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Cambridge University Press
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Asia, America, and the Transformation of Geopolitics by William H. Overholt
Asia is changing. But the U.S. is stuck seeing the world through an outdated Cold War lens. Most important, the U.S. must recognize that the rise of China is not a threat. In fact, China's success as a peaceful, unified and increasingly prosperous and free nation is unambiguously good thing.
That's WILLIAM H. OVERHOLT's basic message. There's more, much more. But Overholt's recurrent message is that the U.S. must stop tilting against China, especially if it means siding with right-wing Japanese militarists. More broadly, the U.S. must re-engage Asia on a broad variety of fronts. It must do away with the military-first strategy toward the region.
This work was published in 2008, though most of it was written by 2007. It's startling how much the world has already changed. Overholt imagined that the LDP would rule Japan indefinitely. Instead, a new opposition government has taken power. Now, far from a turbocharged Japanese-U.S. military alliance, the new Japanese government shows signs of pulling away from the U.S. and perhaps engaging more closely with China as well.
Overholt's optimism about China has to date proven more accurate. China has so far come through the economic crisis in a stronger position vis-a-vis the rest of the world than it had going in. It is taking an increasingly assertive role in everything to climate talks to commercial disputes. This is to some extent natural and expected and fits with Overholt's thesis. But the muscularity with which China defends its interests -- the recent dispute with Google and the hard-ball tactics it has played with iron ore producers (including the ongoing imprisonment of Australian Stern Hu) is at odds with the benign rising China that Overholt paints.
Tellingly, environmental issues don't figure in Overholt's analysis at all. Yet they have emerged as a growing irritant between the U.S. on one side and China and India on the other. At the same time, some of the most hopeful signs of Sino-U.S. cooperation are in the area of clean energy technologies.
The global financial crisis isn't prefigured, although it was already starting to claim its victims before this book went to press. Yet here Overholt shows himself uncannily prescient, as China has used the crisis much as he would have predicted. As it did in the 1997-98 regional crisis, China has shown itself to be a regional leader. In the earlier crisis, Jiang Zemin promised an ASEAN meeting in Kuala Lumpur that China would not devalue its currency. This time, China's bold stimulus program has taken on global importance.
Although Overholt can seem too naively pro-China, skeptics would do well to remember that The Rise of China, which Overholt wrote in 1993, was seen as far too bullish on China. Instead that work, Overholt's best-known, understated the speed and scale of China's rise. Overholt makes an important point in noting that the move from authoritarianism to democracy in Korea and Taiwan could augur well for the future of China.
The book could have used more thorough editing -- and less material on Overholt himself would have been more appropriate for a book with this sweep. Yet this impressive summary by a long-time Asia watcher belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in U.S.-Asian relations.
Written while Overholt was still at RAND, the book has a heavy U.S. flavor. Overholt is, quite rightly, frustrated at the U.S.'s Asia policy shift away from economics, trade and multilateral institutions. During the Bush years the U.S. let the military dominate its relationship with Asia and stepped back from more broad-ranging engagement. It also ceded important parts of regional leadership to China. Although the Obama administration was dealt a weak hand, Overholt's advice that Washington re-engage with the region in a more thorough-going way remains even truer now than when the book was written in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Mark Clifford
18/02/2010
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Mark Clifford is Executive Director of the Asia Business Council and has authored or co-authored four books on Asia, including Building Energy Efficiency: Why Green Buildings Are Key to Asia's Future, 'Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea' and, with Supachai Panithcpakdi, 'China and the WTO: Changing China, Changing World Trade'. |
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