In the new concluding chapter to his classic The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearsheimer argues: “There is already substantial evidence that countries like India, Japan, and Russia, as well as smaller powers like Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, are worried about China’s ascendancy and are looking for ways to contain it. In the end, they will join an American-led balancing coalition to check China’s rise, much the way Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and eventually China, joined forces with the United States during the Cold War to contain the Soviet Union.”
This is at odds with most analyses which postulate that Asia is not ripe for a NATO style containment block against China. For instance, in summing up the conventional wisdom on the subject, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart Patrick opined last summer that: “Despite its strategic ‘rebalancing’ toward Asia, the United States is unlikely to sponsor a collective defense organization for the Asia-Pacific, for at least three reasons: insufficient solidarity among diverse regional partners, fear of alienating China, and the perceived advantages of bilateral and ad-hoc security arrangements.”
When placed in their historical perspective, these reasons seem insufficient to me. Let’s review them each in turn.
First, one of the main reasons many argue that a NATO-like organization could never work in Asia is because “the countries of the region retain diverse interests and regional priorities and (in the case of ROK-Japanese relations) insufficient levels of trust to band together.” The implication is that in the early Cold War Western Europeans had similar interests and high levels of trust, which allowed them to form the NATO alliance.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there is a considerable level of distrust between Japan and South Korea today, as well as between nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, this pales in comparison to the level of distrust France had for Germany, the U.K., and the United States in the early Cold War. Indeed, Germany had invaded France twice in the preceding decades and Paris was far more worried about a security threat emanating from West Germany than from the Soviet Union. That is why France adamantly opposed allowing West Germany to rearm and, when it failed to prevent this outcome, it built nuclear weapons.
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Another supposed obstacle to a NATO-like organization in Asia is “the perceived advantages of bilateral and ad-hoc security arrangements.” As Patrick elaborates on the subject: “the United States is increasingly attracted to cooperation within flexible coalitions that can coalesce temporarily, as mechanisms for addressing regional as well as global security challenges.”
This again needs to be placed in its historical context. Following WWII, the U.S. rapidly demobilized its forces and began withdrawing them from Europe. It fought tooth and nail against being involved in a collective security organization like NATO as one might expect a regional hegemon to do. As such, the U.S. initially pursued bilateral and ad-hoc security arrangements. For example, some members of Congress proposed unilaterally extending the Monroe Doctrine to cover Western Europe, rather than sign a collective security treaty.
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The final obstacle Patrick and others see to a NATO-like organization in Asia is America and regional states’ fears of alienating China. This is probably the biggest obstacle to a collective security agreement in Asia because, unlike in post-WWII Europe, China has strong economic ties with most its neighbors. For most of these neighbors, this is not a case of interdependency with China—rather, China’s neighbors remain far more dependent on Beijing economically than vice-versa.
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Overcoming the fear of alienating China, then, is likely to be dependent on how large a threat China poses to the region. As noted above, China is not currently as menacing as the Soviet Union was to Europe in the late 1940s. Furthermore, it took a number of strong catalysts from the Soviet Union and its allies (Berlin, nuclear weapon testing, Communists winning in China and the Korean War) to compel the U.S. and its Atlantic allies to form a collective security arrangement. The same is likely to prove true in Asia. While no immediate Asian NATO is likely to be forthcoming, this could change very quickly if China takes a brazen action such as invading Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands.
Full article: Is an Asian NATO Possible? (The Diplomat)
Global Geopolitics 