ASEAN Plus China

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh heads to the East Asian Summit in Bali, Indonesia at a moment when the old continent’s tectonic plates are moving.
Asia’s current power shift is driven by the rise of China.
The Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s, the normalisation of Sino-Soviet relations in the early 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 all convulsed Asia and tested India’s national security strategy.
Unlike in the past, India need not be a mute spectator to the changes in the balance of power around it.
After being the anchor of Asia’s security system since the end of World War II, the US seemed to turn its back on the region in the last two decades.
In the 1990s, the US was preoccupied with managing the post-Cold War political arrangements in Europe.
In the last decade, the US dug itself into a hole in the so-called Greater Middle East with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As it lost ground to China, Washington seemed unwilling or incapable of contesting Beijing’s new Asian primacy.
Beijing’s attempt to enforce its territorial claims in the East and South China Seas shook the region to the core.
Discarding the thesis of China’s “peaceful rise”, Beijing’s neighbours turned to Washington in the middle of 2010.
It ends a longstanding illusion that Asia can construct a regional order on its own. By inviting America and Russia into the tent, ASEAN has declared that Asian security can only be constructed within a larger framework.
East Asia’s fear of a rising China and its re-embrace of America are playing themselves out in three very different domains.
The first is the economic. Until now, East Asia accepted the centrality of China in promoting regional economic integration. The principal vehicle for this has been the “ASEAN Plus Three” structure that brought the 10 Southeast Asian nations together with China, Japan and South Korea. The region is now actively considering an alternative, the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The second is in the political arena. Only a few years ago, even the closest allies of the US, including Japan, Australia and Korea, were drifting towards neutrality between Washington and Beijing. Today, they are all eager to reinforce their longstanding alliances with the US.
Washington is also standing up with the smaller nations of Asia in their intensifying maritime territorial disputes with China. While the US does not take sides in these disputes, it has emphasised American interest in a peaceful resolution of the competing claims in the South China Sea according to accepted principles of international law. Beijing in contrast prefers to talk with its neighbours bilaterally
The third is the military. There has been much concern in Asia about the military staying power of the US amidst the economic crisis and the growing pressure to cut the defence budget.
As it confronts China’s rising naval and missile capabilities in the Western Pacific, Washington is expected to announce a new doctrine called “air-sea battle” that will counter Beijing’s attempts to push the US navy away from the Asian littoral.