Being No.1?
Danny Quah, professor of economics and Dean of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew school of Public Policy recently asked, what would happen to the American people’s way of life and the US system of government if it becomes No.2. He answered his own question saying, “Absolutely nothing”, adding that it would make no difference to how Southeast Asia would behave and engage either with America or with China. For Quah what really matters is for the USA to take care of its own people – the unfortunate, the weak, and the vulnerable. He points out that the bottom 50% of its population is barely better off than it was decades ago.
If the US gives up its obsession with being No.1, its engagement with China would no longer need to be confrontational. Instead, a win-win outcome would be possible. In 1967, Richard Nixon wrote, referring to China: “There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”
Violence
No name is more closely associated with the bombing campaign in North Korea than Curtis Lemay, the US head of Strategic Air Command. He estimated that “We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million from their homes.” He later conceded that, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”[i]
The renowned Singaporean diplomat and scholar, Kishore Mahbubani points out that in the past 20 years, the West (mainly the US) dropped 326,000 bombs in the greater Middle East/North Africa region while the total number of bombs dropped in inter-state conflicts in East Asia during the same period is ZERO.
The US doctrine is about maintaining US hegemony. It is an obsession with democracy versus autocracy, good versus evil! The US has more than 750 military bases located all over the world. Although China is concerned about the security of its borders, it has only one military base located in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa. China neither bombs other countries nor does it have any military bases near the United States. China is not a threat to world peace, but the US is!
American “exceptionalism” is deeply embedded in American consciousness, framing the US as a force for good and a beacon of liberty and democracy. Any challenge to US primacy is viewed as an existential threat. China’s rapid ascent and extraordinary success strikes at the heart of American exceptionalism and the idea that China could surpass the US provokes deep anxiety.
Diminishing Influence
Since 2000, the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute (ISEAS), funded primarily by the Singaporean government conducts polls in the ten ASEAN countries. In 2023, 61% of respondents chose the US compared with only 39% who chose China but in 2024, China edged past the US as the region’s choice of alignment partner with 50.5% choosing China and 49.5% choosing the US. In the same year, the majority picked China over the United States when asked whom ASEAN should align with if forced to choose.
When ISEAS asked respondents who was the “most influential economic power” in Southeast Asia, almost 60% of respondents selected China, while the US trailed with only 14%. Many Southeast Asians see the US as dysfunctional at home while pursuing a nakedly self-interested agenda abroad. China’s BRI projects are welcomed in Southeast Asia for the growth and development potential they offer.[ii]
China’s President Xi Jinping proposes a “Community of Common Destiny”. While China plays an outsize role, it is not just about China. Much of the world’s population including Eurasia, India and the ASEAN States remain outside American influence.
Resistance to the hegemon includes most countries making up the Global South as well as BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and the members the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a forum of 120 countries who are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. The purpose of NAM was summarised by Fidel Castro in his Havana Declaration of 1979 saying that it was to ensure “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries.” A condition for membership of NAM is that member states cannot be part of a military alliance such as NATO.
What Can be Done?
In a recent paper published in Foreign Affairs by Jessica Chen Weiss, she suggests that there will be an opportunity for a “necessary recalibration” by the incoming US administration to move US-Chinese relations towards a more stable and productive footing adding that “Diplomacy is not appeasement”. She talks of the US having an opportunity to develop a more affirmative approach, dialing down the heat and focusing instead on preserving the benefits of the vast web of ties which connect the US and China. Weiss points out that US partners and allies would welcome the shift as most of them seek constructive relationships with China and do not want to take sides.
In the book, An Open World [iii] the authors argue that the US needs a new strategic vision. They refer to “an open international system” which would require a departure from reliance on a messianic liberal mission and instead, a strategy seeking cooperation with other great powers. There is a growing rejection of the assumption that national security requires the US to police world order. Washington has an opportunity to revise its strategy for international order and to place the system on a firm foundation. This alternative strategy would promote openness and security cooperation without insisting upon the spread of liberal governance.
Openness would not require states to choose between duelling blocs aligning with Washington or Beijing. Openness anticipates a world in which the US does not monopolise rule making and instead accepts participation of other powers on an equal basis. Any successful US strategy must allow for an interactive process which entails cooperation among other important global powers such as China, Russia, India, Japan, and Germany.
Can and will America adopt a strategy of openness without a fight?
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[i] Korea my Michael Pembroke 2018
[ii] Foreign Affairs (September 2024) by Lynn Kuok, the Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University
[iii] An Open World by R. Lissner and M. Rapp-Hooper 2020
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