84 - ASEAN and Major Power Transitions in East Asia

Summary

The US and China are groping towards a new equilibrium in their relationship with each other and with other countries in East Asia. Since the Second World War, East Asia has been very largely an American creation because it was the US that created conditions that facilitated the growth that is the most salient common characteristic of an otherwise very diverse region. China's rapid growth and re-emergence as a major regional and potentially global actor would not have been possible without the Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s and 1980s. But the US and China are now both freed of the constraints of the de facto anti-Soviet alliance of that period and China's transformation is transforming East Asia.

There is now a consensus across the region that while the US is still and will remain a necessary condition for the stability that is vital for continued growth, it is no longer a sufficient condition and needs to be supplemented — supplemented not supplanted — by some new architecture.

This is a consensus shared by US friends and allies and implicitly by China as well, at least for the present.

No one really knows what this new architecture will look like, but US-China relations will certainly be its central pillar. Neither does anyone know how long Washington and Beijing will take to reach a new accommodation with each other, although this will probably be a work of decades and not just a few years. In the meantime, we will all have to endure the trials and tribulations that inevitably arise when strategic adjustments of this scale are underway between major powers.

China is certainly rising. But America is not obviously in decline. I concede that if one were to assess the US solely by what is going on in its capital, one could be forgiven for coming to such a bleak conclusion. But it would be a mistake to forget that the most important developments in the US do not always occur in Washington DC. Equally if not more important are what happen in the fifty states of the United States, in the boardrooms of major American corporations, on Wall Street, and in American universities and research laboratories.