Asia is on a slide into conflict alongside shifts in power
A rise in tensions across Asia means the risk of major war in the region is much greater today than most people assume.
On the morning of April 1, 2001, an American EP-3 reconnaissance plane took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to conduct a routine surveillance mission over international waters off China’s coast. Two Chinese J-8 fighters deployed from Lingshui Air Base on Hainan Island with orders to tail the US plane.
One of the J-8 pilots was 33-year-old Wang Wei, a maverick who revelled in pulling off risky aerial manoeuvres. He slowed his aircraft down to match the speed of the spy plane and came within metres of it.
Suddenly, at about 9.07am and a little more than 104km southeast of Hainan, the Chinese fighter stalled and collided with the American plane. Firing his booster engines in an attempt to recover, Wang took the nose off the EP-3 and plummeted towards the waters of the South China Sea. He ejected but was never seen again.
The EP-3 spiralled, too, falling 3.4km in a matter of minutes. Its crew of 24 began destroying the highly sensitive equipment and information on board as its American pilot readied to make an emergency landing at the same air base from where, minutes earlier, Wang had taken off. After realising the American mayday was not an April Fools’ Day prank, ground control granted permission to land.
The incident was indeed no laughing matter. An acrimonious crisis in relations between the US and China ensued.
What if this collision had involved Chinese and Japanese military aircraft instead, unleashing waves of virulent nationalism in both countries? Such a scenario is far from the stuff of fiction. Chinese and Japanese planes regularly engage in dangerous aerial encounters over the East China Sea.
Or what would happen if, during the period of the erratic Donald Trump presidency, Pyongyang believed Washington was readying its forces for pre-emptive military action? Would Kim Jong-un be able to hold his nerve and not initiate an anticipatory strike?
Or what if the Taiwanese navy vessel that accidentally fired an anti-shipping missile in the direction of the mainland in July 2016 had struck a Chinese rather than a Taiwanese craft? And rather than this incident occurring on the 95th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, what if it were to occur in the nationalistic atmosphere of the party’s centenary in 2021?
The risk of major war in Asia is much greater today than most people assume. All it would take is an accidental clash between the wrong two militaries, at the wrong place or the wrong time, and a highly dangerous escalation could occur. Asia has been lucky so far that it hasn’t.
Serendipity has played a critical role throughout history when leaders have walked back from the brink of war.
In the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, who served as US defence secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, reflects on the part providence played in avoiding nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban missile crisis, “At the end we lucked out,” he says. “It was luck that prevented war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.”
We should learn from McNamara’s wisdom. It would be imprudent to assume that Asia’s luck will hold indefinitely.
It is not only the danger of localised conflict in Asia that confronts us. The danger of “wide war” in Asia is growing, too, because this region is experiencing what eminent Australian strategist Coral Bell once described as a “crisis slide”. As Bell wrote in the early 1970s: “There are periods in history when individual crises remain distinct, like isolated boulders rolling down a mountainside. Each may do some damage, and present some dangers, but they are events discrete in themselves … there are other periods when the boulders, or the crises, not only come thick and fast, but seem, as it were, to repercuss off each other until the whole mountainside, or the whole society of states, begins to crumble.”
Bell pointed to two previous instances when such “crises slides” ended in catastrophic conflict. The first was in the lead-up to World War I, which was preceded by a series of international crises — the First Moroccan Crisis (1905-06), the First Balkan Crisis (1908-09), the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911) and the culminating crisis of July 1914, which was sparked by the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The second was the lead-up to World War II, where a similar series of events — Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland (1936), his annexation of Austria and his occupation of the Sudetenland under the terms of the Munich Agreement (1938), the signing of the Pact of Steel between Germany and Italy, and Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland (1939) — left Britain and France with no option other than to declare war against Germany in September 1939.
Crisis slides of the kind that preceded the world wars are dangerous for three reasons. They make international relations more volatile. Governments become more antagonistic towards, and distrustful of, one another. These animosities intensify and begin to roll over into other areas. Governments also increasingly harden their positions and become less inclined to co-operate or compromise with each passing crisis. Every crisis inevitably generates “winners and losers”, and the lessons most losing governments take is that firmer diplomatic and strategic postures are needed to avoid losing face in future.
