{"id":17866,"date":"2015-01-16T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=17866"},"modified":"2015-01-19T09:07:46","modified_gmt":"2015-01-18T22:07:46","slug":"assessing-the-us-rebalance-to-the-asia-pacific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/assessing-the-us-rebalance-to-the-asia-pacific\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing the US rebalance to the Asia\u2013Pacific"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>CSIS\u2019s release of its recent report<\/a> Pivot 2.0<\/em>\u2014intended to help nurture a bipartisan consensus in Washington in favour of the policy\u2014shows the topic of the \u2018rebalance\u2019 is still a live one in US foreign and strategic policy circles. The report succinctly covers a range of issues, starting with the prospects for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and working its way through China, defence, Korea, India and Southeast Asia. Australia\u2019s clearly not seen as a problem\u2014it barely rates a mention.<\/p>\n

The US rebalance (n\u00e9e \u2018pivot\u2019) dates from the first term of the Obama administration. So at the start of 2015 it seems quaint still to be writing a blog post on the policy. But around the region, and even within the US, it\u2019s a policy about which people remain uncertain. Some critics describe it as merely the name for Obama\u2019s Asia policy, but in private conversations I\u2019ve heard harsher judgments.<\/p>\n

So let me put down here a set of assessments about the rebalance. The policy itself emerged from an early policy review undertaken by the Obama administration to identify where the US was overweight and underweight in its international commitments. The answer was that it was overweight in Europe and the Middle East, and underweight in Asia\u2014underweight across a range of dimensions including the diplomatic, military, economic and institutional.<\/p>\n

For those who want to see what is\u2014and isn\u2019t\u2014occurring under the rebalance, I\u2019d recommend doing more than reading the CSIS report. Have a look at two other US sources. The first is the presentation<\/a> that US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, gave to the Council on Foreign Relations at the end of September 2014. In that presentation, Work provided a robust defence of the efforts being made to enhance US military capacities across the region. The four largest defence construction projects since the Cold War are all located in Asia. By 2020, 60% of US air and naval forces will be based in the region. And that\u2019ll include the newest equipment, like the F-35s, the P-8s, and the Zumwalt-class destroyers.<\/p>\n

In Work\u2019s view, the rebalance is occurring but its effects are somewhat diluted by an even larger global shift within the US defence force\u2014after Afghanistan and Iraq, a smaller emphasis on forward-deployed forces and a larger one on reconstitution of US surge-force capabilities.<\/p>\n

The second source is the majority staff report<\/a> prepared for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in April 2014. That report looked in greater detail at the non-military side of the rebalance\u2014including diplomacy and aid\u2014and in general found a set of policy instruments that were even less well-resourced than the military effort. The East Asia and Pacific Bureau in the State Department, for example, had 12% less funding in 2014 than it had back in 2011.<\/p>\n

So yes, the rebalance exists. But it struggles for oxygen, in part because of the broader strategic baggage carried by the president. Moreover, substantial parts of the rebalance will take time to unfold\u2014it\u2019s not designed to address allies\u2019 and partners\u2019 demands for instant gratification and constant assurance. And, even when it\u2019s run its course, the rebalance isn\u2019t going to restore the regional status quo ante<\/em> China\u2019s rise.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that last point that highlights the extent to which the rebalance faces what we might call a crisis of expectations. Since different people believe it was meant to do different things, they judge it by different standards. Some of those metrics strike me as unrealistic. For example, it\u2019s perfectly true that even after the rebalance is completed, the US\u2019 position in the region won\u2019t be restored to what it was in the glory days of the 1990s. But the rebalance was never intended to do that. It wasn\u2019t meant to reverse the rise of the Asian great powers, nor to roll back the tides of history.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the rebalance was never intended to suggest that the US was happy to ignore what went on in Europe and the Middle East. Washington might have thought it was overweight in those areas, but it certainly didn\u2019t think they were irrelevant. So have events in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq distracted the US from Asia? Of course. But the US is a global player, not just a regional one.<\/p>\n

The rebalance, even if successful, is merely one variable in a shifting strategic landscape. By itself, it won\u2019t return the US to the position of the \u2018indispensable player\u2019 in Asia. Still, its principal value lies in the fact that the policy strengthens Washington\u2019s ties to Asia. And that\u2019s why Australia should want the rebalance to succeed: because its various components\u2014including a comprehensive TPP agreement, a military reorientation into the region, and US membership of key regional institutions\u2014will mean a US more closely engaged with both our and the region\u2019s strategic future.<\/p>\n

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

CSIS\u2019s release of its recent report Pivot 2.0\u2014intended to help nurture a bipartisan consensus in Washington in favour of the policy\u2014shows the topic of the \u2018rebalance\u2019 is still a live one in US foreign and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":17868,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131,143,17,52,325,218,293,378,714,31],"class_list":["post-17866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-anzus","tag-asia-pacific","tag-australia","tag-china","tag-europe","tag-middle-east","tag-pivot","tag-rebalance","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAssessing the US rebalance to the Asia\u2013Pacific | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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