Powder Keg in East Asia

President Obama’s high-profile release of America’s big new strategic defense review has made it official: The brave new world of the War on Terror is a thing of the past, and the bad old world of global great-power politics is back. A new Great Game is afoot. In response to China’s debut of its first aircraft carrier, its more muscular attitude toward the smaller powers surrounding the South China Sea, and similar developments, the United States has begun a courtship of Myanmar, announced a permanent installation of 2,500 Marines in Australia, and crystallized the vision behind it all in a few key pages of the review document. Gone is the military emphasis on open-ended, resource-intensive counterinsurgency operations—with all its murky questions about the future of sovereignty and the transformation of war. In its place, the new strategic review elevates the "Asia Pacific"—thinly veiled code for China and anywhere near it—to a place of unprecedented prominence.

The President’s overt and deliberate strategic shift exhibits the classic response of a status quo power to the problems posed by a new power rising even marginally closer to parity. Among analysts, the move has ushered in visions of the Western world’s prickly state of affairs a hundred years ago, with today’s China playing the role of a 21st-century German Empire. For writers across the conceptual spectrum, from The Diplomat to LewRockwell.com, the evocative comparison is as natural as it is worrisome. For the White House, however, the catastrophic run-up to the First World War would seem to make for a teachable moment. As Walter Russell Mead has argued, the Administration’s broader policy for the region promises to bring great flourishing to both sides of the Pacific, so long as China understands there will be real downsides to refusing to play by the so-called rules of the road. Instead of a tit-for-tat race to the belligerent bottom, perhaps the Obama strategy augurs the dawn of a true sphere of mutual prosperity for East Asia.

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