Repeated crises also have the seemingly paradoxical effect of generating an unhealthy level of complacency. As more crises are resolved seemingly short of war — even if their underlying causes are not — governments begin to disbelieve the possibility that they could end up waging full-blown conflict.
A crisis slide is evident in Asia today. After a period of relative calm that stretched from the mid-1990s through the 2000s, crises around the region have been coming thick and fast. The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan and North Korea’s bombing of Yeonpyeong Island took the Korean peninsula to the brink of war in 2010. Tokyo’s nationalisation of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and Beijing’s provocative reactions had respected commentators talking up the prospects of Sino-Japanese conflict from 2012 to 2014. Similar claims were made about the South China Sea following the Scarborough Shoal and Beijing oil-rig crises of 2012 and 2014. This speculation has intensified following Beijing’s land-reclamation campaign, which has seen the development of military facilities on many of this area’s disputed land features. Today, after two decades of calm, tensions over Taiwan are resurfacing following the election of an independence-leaning president. The clouds of danger also hang over the Korean peninsula, despite Trump tweeting that this crisis has passed due to his summit with Kim. The connections between these areas also have been intensifying. Japan’s increasing involvement in the South China Sea reflect its concern that what China gets away with here will set the terms for what the international community will accept in the East China Sea. Trump’s harder line on Taiwan has been seen as a reflection of his frustration at Beijing’s unwillingness to deal more decisively with Pyongyang or to de-escalate in the South China Sea.
The positions of the key players are hardening. Washington continues to insist on Pyongyang’s denuclearisation as a non-negotiable element of its diplomacy. China’s leaders remain concerned about appearing weak to a virulently anti-Japanese populace, while the same is true in reverse. The US is concerned that seeming so in response to growing Chinese assertiveness will further erode regional confidence in US resolve, particularly in the eyes of US allies and partners.
At the same time, there seems a strange complacency about the prospects for conflict in Asia — even as the key players understand how devastating major war would be. The leaders of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have spent almost two decades discussing the development of a South China Sea code of conduct, intended to avoid the use of military force to resolve disputes in this area. Despite their recent agreement to restart negotiations, they seem no closer to realising that goal than they were in the late 1990s.
Washington has spent much of the past quarter-century kicking the North Korean can down the road, leading to the dangerous drift towards war last year. Similarly, Chinese and Japanese officials have spent a decade haggling over a hotline to avoid accidental air and naval clashes. In May they finally committed to begin operating this mechanism, although it remains unclear whether it will cover the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
Given the glacial pace at which each of these initiatives has progressed, one can be excused for thinking that Asia’s leaders are daydreaming about the prospects for peace rather than sleepwalking towards war. Such complacency is dangerous and badly misplaced.
Some commentators suggest the most viable way to avoid catastrophic conflict in Asia is for the US and China to strike a “grand bargain”, where one side gives up something strategically significant in exchange for something of equal or greater value. Trump, given his background in business, may be well disposed towards such a deal. This speculation has generated concern in Taiwan and Asia-Pacific countries that Trump may be willing to trade away US support in Asia in exchange for China’s help with resolving the North Korean nuclear issue.
Even if Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping did trade North Korea for Taiwan, there is no guarantee that this would arrest Asia’s crisis slide. It is difficult to envisage Kim giving up without a fight. Instead, he would likely look for succour from other patrons, such as Russia, and through illicit channels. He could seek to transfer nuclear weapons materials and technology to non-state actors. In a worst-case scenario, he even might unleash his nuclear arsenal on the world. Troublingly, declining powers throughout history have shown a tendency to lash out.
The risk of escalation remains on the Korean peninsula, too, despite the heat that recent summits at Panmunjom and in Singapore have taken out of this nuclear conundrum. Should these ongoing diplomatic efforts falter, there could certainly come a point when Kim reads too much into aggressive American rhetoric and mistakenly believes US military preparations are a prelude to attack, prompting him to order an anticipatory strike. Alternatively, Trump could take his “America first” logic to its extreme and risk sacrificing Seoul and cities in Japan to eliminate the threat North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles pose to the US homeland. Or Kim, feeling invulnerable because of his burgeoning nuclear and missile arsenal, and buoyed by the prospect of a faltering US-South Korea alliance, could launch a surprise conventional strike against Seoul with a view to reunifying Korea by force.
