[Subscribe to APARC’s newsletters to get our latest commentary and analysis]

Soft Power and U.S.-China Competition

One thing the Trump administration has identified correctly and managed to get consensus on, says Chinese military and security expert Oriana Skylar Mastro, is that the United States is in a great-power competition with China. Biden now accepts this framework, and Mastro expects him to maintain the basic principles of U.S. Asia policy, such as strategic ambiguity and ensuring Taiwan’s defense through arms sales. The difference will be in Biden’s approach, which is based on “multilateralism, strengthening partnerships, and not trying to provoke Beijing for the sake of provoking Beijing.” This approach, believes Mastro, is going to improve the U.S. position in terms of competition.

A core component of the U.S.-China great-power competition, however, is soft power — the ability of countries to get what they want through persuasion or attraction in the form of culture, values, and policies. Soft power, argues Mastro, is an area that is very hard for a president to have control over and rebuild, and American soft power has taken a tremendous hit with the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Demonstrating the decline of American democracy, the scenes from the pro-Trump mob attack have been a win for China and are hardly encouraging for U.S. partners and allies.

Biden can do a lot to tackle U.S. domestic problems and improve the political image of America abroad. But soft power, concludes Mastro, is organic. “I fear that President-elect Biden is going to learn that soft power, once lost, is very difficult to regain.”

The U.S.-Japan Alliance and Security in the Asia-Pacific

In shifting to relations between the United States and Japan, Kiyoteru Tsutsui focuses on how the traditional aspects of the Japan-U.S. alliance are playing out in the current geopolitical theater. In Tsutsui’s view, Japan’s early brushes with Chinese might in the 2010s has left the country particularly keen on ensuring that a strong counterbalance exists to China’s strategic advantage.

To that end, Japan has proactively partnered with other nations on trade deals such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The fact that both of these major free trade agreements were concluded without U.S. involvement is significant, and whether President Biden makes any response will be “one the more closely watched issues among foreign policy experts in the coming years,” by Tsutsui’s measure.

The reemergence of ‘the Quad,’ and even discussions of a ‘Quad+’ that includes nations such as South Korea, is of particular interest to Tsutsui. Such groups provide additional avenues for further developing the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy originally envisioned by Prime Minister Abe. But Tsutsui is also not opposed to the idea of engaging China directly in multilateral efforts as long as China understands the U.S. and Japan’s resolve in countering Chinese aggression and non-peaceful ambitions.

The Korean Peninsula in the Spotlight

When it comes to engagement on the Korean peninsula, Gi-Wook Shin hopes the new administration will avoid a reactionary response and backsliding into old habits. The temptation to respond with an “anything but Trump’s” approach to handling relations with North Korea may be strong, particularly given the president’s unusually forward relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but Shin counsels to not set aside everything Trump did in regards to the DPRK.

“Bringing North Korea and Kim Jong Un more into the international community was an important step that no other president has made,” he says. Shin strongly cautions against a return to the strategic patience typical of the Obama era. With Kim’s consolidated control and North Korea’s wielding far more advanced nuclear capabilities and significantly strengthened ties to China than it did eight years ago, a return to previous patterns of diplomacy would fail to address the present circumstances on the Korean peninsula. Shin urges the Biden administration to reemphasize human rights and deepening dialogues with its diplomatic counterparts in Seoul. He foresees an improvement in U.S.-ROK relations but warns that North Korea can be a source of tension between the two allies.

Opportunities for Allies in Southeast Asia

Donald Emmerson also recommends strengthening diplomatic ties to the nations of Southeast Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). By his assessment, “ASEAN needs creativity. It needs new ideas rather than simply following the path of least resistance.” Emmerson envisions this well-spring of creativity coming in part from robust new efforts by the United States to engage with the region diplomatically and academically.

Existing forums such as the Bali Democracy Forum can provide a ready-made platform for engagement, while active participation in gatherings such as the Global Town Hall organized earlier this year by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI) provide easy opportunities for the United States to meaningfully engage with Southeast Asia.

An Outlook on the Broader Asia-Pacific

Closing out the panel’s remarks, Thomas Fingar offers measured optimism for the future. “I think the incoming U.S. approach to the countries in Asia, China included, is going to be pragmatic and instrumental, not transactional. Every nation who thinks they can contribute, does contribute, and is willing to play by a rules-based order can be part of the solution.”

