Dr Stephan Frühling and Dr Benjamin Schreer are Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.
Hugh White's replies to our comments and those of Malcolm Cook on his original Quarterly Essay have been valuable in advancing our debate. To us, it seems that our disagreements crystallize around two main questions.
First, the nature of US conduct in the region. Hugh writes in his reply to us that 'If the countries of Asia believe that the region's peace can be maintained by an order based on shared power, they are unlikely to support America in asserting primacy at the cost of disorder'.
Our problem with this statement, which is central to Hugh's whole argument, is not its internal logic. Rather, we do not share the implicit empirical statement, that it is a desire for US primacy that is causing tension in East Asia. To the contrary, it seems to us that it has been a relative absence of the US, for example in the South China Sea, that has been a concern in the region. Similarly, we think that the US reaction to the Chinese build-up of conventional and nuclear forces is notable for its nonchalance.
When Hugh argues that future US conduct will be a cause of tension in the region, he therefore assumes a very different pattern from that exhibited in recent years and decades. To us, he has not provided enough evidence or argument to suggest that this would be a likely development.
Second, Hugh's recent posts have made it even less certain in our eyes what kind of regional order he proposes as a solution to China's rise. In his reply to us, he refers to an undefined 'future Asian order based on shared leadership' that reminds us of President Roosevelt's still-born concept of the Four Policemen, more than any other past regional or world order as it has existed in reality.
In his original essay, he proposed a 'concert of powers', which he loosely modeled on the European alliance against domestic revolution that was created in the Vienna Congress of 1815 (although he sees this system as having continued for a century, despite the repeated wars of the mid-19th century, including the de facto unconditional French surrender to Prussia in 1871).
In his reply to Malcolm Cook, Hugh instead referred to 'a regional coalition to support cautious accommodation', which sounds to us like it is based much more on two Asian blocs, one being China and one the rest. If that is what he is now proposing, we would be in much greater agreement with him than on his original proposal — Hugh correctly points out that we 'see Asia moving to a balance of power system in which Asia is dominated by systemic competition between power blocs'.
But in Hugh's view, a 'relatively stable and peaceful' example for such a system is 18th century Europe — wracked by the ever-changing coalitions in the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), Seven Year War (1754-1763), and War of American Independence (1776-1783) before the beginning of the Wars of the French Revolution in 1791, to name but the most important conflicts.
In contrast, we see Asia developing along two systemic blocs that are much less clearly organized than was the case during the Cold War, but with a similar stability in membership. In short, in our view, Asia's future will be like the present, only more so. To us, that would be a system capable of accommodating significant regional tension.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
