Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
As U.S. influence wanes, China ascends in Pacific
Under Trump, U.S. pull in the region may be declining
China flexes economic, military and political muscle from Sri Lanka to South China Sea.
WASHINGTON — For years, China has trumpeted the decline of the United States as a Pacific power.
A rising force, now the world’s second-largest economy, China predicted that America’s decline would be slow and inevitable, the ebbing of one global power and the ascent of another.
But that process may be accelerating as President Donald Trump wobbles on long-standing commitments to Japan and South Korea, and calls for shrinking the U.S. military presence in the region — even as China is flexing its economic, military and political muscle from Sri Lanka to the South China Sea.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who met with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week in Beijing, emphasized U.S. concerns about China’s growing militarization of scattered islands and shoals in the South China Sea. Other nations also claim the islands, and the maritime and territorial disputes with Beijing have roiled the region.
China argues that the runways, missiles and electronic jammers it has installed are for defensive purposes, and Xi made clear Beijing will not back down. “Not one inch of the territory left by our ancestors can be lost,” he told Mattis, according to the official New China News Agency.
Mattis’ visit came after the Pentagon disinvited China’s military from a major naval exercise in the Pacific, a snub meant to protest the island buildup. This year, the Pentagon issued a national defense strategy that described China as a primary challenge to U.S. security, noting its planned construction of aircraft carriers, a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles, increasingly advanced aircraft and a growing capability in cyberspace and outer space.
“The Chinese are celebrating the reduced influence of the United States,” said Bonnie Glaser, senior Asia adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
“Even the way the president is talking about pulling troops out of Korea — this is music to China’s ears,” she said.
Trump’s June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and the president’s surprise decision to halt U.S. military exercises with South Korea, may augur diminishing American engagement in northeast Asia, long seen as crucial to regional stability and prosperity.
Although Beijing was not at the table, it flaunted its influence by flying Kim to Singapore in an Air China plane. Kim has met three times with China’s president since the summit was announced in March, a sign that China will not allow North Korea to strike a deal with the United States behind its back.
What promises to be protracted negotiations over North Korea’s pledge to work toward denuclearization will maximize China’s influence “at a time when China is confident that its regional power in Asia is increasing while that of the United States is declining,” said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, a nonprofit research organization in Washington.
But Trump’s announcement that he was suspending U.S. military exercises with South Korean forces, partly in response to Kim’s previous pledge to stop nuclear and ballistic missile tests, gave China a diplomatic victory that it long had sought: a “freeze for a freeze” as the basis for future negotiations, a position previous U.S. presidents had rejected.
Trump even adopted China and North Korea’s language, describing the drills as “war games” and “provocative.” The Pentagon describes the exercises as defensive in nature and in keeping with America’s treaty obligations to help defend South Korea in case of attack.
Trump said ending the drills would save money, including the cost of flying bombers and other aircraft from Guam. He has repeatedly spoken of drawing down the 28,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea and the 50,000 in Japan, citing the cost of keeping them overseas, although he has not done so.
Those comments have sown unease in Seoul and Tokyo. So has “Not our neighborhood,” the phrase Trump used when he vowed that Washington would not foot the bill for rebuilding North Korea.
“When he said, ‘Korea is not in America’s neighborhood,’ he played right into Chinese strategy and directly contradicted the long-standing global policies of the United States,” said Daniel Russel, an assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration.
“Hopefully, this is a historical blip,” said Michael Green, author of a published history of the United States in the Pacific. “If we pull out of Korea, we are basically giving China 60 yards on the field for free.”
Green said China and other regional players would see a U.S. departure as a sign of weakness, and that would embolden the Chinese and make negotiations with North Korea even more complex.
Trump’s talk of a retreat from the Pacific contrasts with the Obama administration, which in 2012 announced a so-called pivot to Asia and began adding warships and troops to Guam, Australia and elsewhere in an effort to bolster regional allies nervous about Chinese expansion.