Fingar expects the Biden administration’s foreign policy to be “focused on problems, not places” — to be driven less by particular animosity or affection for certain countries and more by addressing global issues that promote American interests, such as climate change, the impediments in the international system to advancing American economy, and preserving security.

By consensus, the incoming Biden administration’s most immediate concerns are overwhelmingly domestic. But as Mastro articulated, the effects of the United States’ domestic policies directly impact its perception, standing, and sphere of influence around the globe.

Effective relationships between the United States and the Asia-Pacific cannot be sustained in the long term with an ongoing ‘America first’ agenda or by pursuing zero-sum goals. Rather, the Biden administration must focus on finding solutions to multilateral needs by working side-by-side with Asian nations as co-sponsors and co-leaders.

While U.S. policymakers and military planners have been heavily focused on China’s maritime expansion in the western rim of the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, Beijing has been steadily growing its capacity in the Indian Ocean region. The United States and its partners should take realistic and effective steps that address the strategic risks they face in the region and realize their vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” writes APARC’s South Asia Research Scholar Arzan Tarapore in the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly.

[Subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest from our scholars.]

The United States’ strategic competition with China now extends to the Indian Ocean region, albeit it takes a different form compared with the heavily militarized territorial disputes of the western rim of the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) fleet is increasingly designed for oceanic deployments beyond China’s near seas and is rapidly expanding its amphibious capability. The PLAN conducts frequent oceanographic survey and submarine deployments, maintaining a constant presence of at least seven or eight navy ships in the Indian Ocean at any time. Having established its first-ever overseas military base on the western edge of the ocean, in Djibouti in 2017, China continues to develop other ports from Tanzania to Indonesia under the banner of the Belt and Road Initiative. It is also expanding security cooperation with regional states.

“This military expansion poses strategic risks for the United States and its allies and partners,” argues Tarapore. “It gives China rapidly increasing capacity to use military coercion in the Indian Ocean region, both directly, through military intervention, and indirectly, by compelling changes in regional states’ security policies.” It also gives China advantages in case of a potential war in the region.

The United States and its partners have proclaimed their commitment to the “free and open Indo-Pacific” vision. However, the four powers with the greatest interest and capacity to push back on China’s inroads —namely, the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, which banded together as the “Quad” — have failed to mitigate Beijing’s challenge. Their haphazard response “does little to curtail China’s capacity to coerce small states or posture for war,” says Tarapore.

He then offers a strategic assessment and a conceptual framework by which the United States and its partners can more effectively mitigate the risks of Chinese military expansion. Their most urgent task, he claims, is to build “strategic leverage,” that is, develop their political relationships and military capabilities in ways that consolidate their advantages. By doing so, they would ideally convince Beijing that coercive policies are unworkable or prohibitively costly, which would then impede China’s capacity to coerce regional states or posture for wartime. Tarapore is convinced that India has a key role to play within this framework if the latter also accounts for India’s particular resource and policy constraints.

This op-ed by Donald K. Emmerson originally appeared in The Diplomat.

On November 20, 8,300 people in 83 countries attended a virtual Global Town Hall to watch and hear 66 speakers in multiple countries discuss “Rebuilding from the Covid-19 World.” Organized in Jakarta by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI), the event ran 15 consecutive hours.

Few would choose virtual diplomacy over the in-person kind, other things being equal. When speakers are confined to flat boxes on small screens watched by strangers, the disincentives to candor and creativity are too high—not to mention the necessarily disadvantageous clashing of time zones. Gone are the clues and nuances of physical proximity, the creative chats in coffee breaks, the security from digitally prying eyes and ears afforded by a conversational stroll outdoors. But the technology of virtual discourse is here to stay, at least until such time as direct brain-to-brain or bot-to-bot communication is innovated and programmed on a planetary scale.

[Subscribe to APARC's newsletters to never miss an update from our scholars.]

Viewed in this cautionary light, the November town hall was distinctive and promising. It was organized not in the world of industrialized democracies where the ubiquity of electronic gatherings has already prompted webinar fatigue.  Nor was it sponsored by the United Front Department of the Communist Party of China or by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to propagandize for Beijing or Moscow. Indonesia’s virtual Global Town Hall was the brainchild of Dr. Dino Patti Djalal, a public figure well known in and outside his country for having founded and led the FPCI. (Although I know him, I played no role in the event or its preparation.)