Asia is home to antipathies and animosities that run deep. The legitimacy of its leaders — even and arguably especially those of non-democratic countries — depends heavily on their attentiveness to these sentiments. Showing weakness towards a long-time adversary can amount to political suicide.
This is not to suggest that finding a lasting solution to the crisis in Asia is impossible. As peace processes past have shown — in far-flung locales such as Aceh, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka — solutions can spring suddenly from the most seemingly intractable of disputes. Many hope the Korean peninsula will prove a case in point. But hope is never a strategy.
Management through deterrence offers the likeliest means for keeping the peace on the Korean peninsula and in the East China Sea. The recent introduction of measures designed to reduce the risk of miscommunications and accidental clashes also will help. But these measures do not go far enough. We urgently need much more ambitious approaches, agreed to in advance, for managing major crises.
Debate over Asia’s future is deeply divided. On one side are those who contend that China soon will emerge as the region’s dominant power, as its inexorable economic and military rise marginalises US influence and eventually evicts America from this part of the world. Some would argue we have already reached that point. Australia’s first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, boldly declared in an address in March last year that “we are living in a Chinese world”. On the other side are those who argue that the US-led Asian order, which has been in place since the end of World War II, can still be preserved if the US and other “like-minded” countries, such as Australia, India and Japan, are prepared to stand together to stare down the Chinese challenge.
Asia’s most viable future lies somewhere between these opposing camps.
When the US and its allies think about the Asian balance of power, balance in any genuine sense is hardly what they have in mind. The “balance” they are used to is where their side enjoys a significant margin of strength over its adversaries. This keeps the peace and preserves the international order because those opponents are in no position to mount a serious military challenge.
This kind of lopsided balance cannot last. Indeed, it is already toppling. As China’s economic and military strength grows, America’s ability to intervene in the Taiwan Strait is receding, while an attempt to re-engage carries the risk of sparking “a war like no other”. Similarly, Washington will find it increasingly harder to stare down Beijing in the South China Sea; geography favours China too strongly.
But this does not mean that a Chinese-dominated Asia is inevitable. The US and its allies hold the upper hand in the East China Sea and on the Korean peninsula. For the foreseeable future, Beijing cannot prevail militarily over the US in either of these areas or force its retreat. If Washington withdraws, it will be of its own volition.
These situations of strength can form the basis for a new Asian balance of power — which is why Trump’s impulse to withdraw US troops from the Korean peninsula is so ill-advised. This balance will be less lopsided, but that is in keeping with the original metaphor of balance in foreign policy. When Italian city statesmen of the 15th and 16th centuries came up with this concept, what they had in mind was an even distribution of power among the major players, an equilibrium where no sole power could become so strong as to endanger the others.
These situations of strength will not be preserved without effort. As with a set of scales, the US will need to adjust continually to the tests to its resolve that China will inevitably make. But with the future of its role in the region on the line, Washington should respond.
China will be unable to dominate Asia in its entirety. The US will continue to meet its longest standing objective — the prevention of regional dominance by a great power rival. But it will be able to do so credibly and with considerably lower risk than through an ill-advised attempt at preserving the incumbent order.
Yet in the final analysis, all this discussion of power balances, situations of strengths and defensive lines will be largely meaningless if Asia’s worsening crisis slide is not arrested. The good news is that it can be, and catastrophic conflict, sparked by mistake or miscalculation and fuelled by the mounting pressure of repeated strategic crises, can be avoided. But this will not be easy. It will require careful management of Asia’s increasingly interconnected flashpoints, which each require subtly different methods of control.
More important, it will demand of Asia’s leaders a much greater sense of urgency than has so far been shown. Because time is running short.
This is an edited extract from The Four Flashpoints: How Asia Goes to War by Brendan Taylor (La Trobe University Press, 29.99), out today.
A searing indictment of FBI
Americans deserve a full accounting of the missteps of James Comey and the FBI.
Trump’s good news day
Those repeated claims of no collusion now have credence.