Shangri-La No More

The Pentagon becomes a growing voice in Sino-US relations even as China seeks greater space from the US in East Asia and the Western Pacific
Zorawar Daulet Singh Delhi

If there was one big message from this year's Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual Asian security conference held in Singapore, it was the quiet burial of the G-2. Last year's exuberance surrounding the idea that the US and China could attain seamless geopolitical cooperation on diverse issues has finally been overwhelmed by a realistic re-assessment by Washington. 

What explains this new image of Sino-US relations? It is now clear that China misperceived the US quest for a broad-based cooperative entente with China as a sign of weakness, which emboldened an already confident Beijing to assert itself diplomatically. To be sure, the West's narrative for a G-2 itself was flawed, since it was based on the naïve assumption that a Sino-US partnership could be constructed without ceding strategic space to a rising China, especially in the Western Pacific. The Chinese, while they relished the accommodative 'Chimerican' spirit of Obama's first year in office, were unwilling to actually expend resources and diplomatic capital on solving questions that were viewed as inherently American problems: Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, economic imbalances, climate change etc.
 
Second, it seems that the post-economic-crisis phase has affected the internal balance of influence on US's China policy. The Obama administration appears to be rebalancing its China policy, which until the crisis was dominated by a coalition of business and financial interests, towards a more coordinated approach that now includes the security community or the Pentagon as a growing stakeholder in US policy towards China and Asia. Arguably, the first group's bargaining power has diminished within the US national security hierarchy. 

Further, given the national imperatives of reviving growth across the world economy where US, China and others are scrambling for new export markets, including market access vis-à-vis each other, to raise aggregate demand and employment at home, it is unlikely that the pre-crisis equilibrium of China exporting its way to glory can be restored. In sum, competition in the economic sphere has added a new dimension to Sino-US interactions. 

The elevation of the US military establishment as a growing voice in Sino-US relations was signaled by the firmness that Washington showed on issues such as arms sales to Taiwan, which, despite being an old question, was initiated to dispel Chinese perceptions of a major global power shift that entitled China to assume a more active foreign policy. For example, this March, it was reported that Chinese officials told two visiting senior US administration officials that China would not tolerate any interference in the South China Sea, labeling it for the first time a 'core interest' for China. China seems to be probing to discover if it can extract greater space from the US in East Asia and the Western Pacific, but the US has so far been unwilling to accept a change in the status quo. 

Finally, the complexity and geopolitical plurality across Eurasia, which includes other important actors like Russia and India, along with the latent and open contradictions between the US and China, have altered the trajectory of US-China relations and devalued its supporting G-2 narrative. The Sino-US equation has now reverted to one based on the actual balance of power between the two sides. This was the general backdrop to this year's Shangri-La conference.