The Community’s mission is to encourage “healthy internationalism” in Indonesia; “resist xenophobia”; “bring foreign policy to the grassroots”; and serve as “a dynamic meeting point” where Indonesians can interact on foreign affairs with each other and with foreigners “as equals.”

The Global Town Hall lived up to these promises in the size of its audience, the length and scope of its program, and the diversity of its many panels and speakers. Topics discussed during the marathon ranged from narrow to vast—from vaccines against Covid-19 to broad concepts and challenges such as the Indo-Pacific and climate change; development and democracy; nationalism and populism; emerging leaders and world order.

The conference was designed to call for new beginnings in a post-pandemic world.  One session debated the need for a “great social reset.” Another considered the contours of a no less urgent “geo-political reset.”  A third looked for “the light at the end of [a] tunnel” of global contagion and conflict, while a fourth pictured “the worst economic recession of our time” as “the edge of a cliff.” Just as Djalal and his team had intended, the sense of a global turning point calling for creative responses was palpable throughout.

The pandemic is not only planet-wide.  It is an all-of-society problem that cannot be reduced to adjustments in foreign policy. Accordingly, the town hall’s speakers were not only from different countries but from different walks of life as well.  Impressively, they included, alongside the foreign ministers of Australia, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa, influencers and analysts from think tanks, international organizations, and universities around the world.

The absence of someone from the Trump administration did not create a vacuum filled by China. On the contrary, the five speakers from the PRC were outnumbered three-to-one by the 15 Americans who spoke.  Yet the program was not stacked against Beijing.  Brainstorming in public is not China’s forte. In any conference that invites originality, creativity, and diversity, China is structurally disadvantaged by its authoritarian system, which limits what people are willing to say. Why invite speakers who are limited to thinking and speaking inside the box traced by a one-party line?

Only one Chinese think tank was among the town hall’s 44 sponsors and partners—the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), an adjunct of China’s foreign ministry. Beijing actively promotes Chinese centers of research and opinion as no less deserving of praise and influence than their counterparts in democratic countries. But that campaign for global legitimacy is not helped by the oxymoronic status of free thinking and speaking in an unfree society.

A case in point is the Pangoal Institution, an ostensibly non-governmental think tank in Beijing. On its website, it upholds “objectiveness, openness, inclusiveness,”  and “innovation.” Yet in 2018, its president warned China’s think tanks to shun “the Western model” of what a think tank should be; eschew “so-called ‘independence’”; and adhere instead “to the leadership of the [Chinese Communist Party] and socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The risk of not channeling the groupthink required by the CPC was implied, as was the need to think “Xi Jinping Thought,” a guideline added to the CPC’s constitution in 2017.

China’s handicap in free speech and candor was also implicitly displayed at the very end of the conference, in its 12th and final panel. Harvard’s Joseph Nye and a balanced set of Washington-based analysts freely and critically discussed a range of sensitive issues in foreign and domestic policy including the jeopardized transition to a Joe Biden presidency. The event was coordinated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of three American think tanks chosen by FPCI to partner in holding the town hall.

[For more news from the Southeast Asia Program, be sure to sign up for updates.]

Even more telling than the remarks the Americans made at that final panel, however, was its title, chosen by Djalal and the FPCI, which amounted to a collective sigh of relief after Donald Trump: “Welcome Back, America!”  The welcome suggested that the challenge of “Rebuilding from the Covid-19 World” posed by the Global Town Hall could not be met without the United States fully on board, as if, once on board, Joe Biden would do the right thing.

In November 2019, by a two-to-one margin, elite respondents in Southeast Asia named China over the U.S. as the outside power with the most “political and strategic influence” in their region. But of those who picked China, merely 15 percent welcomed Chinese influence, a fraction of the 53 percent of U.S.-choosers who welcomed American influence.

Soft power is perishable. Goodwill can be transient. But the pop-up Global Town Hall put together so creatively by Djalal and his colleagues in Indonesia, apart from its value as an experiment in worldwide policy discourse, delivered an encouraging reminder: America is welcome. The anti-multilateral jingoism of Donald Trump has failed to destroy the willingness of Djalal, his colleagues, and policy influentials elsewhere in Southeast Asia to work with a United States that can once again, openly and self-critically, interact with others to achieve common goals.

