As alliances in Asia shift, ‘global order’ challenged
TOKYO — Moscow is cozying up to its old rival China. China is holding hands with Seoul. Tokyo is striking deals with Pyongyang.
In the ever-shifting game of Asian alliances, where just about everybody has a dispute over something or can actually remember a shooting war with neighbours, past grudges run deep. But expedience and pragmatism often run deeper.
While U.S. President Barack Obama tries to develop his pivot to Asia policy, the region is spinning ahead in its own direction, energized by dynamic economies, expanding trade relations and a plethora of disputes and rivalries.
For sure, the world’s mightiest countries, themselves Pacific powers, still throw a lot of weight around. But as they jockey for advantage in the world’s most populous region, relations across Asia are fluid. Countries at the centre of the power game, and on the sidelines, have both a chance to capitalize and a risk of getting frozen out.
TURNING EAST
Washington was long able to capitalize on Cold War rifts between Russia and China, but Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, recently wrote that the two are rebuilding a relationship likely to grow significantly stronger, a trend accelerated in part because of Moscow’s frustration with the West over its Ukraine sanctions.
“They are not in a clear alliance, and have a number of diverging, even partially colliding, interests. But they both challenge the global order in which the United States is the norm-setter and the sole arbiter,” he wrote. “The unique position that the United States has held since the 1990s as the dominant power in Eurasia is now history,” Trenin concluded.
TRADING PARTNERS
Here’s a puzzle. Why would the president of China, North Korea’s closest thing to an ally, snub Kim Jong Un and go to Seoul last week to woo his archrival, South Korean President Park Geun-hye?
China’s overtures to South Korea play into its ambitions to build a China-centred network of alliances that sidesteps the U.S. and Japan, said political science professor Willy Lam of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Beijing also wants to show that China, not the U.S., is the solution to the North Korea crisis, said Christopher Johnson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. thinktank.
BREAKING RANKS, A LITTLE
Washington has had no closer and more reliable ally in Asia than Japan, but Japan’s increasingly angry reaction to its territorial spat with Beijing, its fears of increased Chinese military might and its stalemate with Russia over disputed islands have made many in Tokyo wary.
Hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has revived negotiations with North Korea over Japanese abductees, and led the charge to reinterpret its constitution to allow greater use of military force to defend its allies.