America’s Militarist Drift in the Indo-Pacific

Four years of the Trump administration left Asia’s governing elites with a hangover. Many hoped that President Joe Biden would be the cure. On the eve of Biden taking office, pundits widely expected he would restore competence, rhetorical restraint, and a sense of normalcy in Asia policy. Twelve months later, the Biden administration has done precisely that, replacing Trump’s grievance politics and erraticism with a steady decency and respect toward allies and partners.

The problem, however, is that Biden and his staff have also lived up to other expectations: That the United States would promote Asia’s militarization with the vague aim of “countering” China, give the Pentagon a blank check on defense posture and military spending, show ambivalence about international trade, exhibit contradictions in democracy promotion, fail to do anything about a nuclear North Korea, and pursue an internally conflicted China policy that defaulted to competition.

In these respects too, U.S. Asia policy has proven predictable, which is more problematic than reassuring. The totality of the Biden administration’s words and deeds in the region amount to little more than residual inertia from Trump’s military-first approach to Asia plus a modest revival of the Obama era pivot to Asia, which sought to preserve an American hegemony that no longer exists in the region.

The absence of anything that might pass for coherent design or a Biden doctrine is glaring. Put differently, U.S. statecraft in 2021 has become behaviorally consistent, but conceptually schizophrenic. Given the political constraints Biden faces at home and the ideological disposition of his staff, it could hardly be otherwise.

“Decentpolitik”: What’s Changed Since 2020

While U.S. policy toward the Indo-Pacific in 2021 showed much greater continuity than change in moving from Trump to Biden, the changes are mostly a boon for near-term stability and perceptions of America as a responsible “Pacific Power.”

Biden has turned down the volume on diplomacy and turned up its frequency. Despite the constraints of the pandemic, for example, the leaders of both Japan and South Korea were granted presidential summits, and the administration has quietly worked out cost-sharing arrangements with both allies – a major source of alliance friction in the Trump era. It has also avoided saber-rattling toward either China or North Korea, in contrast with the Trump administration’s race-baiting jingoism toward the former and gratuitous threats of nuclear annihilation toward the latter.

Additionally, Biden has made an at least symbolic commitment to providing public goods for Asia where the Trump administration’s approach prioritized extracting payments, subsidies, and anti-China-related favors from regional leaders.

To address climate change, Biden appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry as a climate special envoy – a newly created position. He also began extending development financing for green energy transitions in countries like India. The amount of money involved is a pittance compared to what is needed, but is nevertheless a stark change in direction on environmental policy compared to the recent past. Trump, it should be remembered, withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and spuriously claimed, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese.”

The United States has also donated more than 74 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Asian and Pacific governments as a way to help end the pandemic and begin economic recovery. Biden even personally called for a suspension of intellectual property rights on vaccine manufacturing so that mass production and distribution can be done more quickly and cheaply.

These differences with the Trump administration are more stylistic than substantive – they do not change geopolitical alignments, power balances, or economic positions – but they help mend a damaged American reputation. At a minimum, these differences show that Biden and his Cabinet are sensitive to near-term risks of conflict and want the United States to be a responsible player in Asia. If a genuine crisis emerges on Biden’s watch, it will not be the result of excessive U.S. braggadocio or gunboat diplomacy.

Is Biden’s Doctrine Trump’s Legacy?

Stylistic differences aside, the most striking thing about Biden’s Asia policy is how much it resembles Trump’s on all the issues that matter over the long term.

China-Taiwan

Trump embraced rivalry with China, breaking a generation-long understanding of Sino-U.S. relations as basically cooperative, which was already coming undone while Barack Obama was still president. As part of pursuing rivalry during the Trump years however, the United States increased the defense budget every year – always using China as the justification. It reinvigorated the Quad, a dormant partnership with India, Japan, and Australia meant to “counter” China. It launched a series of tariffs against China based on accusations of unfair trade practices. It initiated an economic decoupling between China and the United States in technology areas that had national security relevance. It increased arms sales to Taiwan and made several smaller symbolic moves meant to signal a closer relationship with Taipei in antagonism of Beijing. And it launched a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)-led “China Initiative” in 2018 to investigate some 2,000 potential Chinese spies in academia and industry, which brought less than 50 convictions, suggesting either a racialized witch hunt or bureaucratic procedural ineptitude (possibly both).

In all of these respects, Biden’s China policy is Trump’s, only more so. The FBI’s counter-China program continues despite its horrendous performance. Trump’s tariffs have almost all remained in place; the Biden administration has since added new sanctions for human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and it has increased the number of blacklisted Chinese companies prohibited from doing business in the United States. Although Biden has tried to rebrand the Quad to be a win-win partnership for the public good – championing, in particular, vaccine diplomacy – it nevertheless endures and in Biden’s early months was its most heavily promoted foreign policy action.