While much of the world has been occupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been active in promoting China’s claims in the South China Sea. Is it justified to argue that China is taking advantage of the global pandemic to make military gains?

In a new essay published in the Winter 2020 issue of the China Leadership Monitor, FSI Center Fellow at APARC Oriana Skylar Mastro sheds light on this question. Leveraging Chinese-language sources in addition to her own operational knowledge from over a decade of military experience, Mastro evaluates the PLA activities in the South China Sea over the eight-month period since March 2020. She includes in her analysis PLA statements, military exercises and operations, and deployment of relevant platforms and weapons in the region. Her conclusion is that the PLA has not significantly increased its operational role in the South China Sea but rather its signaling role. “Specifically, the Chinese military seems to be purposefully using, and perhaps even exaggerating, its capabilities and activities to enhance deterrence against the United States,” she argues.

Deployments of Weapons Systems and Military Exercises

After compiling a comprehensive picture of Chinese military activities in the South China Sea that includes both deployments of systems to the Paracels and Spratlys Islands and military exercises in the area, Mastro examines what these activities reveal about the PLA’s role in China’s South China Sea strategy.

PLA deployments in the area suggest it is trying to discourage the United States from countering its attempts to increase control over the South China Sea, she says. “China has been linking its deployments to U.S. activities for signaling purposes […] With new basing on the South China Sea islands and longer-range and more capable aircraft, China now has the option to move these platforms as a way to demonstrate to the United States its capability and resolve.” Over the past eight months, China has also conducted more robust military exercises to prepare for South China Sea contingencies. “But military readiness and preparedness are not the only reasons the PLA conducts exercises, notes Mastro. Instead, she argues that the PLA role has evolved beyond the operational to become a leader in a signaling strategy to bolster Chinese deterrence vis-à-vis the United States.

Chinese Discourse  

One of the strongest indicators that the Chinese military is attempting to leverage its role to signal capability to the United States is how the Chinese official media are capturing the ongoing competition. Having reviewed approximately 80 publications on the South China Sea, Mastro finds that the Chinese media are being used to amplify how capable the PLA has become in conducting complex operations in the South China Sea and to highlight that it is blameless for the current tensions in the region.

Mastro concludes that the PLA has taken a more active role in China’s South China Sea strategy, but not necessarily a more aggressive one. It is the need to enhance deterrence vis-à-vis the United States that has become a priority. “The PLA has become the main vehicle through which China is attempting to convince the United States to moderate its own South China Sea approach.” This sensitivity, and in some cases paranoia, about U.S. strategy, she claims, “suggests we are likely to hear tough talk and ostentatious military activity for some months to come.”

This analysis by Oriana Skylar Mastro originally appeared in The Interpreter, by the Lowy Institute.

China’s strategy in responding to concerns about its intentions in the South China Sea is to claim that none of the activities, statements or behaviours that concern other countries are actually happening.

China claims it has not militarised the South China Sea, but that the United States “is the real pusher of militarisation” in these waters. Its leaders often argue that China is a peace-loving country only interested in defending itself. As the China’s General Wei Fenghe stated at the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2018, “China has never provoked a war or conflict, nor has it ever invaded another country or taken an inch of land from others. In the future, no matter how strong it becomes, China shall never threaten anyone.”

China has similarly brushed off concerns of other claimants, such as Vietnam, about its intensifying military exercises in the South China Sea and largely ignored Australia’s assertion at the United Nations that China’s claims have no legal backing.

So apparently it is all one big misunderstanding.

On 24 November, former Chinese ambassador Fu Ying criticised the United States in a New York Times op-ed for raising multiple issues that in her mind do not exist. Thus, the way to resolve the growing bilateral tensions is for the two countries “to have candid talks to better understand each other’s intentions and cultivate trust”.

So, in the Chinese communist spirit of 实事求是, or “seeking truth from facts”, I have charted the military capabilities China has deployed to the South China Sea, which are displayed with references on the map below. The Paracel Islands and the Spratly Islands are under dispute; Hainan Island is a recognised part of China, but I include it because the military capabilities in situ have implications for Chinese military options in the South China Sea writ large.

This article by Southeast Asia Program Director Donald Emmerson originally appeared in East Asia Forum.

