the foundations of the emerging global order are the US, European, and Asian systems—all at the same time. Each provides vital services around the world, such as military protection, financial investment, and infrastructure development. Rather than one superpower simply fading away to be replaced by a successor, we are living—for the first time ever—in a truly multipolar and multicivilizational order in which North America, Europe, and Asia each represents a major share of power. Asia is not replacing the United States or the West—but it is now shaping them as much as they have shaped it.
To appreciate just how rapidly global order can realign, consider the arc of the post–World War II era. The United States inherited the mantle of preeminence from its wartime ally Great Britain, then provided the security umbrella for Europe to rebuild itself during the Cold War. Today the European Union is a larger economy, plays a greater role in world trade, and exports more capital than does the United States. The United States also provided a Cold War security umbrella for Japan and South Korea, enabling their economies to lift off after decades of conflict. As economic globalization accelerated from the 1970s onward, China leveraged the US-designed global trading system to displace Japan as Asia’s largest economy, surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy, and become the top trade partner of twice as many countries as the United States. Though the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the United States stood alone as the world’s sole superpower, its “unipolar moment” of the 1990s and 2000s proved to be just a moment as failed wars and a financial crisis turned the rhetoric of invincibility into a fear of imperial overstretch. Meanwhile, both of the regions that America had protected in the postwar years—Europe and Asia—now call their own shots. Trade between Europe and Asia now far
exceeds either of their trade with the United States. Both view the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a lucrative opportunity to boost commerce across the Eurasian megacontinent. Neither cares for the United States’ suspicion of BRI, for it comes from outside the tent. Once the bedrock of global order, the transatlantic relationship is now an uncomfortable nostalgia, like driving forward while looking in the rearview mirror. That is how quickly the geopolitical world spins.
Asia is the most powerful force reshaping world order today. It is establishing an Asia-centric commercial and diplomatic system across the Indian Ocean to Africa, reorienting the economies and strategies of the United States and Europe, and elevating the appeal of Asian political and social norms in societies worldwide. Geopolitical forecasters like to identify a neat global pecking order, always asking “Who is number one?” But power can’t be measured simply by comparing static metrics. The United States is still the leading global military power with the deepest financial markets and largest energy production. Europe still leads the world in market size, the quality of its democratic institutions, and overall living standards. Asia in general, and China in particular, boasts the biggest populations and armies, highest savings rates, and largest currency reserves. Each has different types of power, quantities of power, and geographies of power. There is no definitive answer to who’s number one.
Interestingly, China’s rise is not as significant a development as it would have been when the United States was the world’s sole superpower. For decades, the United States had the most powerful military and largest economy. It protected the global commons, was the consumer of last resort, and had the world’s only major currency. By contrast, today the United States, Eurozone, and China each represents more than $10 trillion in GDP. A dozen other countries have economies larger than $1 trillion. Many countries have powerful militaries capable of protecting their own domains, alone or in partnership with others. China is a superpower, but its rise affirms the world’s multipolarity; it does not replace it.
Equally important, just as the global landscape is multipolar, so, too, is Asia’s. Japan was once Asia’s most powerful nation. Today the most powerful nation is China. India has a younger population and will soon be more populous than China. Russia and Iran are flexing their muscles. In Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations schematic, most of the world’s cultural zones are Asian—Hindu, Buddhist, Sinic, Islamic, and Japanese—and much of the Orthodox realm is as well. None has ever dominated over more than one of the others for very long. The Asian system has never been an Asian bloc. To the contrary, for most of history, there has been stability across the many Asian subregions and fluidity rather than hierarchy. There will be therefore be no Chinese unipolarity—neither globally nor even in Asia. Asians are much more comfortable with the idea of global multipolarity than are Americans, for whom recent history (and most scholarship) has focused on unipolar orders—especially their own. But the more multipolar the world becomes, the more the global future resembles Asia’s past.
Getting Asia Right
The time has come to approach Asian dynamics from the inside out. The histories and realities of Asians shouldn’t have to be qualified or apologized for. Westerners must be placed, even briefly, in the uncomfortable position of imagining what it’s like when about 5 billion Asians don’t care what they think and they have to prove their relevance to Asians rather than the reverse.
Americans are just beginning to pay attention to the long and complex cycle of feedback loops tying the United States to Asia. The outsourcing of US jobs to Asia and the erosion of the country’s industrial base were among the most salient causes of working-class frustration that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Thousands of US troops still have their lives on the line in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan; East Asia is home to even more US soldiers based in Japan and South Korea. Asia is now a prime destination for US energy, with oil exports across the Pacific increasing by 500 percent between 2011 and 2016—especially to China. (In fact, the United States’ trade deficit with Asia would be much worse were it not for rising oil exports.) These realities clearly betray Americans’ prevailing mood of wanting to shift their focus inward.