And in a bid to preserve military superiority against China’s rapidly expanding navy and nuclear arsenal, the Biden administration has become Asia’s champion of military modernization to the point of arms racing. The U.S. defense budget under Biden actually increased from Trump’s final year in office, ensuring funding for every major weapons program connected to China warfighting scenarios. It is funding a massive nuclear modernization initiative costing between $1.2 and $1.7 trillion and so far includes investments in a potentially destabilizing new low-yield nuclear warhead and 145 B-21 stealth bombers – more than six times the number of the U.S. B-2 bomber force.

The Biden administration is also sponsoring, directly or indirectly: unlimited range cruise missiles for South Korea, $2.6 billion in weapons sales to the Philippines, cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as part of a new trilateral initiative alongside the United Kingdom called AUKUS, and longer range cruise and hypersonic missiles in Japan.

Everyone recognized that Trump had a military-first approach to Asia, and in 2021 Biden managed to actually outdo him.

Losing the Plot on North Korea

The United States’ North Korea policy has easily been its single biggest regional failure for a generation and Biden is upholding the inglorious tradition. On the campaign trail, Biden took the most conservative position on North Korea of the various candidates running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, calling Kim Jong Un a “thug,” holding fast to the goal of unilaterally disarming North Korea of its nuclear weapons, and refusing to even gesture at sanctions relief.

Notwithstanding Trump’s fabulist summit meetings with Kim, this tough line on North Korea was in fact the U.S. approach under Trump: no sanctions relief, no declaration of the end of the Korean War, no alterations to troop presence in South Korea, no change to the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Biden’s team conducted a North Korea policy review at the start of 2021, but by March it had concluded with nothing to say for itself. There was no rollout, no findings, no change in basic assumptions or objectives, just a verbal aside at a press conference noting that the administration would be “pragmatic.”

In 2021, U.S. officials reached out to North Korean diplomats – as every presidential administration since Bill Clinton had done – on at least four occasions, probing for working level nuclear talks. Pyongyang, though, was predictably disillusioned and spurned the requests. Trump held out the possibility of Kim Jong Un getting much of what he wanted – sanctions relief, a partial U.S. troop withdrawal, an end to alliance military exercises, and the normalization of diplomatic relations – all without actually denuclearizing. With none of that coming to fruition, North Korea ended its self-imposed moratorium on missile testing in 2021 and continued advancing its nuclear and missile capabilities (which it had never stopped, even throughout the period of the summits in 2018 and 2019).

The Korean Peninsula did not boil over into crisis in 2021 because the United States did not overreact to North Korean missile testing and occasional insulting rhetoric. In fact, the United States did not react at all. Sanctions remained firmly in place, U.S. officials had no substantive negotiations with North Korean diplomats, and the North has used the stalemate to advance its nuclear program in more lethal and survivable directions. The United States has quietly contemplated South Korea’s request to declare an end to the Korean War – on the theory that it could jumpstart nuclear talks – but 2021 ended without any declaration actually taking place.

Ambivalence About Trade and Investment

Like Trump, the Biden of 2021 has rejected neoliberal free-trade dogma. But Trump’s economic policy was vindictively and haphazardly mercantilist. Biden’s anti-neoliberalism has been dictated to him by domestic political constraints and an urgent pandemic-induced need for large Keynesian public spending.

Politically, there is no longer a voting constituency for pro-globalization, pro-corporate free trade agreements. There is nothing Biden could negotiate abroad that the Congress will make into law, unless it is explicitly anti-China in its aims.

Accordingly, Biden has no plans to join (or rejoin, since Trump withdrew from its earlier iteration) the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). He called tariffs “the greatest negotiating tool in the history of our country.” He has begun a process of “onshoring” supply chains for critical infrastructure and vital goods. Not long ago, industrial policy was taboo because it interfered with “market efficiency.” In 2021, industrial policy is not just normal but widely seen as necessary in Washington both as a way to rebuild the U.S. economy and to compete with Chinese influence abroad.

If done for the right reasons, shifting away from neoliberal economic policies can be a powerful force for good, in Asia and the United States. America has tremendous latent power in political economy because of its unique advantages – it is a crucial hub for international banking transactions, retains a large consumer market, has outsized voting shares in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and it still has the world’s reserve currency.

The problem is the intellectual opacity behind the shift away from globalization. Biden – like Trump before him – is acting out of expedience. He has no concept for how to use economic statecraft to convert structural advantages in political economy globally down to the regional level. The liberal internationalism that guides U.S. foreign policy globally is built on a free-trade ethos; more than anything it exists to defend capital’s right to traverse borders freely. Yet domestic politics shows little favor toward this principle. Caught between such cross-pressures, a coherent economic strategy is unrealistic.

