{"id":17668,"date":"2014-12-24T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2014-12-23T19:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=17668"},"modified":"2014-12-29T11:21:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T00:21:34","slug":"retrovision-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/retrovision-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrovision, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Looking<\/a><\/figure>\n

Humorists often say that hindsight is 20\/20 vision. Not so. Historians will tell you that we often don\u2019t see things clearly even in the rear-view mirror. As ASPI begins its shutdown for the Christmas\u2013New Year break, it\u2019s a good time to reflect on where we are at the end of 2014.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the great powers. The US remains hesitant, its leader a Jeffersonian, its middle class sucked down by lack of employment opportunities and a declining share of the national cake. In his first term, President Obama used to talk about the recovery of the US middle class as the path to US leadership in the 21st century. That recovery hasn\u2019t happened. The US remains the world\u2019s dominant power, but there\u2019s an uneasiness about its leadership. In Asia, allies and partners remain anxious about the US rebalance\u2014which is happening, but not at a pace sufficient to satisfy their need for instant gratification and not to an extent that restores the US position in the region to what it was in earlier decades.<\/p>\n

In Russia, Putin\u2019s charted a course to the past\u2014not to the communist past, but to the Tsarist one, where supreme leaders weren\u2019t constrained by the dead hand of communist bureaucracy. Putin enjoys having adversaries; he thinks Russia gets more attention that way. He\u2019s not shy of using Russian hard power. We\u2019ve seen that in Ukraine and in the resumption of long-range naval and air patrols. Earlier this month the Russian foreign minister was claiming Russia\u2019s right to station nuclear weapons in Crimea; a claim designed to intimidate. But the Russian economy\u2019s struggling, and with oil at its current price it\u2019ll struggle more in 2015. Not a good combination of factors.<\/p>\n

Xi Jinping\u2019s China reached a Purchasing Power Parity milestone this year\u2014becoming the world\u2019s largest economy. But its strategic signals remain confusing. The concept of \u2018Asia for the Asians\u2019 that Xi outlined in May at the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia didn\u2019t play that well in Asia, not least because of Chinese pushiness in the South China Sea and East China Sea. And it\u2019s never quite clear what Beijing wants in terms of regional order. Its own picture of order seems historic rather than contemporary. It describes the current order as hegemonic, and of course in a real sense it is\u2014but it reflects a hegemonic power interested in liberalism, prosperity and peace. China rose under that order. Its own preferred vision, \u2018Asia for the Asians\u2019, implies a closed regional system of a sort that hasn\u2019t existed since the Opium Wars.<\/p>\n

In Japan, Shinzo Abe\u2019s government attempts a difficult balancing act in trying to be both evolutionary and revolutionary at the same time. Abe has a difficult task in front of him: defining a \u2018normal\u2019 role for Japan in Asian security, when the 20th\u00a0century was comparatively bereft of convincing examples. Changes of leadership in both India and Indonesia raise the prospect that both countries might also be feeling their way to more expansive regional roles, but both are works in progress. Australia would especially welcome the opportunity to work more closely with Jakarta in the field of regional security.<\/p>\n

In Europe, NATO allies are more nervous. Not nervous enough to make a substantial lift in their defence spending\u2014Germany remains at 1.3% of GDP\u2014but nervous enough to make the NATO summit in Wales one of the more important in recent years. NATO has rediscovered its strategic purpose, and it turns much more upon European defence than out-of-area deployments.<\/p>\n

The Middle East retains its status as the world\u2019s last geopolitical shatterbelt. Syria and Iraq now form the new crush zones between the Sunni and Shia worlds. There\u2019s little the West can do to change that. Meanwhile the negotiations continue to constrain Iran\u2019s nuclear program. Some form of agreement now looks more likely than not\u2014but it\u2019ll probably be one which leaves Tehran with a degree of nuclear \u2018latency\u2019 that the neighbours will find concerning.<\/p>\n

In Australia, the recent events in Martin Place have cast a shadow over what\u2019s primarily been a good year. Canberra\u2019s concluded a range of Free Trade Agreements with rich partners, struck up a new strategic relationship with Tokyo, cemented its place in the G20, and committed to a target in defence spending of 2% of GDP. But it\u2019s hard to escape the feeling that there\u2019s much more that needs to be done, especially if Australian strategic policy is to keep pace with the transformational changes unfolding across the Asia Pacific.<\/p>\n

At the Carnegie Endowment, the retiring president Jessica Tuchman Matthews recently depicted the coming year, 2015, as \u2018a world confused<\/a>\u2019. Sounds like more of the same is on the way.<\/p>\n

Rod Lyon<\/em><\/a> is a fellow at ASPI and executive editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Strategist. Image courtesy of Flickr user Bob B. Brown<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Humorists often say that hindsight is 20\/20 vision. Not so. Historians will tell you that we often don\u2019t see things clearly even in the rear-view mirror. As ASPI begins its shutdown for the Christmas\u2013New Year …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":17673,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,959,69,8,135,127,31],"class_list":["post-17668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-china","tag-eu","tag-india","tag-indonesia","tag-japan","tag-terrorism","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRetrovision, 2014 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/retrovision-2014\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Retrovision, 2014 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Humorists often say that hindsight is 20\/20 vision. 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