Robert D. Kaplan on U.S.-Asia Relations (Agenda)
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Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, Stratfor cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Video Transcript:
Colin Chapman: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs Kurt Campbell said this weekend that the United States seeks to deepen relationships with China and rejected suggestions that it wanted to contain the world's second largest economy. This, he said, was patently false. But Stratfor sees the United States now seeking to build stronger partnerships with three Asian democracies: India, Japan and the Philippines.
Welcome to Agenda. I'm Colin Chapman, and with me this week is Stratfor's chief geopolitical analyst, Robert Kaplan. Robert, what's America's goal here?
Robert Kaplan: The United States would like to see, Colin, an emerging Asian power web, whereby Asian states have more and more military, economic and political diplomatic cooperation with each other as well as bilaterally with the United States. This is because these interrelationships will in a very natural, organic way balance against a rising China.
But the United States needs a different strategy for each of these countries because they're all so unique. India's situation is so much different from that of the Philippines. The Philippines' situation is so much different from that of Japan. An Asian strategy is not just about having aircraft carriers and you know near the South China Sea. It's about getting countries like India and the Philippines to help us out in a very almost covert way rather than in an overt way.
Colin: Well, let's take India first. The Bush administration sought to engage with India, but under Obama this seems to have fallen away a bit.
Robert: The United States cannot look at India in terms of it transactional relationship. In other words, the relationship cannot be: "We will do this for New Delhi, and then New Delhi will do this for us; for everything we do they will reciprocate." That's not how it can work with India. India has had decades leading the Non-Aligned Movement. It had the period of Nehruvian socialism, which distanced it from the United States. It has a strong political and intellectual logic built into the elites in New Delhi, where they see India as a power in its own right rather than as anything subservient to the United States.
Let me give you an example: Were U.S.-China relations to worsen significantly, we should not expect India to be by our side. They would have to move closer to China simply because, as much as India is a rival to China, it is also close enough to China so that New Delhi needs a steady relationship with Beijing. But if the United States were to move closer to China and there were to be a real Washington-Beijing rapprochement rather dramatically, then India might feel nervous and left out and then move closer to Washington.
In other words, the very rise of India economically and militarily is the best piece of strategic good luck the United States has gotten since the end of the Cold War. Merely by being where it is, a rising India hedges against China. But we're going to need to play this great power game very, very subtly in order to utilize India.
Colin: Let's move on to Japan, Asia's second largest economy currently in a testy spat with China over territory. Its relationship with Washington has had a few wobbles, hasn't it?
Robert: Japan is not only Asia's second largest economy, but it has arguably Asia's most capable military as well. It may be smaller in size than China's, but it's extremely high-tech and extremely deployable. There are more Japanese warships in the Pacific than U.S. warships. Japan has a real strong niche capabilities and special operations forces in submarines. Japan's economy may have been in the doldrums for two decades now and Japan's and military may be hampered by the Japanese constitution. Yet, if you compare Japan's economy and naval and air capacity to most other countries in the world with the exception of just a handful, Japan is still a significant political and military power in Asia.
You alluded to the bumps the United States has had with Japan. I think as China's military power comes more and more on line and becomes more and more obvious in the Western Pacific, it naturally drives Japan closer to the United States. Japan, as you alluded to, is a formal treaty ally of the United States. But in recent years, due to the military rise of China, Japan's leadership has felt emotionally the need to move closer to Washington.
Colin: Another democracy in dispute with China is the Philippines. You've just been to Manila.
Robert: Yes. The Philippines is also a formal treaty ally of the United States. Like Japan, it occupies the eastern littoral of the South China Sea. It's very strategically located. The United States had a great air base there at Clark Air Base and a great naval base at Subic Bay, although those closed in 1992 when Philippine-American relations went downhill. In recent years, there's been a dramatic upsurge that I detected at the Philippine Foreign Ministry in Manila and elsewhere about the need for the Philippines to move diplomatically and militarily closer to Washington.
But there are problems -- real challenges -- that Washington faces with Manila. The Philippines, honestly, is a weekly institutionalized, sprawling archipelago -- a weak state at best. Even though it's in East Asia, it has a poor, Latin American-style economy; it's not really hooked into the global economy. The United States just gave to the Philippines a 1960s Coast Guard cutter and it became the pride of the Philippine navy. And as people told me, the United States brought the Philippine navy up from a World War II level to a 1960s level. So the Philippines has a long way to go. Whether economically, politically or bureaucratically, it is a very weak state.
And the United States has to be very careful with the Philippines and with Vietnam, which though not a treaty ally is a de facto ally as a hedge against the rise of China. The United States has to be careful in this regard: On the one hand, the United States cannot let China dominate the South China Sea as Beijing seeks to do. On the other hand, the United States cannot let a country like Vietnam or the Philippines drag the United States into a conflict with China over the South China Sea because the United States has too many other equities with China and a reasonably good relationship with Beijing to allow itself to be dragged into conflict.
Colin: Robert Kaplan, ending this week's agenda. Thanks for joining Stratfor today. I'll be in Poland for the next couple of weeks looking at this important country's role in the European Union's struggle to recover and as a close neighbor of Vladimir Putin's Russia. See you soon.
