The Donald Trump administration was not known for its transparency. Yet on its way out the door, it did something unusual, declassifying the National Security Council’s strategy for the most important region in the world.
The “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific” — at its core, a plan for countering China’s rise — underscores several constructive legacies that the Trump administration handed down to its successor. But the document also betrays a certain confusion — which President Joe Biden’s administration would do well do clear up — about what, exactly, the US is seeking to accomplish in the Indo-Pacific, and what makes it such an unusually effective superpower in the first place.
The strategic framework was finalized in February 2018, not long after the Trump administration issued a National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy declaring that an age of great-power competition had begun. Many of initiatives outlined in the framework subsequently became important parts of a strategy for pushing back against Beijing.
The US, that document asserted, must hasten India’s rise as a strategic counterweight to China. It should invest in the so-called Quad, linking Australia, India, Japan and the US in support of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” It should combat Chinese economic and intelligence campaigns while helping Taiwan and other frontline states strengthen their defenses against coercion and military aggression. It should preserve America’s technological edge over China and help regional partners avoid being pulled into Beijing’s technological orbit.
The Trump administration made some meaningful progress on these various policies, all of which should — and probably will — be adopted by the Biden team as part of an emerging, bipartisan approach to China.
Above all, there is also a welcome realism to the document’s description of the military challenges America faces. Never again will the US have the advantages that allowed it, during a crisis involving Taiwan in 1996, to sail two carrier strike groups into the waters just off China’s coast. Rather, within the “first island chain” — which runs from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines — it will require significant military investments and creativity just to prevent Beijing from bending those states to its will. Biden’s Pentagon confronts no more important task than this.
Unfortunately, the strategic framework is also a roster of ambitions that went unfulfilled, sometimes glaringly so, from progress toward denuclearizing North Korea to the creation of a framework for regional economic cooperation after Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In Southeast Asia, the US lost more ground than it gained over the past four years, with the US-Philippines alliance fraying during the bloody rule of President Rodrigo Duterte, relationships with Malaysia and Indonesia stagnating, Singapore openly proclaiming its ambivalence about US-China confrontation, and Beijing improving its position in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.
It’s hard to blame Trump for some of these setbacks: Duterte’s relationship with President Barack Obama wasn’t exactly pleasant. But as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Zack Cooper observes, Trump’s strategic legacy in Southeast Asia is fairly bleak.
There’s also a conceptual problem at the heart of the document. The strategic framework lists as a key goal preserving “US strategic primacy in the Indo-Pacific region” — in other words, maintaining Washington as the region’s dominant power. Yet that’s the wrong way to think about meeting the Chinese challenge.
America’s fundamental interest in the Indo-Pacific is not hegemony but anti-hegemony: It doesn’t need to dominate that region, but simply to prevent anyone else from doing so. The great strategic nightmare of America’s Asia hands, dating back to the late 19th century, is that some hostile actor would assert control of the area, severing American trade and harnessing the resources necessary to project power on a global scale.
What Washington requires, then, is not the sort of economic and geopolitical control that China seeks to establish, but simply sufficient influence to prevent Beijing from having its way in the region. Openness, not dominance, is the overarching US objective.
This may sound like hair-splitting. After all, the level of influence and presence needed to check Chinese designs in the Indo-Pacific is imposing indeed. A country that seeks to defend allies located thousands of miles from its borders can hardly be accused of geopolitical modesty. That Americans seeks to maintain a favorable balance of power in regions around the globe, not simply in the Western Hemisphere, has led it to amass capabilities that outpace those of any rival. This surely looks like primacy, even a menacing dominance, to the countries Washington opposes.
Yet the distinction matters. The concept of American primacy overstates what the US truly needs to accomplish in South or Southeast Asia, where the question isn’t how much control Washington enjoys as how well it can support local actors in resisting Chinese pressure. And it threatens to obscure what makes US power seem relatively appealing and its influence seem relatively benign to countries from Japan to Singapore to India. It is precisely because the US has traditionally focused on preventing the dominance of others, rather than asserting its own, that countries in the Indo-Pacific and around the world have welcomed American influence rather than balancing against it. They have looked to the faraway superpower in Washington to ward off aggressive, nearby predators such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War or China today.
The Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy was surely right about one thing: The challenge of keeping China from establishing its own regional primacy will be hard, given the power Beijing wields and the potential it may still realize. As one administration gives way to another, the US shouldn’t make that challenge harder by confusing the condition it seeks to prevent with the one it seeks to attain.
Bloomberg