Joe Biden’s immediate priority following his inauguration on 20 January 2021 will be domestic, difficult and crisis-driven. His challenge will be to reduce the spread of COVID-19 without worsening unemployment, triggering a recession or yielding to obstruction by Donald Trump’s fans in Congress or by his right-wing judicial appointees. The new administration will be turned further inwards by the need to re-professionalise agencies that Trump has had four years to politicise and corrupt.

Biden will begin his foreign policy by re-entering the world. Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Paris Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO and the World Health Organization. He threatened withdrawal from the World Trade Organization and criticised NATO and the G7.

The Biden administration may not be able or inclined to reverse all of these exits — reviving the Iran deal and joining the revised TPP are notably problematic. But all else being equal, ‘America First’ glossed as ‘America Alone’ will be jettisoned in favour of what might be called ‘America Together’ — institutionalised cooperation towards shared goals with like-minded partners around the world.In the course of excoriating ‘globalists’, Trump has embarrassed or alienated many foreign counterparts. European leaders have been especially angered by insulting disregard, so Biden will want to restore comity with them. They and heads of other developed countries such as Japan can also help him address key transnational challenges — global infection, global warming and global competition in trade and technology.

[Sign up for our newsletters to hear more insights from our researchers.]

Among Asian states, the one that will challenge Biden most is China — a semi-developed country, the origin of COVID-19, the world’s leading emitter of CO2 and a would-be global digital power. Not to mention military clout and repressive-cum-expansionary behaviour.

Biden’s approach to China and Asia will depend in part on advice he is given by the cadre of foreign-policy advisers he assembled over his 2009–2017 vice-presidency and his earlier chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Based on preliminary signs of what that advice would be and what Biden would himself prefer, his administration’s likely statements and steps can be summarised in one word: internationalisation. Biden would prioritise enlisting outside powers in efforts to achieve US objectives in the wider world.

Internationalisation warrants support on several grounds. Domestically, it responds to the concern shared by many, both in Trump’s base and on the Democratic left, that the United States is overcommitted abroad. Sharing burdens with partners can be portrayed as an optimal position between badgering them as in Trump and over-involving the United States in their affairs.

‘America Together’ will acknowledge the reality of stressed and stretched U.S. resources and the need to augment them with help from partnering countries in addressing shared concerns — the pandemic, the environment, poverty and security, for example. In East Asia, such a policy could encourage and help countries that are willing to work with China on fair terms but unwilling to be bullied or bought into a region remade in Beijing.

In this context a Biden administration can be expected to revalidate and elevate the non-partisan profession of diplomacy following egregious abuse under Trump. The centre-left Center for American Progress, for example, has recommended enlarging and empowering the State Department in ways that would, perhaps controversially, reduce the Department of Defense’s role.

Cognate are remarks regarding a Biden administration’s likely policy on the South China Sea made recently by Daniel Russel, a career foreign service officer and former Asia adviser to President Obama. Biden’s policy, he said, would include ‘not just sending warships’ — a reference to US Pacific Command Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea — but ‘diplomacy, engagement and participation with ASEAN and regional forums’.

China’s behaviour in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the South and East China seas and on Taiwan has prompted global pushback and led many US policy advisers to toughen their China positions.

Biden’s Asia team will not readily revert to the softer stance of the Obama years, but the team’s success in Asia will depend on its and Biden’s ability to do several divergent if not incompatible things simultaneously. They will need to work in tandem with other countries to oppose China’s predatory expansion, interference and repression, while selectively supporting China’s participation in multilateral efforts to defeat contagion, mitigate warming and improve human welfare.

Internationalisation is not a panacea. Multilateral diplomacy will fail if it becomes an end in itself, as in the caricature of ASEAN as an Asian NATO — ‘No Action, Talk Only’. Conducting international meetings virtually on screens will limit the exercise of personal empathy that Biden is known for. Unregenerate Trumpians will do what they can to delegitimise global outreach as kowtowing to outsiders.

Biden’s Republican opponents will enlarge their minority in the House of Representatives and seem likely to retain their majority in the Senate. Biden will need their cooperation if ‘America Together’ with other countries is to work.

Internationalisation will not restore lost trust in the United States unless the new administration manages to put the United States’ own house in order, showing the world that the years under Trump were anomalous — not a harbinger of worse to come.

Donald K Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University. His latest publication is The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (ed., 2020).