A Three-Way Strategic Partnership Is Needed
As the minimizing of the office of the American presidency proceeds apace, so does the roiling of the global economy. The crisis now spawns dishevelment elsewhere across the globe, most worrisomely, perhaps, in Russia. Not so many years ago, whenever the subject of big-time world economics came up, it was usually the German Bundesbank’s all-powerful mark, the Bank of London’s oft-referenced pound and of course the U.S. Federal Reserve’s almighty dollar that got the limelight. No more: Today Asia is where the action is, for better or as today, for worse. In the current global marketplace, the monetary center of gravity hovers somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. The key players in the coming Pacific Century are the United States, Japan and China.
In the prior world order, where the most salient and immediate criteria were strategic and military (the raw materials of traditional power politics), one nation’s gain was usually another’s loss. That’s rarely true in this fiercely interconnected, globalized world. Rather, one nation’s loss can spread and make others losers because losses stubbornly refuse to stay at home.
It used to be that only if a big country coughed would the little ones catch the cold. No longer: Last summer’s implosion of the Thai baht wound up despoiling the entire region. And the ripples from Thailand, with an economy a mere slice that of Japan’s, became the historic triggering element for the current world anxiety.
Forget any wish to put the globalism genie back in the bottle. Even if we tried, we could not contain this powerful technological and market force.
There’s another problem. Once the Asian financial recovery comes, China and Japan will resume their relentless growth. Even in today’s troubled times, both continue to hold tremendous foreign currency reserves and trade surpluses. We Americans need to put aside our current sense of superiority and accept that over time, the predictable U.S. economic decline relative to these two Pacific Rim giants mandates that we invent ways of deepening and strengthening the triangular relationship.
Wise American policy would not wish to beat a retreat back to the cocoon of the West but instead to reach out across the Pacific. For now more than ever, Asia needs our help, just as some day we will need Asia’s. Don’t forget that the United States remains the biggest debtor country overall. We Americans still do not save enough to ensure an adequate cushion should our now-thriving economy sputter and fail. What’s to say it won’t? And note carefully that our biggest creditors are the Japanese: Might not it be prudent to be careful about addressing them with strident overtones of arrogance?
President Clinton’s efforts to improve Sino-U.S. relations and his decision to put on the back burner the recourse to economic sanctions have opened the door to the possibility of an Asia-Pacific triangle for progress. “Sanctions are too blunt to be useful diplomatic instruments,” writes Ramesh Thakur of the United Nations University in Tokyo in the Japan Times.
America’s newfound tolerance of China may pave the way for an enduring Pacific relationship, as long as the Washington-Beijing bilateral doesn’t unnerve Tokyo. U.S. diplomacy must draft a careful plan of Big Three cooperation. Washington, Beijing and Tokyo need to form the irreducible core of a new Pacific Concert, a kind of nonmilitary NATO. “Since the international system of the early 21st century probably will be dominated by the Big Three, extremely powerful states whose commercial and security interests are global,” notes Charles W. Kegley Jr., professor of international relations at the University of South Carolina, “it is important that they do not become segregated into rival blocs.” Kegley believes only a three-way Pacific diplomacy can prevent that.
It is vital that this president and the next one plant America’s Pacific diplomacy in the soil of a triangular relationship that is as fully developed as anything America has ever achieved in Europe with once-enemy nations like Germany and Italy. If America would just see beyond the current Asian crash, it would be able to envision a 21st century in which China and Japan are not condescended to but treated as equals. That may be difficult for some American super-patriots to swallow. But better to prepare now for the shock of the future than to be rendered senseless by it later.
