President Donald Trump alone hasn’t surrendered US strategic leadership in Asia to China. What he has done is accelerate long-term trends that have severely diminished America’s position in the Western Pacific, an area where the US had held sway largely unchallenged since World War II.

That era of primacy is close to an end. In fact, the US strategic position is eroding so quickly that even sharing the region with China isn’t really a valid option any longer, argues Hugh White, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. America’s allies in Southeast Asia and Australia say they don’t want to choose between the US and China, but underneath those platitudes, nobody in the region wants to make an enemy of Beijing. All the more so because officials increasingly doubt the US will be there in the end, according to White.

White put these thoughts to paper and pixel with a much-debated essay in the Australian publication Quarterly Essay. “Without America” envisions a Situation Room scene where a fictitious US president decides that, even with America’s superior conventional military, the risk of a confrontation with China just isn’t worth it. Even if the US prevailed, all China would need to do would be to inflict a couple of glancing blows and it would, politically, have triumphed.

For context, White is no raging left-wing academic. He has worked for Bob Hawke, a former Australian prime minister, and Kim Beazley, Hawke’s defense minister. Both politicians were among the most pro-American figures in the Australian Labor Party.

White’s opinions have not gone unchallenged. To give him a chance to clarify his predictions and present them to a broader global audience, we spent a few days recently interviewing him over email. Here is a lightly edited transcript:

Daniel Moss: Given China’s huge stake in the world economy and the combined role that China and the US play, why would either side get themselves into a situation where there becomes a face-off where one must blink?

Hugh White: Clearly China and America face an economic equivalent of mutually assured destruction. For each side the economic consequences of a rupture are so immense as to be almost unthinkable. But that doesn’t mean that one side or the other would never be tempted to risk a confrontation, if they come to believe that the other side would blink first. That seems to be what Beijing now assumes, which is why it has been so assertive in recent years. Beijing believes that America will blink first to avert a crisis because its interest in Asia is, in the long run, less important than China’s. And I think they are probably right.

Tobin Harshaw: In a Bloomberg View op-ed last month, Hal Brands of the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that your outlook on US abdication in the Pacific was over-dire and dangerous in that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What’s your response?

HW: I can understand his concern, but I think it is misplaced. The suggestion that the arguments I have presented may hasten America’s withdrawal from Asia overlooks the massive tectonic forces that are driving this process. As China’s power grows, the costs to America of resisting China’s ambitions for regional leadership grow too. But America’s reasons to remain the primary power in Asia have not become more compelling. The trend therefore is clear: We will reach the point at which the costs of resisting China’s ambitions outweigh the benefits. The failure of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” and the instincts of the current administration, suggest that point is very close, if not already upon us.

DM: A year on from Xi Jinping’s 2017 Davos speech, how much has China seized the moral and intellectual high ground in the world’s political economy?

HW: I’m not sure that China has really won any of the moral and intellectual high ground, because its claims to it are so transparently self-serving. But clearly, under Trump, America has lost that high ground. That is not the sole or primary cause of America’s dwindling leadership in Asia or elsewhere -- as I said before, I think that’s driven by much larger trends -- but the damage Trump has done to America’s leadership credibility certainly accelerates the process. Who can take the US seriously as the guarantor of regional or global order under his leadership? And who can be sure that whoever takes his place will be much better?

DM: China is Asia’s largest economy, but global supply chains of US-headquartered multinationals crisscross the region. Won’t this underpin at least some leadership role for America?

HW: Of course America will remain a major economic player globally, and in Asia, for as far ahead as we can see. But that will not guarantee any leading strategic or political role in the region. Its position will be like that of the Europeans, who trade and invest massively in Asia without any real strategic presence there.

Of course, that will mean that America will have to engage economically within the terms set by a regional strategic order led by others -- presumably by China. That won’t be ideal for America, but it would be better than the alternative, if the alternative is to confront China in a bitter all-out contest for regional leadership in which China enjoys many asymmetric advantages.

DM: Does “Indo-Pacific” -- a phrase now favored by Trump and others -- have an economic underpinning the way “Asia-Pacific” does, which is partly what makes the latter such an attractive term?

HW: I don’t think the “Indo-Pacific” has much substance either economically or strategically. Despite its immense potential, India is still far behind China, both in the size of its economy and in its global and regional interconnectedness. It therefore does little to pull the economic center of gravity westward, as the Indo-Pacific concept presupposes. Likewise, strategically, the Indo-Pacific concept presupposes that India’s power can play a real role in limiting China’s influence in East Asia. So far, that seems to be just wishful thinking.


Tobin Harshaw and Daniel Moss
Tobin Harshaw writes editorials on national security, education and food for Bloomberg View. Daniel Moss writes and edits articles on economics for Bloomberg View. -- Ed.

(Bloomberg)