Though the United States’ biggest strategic questions revolve around Asia, Asians aspire to what North Americans already enjoy: a high degree of autarky. US arms sales to Saudi Arabia, India, and Japan have picked up, but Asian defense spending is motivated by the desire either to push the United States out of the region (as China is doing) or to diminish dependence on the United States (as South Korea and others are doing). Asians are working hard to expand access to energy supplies from the Arctic, Russia, Central Asia, and Africa, as well as to invest in their own alternative and renewable energy sources such as natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, wind power, and biomass. The US dollar is still the world’s main reserve currency, but Asians have started denominating ever more trade in their own currencies, as well as shedding some of their dollar reserves. And from Amazon to Apple, US corporate profits depend considerably on sales in Asia, but Asian regulators and companies will stop at nothing to capture greater market share for themselves, both in Asia and worldwide.
These examples reflect how Asians view the United States: not as a hegemon but as a service provider. US weapons, capital, oil, and technology are utilities in a global marketplace. The United States is a vendor, and Asia has become its largest customer and competitor at the same time. There was a time when the United States was the default option for the provision of security, capital, and technology, but Asian countries are increasingly providing these services for one another. The United States is more dispensable than it thinks.
To see the world from the Asian point of view requires overcoming decades of accumulated—and willfully cultivated—ignorance about Asia. To this day, Asian perspectives are often inflected through Western prisms; they can only color to an unshakable conventional Western narrative, but nothing more. Yet the presumption that today’s Western trends are global quickly falls on its face. The “global financial crisis” was not global: Asian growth rates continued to surge, and almost all the world’s fastest-growing economies are in Asia. In 2018, the world’s highest growth rates were reported in India, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Uzbekistan. Though economic stimulus arrangements and ultralow interest rates have been discontinued in the United States and Europe, they continue in Asia. Similarly, Western populist politics from Brexit to Trump haven’t infected Asia, where pragmatic governments are focused on inclusive growth and social cohesion. Americans and Europeans see walls going up, but across Asia they are coming down. Rather than being backward-looking, navel-gazing, and pessimistic, billions of Asians are forward-looking, outward-oriented, and optimistic.
These blind spots are a symptom of a related oversight often found in foreign analyses of Asia, namely that they are actually about the United States. There is a presumption that Asia (and frankly every other region as well) is strategically inert and incapable of making decisions for itself; all it is waiting for is the US leadership to tell them what to do. But from the Asian view, the past two decades have been characterized by President George W. Bush’s incompetence, President Barack Obama’s half-heartedness, and President Donald Trump’s unpredictability. The United States’ laundry list of perceived threats—from ISIS and Iran to North Korea and China—have their locus in Asia, but the United States has developed no comprehensive strategy for addressing them. In Washington it is fashionable to promote an “Indo-Pacific” maritime strategy as an antidote to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, failing to see how in reality Asia’s terrestrial and maritime zones cannot be so neatly separated from each other. For all their differences, Asians have realized that their shared geography is a far more permanent reality than the United States’ unreliable promises. The lesson: the United States is a Pacific power with a potent presence in maritime Asia, but it is not an Asian power.
The most consequential misunderstanding permeati
ng Western thought about Asia is being overly China-centric. Much as geopolitical forecasters have been looking for “number one,” many have fallen into the trap of positing a simplistic “G2” of the United States and China competing to lead the world. But neither the world as a whole nor Asia as a region is headed toward a Chinese tianxia, or harmonious global system guided by Chinese Confucian principles. Though China presently wields more power than its neighbors, its population is plateauing and is expected to peak by 2030. Of Asia’s nearly 5 billion people, 3.5 billion are not Chinese. China’s staggering debt, worrying demographics, and crowding of foreign competition out of its domestic market are nudging global attention toward the younger and collectively more populous Asian subregions, whose markets are far more open than China’s to Western goods. The full picture is this: China has only one-third of Asia’s population, less than half of Asia’s GDP, about half of its outward investment, and less than half of its inbound investment. Asia is therefore much more than just “China plus.”
Asia’s future is thus much more than whatever China wants. China is historically not a colonial power. Unlike the United States, it is deeply cautious about foreign entanglements. China wants foreign resources and markets, not foreign colonies. Its military forays from the South China Sea to Afghanistan to East Africa are premised on protecting its sprawling global supply lines—but its grand strategy of building global infrastructure is aimed at reducing its dependence on any one foreign supplier (as are its robust alternative energy investments). China’s launching the Belt and Road Initiative doesn’t prove that it will rule Asia, but it does remind us that China’s future, much like its past, is deeply embedded in Asia.
BRI is widely portrayed in the West as a Chinese hegemonic design, but its paradox is that it is accelerating the modernization and growth of countries much as the United States did with its European and Asian partners during the Cold War. BRI will be instructive in showing everyone, including China, just how quickly colonial logic has expired. By joining BRI, other Asian countries have tacitly recognized China as a global power—but the bar for hegemony is very high. As with US interventions, we should not be too quick to assume that China’s ambitions will succeed unimpeded and that other powers won’t prove sufficiently bold in assrting themselves as well. Nuclear powers India and Russia are on high alert over any Chinese trespassing on their sovereignty and interests, as are regional powers Japan and Australia. Despite spending $50 billion between 2000 and 2016 on infrastructure and humanitarian projects across the region, China has purchased almost no meaningful loyalty. The phrase “China-led Asia” is thus no more acceptable to most Asians than the notion of a “US-led West” is to Europeans.