Janus-Faced Democracy Promotion

The United States has never been all that consistent in the way it exemplified and promoted democracy in Asia. Trump, with his authoritarian predilections and agnostic attitude toward dictatorships, was no exception. In 2021, neither was Biden.

The landmark event of U.S. foreign policy in 2021, a global summit for democracies, was an idea Biden promised and delivered. But hypocrisy was unavoidable, not only because the United States itself now has a major political party that has taken an authoritarian turn, but also because of how it navigated invitations. The United States spurned autocratic Singapore and Thailand – the former a close partner and the latter a treaty ally – but invited the Philippines even though its leader has suppressed free speech and is being investigated by the International Criminal Court for extrajudicial killings.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has kept silent about the growing illiberalism of India and its oppressive unilateral control of Kashmir (because India helps balance China). It has approved $2.6 billion in arms sales to the Philippines despite congressional concerns with transferring weapons to a country engaged in corruption and human rights abuses (because the Philippines is needed to counter China). It currently has no plan for how to reduce regional inequality or make life difficult for the oligarchs and kleptocrats in Asia who impoverish democracy itself.

Hypocrisy on democracy promotion is nothing new in U.S. Asia policy, but when contrasted with the tremendous (and correct) noise Washington makes about China’s genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the latter looks cynical and opportunistic.

Getting Asia Wrong Has Consequences

Taking stock of the above reveals discernible themes – competition with China, military-first strategizing, favorability toward allies, a diminution of economic clout. These themes, however, do not add up to a theory of security or a grand design. Biden and his staff have clearly brought the Obama-era liberal internationalist mindset to the Asia of 2021. The problem is the context has changed, heavily shaped by the events of the Trump years.

The Obama administration’s Asia hands (disclosure: I was one) had a muddled way of thinking about the region that the Biden administration has revived – the “operating system” metaphor. Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Indo-Pacific coordinator and the architect of Obama’s pivot to Asia strategy, has at several points in 2021 invoked comparisons to an “operating system” when describing how Asia is kept stable.

Campbell’s view, detailed extensively in his 2016 book “The Pivot,” is that Asian stability is a complex operating system of free trade-based interdependence, a patchwork of regional institutions, and a melange of informal multilateral arrangements, all girded by a network of U.S. bilateral alliances. Underwriting those alliances is U.S. military superiority – that is, the ability to defeat any plausible adversary or combination of adversaries even in the most unfavorable conditions that defense planners can imagine (for instance, combat operations 100 miles off of mainland China).

This was a sufficiently conservative approach to the region that, even in an increasingly polarized America, the Republican Party’s Asia hands were enthusiastic about Obama’s “pivot” to Asia – so much so that they tried to claim it had actually begun under President George W. Bush. They wanted credit for it. Consequently, Asia policy became one of the only areas of bipartisan consensus in American politics, but the reason was that Democrats had imported Republican thinking about the region wholesale.

Not only did the “operating system” metaphor basically endorse anything that anyone in Asia was already doing as long as they were not U.S. adversaries; it also explicitly aimed at propping up American hegemony. As Obama confidant Ben Rhodes quipped, “What we’re trying to do is to get America another 50 years as leader.” If you were an American Republican, what was not to like?

But this metaphor, which had always undersold the tremendous work Sino-U.S. relations was doing to keep Asia out of catastrophe, has not aged well. The region has changed, and so has the United States.

The Biden administration may be the last to recognize it, but in Asian political economy, China has become Asia’s de facto hegemon when it comes to trade, investment, and financial flows. Its sway in writing the rules governing intra-regional financial architecture well exceeds that of the United States, in no small part because China belongs to an alphabet soup of regional arrangements that exclude the United States and were put in place since the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis (for which Asian governments disproportionately blame the United States).

U.S. military primacy, meanwhile, is unchallengeable in most parts of Asia. The tension, however, is that U.S. military superiority does not extend to Taiwan – it is the one regional flashpoint where China is much better positioned militarily and no amount of U.S. capability can fix the imbalance there.

Thus, U.S. policy has an unrealistic view of both the military and economic spheres, but in different ways. The United States, by pouring resources into region-wide arms-racing and refusing to see that China has displaced it as Asia’s dominant economic power, is not doing Asia any favors in the long-term. The trajectory of current trends point toward growing nationalism, economic volatility, and ultimately conflict. The operating system perspective puts the United States on the wrong side of these trends. Asia does not need a systems engineer; it needs future proofing against foreseeable dangers.