{"id":29521,"date":"2016-11-14T12:30:08","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T01:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=29521"},"modified":"2016-11-14T11:49:38","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T00:49:38","slug":"preparing-asia-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/preparing-asia-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparing Asia for Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-29522 size-full\" title=\"Image courtesy of the US Department of Defense.\" src=\"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/160917-F-PM645-077-e1479084484392.jpg\" alt=\"Image courtesy of the US Department of Defense.\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Whether or not US President-elect Donald Trump behaves better once in office than he did on the campaign trail, America\u2019s global authority has already taken a battering, not least among its allies and partners in Asia.<\/p>\n<p>Exercising <a href=\"https:\/\/www.project-syndicate.org\/commentary\/us-presidential-election-soft-power-by-shashi-tharoor-2016-11\" target=\"_blank\">soft power<\/a>\u2014leading by democratic and moral example\u2014will not be easy for Trump, given the disdain he showed for truth, rational argument, basic human decency, and racial, religious, and gender differences, not to mention the fact that he was not actually elected by a majority of voters. And when it comes to exercising harder power\u2014doing what it takes to counter serious challenges to peace and security\u2014there will be little confidence in Trump\u2019s judgment, given that almost every statement he made during his campaign was either wildly contradictory or downright alarming.<\/p>\n<p>Maintaining security, stability, and prosperity in Asia requires a cooperative environment, in which countries secure their national interests through partnerships\u2014not rivalries\u2014and trade freely with one another. The only grounds for confidence on this front after Trump\u2019s victory is that he may actually do none of the things he said he would, such as starting a trade war with China, walking away from alliance commitments, and supporting Japan and South Korea going nuclear.<\/p>\n<p>With little or no hard knowledge of international affairs, Trump is relying on instincts that are all over the map. He combines \u2018America first\u2019 isolationist rhetoric with muscular talk of \u2018making America great again.\u2019 Staking out impossibly extreme positions that you can readily abandon may work in negotiating property deals; but it is not a sound basis for conducting foreign policy.<\/p>\n<p>Trump\u2019s dangerous instincts may be bridled if he is capable of assembling an experienced and sophisticated team of foreign-policy advisers. But this remains to be seen, and the US Constitution grants him extraordinary personal power as Commander-in-Chief, if he chooses to exercise it.<\/p>\n<p>US leadership in Asia is a double-edged sword. Noisy assertions of continued primacy are counterproductive. China\u2019s legitimate demand to be accepted as a joint rule-maker, not just a rule-follower, has to be recognized. But when China overreaches, as it has done with its territorial assertions in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.project-syndicate.org\/commentary\/south-china-sea-arbitration-ruling-by-gareth-evans-2016-07\" target=\"_blank\">South China Sea<\/a>, there does need to be pushback. On that front, a quiet but firm US role remains necessary and welcome.<\/p>\n<p>Shortly after former President Bill Clinton left office, I heard him say privately (though never publicly) that the US could choose to use its \u2018great and unrivaled economic and military power to try to stay top dog on the global block in perpetuity.\u2019 A better choice, however, would be \u2018to try to create a world in which we will be comfortable living, when we are no longer top dog on the global block.\u2019 That kind of language seems to be anathema for anyone holding high office in the US, at least publicly. But it is what Asia wants to hear.<\/p>\n<p>For Australia and other US allies and partners in the region, this presidential election makes it clear that we can no longer\u2014assuming we ever could\u2014take coherent, smart American leadership for granted. We must do more for ourselves and work together more, while relying less on the US.<\/p>\n<p>Trump will probably have more instinctive sympathy for Australia than he will for many other US allies. We are seen as paying our alliance dues, not least by having fought alongside the US in every one of its foreign wars\u2014for better or worse\u2014over the past century. And, as cohabitants in the Anglosphere, we are in Trump\u2019s cultural comfort zone. But Australia will be anything but comfortable if the larger regional dynamics go off the rails.<\/p>\n<p>We should have learned by now that the US, under administrations with far more <em>prima facie<\/em> credibility than Trump\u2019s, is perfectly capable of making terrible mistakes, such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. We now have to be ready for American blunders as bad as, or worse than, in the past. We will have to make our own judgments about how to react to events, based on our own national interests.<\/p>\n<p>This does not mean that Australia should walk away from its alliance with the US. But we will need to be more skeptical of American policies and actions than in recent decades. Australia should become much more self-consciously independent, and assign much higher priority to building closer trade and security ties with Japan, South Korea, India, and especially Indonesia, our huge near-neighbor.<\/p>\n<p>No one should give ground if China overreaches, and Australia should, now more than ever, work closely with our Asian neighbors to ensure that it does not. But we must also recognize the legitimacy of China\u2019s new great-power aspirations, and engage with it non-confrontationally. We will all benefit from a common regional-security framework based on mutual respect and reciprocity, not least when confronting regional threats such as North Korea\u2019s nuclear chest-beating.<\/p>\n<p>We can only hope that Trump will dispel our worst fears when he is in office. But in the meantime, Australian and other regional policymakers should adhere to a simple mantra: More self-reliance. More Asia. Less US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whether or not US President-elect Donald Trump behaves better once in office than he did on the campaign trail, America\u2019s global authority has already taken a battering, not least among its allies and partners in &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":29522,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,52,1428,293],"class_list":["post-29521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-asia-pacific","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-pivot"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Preparing Asia for Trump | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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