2: THE RISE OF ASIA AND THE DISPERSAL OF GLOBAL POWER
The rise to global preeminence of three Asian powers—Japan, China, and India—has not only altered dramatically the global ranking of power but also highlighted the dispersal of geopolitical power. The emergence of these Asian states as significant political-economic players is a specifically post–World War II phenomenon because none of them could exploit their population advantage until the second half of the twentieth century. Admittedly, inklings of Asia’s emergence on the international scene first came into view with the brief rise of Japan as a major military power following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. That unexpected triumph, however, was followed not long after by Japan’s embrace of militaristic imperialism that ended in total defeat at the hands of the United States in 1945 in a war that the Japanese had proclaimed was aimed to free Asia from Western domination. The subsequent national recovery of Japan from its massive destruction in World War II provided the first major preview of an Asia whose economic growth signaled growing international stature.
The combination of a stable pacifist democracy, a national acceptance of American military protection, and a popular determination to rebuild the country’s devastated economy created a fertile climate for Japan’s rapid economic growth. Based on high rates of savings, moderate wages, deliberate concentration on high technology, and the inflow of foreign capital through energetically promoted exports, Japan’s GDP grew from $500 billion in 1975 to $5.2 trillion in 1995.[2]Before long, Japan’s economic success was emulated—though in politically more authoritarian settings—by China, South Korea, Taiwan, the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, and Indonesia, as well as by the more democratic India.
The relatively complacent American public of the mid-twentieth century at first paid little attention to Japan’s new role in the world economy. But during the 1980s and early 1990s, American public anxiety suddenly focused on Japan. Public opinion was stimulated not by Japan’s geopolitical assertiveness—for it possessed a pacifist constitution and was a steadfast American ally—but rather by Japanese electronic and then automobile products’ highly visible domination of the American domestic market. US paranoia was fanned further by alarmist mass media reports of Japanese buyouts of key American industrial assets (and some symbolic ones: e.g., Rockefeller Center in New York City). Japan came to be seen as an economic powerhouse, a trading giant, and even a growing threat to America’s industrial and financial global preeminence. Japan as the new “superstate” became the fearsome and widely cited slogan of overblown media coverage and demagogic congressional rhetoric. Academic theories of America’s inevitable decline in the face of the “rising sun” gave intellectual credence to widespread populist anxiety that only receded after Japan’s “lost decade” of anemic economic growth during the 1990s.
Though fears of global economic domination by the Japanese were unrealistic, Japan’s post–World War II recovery awakened the West to Asia’s potential to assume a major economic and political role. And subsequent economic successes in the region, notably South Korea’s similar drive, beginning in the 1960s, to establish an export-driven economy, further emphasized this point. By 2010, the president of the once-impoverished South Korea could assert confidently that his country was ready to play a significant role in global economic decision making; symbolically, Seoul even hosted a G-20 summit in 2010. Concurrently, both Taiwan and Singapore also emerged as dynamic examples of economic success and social development, with considerably higher rates of growth during the second half of the twentieth century than those attained by the Western European economies during their post– World War II recovery.
But these were merely a prelude to the most dramatic change in the world’s geopolitical and economic pecking order: China’s meteoric rise, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, into the front ranks of the leading world powers. The roots of that emergence go back many decades, beginning with the quest for national renewal launched more than a century ago by nationalistic young Chinese intellectuals and culminating some decades later in the victory of Chinese Communists. Although Mao’s economically and socially devastating Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution set back China’s rise for some years, the unprecedented takeoff in China’s social and economic modernization started in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s bold adoption of market liberalization, which “opened” China to the outside world and set it on a trajectory of unprecedented national growth. Its rise signals both the end of the West ’s singular preeminence and the concomitant shift eastward of the global center of gravity.
China’s domestic reorientation coincided with a dramatic geopolitical realignment, its separation from the Soviet Union. Their gradual estrangement and growing mutual hostility broke into the open during the 1960s. That provided the United States with a unique opportunity, first explored by President Richard Nixon in 1972 and then consummated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, to engage China in a common front against Moscow. In the course of the subsequent mere three decades, China, no longer faced by a potential Soviet threat and thus free to focus its resources on domestic development, achieved a degree of infrastructural modernization comparable to what had transpired in the West over the course of the previous century. Though faced with lingering internal ethnic challenges posed by Tibet and Xinjiang, a significant domestic political disruption in 1989, and socially painful inequality in rural and urban development, China’s results were spectacular. However, they also eventually fueled American populist and geopolitical anxiety. Slogans about China “owning” the United States echoed the earlier uproar over Japanese purchases of American industrial and real estate assets during the late 1980s. By 2010, in an overreaction reminiscent of the earlier case of Japan, many feared that China would soon supplant America as the world’s leading superpower.
The ongoing shift eastward in the distribution of global power has also been prompted by the recent emergence on the world scene of postcolonial India, one of the world’s two most populous countries and a state also entertaining global ambitions. Contemporary India is a complicated mixture of democratic self-governance, massive social injustice, economic dynamism, and widespread political corruption. As a result, its political emergence as a force in world affairs has lagged behind China’s. India was prominent in sharing leadership of the so-called nonaligned nations, a collection of neutral but politically wavering states, including Cuba and Yugoslavia, all allegedly opposed to the Cold War. Its brief military collision with China in 1962, which ended in India’s defeat, was only partially redeemed by its military successes in the two wars with Pakistan of 1965 and 1971. By and large, the prevailing view of India until relatively recently has been one of a country with strong moralistic opinions about world affairs but without commensurate influence.
This perception began to change as a consequence of two significant developments: India’s defiant testing of its own nuclear device in 1974 and of nuclear weapons in 1998, and its period of impressive economic growth beginning in the 1990s. India’s liberalizing reforms—including the deregulation of international trade and investment and the support of privatization—are transforming what was an anemic and cumbersome quasi-socialist economy into a more dynamic economy based on services and high technology, thus putting India on an export-driven growth trajectory similar to that of Japan and China. By 2010, India, with a population beginning to exceed China’s, was even viewed by some as a potential rival to China’s emerging political preeminence in Asia, despite India’s persisting internal liabilities (ranging from religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity to low literacy, acute social disparities, rural unrest, and antiquated infrastructure).
India’s political elite is motivated by an ambitious strategic vision focused on securing greater global influence and a conviction of its regional primacy. And the gradual improvement in US-Indian relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century has further enhanced India’s global stature and gratified its ambitions. However, its simmering conflict with Pakistan, which includes a proxy contest with it for greater influence in Afghanistan, remains a serious diversion from its larger geopolitical aspirations. Therefore, the view—held by its foreign policy elite—that India is not only a rival to China but also already one of the world’s superpowers lacks sober realism.
Nonetheless, the appearance on the world scene of China as the economic challenger to America, of India as a regional power, and of a wealthy Japan as America’s Pacific Ocean ally have not only altered dramatically the global ranking of power but also highlighted its dispersal. That poses some serious risks. The Asian powers are not (and have not been) regionally allied as in the case of the Atlantic alliance during the Cold War. They are rivals, and thus in some respects potentially similar to the European Atlantic powers during their colonial and then continental European contests for geopolitical supremacy, which eventually culminated in the devastation of World War I and
